Before I Fall

It works, kind of. I stand up so quickly I knock over my chair. Rob looks at me, disgusted, then taps the chair with his toe—not hard, but enough so that it’s loud—and says, “Find me later.”

He stalks off into the cafeteria, but I’m not watching him anymore. I’m watching Juliet float, drift, skim into the room. Like she’s already dead and we’re just seeing her flickering back to life in patches, imperfectly.

She’s not carrying anything, either, not a single stem, just a lumpy brown paper bag as always. My disappointment is so heavy and real I can taste it, a bitter lump in the back of my throat.

“…And then one of the Cupids came in, and I swear, she had, like, three dozen flowers, all for Juliet.”

I whip around. “What did you say?”

Ally frowns a little at my tone of voice, but she repeats, “She just got, like, this huge bouquet of roses delivered to her. I’ve never seen so many roses.” She starts to giggle. “Maybe Psycho has a stalker.”

“I just don’t understand what happened to our rose,” Lindsay says, pouting. “I specifically told them third period, bio.”

“What did she do with them?” I interject.

Ally, Elody, and Lindsay stare at me. “Do with what?” Ally says.

“The roses. Did she—did she throw them out?”

“Why do you care?” Lindsay wrinkles her nose.

“I just—I don’t care. It’s just…” They’re all staring at me blankly. Elody has her mouth open and I can see mushed-up french fries in it. “I think it’s nice, okay? If someone sent her all those roses…I don’t know. I just think it’s nice.”

“She probably sent them herself,” Elody says, starting to giggle again.

I finally lose my temper. “Why? Why would you say that?”

Elody jerks back like I’ve hit her. “I’m just—it’s Juliet.”

“Yeah, exactly. It’s Juliet. So what’s the point? Nobody gives a shit about her. Nobody pays any attention.” I lean forward, pressing both hands on the table, my head pounding from anger and frustration. “What’s. The. Point?”

Alley frowns at me. “Is this because you’re upset about Rob?”

“Yeah.” Lindsay folds her arms. “What’s up with that anyway? Are you guys okay?”

“This isn’t about Rob,” I say, squeezing the words out through gritted teeth.

Elody jumps in. “It was a joke, Sam. Yesterday you said you were scared Juliet would bite you if you went too close. You said she probably had rabies.”

That’s what really breaks me—right then, when Elody says that. Or rather, when she reminds me that I said that: yesterday, six days ago, a whole different world ago. How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all? That’s the very worst thing about all of this, a feeling of desperate hopelessness, and I realize my question to Elody is the question that’s been tearing me up all along. What’s the point? If I’m dead—if I can’t change anything, if I can’t fix it—what’s the point?

“Sam’s right.” Lindsay winks at me, still not getting it. “It’s Cupid Day, you know? A time of love and forgiveness, even for the psychos of the world.” She raises a rose like it’s a glass of champagne. “To Juliet.”

Ally and Elody lift their roses, giggling. “To Juliet,” they say in unison.

“Sam?” Lindsay raises an eyebrow. “Care to toast with us?”

I spin around and head to the back of the senior section, to the door that leads directly to the parking lot. Lindsay shouts something, and Ally calls, “She didn’t throw them out, okay?”

I keep going anyway, threading past tables piled with food and roses and bags, everyone talking and laughing, oblivious. I get a pang in my stomach that feels like regret. Everything looks so stupidly, happily normal: everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who’s with who and did you hear.

On the horizon is the black line of clouds, just sitting there, a curtain about to be closed. I scan the parking lot, looking for Juliet, bouncing up and down on my toes to keep warm. Music blares from a car in Senior Alley and I recognize Krista Murphy’s silver Taurus gun up toward the exit. Otherwise the parking lot is still. Juliet has melted away somewhere into the landscape of metal and pavement.

I take a breath and exhale a cloud, enjoying the sharp sting of the air on my throat. I’m almost relieved that Juliet is gone. I’m not sure exactly what I would have said to her. And she didn’t throw out the flowers, after all. That’s a good sign. I stand there for a second more, bouncing on my toes, thinking, Tonight’s the night I’m going to get free of this thing. Thinking of all the things I’m going to do more of in my life. Go up to Goose Point with Izzy, until she’s too old to stand it. Hang out with Elody one-on-one. Drive into New York and go to a Yankees game with Lindsay, and stuff my face with hot dogs and catcall all the players.

Kiss Kent. Really kiss him, slow and long, somewhere outside—maybe while it’s snowing. Maybe standing in the woods. He’ll lean forward and he’ll have little snowflakes on his eyelashes again and he’ll brush the hair away from my face and put a warm hand behind my neck, so warm it’s almost burning“Hey, Sam.” Kent’s voice.

I spin around with a squeak, tripping on my own feet. Just like with Juliet Sykes, I’m so lost in fantasy about Kent that his actual appearance seems like a dream or wishful thinking. He’s wearing an old corduroy blazer with patches sewn onto the elbows like a deranged—and adorable—English teacher. The corduroy looks soft and I get the urge to reach out and touch it, an urge that has nothing to do with my general sense of today and the preciousness of things.

Kent’s hands are buried in his pockets, and his shoulders are shrugged toward his ears like he’s trying to stay warm. “No calculus today?”

“Um…no.” I’ve been waiting to run into him all day, but now my mind is a blank.

“That’s too bad.” Kent grins at me, jogging on his feet. “You missed some roses.” He whips his bag over one shoulder and unzips it, pulling out the cream-and-pink-swirled rose with a gold note card fluttering from one end. “A few of them went back to the office, I think. But I—uh, I wanted to bring this one to you myself. It’s a little crushed. Sorry.”

“It’s not crushed,” I say quickly. “It’s beautiful.”

He bites the edge of his lip—the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. I think he might be nervous. His eyes are flitting over my face and then away, and each time they land on me it feels like the world is falling away and it’s just the two of us in the middle of a bright, green field.

“You didn’t miss anything in math,” he says, and I recognize a Kent McFuller babble coming on. “I mean, we went over some of the stuff from Wednesday’s homework because some people were, like, freaking out about the quiz on Monday. But mostly everyone was a little bit antsy, I think because of Cupid Day, and Daimler didn’t really care that—”

“Kent?”

He blinks and shuts up. “Yeah?”

“Did you send me this?” I hold up the rose. “I mean, is it from you?”

His smile gets so big it’s like a huge beam of sunshine. “I’ll never tell,” he says, winking.

I’ve unconsciously taken several steps toward him, so I can feel the heat coming off his body. I wonder what he would do if I pulled him to me right now, brushed my lips against his the way he did—the way I hope he did—last night. But even the idea sends a flurry of butterflies upward from my stomach, my whole body feeling quivery and uncertain.

At that moment I remember what Ally said to us on the first day, the day it all started: that if a group of butterflies takes off in Thailand it can cause rainstorms in New York. And I think of all the thousands of billions of steps and missteps and chances and coincidences that have brought me here, facing Kent, holding a pink-and- cream-swirled rose, and it feels like the biggest miracle in the world.

“Thank you,” I blurt out, and quickly add, “you know…for bringing me this.”

He ducks his head, looking pleased and embarrassed. “No problem.”

“I, um, hear you’re having a party tonight?” I’m mentally kicking myself for sounding so lame. In my head, this played out so much easier. In my head, he would lean down and do the thing with his lips again, the soft fluttery thing. I’m desperate to make it all go right again, desperate to get back to that feeling I had last night— we had last night, he must have felt it—but I’m afraid that anything I say could screw it up. A temporary sadness for what I’ve lost overwhelms me. Somewhere in the endless