Before I Fall (16 page)

Mrs. Harris doesn’t seem surprised to find us sitting up, waiting for her. She’s wearing a long silk nightgown and has an eye mask perched on top of her head. I’ve never seen Mrs. Harris looking less than perfect and it makes fear yawn open in my stomach.

“What?” Ally’s voice is semihysterical. “What happened? Is it Dad?”

Mrs. Harris blinks and seems to focus on us like she’s just been called out of a dream. “No, no. It’s not your father.” She takes a breath, then blows it out loudly. “Listen, girls. What I’m about to tell you is very upsetting. I’m only telling you in the first place because you’ll find out soon enough.”

“Just tell us, Mom.”

Mrs. Harris nods slowly. “You all know Juliet Sykes.”

This is a shock: we all look at one another, completely bewildered. Of all the words that Mrs. Harris could have said at this moment, I’m pretty sure “You all know Juliet Sykes” ranks pretty high on our list of the unexpected.

“Yeah. So?” Ally shrugs.

“Well, she—” Mrs. Harris breaks off, smoothing down her nightgown with her hands, and starts again. “That was Mindy Sachs on the phone.”

Lindsay raises her eyebrows, and Ally gives a knowing sigh. We all know Mindy Sachs too. She’s fifty and divorced but still dresses and acts like a sophomore. She’s more gossip-obsessed than anybody at our school. Whenever I see Ms. Sachs I’m reminded of the game we used to play when we were kids, where one person whispers a secret and the next person repeats it and so on and so on, except in Ridgeview Ms. Sachs is the only one doing the whispering. She and Mrs. Harris sit on the school board together, so Mrs. Harris always knows about
divorces and who just lost all their money and who’s having an affair.

“Mindy lives just next to the Sykes’,” Mrs. Harris continues. “Apparently their street has been swarming with ambulances for the past half hour.”

“I don’t get it,” Ally says, and maybe it’s the hour or the stress of the past few days, but I’m not getting it either.

Mrs. Harris has her arms folded across her chest and she hugs herself a little, like she’s cold. “Juliet Sykes is dead. She killed herself tonight.”

Silence. Total silence. Ally stops chewing on her nails, and Lindsay sits as still as I’ve ever seen her. I really think for several seconds my heart stops beating. I feel a strange tunneling sensation, like I’ve been parachuted out of my body and am now just looking at it from far away, like for a few moments we’re all just pictures of ourselves.

I’m suddenly reminded of a story my parents once told me: back when Thomas Jefferson was called Suicide High, some guy hanged himself inside his own closet, right there among the mothball-smelling sweaters and old sneakers and everything. He was a loser and played in the band and had bad skin and next to no friends. So nobody thought anything of it when he died. I mean, people were sad and everything, but they
got
it.

But the next year—the next year to the day—one of the most popular guys in school killed himself in the
exact same
way
. Everything was the same: method, time, place. Except this guy was captain of the swim team and the soccer team, and apparently when the police went into the closet, there were so many old athletic trophies on the shelves it looked like he’d been entombed in a gold vault. He left only a one-line note:
We are all Hangmen.

“How?” Elody asks, barely a whisper.

Mrs. Harris shakes her head, and for a second I think she might cry. “Mindy heard the gunshot. She thought it was a firecracker. She thought it was a prank.”

“She shot herself?” Ally says it quietly, almost reverentially, and I know we’re all thinking the same thing: that’s the worst way of any.

“How are they…” Elody adjusts her glasses and licks her lips. “Do they know why?”

“There was no note,” Mrs. Harris says, and I swear I can hear something go around the room: a tiny exhalation. A breath of relief. “I just thought you should know.” She goes to Ally and bends over, kissing her forehead. Ally pulls away, maybe in surprise. I’ve never seen Mrs. Harris kiss Ally before. I’ve never seen Mrs. Harris look so much like a
mother
before.

After Mrs. Harris leaves we all sit there while the silence stretches out and expands in huge rings around us. I feel like we’re all waiting for something, but I’m not sure what. Finally Elody speaks.

“Do you think…” Elody swallows, looking back and forth
from one to the other of us. “Do you think it’s because of our rose?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Lindsay snaps. I can tell she’s upset, though. Her face is pale, and she twists and untwists the edge of her blanket. “It’s not like it was the first time.”

“That makes it even worse,” Ally says.

“At least we knew who she was.” Lindsay catches me staring at her hands, and she places them firmly in her lap. “Most people just acted like she was invisible.”

Ally bites her lip.

“Still, on her last day…” Elody trails off.

“She’s better off this way,” Lindsay says. This is low, even for her, and we all stare.

“What?” She lifts her chin and stares back at us defiantly. “You know you’re all thinking it. She was miserable. She escaped. Done.”

“But—I mean, things could have gotten better,” I say.

“They wouldn’t have,” Lindsay says.

Ally shakes her head and draws her knees to her chest. “God, Lindsay.”

I’m in shock. The weirdest part of it all is the gun. It seems so harsh, so loud, so physical a way to do it. Blood and brains and searing heat. If she had to do it—to die—she should have drowned, should have just walked into the water until it folded over her head. Or she should have jumped. I picture Juliet floating this way and that, like she’s being supported
by currents of air. I can imagine her spreading her arms and leaping off a bridge or a canyon somewhere, but in my head she starts soaring upward on the wind as soon as her feet leave the ground.

Not a gun. Guns are for cop dramas and 7-Eleven holdups and crack addicts and gang fights. Not for Juliet Sykes.

“Maybe we should have been nicer to her,” Elody says. She looks down like she’s embarrassed to say it.

“Please.” Lindsay’s voice is loud and hard in comparison. “You can’t be mean to someone forever and then feel bad when she dies.”

Elody lifts her head and stares at Lindsay. “But I
do
feel bad.” Her voice is getting stronger.

“Then you’re a hypocrite,” Lindsay says. “And that’s worse than anything.”

She gets up and shuts off the light. I hear her climb back on the couch and rustle around in the blankets, settling in.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she says, “I have sleep to catch up on.”

There’s total silence for a while. I’m not sure if Ally’s lying down or not, but as my eyes adjust to the darkness I see that she isn’t: she’s still sitting there with her knees drawn up to her chest, staring straight ahead.

After a minute she says, “I’m going to sleep upstairs.” She gathers up her sheets and blankets, making extra noise, probably to get back at Lindsay.

A moment later Elody says, “I’m going with her. The couch
is too lumpy.” She’s obviously upset too. We’ve been sleeping on this couch for years.

After she leaves I sit for a while listening to Lindsay breathe. I wonder if she’s sleeping. I don’t see how she could be. I feel as awake as I’ve ever been. Then again, Lindsay’s always been different from most people, less sensitive, more black-and-white. My team, your team. This side of the line, that side of the line. Fearless, and careless. I’ve always admired her for that—we all have.

I feel restless, like I need to know the answers to questions I’m not sure how to ask. I ease off the couch slowly, trying not to wake Lindsay, but it turns out she’s not sleeping after all. She rolls over, and in the dark I can just make out her pale skin and the deep hollows of her eyes.

“You’re not going upstairs, are you?” she whispers.

“Bathroom,” I whisper back.

I feel my way out into the hallway and pause there. Somewhere a clock is ticking, but other than that it’s totally silent. Everything is dark and the stone floor is cold under my feet. I run one hand along the wall to orient myself. The sound of the rain has stopped. When I look outside I see the rain has turned to snow, thousands of snowflakes melting down the latticed windows and making the moonlight that comes through the panes look watery and full of movement, shadows twisting and blurring on the floor, alive. There’s a bathroom here, but that’s not where I’m headed. I ease open the door that leads to
Ally’s basement and grope my way down the stairs, holding on to both banisters.

As soon as my feet hit the carpet at the bottom of the stairs, I fumble on the wall to my left, eventually finding the light switch. The basement is suddenly revealed, big and stark and normal-looking: beige leather couches, an old Ping-Pong table, another flat-screen TV, and a circular area with a treadmill, an elliptical machine, and a three-sided mirror at its center. It’s cooler here and smells like chemicals and new paint.

Just beyond the exercise area is another door, which leads into the room we’ve always referred to as the Altar of Allison Harris. The room is papered with Ally’s old drawings, none of them good, most dating back to elementary school. The bookshelves are crowded with pictures of her: Ally dressed up like an octopus for Halloween in first grade, Ally wearing a green velvet dress and smiling in front of an enormous Christmas tree absolutely collapsing with ornaments, Ally squinting in a bikini, Ally laughing, Ally frowning, Ally looking pensive. And on the lowest shelf, every single one of Ally’s old yearbooks, from kindergarten on. Ally once showed us how Mrs. Harris had gone through all the books, one by one, placing colored sticky tabs on each one of Ally’s friends from year to year. (“So you can remember how popular you always were,” Mrs. Harris had told her.)

I drop to my knees. I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for, but there’s an idea taking shape in my head, some old memory
that disappears whenever I will it to take form, like those Magic Eye games where you can only see the hidden shape when your eyes aren’t in focus.

I start with the first-grade yearbook. I open it directly to Mr. Christensen’s class—just my luck—and there I am, standing a little ways apart from the group. The flash reflected in my glasses makes it impossible to see my eyes. My smile is closer to a wince, as though the effort hurts. I flip past the picture quickly. I hate looking through old yearbooks; they don’t exactly bring back a flood of positive memories. Mine are stashed somewhere in the attic, with all the other crap my mom insists I keep “because you might want it later,” like my old dolls and a ratty stuffed lamb I used to carry with me everywhere.

Two pages later I find what I’m looking for: Mrs. Novak’s first-grade class. And there Lindsay is, front and center as always, beaming a big smile at the camera. Next to her is a thin, pretty girl with a shy smile and hair so blond it could be white. She and Lindsay are standing so close together their arms are touching all the way from their elbows to their fingertips.

Juliet Sykes.

In the second-grade yearbook, Lindsay is kneeling in the front row of her class. Again, Juliet Sykes is next to her.

In the third-grade yearbook, Juliet and Lindsay are separated by several pages. Lindsay was in Ms. Derner’s class (with me—that was the year she invented the joke: “What’s red and white and weird all over?”). Juliet was in Dr. Kuzma’s class.
Different pages, different classes, different poses—Lindsay has her hands clasped in front of her; Juliet is standing with her body angled slightly to the side—and yet they look exactly the same, wearing identical powder blue Petit Bateau T-shirts and matching white capri pants, which cut off just below the knee; their hair, blond and shining, parted neatly down the middle; the glint of a small silver chain around both of their necks. That was the year it was cool to dress up like your friends—your best friends.

I pick up the fourth-grade yearbook next, my fingers heavy and numb, cold running through me. There’s a big Technicolor portrait of the school on its cover, all neon pinks and reds, probably painted by an art teacher. It takes me a while to find Lindsay’s class, but as soon as I do my heart starts racing. There she is with that same huge smile, like she’s daring the camera to catch her looking less-than-perfect. And next to her is Juliet Sykes. Pretty, happy Juliet Sykes, smiling like she has a secret. I squint, focusing on a tiny blurred spot between them, and think I can just make out that their index fingers are linked together loosely.

Fifth grade. I find Lindsay easily, standing front and center in Mrs. Krakow’s classroom, smiling so widely it looks like she’s baring her teeth. It takes me longer to find Juliet. I go through all the photographs looking for her and have to start over from the beginning before I spot her, far up in the right-hand corner, sandwiched between Lauren Lornet and Eileen Cho,
shrinking backward like she wants to suck herself out of the frame altogether. Her hair hangs in front of her face like a curtain. Next to her, both Lauren and Eileen are angled slightly away, as though they don’t want to be associated with her, as though she has some contagious disease.

Fifth grade: the year of the Girl Scout trip, when she peed in her sleeping bag and Lindsay nicknamed her Mellow Yellow.

I put the yearbooks back carefully, making sure to order them correctly. My heart is thumping wildly, an out-of-control drum rhythm. I suddenly want to get out of the basement as quickly as possible. I shut off the lights and feel my way up the stairs blindly. The darkness seems to swirl with shapes and shadows, and terror rises in my throat. I’m sure that if I turn around I’ll see her, all in white, stumbling with her hands outstretched, reaching for me, face bloody and broken apart.

And then I’m upstairs and there she is: a vision, a nightmare. Her face is completely in shadow—a hole—but I can tell she’s staring at me. The room tilts; I grab on to the wall to keep myself steady.

“What’s your problem?” Lindsay steps farther into the hall, the moonlight falling differently so that her features emerge. “Why are you looking at me like that?”