Before I Fall (7 page)

Juliet looks up at me after I dump the beer out. I can’t explain it—it’s crazy—but it’s almost a pitying look, like
she
feels bad for
me
.

All of the breath leaves my body in a rush, and I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. Without thinking, I lunge at her and shove as hard as I can, and she goes backward into a bookshelf that almost falls over. I’ve pushed her back toward the door, and as everyone is still squealing and laughing and screaming “Psycho,” she runs out of the room. She has to squeeze by Kent. He’s just come in, probably to see what everyone’s screaming about.

We lock eyes for a moment. I can’t exactly tell what he’s thinking, but whatever it is, it’s not good. I look away, feeling hot and uncomfortable. Everyone’s buzzing with energy now, laughing and talking about Juliet, but my breathing won’t go back to normal and I feel the vodka burning my stomach, creeping back up my throat. The room is stifling, spinning faster than before. I have to get out for some air.

I try to push my way out of the room, but Kent gets in my face and blocks my way.

“What the hell was that about?” he demands.

“Can you let me by, please?” I’m not in the mood to deal with anyone, and I’m especially not in the mood to deal with Kent and his stupid button-down shirt.

“What did she ever do to you?”

I cross my arms. “I get it. You’re friends with Psycho. Is that it?”

He narrows his eyes. “Pretty clever nickname. Did you think of that all by yourself, or did your friends have to help you?”

“Get out of my way.” I manage to squeeze past him, but he grabs my arm.

“Why?” he says. We’re standing so close together I can smell that he’s just eaten peppermints and see the heart-shaped mole under his left eye, even though everything else is blurry. He’s looking at me like he’s desperate to understand something, and it’s worse, much worse than anything else so far—than Juliet or his anger or the feeling I’m going to be sick any second.

I try to shake his hand off my arm. “You can’t just
grab
people, you know. You can’t just grab
me
. I have a boyfriend.”

“Keep your voice down. I’m just trying to—”

“Look.” I succeed in shaking him off. I know I’m talking too loud and too fast. I know I sound hysterical, but I can’t help it. “I don’t know what your problem is, okay? I’m not going to go out with you. I would never go out with you in a million years. So you can stop
obsessing
over me. I mean, I shouldn’t even know your name.” The words fly out and it’s as though they strangle me on the way up: suddenly I can’t breathe.

Kent stares at me hard. Then he leans in even closer. For a second I think he’s going to try to kiss me and my heart stops.

But he just puts his mouth up to my ear and says, “I see right through you.”

“You don’t know me.” I jerk backward, shaking. “You don’t know one thing about me.”

He holds his hands up in surrender and backs off. “You’re right. I don’t.” He starts to turn away and mutters something else.

“What did you say?” My heart is pounding in my chest so hard I think it will explode.

He turns to look at me. “I said, ‘
Thank God
.’”

I spin around, wishing I hadn’t borrowed a pair of Ally’s heels. The room spins with me and I have to steady myself against the banister.

“Your
boyfriend’s
downstairs, puking in the kitchen sink,” Kent calls after me.

I give him the finger over my shoulder without turning around to see if he’s watching me, but I get the feeling he’s not.

Even before I go downstairs to see whether what Kent said about Rob is true, I know it: tonight isn’t the night after all. The combination of disappointment and relief is so overwhelming I have to hold on to the walls as I walk, feeling the stairs spiral up under me like they’re going to slip away any second. Tonight isn’t the night. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and be exactly the same, and the world will look the same, and everything will feel and taste and smell the same. My throat gets tight and my eyes start to burn, and all I can think in that moment is that it’s all Kent’s fault, Kent’s and Juliet Sykes’s.

Half an hour later the party starts to wind down. Inside, someone has ripped the Christmas lights off the wall and they’re trailing along the floor like a snake, lighting up the dust mites in the corners.

I’m feeling better now, more like myself. “There’s always tomorrow,” Lindsay said to me, when I told her about Rob, and I run the phrase over and over in my head like a mantra:
There’s always tomorrow. There’s always tomorrow.

I spend twenty minutes in the bathroom, first washing my face and then reapplying makeup, even though my hands are unsteady and my face keeps doubling in the mirror. Every
time I put on makeup it reminds me of my mother—I used to watch her bend over her vanity, getting ready for dates with my father—and it calms me down.
There’s always tomorrow.

It’s the time of the night I like best, when most people are asleep and it feels like the world belongs completely to my friends and me, as though nothing exists apart from our little circle: everywhere else is darkness and quiet.

I leave with Elody, Ally, and Lindsay. The crowd is thinning as people take off, but it’s still hard to move. Lindsay keeps calling out, “Excuse me, excuse me, move it, feminine emergency!” Years ago we discovered at an under-eighteen concert in Poughkeepsie that nothing clears people faster than referencing a feminine emergency. It’s like people think they’ll catch it.

On our way out we pass people hooking up in corners and pressed against the stairwell. Behind closed doors we hear the muffled sounds of people giggling. Elody slams her fist against each door and yells out, “No glove, no love!” Lindsay turns around and whispers something to Elody, and Elody shuts up and looks at me guiltily. I want to tell them I don’t care—I don’t care about Rob or missing my chance—but I’m suddenly too tired to talk.

We see Bridget McGuire sitting on the edge of a bathtub with the door just cracked open. She has her head in her hands and she’s crying.

“What’s wrong with her?” I say, trying to fight the feeling of swimming in my own head, of my words coming from a distance.

“She dumped Alex.” Lindsay grabs on to my elbow. She seems sober, but her pupils are enormous and the whites of her eyes bloodshot. “You’ll never believe it. She found out that the Nic Nazi busted Alex and Anna together. He was supposed to be at a doctor’s appointment.” The music’s still going so we can’t hear Bridget, but her shoulders are shaking up and down like she’s convulsing. “She’ll be better off. Scumbag.”

“They’re all scumbags!” Elody says, raising her beer and spilling some of it. I don’t even think she knows what we’re talking about.

Lindsay takes her cup and sets it on a side table, on top of a worn copy of
Moby Dick.
She pockets a little ceramic figurine too: a shepherd with curly blond hair and painted eyelashes. She always steals something from parties. She calls them her souvenirs.

“She better not hurl in the Tank,” she says in a whisper, tipping her head back toward Elody.

Rob is stretched out on a sofa downstairs, but he manages to grab my hand as I go by and tries to pull me down on top of him.

“Where’re you goin’?” he says. His eyes are unfocused and his voice is hoarse.

“Come on, Rob. Let me go.” I push him off me. This is his fault, too.

“We were supposed to…” His voice trails off and he shakes his head, confused, then narrows his eyes at me. “Are you cheating on me?”

“Don’t be stupid.” I want to rewind the whole evening, rewind the past few weeks, go back to the moment when Rob leaned over, rested his chin on my shoulder, and told me he wanted to sleep next to me, go back to that quiet moment in that dark room with the TV blue and muted in front of us and the sound of his breathing and my parents sleeping upstairs, go back to the moment I opened my mouth and heard “I do too.”

“You are. You’re cheating. I knew it.” He lurches to his feet and looks around wildly. Chris Harmon, one of Rob’s best friends, is standing in the corner laughing about something, and Rob stumbles over to him.

“Are you cheating with my girlfriend, Harmon?” Rob roars, and pushes Chris. Chris stumbles and knocks against a bookshelf. A porcelain figurine topples over and shatters and a girl screams.

“Are you crazy?” Chris jumps back on Rob and suddenly they’re locked together, wrestling, shuffling around the room and knocking into things, grunting and yelling. Somehow Rob gets Chris down on his knees and then they’re both on the floor. Girls are shrieking and jumping out of the way. Someone
cries out, “Watch the beer!” just before Rob and Chris roll up against the entrance of the kitchen, where the keg is sitting.

“Let’s go, Sam.” Lindsay squeezes my shoulders from behind.

“I can’t just leave him,” I say, though a part of me wants to.

“He’ll be fine. Look—he’s laughing.”

She’s right. He and Chris are already done fighting and are sprawled on the floor, laughing their heads off.

“Rob’s going to be so pissed,” I say, and I know Lindsay knows I’m talking about more than just ditching him at the party.

She gives me a quick hug. “Remember what I said.” She starts to singsong,
“Just thinkin’ about tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow….”

For a moment my stomach clenches, thinking she’s making fun of me, but it’s a coincidence. Lindsay didn’t know me when I was little, wouldn’t even have spoken to me. She has no way of knowing I used to lock myself in my room with the
Annie
soundtrack and belt that song at the top of my lungs until my parents threatened to throw me out onto the street.

The melody starts repeating in my head and I know I’ll be singing it for days.
Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya tomorrow.
A beautiful word, when you really think about it.

“Lame party, huh?” Ally says, coming up on the other side of me. Even though I know she’s only pissed Matt Wilde didn’t show, I’m glad she says it.

The sound of the rain is louder than I thought it would be and it startles me. For a moment we stand under the porch eaves, watching our breath condense into clouds, hugging ourselves. It’s freezing. Water is falling in steady streams from the eaves. Christopher Tomlin and Adam Wu are throwing empty beer bottles into the woods. Every so often we hear one shatter, and the sound comes back to us like a gunshot.

People are laughing and screaming and running in the rain, which is coming down so hard everything looks as though it’s melting into everything else. There are no neighbors to call the cops for miles. The grass is churned up, great black pits of mud exposed. Headlights are flashing in the distance, in and out, on and off, as cars sweep down the driveway toward Route 9.

“Run for it!” Lindsay yells, and I feel Ally tugging on me and then we’re running, screaming, the rain blinding us and streaming down our jackets, the mud oozing into our shoes; rain so hard it’s like everything is melting away.

By the time we get to Lindsay’s car I really
don’t
care about the awful way the night turned out. We’re laughing hysterically, soaked and shivering, woken up from the cold and the rain. Lindsay’s squealing about wet butt marks on her leather seats and mud on the floor, and Elody’s begging her to go to Mic’s for an egg and cheese and complaining that I always get shotgun, and Ally’s yelling for Lindsay to turn on the heat and threatening to drop dead right there from pneumonia.

I guess that’s how we get started talking about it: dying, I
mean. I figure Lindsay’s okay to drive, but I notice she’s going faster than usual down that awful, long, penned-in driveway. The trees look like stripped skeletons on either side of us, moaning in the wind.

“I have this theory,” I’m saying as Lindsay skids out onto Route 9 and the tires shriek against the slick black road. The clock on the dashboard is glowing: 12:38. “I have this theory that before you die you see your greatest hits, you know? The best things you’ve ever done.”

“Duke, baby,” Lindsay says, and takes one hand off the wheel to pump her fist in the air.

“First time I hooked up with Matt Wilde,” Ally says immediately.

Elody groans and leans forward, reaching for the iPod. “Music, please, before I kill myself.”

“Can I get a cigarette?” Lindsay asks, and Elody lights one for her off the butt she’s holding. Lindsay cracks the windows, and the freezing rain comes in. Ally starts to complain about the cold again.

Elody puts on “Splinter,” by Fallacy, to piss Ally off, maybe because she’s sick of her whining. Ally calls her a bitch and unbuckles her seat belt, leaning forward and trying to grab the iPod. Lindsay complains that someone is elbowing her in the neck. The cigarette drops from her mouth and lands between her thighs. She starts cursing and trying to brush the embers off the seat cushion, and Elody and Ally are still fighting and
I’m trying to talk over them, reminding them all of the time we made snow angels in May. The clock ticks forward: 12:39. The tires skid a little on the wet road and the car is full of cigarette smoke, little wisps rising like phantoms in the air.

Then all of a sudden there’s a flash of white in front of the car. Lindsay yells something—words I can’t make out, something like
sit
or
shit
or
sight
—and suddenly the car is flipping off the road and into the black mouth of the woods. I hear a horrible, screeching sound—metal on metal, glass shattering, a car folding in two—and smell fire. I have time to wonder whether Lindsay had put out her cigarette—

And then—

That’s when it happens. The moment of death is full of heat and sound and pain bigger than anything, a funnel of burning heat splitting me in two, something searing and scorching and tearing, and if screaming were a feeling it would be this.

Then nothing.

I know some of you are thinking maybe I deserved it. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent that rose to Juliet or dumped my drink on her at the party. Maybe I shouldn’t have copied off Lauren Lornet’s quiz. Maybe I shouldn’t have said those things to Kent. There are probably some of you who think I deserved it because I was going to let Rob go all the way—because I wasn’t going to save myself.