CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Before
On the first day of preschool, Liz dug her fingers into the leg of her father’s jeans and held on tight as the overly sunny teacher tried to drag her into the overly sunny classroom.
Her dad leaned down and told her to make a wish.
Tearfully, Liz asked her daddy to stay with her.
He promised to never leave.
On the first day of school after her father’s funeral, Monica dropped Liz off for the first time. Monica didn’t try to hug her, and Liz didn’t ask her to stay.
On the first day of fifth grade at Meridian Elementary School, Liz jumped off the swings during recess and headed for the kickball diamond. She kicked a ball into Jimmy Travis’s face, gave him a bloody nose, won her team the game, and sat down at the popular table during lunch without being asked. She never left.
On the first day of middle school, Liz walked into the building with Kennie at her side. At recess that day, Jimmy Travis told her that she was pretty, and she kissed him beside the swings.
They were the first official couple.
She dumped him two weeks later when he refused to let her copy his math homework, and from then on, Liz Emerson was rarely without a boyfriend.
She didn’t really like any of them.
On the day after eighth-grade graduation, she went to her first party and kissed an older boy named Zack Hayes, who he had given her a red Solo cup. She tried the beer and hated it, but she drained the cup anyway and he refilled it for her. It made the world dissolve and scatter around her like petals, and it wasn’t unpleasant. When she wobbled and fell, he caught her and carried her into a bedroom but didn’t leave, and she couldn’t find the words to ask him to.
Julia found them later and pulled her away, but Liz wasn’t sure what had happened before she got there.
On the first day of her freshman year, an upperclassman named Lori Andersen elbowed Liz into a locker and called her a stupid freshman.
During lunch, Liz stole Lori’s car keys while Lori was in the lunch line, turned the car alarm on, and threw the keys in a toilet. Then, while Lori was fuming, Liz offered her sympathies and a coupon to the salon for a free facial waxing. Lori, who had an unfortunate habit of underestimating freshmen, took it.
That particular salon was owned by Kennie’s uncle. He’d opened it when he got out of prison and found out that he could get paid to pull hair out of people.
Liz called him and told him that Lori would be coming by after school. She asked him to please give her the special, free of charge. He replied that it would be his pleasure.
The next day, Lori came to school with newly cut bangs. It wasn’t the best look for her, though her friends assured her that it was adorable. It went well until Lori went outside for gym, and the wind blew her bangs back.
It was then that everyone saw that Lori Andersen no longer had eyebrows.
Liz took Lori’s place at the Center Table in the Cafeteria That Looked Exactly Like All the Other Tables but Held Immense Social Meaning.
Later, she would wonder what would have happened if she had let her world change as it should have changed. On nights when she remembered Lori Andersen’s missing eyebrows, she told herself that it would have happened anyway. Lori’s grades would have dropped anyway. She would have had to work at Subway instead of going to college anyway.
And besides, her eyebrows grew back.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ziplock Bags
Liz’s next class is government. They were supposed to debate the death penalty, but today, even the affirmative squad wants to argue that no one deserves to die.
Besides, they’re missing a member of their team.
Liz is not fantastic at debate, pointwise. She just happens to like arguing, and she has an incredible talent for making others look stupid.
Julia is also in this class, but she hates debating. It isn’t that she’s not eloquent—she could probably win every debate based on her vocabulary alone—but she doesn’t understand absolutes. She doesn’t see why one side is completely right and the other completely wrong.
Which isn’t to say that Julia is any more secure in her morals than Liz is. Julia has plenty of issues, the greatest being the ziplock bag she buys from the RadioShack pervert every Sunday after church.
Julia sits there and thinks about the fight she and Liz had the day before yesterday. Just two days ago. Julia glances at the clock and hates it for its blind, relentless ticking, because every moment that passes is another step from yesterday, when Liz was whole and alive, and the world was all right.