The Fall (6 page)

I kept rolling down the hall.

She looked like Morgan, but prettier, I guess. Thinner, taller, hair lighter, more fussed over. Anybody could tell they were related, though, which must have been weird for her. Because it was definitely weird for me. So I motored past, but she called out, “Excuse me? Can you help?”

I'm like, “Huh?”

She smiled, embarrassed. “My locker is spazzing out on me. I think I'm doing the combination right, but it won't open. I'm, like, five minutes late already.”

It was just us in the hall, so it wasn't like I could melt into the crowd or anything. If I could have evaporated right there, I would have.
Poof,
you know. Gone. Instead I said, “Yeah, they stick sometimes. You gotta kind of…”

I punched the top right corner of the locker with the side of my fist.
Boom
. A loud, echoing, rattling sound. Then I pulled up on the handle real hard and—
fliiiiiing!
—the door shivered open in my hand.

“Cool,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” I said. “Any time.”

There were a lot of thoughts racing through my head right then. About eighteen different things I could have said.

“I'm Sam,” I told her, and added idiotically, “Sam I am,” and scooted out of there fast.

 

DOUBTS

How do you say

sorry

& actually mean it?

 

DAD'S GUN

My father keeps a gun on the top shelf of his bedroom closet. Way in the back. He stores it in a wooden case that's lined with felt, like the inside of a fancy guitar case. There's a lock on it, but he never locks it. I guess Dad figures he doesn't want to be fumbling for the key when the zombie hordes smash through the windows.

(
Braiiiiiins, braiiiiins
!)

I discovered the gun a couple of years ago when I was searching for Christmas presents. I'm the kid who will check every corner of the house if I think there's something good hidden. I like poking around in people's secret places. Finding Christmas gifts is my specialty.

The first time I found it, the gun scared me. Now, not too much. The truth is, I never felt for one minute that I would actually use it on myself. I couldn't imagine ever feeling that way. But I tried to bring my mind to that place. The despair, the hopelessness. I slumped against the closet floor and stared at the silver gun in my hand. A .38 Special Colt Diamondback. It was horribly beautiful, or beautifully horrible.

Time passed, no idea how long. The bullets were in the box. If I wanted to, it would have been so simple. In a momentary impulse, I could have pushed the barrel up against the roof of my mouth and squeezed the trigger.

Boom.

Lights out.

Crazy, right?

And it would be done. All over. I'd never get a chance to take it back. There would be no … oh, wait, hold on. Did Morgan actually understand that? Could her mind wrap around the finality of it? Maybe that's all she saw, the end of her suffering, the black, blank silence of the departed. No more bells, no more noises, no more voices and their terrible, disapproving faces. No past, no future, no more sad todays. No tomorrows.

I placed the .38 back in its case, returned the box to the shelf in precisely the same spot. My father would never know I'd held it in my hand. He'd never know what I thought about. Every kid has secrets. Parents are mostly in the dark.

 

SOMEBODY'S FINGERPRINT

This is going to sound dumb. Or lame. Or just really, really boring (so I'll keep it short). But I've been staring at my fingertips for the past ten minutes. I took a black marker and pressed my colored-in thumb onto a white page. There I am. That's me. Those bumps and contours, the ridges and lines. It looks like the topographical maps Mr. Haycox made us study in P.E.

(Which was annoying, by the way.)

In the old days, P.E. was this awesome thing where kids played dodgeball, climbed ropes, and smacked the hell out of each other. Now there are actual bubble tests and all this phony learning. It's not enough that we run around and sweat, now we have to dance and cooperate, play games of “Trust,” and have meaningful activities. Shoot me now, you know? Anyhow, that's how I learned about topographical maps and backpacking, which is what I thought about after staring at my fingerprint for the past ten minutes.

The FBI can identify people by their fingerprints. We're all our own unique snowflake—isn't that corny? Nobody else is exactly like me. Which is amazing also, when you think about the world filled with more than seven billion people. I look at those bumps and lines and wonder how that could be possible? There's got to be some kid in Somalia or wherever with my exact fingerprint. The lines, the ridges, exactly the same. Identical.

I'm a little worried about how much I've been thinking about my fingerprints. All the places I've been, the things and people I've touched, the marks I've left behind.

 

SHE LIKED BATHS

She was the most random person I ever met. Everything she said surprised me. Her mind roamed around like a hungry animal, foraging for food.

“Do you take baths?” she asked.

“Almost never,” I answered.

“A good hot bath can fix just about anything,” she said. We were in the cemetery next to the school grounds. If that sounds creepy, it wasn't. The cemetery was actually a really pretty, peaceful place. And best of all, it was private. Morgan closed her eyes and stretched her arms. “I learned that from
The Bell Jar.
She took a lot of baths in that book.”

I didn't understand most of what Morgan talked about. I felt like a moose staring dumbly over the rim of the Grand Canyon. It was amazing but … incomprehensible. Nothing organized itself in my mind. Words and ideas shifted around like sand.

She kept talking about baths, the relief of sinking into hot, hot water. The mirror all fogged up so you couldn't see yourself, even if you wanted to, which you didn't.

“I sometimes take two, three baths a day,” she said. “But the water always gets cold, and then I feel like a slab in the morgue.”

“What?”

“A cold pancake!” she chirped brightly, performing a sudden, graceful twirl, her arms outstretched, spinning like a snowflake in a storm.

I stood there, drawn to her like a magnet, understanding none of it, not a word.

A corpse in a morgue?

“There's nothing sadder than a cold pancake,” I finally said.

She stopped spinning to stare at me, staggering a little, still dizzy from her whirling dance. “You're right!” she exclaimed. “Cold pancakes suck ass. Let's climb a tree!”

Then she raced off, giddy, toward the tall pines.

I followed. What else was I going to do? Like I just wrote, I was metal (mental?) and she was my magnet.

 

MEETING WITH LANEWAY

I scoped out his office a few times, strolled down the hallway, checking out what's what. One time the door was open and I spied Laneway at his desk. I half-stepped, half-leaned in, and said, “So this is where the magic happens, huh?”

He pulled on his mustache, closed the book on his desk.

“Hello, Sam.”

I glanced around the small, cramped office, bursting with books, boxes, piles of papers, articles and photographs torn from magazines and thumb-tacked to bulletin boards. “I see you're a hoarder,” I joked.

He leaned back in his chair, hands hammocked behind his head, and looked around at the office as if seeing it for the first time. He said, “People usually ask me, ‘Why do you keep all this stuff?' And I always wonder, ‘Why do you throw it all away?'”

“That's one way of looking at it,” I said.

He didn't say anything. Just looked at me, waiting.

“Well, anyway, just saying hi.” I inched out of the room.

“Are you free?” he asked.

I hesitated. “I've got band.”

“I could write a pass,” he offered. “Sit, if you'd like.”

So I sat.

“What's up?” he asked.

I looked down at the hands on my lap. “I started a journal, like you suggested.”

“I'm glad to hear that, Sam. How's it going?”

“I'm trying to keep up with it,” I said. “A little bit every day.”

Another silence. Maybe Mr. Laneway couldn't think of anything worth saying. Maybe he didn't mind the quiet.

Finally, he asked, “Has it helped?”

“Helped?” I repeated. “You mean, like with…”

“Morgan,” he said.

There were no windows in his office, and I really could have used a window right then. The air felt suddenly stagnant, the walls too close.

“I sometimes think it was my fault,” I said, unbelievably. I mean, I never intended to say that to anyone.

He sat up a little straighter. “Is there a reason why you feel that way?”

“A reason? Like
one
reason? No,” I said.

Then I talked for a while. Not about the message board, not that, in so many words. But maybe I gave him enough to figure it out. Mostly I talked about Morgan and me. The times we hung out. And how I rejected her at school. It was impossible to tell all of it. But bits and pieces came gushing out, like blood from a sliced thumb.

“And how are you feeling about all this?” he asked.

(Seriously?)

“Pretty crappy,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied. “Yes, Sam. I can see that. Let me ask you. Is this about her social media page?”

(He knew? He knew!)

I looked away from his serious, super-earnest face. All I could do was nod yes. “Some,” I said.

“I see.”

More silence, but a worse kind. This one was heavy, thick, sorrowful.

I studied the tile pattern of the floor.

“You participated in it?” he asked.

“I wrote some things,” I said. “Then I stopped.”

“Did you ever tell anyone?”

I shrugged helplessly.

“That must be a hard thing to live with,” he said.

At first, I thought he meant Morgan. Because, obviously. Then I realized he was talking about me. I was the one who lived.

Mr. Laneway pushed a box of Kleenex toward me. I frowned, wiped my eyes with the back of my sleeve. He stood up, walked away, returned with a glass of water. “Thanks,” I said, and drank it.

“In times like this,” he said, now leaning against the front of his desk, close to me, voice very quiet. “In these times,” he sighed, searching for words, “many good, decent people look within and find ourselves wanting. We can't help but wonder.”

I wasn't sure what he meant, but the sound of his voice made me feel better.

“We ask ourselves, ‘What could I have done?'” he said. “We feel—”

“Like failures,” I said.

“Yes, like failures,” he said. “But that's only natural. It probably means that you're a caring person.”

“I don't know, doubtful.” I shook my head. “I really don't.”

“I do,” he said. “When someone takes her own life, Sam, it's a horrible, awful, heartbreaking tragedy. We can never fully understand why.”

I nodded, sniffled.

He said, “We can't know what goes on inside someone's head, or the circumstances of her life, or exactly why anyone does the things she does. Depression can be a devastating illness. We have to live with that unknowing.”

I looked into Mr. Laneway's face. “My parents tell me that I have to move on, but they never told me how.”

 

CLEAR ALL

We never touched.

We never kissed.

I never put my arm around her.

Never held her hand.

But we did text.

And on the day she died,

after I heard, I cleared

every message in my cell,

wiping away the prints.

I wish I had that day back.

I would remember, then,

not to forget.

 

GROUNDHOG LIFE

“You ever see the movie
Groundhog Day
?” Morgan asked.

“Um, not sure.”

“You must have,” she said, knocking me on the shoulder with the side of her fist. “Everybody has. Bill Murray is a weatherman who gets stuck in a time loop, where he has to live the same day over and over.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, remembering. “I might have seen that.”

“That's what my life feels like,” she told me. “I go to bed, hoping that after a long sleep I'll feel better. But each day it's exactly the same. Nothing changes. I can't snap the streak.”

“Maybe you need to try something new,” I suggested.

She looked at me thoughtfully, in that way she had of looking at me. “You mean … something radical?”

“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Go on a hot-air-balloon ride, learn to play the banjo, take up painting, join the Y, go skydiving or something.”

“Skydiving!” she said.

“I don't know, it's super expensive,” I said. “How did he get out of the time loop in the movie?”

She paused, head tilted. “I don't remember,” she said, smiling. “That's funny, I have no idea how he finally did it.”

 

GOTTA GET GOING

I remember one afternoon—just an absolutely gorgeous postcard afternoon, the kind of day when troubles lift away—I was lazing in the cemetery with Morgan. She checked the time. “Oh shoot, oh crap, oh shoot!” she gasped, and got all panicky and flustered. “I gotta go, I gotta get going, I gotta go!”

“Huh, what?” I said helpfully.

“I gotta go, I'm late, oh shoot!” she said—and I saw that her hands became bees and her hair was tangled and her eyes were wide and wild and—

(She was crying.)

I didn't understand the sudden stress.

“What's happening?” I asked.

She snatched up her things—her phone, her bag, her cigarettes. (Morgan had started smoking, stealing cigarettes from her mother.)