When she had me.
She rolled up her sleeve and wrote her three rules across her arm, so she wouldn’t forget. She underlined them, and added: HERE LIES LIZ EMERSON.
SNAPSHOT: HIDING
The house is white with blue shutters, and there is something indefinably cozy about it. To the side, Liz is behind a bush, her hands pushing the leaves apart. We have played at least a thousand games of hide-and-seek here. Liz counts to a hundred and then searches everywhere, as though she can’t hear me giggling, as though I ever hide anywhere except behind the brown couch.
Soon Liz will begin to grow up. The older she gets, the less interested she will be in searching, the more easily distracted she will be by television and snacks and stories, the less she will care if I am ever found.
One day, she will count, and I will hide behind the brown couch.
She will forget to seek.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Fifty-Five Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
She was sharply aware of the time slipping through her fingers, and she wondered if it had always passed this quickly. Yesterday she was getting her first bra, and the day before that she was graduating from elementary school. A week ago, she had taken the training wheels off her bike all by herself and had ridden almost five feet before the entire bike fell apart because she had loosened one screw too many.
If only time had moved as quickly during physics class.
Outside the car, it had started snowing again. Little specks like dandruff. Gravity, thought Liz. Goddamn gravity, and all of a sudden those suppressed twinges of sadness flared into something much greater. She would never understand, would she? Gravity and inertia, force and mass and acceleration—she would never know why.
She glanced at her clock and thought, I still have time.
Objects at rest.
But it was like taking a timed test, and her mind did what it always did during timed tests. It wandered, and soon Liz was thinking about fourth grade, the year before her mother was promoted and they moved to Meridian. They were all objects at rest, then.
Fourth grade was fuzzy—she remembered only the most vague and cliché of events—playing kickball at recess, cutting in the lunch line, getting caught and subsequently sentenced to five minutes on the Wall. Fractions.
Liz had no real friends back then. There were people with whom she was friendly, she sat in a big group at lunch, and she had a reasonable amount of fun. But her friends were interchangeable. Somehow, they all felt temporary.
And she certainly hadn’t belonged to the group of girls who wore matching skirts and sneakers from Target. That Liz Emerson had been content in her place just outside the spotlight. She was comfortable with her quiet half anonymity.
There was one girl in particular, Mackenzie Bates, who was enormously popular by fourth-grade standards, which mostly meant that she brought the best lunches in the prettiest lunch boxes and was the tallest girl in the class. When Mackenzie spoke, the fourth grade listened.
A few months into the year, a girl named Melody Lace Blair arrived at school. Her parents were hippies from California, and Melody came to class in overalls—overalls, the deadliest and ugliest sin. That would have been enough reason to exclude her even if Mackenzie hadn’t developed an immediate and intense hatred for her.
Not only did they share initials, but Melody was exactly one inch taller than Mackenzie.
It had started small. Snide whispered comments. Glares from the opposite side of the room. But soon Mackenzie got her group of matching friends in on it, and things began to escalate.
At one point or another, most of the fourth graders remembered all of the antibullying assemblies they had sat through. They recalled how eagerly they had agreed to speak up if they saw someone being bullied.
But slowly, then with more force, the fourth grade came to agree with Mackenzie. Melody was different, different was weird, weird was bad. It was simple. Maybe they didn’t actively participate in the undoing of Melody Blair, but it was their silence, their willingness to look away, that lent Mackenzie her power.
So as everyone else became blind in matters concerning Melody, Liz kept watching. She tried to understand why everyone was so afraid of being different—why she was too. A hundred times she opened her mouth to speak up for Melody, and a hundred times she closed it. It would have been a one-way ticket to the center of the shooting range.
Say something, I told her, and told her again. Say something. You promised.
She wasn’t listening.