No one guessed that Liz cried when she watched it.
After Liam quit band and left his dented and ruined flute behind, she watched the video again and again. She deleted it and cried because she couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t drag the video back from all people she had sent it to, or all the people they had sent it to. She couldn’t take it off the internet. She couldn’t put Liam’s flute back together. So she didn’t try.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Thirty-Three Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Liz thought about Liam Oliver in terms of Newton’s Second Law of Motion.
Mass. Liz managed to gather an enormous audience. The video spread like a virus. Towns an hour away knew about Liam Oliver. Kids would stop him at Walmart and ask, smirking, about his flute.
Acceleration. There was no unit that could accurately measure the speed, the potential and kinetic energy, of gossip. It made sound look like a tortoise. It made light look like Kennie’s crippled grandma. There was a strange addiction in the act of spreading a rumor, relishing someone else’s pain. No one could resist.
Force. Liz. She looked around and saw all of the broken things in her wake, and then she looked inside herself and saw the spidering cracks from the weight of all the things she had done. She hated what she was and didn’t know how to change, and half an hour before she drove her car off the road, she saw that despite all of that, she didn’t have enough force to stop the world from turning.
But she had enough to stop her own.
After Liam, there were others.
There was Lauren Melbrook, who began dating Lucas Drake after he dumped Kennie. They were a cute couple and they made Kennie cry. So one morning that January, Liz, Julia, and Kennie woke up early to spray-paint SLUT across the snow on Lauren’s front lawn. They took pictures, uploaded them to Facebook, and tagged Lauren in all of them. Lucas Drake dumped her on the very same day.
There was Sandra Garrison, who told Mrs. Schumacher, their Algebra II teacher, that Liz had copied off her test. Mrs. Schumacher believed her, but Sandra had no proof, so Mrs. Schumacher let it go, but Liz (because she had, in fact, cheated on the test) felt it necessary to spread a rumor that Sandra Garrison was pregnant. Being a stress eater, Sandra did indeed gain weight after the rumors made their rounds. Liz later spread a follow-up rumor that Sandra had aborted her baby, which marked the death of her already nosediving social status.
There was Justin Strayes, who had made fun of Julia’s strained relationship with her father. Liz planted a small bag of pot in his locker on a day the drug dogs came. There was an enormous investigation, and Justin ended up missing quite a bit of school to appear in court. When he came back, no one would look him in the eye. It was okay to experiment. It was not okay to get caught. Justin had gotten caught, and now no one talked to him except the stoners.
They all became numbers in Liz’s metaphorical body count.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Twenty-Nine Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Liz wondered why Lauren Melbrook had never spray-painted HYPOCRITE across her lawn.
CHAPTER FIFTY
What Liz Didn’t Know
Liam never actually quit playing the flute.
He quit band. But band had always been stupid. He smashed his flute. But he had three others at home.
There were days on which he was tempted to give up entirely. He never seriously considered suicide—in fact, he wasn’t quite sure how to do it; was dropping a toaster into your bathtub still a thing?—but it passed through his mind a few times.
What the video really did was this: it made him see why so many people hated Liz Emerson, and he also saw why they all followed her. Liz Emerson got drunk too easily, and on just about anything: alcohol, power, expectations. She was never careful with her life or anyone else’s, and in her disregard was a coldness, a deep cruelty, a willingness to destroy anyone, everyone.
He went on. He played his flute. He found that there were still beautiful things in the world, and nothing could ever change that.
And one day, he decided to forgive Liz Emerson.
It was near the beginning of sophomore year. It had been cloudy on and off that day. Liam had stayed after school to finish editing his piece for the literary magazine, and when he left the building, he realized that he was not alone.
Liz Emerson was waiting for a ride. Judging by the small ring of sweat on her T-shirt and the state of her hair, she had just finished cross-country practice. They ignored each other studiously. Liam stood in the shadows of the building, and Liz stood in the dull and uncertain light, her head bent over her phone, her shoulder pushed against the brickwork.