Before I Fall

I turn around: Bridget McGuire and Alex Liment.

“You have Mrs. Harbor for English, right?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer before launching into her spiel. “Do you know if she handed out the essay assignments for Macbeth? Alex missed. Doctor’s appointment.”

Because I didn’t go with Lindsay for frozen yogurt after all—something was tugging at me, making me want to stay close to school, to the center of things—I’d almost forgotten about Bridget and Anna and Alex. And now the look on Alex’s face—the little, crooked smile that used to creep onto Rob’s face whenever he’d successfully gotten an extension from one of his teachers for some completely fabricated reason—makes me want to smack him. I think of Anna with her coal-black eye makeup and her improvised lunchroom on the floor of the abandoned bathroom. Even Bridget isn’t so bad. Annoying, yes, but pretty and nice and the type of person who probably spends her free time volunteering with sick children.

I can’t take it. I can’t let him get away with it.

Bridget’s still babbling about Alex’s mom being a health nut. I interrupt her. “Does anybody smell Chinese food?”

Bridget wrinkles her nose, clearly disappointed that I haven’t been listening. “Chinese food?”

I make a big show of sniffing. “Yeah. Like, like”—I stare directly at Alex—“like a big bowl of orange beef.”

His smile droops a little, but he shrugs and says, “I don’t smell anything.”

“Oh my God.” Bridget cups a hand in front of her mouth. “It’s not my breath, is it? I totally had Chinese food last night.”

I keep staring at Alex. “What’s wrong with you?” I ask, not even bothering to keep the edge out of my voice.

He blinks. “What?”

Bridget looks confused, and for a moment the three of us stand there, not saying anything. Alex and I have locked eyes, and Bridget is looking back and forth between us so rapidly I’m worried her neck’s going to snap off.

Then I smile. “You know, health-wise. Why did you have to go to the doctor?”

Alex relaxes visibly. “No big deal. My mom wanted me to get some weird shot. And you know, just a general checkup and stuff.”

“Mmm-hmmm. I hope they were thorough.” I shoot a pointed glance at his crotch. Fortunately Bridget is staring at him, watching him turn red, and doesn’t see.

“Um. Y-yeah. Pretty much.” He squints at me like he’s just noticed me for the first time.

“I’ve been looking for a doctor,” I breeze on. I feel bad for Bridget, but at the same time, she deserves to know what her lame excuse for a boyfriend is up to. “It’s so hard to find a good one, you know? Especially one that doubles as a restaurant with a $4.99 lunch special. That’s rare.”

“What are you talking about?” Bridget’s voice is a squeak. She whips back to Alex. “What is she talking about?”

A muscle is ticking in Alex’s jaw. I can tell he wants to curse me out but knows that would make it worse, so he just stands there glaring.

I put my hand on Bridget’s arm. “I’m sorry, Bridget. But your boyfriend is really a slimeball.”

“What is she talking about?”

Bridget’s voice shoots up another octave, and as I walk away I hear Alex start trying to calm her down, no doubt feeding her lies as quickly as he can come up with them. I should feel good about what I’ve done—he deserves it, after all, and in a weird way I’m only setting things right—but as soon as I walk away I feel strangely deflated. The feeling of control vanishes and in its place comes a tingly feeling of anxiety. I flip back through the day’s events like I’m scrolling down a computer screen, trying to find some lapse, something I’ve forgotten to do or say. Maybe I should have gone to Juliet’s house earlier, to check up on her. Then again, I’m not really sure what I would have said. Hi. Can you verify for me that you’re not going to throw yourself in front of any cars tonight? That would be great. No explosives, either. This is my life you’re playing with.

The music’s so loud, the notes are hardly distinguishable from one another. I fantasize about taking Kent’s hand and pulling him away somewhere quiet and dark. The room downstairs, maybe, or the woods, or someplace farther. Maybe we’ll just get in the car and drive.

“Sam! Sam!”

I look up. In the back room Lindsay’s climbed onto one of the couches, waving at me over the tide of bobbing heads. Ally’s next to her, and several feet beyond them I see Elody whispering something to Steve Dough.

I hesitate, a sense of hopelessness washing over me. It’s ridiculous for me to talk to Kent. I have no words to describe how wrong I’ve been about him, about Rob, about everyone. I don’t think I can explain to him how I’ve been changing. And maybe it’s all a lie, anyway. Maybe it’s impossible to change.

In that moment, while I’m teetering between two doorways, the people around me get all quiet and hushed, faces growing slack. Up on the couch Lindsay falters, her hand flapping uselessly to her side. Next to her, Ally begins opening and shutting her mouth like a fish. The buzzing is all through my body now, like the hum of an electrical wire.

And there she is, marching down the hallway. After all that: Juliet Sykes on a mission.

In a second the despair, the hopelessness, the sense of forgetting things or missing the point somehow, all gets transformed into rage. When she sees Lindsay she stops and opens her mouth, going straight into her “you’re a bitch” routine, but I don’t even let the first word escape from her mouth before I’m charging forward, grabbing her arm, and half dragging her backward down the hallway. She’s too surprised to fight me.

I pull her into the nearest bathroom—“Out,” I order two girls who are primping in front of the mirror—and slam the door and lock it. When I turn around to face her she’s staring at me like I’m the psychopath.

“What are you doing?”

She must misunderstand my question. “It’s a party,” she says with soft insistence. When she’s not busy freaking out and calling me a bitch she has a nice voice, musical like Elody’s. “I’m allowed to be here like everybody else.”

“No.” I shake my head, pressing fingers to my temples to keep them from pounding. “I mean, what are you really doing? Why are you here?”

Her eyes flutter to the doorknob behind me. I move over so it’s wedged into my lower back. If she wants to get out, she’ll have to move me out of the way.

Apparently she doesn’t like her chances, because she takes a long, slow breath. “I came to tell you something. You, and Lindsay, and Elody, and Ally.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

“You’re a bitch,” she says quietly, not like an accusation at all, more like something she’s sorry about.

At the same time she says it, I say it with her. “I’m a bitch.”

She stares at me.

“Listen, Juliet”—I rake my hands through my hair—“I know we haven’t always been nice to you or whatever. And I really feel bad about it—I do.” I try to gauge what she’s thinking, but it’s like something has shut down behind her eyes, a button switching off, and she just stands there staring at me dully. I rush on, “The thing is, we never really meant anything by it, you know? I don’t think I—we—really thought about it. It’s just the kind of thing that happens. People used to make fun of me all the time.” She’s making me nervous, just staring like that, and I lick my lips. “All the time. And, like, I don’t think it’s really because people are mean or bad or whatever. I just think…I just think…” I’m fighting to find the words. Memories are colliding in my head: the sound of people singing as I walked down the hall, the smell of ice cream on Lindsay’s breath the day we threw Beth’s tampons out the window, riding a horse through a blur of trees. “I just think that people don’t think. They don’t know. We—I—didn’t know.”

I feel pretty proud of myself for getting all of that out. But Juliet hasn’t moved or smiled or even freaked out. She’s so still she could be carved out of stone. Finally a little tremor goes through her, a personal earthquake, and her eyes seem to focus on me.