The fall is not at all survivable.

CHAPTER 29

The Ones You Don’t See Coming, Part 3

THE NEXT DAY, I manage to avoid Sophie and Cassidy while also pretending not to avoid them. In the morning, I go to my locker ten minutes earlier than usual. At lunchtime, when they text me from the cafeteria, I tell them I’m catching up on homework in the library. After school, I say I have to run errands for Mom.

But they suspect something’s wrong.

Later that evening, Mom knocks on my door. “Your girls are here,” she says. “I didn’t know they were coming over.”

I didn’t either.

When I get downstairs, Sophie and Cassidy are both eating lemon-blueberry cookies from Mom’s latest recipe experiments. Sophie’s even drinking a glass of milk. Mom hangs out with us for a few minutes, asking the usual parent questions: How are your folks? How’s senior year? Ready for college? She’s done with her questions and they’re done with their cookies faster than I want them to be. Mom goes back to watching Sugared Up! on TV.

“Let’s go up to your room,” says Cassidy.

She starts in as soon as I close my door. “Why are you avoiding us?”

“I’m not,” I say, without meeting her eyes. We both know I’m lying. I try again. “I’m just really—”

“Busy. Yeah, we heard,” says Cassidy.

Sophie walks to my bed and sits down. “We were wondering if seeing us together is weird for you.”

“Why would it be weird?”

Cassidy sighs an impatient sigh, but Sophie keeps going. “Because Cassidy and I are a couple now and it makes things different for the four of us.”

“Martin’s fine with it,” Cassidy interjects.

Sophie gives Cassidy a please be quiet look.

Cassidy mimes zipping her lips.

“What’s going on with you?” asks Sophie.

“I’m fine,” I say.

“No, you’re not,” Cassidy says. She pushes herself off the door and sits down next to Sophie on my bed. “You’re cynical and a pain in the—”

Even though she’s right, I feel defensive, like I’m the focus of some kind of intervention. But I’m not the one who needs saving.

“I don’t think you guys should date,” I blurt out.

“See?” Cassidy says turning to Sophie. “I knew it!”

Sophie looks down at her hands. “But why?”

“I’m worried about what’ll happen to our friendship when you guys break up,” I say as gently as I can. But there’s no way to say a thing like that gently.

Sophie folds her arms tight across her chest and taps her foot. “Who says we’re going to break up?”

“I mean…most couples break up eventually, right?”

Weirdly, it’s Cassidy who tries to save me from myself. “Eves, come on. We’re in love. Just be happy for us.”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, shaking my head. “I can’t pretend to be happy about the end of our friendship.”

It’s funny how many different kinds of silences there are. This one is shocked and disappointed and final.

I could tell them about Dad getting engaged to Shirley. Cassidy would get angry on my behalf and Sophie would be sympathetic. They’d both forgive me for the awful things I just said, but I don’t. I’m just trying to stop them from hurting each other. From hurting all of us.

They stand at the same time. I feel their eyes on me, but I stare down at my feet. I don’t look up as I hear my bedroom door open or as I hear their footsteps heavy on the stairs or as I hear the slam of the front door.

I know our friendship was going to change anyway. We’re all going to separate colleges in the fall. But I thought we still had the rest of the summer for our epic road trip, for things to be the way they’ve always been. Now it turns out we don’t have any time left.

CHAPTER 30

Off the Cliff

WHEN I GET home from school the next day, Mom and Danica are at the kitchen table peering at Danica’s laptop screen.

Mom says a quick hello before she goes back to typing something.

Danica sighs and takes the laptop away from her. “No, Mom, you have to say something interesting about yourself,” she whines. “Don’t make it about being a mother. Make it about you.”

I don’t have to see Mom’s face to know she’s smiling her look how much you don’t know yet smile. “Those are the same thing, D!”

“But being a mom is not sexy.”

“I’ll remind you that you said that in about twenty years,” Mom says.

I can’t believe Danica is trying to talk Mom into dating. First Sophie and Cassidy, then Dad getting engaged and now this?

When Martin texts me five minutes later to meet him at La Brea Tar Pits, I get on my bike right away. Anything to get me out of my own head.

La Brea Tar Pits is called La Brea Tar Pits because it’s on La Brea Avenue and has quite a few…tar pits. The largest one, Lake Pit, is just off the main entrance. The tar is greenish-black, thick and always oozing. Occasionally a bubble of stinky air burps to the surface.

Lake Pit is my favorite of the pits because it has one of the most macabre sculptures I’ve ever seen. It’s of three enormous woolly mammoths—two adults and a baby. One of the adults is trapped waist-deep in tar. The other adult and the baby mammoth are safe on land, but the baby is clearly trumpeting in distress. Its mouth is frozen wide-open in a scream. Its trunk is rigid and pointed straight at the trapped mammoth. The other adult mammoth looks resigned.

The thing about the sculpture is that it captures a moment in time. You can read it two ways. Either the mammoth in the pit is done for and we’re seeing its last seconds on earth. Or we’re actually seeing the start of a miraculous escape.

How I read it changes depending on my mood.

Today, I decide that the mammoth in the pit is doomed.

I leave the mammoth family to their never-ending tragedy and climb to the top of the main hill and sit down on the grass. It’s three o’clock. At this time of day the park population is mostly families with young children. I watch the little kids run up the hill and roll down it over and over again. I watch their anxious parents watch them anxiously.

Ten minutes later, Martin comes ambling up the hill. He’s wearing a khaki shirt with khaki shorts and khaki hat. There’s a red handkerchief tied around his neck.