Before I Fall

I shake my head, but I can’t respond right away. I’m laughing too hard to breathe. I’ve been kind of squatting next to her, but I’m shaking so hard, the laughter heaving through me, that I tumble backward, landing on my butt with a loud thump. Anna cracks a smile again.

“You’re crazy,” she says, giggling.

I take a few gasping breaths. “Least I don’t barricade myself in bathrooms.”

“Least I don’t get stoned off half a joint.”

“Least I don’t sleep with Alex Liment.”

“Least I don’t have bitchy friends.”

“Least I have friends.”

We’re going back and forth, laughing harder and harder. Anna cracks up so hard she bends to the side and supports herself on one elbow. Then she rolls over all the way so she’s just lying there on the bathroom floor making these hilarious yelping noises that remind me of a poodle. Every so often she snorts, which just makes me go off again.

“Let me tell you something,” I say, as soon as I can get the words out.

“Hear, hear.” Anna pretends to pound a gavel and then snorts into her palm.

I love the feeling of thickness around me. I’m swimming in murk. The green walls are water. “I kissed Mr. Daimler.” As soon as I say it I die laughing again. Those must be the four most ridiculous words in the English language.

Anna heaves herself up on one elbow. “You did what?”

“Shhhh.” I bob my head up and down. “We kissed. He put his hand up my shirt. He put his hand…” I gesture between my legs.

She shakes her head from side to side. Her hair whips around her face, reminding me of a tornado. “No way. No way. No way.”

“I swear to God.”

She leans forward, so close I can smell her breath on my face. She’s been sucking on an Altoid. “That is sick. You know that, right?”

“I know.”

“Sick, sick, sick. He went to high school here, like, ten years ago.”

“Eight. We checked.”

She lets out a loud howl of laughter, and for a second she lays her head down on my shoulder. “They’re all perverts,” she says, the words quiet and directed straight into my ear. Then she pulls away and says, “Shit! I’m so dead.”

She stands up, steadying herself with one hand on the wall. She teeters for a moment as she stands in front of the mirror, smoothing down her hair. She takes a small bottle from her back pocket and squeezes a couple of drops into each eye. I’m still on the floor, staring up at her from below. She seems to be miles and miles away.

I blurt out, “You’re too good for Alex.”

She’s already stepped over me on her way to the door. I see her back stiffen and I think she’s going to be angry. She pauses, one hand resting on the chair.

But when she turns around she’s smiling. “You’re too good for Mr. Daimler,” she says, and we both crack up again. Then she shoves the chair out of the way and tugs the door open, slipping into the hall.

After she’s gone I sit with my head back, enjoying the way the room feels like it’s doing loops. This is what it’s like to be the sun, I think, and then I think how stoned I am, and then I think how funny it is to know that you’re stoned but not be able to stop thinking stoned thoughts.

I see something white peeking out from underneath the sink: a cigarette. I lean down and find another one. Anna forgot to pick them up. Just then there’s a sharp knock on the door, and I snatch both cigarettes up and get to my feet. As soon as I stand the circling and the feeling of being underwater gets worse. It seems to take me forever to push the chair out of the way. Everything is so heavy.

“You forgot these,” I say, holding the cigarettes up between two fingers as I open the door.

It’s not Anna, though. It’s Ms. Winters, standing in the hallway with her arms crossed and her face pinched up so tightly it looks like her nose is a black hole and the rest of her face is getting slowly sucked into it.

“Smoking on school property is forbidden,” she says, pronouncing each word carefully. Then she smiles, showing all of her teeth.

THE PUGS

In the Thomas Jefferson High School R & R (Rules and Regulations Handbook), it says that any student caught smoking on school property is subject to three days’ suspension. (I know this by heart because all the smokers like to tear this page out of the handbook and burn it at the Lounge, sometimes crouching and sticking their cigarettes in the flames to catch a light, as the words on the page curl and blacken and smoke into nothing.)

But I get off with only a warning. I guess the administration makes exceptions for students who have dirt on a certain vice principal and a certain gym teacher/soccer coach/mustache fan. Ms. Winters looked like she was going to have a massive coronary when I’d started going off about role models and my poor impressionable mind—I love that expression, as though everyone under the age of twenty-one has all the brain power of dental plaster—and the administration’s responsibility to set an example, especially when I’d reminded her about page sixty-nine in the R & R: it is forbidden to engage in lewd or sexually inappropriate acts in or around school property. (That one I know because the page has been torn out and hung up about a thousand times in various bathrooms on campus, the margins decorated with drawings of a decidedly lewd and sexually inappropriate nature. The administration was totally asking for it, though. Who puts a rule like that on page sixty-nine?)

At least the hour and a half I spent with Ms. Winters has sobered me up. The last bell has just rung, and all around me students are sweeping out of classrooms, making way more noise than is necessary—shrieking, laughing, slamming lockers, dropping binders, shoving one another—a jittery, mindless, restless noise unique to Friday afternoons. I’m feeling good, and powerful, and I’m thinking, I have to find Lindsay. She won’t believe it. She’ll die laughing. Then she’ll put her arm around my shoulder and say, “You’re a rock star, Samantha Kingston,” and everything will be fine. I’m keeping an eye out for Anna Cartullo, too—while I was sitting in Ms. Winters’s office it occurred to me that we never switched shoes again. I’m still wearing her monster black boots.

I swing out of Main. The cold makes my eyes sting, and a sharp pain shoots up my chest. February really is the worst month. A half dozen buses are idling in a line next to the cafeteria, engines choking and coughing, letting up a thick black wall of exhaust. Through the dirt-filmed windows the pale faces of a handful of underclassmen—all slouched in their seats, hoping not to be seen—are featureless and interchangeable. I start cutting across the faculty lot toward Senior Alley, but I’m only halfway there when I see a big-ass silver Range Rover—its walls thudding with the bass of “No More Drama”—tear out of the alley and start gunning it toward Upper Lot. I stop, all of the good buzzy feeling draining out of me quickly and at once. Of course, I didn’t really expect Lindsay to be waiting for me, but deep down I guess I was hoping for it. Then it hits me: I have no ride, nowhere to go. The last place I want to be is at home. Even though I’m freezing, I feel prickles of heat rising up from my fingers, crawling up my spine.

It’s the weirdest thing. I’m popular—really popular—but I don’t have that many friends. What’s even weirder is that it’s the first time I’ve noticed.

“Sam!”

I turn around and see Tara Flute, Bethany Harps, and Courtney Walker coming toward me. They always travel in a pack, and even though we’re kinda-friends with all of them, Lindsay calls them the Pugs: pretty from far away, ugly up close.

“What are you doing?” Tara always has a perma-smile, like she’s constantly auditioning for an ad for Crest toothpaste, and she turns it on me now. “It’s, like, a thousand degrees below zero.”

I toss my hair over one shoulder, trying to look nonchalant. The last thing I need is for the Pugs to know I’ve been ditched. “I had to tell Lindsay something.” I gesture vaguely in the direction of Senior Alley. “She and the girls had to jet out without me—some community-service thing they do once a month. Lame.”

“So lame,” Bethany says, nodding vigorously. As far as I can tell, her only role in life is to agree with whatever has just been said.

“Come with us.” Tara slips her arm in mine and squeezes. “We’re headed to La Villa to shop. Then we thought we’d hit up Kent’s party. Sound good?”

I briefly run through my other options: home is obviously out. I won’t be welcome at Ally’s. Lindsay has made that clear. Then there’s Rob’s…sitting on the couch while he plays Guitar Hero, making out a little bit, pretending not to notice when he tears another bra because he can’t figure out the clasp. Making conversation and waving while his parents pack up the car for the weekend. Pizza and lukewarm beer from the garage stash as soon as they’re gone. Then more making out. No, thank you.

I scan the parking lot once more, looking for Anna. I feel kind of bad about taking off with her boots—but then again, it’s not exactly like she’s made an effort to find me. Besides, Lindsay always said a new pair of shoes could change your life. And if I was ever in need of a serious life change—or afterlife change, whatever—it’s now.

“Sounds perfect,” I say, and if possible Tara’s smile gets a little wider, teeth so white they look like bone.

As we leave school I tell the Pugs—I can’t help but think of them that way—about my trip to the office, and how Ms. Winters has been getting her freak on with Mr. Otto, and how I got off without a detention, because I promised her I would destroy a camera-phone pic of one of her love sessions in Otto’s office (fabricated, obviously—there’s no way I’d ever hang on to evidence of their coupling, much less in high-digital format). Tara is gasping she’s laughing so hard, and Courtney’s looking at me like I’ve just cured cancer or developed a pill that makes you grow a cup size, and Bethany covers her mouth and says, “Holy mother of Lord Cocoa Puffs.” I’m not exactly sure what that means, but it’s definitely the most original thing I’ve ever heard her say. It all makes me feel good and confident again, and I remind myself that this is my day: I can do whatever I want.

“Tara?” I squinch forward. Tara’s car is a tiny two-door Civic, and Bethany and I are crushed in the backseat. “Can we stop at my house for a second before we hit the mall?”

“Sure.” There’s her smile again, reflected in the rearview like a piece of sky. “Need to drop something?”

“Need to get something,” I correct her, shooting her my biggest smile back.

It’s almost three o’clock, so I figure my mom should be back from yoga, and sure enough her car is in the driveway when we pull up to the house. Tara starts to pull in behind the Accord, but I tap her shoulder and gesture for her to keep going. She inches her car along the road until we’re hidden behind a cluster of evergreens my mom had the landscaper plant years ago, after she discovered that our then-neighbor, Mr. Horferly, liked to take midnight strolls on his property totally in the buff. This is pretty much the answer to every problem you encounter in suburbia: plant a tree, and hope you don’t see anyone’s privates.