Fall to Pieces by Vahini Naidoo

to tug me along, but I shake her away. “I can walk on my own.”
    She doesn’t reply but stays beside me as we make our way through the trees. She stays beside me when we leave them, when we begin tramping down the leaf-littered streets of Sherwood. She stays beside me until we’re standing outside of my house. God, I love her for that.
    For a moment both of us stare at that spot on my front lawn, the one where Amy snapped her neck that night.Then Pet wraps a loose arm around my shoulders. “We’re okay,” she whispers. Her arm slides away, and she does, too. She walks down my street, walks away from me.
    Leaves me alone.
    I do the same thing I do every time I’ve gotten home early for the past few months. I climb up onto the roof and stare at the front lawn. Let my eyes bore into the dirt and weeds, let the storm of thoughts brewing in my head break all over the place.
    What will happen to me if I keep up this way?
    If I play Russian roulette.
    If I go bungee jumping without a cord.
    If I keep climbing up onto my roof in the moonlight. Keep looking at the tangle of weeds. Keep feeling that tingle in every single one of my limbs.
    Here’s the truth: I don’t want to die. I mean, I do. We all do, or else we wouldn’t be playing Pick Me Ups.
    But I’m not going to die. I’m going to fall down, and I’m going to pick myself up, and I’m going to keep going.
    Because dying? Not an option. Not till I’ve figured out the truth.

Chapter Twelve
    I SPEND MOST of the next school day in Cherry Bomb, whiling away the hours. Listening to the bell ring to signal the shift to a new class again and again and again. Mark’s not skipping for once in his life because the administration’s finally threatened to revoke his scholarship, and Petal didn’t turn up today. She claims Wednesday is the worst day of the week.
    So it’s me, myself, and I out in the parking lot.
    I’m sprawled on Cherry Bomb’s backseat, foam from the holes Amy poked two years ago whispering against my back. When I was younger, when my family was still whole and my father still looked at me as if I were his world, he’d speak in clichés and tell me that the sky was the limit. Today my sky is the dirty brown car roof. Today I feel limited and safe and confined and conflicted and longing. Mostly longing. Longing for a combination of past innocence and future hope.
    So when Explosive Boy taps on Cherry Bomb’s window, I ignore him because he is neither past nostalgia nor future hope. Unfortunately, he pretends to ignore me ignoring him and keeps right on tapping away at the window.
    “Ella,” he says, his voice muffled by the glass. “Come on, open up.”
    Sigh
. I twist myself out of my supine pose and open the door to make room for him on the backseat. He climbs in, bringing a stray leaf with him. It falls, an orange butterfly fluttering from the tattered corner of his blue jacket, to the car floor.
    “Hi,” he says.
    I don’t reply.
    “So, where are we going today?”
    I let out a deep breath and say, “Are you fucking serious—you want to come with us?”
    Yesterday we pushed him off a bridge. Yesterday he punched Mark in the face. Yesterday I was certain that my plan to bring E into this strange game to spice things up had failed. That I had destroyed him appropriately, and he would never give me Kleenex or a pitiful look ever again.
    Now I’m not sure.
    “Yeah, I’m still interested in that orgy,” he says in a tone that’s so playful I know he’s using it to mask something, to hide some other agenda.
    And that’s what stops me from telling him to get the hell out of the car. My curiosity about his hidden agenda. Well, that and my need to unite Mark and Pet and me. To make them spill the truth about the night Amy died.
    “You’ll see when you get there,” I say to Explosive Boy.
    He surprises me with his maple syrup smile. As if he doesn’t give a fuck that I’m being a bitch to him. “Going to blindfold me again?” he