Before I Fall

Now I’m definitely regretting coming. For a second I have this wild fantasy that Juliet comes from a whole family of crazy serial killers, and that at any second Mrs. Sykes is going to go Silence of the Lambs on me. The whole family’s wacked, that’s what Lindsay had said. The darkness is pressing all around me, stifling, and I almost cry out with gratitude when Mrs. Sykes switches on a light and the hall appears lit up and normal, and not full of dead human trophies or something. There’s a dried flower arrangement on a side table decorated with lace, next to a framed family photo. I wish I could look at it more closely.

“Was it important, this assignment?” Mrs. Sykes asks, almost in a whisper. She shoots a nervous glance in the direction of the TV room, and I wonder if she thinks she’s being too loud.

“I just…I kind of promised Juliet I would pick up some stuff for our makeup presentation on Monday.” I try to lower my voice, but she still winces. “I thought Juliet said she would be home tonight.”

“Juliet went out,” she says, and then, as if she’s unused to saying the words and is testing them on her tongue, repeats, “She went out. But maybe she left it for you?”

“I could look for it,” I say. I want to see her room, I realize: that’s why I’m here. I need to see it. “She probably just dumped it on her bed or something.” I try to sound casual, like Juliet and I are on really good terms with each other—like it’s not weird for me to waltz into her house at ten thirty on a Friday night and try to weasel my way into her bedroom.

Mrs. Sykes hesitates. “Maybe I can call her cell phone,” she says, and then adds apologetically, “Juliet hates to have anyone in her room.”

“You don’t have to call her,” I say quickly. Juliet will probably tell her mom to sic the cops on me. “It’s not that important. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

“No, no. I’ll call her. It will just take a second.” Juliet’s mom is already disappearing into the kitchen. It’s amazing how quickly and soundlessly she moves, like an animal slipping in and out of the shadows.

I consider jetting out while she’s in the kitchen. I think about going home, crawling into bed, watching old movies on my computer. Maybe I’ll make a pot of coffee and sit up all night long. If I never go to sleep, maybe today will have to turn into tomorrow. I wonder idly how long I can go without sleep before I flip my shit and start running down the street in my underwear, hallucinating purple spiders.

But instead I just stand there, waiting. There’s nothing else to do, so I take a few steps forward and bend down to look at the photograph on the table. For a second I’m confused: it’s a picture of an unfamiliar woman, probably twenty-five or thirty, with her arms wrapped around a good-looking guy in a flannel shirt. The colors are all saturated and Technicolor-bright, and the couple looks perfect, sparkling, all white teeth and dazzling smiles and beautiful brown hair. Then I see the words printed in the lower bottom corner of the picture—ShadowCast Images, Inc.—and realize that this isn’t even a real family photo. It’s one of the generic pictures that gets sold along with the picture frame, a shiny, happy advertisement for all the shiny, happy moments you can capture forever inside the 5" × 7" sterling silver frame with butterfly detail. No one has bothered to replace it.

Or maybe the Sykes family doesn’t have too many shiny, happy moments to remember.

I pull away quickly, wishing I hadn’t looked. Even though it’s just a picture of two models, I feel, weirdly, like I’ve seen something way too personal, like I’ve accidentally caught a glimpse of someone’s inner thigh or nose hairs or something.

Mrs. Sykes still isn’t back so I wander out of the hall into the living room on the right. It is mostly dark, and it’s all plaids and lace and dried flowers. It looks as though it hasn’t been redecorated since the fifties.

There’s a single, dull light shining near the window, casting a circular reflection on the black pane of glass, a version of the room appearing in miniature there.

And a face.

A screaming face pressed up against the window.

I let out a squeak of fear before I realize that this, too, is a reflection. There’s a mask mounted on a table just in front of the window, facing outward. I go over to it and lift it carefully from its perch. It’s a woman’s face crafted from newspaper and red stitching, which is crisscrossed over the skin like horrible scars. Words run up the bridge of the nose and across the forehead, certain headlines visible or halfway visible, like BEAUTY REMEDY and TRAGEDY STRIKES, and little scraps of paper are unfurling from various places on her face, like she’s molting. The mouth and the eyes are cut completely away, and when I lift the mask to my face, it fits well. The reflection in the window is awful; I look like something diseased, or a monster from a horror movie. I can’t look away.

“Juliet made that.”

The voice behind me makes me jump. Mrs. Sykes has reappeared and is leaning against the door, frowning at me.

I pop the mask off, return it quickly to its perch. “I’m so sorry. I saw it and…I just wanted to try it on,” I finish lamely.

Mrs. Sykes comes over and rearranges the mask, straightening it, making sure it’s aligned correctly. “When Juliet was younger she was always drawing, always sketching or painting something or sewing her own dresses.” Mrs. Sykes shrugs, flutters a hand. “I don’t think she’s very interested in that stuff now.”

“Did you talk to Juliet?” I ask nervously, waiting for her to kick me out.

Mrs. Sykes blinks at me several times, as though trying to squeeze me into focus. “Juliet…” she repeats, and then shakes her head. “I called her phone a couple of times. She didn’t answer. She doesn’t usually go out on the weekends….” Mrs. Sykes looks at me helplessly.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” I say as cheerfully as I can, feeling like each word is a knife going down into my stomach. “She probably didn’t hear her phone.”

Suddenly the thing I want most of all is to get out of there. I can’t stand to lie to Mrs. Sykes. She looks so sad, standing in her nightgown, ready for bed—as though she’s already asleep, sort of. That’s what the whole house feels like, as though it’s wrapped up in a heavy sleep, the kind that stifles you, won’t let you wake, drags you back into the sheets, drowning, even when you fight it.

I imagine Juliet sneaking up to her room in the dark, and the silence, through the atmosphere of sleep so thick it feels solid, the lullaby of creaking floorboards and quietly hissing radiators, the slow revolutions of people orbiting wordlessly around one another…. And then…

Bang.

Mrs. Sykes walks me back to the front hall. “You can come by tomorrow,” she says. “I’m sure Juliet will have everything ready by then. She’s usually very responsible. A good girl.”

“Sure. Tomorrow.” I don’t even like to say the word, and I wave a quick good-bye before dashing once again through the dark to my car.

It’s even colder than it was earlier. The rain, half ice, pings off the hood of my car as I sit there waiting for the engine to warm up, blowing on my hands and shivering, grateful to be out of there. As soon as I’m out of the house, a weight eases up off my chest, like the atmosphere and pressure inside is different, heavier. My first impression was right: it really is a desperate house. I see Juliet’s mom silhouetted by the window. I wonder if she’s waiting for me to leave or for her daughter to come home.

That’s when I make a decision. I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to Kent’s house and I’ll catch Juliet, and if I have to, I will hit her in the face. I’ll make her see how stupid the whole death idea is. (It’s certainly no picnic for me.) If it comes down to it, I’ll tie her up in the back of my car so she can’t get her hands on the gun.

I realize I’ve never really done something good for someone else, at least not for a while. I volunteer sometimes for Meals on Wheels, but that’s because colleges like that kind of thing; BU especially mentioned charity on the application portion of their website. And obviously I’m nice to my friends, and I give great birthday gifts (I once spent a month and a half collecting cow-shaped saltshakers to give to Ally, because she loves cows and salt). But I don’t usually do good things just for the hell of it. This will be my good thing.

Then I have a glimmer of an idea. I remember when we were studying Dante in English, and Ben Gowan kept asking if the souls in purgatory ever got cast down into hell (Ben Gowan once got suspended for three days for drawing a picture of a bomb blowing up our cafeteria and all of these decapitated heads flying everywhere, so for him the question was normal), and Mrs. Harbor went off on one of her tangents and said that no, that wasn’t possible, but that some modern Christian thinkers believed you could go up from purgatory into heaven once you’d done enough time there. I’ve never really believed in heaven. It always sounded like a crazy idea: everybody happy and reunited, Fred Astaire and Einstein doing a tango on the clouds, that kind of stuff.

But then again, I never really believed I’d have to relive one day forever, either. It’s no crazier than what’s already happened to me. Maybe the whole point is I have to prove that I’m a good person. Maybe I have to prove that I deserve to move on.

Maybe Juliet Sykes is the only thing between me and an eternity of chocolate fountains and perfect love and guys who always call when they say they will and banana sundaes that actually help you burn calories.

Maybe she’s my ticket out.

UNFASHIONABLY LATE

I don’t even bother pulling into Kent’s driveway. I’m not planning on being here long, and I don’t want to get blocked in. Besides, something about tramping through the woods in the rain appeals to me. It’s a trial, another way I can sacrifice myself. And from my very limited memories of Sunday school (my mom gave up the fight after I threw a tremendous tantrum when I was seven and threatened to convert to voodoo, even though I wasn’t sure exactly what that was), I know that that’s how it works: you have to sacrifice something.

I pull over onto the shoulder of Route 9, grabbing Izzy’s sweatshirt again, which is now soaking wet. Still, it’s better than nothing. I drape it over my head and get out of the car, pausing for just a second. The road is empty, stretches of black interspersed with weak pools of yellow light from the streetlamps. I try to locate the exact spot where Lindsay’s car went spiraling off the road that first night, but it all looks the same. It could have been anywhere. I reach back once more for some memory of life beyond the collision, beyond the blackness, but I get nothing.

I grab a flashlight from the trunk and set off through the woods.

It’s a longer walk than I would have thought, and the ground alternates between a thin coat of hard ice and slurpy gloop that sucks at my purple New Balances like quicksand. After a few minutes I can hear the faint throb of music from the party, pulsing through the darkness like it belongs there, like its rhythm is part of the night. It’s another ten minutes before I see the faint twinkle of lights flashing sporadically beyond the trees—thank God, since I was beginning to think I was walking in circles—and another five before the woods thin out and I can see the house, a big pile of ice-cream cake sitting on that lawn, shimmering in and out as the rain bends and splits the lights from the porch. I’m totally freezing, and 100 percent regretting my decision to come on foot. That’s the whole problem with sacrifice. It’s a pain, literally.