“Are you sure you want to talk about this right now?”
“Positive,” I said.
“Well,” Emily started, still a little hesitant, “I told you about the music program.”
I nodded and settled myself more comfortably on the bed. I couldn’t bring Lizzie back to life. I couldn’t make Mychelle less horrible or make Enzo into the person I wanted him to be.
But my friendship with Emily was something I had control over. I could be there for her, the same way she was there for me. For once, I could shut up and listen.
Chapter 35
In the Woods, Again
I waited until the first big snow to return to the woods. It was way later than usual. We’d had flurries, but none of it stuck. Fall seemed to last forever, the trees barren except for the few leaves still managing to hold on, poised in some terrible in-between.
But one morning, I woke up to snow falling and collecting on the ground. I was ready for it. I grabbed my bag and left the house, careful not to wake my family.
I went to Lizzie and Enzo’s campsite first. I still thought of it that way, as belonging to them, even though I’d been there more with Enzo than Lizzie had. We had talked there and plotted there and fought there and kissed there. But it was the last place Lizzie and Enzo were together before she died, and that overrode all of the time he and I had spent there.
I unzipped my bag, took out a map, and spread it on the flat rock where Enzo and I used to sit and talk. I was just stalling. I didn’t need the map. I’d already traced the path a thousand times. I knew where to go and how to get there. It was pretty much impossible to not know.
That’s the thing about high school. Even social outcasts can’t help but overhear gossip. Like how kids were already daring each other to go out in the woods in the middle of the night, to the place where Lizzie killed herself. It was turning into another site on the Griffin Mills haunted tour. First stop, the Griffin Mansion; next up, the Lizzie Lovett suicide grove. With an extra reputation boost for anyone brave enough to stay there all night.
Pretty soon, it would be like Lizzie had never been a real person at all.
If Enzo were there, I could have told him it scared me how Lizzie was already becoming irrelevant. He would have understood. He would have turned my feelings into a painting, allowing me to distance myself from them.
Or maybe he would have made everything more complicated.
I folded the map and set off.
When Lizzie had walked through the woods, there hadn’t been a path. But with so many people trampling through during the past month, a trail was starting to form.
I wished I had been the first to follow her. But my feet stepped in the same places hers had, and my clothes got snagged on the same underbrush. I tried to see the woods the way she would have on the night she died.
What had she been thinking when she walked through the trees? Was she scared? Was she sad? Was she happy that she was making her escape?
When I found out about Lizzie, it was the first time I considered that I was eventually going to die. I was going to die, and so were my parents and my brother and my friends and everyone in the world. Death is the only thing in life that’s for sure going to happen. Didn’t someone famous say that once? It’s true. One day, we’ll all die.
It was the mystery of death that I found most awful. Will it be fast or slow? Will you be young or old? Will it be easy or painful? There were so many ways to die. Accidents and sicknesses and even more terrible ways, like murder. Leaving your house is dangerous. Staying inside is dangerous. The odds are against everyone, and it seemed like dumb luck so many people stuck around for eighty or so years. And that bothered me.
I was going to die. But I didn’t know when.
What if Lizzie thought the same thing? What if that was part of why she killed herself? Maybe she hated being out of control, knowing that someone or something else was dictating her fate. Because it’s really not fair. A drunk driver runs a red light, and you end up dead. A guy in a movie theater coughs on you, and you catch some rare, fatal disease. You sit in class minding your own business, and there’s the kid from sixth period holding a gun in his hand. Why should other people be in control? Why should someone else get to choose when you die?
Maybe Lizzie decided the world was crazy, and it was always going to be crazy, and there was nothing she could do about it. But her death? That was another story. That was something she could control. She could beat everyone to it, do it her way.
On the other hand, I’d learned from Enzo’s stories that sometimes it’s better not knowing the ending. The most magical part of life is the mystery. When she killed herself, Lizzie gave that up.
The path I was on was hard to navigate, and when Lizzie walked there at the end of summer, it would have been even more overgrown. And she did it in the dark. Did she have a spot already picked out? Or did she just walk until she was too tired to go any farther? How did she manage to take step after step, knowing what waited for her at the end?
I heard a noise behind me, something like a twig snapping. I scanned the woods. Nothing was there. Unless it was Lizzie’s ghost.
What about ghosts? And what about heaven? Did Lizzie believe in it? Most religions consider suicide a sin, so Lizzie probably wasn’t religious. But did that mean she didn’t believe in the afterlife at all?
I wasn’t too sure about the afterlife either. My dad always said that he didn’t know one way or another, but he wasn’t going to worry about it while he was still alive. My mom would say people have different beliefs about where we go when we die, and maybe everyone is right in their own way. I wished I knew what Lizzie believed. I wished I’d asked Enzo. But why would I have? I thought we were chasing a werewolf, not a dead girl.
It crossed my mind that I might not know the spot when I got there. Maybe I would walk past it and go deeper and deeper into the woods until I was hopelessly lost, more lost than Lizzie. But I didn’t need to worry. After hiking down a steep ravine—where I was very aware of the danger of slipping and breaking a leg—I saw a piece of crime scene tape still tied to a tree.
I froze and sucked in my breath. I’d sought out the site of Lizzie’s death, but I hadn’t anticipated how much it would hurt to actually be there. It was like being punched in the stomach.
The woods around me weren’t special. There was nothing to indicate why Lizzie had chosen that spot for her last moments. I looked around for anything she might have left behind—an earring that had fallen out, a shoe that had been kicked off. But there was nothing. I wasn’t even sure which tree was The Tree.
The woods had swallowed Lizzie’s secrets. She had lived, and she had died, and now, there was no trace of her. Elizabeth Lovett was just a name in a newspaper article, a statistic, someone people used to know.
Another crack came from behind me. It sounded like a bone snapping, something crawling out of a grave. I spun around, part of me expecting to see Lizzie, purple skin and ligature marks around her neck, asking me why I was disturbing her.
But it wasn’t Lizzie. It was my brother.
“Rush? What are you doing here?”
“I’d like to know the same thing about you.”
For a moment, we stared at each other, the snow falling softly around us. Rush was the one who spoke first.
“I heard you sneaking around the house. So I followed you.”
“Why?”
He shifted back and forth, for once looking as awkward as I usually felt. “I’ve been worried. Ever since Thanksgiving. With the scarf.”
“You think I came here to kill myself?” I asked, surprised. Though after a moment of consideration, I realized my behavior had been pretty suspicious.
Rush shrugged.
“I’m not suicidal,” I assured him.
“So what are you doing out here?”
“I needed t
o see the tree. You know. The one she hanged from.”
“That’s morbid.”
It was my turn to shrug. “I guess it is. I just needed some closure.”
“So which tree is it?”
“I don’t know. I thought I’d be able to tell.”
Rush sat down in the dirt and leaves and snow. I sat next to him. We looked at the trees together in silence, trying to pick out the same one as Lizzie, the tree that was special enough to die beneath.
“I wanted to be close to her for a little while,” I said. “And the snow…maybe it seems stupid, but snow makes everything feel safe and clean.”
“Snow is a symbol for purity, if you can trust my community college English lit professor anyway.”
We both laughed at that, louder than we should have, because it wasn’t really that funny. But it was like being scared of the dark. With a little light, the shadows disappeared, and your surroundings weren’t so frightening.
“I brought these,” I said. I reached into my backpack and took out a stack of photos. The photos Enzo wanted to turn into art.
Rush flipped through the pictures. “Where’d you get these?”
“I took them from Enzo’s.”
“Don’t you think he might want them? Especially now?”
“Enzo doesn’t deserve them. I want to leave them here. Like a memorial.”
So Rush helped me arrange the photos in an arc on the ground. I knew the snow would ruin them and the wind would scatter them. By next summer, by the anniversary of Lizzie’s death, the photos would be unrecognizable. That was OK though. The place where Lizzie died now held a small glimmer of her life, and that was enough. A moment is all any of us has, really.
“Why do you think she did it?” I asked Rush.
“I don’t know. Maybe there wasn’t some big reason. Maybe she was just unhappy.”
“She didn’t seem like an unhappy person.”
“I saw her crying once,” Rush said. “I’d left the locker room after everyone else, and Lizzie was in the hallway crying. She must have thought no one was around.”
“People cry all the time. That doesn’t mean they’re suicidal.”
“It wasn’t that. When she saw me, she just stopped. Like, from sobbing to perfectly OK in two seconds. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me it was nothing, that she was just being dumb. Then we left for a party, and she seemed happy for the rest of the night. But I always wondered, if she could turn her feelings off like a switch, how much was she hiding from us? It made her seem mysterious. Which is stupid. She wasn’t mysterious; she was depressed.”
Could the answer be as easy as that? The person I’d admired and hated and envied and compared myself to for years was depressed. I looked down at the pictures of Lizzie. One of the versions of Lizzie anyway. I’d assumed she switched personalities to put on fronts for other people, but maybe she’d actually been lying to herself. Hoping that if she reinvented herself enough times, one day, she’d become a Lizzie Lovett who wasn’t deeply unhappy.
“I shouldn’t have believed her,” Rush said. “I should have made her talk to me. Maybe things would be different now.”
“I doubt there was anything you could have done.”
“I guess we’ll never know.” He looked at the pictures of Lizzie for a little while, then back at me. “Everyone’s worried about you, you know.”
“By everyone, you mean Mom and Dad?”
“And me. Don’t I count?”
I shrugged.
“Connor keeps asking about you,” Rush said.
“He does?”
“Half the time, I think he uses me as an excuse to see you.”
I raised my eyebrows at that unexpected bit of information.
“You need to let go of this thing with Lizzie,” Rush said. “Stop obsessing over her. Stop wishing you had her life. Even Lizzie didn’t want to be Lizzie.”
A month ago, I wouldn’t have believed him. I thought Lizzie had been born with some magical luck that I missed out on. I wasn’t so sure of that anymore. Maybe the luckiest people are the ones who know that no matter how bad things seem, there’s always something to live for.
“Do you think I’m horrible?” I asked.
“What? Why?”
“For the whole werewolf thing.”
“No,” Rush said. “You’re not horrible.”
He put his arm around me and pulled me close, the way he used to when we were little kids and he thought it was his job to protect me from the rest of the world.
I felt safe. Out there in the woods, where a girl had killed herself, during the first snow of the season, sitting next to my big brother, who was doing his best to look out for me, I felt safe and content. For the first time in a long time, I felt like maybe, probably, everything was going to be OK.
Chapter 36
And Life Went On
Lizzie was dead, but life went on. That’s what I found out that winter.
Sometimes, it felt like Lizzie sucked all the magic out of the world when she died. Out of my world, at least. And sometimes, that made me think there wasn’t any point to anything. On those days, I would curl up in bed until one of my parents or Rush dragged me out. But even then, even on those bad days, I had no desire to join Lizzie. I was sad but not ready to give up.
Life went on at school, and life went on out of school. I studied for midterms and went Christmas shopping and wiped down tables at the café before I closed up. I did most of that stuff by myself, but that was OK. I was alone, but for once, I didn’t feel lonely.
My brother spent a lot of time trying to entertain me that winter. Every few days, he’d stick his head in my room and ask “What about seeing a movie tonight?” or “Some people are going sledding. You want to come?” When school let out for winter break, I finally told him he didn’t need to babysit me. He said he wasn’t—he just wanted to hang out. I didn’t know if he was telling the truth, but it made me feel good.
I tried not to care about Lizzie, but no one in the history of the world has ever gotten over Lizzie Lovett easily. Sometimes, late at night, I would look out the window at the icy road and bare trees and imagine Lizzie’s ghost walking into my yard. She’d be pale and wearing white, and her hair would blend in with the snow. She would stop under my window and look up at me and smile that knowing half smile, the one that looked haunted even when she was alive. And I would run outside to her, and I’d be shivering from the cold, and she wouldn’t be, and I would say, “Just tell me why.”
I only wanted one conversation. One hour. I wanted to ask why she did it, what about the world seemed so terrible that she had to leave it. I wanted to tell her there were so many people who would have tried to save her if she would have let them. I wanted to tell her how much I’d hated her and loved her, even though I never knew her at all—but that I would have done whatever I could to help her.
But Lizzie wasn’t ever coming back. I knew I had to learn to be OK with that.
I thought about Enzo sometimes too. Even if I wanted to forget him, Mychelle wouldn’t let me. All through first period, I had to listen to what they’d done the night before. One morning, she even slipped a photo of them kissing into my locker. It was a sloppy photo, way too close, with tongues and spit. My first instinct was to tear it up, but I submitted it for the yearbook instead.
Mychelle slowly started talking about Enzo less and less, until she stopped mentioning him at all. Then, the day of midterms, I saw her making out in the cafeteria with Noah Ridgeway, the freshman quarterback. I waited for her at her locker after school.
“A freshman, huh?” I said by way of greeting. “It’s only midterm, and you’ve already exhausted your options in the senior, junior, and sophomore classes?”
Mychelle brushed past me and opened her locker. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
> “I guess Enzo was way too old for you. What is he, ten years older than Noah?”
Mychelle stopped rooting through her locker and looked at me coldly. “What do you want?”
“I want to know what it feels like.”
“What what feels like?”
“You gave yourself to Enzo to mess with me. You didn’t actually like him, right? How many people have you slept with just to get what you want? And how do you think those guys feel about you when they realize what a manipulative bitch you are?”
Mychelle slammed her locker shut and started to walk away.
“That’s what I wanted to know,” I called after her, not caring about the crowd that was starting to form. “What’s it feel like to be a regret?”
She didn’t answer, of course. But as I was leaving school, Ronna Barnes, who looked ready to go into labor at any second, told me she’d seen Mychelle crying in the bathroom, and that everyone was talking about what I’d said. It was the sort of thing you think will make you feel awesome but instead leaves you empty and as awful as the person you’re putting down.
That’s why I figured it was time for me to stop thinking about Mychelle Adler. Which I was mostly successful at. It wasn’t so easy with Enzo though. I felt sort of bad for him, even though the thing with Mychelle was his own fault. And for all I knew, he’d been the one to break it off with her, not the other way around. Maybe after Lizzie, Mychelle, and me, he’d had his share of crazy girls.
Either way, life went on.
But it didn’t go on for everyone. Christa called me two days after Christmas and told me about the obituary. I went to the computer and looked up the Layton newspaper. It was there, just like she said. Vernon Miles, age eighty-one, passed away from health complications.
I cried because he had died, and because the obituary mentioned how much he enjoyed doing puzzles, and because up until that point, I hadn’t even known his last name.
I thought for sure that by the day of his funeral, my tears would have all dried up, but they hadn’t. The service was in the little chapel adjacent to the cemetery, and only about a dozen people attended. Christa and I stood together, and she passed me tissues from a seemingly never-ending supply in her purse.
The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett Page 27
