Feel Me Fall Page 22

  “I don’t know who ate the food in the night, though. That’s the thing I don’t know. It wasn’t me. Maybe it was all of us, slowly sneaking a piece or two. And not that this makes up for anything, but it was me who thought of making a stretcher for Ryan. I carried him. No one else wanted to. Maybe in some small way that makes a difference.”

  I hope so, I think. I sure as hell hope so.

  “As for sleeping with Nico, it’s true it only happened once.”

  I pause, waiting for a sign, a response, something from my mother.

  “I slept with the guy my best friend liked. What kind of girl does that? You hate those girls. I hate those girls. No one grows up thinking that’s who you’ll be. And then it happens. And you’re like, oh, that girl is me. How did I become the villain in my own life? At the time, I didn’t know why I’d done what I did. Now I do. I was jealous of Viv. I wanted to feel special. I wanted something she didn’t have. And after I was with him, I knew, deep down, I’d been there first. I literally felt his heartbeat in my hand. I finally had something she didn’t.”

  The hospital is so sterile. Unlike me.

  “Not a satisfying answer, but it’s the truth. And what started as my own little secret began to eat away at me. I swallowed that secret and kept it buried. No one was ever going to know. Especially Viv.

  “What hurts more, though, were Nico’s last words. They weren’t ‘the sun feels nice.’ How nice would that have been? Makes dying seem, well, not like it was. His last words were pleading with me not to leave. Begging me. I left him waiting for death. I left him in fear. Remember how I spent that one summer volunteering at the Humane Society? I only lasted a few days. I couldn’t bear to be around when they put the animals down. What was worse was when people would just drop off their old dogs knowing what would happen to them. They threw away their dogs like garbage. I hated those people. But I did that to Nico. I left him there. Alone.”

  I stop and take a long breath. I am so tired.

  “That’s the thing with secrets. They always come out. I guess that’s why I’m telling you. I’ll say it once so I know it’s out in the universe. No one else may know, but I do. I know the secret’s not a secret anymore. Maybe it won’t kill me so much when I think about it.”

  My mother sits across from me, slumped over, but her breathing has changed. It’s no longer deep, but shallow. Her eyes are closed, but I know she’s only pretending to sleep. I don’t know how long she’s been listening. That’s fine, I think. We all have our secrets. Now she has mine.

  “I think that’s everything,” I say. “Well, almost everything.”

  The flight had been smooth, and yet I waited in tense anticipation for the turbulence to return. I reminded myself: not much longer. We’re almost there. As a distraction, I thought of the book of poetry Johannes had given me, a cherished gift, which rested in my bag like a permanent valentine. In my row, Viv sat in her chair, sleeping, and I was jealous that her life seemed non-stick; everything that slapped against it simply fell to the wayside.

  I took deep breaths to try and calm myself.

  The air in the cabin was dry and it was like breathing from inside a scuba-diving tank. I just wanted off this plane. I tapped Johannes on the shoulder.

  “I gotta use the ladies’ room.”

  That’s when we heard a loud mechanical snap. The plane began to vibrate. It reminded me of the awful sound in cars when the windows are down and it’s like someone blowing over an empty beer bottle.

  “Is that normal?” I asked.

  The look on his face told me it wasn’t, but he lied to soothe me. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  I decided to stay in my seat.

  Things happened quickly. The plane jostled violently, and not like rhythmic turbulence, more like a bobber being pulled down by a creature you never want to see. We descended unnaturally, too fast, too steep. Fasten Seat Belt Lights snapped on. The captain yelled over the intercom: “Seatbelts! Seatbelts!”

  This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t normal at all.

  People were screaming, and I felt the G-forces pressing me against my seat. Strangely, I felt as if I was in the center of an emotional hurricane. Around me, chaos reigned, but in my own little world, I watched with surreal calmness. All sound faded to nothing. People’s mouths were agape, their faces like caricatures, drawings an artist would make on the seashore, exaggerating features.

  The plane not only vibrated: it rumbled, and I felt the low-grade pulses rising through the soles of my feet, to my legs, shaking my entire body. It was as if the plane’s very skeleton was coming apart and it was fighting to remain whole. The bins atop the plane came loose and suitcases fell. Up and down the aisle bags rained down, some opening, throwing out clothes like confetti in a parade. The emergency lights popped on while other lights flickered. The TV screens in the back of our seats went to static, flooding the cabin in a ghostly hue.

  In my mind, I transposed the people screaming in terror into people at a club, dancing, their hands waving in the air, their mouths open as if singing.

  Johannes shook me, and it brought me back to reality.

  He was a grown man and I saw his pants were wet. He screamed at me, “You’re my wish, Emily! You’re my wish!” He reached over and tried to kiss me, but with all the turbulence, it was impossible, our heads colliding. Frustrated, he unbuckled his seat belt and grabbed the back of my head and kissed me long and hard on the lips.

  “I love you, Emily. I love you.”

  Those were the last words he ever said to me.

  We dropped so much I felt my hair rise above my head and Johannes flew from his seat, hitting the ceiling. Almost just as fast, the altitude shifted and he dropped back to his seat, his head bloody, and I thought with envy, unconscious.

  Viv cried across from me.

  I made the mistake of looking out the window. All was a vast emptiness. I didn’t see a single town or road. We were falling into the middle of nowhere.

  There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to run.

  Nothing to do but wait.

  I thought of my wish, the wish Johannes promised I could send into the heavens, and I mentally sent it as far and fast and hard as I could: I don’t want to die. Someone else, but not me.

  After we fell from the sky, after the plane had crashed, after I’d been pushed from the sinking aluminum tube and into the water, I was dead to the world and when I came to I was drowning. Water gushed into my mouth and I was tumbling, flailing, not knowing what end was up or down. I heard the sounds of screaming and the roaring of water and then nothingness. I was in a river.

  The current sped faster, churning like boiling water and I thought I was going to die. The torrent sucked me into a watery hell and I couldn’t breathe. I started to panic.

  Suddenly, I took a shot to the head and saw stars. A high-pitched squeal rang in my ears. A growing sensation of darkness invited me to join its depths. I could let go. I could fall into it, like falling asleep. How badly I wanted to sleep.

  I was about to when something grabbed me. My head was pulled out of the water. I looked and only saw the sun reflecting behind someone’s head. The face came into focus. “Viv?”

  “I’ve got you, Emily.”

  My head was woozy. This tiny person was swimming with me. She said, “Can you kick a little?”

  I listened like a child and did as she asked. She was so beautiful in that light. Her hands around me. Helping me. Saving me. I said, “You look like an angel.”

  “Nothing close. Keep kicking, Emily. We’re almost there.”

  Viv was no mirage. She helped me onto shore and I thought of her as an ant that could lift several times its body weight. She gently sat me down in the mud. Scrunched with concern, her face was right in front of mine, “You took a shot to the head.”

  “I never told you, Viv. I love you. You’re my best friend.”

  “I love you, too, Emily. Now rest.” She laid me on the ground. “Everything’s gonna be all righ
t.”

  And I knew it would be. My best friend was by my side.

  Chapter 33

  The interviews are over and the world knows. Not the truth maybe, but the truth the world wants to hear. A story that makes people believe in hope. Alan put the kibosh on doing any more so as not to saturate the market. Just enough, he said, to tease the audience, get the story out there, and then move onto a book deal. He said we’d use my journal as raw material. We meet publishers next week, and the week after, movie studios. The future awaits.

  I’m feeling better. Confessing was like shedding skin, like a molting snake. I was lost but now I’m found. I am forgiving myself and I feel lighter and lighter.

  It’s odd: the crash was bad luck, but I was rescued by good luck. The search, after all, had been canceled. We were declared dead. But a helicopter on the payroll of a wealthy Riverdale Academy parent found me. Pete Conlin’s parents, in fact. It was purely by chance that the pilot decided to check a route from off the grid before heading back to base. I plan on living off that stroke of luck for the rest of my life.

  If there is forgiveness in death, then I think, surely I’m allowed forgiveness in life. I’ve decided to get my GED and then go to college. I’m leaving writing behind. Words on a page are all manipulation, anyway. Instead, I may go into psychology and trauma care. I know what trauma is, and I know how to move past it. Maybe I can help others.

  No one changes. Not really. That’s what Derek had said.

  I’ve come to believe events don’t change you; they reveal you.

  And I know I am stronger than I ever believed.

  If I’ve learned anything over the past few months, it’s that we are all miserably flawed and capable of acting like monsters. And yet there’s something in me determined to do something with this knowledge—rise about it, somehow.

  As for today, this is to be my last in the hospital. With the interviews over, there’s no need for “optics,” and I can go home. I’ve only eaten hospital food, and I’m craving an In-N-Out Burger animal-style something fierce. I’m craving a walk on the beach. I’m craving a lot of things.

  I’m no longer anonymous. Someone created a Facebook page in my honor. There are even a couple marriage proposals. So weird.

  I’ve had so many days subtracted from my life that it’s going to feel strange to go back to living. I’m scared, too. I know how ruthless the world can be and I’m stepping back into it. But I remind myself when I’m feeling anxious: I am a survivor. I know what it takes. No one will drown me. Ever.

  I pack my meager things, mainly get-well cards and dried flowers. I gather them in my hand and they seem like remnants from someone else’s life. Someone else’s history. I let them fall into the wastebasket.

  There’s a knock at the door. “Come in,” I say.

  The door opens a few inches. The bottom feet of a wheelchair tries to push through. Someone’s arm swings the door wide open, and the girl in a wheelchair awkwardly pushes herself inside. She’s too slow and the door clanks against metal. Attached to the chair is a clear bag, from which snakes a plastic drip-tube into her forearm.

  The girl is small, her head shaved, her cheeks hollow, and she looks like an anorexic patient from an eating disorder clinic. She wears a blue hospital gown, but there are clean bandages wrapped around her arms and legs. One arm is in a fresh cast. She wears a patient barcode bracelet on her wrist that looks brand new. She must’ve been admitted today. I’m having an awful sense of déjà vu, but I know I haven’t lived this moment before. She looks familiar, but I can’t place her. I wonder if she’s wandered into the wrong room, or maybe this is hers and the hospital thinks I’ve already left.

  “I’ll be out of your way in just a sec,” I say.

  “Don’t you recognize me?” she asks, her voice like pebbles against a lake.

  That voice. I stop and look at her. I really have no clue. No clue at all, unless….

  It couldn’t be.

  My heart stops.

  The silky dark hair is gone. The infectious smile is gone. In its place is someone—something—else.

  Is it? Could she have survived? Could they have found her?

  My legs slip out from under me and I sit on the bed, dazed. “Viv, is that you?”

  She nods, and there’s the slightest smile on her gaunt face, like a shrunken apple left too long in the sun. I have a flood of questions and concerns but before I can ask, she says, “I hear you have a story to tell.”

  The End

  Note From The Author

  Thank you for making it all the way to the end of this book. If you’d like to know when I release a new one, sign up at my website jamesmorriswriter.com. Also, if you enjoyed this, I’d love if you left a review and told a friend, or suggested it to your book club. Word of mouth is the best advertising around, and it helps allow me to do what I do. Serious gratitude and thanks!

  Introducing

  If you enjoyed

  FEEL ME FALL

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  MELOPHOBIA

  By james Morris

  Melophobia: fear or hatred of music.

  The time—now; the place—America, but in a world where the government controls all forms of art and creativity. Any music sowing the seeds of anarchy is banned—destroyed if found—its creators and listeners harshly punished.

  Merrin Pierce works as an undercover Patrol officer assigned to apprehend a fugitive musician who threatens the safe fabric of society, only to confront everything she thought to be true—her values, upbringing, job, and future.

  Can love survive in a world without music?

  Publisher's Weekly called it "a convincing alternative history novel and...an accomplished coming-of-age love story that asks big questions about freedom and expressiveness in the face of oppression."

  MELOPHOBIA

  Chapter 1

  He stood outside, his hand lifted to bang on the door, when he hesitated for reasons he couldn’t name. Flush with adrenaline, his heartbeat accelerated; his hearing sharpened, and even his skin felt the slightest change in pressure. Desert air blew against his face, drying his perspiration, and his caged energy contrasted with his desolate surroundings: a lone warehouse on the outskirts of Los Angeles bathed in the glow of a Hunter’s moon.

  He enjoyed the silence—his moment of Zen. It reminded him of playing football in high school, positioned across an opponent seconds before the hike, an eternity of stillness before acceleration. He took a deep breath and centered himself, hearing the breath move past his nostrils, expanding his belly and exhaling slowly.

  He looked at his watch. It was time.

  He banged on the thick metal door, breaking the monotony of the night. A small window clanked opened on the door revealing a man with a crumpled, fat face.

  He cleared his throat. “I’m on the list. Anders Copeland.”

  The bouncer looked at him from behind the safety of the barred window and scanned over a clipboard. A moment later, Anders heard a bolt slide and the door swung open. He walked into the warehouse, past the bouncer and descended a long flight of stairs funneling him down a narrow, darkened hallway. Echoing behind him, the door slammed shut.

  A single light bulb dangled, casting shadows outside its cone of light. For every step Anders took, he moved towards darkness, leaving the safe cocoon of the outside world behind.

  Rusty pipes dripped water onto the floor. His feet sloshed through the occasional puddle, wafting up the unmistakable smell of urine and stale beer. A large door awaited him at the end of the stairs, the decline steeper, like an entrance to a mammoth tomb. The air should’ve been cooler as he continued, but instead it was hot and sticky. Strange.

  He heard it now.

  Muffled thumps, like miniature explosions pulsed at regular intervals, growing louder with each stride, attacking his eardrums. He’d never heard it before. The cause of such noise sent his imagination spinning. What the hell was going on behind those doors? What kind of machine or monst
er—?

  He arrived at the door and patted underneath his jacket, satisfied to feel his revolver still safely hidden.

  His stomach churned, and he wanted to run, taking the steps two at a time, leaving all this behind, but his pride kept him where he was. Like an automaton, he saw his arm reach out in front of him and open the door—

  And immediately wished he hadn’t.

  His senses retreated, on overload. There was no monster, only light & sound & motion—amped to an inhuman degree. A wall of hot air made him feel as if he was breathing wet oxygen; he licked his lips—if sin ever had a taste, this was it; the room smelled of illegal cigarette smoke comingled with sweat and desire; the pounding of noise at deafening levels, the treble notes screeching, more penetrating than a dentist’s drill, and all of it repetitive, without melody, the same eight bars again and again—the sound of insanity, loud and incoherent.

  Finally, he witnessed an orgy of bodies “dancing.” Unlike any dance he’d seen—not ballroom, it was even worse than the kind his superiors railed against. Much worse. They looked out of control, spastics on drugs, whirling dervishes worshipping no one, falsely copulating each other, wearing so little as to be almost bare, seeking to leave this reality by sheer excess, and all to the earthquake beats which rose from the floor, through his shoes, up his spine, to his head where they pinballed in his skull.

  There was no escape. Every time he felt as if the overwhelming assault was on a downward spiral to quietude, he realized it was only a pause, a hiccup, and it continued in its tornado fashion, crashing over all the people under its spell.

  This was more than noise. This was sonic warfare.

  The stories he’d heard from his elders were true. No longer fables from the past, but real. Now. This is how the War started last time—the anarchy, the flaunting of the law, the sense of freedom with no limit. He stepped back against the wall for support. The speeding strobe lights made him wince. Crunched over, his dinner spilled out onto the floor. Humiliated, he wiped the taste of bile from his mouth and rolling against the wall, scurried away, losing himself in the maelstrom of the dance floor.