Before I Fall

ONE

“Beep, beep,” Lindsay calls out. A few weeks ago my mom yelled at her for blasting her horn at six fifty-five every morning, and this is Lindsay’s solution.
“I’m coming!” I shout back, even though she can see me pushing out the front door, trying to put on my coat and wrestle my binder into my bag at the same time.
At the last second, my eight-year-old sister, Izzy, tugs at me.
“What?” I whirl around. She has little-sister radar for when I’m busy, late, or on the phone with my boyfriend. Those are always the times she chooses to bother me.
“You forgot your gloves,” she says, except it comes out: “You forgot your gloveths.” She refuses to go to speech therapy for her lisp, even though all the kids in her grade make fun of her. She says she likes the way she talks.
I take them from her. They’re cashmere and she’s probably gotten peanut butter on them. She’s always scooping around in jars of the stuff.
“What did I tell you, Izzy?” I say, poking her in the middle of the forehead. “Don’t touch my stuff.” She giggles like an idiot and I have to hustle her inside while I shut the door. If it were up to her, she would follow me around all day like a dog.
By the time I make it out of the house, Lindsay’s leaning out the window of the Tank. That’s what we call her car, an enormous silver Range Rover. (Every time we drive around in it at least one person says, “That thing’s not a car, it’s a truck,” and Lindsay claims she could go head-to-head with an eighteen-wheeler and come out without a scratch.) She and Ally are the only two of us with cars that actually belong to them. Ally’s car is a tiny black Jetta that we named the Minime. I get to borrow my mom’s Accord sometimes; poor Elody has to make do with her father’s ancient tan Ford Taurus, which hardly runs anymore.
The air is still and freezing cold. The sky is a perfect, pale blue. The sun has just risen, weak and watery-looking, like it has just spilled itself over the horizon and is too lazy to clean itself up. It’s supposed to storm later, but you’d never know.
I get into the passenger seat. Lindsay’s already smoking and she gestures with the end of her cigarette to the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee she got for me.
“Bagels?” I say.
“In the back.”
“Sesame?”
“Obviously.” She looks me over once as she pulls out of my driveway. “Nice skirt.”
“You too.”
Lindsay tips her head, acknowledging the compliment. We’re actually wearing the same skirt. There are only two days of the year when Lindsay, Ally, Elody, and I deliberately dress the same: Pajama Day during Spirit Week, because we all bought cute matching sets at Victoria’s Secret last Christmas, and Cupid Day. We spent three hours at the mall arguing about whether to go for pink or red outfits—Lindsay hates pink; Ally lives in it—and we finally settled on black miniskirts and some red fur-trimmed tank tops we found in the clearance bin at Nordstrom.
Like I said, those are the only times we deliberately look alike. But the truth is that at my high school, Thomas Jefferson, everyone kind of looks the same. There’s no official uniform—it’s a public school—but you’ll see the same outfit of Seven jeans, gray New Balance sneakers, a white T-shirt, and a colored North Face fleece jacket on nine out of ten students. Even the guys and the girls dress the same, except our jeans are tighter and we have to blow out our hair every day. It’s Connecticut: being like the people around you is the whole point.
That’s not to say that our high school doesn’t have its freaks—it does—but even the freaks are freaky in the same way. The Eco-Geeks ride their bikes to school and wear clothing made of hemp and never wash their hair, like having dreadlocks will somehow help curb the emission of greenhouse gases. The Drama Queens carry big bottles of lemon tea and wear scarves even in summer and don’t talk in class because they’re “conserving their voices.” The Math League members always have ten times more books than anyone else and actually still use their lockers and walk around with permanently nervous expressions, like they’re just waiting for somebody to yell, “Boo!”
I don’t mind it, actually. Sometimes Lindsay and I make plans to run away after graduation and crash in a loft in New York City with this tattoo artist her stepbrother knows, but secretly I like living in Ridgeview. It’s reassuring, if you know what I mean.
I lean forward, trying to apply mascara without gouging my eye out. Lindsay’s never been the most careful driver and has a tendency to jerk the wheel around, come to sudden stops, and then gun the engine.
“Patrick better send me a rose,” Lindsay says as she shoots through one stop sign and nearly breaks my neck slamming on the brakes at the next one. Patrick is Lindsay’s on-again, off-again boyfriend. They’ve broken up a record thirteen times since the start of the school year.
“I had to sit next to Rob while he filled out the request form,” I say, rolling my eyes. “It was like forced labor.”
Rob Cokran and I have been going out since October, but I’ve been in love with him since sixth grade, when he was too cool to talk to me. Rob was my first crush, or at least my first real crush. I did once kiss Kent McFuller in third grade, but that obviously doesn’t count since we’d just exchanged dandelion rings and were pretending to be husband and wife.
“Last year I got twenty-two roses.” Lindsay flicks her cigarette butt out of the window and leans over for a slurp of coffee. “I’m going for twenty-five this year.”
Each year before Cupid Day the student council sets up a booth outside the gym. For two dollars each, you can buy your friends Valograms—roses with little notes attached to them—and then they get delivered by Cupids (usually freshman or sophomore girls trying to get in good with the upperclassmen) throughout the day.
“I’d be happy with fifteen,” I say. It’s a big deal how many roses you get. You can tell who’s popular and who isn’t by the number of roses they’re holding. It’s bad if you get under ten and humiliating if you don’t get more than five—it basically means that you’re either ugly or unknown. Probably both. Sometimes people scavenge for dropped roses to add to their bouquets, but you can always tell.
“So.” Lindsay shoots me a sideways glance. “Are you excited? The big day. Opening night.” She laughs. “No pun intended.”
I shrug and turn toward the window, watching my breath frost the pane. “It’s no big deal.” Rob’s parents are away this weekend, and a couple of weeks ago he asked me if I could spend the whole night at his house. I knew he was really asking if I wanted to have sex. We’ve gotten semi-close a few times, but it’s always been in the back of his dad’s BMW or in somebody’s basement or in my den with my parents asleep upstairs, and it’s always felt wrong.
So when he asked me to stay the night, I said yes without thinking about it.
Lindsay squeals and hits her palm against the steering wheel. “No big deal? Are you kidding? My baby’s growing up.”
“Oh, please.” I feel heat creeping up my neck and know my skin’s probably going red and splotchy. It does this whenever I’m embarrassed. All the dermatologists, creams, and powders in Connecticut don’t help. When I was younger kids used to sing, “What’s red and white and weird all over? Sam Kingston!”
I shake my head a little and rub the vapor off the window. Outside the world sparkles, like it’s been coated in varnish. “When did you and Patrick do it, anyway? Like three months ago?”
“Yeah, but we’ve been making up for lost time since then.” Lindsay rocks against her seat.
“Gross.”
“Don’t worry, kid. You’ll be fine.”
“Don’t call me kid.” This is one reason I’m happy I decided to have sex with Rob tonight: so Lindsay and Elody won’t make fun of me anymore. Thankfully, since Ally’s still a virgin it means I won’t be the very last one, either. Sometimes I feel like out of the four of us I’m always the one tagging along, just there for the ride. “I told you it was no big deal.”
“If you say so.”
Lindsay has made me nervous, so I count all the mailboxes as we go by. I wonder if by tomorrow everything will look different to me; I wonder if I’ll look different to other people. I hope so.
We pull up to Elody’s house and before Lindsay can even honk, the front door swings open and Elody starts picking her way down the icy walkway, balancing on three-inch heels, like she can’t get out of her house fast enough.
“Nipply outside much?” Lindsay says when Elody slides into the car. As usual she’s wearing only a thin leather jacket, even though the weather report said the high would be in the mid-twenties.
“What’s the point of looking cute if you can’t show it off?” Elody shimmies her boobs and we crack up. It’s impossible to stay stressed when she’s around, and the knot in my stomach loosens.
Elody makes a clawing gesture with her hand and I pass her a coffee. We all take it the same way: large hazelnut, no sugar, extra cream.
“Watch where you’re sitting. You’ll squish the bagels.” Lindsay frowns into the rearview mirror.
“You know you want a piece of this.” Elody gives her butt a smack and we all laugh again.
“Save it for Muffin, you horn dog.”
Steve Dough is Elody’s latest victim. She calls him Muffin because of his last name, and because he’s yummy (she says; he looks too greasy for me, and he always smells like pot). They have been hooking up for a month and a half now.
Elody’s the most experienced of any of us. She lost her virginity sophomore year and has already had sex with two different guys. She was the one who told me she was sore after the first couple of times she had sex, which made me ten times more nervous. It may sound crazy, but I never really thought of it as something physical, something that would make you sore, like soccer or horseback riding. I’m scared that I won’t know what to do, like when we used to play basketball in gym and I’d always forget who I was supposed to be guarding or when I should pass the ball and when I should dribble it.
“Mmm, Muffin.” Elody puts a hand on her stomach. “I’m starving.”
“There’s a bagel for you,” I say.
“Sesame?” Elody asks.
“Obviously,” Lindsay and I say at the same time. Lindsay winks at me.
Just before we get to school we roll down the windows and blast Mary J. Blige’s “No More Drama.” I close my eyes and think back to homecoming and my first kiss with Rob, when he pulled me toward him on the dance floor and suddenly my lips were on his and his tongue was sliding under my tongue and I could feel the heat from all the colored lights pressing down on me like a hand, and the music seemed to echo somewhere behind my ribs, making my heart flutter and skip in time. The cold air coming through the window makes my throat hurt and the bass comes through the soles of my feet just like it did that night, when I thought I would never be happier; it goes all the way up to my head, making me dizzy, like the whole car is going to split apart from the sound.
POPULARITY: AN ANALYSIS

Popularity’s a weird thing. You can’t really define it, and it’s not cool to talk about it, but you know it when you see it. Like a lazy eye, or porn.
Lindsay’s gorgeous, but the rest of us aren’t that much prettier than anybody else. Here are my good traits: big green eyes, straight white teeth, high cheekbones, long legs. Here are my bad traits: a too-long nose, skin that gets blotchy when I’m nervous, a flat butt.
Becky DiFiore’s just as pretty as Lindsay, and I don’t think Becky even had a date to junior homecoming. Ally’s boobs are pretty big, but mine are borderline nonexistent (when Lindsay’s in a bad mood she calls me Samuel, not Sam or Samantha). And it’s not like we’re shiny perfect or our breath always smells like lilacs or something. Lindsay once had a burping contest with Jonah Sasnoff in the cafeteria and everyone applauded her. Sometimes Elody wears fuzzy yellow slippers to school. I once laughed so hard in social studies I spit up vanilla latte all over Jake Somers’s desk. A month later we made out in Lily Angler’s toolshed. (He was bad.)
The point is, we can do things like that. You know why? Because we’re popular. And we’re popular because we can get away with everything. So it’s circular.
I guess what I’m saying is there’s no point in analyzing it. If you draw a circle, there will always be an inside and an outside, and unless you’re a total nut job, it’s pretty easy to see which is which. It’s just what happens.
I’m not going to lie, though. It’s nice that everything’s easy for us. It’s a good feeling knowing you can basically do whatever you want and there won’t be any consequences. When we get out of high school we’ll look back and know we did everything right, that we kissed the cutest boys and went to the best parties, got in just enough trouble, listened to our music too loud, smoked too many cigarettes, and drank too much and laughed too much and listened too little, or not at all. If high school were a game of poker, Lindsay, Ally, Elody, and I would be holding 80 percent of the cards.
And believe me: I know what it’s like to be on the other side. I was there for the first half of my life. The bottom of the bottom, lowest of the low. I know what it’s like to have to squabble and pick and fight over the leftovers.
So now I have first pick of everything. So what. That’s the way it is.
Nobody ever said life was fair.


We pull into the parking lot exactly ten minutes before first bell. Lindsay guns it toward the lower lot, where the faculty spaces are, scattering a group of sophomore girls. I can see red and white lace dresses peeking out under their coats, and one of them is wearing a tiara. Cupids, definitely.
“Come on, come on, come on,” Lindsay mutters as we pull behind the gym. This is the only row in the lower lot not reserved for staff. We call it Senior Alley, even though Lindsay’s been parking here since junior year. It’s the VIP of parking at Jefferson, and if you miss out on a spot—there are only twenty of them—you have to park all the way in the upper lot, which is a full .22 miles from the main entrance. We checked one time, and now whenever we talk about it we have to use the exact distance. Like, “Do you really want to walk .22 miles in this rain?”
Lindsay squeals when she sees an open space, jerking her wheel to the left. At the same time, Sarah Grundel is pulling up her brown Chevrolet from the other direction, angling it into the spot.
“Oh, hell no. No way.” Lindsay leans on the horn, even though it’s obvious Sarah was here before us, then presses her foot on the accelerator. Elody shrieks as hot coffee sloshes all over her shirt. There is the high-pitched squeal of rubber, and Sarah Grundel slams on her brakes just before Lindsay’s Range Rover takes off her bumper.
“Nice.” Lindsay pulls into the spot and throws her car in park. Then she opens her door and leans out.
“Sorry, sweetie!” she calls to Sarah. “I didn’t see you there.” This is obviously a lie.
“Great.” Elody is mopping up coffee with a balled-up Dunkin’ Donuts napkin. “Now I get to go around all day with my boobs smelling like hazelnut.”
“Guys like food smells,” I say. “I read it in Glamour.”
“Put a cookie down your pants and Muffin will probably jump you before homeroom.” Lindsay flips down the rearview mirror and checks her face.
“Maybe you should try it with Rob, Sammy.” Elody throws the coffee-stained napkin at me and I catch it and peg it back.
“What?” She’s laughing. “You didn’t think I’d forget about your big night, did you?” She fishes in her bag and the next thing that flies over the seat is a crumpled-up condom with bits of tobacco stuck to its wrapper. Lindsay cracks up.
“You’re pagans,” I say, taking the condom with two fingers and dropping it in Lindsay’s glove compartment. Just touching it gets my nerves going again, and I can feel something twist at the bottom of my stomach. I’ve never understood why condoms are kept in those little foil wrappers. They look so clinical, like something your doctor would prescribe for allergies or intestinal problems.
“No glove, no love,” Elody says, leaning forward and kissing my cheek. She leaves a big circle of pink lip gloss there.
“Come on.” I get out of the car before they can see I’m blushing.
Mr. Otto, the athletic director, is standing outside the gym when we’re getting out of the car, probably checking out our asses. Elody thinks the reason he insisted his office be right next to the girls’ dressing room is because he rigged up a camera feed from his computer to the toilet. Why else would he even need a computer? He’s the athletic director. Now every time I pee in the gym I get paranoid.
“Move it, ladies,” he calls to us. He’s also the soccer coach, which is ironic since he probably couldn’t run to the vending machine and back. He looks like a walrus. He even has a mustache. “I don’t want to have to give you a late slip.”
“I don’t want to have to spank you.” I do an impression of his voice, which is strangely high-pitched—another reason Elody thinks he might be a pedophile. Elody and Lindsay crack up.
“Two minutes to bell,” Otto says, more sharply. Maybe he heard me. I don’t really care.
“Happy Friday,” Lindsay grumbles, and puts her arm through mine.
Elody has taken out her cell phone and is checking her teeth in its reflective back, picking out sesame seeds with a pinkie nail.
“This sucks,” she says, without looking up.
“Totally,” I say. Fridays are the hardest in some ways: you’re so close to freedom. “Kill me now.”
“No way.” Lindsay squeezes my arm. “Can’t let my best friend die a virgin.”


You see, we didn’t know.


My first two periods—art and AHAP (American History Advanced Placement; history’s always been my best subject)—I get only five roses. I’m not that stressed about it, although it does kind of piss me off that Eileen Cho gets four roses from her boyfriend, Ian Dowel. It didn’t even occur to me to ask Rob to do that, and in a way I don’t think it’s fair. It makes people think you’ve got more friends than you do.
As soon as I make it to chemistry, Mr. Tierney announces a pop quiz. This is a big problem since (1) I haven’t understood a word of my homework in four weeks (okay, so I stopped trying after week one) and (2) Mr. Tierney’s always threatening to phone in failing grades to college admissions committees, since a lot of us haven’t been accepted to school yet. I’m not sure whether he’s serious or whether he’s just trying to keep the seniors in line, but there is no way I’m letting some fascist teacher ruin my chances of getting into BU.
Even worse, I’m sitting next to Lauren Lornet, possibly the only person in the class more clueless about this stuff than I am.
Actually my grades have been pretty good in chem this year, but it isn’t because I’ve had a sudden epiphany about proton-electron interaction. My straight A–average can be summarized in two words: Jeremy Ball. He’s skinnier than I am and his breath always smells like cornflakes, but he lets me copy his homework and inches his desk closer to mine on test days so I can peek over at his answers without being obvious. Unfortunately, since I stop before Tierney’s class to pee and check in with Ally—we always meet in the bathroom before fourth period, since she has biology at the same time I have chem—I arrive too late to get my usual seat next to Jeremy.
There are three questions on Mr. Tierney’s quiz, and I don’t know enough to fake an answer to a single one. Next to me, Lauren’s doubled over her paper, tongue just poking out between her teeth. She always does that when she thinks. Her first answer’s looking pretty good, actually: her answers are neat and deliberate, not frantically scribbled like you do when you don’t know what you’re talking about and are hoping if you scrawl enough your teacher won’t notice. (For the record, it never works.) Then I remember that Mr. Tierney lectured Lauren about improving her grade last week. Maybe she’s been studying extra hard.
I peek over Lauren’s shoulder and copy down two of her answers—I’m good at being subtle about it—when Mr. Tierney calls out, “Threeeeee minutes.” He says it dramatically, like he’s doing a voice-over for a movie, and it makes the fat under his chin wiggle.
It looks like Lauren’s finished and checking her work, but she’s leaning so I can’t see the third answer. I watch the second hand tick its way around the clock—“Two miiinnnuuutes and thirrrrty secondssss,” Tierney booms—and I lean over and poke Lauren with my pen. She looks up, startled. I don’t think I’ve talked to her in years, and for a second I see a look pass over her face that I can’t quite identify.
Pen, I mouth to her.
She looks confused and shoots a glance up at Tierney, who is thankfully bent over the textbook.
“What?” she whispers.
I make some gestures with my pen, trying to communicate to her that I’ve run out of ink. She’s staring at me dumbly, and for a second I feel like reaching out and shaking her—“Twwooooo minnnutttesss”—but finally her face clears up and she grins like she’s just figured out how to cure cancer. I don’t want to sound harsh, but it’s such a waste to be a dork and kind of slow on the uptake. What’s the point if you can’t at least play Beethoven or win state spelling bees or go to Harvard or something?
While Lauren’s bent over rummaging for a pen in her bag, I copy down the final answer. I kind of forget I even asked her for a pen, actually, because she has to whisper at me to get my attention.
“Thirrrrttttyyyy seconnndss.”
“Here.”
I take it from her. One end is chewed: gross. I give her a tight smile and look away, but a second later she whispers, “Does it work?”
I give her a look so she’ll know that now she’s being annoying. I guess she takes it as a sign I don’t understand.
“The pen. Does it work?” she whispers a little louder.
That’s when Tierney slams the textbook against his desk. The sound is so loud we all jump.
“Miss Lornet,” he bellows, glaring at Lauren. “Are you talking during my quiz?”
She turns bright red and looks back and forth from me to the teacher, licking her lips. I don’t say anything.
“I was just—” she says faintly.
“Enough.” He stands up, frowning so hard his mouth looks like it’s going to melt into his neck, and crosses his arms. I think he’s going to say something more to Lauren because he’s shooting her a death stare, but instead he just says, “Time, everybody. Pencils and pens down.”
I go to give Lauren’s pen back to her but she won’t take it.
“Keep it,” she says.
“No, thanks,” I say. I hold it between two fingers and lean over, dangling it above her desk, but she tucks her hands behind her back.
“Seriously,” she says, “you’re going to need a pen. For notes and stuff.” She’s looking at me like she’s offering me something miraculous and not a Bic pen with slobber on it. I don’t know if it’s her expression or not, but all of a sudden I remember the time we went on a field trip in second grade, and the two of us were the only ones left after everyone had chosen their buddies. We had to hold hands for the rest of the day whenever we crossed the street, and hers were always sweaty. I wonder if she remembers. I hope not.
I smile tightly and drop the pen in my bag. She grins from ear to ear. I’ll throw it out as soon as we’re done with class, of course; you never know what kind of diseases get carried through slobber.
On the bright side: my mom always said you should do one nice thing a day. So I guess that means I’m in the clear.
MATH CLASS:
FURTHER LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY

Fourth period I have “life skills,” which is what they call gym when you’re old enough to be offended by forced physical activity (Elody thinks they should call it slavery instead, for accuracy). We’re studying CPR, which means we get to make out with life-sized dummies in front of Mr. Otto. More proof of his perviness.
Fifth period I have calc and the Cupids come early, just after class has started. One of them is wearing a shiny, red unitard and has devil’s horns; one of them looks like she might be dressed as the Playboy bunny, or maybe the Easter bunny in heels; one of them is dressed up like an angel. Their costumes don’t really make sense in the context of the holiday, but like I said, the whole point is to show off in front of the junior and senior boys. I don’t blame them. We did it too. Freshman year Ally dated Mike Harmon—a senior at the time—for two months after she delivered a Valogram to him and he said her butt looked cute in her tights. That’s a real love story right there.
The devil gives me three roses—one from Elody, one from Tara Flute, who’s kind of in our group but not really, and one from Rob. I make a big deal of unfolding the tiny card that’s looped around the rose stem and acting moved when I read the note, even though all he’s written is Happy Cupid Day. Luv ya and then in smaller letters near the bottom: Happy now?
“Luv ya” isn’t exactly “I love you”—which we’ve never said—but it’s getting close. I’m pretty sure he’s saving it for tonight, actually. Last week it was late and we were sitting on his couch and he was staring at me and I was sure—sure—he was going to say it—but instead he just said from a certain angle I looked like Scarlett Johansson.
At least my note is better than the one Ally got from Matt Wilde last year: Roses are red, violets are blue, if I get you in bed, it would be really cool. He was kidding, obviously, but still. Blue and cool don’t even rhyme.
I think that’s going to be all of my Valograms, but then the angel comes over to my desk and hands me another one. The roses are all different colors and this one’s pretty amazing: cream and pink swirled petals, like it’s made out of some kind of ice cream.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathes.
I look up. The angel is just standing there, staring at the rose lying on my desk. It’s pretty shocking for a lowerclassman to have the balls to speak to a senior, and it annoys me for a second. She doesn’t look like the average Cupid either. She has hair so pale blond it’s almost white, and I can see individual veins through her skin. She reminds me of someone, but I can’t remember who.
She catches me looking at her and gives me a quick, embarrassed smile. I’m happy to see some color rush into her face—at least it makes her look alive.
“Marian.”
She turns around when the devil girl calls to her. The devil makes an impatient gesture with the roses she’s still carrying, and the angel—Marian, I guess—quickly rejoins the other Cupids. All three of them leave.
I brush my finger over the rose petals—they’re as soft as anything, as air or a breath—and then instantly feel stupid. I open the note, expecting something from Ally or Lindsay (hers always say Love you to death, bitch), but instead I see a cartoon drawing of a fat cupid accidentally shooting a bird out of a tree. The bird is labeled American Bald Eagle, and it looks like it’s about to fall directly on top of a couple sitting on a bench—Cupid’s original target, presumably. Cupid’s eyes are spirals and he has a stupid grin on his face.
Underneath the cartoon it says: Don’t drink and love.
It’s obviously from Kent McFuller—he draws cartoons for The Tribulation, the school humor paper—and I look up and glance in his direction. He always sits in the back left corner of the room. It’s one weird thing about him but definitely not the only one. Sure enough, he’s watching me. He gives me a quick smile and a wave, then makes a motion with his arms like he’s pulling back an arrow on a bowstring and shooting it at me. I make a point of frowning and deliberately take his note, fold it up quickly, and toss it in the bottom of my bag. He doesn’t seem to mind, though. It’s like I can feel his smile burning on me.
Mr. Daimler comes up and down the aisles, collecting homework, and he pauses at my desk. I have to admit it: he’s the reason I’m psyched to get four Valograms in calc. Mr. Daimler’s only twenty-five and he’s gorgeous. He’s assistant coach of the soccer team, and it’s pretty funny to see him standing next to Otto. They’re complete physical opposites. Mr. Daimler’s over six feet, always tan, and dresses like we do, in jeans and fleeces and New Balance sneakers. He graduated from Thomas Jefferson. We looked him up once in the old yearbooks in the library. He was prom king, and in one picture he’s wearing a tux and smiling with his arm around his prom date. You can just see a hemp necklace peeking out of his shirt collar. I love that picture. But you know what I love even more? He still wears that hemp necklace.
It’s so ironic that the hottest guy at Thomas Jefferson is on the faculty.
As usual, when he smiles my stomach does a little flip. He runs a hand through his messy brown hair, and I fantasize about doing the same thing.
“Nine roses already?” He raises his eyebrows, makes a big show of checking his watch. “And it’s only eleven fifteen. Well done.”
“What can I say?” I make my voice as smooth and flirtatious as possible. “The people love me.”
“I can see that,” he says, and winks at me.
I let him move a little farther down the aisle before I say, loudly, “I still haven’t gotten my rose from you, Mr. Daimler.”
He doesn’t turn around, but I can see the tips of his ears go red. There are giggles and snorts from the class. I get that rush that comes when you know you’re doing something wrong and are getting away with it, like stealing something from the school cafeteria or getting tipsy at a family holiday without anyone knowing.
Lindsay says Mr. Daimler’s going to sue me for harassment one day. I don’t think so. I think he secretly likes it.
Case in point: when he turns around to face the class, he’s smiling.
“After reviewing last week’s test results, I realize there’s still a lot of confusion about asymptotes and limits,” he begins, leaning against his desk and crossing his legs at the ankle. Nobody else could make calculus even remotely interesting, I’m sure of it.
For the rest of the class he barely looks at me, and even then only when I raise my hand. But I swear that when our eyes do meet, it makes my whole body feel like a giant shiver. And I swear he’s feeling it too.


After class Kent catches up with me.
“So?” he says. “What did you think?”
“Of what?” I say to irritate him. I know he’s talking about the cartoon and the rose.
Kent just smiles and changes the subject. “My parents are away this weekend.”
“Good for you.”
His smile doesn’t waver. “I’m having a party tonight. Are you coming?”
I look at him. I’ve never understood Kent. Or at least I haven’t understood him in years. We were super close when we were little—technically I suppose he was my best friend as well as my first kiss—but as soon as he hit middle school, he started getting weirder and weirder. Since freshman year he’s always worn a blazer to school, even though most of the ones he owns are ripped at the seams or have holes in the elbows. He wears the same scuffed-up black-and-white checkered sneakers every day and his hair is so long it’s like a curtain that swings down over his eyes every five seconds. But the real deal breaker is this: he actually wears a bowler hat. To school.
The worst thing is that he could be cute. He has the face and the body for it. He has a tiny heart-shaped mole under his left eye, no joke. But he has to screw it up by being such a freak.
“Not sure what my plans are yet,” I say. “If that’s where everyone ends up…” I let my voice trail off so he knows I’ll only show if there’s nothing better to do.
“It’s going to be great,” he says, still smiling. Another infuriating thing about Kent: he acts like the world is one big, shiny present he gets to unwrap every morning.
“We’ll see,” I say. Down the hall I see Rob ducking into the cafeteria and I start walking faster, hoping Kent will get the picture and back off. It’s pretty optimistic thinking on my part. Kent has had a crush on me for years. Possibly even since our kiss.
He stops walking entirely, maybe hoping I’ll stop too. But I don’t. For a second I feel bad, like I was too harsh, but then his voice rings out after me, and I can tell just by the sound of it that he’s still smiling.
“See you tonight,” he says. I hear the squeak of his sneakers on the linoleum, and I know he has turned around and started off in the opposite direction. He starts whistling. The sound of it carries back to me, getting fainter. It takes me a while to place the tune.
The sun’ll come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun. From Annie, the musical. My favorite song—when I was seven.
I know no one else in the hall will get it, but still I’m embarrassed and can feel heat creeping up my neck. He’s always doing things like that: acting like he knows me better than anyone else just because we used to play in the sandbox together a hundred years ago. Acting like nothing that’s happened in the past ten years has changed anything, even though it’s changed everything.
My phone’s buzzing in my back pocket and before I go in to lunch I snap it open. There’s one new text from Lindsay.
Party @ Kent McFreaky’s 2nite. In?
I pause for just a second, blowing out a long breath, before I text back.
Obv.


There are three acceptable things to eat in the Thomas Jefferson cafeteria:
1. A bagel, plain or with cream cheese.
2. French fries.
3. A deli sandwich from the make-your-own sandwich bar.
a. But only with turkey, ham, or chicken breast. Salami and bologna are obvious no-nos, and roast beef is questionable. Which is a shame, because roast beef is my favorite.
Rob is standing over by the cash register with a group of his friends. He’s holding an enormous tray of fries. He eats them every day. He catches my eye and gives me a nod. (He’s not the kind of guy who does so well with feelings, his or mine. Thus the “luv ya” on the note he sent me.)
It’s weird. Before we were going out, I liked him so much, and for so long, that every time he even looked in my direction I would get this bubbling, fizzing feeling so strong it would make me dizzy. No lie: sometimes I got light-headed thinking about him and had to sit down.
But now that we’re officially a couple, I sometimes have the strangest thoughts when I look at him, like I wonder if all those fries are clogging his arteries or whether he flosses or how long it’s been since he washed the Yankees hat he wears pretty much every day. Sometimes I’m worried there’s something wrong with me. Who wouldn’t want to go out with Rob Cokran?
It’s not that I’m not totally happy—I am—but it’s almost like sometimes I have to keep running over and over in my head why I liked him in the first place, like if I don’t I’ll somehow forget. Thankfully there are a million good reasons: the fact that he has black hair and a billion freckles but somehow they don’t look stupid on him; that he’s loud but in a funny way; that everyone knows him and likes him and probably half of the girls in the school have a crush on him; that he looks good in his lacrosse jersey; that when he’s really tired he lays his head on my shoulder and falls asleep. That’s my favorite thing about him. I like to lie next to him when it’s late, dark, and so quiet I can hear my own heartbeat. It’s times like that when I’m sure that I’m in love.
I ignore Rob as I get in line to pay for my bagel—I can play hard to get too—and then head for the senior section. The rest of the cafeteria is a rectangle. Special ed kids sit all the way down, at the table closest to the classrooms, and then there are the freshman tables, and then the sophomore tables, and then the junior tables. The senior section is at the very head of the cafeteria. It’s an octagon lined completely with windows. Okay, so it only looks out over the parking lot, but it’s still better than getting a straight view of the short-bus brigade dribbling their applesauce. No offense.
Ally’s already sitting at a small circular table right by the window: our favorite.
“Hey.” I put down my tray and my roses. Ally’s bouquet is sitting on the table and I do a quick count.
“Nine roses.” I gesture to hers and then give my bouquet a rattle. “Same as me.”
She makes a face. “One of mine doesn’t count. Ethan Shlosky sent one to me. Can you believe it? Stalker.”
“Yeah, well, I got one from Kent McFuller, so one of mine doesn’t count either.”
“He looves you,” she says, drawing out the o. “Did you get Lindsay’s text?”
I pick the mushy center out of my bagel and pop it in my mouth. “Are we really going to go to his party?”
Ally snorts. “Afraid he’ll date-rape you?”
“Very funny.”
“There’s gonna be a keg,” Ally says. She takes a tiny nibble of her turkey sandwich. “My house after school, okay?” She doesn’t really have to ask. It’s our tradition on Fridays. We order food, raid her closet, blast music, and dance around swapping eye shadows and lip glosses.
“Yeah, sure.”
I’ve been watching Rob come closer out of the corner of my eye, and suddenly he’s there, plopping into a chair next to me and leaning in until his mouth is touching my left ear. He smells like Total cologne. He always does. I think it smells a little like this tea my grandmother used to drink—lemon balm—but I haven’t told him that yet.
“Hey, Slammer.” He’s always making up names for me: Slammer, Samwich, Sammy Says. “Did you get my Valogram?”
“Did you get mine?” I say.
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.


There’s a definition of irony for you, Mrs. Harbor.
Or maybe foreshadowing?


Technically you need a special pass signed by your parents and the administration to leave campus during the school day. This wasn’t always true. For a long time one of the perks to being a senior was getting to leave campus whenever you wanted, as long as you had a free period. That was twenty years ago, though, a few years before Thomas Jefferson got the reputation for one of the highest teen suicide rates in the country. We looked up the article online once: the Connecticut Post called us Suicide High.
And then one day a bunch of kids left campus and drove off a bridge—a suicide pact, I guess. Anyway, after that the school forbade anyone from leaving school during the day without special permission. It’s kind of stupid if you think about it. That’s like finding out that kids are bringing vodka to school in water bottles and forbidding anyone to drink water.
Fortunately, there’s another way to get off campus: through a hole in the fence beyond the gym by the tennis court, which we call the Smokers’ Lounge, since that’s where all the smokers hang out. No one’s around, though, when Lindsay and I slip through the fence and get started across the woods. In a little while we’ll come on to Route 120. Everything is still and frozen. Twigs and black leaves crack under our shoes, and our breath rises in solid white puffs.
Thomas Jefferson is about three miles outside of downtown Ridgeview—or what you can call the downtown—but only about a half mile from a small strip of dingy stores we’ve named the Row. There’s a gas station, a TCBY, a Chinese restaurant that once made Elody sick for two days, and a random Hallmark store where you can buy pink glittery ballerina figurines and snow globes and crap like that. That’s where we head. I know we must look like total freaks, stomping along the road in our skirts and tights, our jackets flapping open to show off our fur-trimmed tank tops.
We pass Hunan Kitchen on our way to TCBY. Through the grime-coated windows we spot Alex Liment and Anna Cartullo bent over a bowl of something.
“Ooo, scandal,” Lindsay says, raising her eyebrows, although it’s really only a half scandal. Everyone knows that Alex has been cheating on Bridget McGuire with Anna for the past three months. Everyone except Bridget, obviously.
Bridget’s family is super-Catholic. She’s pretty and really clean-looking, like every time you see her she’s just scrubbed her face really hard. Apparently she’s saving herself for marriage. That’s what she says, anyway, although Elody thinks Bridget might be a closet lesbo. Anna Cartullo is only a junior, but if the rumors are true she’s already had sex with at least four people. She’s one of the few kids in Ridgeview who doesn’t come from any money. Her mom’s a hairdresser, and I don’t even know if she has a dad. She lives in one of the shitty rental condos right off the Row. I once heard Andrew Singer saying her bedroom always smelled like General Tso’s chicken.
“Let’s go in and say hi,” Lindsay says, reaching for my hand.
I hang back. “I’m going through sugar withdrawal.”
“Here. Take these.” She pulls a pack of SweeTarts from the waistband of her skirt. Lindsay always carries candy on her, 24/7, like she’s packing drugs. I guess she kind of is. “Just for a second, I promise.”
I let myself be dragged inside. A bell tinkles as we come through the door. There’s a woman flipping through Us Weekly behind the counter. She looks at us, then looks down again when she realizes we’re not going to order.
Lindsay slides right up to Alex and Anna’s booth, leaning against the table. She’s kinda, sorta friends with Alex. Alex is kinda, sorta friends with a lot of people, since he deals pot out of a shoe box in his bedroom. He and I have a head-nod friendship, since that’s pretty much the limit of our interaction. He’s actually in English with me, though he shows even less than I do. I guess the rest of the time he’s with Anna. Every so often he’ll say something like, “That essay assignment blows, huh?” but other than that we don’t talk.
“Hey, hey,” Lindsay says. “You going to Kent’s party tonight?”
Alex’s face is red and splotchy. At least he’s embarrassed to be caught out with Anna so blatantly. Or maybe he’s just having a reaction to the food. I wouldn’t be surprised.
“Um…I don’t know. Maybe. Gotta see….” He trails off.
“It’s gonna be super fun.” Lindsay makes her voice extra perky. “Are you going to bring Bridget? She’s such a sweetheart.”
Actually, we both think Bridget is annoying—she’s always really cheerful and she wears T-shirts with lame slogans like Unless You’re the Lead Dog the View Never Changes (no lie)—but Lindsay despises Anna and once wrote AC=WT all over the bathroom right across from the cafeteria—the one everyone uses. WT stands for white trash.
The situation is beyond awkward, so I blurt out, “Sesame chicken?” I point at the meat congealing in a grayish sauce in a bowl on the table, next to two fortune cookies and a sad-looking orange.
“Orange beef,” Alex says. He seems relieved by the change of topic.
Lindsay gives me a look, annoyed, but I keep rattling on. “You should be careful about eating here. The chicken once poisoned Elody. She threw up for, like, two days straight. If it was chicken. She swears she found a fur ball in it.”
As soon as I say this Anna picks up her chopsticks and takes an enormous bite, looking up and smiling at me as she chews so I can see the food in her mouth. I’m not sure whether she’s doing it deliberately to gross me out, but it seems like it.
“That’s nasty, Kingston,” Alex says, but he’s smiling now.
Lindsay rolls her eyes, like Alex and Anna are both a total waste of our time. “Come on, Sam.”
She pockets a fortune cookie and breaks it open when we get outside. “Happiness is found when one is not looking,” she reads, and I crack up when she makes a face. She balls up the little slip of paper and lets it flutter to the ground. “Useless.”
I take a deep breath. “The smell in there always makes me sick.” It does, too: that smell of old meat and cheap oil and garlic. The clouds on the horizon are slowly taking over the sky, turning everything gray and blurry.
“Tell me about it.” Lindsay puts a hand on her stomach. “You know what I need?”
“A jumbo cup of The Country’s Best Yogurt!” I say, smiling. TCBY is another thing we can’t bring ourselves to abbreviate.
“Definitely a jumbo cup of The Country’s Best Yogurt,” Lindsay echoes.
Even though we’re both freezing, we order double-chocolate soft-serve with sprinkles and crushed peanut butter cups on top, which we eat on our way back to school, blowing on our fingers to keep them warm. Alex and Anna are gone from Hunan Kitchen when we pass, but we run into them again at the Smokers’ Lounge. We have exactly seven minutes left until the bell for eighth period, and Lindsay pulls me behind the tennis courts so she can have a cigarette without listening to Alex and Anna argue. That’s what it looks like they’re doing, anyway. Anna’s head is bent and Alex is grabbing her shoulders, whispering to her. The cigarette in his hand burns so close to her dull brown hair I’m positive it’s going to catch fire, and I picture her whole head just going up like that, like a match.
Lindsay finishes her smoke and we dump our yogurt cups right there, on top of the frozen black leaves and trampled cigarette packs and plastic bags half filled with rainwater. I’m feeling anxious about tonight—half dread and half excitement—like when you hear thunder and know that any second you’ll see lightning tearing across the sky, nipping at the clouds with its teeth. I shouldn’t have skipped out on English. It has given me too much time to think. And thinking never did anybody any good, no matter what your teachers and parents and the science-club freaks tell you.
We skirt the perimeter of the tennis courts and go up along Senior Alley. Alex and Anna are still standing half concealed behind the gym. Alex is on his second cigarette at least. Definitely an argument. I feel a momentary rush of satisfaction: Rob and I hardly ever fight, at least not about anything serious. That must mean something.
“Trouble in paradise,” I say.
“More like trouble in the trailer park,” Lindsay says.
We start cutting across the teachers’ lot when we see Ms. Winters, the vice principal, threading between cars, trying to rout out the smokers who don’t have time or are too lazy to walk all the way down to the Lounge and instead try to hide out between the teachers’ old Volvos and Chevrolets. Ms. Winters has some crazy vendetta against people who smoke. I heard that her mom died of lung cancer or emphysema or something. If you get caught smoking by Ms. Winters you get three Friday detentions, no questions asked.
Lindsay frantically rifles in her bag for her Trident and pops two pieces in her mouth. “Shit, shit.”
“You can’t get busted just for smelling like smoke,” I say, even though Lindsay knows this. She likes the drama, though. Funny how you can know your friends so well, but you still end up playing the same games with them.
She ignores me. “How’s my breath?” She breathes on me.
“Like a friggin’ menthol factory.”
Ms. Winters hasn’t spotted us yet. She’s making her way down the rows, sometimes stooping to peer 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?”
“It’s just a little farther,” I say, even though I have no idea, and I’m starting to wonder whether we turned too early. I have butterflies in my stomach, but I’m not sure whether they’re good or bad.
The woods press closer and closer until they’re nearly brushing up against the car doors. Lindsay starts complaining about the paint job. Just when it seems like we’ll be sucked up into the darkness, all of a sudden the woods stop completely and there’s the biggest, most beautiful lawn you can imagine, with a white house at its center that looks like it’s made out of frosting. It’s got balconies and a long porch that runs along two sides. The shutters are white too, and carved with designs it’s too dark to make out. I don’t remember any of it. Maybe it’s the alcohol, but I think it’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.
We’re all silent for a minute, looking. Half the house is dark, but warm light is shining from the top floor, and where it makes it to the lawn it turns the grass silver.
Lindsay says, “It’s almost as big as your house, Al.” I’m sorry she spoke: it feels like a spell has been broken.
“Almost,” Ally says. She takes the vodka out of her bag and swigs it, coughs, burps, and wipes her mouth.
“Give me a shot of that,” Elody says, reaching for the bottle.
The bottle’s in my hand before I realize it. I take a sip. It burns my throat and tastes awful, like paint or gasoline, but as soon as it’s down I get a rush. We climb out of the car and the light from the house surges and expands, winking at me.
Walking into parties always gives me a crampy feeling at the bottom of my stomach. It’s a good feeling, though: the feeling of knowing anything can happen. Most of the time nothing does, of course. Most of the time one night blends into the next, and weeks blend into weeks, and months into other months. And sooner or later we all die.
But at the beginning of the night anything’s possible.
The front door is locked and we have to go around the side, where a door opens onto a really narrow hallway all paneled in wood and a tiny flight of steep wooden stairs. It smells like something I remember from childhood, but I can’t quite place it. I hear the tinkle of breaking glass and someone yells, “Fire in the hole!” Then Dujeous roars from the speakers: All MCs in the house tonight, if your lyrics sound tight then rock the mic. The stairs are so narrow we have to squeeze up in single file because people are coming down in the opposite direction, empty beer cups in hand. Most of them have to turn so their backs are against the wall. We say hi to a few people and ignore the rest. As usual I can feel all of them looking at us. That’s another nice thing about being popular: you don’t have to pay any attention to the people paying attention to you.
At the top of the stairs a dim hallway is hung all over with multicolored Christmas lights. There are a series of rooms, each leading off the next, and all seem to be filled with draped fabrics and big pillows and couches and all are packed with people. Everything is soft—the colors, the surfaces, the way people look—except the music, which pumps through the walls, making the floor vibrate. People are smoking inside too, so everything’s happening behind a thick blue veil. I’ve only smoked pot once, but this is what I imagine it’s like to be stoned.
Lindsay leans back and says something to me, but it gets lost in the murmur of voices. Then she’s moving away from me, weaving through the crowd. I turn around, but Elody and Ally are gone too, and before I know it my heart is pounding and I get this itchy feeling in my palms.
Recently I’ve been having this nightmare where I’m standing in the middle of an enormous crowd, being pushed from left to right. The faces look familiar, but there’s something horribly wrong with all of them: someone will walk by who looks like Lindsay, but then her mouth is weird and droopy like it’s melting off. And none of them recognize me.
Obviously standing in Kent’s house isn’t the same thing, since I pretty much know everybody except for some of the juniors and a couple of girls who I think might be sophomores. But still, it’s enough to make me freak out a little.
I’m about to head over to Emma Howser—she’s super cheesy and normally I wouldn’t be caught dead talking to her, but I’m getting desperate—when I feel thick arms around me and smell lemon balm. Rob.
He puts a wet mouth against my ear. “Sexy Sammy. Where’ve you been all my life?”
I turn around. His face is bright red. “You’re drunk,” I say, and it comes out more accusatory than I meant it to.
“Sober enough,” he says, trying and failing to raise one eyebrow. “And you’re late.” His grin is lazy. Only one half of it curves upward. “We did a keg stand.”
“It’s ten o’clock,” I point out. “We’re not late. I called you, anyway.”
He pats his fleece and his pockets. “Must’ve put my phone down somewhere.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re a delinquent.”
“I like it when you use those big words.” The other half of his smile is creeping upward slowly and I know he’s going to kiss me. I turn partly away, searching the room for my friends, but they’re still MIA.
In the corner I spot Kent, wearing a tie and a collared shirt about three sizes too big for him, which is half tucked into a pair of ratty khakis. At least he’s not wearing his bowler hat. He’s talking to Phoebe Rifer and they’re laughing about something. It annoys me that he hasn’t noticed me yet. I’m kind of hoping he’ll look up and come barreling over to me like he usually does, but he just bends closer toward Phoebe like he’s trying to hear her better.
Rob pulls me into him. “We’ll only stay for an hour, okay? Then we’ll leave.” His breath smells like beer and a little like cigarettes when he kisses me. I close my eyes and think about how in sixth grade I saw him kissing Gabby Haynes and was so jealous I couldn’t eat for two days. I wonder if I look like I’m enjoying it. Gabby did, in sixth grade.
It relaxes me to think about things like that: how funny life is.
I haven’t even taken off my jacket, but Rob unzips it and moves his hands along my waist and then under my tank top. His palms are sweaty and big.
I pull away long enough to say, “Not right here, in the middle of everyone.”
“Nobody’s watching,” he says, and clamps down on me again. This is a lie. He knows everyone watches us. He can see it. He doesn’t even close his eyes.
His hands inch over my stomach and his fingers are pulling at the underwire of my bra. He’s not very good with bras. He’s not that good with breasts in general, actually. I mean, it’s not like I really know what it’s supposed to feel like, but every time he touches my boobs he kind of just massages them hard in a circle. My gyno does the same thing when I go in for an exam, so one of them has to be doing it wrong. And to be honest, I don’t think it’s my gyno.
If you want to know my biggest secret, here it is: I know you’re supposed to wait to have sex with someone you love and all that, and I do love Rob—I mean, I’ve kind of been in love with him forever, so how could I not?—but that’s not why I decided to have sex with him tonight.
I decided to have sex with him because I want to get it over with, and because sex has always scared me and I don’t want to be scared of it anymore.
“I can’t wait to wake up next to you,” Rob says, his mouth against my ear.
It’s a sweet thing to say, but I can’t concentrate while his hands are on me. And it occurs to me all of a sudden that I’d never thought about the waking-up part. I have no idea what you’re supposed to talk about the day after you’ve had sex, and I imagine us lying side by side, not touching, silent, while the sun rises. Rob doesn’t have any blinds in his room—he ripped them down once when he was drunk—and during the day it’s like a spotlight has been turned on his bed, a spotlight or an eye.
“Get a room!”
I pull away from Rob as Ally appears next to me, making a face. “You two are perverts,” she says.
“This is a room.” Rob lifts both arms and gestures around him. He sloshes a little bit of beer onto my shirt, and I make a noise, annoyed.
“Sorry, babe.” He shrugs. Now there’s only a half inch of beer in his cup and he stares at it, frowning. “Gonna go for a topper. You guys want?”
“We brought our own.” Ally pats the vodka in her purse.
“Smart thinking.” Rob brings a finger up to tap the side of his head but nearly takes an eye out instead. He’s drunker than I thought. Ally covers her mouth and giggles.
“My boyfriend’s an idiot,” I say as soon as he lurches away.
“A cute idiot,” Ally corrects me.
“That’s like saying ‘a cute mutant.’ Doesn’t exist.”
“Sure it does.” Ally’s looking around the room, pouting her lips to make them look more kissable.
“Where did you go, anyway?” I’m feeling more annoyed than I should by everything: by the fact that my friends ditched me after thirty whole seconds, by the fact that Rob’s so drunk, by the fact that Kent’s still talking to Phoebe Rifer, even though he’s supposed to be obsessively in love with me. Not that I want him to be in love with me, obviously. It’s just a constant that’s always been comforting, in a weird way. I wrestle the bottle out of Ally’s bag and take another sip.
“We made a round. There’s, like, seventeen different rooms up here. You should check it out.” Ally looks at me, notices the face I’m pulling, and holds up her hands. “What? It’s not like we abandoned you in the middle of nowhere.”
She’s right. I don’t know why I’m feeling so pissy. “Where did Lindsay and Elody go?”
“Elody’s suctioned to Muffin’s lap. And Lindsay and Patrick are fighting.”
“Already?”
“Yeah, well, they kissed for the first three minutes. They waited until minute four to start going at it.”
This cracks me up and Ally and I laugh over it. I start to feel better, more comfortable. The vodka fills my head with warmth. More people are arriving all the time and the room seems to be revolving just a little bit. It’s a nice feeling, though, like being on a really slow carousel. Ally and I decide to go on a mission to save Lindsay before her fight with Patrick turns into an all-out brawl.
It seems like the whole school has shown up, but really there are only sixty or seventy kids. This is the most that ever shows up at a party. There’s the top and middle of the senior class, popularity-wise—Kent’s just holding on to the lower rung of the ladder, but he’s hosting so it’s okay—some of the cooler juniors, and a couple of really cool sophomores. I know I’m supposed to hate them, like we were hated when we were sophomores at all the senior parties, but I can’t bring myself to care. Ally gives a group of them one of her ice stares as we go by, though, and says “Skanks” loudly. One of them, Rachel Kornish, supposedly hooked up with Matt Wilde not long ago.
Obviously no freshmen are allowed in. The social bottom doesn’t show either. It isn’t because people would make fun of them, although they probably would. It’s more than that. They don’t hear about these parties until after they’ve happened. They don’t know the things we know: they don’t know about the secret side entrance to Andrew Roberts’s guesthouse, or the fact that Carly Jablonski stashed a cooler in her garage where you can keep your beers cold, or the fact that Rocky’s doesn’t check IDs very closely, or the fact that Mic’s stays open around the clock and makes the best egg and cheeses in the world, absolutely dripping with oil and ketchup, perfect for when you’re drunk. It’s like high school holds two different worlds, revolving around each other and never touching: the haves and the have-nots. I guess it’s a good thing. High school is supposed to prepare you for the real world, after all.
There are so many tiny hallways and rooms, it feels like a maze. All of them are filled with people and smoke. Only one door is closed. It has a big KEEP OUT sign plastered on it over a bunch of weird bumper stickers that say things like VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS and KISS ME. I’M IRISH.
By the time we get to Lindsay, she and Patrick have made up, big surprise. She’s sitting on his lap and he’s smoking a joint. Elody and Steve Dough are in a corner. He’s leaning against the wall and she’s half dancing and half grinding against him. She has an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips, butt end out, and her hair is a mess. Steve is steadying her, using one arm to keep her on her feet, but he’s having a conversation with Liz Hummer (her real name—and, coincidentally, her car) like Elody isn’t even there, much less rubbing on him.
“Poor Elody,” I say. I don’t know why I suddenly feel bad for her. “She’s too nice.”
“She’s a whore,” Ally says, but not meanly.
“Do you think we’ll remember any of this?” I’m not sure where the words come from. My whole head feels light and fuzzy, ready to float away. “Do you think we’ll remember any of it two years from now?”
“I won’t even remember tomorrow.” Ally laughs, tapping the bottle in my hand. There’s only a quarter of it left. I can’t think when we drank it all.
Lindsay squeals when she sees us and stumbles off Patrick’s lap, throwing an arm around each of us like it’s been years since we were together. She snatches the vodka from me and takes a sip while her arm is still wrapped around my shoulders, her elbow tightening momentarily against my neck.
“Where did you go?” she yells. Her voice is loud, even over the music and the sound of everybody talking and laughing. “I was looking everywhere for you.”
“Bullshit,” I say, and Ally says, “In Patrick’s mouth, maybe.”
We’re laughing over the fact that Lindsay’s a bullshitter and Elody’s a drunk and Ally’s OCD and I’m antisocial, and someone cracks a window to let out the smoke, and a fine mist of rain comes in, smelling like grass and fresh things, even though it’s the dead middle of winter. Without anyone noticing I reach my hand back and rest it on the sill, enjoying the freezing air and the sensation of a hundred pinpricks of rain. I close my eyes and promise myself I’ll never forget this moment: the sound of my friends’ laughter and the heat from so many bodies and the smell of rain.
When I open my eyes I get the shock of my life. Juliet Sykes is standing in the doorway, staring at me.
She’s staring at us, actually: Lindsay, Ally, and Elody, who has just left Steve and come over to stand with us, and me. Juliet’s hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and I think it’s the first time I’ve ever really seen her face.
It’s shocking that she’s there, but it’s even more shocking that she’s pretty. She has blue eyes set wide apart and high cheekbones, like a model’s. Her skin is perfectly clear and white. I can’t stop staring at her.
People are elbowing and pushing her because she’s blocking the doorway, but she just stands there, staring.
Ally catches on first and her mouth drops open. “What the…?”
Elody and Lindsay turn to see what we’re both staring at. Lindsay goes pale at first—she actually looks afraid, which is beyond strange, but I don’t have time to wonder about it because just as quickly her face goes purple, and she looks ready to rip someone’s head off. That’s a more natural look for her. Elody begins giggling hysterically until she doubles over and has to cover her mouth with both hands.
“I can’t believe it,” she says. “I can’t believe it.” She tries to start singing “Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est,” but we’re all still in shock and don’t join in.
You know how in movies someone says or does something inappropriate and the record scratches and there’s dead silence all of a sudden? Well, that isn’t exactly what happens, but it’s close. The music doesn’t stop, but as everyone in the room starts to pick up on the fact that Juliet Sykes—bedwetter, freak, and all-around psycho—is standing in the middle of a party giving four of the most popular girls at Thomas Jefferson the stink eye, conversation drops off and a low sound of whispering fills the room, getting louder and more insistent until it’s a constant hum, until it sounds like wind or the ocean.
Juliet Sykes finally steps away from the door and into the room. She walks slowly and confidently toward us—I’ve never seen her look so calm—stopping three feet in front of Lindsay.
“You’re a bitch,” she says. Her voice is steady and too loud, like she’s deliberately addressing everyone in the room. I’d always imagined her voice would be high-pitched or breathy, but it’s as full and deep as a boy’s.
It takes Lindsay a half second to find her voice. “Excuse me?” she croaks out. Juliet hasn’t made eye contact with Lindsay since the fifth grade, much less spoken to her. Much less insulted her.
“You heard me. A bitch. A mean girl. A bad person.” Juliet turns to Ally next. “You’re a bitch too.” To Elody, “You’re a bitch.” She turns her eyes to me and for a second I see something flashing there—something familiar—but just as quickly it’s gone.
“You’re a bitch.”
We’re all so shocked we don’t know how to respond. Elody giggles again nervously, hiccups, and goes silent. Lindsay’s mouth is opening and shutting like a fish’s, but nothing’s coming out. Ally’s balling up her fists like she’s thinking of clocking Juliet in the face.
And even though I’m infuriated and embarrassed, the only thing I can think when I look at Juliet is: I never knew you were so pretty.
Lindsay pulls herself together. She leans forward so her face is only inches from Juliet’s. I’ve never seen her so angry. I think her eyes are going to pop out of her head. Her mouth is twisted into a snarl, like a dog’s. For a second she looks really and truly ugly.
“I’d rather be a bitch than a psycho,” she hisses, grabbing Juliet by the shirt. Spit is coming out of her mouth—that’s how angry she is. She shoves Juliet backward, and Juliet stumbles into Matt Dorfman. He pushes Juliet again and she careens into Emma McElroy. Lindsay starts screaming, “Psycho, Psycho,” and making the high-pitched knifing noises from the movie, and suddenly everyone’s screaming out, “Psycho!” and making the motion of an invisible knife and screeching and pushing Juliet back and forth. Ally’s the first to overturn a beer on her head, but everyone catches on to that too; Lindsay splashes her with vodka, and when Juliet stumbles my way, half drenched, arms outstretched, trying to get her balance, I grab a half-finished beer from the windowsill and dump it on her. I don’t even realize I’m screaming along with everybody else until my throat is sore.
Juliet looks up at me after I dump the beer out. I can’t explain it—it’s crazy—but it’s almost a pitying look, like she feels bad for me.
All of the breath leaves my body in a rush, and I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. Without thinking, I lunge at her and shove as hard as I can, and she goes backward into a bookshelf that almost falls over. I’ve pushed her back toward the door, and as everyone is still squealing and laughing and screaming “Psycho,” she runs out of the room. She has to squeeze by Kent. He’s just come in, probably to see what everyone’s screaming about.
We lock eyes for a moment. I can’t exactly tell what he’s thinking, but whatever it is, it’s not good. I look away, feeling hot and uncomfortable. Everyone’s buzzing with energy now, laughing and talking about Juliet, but my breathing won’t go back to normal and I feel the vodka burning my stomach, creeping back up my throat. The room is stifling, spinning faster than before. I have to get out for some air.
I try to push my way out of the room, but Kent gets in my face and blocks my way.
“What the hell was that about?” he demands.
“Can you let me by, please?” I’m not in the mood to deal with anyone, and I’m especially not in the mood to deal with Kent and his stupid button-down shirt.
“What did she ever do to you?”
I cross my arms. “I get it. You’re friends with Psycho. Is that it?”
He narrows his eyes. “Pretty clever nickname. Did you think of that all by yourself, or did your friends have to help you?”
“Get out of my way.” I manage to squeeze past him, but he grabs my arm.
“Why?” he says. We’re standing so close together I can smell that he’s just eaten peppermints and see the heart-shaped mole under his left eye, even though everything else is blurry. He’s looking at me like he’s desperate to understand something, and it’s worse, much worse than anything else so far—than Juliet or his anger or the feeling I’m going to be sick any second.
I try to shake his hand off my arm. “You can’t just grab people, you know. You can’t just grab me. I have a boyfriend.”
“Keep your voice down. I’m just trying to—”
“Look.” I succeed in shaking him off. I know I’m talking too loud and too fast. I know I sound hysterical, but I can’t help it. “I don’t know what your problem is, okay? I’m not going to go out with you. I would never go out with you in a million years. So you can stop obsessing over me. I mean, I shouldn’t even know your name.” The words fly out and it’s as though they strangle me on the way up: suddenly I can’t breathe.
Kent stares at me hard. Then he leans in even closer. For a second I think he’s going to try to kiss me and my heart stops.
But he just puts his mouth up to my ear and says, “I see right through you.”
“You don’t know me.” I jerk backward, shaking. “You don’t know one thing about me.”
He holds his hands up in surrender and backs off. “You’re right. I don’t.” He starts to turn away and mutters something else.
“What did you say?” My heart is pounding in my chest so hard I think it will explode.
He turns to look at me. “I said, ‘Thank God.’”
I spin around, wishing I hadn’t borrowed a pair of Ally’s heels. The room spins with me and I have to steady myself against the banister.
“Your boyfriend’s downstairs, puking in the kitchen sink,” Kent calls after me.
I give him the finger over my shoulder without turning around to see if he’s watching me, but I get the feeling he’s not.
Even before I go downstairs to see whether what Kent said about Rob is true, I know it: tonight isn’t the night after all. The combination of disappointment and relief is so overwhelming I have to hold on to the walls as I walk, feeling the stairs spiral up under me like they’re going to slip away any second. Tonight isn’t the night. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and be exactly the same, and the world will look the same, and everything will feel and taste and smell the same. My throat gets tight and my eyes start to burn, and all I can think in that moment is that it’s all Kent’s fault, Kent’s and Juliet Sykes’s.


Half an hour later the party starts to wind down. Inside, someone has ripped the Christmas lights off the wall and they’re trailing along the floor like a snake, lighting up the dust mites in the corners.
I’m feeling better now, more like myself. “There’s always tomorrow,” Lindsay said to me, when I told her about Rob, and I run the phrase over and over in my head like a mantra: There’s always tomorrow. There’s always tomorrow.
I spend twenty minutes in the bathroom, first washing my face and then reapplying makeup, even though my hands are unsteady and my face keeps doubling in the mirror. Every time I put on makeup it reminds me of my mother—I used to watch her bend over her vanity, getting ready for dates with my father—and it calms me down. There’s always tomorrow.
It’s the time of the night I like best, when most people are asleep and it feels like the world belongs completely to my friends and me, as though nothing exists apart from our little circle: everywhere else is darkness and quiet.
I leave with Elody, Ally, and Lindsay. The crowd is thinning as people take off, but it’s still hard to move. Lindsay keeps calling out, “Excuse me, excuse me, move it, feminine emergency!” Years ago we discovered at an under-eighteen concert in Poughkeepsie that nothing clears people faster than referencing a feminine emergency. It’s like people think they’ll catch it.
On our way out we pass people hooking up in corners and pressed against the stairwell. Behind closed doors we hear the muffled sounds of people giggling. Elody slams her fist against each door and yells out, “No glove, no love!” Lindsay turns around and whispers something to Elody, and Elody shuts up and looks at me guiltily. I want to tell them I don’t care—I don’t care about Rob or missing my chance—but I’m suddenly too tired to talk.
We see Bridget McGuire sitting on the edge of a bathtub with the door just cracked open. She has her head in her hands and she’s crying.
“What’s wrong with her?” I say, trying to fight the feeling of swimming in my own head, of my words coming from a distance.
“She dumped Alex.” Lindsay grabs on to my elbow. She seems sober, but her pupils are enormous and the whites of her eyes bloodshot. “You’ll never believe it. She found out that the Nic Nazi busted Alex and Anna together. He was supposed to be at a doctor’s appointment.” The music’s still going so we can’t hear Bridget, but her shoulders are shaking up and down like she’s convulsing. “She’ll be better off. Scumbag.”
“They’re all scumbags!” Elody says, raising her beer and spilling some of it. I don’t even think she knows what we’re talking about.
Lindsay takes her cup and sets it on a side table, on top of a worn copy of Moby Dick. She pockets a little ceramic figurine too: a shepherd with curly blond hair and painted eyelashes. She always steals something from parties. She calls them her souvenirs.
“She better not hurl in the Tank,” she says in a whisper, tipping her head back toward Elody.
Rob is stretched out on a sofa downstairs, but he manages to grab my hand as I go by and tries to pull me down on top of him.
“Where’re you goin’?” he says. His eyes are unfocused and his voice is hoarse.
“Come on, Rob. Let me go.” I push him off me. This is his fault, too.
“We were supposed to…” His voice trails off and he shakes his head, confused, then narrows his eyes at me. “Are you cheating on me?”
“Don’t be stupid.” I want to rewind the whole evening, rewind the past few weeks, go back to the moment when Rob leaned over, rested his chin on my shoulder, and told me he wanted to sleep next to me, go back to that quiet moment in that dark room with the TV blue and muted in front of us and the sound of his breathing and my parents sleeping upstairs, go back to the moment I opened my mouth and heard “I do too.”
“You are. You’re cheating. I knew it.” He lurches to his feet and looks around wildly. Chris Harmon, one of Rob’s best friends, is standing in the corner laughing about something, and Rob stumbles over to him.
“Are you cheating with my girlfriend, Harmon?” Rob roars, and pushes Chris. Chris stumbles and knocks against a bookshelf. A porcelain figurine topples over and shatters and a girl screams.
“Are you crazy?” Chris jumps back on Rob and suddenly they’re locked together, wrestling, shuffling around 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.