Before I Fall

the room and knocking into things, grunting and yelling. Somehow Rob gets Chris down on his knees and then they’re both on the floor. Girls are shrieking and jumping out of the way. Someone cries out, “Watch the beer!” just before Rob and Chris roll up against the entrance of the kitchen, where the keg is sitting.

“Let’s go, Sam.” Lindsay squeezes my shoulders from behind.

“I can’t just leave him,” I say, though a part of me wants to.

“He’ll be fine. Look—he’s laughing.”

She’s right. He and Chris are already done fighting and are sprawled on the floor, laughing their heads off.

“Rob’s going to be so pissed,” I say, and I know Lindsay knows I’m talking about more than just ditching him at the party.

She gives me a quick hug. “Remember what I said.” She starts to singsong, “Just thinkin’ about tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow….”

For a moment my stomach clenches, thinking she’s making fun of me, but it’s a coincidence. Lindsay didn’t know me when I was little, wouldn’t even have spoken to me. She has no way of knowing I used to lock myself in my room with the Annie soundtrack and belt that song at the top of my lungs until my parents threatened to throw me out onto the street.

The melody starts repeating in my head and I know I’ll be singing it for days. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya tomorrow. A beautiful word, when you really think about it.

“Lame party, huh?” Ally says, coming up on the other side of me. Even though I know she’s only pissed Matt Wilde didn’t show, I’m glad she says it.

The sound of the rain is louder than I thought it would be and it startles me. For a moment we stand under the porch eaves, watching our breath condense into clouds, hugging ourselves. It’s freezing. Water is falling in steady streams from the eaves. Christopher Tomlin and Adam Wu are throwing empty beer bottles into the woods. Every so often we hear one shatter, and the sound comes back to us like a gunshot.

People are laughing and screaming and running in the rain, which is coming down so hard everything looks as though it’s melting into everything else. There are no neighbors to call the cops for miles. The grass is churned up, great black pits of mud exposed. Headlights are flashing in the distance, in and out, on and off, as cars sweep down the driveway toward Route 9.

“Run for it!” Lindsay yells, and I feel Ally tugging on me and then we’re running, screaming, the rain blinding us and streaming down our jackets, the mud oozing into our shoes; rain so hard it’s like everything is melting away.

By the time we get to Lindsay’s car I really don’t care about the awful way the night turned out. We’re laughing hysterically, soaked and shivering, woken up from the cold and the rain. Lindsay’s squealing about wet butt marks on her leather seats and mud on the floor, and Elody’s begging her to go to Mic’s for an egg and cheese and complaining that I always get shotgun, and Ally’s yelling for Lindsay to turn on the heat and threatening to drop dead right there from pneumonia.

I guess that’s how we get started talking about it: dying, I mean. I figure Lindsay’s okay to drive, but I notice she’s going faster than usual down that awful, long, penned-in driveway. The trees look like stripped skeletons on either side of us, moaning in the wind.

“I have this theory,” I’m saying as Lindsay skids out onto Route 9 and the tires shriek against the slick black road. The clock on the dashboard is glowing: 12:38. “I have this theory that before you die you see your greatest hits, you know? The best things you’ve ever done.”

“Duke, baby,” Lindsay says, and takes one hand off the wheel to pump her fist in the air.

“First time I hooked up with Matt Wilde,” Ally says immediately.

Elody groans and leans forward, reaching for the iPod. “Music, please, before I kill myself.”

“Can I get a cigarette?” Lindsay asks, and Elody lights one for her off the butt she’s holding. Lindsay cracks the windows, and the freezing rain comes in. Ally starts to complain about the cold again.

Elody puts on “Splinter,” by Fallacy, to piss Ally off, maybe because she’s sick of her whining. Ally calls her a bitch and unbuckles her seat belt, leaning forward and trying to grab the iPod. Lindsay complains that someone is elbowing her in the neck. The cigarette drops from her mouth and lands between her thighs. She starts cursing and trying to brush the embers off the seat cushion, and Elody and Ally are still fighting and I’m trying to talk over them, reminding them all of the time we made snow angels in May. The clock ticks forward: 12:39. The tires skid a little on the wet road and the car is full of cigarette smoke, little wisps rising like phantoms in the air.

Then all of a sudden there’s a flash of white in front of the car. Lindsay yells something—words I can’t make out, something like sit or shit or sight—and suddenly the car is flipping off the road and into the black mouth of the woods. I hear a horrible, screeching sound—metal on metal, glass shattering, a car folding in two—and smell fire. I have time to wonder whether Lindsay had put out her cigarette—

And then—

That’s when it happens. The moment of death is full of heat and sound and pain bigger than anything, a funnel of burning heat splitting me in two, something searing and scorching and tearing, and if screaming were a feeling it would be this.

Then nothing.

I know some of you are thinking maybe I deserved it. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent that rose to Juliet or dumped my drink on her at the party. Maybe I shouldn’t have copied off Lauren Lornet’s quiz. Maybe I shouldn’t have said those things to Kent. There are probably some of you who think I deserved it because I was going to let Rob go all the way—because I wasn’t going to save myself.

But before you start pointing fingers, let me ask you: is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserved to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?

Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does?

Is it really so much worse than what you do?

Think about it.

TWO

In my dream I know I am falling though there is no up or down, no walls or sides or ceilings, just the sensation of cold, and darkness everywhere. I am so scared I could scream, but when I open my mouth nothing happens, and I wonder if you fall forever and ever and never touch down, is it really still falling?

I think I will fall forever.

A noise punctuates the silence, a thin bleating growing louder and louder until it is like a scythe of metal slicing the air, slicing into meThen I wake up.

My alarm has been blaring for twenty minutes. It’s six fifty A.M.

I sit up in bed, pushing away the comforter. I’m covered with sweat even though my room is cold. My throat is dry and I’m desperate for water, like I’ve just been running a long way.

For a second when I look around the room everything seems fuzzy and slightly distorted, like I’m not really looking at my room but only at a transparency of my room that’s been laid down incorrectly so the corners don’t match up with the real thing. Then the light shifts and everything looks normal again.

All at once it comes back to me, and blood starts pounding in my head: the party, Juliet Sykes, the argument with Kent“Sammy!” My door swings open, banging once against the wall, and Izzy comes galloping across the room, stepping all over my notebooks and discarded jeans and my Victoria’s Secret Team Pink sweatshirt. Something seems wrong; something skirts the edges of my memory, but then it is gone and Izzy is bouncing on my bed, throwing her arms around me. They are hot. She curls a fist around the necklace I always wear—a thin gold chain with a tiny bird charm hanging from it, a gift from my grandmother—and tugs gently.

“Mommy says you have to get up.” Her breath smells like peanut butter, and it’s not until I push her off me that I realize how badly I’m shaking.

“It’s Saturday,” I say. I have no idea how I got home last night. I have no idea what happened to Lindsay or