Liz spent a minute trying to remember the exact wording of Newton’s Second Law of Motion—something about acceleration being directly related to the net force and inversely proportional to the mass—so there were only forty minutes left when she decided it didn’t matter. She knew the equation, anyway. Force equals mass times acceleration. F = ma.
The unit on Newton’s Second Law was more math oriented than the first or the third, so Liz had managed to get a decent score on that test. This, however, was more of a testament to her ability to push buttons on her calculator than any true understanding, and forty minutes before she crashed her car, she still didn’t fully appreciate the relationship between force, mass, and acceleration.
The textbook made the world black and white and drew a very uncompromising line between what was and what could never be, as though everything was already dictated and Liz’s only job was to keep breathing.
She wished they had talked more about how all of the equations were derived. She wanted to know how Galileo and Newton and Einstein discovered the things they discovered. She wanted to know how they could have lived in the exact same world as everyone else but see things that no one else did.
Forty minutes before she crashed her car, Liz began to think about Liam Oliver, who always seemed to see things that no one else did, and didn’t seem to care that it was strange.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Thoughts on the Road
When Liam first saw Liz’s car, he nearly crashed his own.
This was his favorite stretch of highway. Of course the only Costco was over an hour away, goddamn middle-of-nowhere Meridian—but he enjoyed the trip wholeheartedly because he was driving his mom’s car and using her gas. She’d had to take his sister to piano lessons, so he’d agreed to bag his homework and run her errands. He liked these long, lonely drives. They allowed him to sort out his thoughts, and he had a lot of thoughts to sort out today.
He thought about Liz Emerson, and the party on Saturday night. She had fallen asleep against his shoulder, and he had taken her home.
There was a patch of trees on his left—he called it a forest out of pity—and a large slope on the other side, so he could see for miles. He loved this stretch because it made him feel insignificant and necessary at the same time, like everything had a reason.
Today, when he looked down the hill, he saw a Mercedes at the bottom, smoking. He thought, That looks like Liz Emerson’s car.
He wondered briefly if he ought to call the police or something, but someone must have already, right? He had almost crossed the bridge when he did a double take; his head snapped around, and somehow, through the smoke and the distance, he caught a glimpse of green through the mangled window.
He thought, Liz Emerson was wearing a green sweater today.
Then he thought, Shit.
And then he thought nothing at all.
SNAPSHOT: ROLLING
We are rolling down an impossibly green hill. Our arms are pressed to our chests, our hair caught in our mouths, tangled with our laughter. Gravity is our playmate, momentum is our friend. We are blurs of motion. We are racing, and we are both winning, because we do not race each other.
We race the world, and as fast as it rotates, as fast as it revolves, we are faster.
CHAPTER FORTY
This is What Liz Emerson’s Car Did
It rolled.
Sitting on the brown couch, she had imagined her death like this: She veers off the road and down the hill. Her car slides, spins a few times. She hits her head and is gone. Her body is mostly whole when they find it. They’ll take out her organs, and her dead body will be more useful than her living one ever was.
It did not happen like that.
About a mile before she veered, she had taken off her seatbelt. She had planned to close her eyes, sit back, and let it happen. If she had paid more attention in physics, she would have known that the laws of motion are stronger than any plans she had.
On the way down, she was braced against the steering wheel, her foot jammed on the brake. Maybe if she pressed hard enough, she could stop the world from spinning.
It didn’t work.
Her seat went flying forward, and her leg broke in three different places. The car landed on its roof at the bottom of the hill and slid across the icy grass into the base of the tree. She screamed and tried to find something to grab, and accidentally flung her hand out the broken window, where the car briefly pinned it against the ground and shattered it. The car slammed into the tree, flattening the passenger side, and the force shoved Liz’s head outside.
Then everything stilled, and she laid in the nest of glass and stared at the sky.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Gravity