“I won’t unwrap you,” I say. “I promise.” I lift the curtain and climb inside. I can barely see her in the dark, but I know she’s sitting there with her knees drawn up to her chin, hugging herself, and I know that she’s been crying because her breath is uneven the way it gets when you’ve been crying hard and for a very long time. Without seeing it, I know her face is red and her eyes are puffy. I move closer so I am facing her and my knees are touching her knees.
“My mom didn’t come,” she says in a tiny voice.
I reach out and stroke her legs.
She is still wearing her costume. I feel silk and leather in the dark.
“I just thought maybe tonight she would get it together. Get herself out of the house for me, you know? Just do something for me just this one time. I was so stupid. How could I have been so stupid?”
“You’re not stupid,” I tell her. “She should have been here.”
There is silence for a while. Fish holds her knees. I touch Fish in the dark. I find the side of her face. Her hair. Her hands clasping her knees. I take one hand away from her knees and run my fingers up and down the inside of her arm.
“I never told you about my scar,” says Fish in the dark.
I find it with my fingers. It rises above her skin, more pronounced in the dark, a raised line, down the inside of her arm to her wrist and then across her wrist and around her thumb. I kiss her hand and hold it against my cheek.
“Sometimes things get so hard, you know?” she says. “People think I’m happy all the time. People think I’m just always jumping around and smiling and being silly all the time. But sometimes things get so hard it just feels like I can’t do it, Max. I just can’t do it anymore. That’s what happened. I just got so tired of pretending.”
“You don’t have to pretend with me,” I say. “You don’t have to pretend to be happy when you’re not. What happened? You can tell me. How did you get the scar?”
“I tried one time,” she whispers into the dark. “When I was eleven. I broke a window and I took a piece of glass and I tried. But it didn’t work.”
I move closer to her. I gather her in to my body and hold her and rock her and kiss her hair. “I am so glad it didn’t work.”
“Me too,” she says, her lips close to my ear. “Because if it had worked, I wouldn’t have met you. I wouldn’t be about to kiss you.”
I turn my face and find her mouth in the dark. We kiss for an eternity, all enveloped in velvet darkness. We kiss each other’s faces. Each other’s hands. Each other’s mouths, we find each other over and over and over again. Fish leans close and pushes in my nose. “Beep,” she says. Then she pulls on both of my earlobes. “Bong.”
We uncurl the curtain and step out onto the stage together. I feel like I am glowing. My whole body is alive, every pore, every cell, my face flushed. I bring her to the edge of the stage, bend her back, and kiss her. We must present an interesting picture alone on the empty stage, me in my black skinny jeans and my red Converse All Stars and Fish in her gown. I take her hand and spin her. She throws back her head and laughs her wonderful, contagious, raucous laugh. Then she wraps her arms around my neck and I am spinning too, both of us together, and we’re laughing so loud that our laughter fills the auditorium.
“To be,” whispers Fish into my ear. “That is the answer.”
“Definitely,” I say.
“I want to celebrate,” says Fish.
“How about some ice cream?”
“Great idea,” says Fish. “Let’s go. Right now.”
“Do you think you should change out of your costume?”
Fish looks down at her gown. “What,” she says, “this old thing?”
“Ravi’s gonna kill you if you get ice cream on it.”
“Come on,” says Fish deviously. “Live a little.”
She takes my hand and we jump together off the stage and run like crazy people up the aisle of the auditorium, through the double swinging doors, and into the empty foyer, where the janitor is pushing his tired broom across the floor. When he spots me and Fish holding hands, he winks at me, tips his baseball cap, and continues on down the hall, whistling.
I hold the door for her and she spins into the night, her gown floating around her like white mist. Most of the snow has melted. You can smell spring under the ground, stirring in the earth, pulsing like a heartbeat. I stop in my tracks and look at the sky. I can’t remember the last time I looked at the stars. Mom knew the names of all the constellations. When I was little she would help me connect the dots, as though all things had meaning and purpose and order. Look at this one, Max, she would say. Can you see it? Can you see it? I would gasp, because gasping seemed like the right thing to do. I see it, Mommy. I see it up there. But I never did.
They gleam above me now. Beautiful and chaotic. I take Fish’s hand and stride, straight-backed and smiling, toward the ice cream parlor around the corner, where I know Dad and Grandma and Lydie and the twins are waiting for us. They will order us a double-fudge ice cream sundae and we will eat it with two spoons. They will make room for Fish to sit at the table with us and they will tell us both how proud they are. I will close my eyes and feel all that pride and love on my head like a blessing, like sunshine coming down, like two soft angel’s lips kissing my hair.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful for the wisdom and eagle-eyes of my editor, Margaret Ferguson, who offered me the gift of her time, her critique, and her superhuman patience draft after draft. I am grateful for the positive spirit of my agent, Victoria Wells Arms, who talked me down from the ceiling when I thought I would never get it right. Thanks to my good friend Esther Ehrlich, who reminded me to find the love in every scene, and whose beautiful book, Nest, gave me the courage to keep writing. Thanks to the librarians at the J.V. Fletcher Library, who always smiled when I stayed late, and to the baristas at Pleasant Street Tea Company in Gloucester, Massachusetts, who supplied endless green-tea smoothies and the perfect funky ambiance for long summer days of writing by the sea. Finally, I owe a tremendous debt to my three gorgeous muses: Stephen, Joshua, and Benjamin Pixley, who gave me the gifts of their ears and their hearts when I read pages out loud during our beloved cross-country road trips. I could never have done it without your support. This novel is for you.
ALSO BY MARCELLA PIXLEY
Freak
Without Tess
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marcella Pixley is a middle school language arts teacher and a writer. Her poetry has been published in various literary journals, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book, Freak, received four starred reviews and was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year. She lives in Westford, Massachusetts, with her husband and two sons. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Promises
Funeral on Rye with Mustard
Welcome to the Hotel Glioblastoma
The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions: And Other Unfortunate Platitudes
Brown-Rice Sushi
Baldwin
Assisted Living Facilities Have Good Ice Cream
Dark Side of the Moon
Measure for Measure
Morning Has Broken
We’re Off to See the Wizard
Yellow Smiley Sickroom
Truth and Truancy
Bottle of Cow
Bildungsroman and Other Four-Syllable Words
Ernie’s Junk Shop
Blue Willow
After
; Beef Lo Mein
Thomas A. Trowbridge the Fourth
Sophomores Are Sophomoric and Other Tautologies
Trust Fall
To Be or Not
Lady J. and the Age of Aquarius
Nirvana
All Things Fragile and Desperate
Ungeziefer Verwandelt
Misery Makes Good Fiction
Get Thee to a Nunnery
Triangles and Other Three-Sided Polygons
Birds to the Slaughter
Perchance to Dream
Scorpion Bowl
TARDIS
Concussion with Extra Cheese
Walrus
Early-Morning Singing Song
Laughter and Tears
Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune
Long Road Home
Paper Cranes
Shard
Aftermath
Steampunk
Ready to Fall
The Fall of a Sparrow
Encore
Curtain Call
Acknowledgments
Also by Marcella Pixley
About the Author
Copyright
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
An imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Text copyright © 2017 by Marcella Pixley
All rights reserved
First hardcover edition, 2017
eBook edition, November 2017
fiercereads.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Pixley, Marcella Fleischman, author.
Title: Ready to fall: a novel / Marcella Pixley.
Description: First edition. | New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2017. | Summary: Seventeen-year-old Max, struggling to come to terms with his mother’s death, is cast as the ghost in Hamlet and finds strength in his new theater friends.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016058779(print) | LCCN 2017029376 (ebook) | ISBN 9780374303594 (ebook) | ISBN 9780374303587 (hardcover)
Subjects: | CYAC: Grief—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Theater—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Jews—United States—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.P68947 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.P68947 Re 2017 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058779
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eISBN 9780374303594
Ready to Fall Page 23
