“Is she . . . how is she?”
Broken. Dying. Unfixable. Gone.
Julia says, “Sleeping.”
Kennie buries her face deeper in Julia’s sweatshirt, and Julia holds her tighter.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Forty-Four Minutes before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Liz thought about Kennie.
Kennie always acted so shallow that sometimes it was difficult to remember that she wasn’t.
At the end of seventh grade, Kennie had bought the three of them matching rings with BFF engraved inside the band. They were cheesy, cheap things that later turned their fingers green, and on those rings, they swore proportionally cheesy, cheap promises: that they would always be there for each other. They would remember each other’s shortcomings and they would fill them. They would do the “all for one and one for all” thing, forever.
Kennie’s greatest shortcoming was her inability to say no, and Liz knew that. Everyone knew that.
And so, forty-four minutes before she crashed her car, Liz thought about how Kennie had done everything Liz had ever told her to—or tried, at least—and how Liz had never once told Kennie to do the right thing. She thought about all the parties at which she had seen Kennie giggling and drunk in the arms of almost-strangers, all the parties at which Liz had watched different boys lead Kennie into different bedrooms. She could clearly remember too many instances when Kennie had glanced back with a sort of helpless look in her eyes, and Liz had only laughed and called Kennie a slut in a loving way, and turned away because she wanted to keep drinking and dancing and forgetting.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Five Days Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
She promised herself, once, that she would never puke again.
It started during the summer before seventh grade, when she and Kennie looked in the mirror while trying on swimsuits and called themselves fat. Liz had decided to eat less, less still, and then not at all. She told Kennie to do it with her, and Kennie had tried, but she wasn’t very good at it. Kennie loved food more than she loved being skinny. She went on and off, sneaking food when she said she wasn’t eating, stashing it in her room. Liz thought that their little diet might have made Kennie eat even more than she used to, but it didn’t matter—Kennie didn’t gain a pound. Lucky Kennie.
Liz, of course, didn’t last much longer. She liked eating too. Bulimia was her compromise, and what a deal it was. Eat all you want, gain nothing. It was perfect, until she started playing soccer again in the spring of seventh grade, and she could barely run the length of the field. It was perfect, until she was dizzy all the time, and so cold she felt on the brink of freezing solid. And then all of the stuff they’d learned in health class came back in a rush, an avalanche, and Liz stopped, mostly.
Mostly.
Thanksgiving—surely that could be an exception. So much food that she couldn’t help herself, and she couldn’t stand feeling bloated. Christmas too, and Easter. Buffet outings. But other than that, she ate, and she kept it inside her.
That was perfect too, until one day she puked and there were little streaks of blood among the undigested food.
It was macaroni and cheese, she remembered. Little chunks of it, blood like sauce.
She was so terrified that she broke down entirely, sat against the wall and sobbed for a good half an hour, because three hundred people died every day from starvation, and here she was, trying to become one of them.
When the tears dried, she looked at herself in the mirror and swore she would never puke again.
Soon, though, she would go to a beach party and stare at the sky from the top of a tower of wishes. Soon they would be buying homecoming dresses, getting their hair done, arriving at the dance, and Kennie would tell them that she was pregnant. Soon she would watch Julia double her weekly supply of ziplock bags. Soon Liz would make out with Kennie’s boyfriend, go home, and make plans.
Soon she will hate what she sees in the mirror and try to change it the only way she knows how: two fingers down her throat, her dinner in the toilet.
Five days before she crashed her car, that’s exactly what she did.
She tore the kitchen apart. She sat on the white couch with the TV blaring, eating chips. She drank almost an entire liter of orange soda. There was a pecan pie in the pantry that she covered with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream and attacked with a fork. There was a plate of ribs from the restaurant down the street and an entire bowl of leftover ravioli from the Italian place in downtown Meridian.
She ate and ate and tried to keep it down.
How much shit can I hold in?
It was not a rhetorical question.
The answer: No more.