Read The Fall for Free Online

Laugh at it. Believe me, she loves it.”
    Deep down, I knew it was a lie. A lie we told ourselves to help us feel better. There was no way she liked that kind of ridicule. Nobody could. But that night, when I played my part, I repeated that lie to myself over and over until I almost believed it.
    I tried to be as not-mean as possible, while still keeping my comment at acceptable levels of snark.
    I saw you in the rain with your butt-ugly dog. Who was walking whom? Woof.
    (Obviously, my heart wasn’t in it.)
    The next morning, I slid the card into Athena’s locker and went directly to the nurse’s office. She stuck a thermometer in my mouth and said there was a nasty stomach bug going around. “Yeah,” I told the nurse, “that’s probably it.”

 
    SOMEBODY LAUGHED
    I don’t think I can write in this journal anymore.
    I don’t want to.
    Screw it.
    But this is a promise I made to myself. I decided that—for Morgan, in her memory; for me, for today—I would unplug the world and let my thoughts leak out like a puddle of blood.
    I can’t stop these thoughts. I need a cork. But what happens next?
    I implode?
    Somebody laughed in the hallway today and it sounded like Morgan. I turned around, forgetting just for that sliver of a second. Hope filled my chest. And it was just some random girl, cackling over something.
    Some days I hate everyone.
    But no one more than I hate myself.

 
    SORRY
    I need …
    I need …
    I need …
    Â 
    something.
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    That’s it for today, people, move along. Nothing to see here. Nothing at all.

 
    THE GREAT AUK
    Today Mrs. Dolan told us the story of the great auk, an animal that was basically the original penguin, more or less. A flightless bird. It went extinct in the 1800s.
    The auks lived in isolation on an island off Iceland somewhere. They couldn’t fly, so they just hung around, had babies, and that was life. Far from men and women.
    Until one day, some sailors came along.
    You have to imagine that for centuries, nobody ever bothered the auks. They were all set. I like to think that one of those big, dumb auks looked out at that first ship and thought, “Oh, goodie, here comes company. That’s nice!”
    Well, no, not exactly.
    It was the beginning of the mass slaughter. Because those dudes in the boats, probably half-starved at that point, stared at all those strange birds and thought, “I wonder how they taste?”
    So mankind came, killed, ate, left, came, killed, ate—like the island was the world’s first fast-food restaurant. Easy targets.
    â€œYou want fries with that auk?”
    Those auks, what chance did they ever have in this world?

 
    THE WATER TOWER
    I visited the water tower. By myself. There’s a big fence there now, topped off with barbed wire, and a locked gate. It’s like a prison that they are trying to keep us from escaping into, like there’s something good up there. A safe place, like in the zombie show The Walking Dead . Which is pretty funny, if you ask me. A prison is where you go to escape the zombies.
    Anyway, when a school kid commits suicide, the adults get busy, making it look like they TAKE THINGS SUPER SERIOUSLY. And they do, I’m sure. The fence was a sign of that. (“We’re not taking this lying down, no siree!”)
    I got over the fence in less than a minute. Cut my hand, but not so bad. There is a high ladder along the side of the tower, with small round metal rungs. I climbed it rung by rung, just like Morgan must have done two months before. It took courage, I’ll tell you.
    Courage or, maybe, desperation?
    Maybe not caring was the key to everything.
    I was trying to figure it out. I wanted to become her, to feel it, to understand. All I knew was I needed to get up there, stand in her exact same spot.
    I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t even know why I wanted to get up there. Wanted