Before I Fall

underneath the cars as though someone might be sandwiched against the ground, trying to light up. There’s a reason everyone calls her the Nicotine Nazi behind her back.

I hesitate, looking back toward the gym. I don’t especially like Alex and I don’t like Anna, but anyone who’s ever been through high school understands you have to stick together against parents, teachers, and cops. It’s one of those invisible lines: us against them. You just know this, like you know where to sit and who to talk to and what to eat in the cafeteria, without even knowing how you know. If that makes sense.

“Should we go back and warn them?” I ask Lindsay, and she pauses too and squints at the sky like she’s thinking about it.

“Screw it,” she says finally. “They can take care of themselves.” As if to reinforce her point, the bell for final period rings and she gives me a shove. “Come on.”

She’s right, as usual. After all, it’s not like they’ve ever done anything for me.

FRIENDSHIP: A HISTORY

Lindsay and I became friends in seventh grade. Lindsay picked me out. I’m still not sure why. After years of trying, I had only just clawed my way up from the social bottom to the social middle. Lindsay’s been popular since first grade, when she moved here. In the class circus that year she was the ringleader; when we did a production of The Wizard of Oz the next year she was Dorothy. And in third grade, when we all performed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, she got to play Charlie.

I think that pretty much gives you an idea. She’s the kind of person who makes you feel drunk just by being around her, like suddenly the world’s edges are dulled and all of the colors are spinning together. I’ve never told her that, obviously. She’d make fun of me for lezzing out on her.

Anyway, the summer before seventh grade a bunch of us were at Tara Flute’s pool party. Beth Schiff was showing off by doing cannonballs in the deep end, but really she was showing off the fact that between May and July she’d sprouted a pair of C-cup boobs—definitely the biggest of any girl there. I was in the house getting a soda when all of a sudden Lindsay came up to me, eyes shining. She’d never spoken to me before.

“You’ve got to come see this,” she said, grabbing my arm. Her breath smelled like ice cream.

She pulled me into Tara’s room, where all the girls had piled their bags and their changes of clothes. Beth’s bag was pink and had her initials marked in purple embroidery on the side. Lindsay had obviously gone through it, because she immediately crouched down and reached for a clear zipper case, like the kind we had to store pens in when we were in grade school.

“Look!” She held it up, rattling it. Inside were two tampons.

I don’t remember how it started, but suddenly Lindsay and I were running through the house, checking bathroom cabinets and drawers, gathering up all the tampons and pads that Tara’s mother and older sister had in the house. I was so happy I was dizzy. Lindsay Edgecombe and I were talking, and not just talking but laughing, and not just laughing but laughing so hard I had to squeeze my legs together to keep from peeing. Then we ran out onto the deck and started throwing handful after handful of tampons down onto the pool party below. Lindsay was screaming, “Beth! These fell out of your bag!” Some of the tampons swirled down into the water and all the guys were suddenly pushing and shoving to get out of the pool like they were going to be contaminated. Beth stood on the diving board, dripping wet and shaking, while the rest of us nearly died laughing.

It reminded me of the time my parents took me to the Grand Canyon in fourth grade and made me stand on a ledge to get photographed. My legs hadn’t been able to stop shaking and my feet got a tingling feeling in the soles, like they were itching to jump: I couldn’t stop thinking about how easy it would be to fall, how high up we were. After my mom took the picture and let me back away from the ledge, I started laughing and couldn’t stop.

Standing on the deck with Lindsay I got that exact same feeling.

After that Lindsay and I were best friends. Ally came in later, after she and Lindsay were in a field hockey league together the summer before eighth grade. Elody moved to Ridgeview freshman year. At one of the first parties of the year she hooked up with Sean Morton, who Lindsay had had a crush on for six months. Everyone thought Lindsay would kill Elody. But the next Monday at school Elody was at our lunch table, and she and Lindsay were bent over a plate of curly fries, giggling and acting like they’d known each other forever. I’m glad. Even though Elody can sometimes be embarrassing, I think deep down she’s the nicest of any of us.

THE PARTY

After school we go to Ally’s. When we were younger—freshman year and even half of sophomore year—we’d sometimes stay in and put on clay masks and order as much Chinese food as we could eat, taking twenties from the cookie jar on the third shelf next to Ally’s refrigerator, where her dad keeps an emergency thousand dollars at all times. We called them our “egg-roll emergency” nights. Then we’d stretch out on her enormous couch and watch movies until we fell asleep—the TV in Ally’s living room is as big as the screen in a movie theater—our legs tangled together under an enormous fleece blanket. Since junior year, though, I don’t think we’ve stayed in even once, except when Matt Wilde broke up with Ally, and she cried so hard that the next morning her face was puffy, like a mole’s.

Today we raid Ally’s closet so we don’t have to wear the same outfit to Kent’s party. Elody, Ally, and Lindsay are paying special attention to how I look. Elody puts bright red polish on my nails, her hands shaking a little so some of it gets on my cuticles and makes it look like I’m bleeding, but I’m too nervous to care. Rob and I are going to meet up at Kent’s and he’s already sent me a text that says I evn made my bed 4 u. I let Ally pick out my outfit—a metallic gold tank top, too big in the chest, and a pair of Ally’s crazy four-inch heels (she calls them her stripper shoes). Lindsay does my makeup, humming and breathing vodka onto me. We’ve all taken two shots, chasing them with cranberry juice.

Afterward I lock myself in the bathroom, warmth tingling from my fingertips up to my head, and try to memorize exactly how I look there, in that second. But after a while all of my features seem like they’re just hanging there, like something I’m seeing on a stranger.

When I was little I used to do this a lot: lock myself in the bathroom and take showers so hot the mirrors would cloud completely over, then stand there, watching as my face took shape slowly behind the steam, rough outlines at first, then details appearing gradually. Each time I’d think that when my face came back I would see somebody beautiful, like during my shower I would have transformed into someone brighter and better. But I always looked the same.

Standing in Ally’s bathroom, I smile and think, Tomorrow I’ll finally be different.

Lindsay’s kind of music-obsessed, so she makes us a playlist for the ride to Kent’s house, even though he lives only a few miles away. We listen to Dr. Dre and Tupac, and then we blast “Baby Got Back” and all sing along.

It’s the weirdest thing, though: as we’re driving there along all those familiar streets—streets I’ve known my whole life, streets so familiar I might as well have imagined them myself—I get this feeling like I’m floating above everything, hovering above all of the houses and the roads and the yards and the trees, going up, up, up, above Rocky’s and the Rite Aid and the gas station and Thomas Jefferson and the football field and the metal bleachers where we sit and scream our heads off every homecoming. Like everything is tiny and insignificant. Like I’m already only remembering it.

Elody’s howling at the top of her lungs. She has the lowest tolerance out of all of us. Ally’s got the rest of the vodka tucked into her bag but nothing to chase it with. Lindsay’s driving because she can drink all night and hardly feel it.

The rain starts when we’re almost there, but it’s so light it’s almost like it’s just hanging in the air, like a big curtain of white vapor. I don’t remember the last time I was at Kent’s house—his ninth birthday party, maybe?—and I’ve forgotten how far it’s set back in the woods. The driveway seems to snake on forever. All we see is the dull light from the headlights bouncing off a twisting, gravelly path and revealing dead tree branches crowding closely overhead, and tiny pellets of rain like diamonds.

“This is how horror movies start,” Ally says, adjusting her tank top. We’ve all borrowed new tops from her, but she’s insisted on keeping on the fur-trimmed one, even though she was the one who was initially against it. “Are you sure he’s number forty-two?”