Before I Fall

“Um. Y-yeah. Pretty much.” He squints at me like he’s just noticed me for the first time.

“I’ve been looking for a doctor,” I breeze on. I feel bad for Bridget, but at the same time, she deserves to know what her lame excuse for a boyfriend is up to. “It’s so hard to find a good one, you know? Especially one that doubles as a restaurant with a $4.99 lunch special. That’s rare.”

“What are you talking about?” Bridget’s voice is a squeak. She whips back to Alex. “What is she talking about?”

A muscle is ticking in Alex’s jaw. I can tell he wants to curse me out but knows that would make it worse, so he just stands there glaring.

I put my hand on Bridget’s arm. “I’m sorry, Bridget. But your boyfriend is really a slimeball.”

“What is she talking about?”

Bridget’s voice shoots up another octave, and as I walk away I hear Alex start trying to calm her down, no doubt feeding her lies as quickly as he can come up with them. I should feel good about what I’ve done—he deserves it, after all, and in a weird way I’m only setting things right—but as soon as I walk away I feel strangely deflated. The feeling of control vanishes and in its place comes a tingly feeling of anxiety. I flip back through the day’s events like I’m scrolling down a computer screen, trying to find some lapse, something I’ve forgotten to do or say. Maybe I should have gone to Juliet’s house earlier, to check up on her. Then again, I’m not really sure what I would have said. Hi. Can you verify for me that you’re not going to throw yourself in front of any cars tonight? That would be great. No explosives, either. This is my life you’re playing with.

The music’s so loud, the notes are hardly distinguishable from one another. I fantasize about taking Kent’s hand and pulling him away somewhere quiet and dark. The room downstairs, maybe, or the woods, or someplace farther. Maybe we’ll just get in the car and drive.

“Sam! Sam!”

I look up. In the back room Lindsay’s climbed onto one of the couches, waving at me over the tide of bobbing heads. Ally’s next to her, and several feet beyond them I see Elody whispering something to Steve Dough.

I hesitate, a sense of hopelessness washing over me. It’s ridiculous for me to talk to Kent. I have no words to describe how wrong I’ve been about him, about Rob, about everyone. I don’t think I can explain to him how I’ve been changing. And maybe it’s all a lie, anyway. Maybe it’s impossible to change.

In that moment, while I’m teetering between two doorways, the people around me get all quiet and hushed, faces growing slack. Up on the couch Lindsay falters, her hand flapping uselessly to her side. Next to her, Ally begins opening and shutting her mouth like a fish. The buzzing is all through my body now, like the hum of an electrical wire.

And there she is, marching down the hallway. After all that: Juliet Sykes on a mission.

In a second the despair, the hopelessness, the sense of forgetting things or missing the point somehow, all gets transformed into rage. When she sees Lindsay she stops and opens her mouth, going straight into her “you’re a bitch” routine, but I don’t even let the first word escape from her mouth before I’m charging forward, grabbing her arm, and half dragging her backward down the hallway. She’s too surprised to fight me.

I pull her into the nearest bathroom—“Out,” I order two girls who are primping in front of the mirror—and slam the door and lock it. When I turn around to face her she’s staring at me like I’m the psychopath.

“What are you doing?”

She must misunderstand my question. “It’s a party,” she says with soft insistence. When she’s not busy freaking out and calling me a bitch she has a nice voice, musical like Elody’s. “I’m allowed to be here like everybody else.”

“No.” I shake my head, pressing fingers to my temples to keep them from pounding. “I mean, what are you really doing? Why are you here?”

Her eyes flutter to the doorknob behind me. I move over so it’s wedged into my lower back. If she wants to get out, she’ll have to move me out of the way.

Apparently she doesn’t like her chances, because she takes a long, slow breath. “I came to tell you something. You, and Lindsay, and Elody, and Ally.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

“You’re a bitch,” she says quietly, not like an accusation at all, more like something she’s sorry about.

At the same time she says it, I say it with her. “I’m a bitch.”

She stares at me.

“Listen, Juliet”—I rake my hands through my hair—“I know we haven’t always been nice to you or whatever. And I really feel bad about it—I do.” I try to gauge what she’s thinking, but it’s like something has shut down behind her eyes, a button switching off, and she just stands there staring at me dully. I rush on, “The thing is, we never really meant anything by it, you know? I don’t think I—we—really thought about it. It’s just the kind of thing that happens. People used to make fun of me all the time.” She’s making me nervous, just staring like that, and I lick my lips. “All the time. And, like, I don’t think it’s really because people are mean or bad or whatever. I just think…I just think…” I’m fighting to find the words. Memories are colliding in my head: the sound of people singing as I walked down the hall, the smell of ice cream on Lindsay’s breath the day we threw Beth’s tampons out the window, riding a horse through a blur of trees. “I just think that people don’t think. They don’t know. We—I—didn’t know.”

I feel pretty proud of myself for getting all of that out. But Juliet hasn’t moved or smiled or even freaked out. She’s so still she could be carved out of stone. Finally a little tremor goes through her, a personal earthquake, and her eyes seem to focus on me.

“You haven’t always been that nice to me?” she says dully, and my stomach sinks. She didn’t hear a word I said.

“I—yeah. And I’m sorry about that.”

Her eyelids flutter. “In seventh grade you and Lindsay stole all my clothes from the locker room so I had to walk around in my sweaty gym clothes for the rest of the day. Then you called me Stinky Sykes.”

“I—I’m sorry. I don’t remember that.” The way she’s staring at me is awful, like she’s seeing in and through and beyond me to some void.

“That was before you came up with Psycho, of course.” Juliet’s voice has lost its musical quality. It’s completely toneless. She raises her arm and mimes slashing a knife through the air, emitting a series of high-pitched shrieks that send chills up and down my arms, and for a moment I think maybe she is crazy. Then she drops her arm. “Real funny. Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est. Catchy.”

“People used to tell this really dumb joke about me. Kind of sing it when I walked by. What’s red and white and weird all over…” I’m hoping to make her laugh or twitch or something, but she just keeps staring at me with that dumb, animal look on her face, a blank.

“I never sang it,” she says, and then, like she’s forced to keep reciting everything we ever did, continues. “You took pictures of me when I was showering.”

“That was Lindsay,” I say automatically, getting more and more uncomfortable. If she would get angry, it would be one thing—but it’s like she’s not even seeing me, like she’s just reading off a list she’s looked at a million times.

“You posted the pictures all over the school. Where teachers could see.”

“We took them down in, like, an hour.” I’m ashamed as soon as I say the words. As though the fact that we took them down makes it better.

“You hacked into my Yahoo account. You published my—my private emails.”

“That wasn’t us,” I say quickly, feeling a rush of relief that this, at least, was not our fault. To this day I’m not sure who did hack her account, and circulate email exchanges between Juliet and some guy named Path2Pain118 she’d obviously met in a chat room. There were dozens of emails, all of them long rants about how much high school sucked and how awful everybody was. The hacker had forwarded the emails to almost everyone in school after giving them a new subject line: Future School Shooters of America. I shiver, thinking about how easy it is to be totally wrong about people—to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it’s the effect or vice versa. And though I’ve now been at Kent’s house five times in six days I feel disoriented, confused by the bright bathroom light and Juliet’s impassive face and the sounds of the party coming through the door.

Juliet keeps going on like I didn’t even speak. “You started the rumor that I lost my virginity for a pack of cigarettes.”

Ally. That was Ally. I can’t say it. It doesn’t matter, anyway. It was us. It was all of us. Everyone who repeated the story and whispered “slut” and made a smoker’s hacking cough whenever she walked by.

“I don’t even smoke.” She says this with a smile, like this is the funniest thing in the world. Like this, her whole life, is one big joke.

“Juliet—”

“My sister heard that rumor. She told my parents. I—” Finally she loses it a little, balling her hands into fists and squeezing them against her thighs. “I’ve never even kissed anyone.” This comes out as a fierce whisper—a confession—and the intensity of it, the sadness and regret, makes a black well of anger break somewhere inside of me.

“I know, okay? I know we did horrible things. I know we’ve been shitty and things are bad and—” I break off, the words getting tangled in my throat. I’m on the verge of tears, full of blind fury that hits me like a cloud, blots out everything but a single burning point of frustration: I can’t make her see, can’t make her see that I’m trying to make things right. I feel like I’m watching both of our lives swirl down the drain, mine and hers, wrapped around each other. “What I’m saying is, I want to make it up to you. I’m trying to apologize. Things—things are going to get better.”

She presses her lips together, staring at me mute and white-faced, and I have to tense every muscle in my arms to keep from reaching out and grabbing her shoulders, shaking her.

“I mean…” I’m going on blindly now, groping, grabbing at words and ideas as they come buzzing up to me through my anger, trying to get through to her. “You got those roses today, right? Like a whole bunch of them?”

An enormous shudder goes through her. And now a light snaps on in her eyes again, but instead of gratitude, there’s hatred burning there.

“I knew it. I knew it was you.” Her voice is so full of rage and pain I rear back like she’s hit me. “What was that? Another one of your little jokes?”