Before I Fall (12 page)

“A bitch. A mean girl. A bad person.” Juliet turns to Elody. “You’re a bitch.” To Ally. “You’re a bitch.” Finally her eyes click on mine. They’re exactly the color of sky.

“You’re a bitch.”

The voices are a roar now, people laughing and screaming out, “Psycho.”

“You don’t know me,” I croak out at last, finding my voice, but Lindsay has already stepped forward and drowns me out.

“I’d rather be a bitch than a psycho,” she snarls, and puts two hands on Juliet’s shoulders and shoves. Juliet stumbles backward, pinwheeling her arms, and it’s all so horrible and familiar. It’s happening again; it’s
actually
happening. I close my eyes. I want to pray, but all I can think is,
Why, why, why, why.

When I open my eyes Juliet is coming toward me, drenched, arms outstretched. She looks up at me, and I swear to God it’s like she knows, like she can see straight into me, like this is somehow
my
fault. I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach and the air goes out of me and I lunge at her without thinking, push her and send her backward. She collapses into a bookshelf and then spins off of it, grabbing the doorframe to steady herself. Then she ducks out into the hallway.

“Can you believe it?” someone is screeching behind me.

“Juliet Sykes is packing some
cojones
.”

“Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, man.”

People are laughing, and Lindsay leans over to Elody and says, “Freak.” The empty bottle of vodka is dangling from her hand. She must have dumped the rest on Juliet.

I start shoving my way out of the room. It seems as though even more people have come in and it’s almost impossible to move. I’m really pushing, using my elbows when I have to, and everyone’s giving me weird looks. I don’t care. I need out.

I finally make it to the door and there’s Kent, staring at me with his mouth set in a line. He shifts like he’s about to block me.

I hold up my hand. “Don’t even think about it.” The words come out as a growl.

Without a sound he moves so I can squeeze past him. When I’m halfway down the hall I hear him shout out, “Why?”

“Because,” I yell back. But really I’m thinking the same thing.

Why is this happening to me?

Why, why, why?

“How come
Sam
always gets shotgun?”

“Because you’re always too drunk to call it.”

“I can’t
believe
you bailed on Rob like that,” Ally says. She’s
got her coat hunched up around her ears. Lindsay’s car is so cold our breaths are all solid white vapor. “You’re going to be in so much trouble tomorrow.”

If there is a tomorrow
, I almost say. I left the party without saying good-bye to Rob, who was stretched out on a sofa, his eyes half shut. I’d been locked in an empty bathroom on the first floor for a half hour before that, sitting on the cold, hard rim of a bathtub, listening to the music pulsing through the walls and ceiling. Lindsay had insisted I wear bright red lipstick, and when I checked my face in the mirror, I saw that it had begun to bleed away from my lips, like a clown’s. I took it off slowly with balled-up tissues, which I left floating in the toilet bowl, little blooming flowers of pink.

At a certain point your brain stops trying to rationalize things. At a certain point it gives up, shuts off, shuts down. Still, as Lindsay turns the car around—driving up on Kent’s lawn to do it, tires spinning in the mud—I’m afraid.

Trees, as white and frail as bone, are dancing wildly in the wind. The rain is hammering the roof of the car, and sheets of water on the windows make the world look like it’s disintegrating. The clock on the dashboard is glowing: 12:38.

I’m gripping my seat as Lindsay speeds down the driveway, branches whipping past us on either side.

“What about the paint job?” I say, my heart hammering in my chest. I try to tell myself I’m okay, I’m fine, that nothing’s going to happen. But it doesn’t do any good.

“Screw it,” she says. “Car’s busted anyway. Have you seen the bumper?”

“Maybe if you stopped hitting parked cars,” Elody says with a snort.

“Maybe if you
had
a car.” Lindsay takes one hand off the wheel and leans over, reaching for her bag at my feet. As she tips she jerks the steering wheel, and the car runs up a little into the woods. Ally slides across the backseat and collapses into Elody, and they both start laughing.

I reach over and try to grab the wheel. “Jesus, Lindz.”

Lindsay straightens up and elbows me off. She shoots me a look and then starts fumbling with a pack of cigarettes. “What’s up with you?”

“Nothing. I—” I look out the window, biting back tears that are suddenly threatening to come. “I just want you to pay attention, that’s all.”

“Yeah? Well, I want you to keep off the wheel.”

“Come on, guys. No fighting,” Ally says.

“Give me a smoke, Lindz.” Elody’s half reclining on the backseat, and she flails her arm wildly.

“Only if you light one for me,” Lindsay says, tossing her pack into the backseat. Elody lights two cigarettes and passes one to Lindsay. Lindsay cracks a window and exhales a plume of smoke. Ally screeches.

“Please, please, no windows. I’m about to drop dead from pneumonia.”

“You’re about to drop dead when I kill you,” Elody says.

“If you were gonna die,” I blurt out, “how would you want it to be?”

“Never,” Lindsay says.

“I’m serious.” My palms are damp with sweat and I wipe them on the seat cushion.

“In my sleep,” Ally says.

“Eating my grandma’s lasagna,” Elody says, and then pauses and adds, “or having sex,” which makes Ally shriek with laughter.

“On an airplane,” Lindsay says. “If I’m going down, I want everyone to go down with me.” She makes a diving motion with her hand.

“Do you think you’ll know, though?” It’s suddenly important for me to talk about this. “I mean, do you think you’ll have an idea of it…like,
before
?”

Ally straightens up and leans forward, hooking her arms over the back of our seats. “One day my grandfather woke up, and he swore he saw this guy all in black at the foot of his bed—big hood, no face. He was holding this sword or whatever that thingy is called. It was Death, you know? And then later that day he went to the doctor and they diagnosed him with pancreatic cancer.
The same day
.”

Elody rolls her eyes. “He didn’t die, though.”

“He could have died.”

“That story doesn’t make any sense.”

“Can we change the subject?” Lindsay brakes for just a second before yanking the car out onto the wet road. “This is so morbid.”

Ally giggles. “SAT word alert.”

Lindsay cranes her neck back and tries to blow smoke in Ally’s face. “Not all of us have the vocabulary of a twelve-year-old.”

Lindsay turns onto Route 9, which stretches in front of us, a giant silver tongue. A hummingbird is beating its wings in my chest—rising, rising, fluttering into my throat.

I want to go back to what I was saying—I want to say,
You would know, right? You would know before it happened
—but Elody bumps Ally out of the way and leans forward, the cigarette dangling from her mouth, trumpeting, “Music!” She grabs for the iPod.

“Are you wearing your seat belt?” I say. I can’t help it. The terror is everywhere now, pressing down on me, squeezing the breath from me, and I think:
if you don’t breathe, you’ll die.
The clock ticks forward. 12:39.

Elody doesn’t even answer, just starts scrolling through the iPod. She finds “Splinter,” and Ally slaps her and says it should be her turn to pick the music, anyway. Lindsay tells them to stop fighting, and she tries to grab the iPod from Elody, taking both hands off the wheel, steadying it with one knee. I grab for it again and she shouts, “Get off!” She’s laughing.

Elody knocks the cigarette out of Lindsay’s hand and it lands
between Lindsay’s thighs. The tires slide a little on the wet road, and the car is full of the smell of burning.

If you don’t breathe…

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—

Well.

You know what happens next.

In my dream I am falling forever through darkness.

Falling, falling, falling.

Is it still falling if it has no end?

And then a shriek. Something ripping through the soundlessness, an awful, high wailing, like an animal or an alarm—

Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep.

I wake up stifling a scream.

I shut off the alarm, trembling, and lie back against my pillows. My throat is burning and I’m covered in sweat. I take long, slow breaths and watch my room lighten as the sun inches its way over the horizon, things beginning to emerge: the Victoria’s Secret sweatshirt on my floor, the collage Lindsay made me years ago with quotes from our favorite bands and cut-up magazines. I listen to the sounds from downstairs, so familiar and constant it’s like they belong to the architecture, like they’ve been built up out of the ground with the walls: the clanking of my father in the kitchen, shelving dishes; the frantic scrabbling sound of our pug, Pickle, trying to get out the back door, probably to pee and run around in circles; a
low murmur that means my mom’s watching the morning news.

When I’m ready, I suck in a deep breath and reach for my phone. I flip it open.

The date flashes up at me.

Friday, February 12.

Cupid Day.

“Get up, Sammy.” Izzy pokes her head in the door. “Mommy says you’re going to be late.”

“Tell Mom I’m sick.” Izzy’s blond bob disappears again.

Here’s what I remember: I remember being in the car. I remember Elody and Ally fighting over the iPod. I remember the wild spinning of the wheel and seeing Lindsay’s face as the car sailed toward the woods, her mouth open and her eyebrows raised in surprise, as though she’d just run into someone she knew in an unexpected place. But after that? Nothing.

After that, only the dream.

This is the first time I really think it—the first time I allow myself to think it.

That maybe the accidents—both of them—were real.

And maybe I didn’t make it.

Maybe when you die time folds in on you, and you bounce around inside this little bubble forever. Like the after-death equivalent of the movie
Groundhog Day.
It’s not what I imagined death would be like—not what I imagined would come
afterward—but then again it’s not like there’s anyone around to tell you about it.

Be honest: are you surprised that I didn’t realize sooner? Are you surprised that it took me so long to even
think
the word—
death? Dying? Dead?

Do you think I was being stupid? Naive?

Try not to judge. Remember that we’re the same, you and me.

I thought I would live forever too.

“Sam?” My mom pushes open the door and leans against the frame. “Izzy said you felt sick?”

“I…I think I have the flu or something.” I know I look like crap so it should be believable.

My mom sighs like I’m being difficult on purpose. “Lindsay will be here any second.”

“I don’t think I can go in today.” The idea of school makes me want to curl up in a ball and sleep forever.

“On Cupid Day?” My mom raises her eyebrows. She glances at the fur-trimmed tank top that’s laid out neatly over my desk chair—the only item of clothing that isn’t lying on the floor or hanging from a bedpost or a doorknob. “Did something happen?”

“No, Mom.” I try to swallow the lump in my throat. The worst is knowing I can’t tell anybody what’s happening—or
what’s happened—to me. Not even my mom. I guess it’s been years since I talked to her about important stuff, but I start wishing for the days when I believed she could fix anything. It’s funny, isn’t it? When you’re young you just want to be older, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.

My mom’s searching my face really intensely. I feel like at any second I could break down and blurt out something crazy so I roll away from her, facing the wall.

“You love Cupid Day,” my mom prods. “Are you sure nothing happened? You didn’t fight with your friends?”

“No. Of course not.”

She hesitates. “Did you fight with Rob?”

That makes me want to laugh. I think about the fact that he left me waiting upstairs at Kent’s party and I almost say,
Not yet
. “No, Mom. God.”

“Don’t use that tone of voice. I’m just trying to help.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not.” I bury deeper under the covers, keeping my back turned to her. I hear rustling and think she’ll come and sit next to me. She doesn’t, though. Freshman year after a big fight I drew a line in red nail polish just inside my door, and I told her if she ever came past the line I’d never speak to her again. Most of the nail polish has chipped off by now, but in places you can still see it spotted over the wood like blood.

I meant it at the time, but I’d expected her to forget after a while. But since that day she’s never once stepped foot in my
room. It’s a bummer in some ways, since she never surprises me by making up my sheets anymore, or leaving folded laundry or a new sundress on my bed like she did when I was in middle school. But at least I know she’s not rooting through my drawers while I’m at school, looking for drugs or sex toys or whatever.

“If you want to come out here, I’ll get the thermometer,” she says.

“I don’t think I have a fever.” There’s a chip in the wall in the exact shape of an insect, and I push my thumb against the wall, squishing it.

I can practically feel my mom put her hands on her hips. “Listen, Sam. I know it’s second semester. And I know you think that gives you the right to slack off—”

“Mom, that is not it.” I bury my head under the pillow, feeling like I could scream. “I told you, I don’t feel good.” I’m half afraid she’ll ask me what’s wrong and half hoping she will.

She only says, “All right. I’ll tell Lindsay you’re thinking of going in late. Maybe you’ll feel better after a little more sleep.”

I doubt it.
“Maybe,” I say, and a second later I hear the door click shut behind her.

I close my eyes and reach back into those final moments, the last memories—Lindsay’s look of surprise and the trees lit up like teeth in the headlights, the wild roar of the engine—searching for a light, a thread that will connect this moment
to that one, a way to sew together the days so that they make sense.

But all I get is blackness.

I can’t hold back my tears anymore. They come all at once, and before I know it I’m sobbing and snotting all over my best Ethan Allen pillows. A little later I hear scratching against my door. Pickle has always had a dog sense for when I’m crying, and in sixth grade after Rob Cokran said I was too big of a dork for him to go out with—right in the middle of the cafeteria, in front of everybody—Pickle sat on my bed and licked the tears off one after another.

I don’t know why that’s the example that pops into my head, but thinking about that moment makes a new rush of anger and frustration swell up inside of me. It’s strange how much the memory affects me. I’ve never mentioned that day to Rob—I doubt he remembers—but I’ve always liked to think about it when we’re walking down the hallway, our fingers interlaced, or when we’re all hanging out in Tara Flute’s basement, and Rob looks over at me and winks. I like to think how funny life is: how so much changes. How
people
change.

But now I just wonder when, exactly, I became cool enough for Rob Cokran.

After a while the scratching on my door stops. Pickle has finally realized he’s not getting in, and I hear his paws ticking against the floor as he trots off. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone in my life.

I cry until it seems amazing that one person could have so many tears. It seems like they must be coming from the very tips of my toes.

Then I sleep without dreaming.

ESCAPE TACTICS

I wake up thinking about a movie I once saw. The main character dies somehow—I forget how—but he’s only half dead. One part of him is lying there in a coma, and one part of him is wandering the world, kind of in limbo. The point is, so long as he’s not completely 100 percent dead, a piece of him is trapped in this in-between place.

This gives me hope for the first time in two days. The idea that I might be lying somewhere in a coma, my family bending over me and everyone worrying and filling my hospital room with flowers, actually makes me feel
good
.

Because if I’m not dead—at least not
yet
—there may be a way to stop it.

My mom drops me off in Upper Lot just before third period starts (.22 miles or not, I will not be seen getting out of my mom’s maroon 2003 Accord, which she won’t trade in because she says it’s “fuel efficient”). Now I can’t wait to get to school. I have a gut feeling I’ll find the answers there. I don’t know how or why I’m stuck in this time loop, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that there’s a reason for it.

“See you later,” I say, and start to pop out of the car.

But something stops me. It’s the idea that’s been bugging me for the past twenty-four hours, what I was trying to talk to my friends about in the Tank: how you might not ever really know. How you might be walking down the street one day and—
bam!

Blackness.

“It’s cold, Sam.” My mom leans over the passenger seat and gestures for me to shut the door.

I turn around and stoop down to look at her. It takes me a second to work the words out of my mouth, but I mumble, “Iloveyou.”

I feel so weird saying it, it comes out more like
olivejuice
. I’m not even sure if she understands me. I slam the door quickly before she can respond. It’s probably been years since I’ve said “I love you” to either of my parents, except on Christmas or birthdays or when they say it first and it’s pretty much expected. It leaves me with a weird feeling in my stomach, part relief and part embarrassment and part regret.

As I’m walking toward school I make a vow: there’s not going to be an accident tonight.

And whatever it is—this bubble or hiccup in time—I’m busting out.

Here’s another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you’re dead, it’s the only thing that keeps you alive.

The bell has already rung for third period, so I book it to chem. I get there just in time to take a seat—big surprise—next to Lauren Lornet. The quiz goes off, same as yesterday and the day before—except by now I can answer the first question myself.

Pen. Ink. Working? Mr. Tierney. Book. Slam. Jump.

“Keep it,” Lauren whispers to me, practically batting her eyelashes at me. “You’re going to need a pen.” I start to try to pass it back, as usual, but something in her expression sparks a memory. I remember coming home after Tara Flute’s pool party in seventh grade and seeing my face in the mirror lit up exactly like that, like somebody had handed me a winning lottery ticket and told me my life was about to change.

“Thanks.” I stuff the pen into my bag. She’s still making that face—I can see it out of the corner of my eye—and after a minute I whip around and say, “You shouldn’t be so nice to me.”

“What?” Now she looks completely stunned. Definitely an improvement.

I have to whisper because Tierney’s started his lesson again. Chemical reactions, blah, blah, blah. Transfiguration. Put two liquids together and they form a solid. Two plus two does not equal four.

“Nice to me. You shouldn’t be.”

“Why not?” She squinches up her forehead so her eyes nearly disappear.

“Because I’m not nice to you.” The words are surprisingly hard to get out.

“You’re nice,” Lauren says, looking at her hands, but she obviously doesn’t mean it. She looks up and tries again. “You don’t…”

She trails off, but I know what she’s going to say.
You don’t have to be nice to me.

“Exactly,” I say.

“Girls!” Mr. Tierney bellows, slamming his fist down on his lab station. I swear he goes practically neon.

Lauren and I don’t talk for the rest of class, but I leave chem feeling good, like I’ve done the right thing.

“That’s what I like to see.” Mr. Daimler drums his fingers on my desk as he walks the aisles at the end of class collecting homework. “A big smile. It’s a beautiful day—”

“It’s supposed to rain later,” Mike Heffner interjects, and everyone laughs. He’s an idiot.

Mr. Daimler doesn’t skip a beat. “—and it’s Cupid Day. Love is in the air.” He looks straight at me and my heart stops for a second. “
Everyone
should be smiling.”

“Just for you, Mr. Daimler,” I say, making my voice extra sweet. More giggles and one loud snort from the back. I turn around and see Kent, head down, scribbling furiously on the cover of his notebook.

Mr. Daimler laughs and says, “And here I thought I’d gotten
you excited about differential equations.”

“You got her excited about
something
,” Mike mutters. More laughter from the class. I’m not sure if Mr. Daimler hears—he doesn’t seem to—but the tips of his ears turn red.

The whole class has been like this. I’m in a good mood, certain everything will be okay. I’ve got it all figured out. I’m going to get a second chance. Plus Mr. Daimler’s been paying me extra attention. After the Cupids came in he took a look at my four roses, raised his eyebrows, and said I must have secret admirers everywhere.

“Not so secret,” I said, and he winked at me.

After class I gather up my stuff and go out into the hall, pausing for just a second to check over my shoulder. Sure enough, Kent’s bounding along after me, shirt untucked, messenger bag half open and slapping against his thigh. What a mess. I start walking toward the cafeteria. Today I looked more carefully at his note: the tree is sketched in black ink, each dip and shadow in the bark shaded perfectly. The leaves are tiny and diamond shaped. The whole thing must have taken him hours. I stuck it between two pages of my math book so it wouldn’t get crushed.

“Hey,” he says, catching up with me. “Did you get my note?”

I almost say to him,
It’s really good
, but something stops me. “‘Don’t drink and love?’ Is that some kind of a catchphrase I don’t know about?”