The final showdown happened in early spring, one of the first days after they were allowed outside for recess again. Maybe Mackenzie was bored, or maybe the change in the weather also called for a change in playground patterns, or maybe she was just experiencing early puberty—whatever the reason, she cornered Melody and tore her apart with words.
It didn’t take long for the rest of the fourth graders to notice and migrate over. Liz had been on the monkey bars with some other girls, but one by one, they left to watch. Finally, Liz did too. She couldn’t help it. There was a certain dark allure in destruction, and who was Liz to defy it?
Standing as part of the silent majority, Liz was not the only one who felt guilty. Guilt, however, wasn’t enough of a force to push them from the winning side. So Liz and everyone else stood and listened as Mackenzie and her friends grew more and more vicious.
“You’re so ugly that you probably break every mirror you pass.”
“Your clothes are, like, totally hideous.”
“You smell so weird. Take a shower, loser.”
Amid the hoots and jeers of his group of miniature-jock friends, Mack Jennings shouted something about Melody being fat, and within minutes, everyone had arranged themselves into a loose ring. One by one, they went around the circle and stated one thing that they disliked about Melody.
When Liz found herself in that circle, she did not move.
I tried to push her, but I didn’t have enough force, either.
They were barely a quarter of the way around when Melody began to cry. She stood surrounded, wide-eyed and lost, shaking and afraid and confused and searching for answers in eyes that refused to meet hers.
“Why do you always walk with your nose up in the air like that? Do you think you’re better than us or something?”
“Is there something wrong with your feet, or do you always walk like a cripple?”
Then it was Liz’s turn. When she hesitated, everyone turned to look at her, and Liz looked at Melody. She looked at the tear-streaked face and the red eyes, and she saw something that made her want to cry too.
“Liz,” Mackenzie said impatiently.
Liz opened her mouth and said in a quiet rush, “When’s your birthday?”
There was a small, confused silence. In it, Liz saw Melody’s hope grow infinitesimally, so Liz looked away when she ripped it to shreds.
“I think I’ll buy you a dictionary,” she said. Still rushing, the words falling and splattering like rain. “So you can look up ‘normal.’ You obviously don’t know what it means.”
Mackenzie laughed. Everybody laughed.
Liz stared at the ground.
I tried to take her hand, but she was slipping away.
Then, suddenly, Melody pushed through the mob and ran into the building. The recess monitors, who were busy trying to wrestle the kindergarteners off the climbing wall, noticed nothing. Mackenzie didn’t move for a moment, disoriented now that her circus act had disappeared. Then she blinked a few times and skipped away with her friends. Bit by bit, everyone else broke off too.
Except Liz. She waited until no one was watching, and headed inside.
She checked the classroom and the cubby room, and when she didn’t find Melody, she went to the girls’ bathroom. Sure enough, she heard the sobs as soon as she pushed open the door. She stepped carefully, her sneakers almost silent against the tiles, and she saw Melody’s feet dangling beneath the stall door as she sat and cried.
But in the end, Liz did nothing. She watched for another moment, and then she went back outside and joined her friends by the monkey bars.
Liz would remember that day while sitting in pre-algebra with a blank pop quiz in front of her. Mackenzie was the inspiration for the piece of paper she sent around the class, on which everyone wrote one thing they disliked about the new girl with the weird clothes, and it was partly because of the dangling feet, watching them, that she ultimately befriended Julia.
One day, years later, Liz went to the beach with Kennie and Julia. Kennie was in the water and Julia was asleep in the sun, and Liz was trying to clean the sand off her phone when she saw an obituary for a girl named Melody Lace Blair, who had been found dead in her bathtub. The police suspected suicide.
Her old school had held a memorial service, according to the obituary. When the students gathered together to remember Melody, one girl gave a moving speech about the beautiful, strong, wonderful person Melody had been, and how she would never be forgotten.
Funnily enough, the speaker had the exact same initials as Melody.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Fifty Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
She gripped the steering wheel and wondered if Melody had known.
That Liz had been there.
That she had watched her feet dangle.