Before I Fall

Her reaction is so unexpected it takes me a few seconds to think of a response. “What? No. That wasn’t—”

“Poor little Psycho.” Juliet narrows her eyes, almost hissing at me. “No friends. No roses. Let’s screw with her one more time.”

“I didn’t want to screw with you.” I have no idea what’s happening or how things have gone so badly wrong. “It was supposed to be nice.”

I don’t know that she even hears me. She leans closer. “So what was the plan? What were you going to do with that ‘secret admirer’ crap? Bribe one of your friends so he’d pretend to like me? Ask me out? Maybe even to go to prom? And then—what? On the night that we’re supposed to go, he just won’t show up? And it will be so goddamned funny if I freak out, if I go crazy, if I cry or break down in the hallways when I see him in school.” She jerks away. “Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re repeating yourselves. Been there, done that. Eighth grade. Spring Fling. Andrew Roberts.”

She slumps forward as though her speech has exhausted her, the anger and the burning light disappearing simultaneously, all the expression going out of her face, her hands uncurling.

“Or maybe you didn’t have a plan,” she says, this time quietly, almost sweetly. “Maybe there was no point to it at all. Maybe you just wanted to remind me that I have nobody, no friends, no secret admirers. ‘Maybe next year, but probably not,’ right?” She smiles at me again, and it’s much worse than her anger.

By this point I’m so frustrated and bewildered I have to fight back tears. “I swear, Juliet, that wasn’t the point. I just—I thought it would be nice. I thought it would make you feel better.”

“Make me feel better?” She repeats the words as though she’s never heard them before, and now her eyes have a dreamy, faraway look. Every trace of anger and emotion is gone. She looks peaceful, even, and I’m struck by how beautiful she is—up close, just like a supermodel, with that ghostly pale skin and those huge blue eyes, the color of the sky very early in the morning.

“You don’t know me,” she says in little more than a whisper. “You never knew me. And you can’t make me better. Nobody can make me better.”

This reminds me of what I said to Kent only two days ago—I don’t think I can be fixed—but now I know I was wrong. Everyone can be fixed; it has to be that way, it’s the only thing that makes sense. I’m trying to figure out a way to tell Juliet this, to convince her of it, but very calmly, and with that floating grace she’s always had, she puts her hand on one of my arms and moves me gently but firmly out of the way, and I find myself stepping aside and letting her reach for the door handle. The tears are pushing at the back of my throat, and I’m still struggling for words, and the whole time it’s like her face is growing paler and paler, glowing almost, like the sheer white point of a flame; and I have this idea that I’m already seeing her sputter out, her life flickering in front of me, a TV on static.

She pauses with her hand on the door, staring directly in front of her.

“You know, I used to be friends with Lindsay.” She’s still speaking in that horrible, calm voice, as though she’s talking from a distance of miles and miles. “When we were younger we did everything together. I still have a friendship necklace she gave me, one of those hearts split down the middle. When you put them together the necklace spelled ‘Best Friends Forever.’”

I want to ask what happened, why they stopped being friends, but the words are stuck behind the lump in my throat. And I’m scared of interrupting. As long as Juliet’s talking to me, she’s safe.

“That was right before her parents got divorced.” Juliet shoots a quick glance in my direction, but her eyes seem to go directly over my face without actually registering it. “She was so sad all the time. I used to go to her house for sleepovers, and her parents would be arguing so badly we’d have to hide under her bed and stuff pillows everywhere to muffle the sound. She called it ‘building a fort.’ She was always like that, you know, always trying to make the best of things. But when she thought I was asleep, she would cry and cry and cry. She started having nightmares, too. Really bad ones. She’d wake up screaming in the middle of the night.”

Juliet’s staring at the door again, smiling a little. I wish I could walk back into her memories and see what she’s seeing, fix whatever is broken there. “She started to wet her bed again, you know? Because everything was so bad with her mom and dad. She was humiliated, of course. She swore me to secrecy—said she’d never speak to me again if I told anybody. We used to wake up in the morning and some of the pillows in the fort would be damp. I would pretend not to notice. One morning I came into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and she was sitting in the tub, scrubbing a pillow with so much bleach it made my eyes sting. She must have been scrubbing for half an hour. The pillow was all white-splotched and ruined, and her fingers were raw and red. They were burned, almost. But it’s like she couldn’t even see it. She just wanted it to be clean.”

I close my eyes, feeling the floor sway underneath me, remembering coming into the bathroom of Rosalita’s and seeing Lindsay on her knees, the chunks of food in the toilet. The mixture of shame and anger and defiance on her face.

“One time the fighting got so bad we even ran away from her house. We were only seven or eight, but we walked all the way to my house. It was March and pretty cold. The plan was for Lindsay to move into my room. I wasn’t going to tell anyone, just keep her safe and bring her food. Mostly she wanted gummy bears and Snickers bars. She loved chocolate then, and candy. Anything sweet, really.”

Without meaning to, I let out a little, strangled sound. I don’t know if I can listen anymore. I have the feeling that this is it: this bathroom, this story. That this is the root and bud of it all, the beginning and the end.

But Juliet keeps going in that strange, measured tone, as though we have all the time in the world. “Of course it didn’t work. We got upstairs and into the bedroom, but then we started arguing about who should sleep in the little trundle bed and who should get the big one, and my mom heard us. She was horrified that we’d walked all that way. She was screaming and crying that we could have been kidnapped or killed or whatever. I remember being really embarrassed.” Juliet turns her hands upward, stares at her palms. “It was nothing compared to Lindsay’s freak-out, though, when my mom said she had to go home. I’ve never heard anyone scream that loudly.”

She’s silent for so long I think she’s done. Her words keep buzzing in my head, flitting around and arranging themselves like clues in a crossword puzzle. She was always like that, you know, always trying to make the best of things…. She must have been scrubbing for half an hour…. Her fingers were raw and red. I feel like I’m on the verge of understanding something I’m not sure I want to know. The room feels tiny and stifling. There’s a crushing weight on my chest. I’m tempted to make a run for it, push past her into the party and go get a beer and forget about Juliet, forget about everything. But I’m rooted where I am. I can’t move. I keep seeing the endless darkness of my dream rising in front of me. I can’t go back to it.

“It’s funny when you think about it,” Juliet says. “We did everything together, Lindsay and me. We even joined Girl Scouts together. It was her idea. I didn’t want to do all that—cookies and campfires and stuff. We went away on a camping trip at the beginning of fifth grade. We slept in the same tent, of course.”

I watch Juliet’s hands. They’re trembling ever so slightly but so quickly you can barely see it, like the wings of a hummingbird. Out of the corner of her eye Juliet catches me looking, and she brings her hands down to her thighs, gracefully but with finality.

“You remember the name they gave me in fifth grade, right? The name Lindsay gave me? Mellow Yellow?” She shakes her head. “I used to dream that name, I heard it so often. Sometimes I forgot what my real name was.”

She turns to me and her face is radiant, almost glowing, gorgeous. “The funny thing is, it wasn’t even me. Lindsay was the one who wet her sleeping bag. In the morning the whole tent smelled. But when Ms. Bridges came in and asked what had happened Lindsay just pointed her finger at me and screamed, She did it. I’ll never forget her face when she screamed it—She did it! Terrified. Like I was a wild dog and I was going to bite her.”

I press back against the door, grateful for something to lean on. It makes perfect sense, of course. It all makes perfect sense now: Lindsay’s anger, the way she always held up her fingers in the shape of a cross to ward Juliet Sykes off. She doesn’t hate her. She’s afraid of her. Juliet Sykes, the keeper of Lindsay’s oldest, maybe her worst, secret.

And it all seems absurd now, the chance and randomness of it. One person shoots up and the other spirals downward—random and meaningless. As simple as being in the right place, or the wrong place, or however you want to look at it. As simple as getting a craving for Diet Pepsi one day at a pool party, and getting swept away; as simple as not saying no.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. My voice comes out hoarse from the effort of swallowing back tears.

Juliet shrugs. “She was my best friend, you know? She was always so sad back then.” Juliet makes a noise that could be a laugh or a whimper. “Besides,” she says more quietly, “I thought it would pass.”

“Juliet—” I start to say.

She shakes her shoulders like she’s brushing off the weight of everything, the conversation, the past. “It doesn’t matter now,” she says quickly, and just like that she snaps the door open and slips out.

“Juliet!”

There’s a huge clot of people standing by the door, and when I come out I’m pressed backward momentarily as two juniors scuffle for the bathroom, both of them yelling, drunk. “I was here first!” “No, I was!” “You just got here!” A few people give me dirty looks, and then Bridget McGuire charges past all of them, face red and blotchy and tear-streaked. When she sees me she sobs out, “You—” but she doesn’t finish her sentence, just swoops around the juniors and locks herself in the bathroom.

“Jesus Christ, not again,” someone yells.

“I’m going to pee my pants,” one of the juniors moans, crossing her legs and hopping up and down.

Alex Liment is right behind Bridget. He pushes up to the bathroom door and begins rapping on it, calling for her to come out. I still haven’t moved. I’m pressed up against the wall, penned in by people, paralyzed by how wrong everything is. I remember a story I once heard about drowning: that when you fall into cold water it’s not that you drown right away but that the cold disorients you and makes you think that down is up and up is down, so you may be swimming, swimming, swimming for your life in the wrong direction, all the way toward the bottom until you sink. That’s how I feel, as though everything has been turned around.