The Fall (7 page)

“It's Wednesday. My father picks us up for dinner on Wednesdays at 5:00, and he's super strict about the time—”

I checked my cell. “It's, like, not even five now—”

“I still have to get home, dumbass!” she snapped.

(And I forgave her instantly, because she was obviously flustered to the maximum, as wigged as anybody I'd ever seen. And over what? A few minutes late? Her hands kept brushing and pulling and adjusting her clothes like crazed bumblebees.)

She sniped, “I can't, like, travel back in time, okay? I have to run home—and he's totally going to flip. I'm so dead,” she sputtered.

“Wait, what?” I called in utter failure.

She ran and ran, and I sat there blinking.

 

SHE QUIT DANCE

Sometimes we texted.

Morgan:
I quit dance.

Me:
Why? You love it.

Morgan:
Doesn't matter.

Me:
But. You. Love. It.

Morgan:
It doesn't love me back.

Me:
Okaaaaay.

Morgan:
I feel relieved about it. Happy.

Me:
Happy is good, I guess.

Morgan:
Yes. It's all good.

 

THAT TIME I KIND OF TRIED

I once tried to talk about it with Morgan. You know, that thing that hung over her neck like an ax. The trolls online.

I learned never to try that again.

It was tricky from the get-go, because I'm not good at talking about, ahem,
real things
. As a rule, I'd rather not. Also, I didn't want Morgan to know what I knew—or that I had been any part of the crapstorm on her social page. So I tried taking the long way around.

We were at a new place, for us. The playground behind her old elementary school. It was pretty sweet and absolutely empty. We sat up in an awesome pirate's ship like a pair of seaworthy scalliwags.

“I can't stand the way my teeth stick out,” Morgan complained.

“I never noticed.”

“I should have had braces when I was younger, but my parents…”

“You look fine,” I said. “No one cares.”

“When I get older, I'm definitely going for plastic surgery,” she said.

“What the what?” I said. “Are you going to buy a big set of plastic boobs?”

“Maybe.” She laughed. “Or a nose job, or a stronger chin. My lips are too thin. I look like a chicken.”

“Can you buy false lips?” I asked.

“Botox,” Morgan said. “Look at my face. I have a lazy left eye. My nose is sort of squished. And I have totally a white person's lips.”

“You
are
totally a white person,” I pointed out. “You need to stop, Morgan. You are fine the way you are.”

(I know, I should have said “beautiful,” but:
integrity
! Plus, I didn't want to send the wrong message.)

“Fine? That's it, huh?”

“You look like yourself,” I said. “Like Morgan.”

“That's the problem. I don't want to look like me,” she said.

“Why are you suddenly so weird about yourself? Plastic surgery is gross.”

“I don't think so.” Morgan shrugged. “If you can improve what you've got, and you're rich, why not go for it?”

“But those Hollywood actors look so fake. It's ridiculous. They can't even smile,” I said.

Morgan stood, stretched, and went over to the slide, where she zipped down surprisingly fast. “That thing's dangerous,” she warned, right after I came down headfirst. We messed around on the swings for a few more minutes, rode the ceramic pelicans on springs, then shifted over to a bench beneath a shady maple tree. We were six years old all over again, missing only individual juice boxes and a Tupperware container of Goldfish crackers.

Morgan checked her cell and it instantly annoyed me. “Seriously, Morgan,” I said. “Are you really looking at your phone again?”

“I really am, yes,” she replied. “That's exactly what I'm doing.”

“Maybe you could unplug every now and then,” I suggested.

“Oh please, Mother. Are you going to talk at me today?” Morgan said. “Unplug? That's how they kill old people in hospitals.”

“Seriously, Morgan. What's so great on there that you have to read it while I'm sitting here right next to you?”

She told me she was following the feed about some Disney celebrity who got arrested for drunk driving. Morgan claimed there were tons of embarrassing photos all over the internet. Everyone was slamming the celebrity on Twitter, nonstop one-liners. Morgan read a bunch to me out loud. At first the comments were clever, then cruel, and eventually just mean.

I said, “I sure hope she doesn't read all that stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wouldn't want to read it if it was about me,” I said.

(See what I was doing there?)

“Look, Sam,” Morgan answered. “She nearly ran over a baby in a stroller, then she bit the cop who arrested her. Dude's got to get tetanus shots! So I'm thinking she deserves whatever she gets.”

“Yeah, but…”

(This wasn't going as well as I'd hoped.)

I tried again. “The trolls write such awful things. Look at the kids in our own school. Some of them say horrible things about people.”

Morgan swiveled her head to look at me in a searching sort of way. “What are you talking about? This doesn't have anything to do with our school.”

“Nothing, I don't know,” I said.

“If I were some big celebrity, and people were talking about me, I'd want to know about it,” Morgan said. “Burying your head in the sand isn't going to help.”

“I don't agree. When you read those idiots, you disrespect yourself,” I said, my voice rising.

She stared at me. “Wait a minute, Sam. Are you talking about me?”

She stood, hands on her hips.

“No,” I said. “No, no. I mean just anybody.”

“I think it's funny,” she said. “Nobody takes any of that stuff seriously.”

I didn't say anything, just sat there and felt depressed. We were quiet for a minute. Morgan standing, scrolling through her phone, tapping away; me resisting the urge to throw it against a brick wall.

Finally, Morgan wondered, “Hey, Sam. Do you think my hair's too thin?”

 

SOMETHING

It wasn't a date, but I guess it was
something
.

Our secret something.

We decided to see a movie together. We were a boy and a girl, yes, but it wasn't
that
.

I'm not even sure how it came about. Oh yeah. One afternoon by the log (we had discovered the most perfect place to sit in the woods behind the elementary school and christened it cleverly “the log”), Morgan was really perky and she started talking about this thing she really wanted us to do. And I mean: really-really.

“I want to go to the movies with you and sneak in tons of food,” she said. “It'll be hilarious. Huge foot-long sandwiches, bags of candy, chips, drinks. A total feast.”

“How are we going to smuggle all that in?” I asked. “Excuse me, young man. Is that a foot-long sandwich in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?”

(
Ha,
she laughed. “Good one!”)

“We should do it,” Morgan urged.

“We should,” I fired back before thinking.

“All right, let's,” she decided.

Um …

“This Saturday,” she said. “We'll go to the earliest show.”

And I was like, “Sure!” before my brain caught up to my mouth and screamed: WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?

Too late.

This wasn't a date. To be clear.

But still! It was
something
. The idea of it felt different.

The movie couldn't have been more random. Morgan couldn't care less what we saw. This was her deal. She opted for a scary movie—
The Haunting
or
The Conjuring
or
The Corn
or whatever it was called,
Paranormal 16
!—at a theater on Elm Avenue, a long bike ride away. It was the easiest theater we could get to by ourselves, without involving parents and a million questions neither of us wanted to answer.

But also this: I felt it was going to be
our
time. No one to see us, no one to judge. We'd do it on our own. Forget the wicked old world for a few hours.

I worried.

“Don't worry,” she said, reading my mind. “No one goes to movies at 10:30 in the morning.”

And she was right,
and she was wrong
.

No one was there.

But I should have worried. Looking back, this was our happiest, purest few hours together—and the beginning of the end. Within two days, she would hate me.

(I'm not ready to tell that part yet.)

First we pedaled to Marco's Deli. Again, totally Morgan's idea. She was the mastermind—and loaded with cash. “My treat,” she said.

“No, no, no,” I protested.

“Yes, yes, yes! I've got gobs of birthday money,” she said. “Let me.”

I looked at her, uncertain.

“Really,” she insisted.

I ordered a turkey sub with bacon, because: bacon! Morgan wandered the aisles and returned clutching packages of gummy worms, chocolate, soda, chips, all kinds of junk.

“Breakfast of champions,” I noted.

“I know what I'm doing,” she said.

I picked out an Almond Joy bar from the candy display.

“Coconut is evil.” She frowned.

“Right,” I said, putting the candy bar back on the shelf. “What was I thinking?”

She stuffed everything into a huge cloth bag and slung the bulging sack around her neck.

“This will actually work?”

“They never check inside a girl's bag,” she replied. “Trust me.”

And I did trust her. We were good to go.

The theater was practically empty. Morgan was right about that too. We huddled in the last row, far-left corner. A few stragglers filtered in, lonely types with uncombed hair and massive buckets of popcorn, nobody I recognized. After the previews, we brought out the feast. Sound the trumpets! We ate like the Knights of the Round Table. Morgan whispered all through the movie, comically commenting on everything that happened onscreen: “Don't go in there! Is she a moron? This actress sucks nugs. I would never leave that huge knife out on the counter—not a good idea, Sugarlips,” and on and on.

(“Sucks nugs” was a new one on me. “It's short for nuggets,” Morgan kindly explained.)

We weren't rude. Morgan kept her voice quiet, like the way you might talk in a crowded elevator or library, and I had to lean in to hear. I felt loose strands of her hair tickle my face, smelled the warmth of her mint-flavored breath.

(We had just plowed through a box of Junior Mints.)

It was fun, I was happy, and she was happy too.

Then I said, “This is like our secret world, you know.”

“Yeah,” she answered.

“Nobody even knows we're friends,” I said. “It's like we're in a bubble. Here's to our impossible friendship. No one ever has to know.”

She didn't have anything to say. Morgan got like that sometimes. She'd go dark for stretches, like that space on the dial between radio signals. A few moments later, I heard the
clink-clink
of glass in her bag. She pulled out two little bottles of rum, like the ones they have on airplanes. I was pretty surprised.

“Pass me your soda,” she said.

“What are you doing?”

Morgan emptied the bottles into my cardboard cup of Coke, stirred it with her pinky. She took a long sip, took another. “Here,” she offered the cup to me.

I took a sip. It tasted gross. I faked it, real smooth. “Cool.” I half-gagged and gave back the cup.

She recapped the empty bottles and returned them to the bag. “I've got a system,” Morgan said. “I use these bad boys to steal booze from my parents.”

“Don't they miss it?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I used to replace the booze with water, but,” she shrugged, “my parents are basically clueless. Besides, my dad's not around much anymore. He's checked out. Cheers!” She took a long sip.

Later she emptied two more tiny bottles into a new cup of soda. I didn't drink any. It kind of freaked me out, to be honest. I never expected it from her.

“Baby,” she teased. Her voice got louder as the movie wore on. She laughed more often. Her breath lost its minty freshness. Something sour took its place.

You know that feeling when you leave a dark theater and step into the sunlight? It only happens after matinees. There was a line of people outside buying tickets. I blinked away purple dots, blinded by the daylight. After my eyes adjusted, I saw Jeff Castellano staring at me. I'll never forget the look on his face. A combination of shock, sorrow, and disgust. He was standing in line with Gavin Flynn and Demarcus Alston.

I felt like I'd fallen into a well. I was alone in a deep, dark place.

I tucked my head and took off around the corner. “Hey, wait, the bikes are the other way, dork,” Morgan called after me. I kept my eyes fixed on the ground and hurried as if my hair was on fire.

I kept berating myself, the same words echoing in my head:
What a mistake, what a stupid mistake!

 

NOTHING

I refused to get our bikes until I was sure they had gone inside the theater. Morgan didn't understand any of it. “What's wrong with you?” she asked.

I pulled out my phone, stared at it. There was a text from Jeff: “WTF?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just chill please, okay? Is that too much to ask?”

“Fine.” She shut her mouth, crossed her arms, and leaned against a brick wall. Already I could feel a distance separate us. She was five feet away, but that brick wall might as well have stood between us.