Before I Fall
Page 5

He swings his backpack off his shoulder and unzips it. There are a half dozen crumpled roses in the bottom of his bag—I’m assuming one of them is mine—and besides that, an empty pack of cigarettes, a pack of Trident gum, his cell phone, and a change of shirts. He’s not so much into studying.
“Who are the other roses from?” I say, teasing him.
“Your competition,” he says, arching his eyebrows.
“Very classy,” Ally says. “Are you going to Kent’s party tonight, Rob?”
“Probably.” Rob shrugs and suddenly looks bored.
Here’s a secret: one time when we were kissing, I opened my eyes and saw that his eyes were open. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was looking over my shoulder, watching the room.
“He’s getting a keg,” Ally says for the second time.
Everyone jokes that going to Jefferson prepares you for the total college experience: you learn to work, and you learn to drink. Two years ago the New York Times ranked us among the top ten booziest public schools in Connecticut.
It’s not like there’s anything else to do around here, though. We’ve got malls and basement parties. That’s it. Let’s face it: that’s how most of the country is. My dad always said that they should take down the Statue of Liberty and put up a big strip mall instead, or those golden McDonald’s arches. He said at least that way people would know what to expect.
“Ahem. Excuse me.”
Lindsay is standing behind Rob, clearing her throat. She has her arms folded and she’s tapping her foot.
“You’re in my seat, Cokran,” she says. She’s only pretending to be hard-core. Rob and Lindsay have always been friends. At least, they’ve always been in the same group, and by necessity have always had to be friends.
“My apologies, Edgecombe.” He gets up and makes a big flourish, like a bow, when she sits down.
“See you tonight, Rob,” Ally says, and adds, “bring your friends.”
“I’ll see you later.” Rob leans down and buries his face in my hair, making his voice deep and quiet. That voice used to make all of the nerves in my body light up like a firework explosion. Now, sometimes, I think it’s cheesy. “Don’t forget. It’s all about you and me tonight.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” I say, hoping my voice sounds sexy and not scared. My palms are sweating and I pray he doesn’t try to take my hand.
Thankfully, he doesn’t. Instead he bends down and presses his mouth into mine. We make out for a bit until Lindsay squeals, “Not while I’m eating,” and throws a fry in my direction. It hits me on my shoulder.
“Bye, ladies,” Rob says, and saunters off with his hat just tilted on an angle.
I wipe my mouth on a napkin when nobody’s looking, since the bottom half of my face is now coated with Rob’s saliva.
Here’s another secret about Rob: I hate the way he kisses.
Elody says all my stressing is just insecurity because Rob and I haven’t actually sealed the deal yet. Once we do, she’s positive I’ll feel better, and I’m sure she’s right. After all, she’s the expert.
Elody is the last to join us at lunch, and we all make a grab for her fries when she sets down her tray. She makes a halfhearted attempt to swat our hands away.
She slaps her bouquet of roses down next. She has twelve, and I feel a momentary twinge of jealousy.
I guess Ally feels it too because she says, “What did you have to do for those?”
“Who did you have to do?” Lindsay corrects her.
Elody sticks her tongue out but seems pleased that we noticed.
All of a sudden, Ally looks at something over my shoulder and starts giggling. “Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est.”
We all turn around. Juliet Sykes, or Psycho, has just drifted into the senior section. That’s how she walks: like she’s drifting, being blown around by forces outside of her control. She’s carrying a brown paper bag in her long pale fingers. Her face is shielded behind a curtain of pale blond hair, shoulders hunched up around her ears.
For the most part, everyone in the cafeteria ignores her—she’s the definition of forgettable—but Lindsay, Ally, Elody, and I start making that screeching and stabbing motion from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which we all watched at a sleepover a couple of years ago. (Afterward we had to sleep with the lights on.)
I’m not sure if Juliet hears us. Lindsay always says she can’t hear at all because the voices in her head are too loud. Juliet keeps up that same slow pace across the room, eventually reaching the door that leads out into the parking lot. I’m not sure where she eats every day. I hardly ever see her in the cafeteria.
She has to shove her shoulder against the door a few times before it will open, like she’s too frail to make it work.
“Did she get our Valogram?” Lindsay says, licking salt off a fry before popping it in her mouth.
Ally nods. “In bio. I was sitting right behind her.”
“Did she say anything?”
“Does she ever say anything?” Ally puts one hand across her heart, pretending to be upset. “She threw the rose out as soon as class was over. Can you believe it? Right in front of me.”
Freshman year Lindsay somehow found out that Juliet hadn’t been sent a single Valogram. Not one. So Lindsay put a note on one of her roses and duct-taped it on Juliet’s locker. The note said: Maybe next year, but probably not.
Every year since then we’ve sent her a rose and the same note on Cupid Day. The only note she’s ever received from anyone, as far as I know. Maybe next year, but probably not.
Normally I would feel bad, but Juliet deserves her nickname. She’s a freak. Rumor has it that she was once found by her parents on Route 84, stark naked at three A.M., straddling the highway divider. Last year Lacey Kennedy said she saw Juliet in the bathroom by the science wing, stroking her hair over and over and staring at her reflection. And Juliet never says a word. Hasn’t for years, as far as I know.
Lindsay hates her. I think Lindsay and Juliet were in a couple of the same elementary school classes, and for all I know Lindsay has hated her since then. She makes the sign of the cross whenever Juliet’s around, like Juliet might somehow go vampire and make a lunge for Lindsay’s throat.
It was Lindsay who found out Juliet peed her sleeping bag during a Girl Scout camping trip in fifth grade, and Lindsay who gave her the nickname Mellow Yellow. People called Juliet that forever—until the end of freshman year, if you can believe it—and stayed away from her because they said she smelled like pee.
I’m looking out the window and I watch Juliet’s hair flash in the sunlight like it’s catching fire. There’s darkness on the horizon, a smudge where the storm is growing. It occurs to me for the first time that I’m not exactly sure why Lindsay started hating Juliet in the first place, or when. I open my mouth to ask her, but they’ve already moved on to other topics.
“—catfight,” Elody finishes, and Ally giggles.
“I’m terrified,” Lindsay says sarcastically. Clearly I’ve missed something.
“What’s going on?” I say.
Elody turns to me. “Sarah Grundel is going around saying Lindsay ruined her life.” I have to wait while Elody folds a fry expertly into her mouth. “She can’t swim in the quarter finals. And you know she lives for that shit. Remember when she forgot to take her goggles off after morning practice and she wore them until second period?”
“She probably keeps all of her blue ribbons on a wall in her room,” Ally says.
“Sam used to do that. Didn’t you, Sam? All those ribbons for playing with horsies.” Lindsay elbows me.
“Can we get back to the point?” I wave my hands, partly because I want to hear the story, partly to take the attention off me and the fact that I used to be a dork. When I was in fifth grade, I spent more time with horses than with members of my own species. “I still don’t get why Sarah’s pissed at Lindsay.”
Elody rolls her eyes at me like I belong at the special ed table. “Sarah got detention—she was late to homeroom for, like, the fifth time in two weeks.” I’m still not getting it and she heaves a sigh. “She was late to homeroom because she had to park in Upper Lot and haul ass—”
“.22 miles!”
We all bust it out at the same time and then start giggling like maniacs.
“Don’t worry, Lindz,” I say. “If you guys throw down I’m totally putting money on you.”
“Yeah, we’ve got your back,” Elody says.
“Isn’t it kind of weird how that stuff happens?” Ally says in this shy voice she gets when she’s trying to say something serious. “How everything spirals out from everything else? Like, if Lindsay hadn’t stolen that parking space…”
“I didn’t steal it. I got it fair and square,” Lindsay protests, bringing her hand down on the table for emphasis. Elody’s Diet Coke sloshes over the side of the can, soaking some fries. This makes us start laughing again.
“I’m serious!” Ally raises her voice to be heard over us. “It’s like a web, you know? Everything’s connected.”
“Have you been breaking into your dad’s stash again, Al?” Elody says.
This is all it takes to really get us going. This is a joke we’ve had with Ally for years because her dad works in the music industry. He’s a lawyer, not a producer or manager or musician or anything, and he wears a suit everywhere (even to the pool in the summer), but Lindsay claims he’s secretly a hippie stoner.
As we’re laughing, doubling over, Ally turns pink. “You guys never listen to me,” she says, but she’s fighting a smile. She takes a fry and throws it at Elody. “I read once that if a bunch of butterflies takes off from Thailand, it can cause a rainstorm in New York.”
“Yeah, well, one of your farts could cause a massive blackout in Portugal.” Elody giggles, throwing a fry back.
“Your morning breath could cause a stampede in Africa.” Ally leans forward. “And I do not fart.”
Lindsay and I are laughing, and Elody and Ally keep throwing fries back and forth. Lindsay tries to say they’re wasting perfectly good grease, but she’s snorting so hard she can barely get the words out.
Finally she sucks in a deep breath and chokes out, “You know what I heard? That if you sneeze enough you can cause a tornado in Iowa.”
Even Ally goes crazy at this, and suddenly we’re all trying it, laughing and sneezing and snorting at the same time. Everybody’s staring at us, but we don’t care.
After about a million sneezes, Lindsay leans back in her chair, clutching her stomach and gasping for breath.
“Thirty dead in Iowa tornadoes,” she gets out, “another fifty missing.”
This sets us off again.
Lindsay and I decide to cut seventh period and go to TCBY. Lindsay has French, which she can’t stand, and I have English. We cut seventh period a lot together. We’re second-semester seniors, so it’s like we’re expected not to go to class. Plus I hate my English teacher, Mrs. Harbor. She’s always going off on tangents. Sometimes I’ll zone out for a few minutes, and all of a sudden she’ll be talking about underwear in the eighteenth century or oppression in Africa or the way the sun looks rising over the Grand Canyon. Even though she’s probably only in her fifties, I’m pretty sure she’s losing it. That’s how it started with my grandmother: ideas swirling around and colliding with each other, causes coming after effects, and point A switched with point B. When my grandmother was still alive we would visit her, and even though I was no more than six, I remember thinking: I hope I die young.