Before I Fall

SIX

This time, when I dream, there is sound. As I fall through the darkness there’s a tinkly, jangly song playing, like the kind of music you hear in doctors’ offices and elevators, and without knowing how I know, I realize that the music is piping all the way from the guidance counselor’s office at Thomas Jefferson.
As soon as I realize this, little bright spots start exploding through the darkness, a zooming gallery of all the annoying inspirational posters my guidance counselor, Mrs. Gardner, keeps on her walls, except in my dream they’re all blown up by about a hundred times, each the size of a house. In one, Einstein is pictured over the words GRAVITY IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR FALLING IN LOVE. There’s a poster with Thomas Edison’s quote: GENIUS IS 1 PERCENT INSPIRATION AND 99 PERCENT PERSPIRATION. I’m thinking of trying to grab one of them and worrying about whether it will hold my weight when I spin past a picture of a striped cat hanging off the branch of a tree by its nails. It says HANG IN THERE.
And it’s the funniest thing: as soon as I see it, the whistling in my ears stops and the feeling of terror drains away, and I realize this whole time I haven’t been falling at all. I’ve been floating.


The alarm that wakes me is the sweetest sound I’ve ever heard. I sit up, a bubble of laughter rising inside me. I have the urge to touch everything in my room—the walls, the window, the collage, the photos cluttering my desk, the Tahari jeans strewn across my floor and my bio textbook and even the dull light just creeping over the windowsill. If I could cup it in my hands and kiss it, I would.
“Someone’s in a good mood,” my mom says when I come downstairs. Izzy’s at the table in front of her peanut butter bagel, taking slow, careful bites, as usual.
“Happy Cupid Day,” my father says. He’s standing at the stove burning eggs for my mom’s breakfast.
“My favorite,” I say, scooting in to steal a bite from Izzy’s bagel. Izzy squeals and slaps at my hand. I plant a big, sloppy kiss on her forehead.
“Stop slobbering on me,” she says.
“See you later, Fizzy Lizard,” I say.
“Don’t call me Lizard.” Izzy sticks a peanut butter–coated tongue out at me.
“You look like a lizard when you do that.”
“Do you want any breakfast, Sam?” my mom asks. I never eat breakfast at home, but my mom still asks me every day—when she catches me before I duck out, anyway—and in that moment I realize how much I love the little everyday routines of my life: the fact that she always asks, the fact that I always say no because there’s a sesame bagel waiting for me in Lindsay’s car, the fact that we always listen to “No More Drama” as we pull into the parking lot. The fact that my mom always cooks spaghetti and meatballs on Sunday, and the fact that once a month my dad takes over the kitchen and makes his “special stew,” which is just hot-dog pieces and baked beans and lots of extra ketchup and molasses, and I would never admit to liking it, but it’s actually one of my favorite meals. The details that are my life’s special pattern, like how in handwoven rugs what really makes them unique are the tiny flaws in the stitching, little gaps and jumps and stutters that can never be reproduced.


So many things become beautiful when you really look.


“No breakfast. Thanks, though.” I go to my mom and wrap my arms around her. She yelps, surprised. I guess it has been a couple of years since we’ve hugged, except the mandatory two-second squeeze on birthdays. “Love you.”
When I pull away she stares at me as though I’ve just announced I’m quitting school to become a contortionist in the circus.
“What?” my dad says, dumping a pan in the sink and wiping his hands on the dishtowel. “No love for your old man?”
I roll my eyes. I hate it when my dad tries to “teen-speak,” as he calls it, but I don’t call him out on it. Nothing can get me down today.
“Bye, Dad.” I let him wrap me in one of his infamous bear hugs. I’m filled with love from the top of my head to the bottom of my toes, a bubbly feeling like someone’s shaken my insides up like a Coke bottle. Everything—the dishes in the sink, Izzy’s bagel, my mom’s smile—looks sharp, like it’s made out of glass or like I’m seeing it for the first time. It’s dazzling, and again I have the desire to go around and touch it all, make sure that it’s real. If I had time I would, too. I would put my hands around the half-eaten grapefruit on the counter and smell it. I would run my fingers through Izzy’s hair.
But I don’t have time. It’s Cupid Day, and Lindsay’s outside, and I have business to take care of. Today I’m going to save two lives: Juliet Sykes’s, and mine.
LET THERE BE LIGHT

“Beep, beep!” Lindsay shouts out her window as I scurry down the icy walkway, sucking the cold air into my lungs, loving the way it burns, loving even the bitter stink of Lindsay’s cigarette and the exhaust that’s clotting the air. “Hot mama! How much?”
“If you have to ask,” I say, sliding into the passenger seat, “you can’t afford it.”
She grins and hands me my coffee before I can reach for it. “Happy Cupid Day.”
“Happy Cupid Day,” I say, and we clink Styrofoam cups.
She too looks clearer to me than ever before. Lindsay, with her angel’s face and messy, dirty blond hair and chipped black nail polish and battered leather Dooney & Bourke bag that always has a film of tobacco and half-unwrapped Trident Original at the bottom. Lindsay, who hates being bored, always moving, always running. Lindsay, who once said—“It’s the world against us, babes”—drunk and looping her arms around our shoulders when we were out in the arboretum and really meaning it. Lindsay, mean and funny and ferocious and loyal and mine.
I lean over impulsively and kiss her cheek.
“Whoa, lesboing out much?” Lindsay shrugs a shoulder up to her cheek and wipes off my lip gloss. “Or just practicing for tonight?”
“Maybe both,” I say, and she laughs long and loud.
I take a sip of my coffee. It’s scalding and has to be the best coffee in all of Ridgeview, in all the world. God bless Dunkin’ Donuts.
Lindsay chatters about how many roses she expects to get and whether Marcy Posner will, as usual, break down and cry in the bathroom during fifth period because Justin Streamer dumped her three years ago on Cupid Day, thus permanently sealing her fate as only medium-popular, and I look out the window and watch Ridgeview go by in a blur of gray. I try to imagine how, in only a few months, the trees will shoot their tiny stems into the sky, the barest spray of flowers and green breathed over everything like a mist. And then, a few months after that, the whole town will be an explosion of green: so many trees and so much grass it will look like a painting still dripping wet. I can imagine it waiting under the surface of the world, like the slides just have to be flipped in the projector and summer will be here.
And there’s Elody, teetering down the lawn in her shoes with no jacket on and her arms wrapped around her chest. When I see her, radiant and alive, the relief is so huge I let out a tremendous shriek of laughter. Lindsay raises her eyebrows at me.
“She’ll freeze,” I gasp, by way of explanation.
Lindsay twirls her finger by her ear. “She’s totally cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”
“Did someone say Cocoa Puffs?” Elody says, getting into the car. “I’m starving.”
I twist around to look at her. It’s all I can do to keep from climbing into the backseat and jumping on her. I feel an overwhelming urge to touch her, make sure she’s really real and here and alive. In some ways she’s the bravest and most delicate of all of us. I wish I could somehow tell her this.
“What?” Elody scrunches up her nose at me, and I realize I’m staring. “What’s wrong? Do I have toothpaste on my face or something?”
“No,” I say, and again the laughter bubbles out of me, a surge of happiness and relief. I think; I could stay forever in this one moment. “You look beautiful.”
Lindsay giggles, checks Elody out in the rearview. “There are some bagels under your butt, beautiful.”
“Mmm, butt bagels.” Elody reaches into the bag and pulls out a bagel, half squashed, then makes a big deal of taking an enormous bite out of it. “Tastes like Victoria’s Secret.”
“Tastes like thong floss,” I say.
“Tastes like crack,” Lindsay says.
“Tastes like fart,” Elody says, and Lindsay spits coffee on the dashboard, and I start laughing and can’t stop, and all the way to school we’re thinking of flavors for butt bagels, and I’m thinking that this—my life, my friends—might be weird or screwy or imperfect or damaged or whatever, but it’s never seemed better to me.


As we’re pulling into the school’s parking lot, I scream for Lindsay to brake. She slams to a stop and Elody curses as coffee slops all over her.
“What the hell?” Lindsay puts a hand on her chest. “You scared me to death.”
“Oh—um. Sorry. I thought I saw Rob.” Up ahead I’m watching Sarah Grundel’s Chevrolet turn into Senior Alley fifteen seconds ahead of us. The parking space is a small thing, a detail, but today I’m not going to do anything wrong. I don’t want to take any chances. It’s like the game we used to play when we were little, where we had to avoid all the cracks in the sidewalk or else it meant we’d kill off our mothers. Even if you didn’t believe in it, you made sure you were stepping correctly, just in case. “Sorry. My bad.”
Lindsay rolls her eyes and steps on the gas again. “Please tell me you’re not going psycho stalker.”
“Leave her alone.” Elody leans forward and pats my shoulder. “She’s just nervous about tonight.”
I bite my lip to keep from giggling. If Lindsay and Elody had any clue at all about what was actually running through my head, they would probably have me committed. All morning, whenever I close my eyes, I keep imagining the feeling of Kent McFuller’s lips brushing against mine, as light as butterfly wings; of the crown of light surrounding his head and the way his arms felt when he was keeping me on my feet. I lean my head against the window. My smile is reflected back at me, growing wider and wider as Lindsay drives up and down Senior Alley, cursing because Sarah Grundel took the very last parking space.
Instead of following Elody and Lindsay into Main, I break off and head toward Building A, where the nurses’ office is, muttering an excuse about a headache. That’s where the roses are stored on Cupid Day, and I have some adjustments to make. Okay, so maybe lying isn’t 100 percent kosher on the Good Deeds Scale (especially lying to your best friends), but it’s for a very, very good cause.
The nurses’ office is long and narrow. Normally a double row of cots runs its length, but the cots have been cleared out and replaced by huge folding tables. The heavy curtains that usually keep the place movie theater–dark have all been drawn back, and the room is literally sparkling with light. Light bounces off the metal wall fixtures and zigzags crazily over the bright white walls. There are roses everywhere—overflowing their trays, stashed in corners, a few of them even scattered across the ground, petals trampled—and if you didn’t know that there was actually an organizing principle to all of it, and a purpose, you would just think that someone had set off some kind of a rose bomb.
Ms. Devane, who usually oversees Cupid Day, isn’t around, but there are three Cupids standing over one of the bins, giggling. They jump and scoot backward when I come in. They’ve been reading the notes, obviously. It’s strange to think about—those little scraps of paper, snippets of words, half compliments and backhanded compliments and broken promises and semi-wishes and almost expressions of what you really want to say: they never tell the full story, or even half of it. A room full of words that are nearly the truth but not quite, each note fluttering off the stem of its rose like a broken butterfly wing. None of the girls talks to me as I start walking the aisle, scanning the labels on the trays, looking for the S’s. I doubt that anybody else has ever barged in on the Rose Room, especially not a senior. Finally I find the tray labeled: St–Ta. There are five or six roses for Tamara Stugen and another half dozen for Andrew Svork and three for a Burt Swortney, who has the most unfortunate name I’ve heard of in a long time. And there it is: the single rose for Juliet Sykes with a note looped delicately around its stem. MAYBE NEXT YEAR, BUT PROBABLY NOT. Maybe next time, but probably not.
“Um…can I help you with something?” One of the girls inches forward a couple of feet. She’s twisting her hands together and looks absolutely petrified.
Juliet’s rose is thin and young, delicately tinged with pink. All of its petals are closed. It hasn’t bloomed yet.
“I need roses,” I say. “Lots of them.”
CORRECTIONS AND ADJUSTMENTS

I leave the Rose Room feeling keyed up and energetic, like I’ve just had three mocha lattes from Caffeine Rush in the mall. I replaced Juliet’s single rose with an enormous bouquet—I shelled out forty bucks for two dozen—and a note printed in block letters that says FROM YOUR SECRET ADMIRER. I only wish I could be around when she receives them. I’m positive it’s going to make her day. More than that: I’m positive it’s going to make things right. She’ll have even more roses than Lindsay Edgecombe. I start thinking about Lindsay’s eyes bugging out of her head when she sees that Juliet Sykes has beaten her for the title of Most Valograms this year, and I let out a huge snort of laughter right in the middle of AP American History. Everyone whips around and stares at me, but I don’t care. This must be what it’s like to do drugs: the feeling of coasting over everything, of everything looking new and fresh and lit up from inside. Except without the next-day guilt and the hangover. And possible prison sentence.
When Mr. Tierney distributes his pop quiz, I spend the whole twenty minutes drawing hearts and balloons around the questions, and when he comes around to collect the papers I give him a smile so bright he actually winces, like he’s not used to people looking happy.
Between classes I scour the hallways, looking for Kent. I’m not even sure what I’ll say to him when I see him. I can’t really say anything. He doesn’t know that we’ve spent the past two nights together, that both nights we were so close that if one of us had breathed we would have ended up kissing, that last night I think we might have. But I have this incredible urge just to be around him, to see him doing those familiar, Kent-like things: flipping his hair out of his eyes, smiling his lopsided smile, shuffling his ridiculous checkered sneakers, and tucking his hands into the over-long cuffs of his button-downs. My heart shoots into my throat every time I think I see his loping walk, or catch sight of some floppy brown hair on a boy—but it’s never him, and each time it isn’t, my heart does a reverse trajectory down into the very pit of my stomach.
I’m guaranteed to see him in calc, at least. After life skills, I stop in the bathroom, and spend the three minutes before bell primping in front of the mirror, ignoring the s’mores chattering on either side of me, and trying hard not to focus on the fact that I’ll come face-to-face with Mr. Daimler in less than five minutes. My stomach’s been performing its roller-coaster move so often—a combination of waiting for Juliet to get the roses, hoping to see Kent, and being disappointed—I’m not sure it can withstand forty-five minutes of having to watch Mr. Daimler smirk and wink and grin at the class. I will away the memory of his tongue inside my mouth, wet and sloppy.
“Such a slut.” One of the sophomores is coming out of a bathroom stall, shaking her head.
For one paranoid second I’m sure she’s talking about me—that somehow she has just read my mind—but then her friends explode with laughter, and one of them says, “I know. I hear she had sex with, like, three people on the basketball team,” and I realize they’re talking about Anna Cartullo. The stall door is swinging open and Lindsay’s scrawl is obvious. AC=WT. And underneath it: Go back to the trailer, ho.
“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” I blurt out, and all three girls instantly shut their mouths and stare at me.
“It’s true,” I say, feeling bolder now that I have such a captive audience. “You know how most rumors start?”
The girls shake their heads. They’re standing so close I think for a second their skulls are going to knock together.
“Because somebody feels like it.”
The bell rings then, and the sophomores scurry for the door like they’ve been let out of class. I stand there, willing my feet out the door and down the hall and down a flight of stairs and to the right and into calc, but nothing happens. Instead I’m fixated by the writing on the stall door, how Ally laughed and pointed to the copycat artists elsewhere. AC=WT. I’m pretty sure Lindsay wrote it on a whim—four measly letters, stupid, meaningless—probably to test out a new marker and see how much ink it had. It would have been better, almost, if she’d meant it. It would be better if she really hated Anna. Because it matters. It has mattered.
Without thinking about the fact that at this point I’m going to be late to calc, I dampen a strip of paper towel, just as an experiment, and begin scrubbing at the writing on the stall door. It doesn’t budge. But then, because I’ve started, I can’t stop. I look under the sink and find a dried-out Brillo pad and a can of Comet. I have to brace the door with one arm and lean hard with the other, scrubbing furiously, but after a little while the graffiti on the door has lightened, and after a little while longer you can hardly see the letters at all. I feel so good once I’ve gotten them off that first door, I go down the row and scrub the remaining two, even though my arm is aching and cramping and I’ve actually started to sweat a little bit in my tank top, mentally cursing Lindsay the whole time for her whims, for using permanent marker.
When all three stalls are finished I turn the doors out and look at their reflections in the mirror: blank, clean, featureless, the way stall doors should be. And for some reason it fills me with such pride and happiness I do a little dance right there, tapping my heels on the tile floor. It feels like I’ve reached back in time and corrected something. I haven’t felt so alive, so capable of doing things, in I don’t know how long.
By now I really have ruined my makeup. Little pricks of sweat are beading across my forehead and the bridge of my nose. I splash cold water on my face and dry off with a scratchy paper towel, starting all over again with the mascara and cream blush in Rose Petal that Lindsay and I both use religiously. My heart is looping crazily in my chest, partly from exhilaration, partly from nerves. Next period is lunch, and lunchtime is showtime.


“Will you stop doing that?” Elody leans forward and presses my fingers—which have been tapping—flat against the table. “You’re driving me crazy.”
“You’re not turning rexi, are you, Sam?” Lindsay gestures to my sandwich, which I’ve only nibbled around the edges. Rexi is her word for anorexic, although I’ve always thought it sounded like something you would name a dog.
“That’s what you get for ordering the mystery meat.” Ally makes a face at my roast beef, which I’ve ordered despite the fact that it’s borderline unacceptable. Things That Don’t Matter When You’ve Lived the Same Day Six Times and Died on at Least Two of Them: lunch meats and their relative coolness.
To my surprise Lindsay sticks up for me. “It’s all mystery meat, Al. The turkey tastes like shoe bottoms.”
“Nasty,” Elody agrees.
“I’ve always hated the turkey here,” Ally admits, and we all look at one another and burst out laughing.
It feels good to laugh, and the knot in my shoulders relaxes. Still, my fingers start up their involuntary drumming again, moving all on their own. I’m scanning every single person who enters the cafeteria, looking alternately for Kent—it’s like, what, he doesn’t eat now?—and Juliet’s shock of white blond hair. So far, nada.
“…to Juliet?”
I’ve been totally zoning out, thinking about Juliet, that for a second when I hear her name I think I’ve only imagined it—or worse, said it aloud myself. But then I see that Lindsay’s looking at Ally, a strange smile curling on her lips, and I know she must have just asked about whether Juliet got our rose. I totally forgot that Ally and Juliet have biology together, and I’m suddenly breathless. The room seems to tilt as I wait for Ally to respond. Oh my God, you guys, it was the weirdest thing…she got the biggest bouquet of flowers…she actually smiled.
Ally claps a hand over her mouth, her eyes bugging out. “Oh my God, you guys. I totally forgot to tell you—”
Hands clamp down over my eyes and I’m so wound up I let out a little squeal. The hands smell like grease and—of course—lemon balm. Lindsay, Ally, and Elody crack up as Rob pulls his hands off my eyes. When I look up at him he’s smiling, but there’s a tightness around his eyes and I can tell he’s unhappy.
“You avoiding me now?” he says, snapping the strap of my tank top like he’s five.
“Not exactly,” I say, trying to sound pleasant. “What do you mean?”
He jerks his head back toward the soda machine. “I’ve been standing over there for, like, fifteen minutes.” His voice is low; he’s clearly not happy to be having this conversation in front of my friends. “You haven’t looked over or come over or anything.”
You made me wait longer than that, I want to say, but obviously he wouldn’t get it. Besides, as I watch him shuffling his scuffed-up New Balance sneakers, I realize he’s not really so horrible. Yeah, he’s selfish and not-so-smart and drinks too much and flirts with other girls and can’t take off a bra for the life of him, not to mention what comes afterward, but someday he’ll grow up a little and make a girl really happy.
“I’m not ignoring you, Rob, it’s just…” I blow air out of my cheeks, stalling. I’ve never broken up with anybody before, and all the clichés keep running through my head. It’s not you, it’s me. (No—it is him. And me.) We’re better off friends. (We were never friends.) “Things between us have been…”
He squints at me like he’s trying to read in a different language. “You got my rose, right? Fifth period? You read the note?”
Like this will make it better. “Actually,” I say, trying to keep the impatience out of my voice, “I didn’t get your rose. I cut fifth.”
“Miss Kingston.” Across the table, Elody puts her hand to her chest and pretends to be shocked. “I am very disappointed in you.” More giggling.
I shoot her a look and turn back to Rob. “But that’s not the point. The point is—”
“I didn’t get a rose from you,” Rob says, and I can see him very slowly starting to put it together: something is wrong. When Rob thinks, you can almost see gears shifting together in his brain.
This morning I made one other change in the Rose Room. I stopped by the C’s and carefully rifled through Rob’s roses—skipping over the rose from Gabby Haynes, his ex-girlfriend, which said, When are we going to hang out like you promised, sexy?—and removed the one from me, with the little note I spent hours agonizing over.
Lindsay slaps at Rob’s arm, still thinking this is all a joke. “Be patient, Rob,” she says, winking at him. “Your rose is coming.”
“Patient?” Rob scowls as though the word tastes bad in his mouth. He crosses his arms and stares at me. “I get it. There is no rose, right? Did you forget or something?”
Something in his voice makes my friends finally get it. They go silent, staring back and forth from Rob to me, me to Rob.
Let me rephrase: someday he’ll make a sorority girl really happy, a blonde named Becky with D boobs who doesn’t mind getting man-handled like meat in a marinade.
“I didn’t forget—” I start to say, but he cuts me off.
His voice is calm, very low, but I can hear the anger running underneath it—hard and cold and cutting. “You make such a huge deal about Cupid Day. And then you don’t keep up your end of the bargain. Typical.”
Inside, my stomach is working like it’s trying to digest a whole cow, but I lift my chin, staring at him. “Typical? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think you know.” Rob passes a hand over his eyes and looks suddenly mean, reminding me of this trick my dad used to do where he would bring his hand down over his face, changing all of his features from happy to sad, then from sad back to happy, in an instant. “You don’t exactly have a perfect history of keeping your promises—”
“Psycho alert,” Lindsay shouts out, probably hoping to diffuse the tension.
It works, kind of. I stand up so quickly I knock over my chair. Rob looks at me, disgusted, then taps the chair with his toe—not hard, but enough so that it’s loud—and says, “Find me later.”
He stalks off into the cafeteria, but I’m not watching him anymore. I’m watching Juliet float, drift, skim into the room. Like she’s already dead and we’re just seeing her flickering back to life in patches, imperfectly.
She’s not carrying anything, either, not a single stem, just a lumpy brown paper bag as always. My disappointment is so heavy and real I can taste it, a bitter lump in the back of my throat.
“…And then one of the Cupids came in, and I swear, she had, like, three dozen flowers, all for Juliet.”
I whip around. “What did you say?”
Ally frowns a little at my tone of voice, but she repeats, “She just got, like, this huge bouquet of roses delivered to her. I’ve never seen so many roses.” She starts to giggle. “Maybe Psycho has a stalker.”
“I just don’t understand what happened to our rose,” Lindsay says, pouting. “I specifically told them third period, bio.”
“What did she do with them?” I interject.
Ally, Elody, and Lindsay stare at me. “Do with what?” Ally says.
“The roses. Did she—did she throw them out?”
“Why do you care?” Lindsay wrinkles her nose.
“I just—I don’t care. It’s just…” They’re all staring at me blankly. Elody has her mouth open and I can see mushed-up french fries in it. “I think it’s nice, okay? If someone sent her all those roses…I don’t know. I just think it’s nice.”
“She probably sent them herself,” Elody says, starting to giggle again.
I finally lose my temper. “Why? Why would you say that?”
Elody jerks back like I’ve hit her. “I’m just—it’s Juliet.”
“Yeah, exactly. It’s Juliet. So what’s the point? Nobody gives a shit about her. Nobody pays any attention.” I lean forward, pressing both hands on the table, my head pounding from anger and frustration. “What’s. The. Point?”
Alley frowns at me. “Is this because you’re upset about Rob?”
“Yeah.” Lindsay folds her arms. “What’s up with that anyway? Are you guys okay?”
“This isn’t about Rob,” I say, squeezing the words out through gritted teeth.
Elody jumps in. “It was a joke, Sam. Yesterday you said you were scared Juliet would bite you if you went too close. You said she probably had rabies.”
That’s what really breaks me—right then, when Elody says that. Or rather, when she reminds me that I said that: yesterday, six days ago, a whole different world ago. How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all? That’s the very worst thing about all of this, a feeling of desperate hopelessness, and I realize my question to Elody is the question that’s been tearing me up all along. What’s the point? If I’m dead—if I can’t change anything, if I can’t fix it—what’s the point?
“Sam’s right.” Lindsay winks at me, still not getting it. “It’s Cupid Day, you know? A time of love and forgiveness, even for the psychos of the world.” She raises a rose like it’s a glass of champagne. “To Juliet.”
Ally and Elody lift their roses, giggling. “To Juliet,” they say in unison.
“Sam?” Lindsay raises an eyebrow. “Care to toast with us?”
I spin around and head to the back of the senior section, to the door that leads directly to the parking lot. Lindsay shouts something, and Ally calls, “She didn’t throw them out, okay?”
I keep going anyway, threading past tables piled with food and roses and bags, everyone talking and laughing, oblivious. I get a pang in my stomach that feels like regret. Everything looks so stupidly, happily normal: everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who’s with who and did you hear.
On the horizon is the black line of clouds, just sitting there, a curtain about to be closed. I scan the parking lot, looking for Juliet, bouncing up and down on my toes to keep warm. Music blares from a car in Senior Alley and I recognize Krista Murphy’s silver Taurus gun up toward the exit. Otherwise the parking lot is still. Juliet has melted away somewhere into the landscape of metal and pavement.
I take a breath and exhale a cloud, enjoying the sharp sting of the air on my throat. I’m almost relieved that Juliet is gone. I’m not sure exactly what I would have said to her. And she didn’t throw out the flowers, after all. That’s a good sign. I stand there for a second more, bouncing on my toes, thinking, Tonight’s the night I’m going to get free of this thing. Thinking of all the things I’m going to do more of in my life. Go up to Goose Point with Izzy, until she’s too old to stand it. Hang out with Elody one-on-one. Drive into New York and go to a Yankees game with Lindsay, and stuff my face with hot dogs and catcall all the players.
Kiss Kent. Really kiss him, slow and long, somewhere outside—maybe while it’s snowing. Maybe standing in the woods. He’ll lean forward and he’ll have little snowflakes on his eyelashes again and he’ll brush the hair away from my face and put a warm hand behind my neck, so warm it’s almost burning—
“Hey, Sam.” Kent’s voice.
I spin around with a squeak, tripping on my own feet. Just like with Juliet Sykes, I’m so lost in fantasy about Kent that his actual appearance seems like a dream or wishful thinking. He’s wearing an old corduroy blazer with patches sewn onto the elbows like a deranged—and adorable—English teacher. The corduroy looks soft and I get the urge to reach out and touch it, an urge that has nothing to do with my general sense of today and the preciousness of things.
Kent’s hands are buried in his pockets, and his shoulders are shrugged toward his ears like he’s trying to stay warm. “No calculus today?”
“Um…no.” I’ve been waiting to run into him all day, but now my mind is a blank.
“That’s too bad.” Kent grins at me, jogging on his feet. “You missed some roses.” He whips his bag over one shoulder and unzips it, pulling out the cream-and-pink-swirled rose with a gold note card fluttering from one end. “A few of them went back to the office, I think. But I—uh, I wanted to bring this one to you myself. It’s a little crushed. Sorry.”
“It’s not crushed,” I say quickly. “It’s beautiful.”
He bites the edge of his lip—the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. I think he might be nervous. His eyes are flitting over my face and then away, and each time they land on me it feels like the world is falling away and it’s just the two of us in the middle of a bright, green field.
“You didn’t miss anything in math,” he says, and I recognize a Kent McFuller babble coming on. “I mean, we went over some of the stuff from Wednesday’s homework because some people were, like, freaking out about the quiz on Monday. But mostly everyone was a little bit antsy, I think because of Cupid Day, and Daimler didn’t really care that—”
“Kent?”
He blinks and shuts up. “Yeah?”
“Did you send me this?” I hold up the rose. “I mean, is it from you?”
His smile gets so big it’s like a huge beam of sunshine. “I’ll never tell,” he says, winking.
I’ve unconsciously taken several steps toward him, so I can feel the heat coming off his body. I wonder what he would do if I pulled him to me right now, brushed my lips against his the way he did—the way I hope he did—last night. But even the idea sends a flurry of butterflies upward from my stomach, my whole body feeling quivery and uncertain.
At that moment I remember what Ally said to us on the first day, the day it all started: that if a group of butterflies takes off in Thailand it can cause rainstorms in New York. And I think of all the thousands of billions of steps and missteps and chances and coincidences that have brought me here, facing Kent, holding a pink-and-cream-swirled rose, and it feels like the biggest miracle in the world.
“Thank you,” I blurt out, and quickly add, “you know…for bringing me this.”
He ducks his head, looking pleased and embarrassed. “No problem.”
“I, um, hear you’re having a party tonight?” I’m mentally kicking myself for sounding so lame. In my head, this played out so much easier. In my head, he would lean down and do the thing with his lips again, the soft fluttery thing. I’m desperate to make it all go right again, desperate to get back to that feeling I had last night—we had last night, he must have felt it—but I’m afraid that anything I say could screw it up. A temporary sadness for what I’ve lost overwhelms me. Somewhere in the endless spinning of eternity that one, tiny, fraction of a second where our lips met is lost forever.
“Yeah.” His face lights up. “Parents out of town, you know. Are you coming?”
“Definitely,” I say, so forcefully he looks kind of startled. “I mean,” I continue at a normal volume, “it’s going to be the place to be, right?”
“Let’s hope so.” Kent’s voice is slow and warm, like syrup, and I wish I could close my eyes and just listen to it. “I got two kegs.” He twirls his finger in the air like, whoop-dee-doo.
“I would come anyway.” I mentally kick myself: what does that even mean?
Kent looks like he gets it, though, because he blushes. “Thanks,” he says. “I was hoping you would. I mean, I figured you would because you’re always at parties, you know, out and stuff, but I didn’t know if there was another party or something, or maybe you and your friends do something different on Fridays—”
“Kent?”
He does that adorable quick stop of his mouth. “Yeah?”
I lick my lips, unsure of how to say what I want to, squeezing my hands into fists.
“I—I have something to tell you.”
He puckers his forehead. Adorable—how did I not realize how adorable he is?—and not making it any easier.
Deep breaths, in and out. “It’s going to sound completely insane, but—”
“Yeah?” He leans even closer, until our lips are less than four inches apart. I can smell peppermint candy on his breath, and my head starts spinning wildly like it’s been turned into a gigantic merry-go-round.
“I, um, I—”
“Sam!”
Kent and I both instinctively take one step back as Lindsay shoulders her way out of the cafeteria door, my messenger bag and hers slung over one arm. I’m actually grateful for the interruption, since I was either about to confess that I died a few days ago or that I was falling for him.
Lindsay lumbers over, being really melodramatic about the fact that she’s carrying two bags, like they’re both made out of iron. “So are we going?”
“What?”
Her eyes flit momentarily over Kent, but other than that she doesn’t even acknowledge him. She plants herself almost directly in front of him like he’s not even there, like he’s not worth her time, and when Kent looks away and pretends not to notice I feel sick. I want to convey, somehow, that she isn’t me—that I know he’s worth my time. He’s better than my time.
“Are we going to The Country’s Best Yogurt or what?” She puts a hand on her stomach and makes a face. “I swear to God, those fries gave me bloat that can only be solved by chemical deliciousness.”
Kent gives me a quick nod and starts to walk away, no good-bye, no nothing, just trying to get out of there as fast as he can.
I duck around Lindsay and call out, “Bye, Kent! See you later!”
He turns around quickly, surprised, and gives me a huge smile. “Later, Sam.” He touches his head, a salute, like one of those guys in an old black-and-white movie, and then he lopes off back into Main.
Lindsay watches him for a minute, then looks at me and narrows her eyes. “What’s up with that? Kent stalk you into submission yet?”
“Maybe,” I say, because I don’t care what Lindsay thinks. I’m buzzing from his smile and being so close to him. I feel light and invincible, the best kind of tipsy.
She stares at me for one beat longer and then just shrugs. “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a brick through the window.” Then she slips her arm through mine. “Yogurt?”
And that, for all her million and one faults, is why I love Lindsay Edgecombe.
THE ROOT AND BUD

“Come on, Sam.” Lindsay’s looking up at Kent’s house greedily, like it’s made out of chocolate. “Your face looks fine.”
I’m checking my makeup for the fiftieth time in the flip-down mirror. I put a final slick of lip gloss on and fish a gummy piece of mascara from the corner of my eyelashes, practicing the speech I’ve rehearsed in my head. Listen, Kent, this may sound random, but I was wondering if you, you know, wanted to hang out sometime….
“I don’t get it.” Ally leans forward from the backseat, her Burberry puffy jacket crackling. “If you’re not going to do it with Rob, what are you freaking out about?”
“I’m not freaking out,” I say. Despite the fact that I’ve put on cream blush and moisturizer with a slight tint, I look vampire-pale.
“You’re freaking out,” Lindsay, Elody, and Ally say at the same time, and then start laughing.
“Sure you don’t want a shot?” Ally pokes my shoulder with the vodka bottle.
I shake my head. “I’m good.” I’m too nervous to drink, weirdly. Besides, this is the first day of my new beginning. From now on I’m going to do things right. I’m going to be a different person, a good person. I’m going to be the kind of person who would be remembered well, not just remembered. I’ve been repeating this over and over, and just the idea of it is giving me strength, something solid I can hold on to, a lifeline.
It’s helping me beat back the fear and the buzzing sense somewhere deep inside me that I’ve forgotten to do something, that something’s off.
Lindsay puts her arms around me and plants a kiss on my cheek. Her breath smells like vodka and Tic Tacs. “Our very own designated driver,” she says. “I feel like an after-school special.”
“You are an after-school special,” Elody says. “The warning kind.”
“You should talk, slutsky,” Lindsay says, turning around to peg Elody with a tube of lip gloss. Elody catches it and squeals triumphantly, then dabs some on her lips.
“Well, I’m the freezing kind,” Ally says. “Can we go in, please?”
“Madame?” Lindsay turns to me, flourishing her hand and bowing slightly.
“All right. Let’s do it.” I keep on running lines in my head: You know, catch a movie, or go get something to eat or whatever…I know it’s been a couple of years since we really talked….
The party is loud, a giant roar. Maybe it’s because I’m sober, but everyone looks ridiculously packed together, hot and uncomfortable, and for the first time in a long time, I feel shy walking in, like people are staring at me. I keep my mind on what I’m here to do: find Kent.
“Crazy.” Lindsay leans forward and circles her hand in the air, gesturing to all the people smashed together, moving an inch at a time, like they’re all connected by an invisible rope.
We push our way upstairs. Everyone’s eyes look bright, like dolls’ eyes, from alcohol and maybe other stuff. It’s kind of creepy, actually. Even though I’ve been in school with all these people forever, they look different, unfamiliar, and when they smile at me I just see teeth everywhere, like piranhas getting ready to eat something. I feel like a curtain has dropped away and I’m seeing people for who they really are, different and sharp and unknowable. For the first time in days, I think about the dream I was having for a while, where I’m walking through a party and everyone looks familiar except for one thing, something off. I wonder if the real point of that dream was not that other people were transforming, but that I was. Lindsay keeps one finger jabbed into the small of my back, encouraging me to keep moving, and I’m glad for it. That little point of connection gives me courage.
I push my way into the first room at the top of the stairs, one of the biggest, and my heart drops all the way into my stomach: Kent. He’s standing in the corner talking to Phoebe Rifer, and instantly my mind goes fuzzy, a big useless snowstorm. My mouth feels like it’s stuffed with cotton and I totally regret not taking at least one shot, just so I won’t be so aware of how weird and tall and awkward I feel, like I’m Alice in Wonderland and have gotten too big for the room.
I whirl around to say something to Lindsay—I don’t know what, but I need to be talking to someone, not just standing there gaping like some kind of overgrown vegetable—but she’s vanished. Of course. She must have gone to find Patrick. I ball my hands into fists and close my eyes. That means any second now, in three, two, one…
“Sam.” Rob doesn’t put his arms around me, and when I turn around, he’s looking down his nose at me like I smell. It’s insane, but I’ve actually forgotten he was going to be at the party. I haven’t been thinking about him at all. “I didn’t think you were going to show.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I fold my arms across my chest after Rob flicks his eyes not so subtly down to my boobs.
“You were acting all crazy today.” There it is: the slur coming out. “So what? Are you going to apologize?” He grins, lazy and sloppy. “We can figure out a way for you to make it up to me.”
Anger bubbles up inside of me. He’s looking me up and down like his eyes are fingers and he’s trying to touch all of me at once. I can’t believe how many nights I spent on his basement couch, letting him slobber on me. Years and years of fantasy fall away in that one second.
“Oh, yeah?” I’m struggling to control my temper, but I can’t keep the edge out of my voice. Fortunately, Rob’s too drunk to notice. “I’d like that. To make it up to you, I mean.”
“Yeah?” Rob’s face lights up and he takes a step closer to me, wraps his arms around my waist. I shudder inwardly but force myself to stay put.
“Hmmm.” I dance my fingers up his chest, sneaking a glance at Kent, who’s still talking to Phoebe. I’m momentarily distracted—Phoebe has the personality of a freaking noodle, for God’s sake—but I snap my eyes back to Rob’s face and force myself to flirt. “I think we need a little one-on-one time, don’t you?”
“Definitely.” Rob lurches a little to one side. “What were you thinking?”
I reach up on my tiptoes so I’m whispering in his ear. “There’s a bedroom on this floor. Bumper stickers all over the door. Go inside and wait for me. Wait for me naked.” I pull away, giving him my sexiest smile. “And I promise to give you the best apology ever.”
Rob’s eyes are nearly bugging out of his head. “Now?”
“Now.”
He detaches himself from me and takes a stumbling step in the direction of the hallway, then something occurs to him and he spins around. “You’ll be there soon, right?”
This time there’s nothing forced about my smile. “Five minutes,” I say, holding up my right hand with my fingers splayed. “I promise.”
When I turn away from Rob it’s a struggle to keep from bursting out laughing, and all the nervousness I feel about talking to Kent dissipates. I’m ready to march right up to him and shove my tongue down his throat if I have to.
Except that he’s gone.
“Shit,” I mutter.
“That’s no way for a lady to talk.” Ally comes up behind me, raising her eyebrows as she takes a swig from the bottle. “What’s wrong with you? Attack of the Cokran Crisis?”
“Something like that.” I rub my forehead. “Have you, um, seen Kent McFuller?”
Ally squints at me. “Who?”
“Kent. McFuller,” I say a little louder, and two sophomores whip around and stare at me. I stare right back until they look away.
“The host with the most.” Ally raises her bottle. “Why, did you break something already? It’s a pretty good party, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, good party.” I try not to roll my eyes. She’s too tipsy to be useful. I gesture toward the back of the house. Lindsay and Elody should be in the back room, and Kent must be close. “Let’s circulate.”
Ally takes my arm. “Yes, ma’am.”
I spot Amy Weiss—probably the biggest gossip in the entire school—making out with Oren Talmadge in the doorway like she’s starving and his mouth is stuffed with Cheetos. I drag Ally toward them.
“You want to circulate with Amy Weiss?” Ally hisses in my ear. Freshman year Amy spread the rumor that Ally let Fred Dannon and two other boys touch her boobs behind the gym in exchange for a month’s worth of math homework. I’ve never been sure whether the story was true or not—Ally swears it wasn’t, Fred swears it was, and Lindsay guesses that Ally only let them look, not touch—but in any case Ally and Amy have been unofficial archnemeses since then.
“Pit stop.” I tap Amy’s shoulder and she extricates herself from Oren’s mouth.
“Hey, Sam.” Her face lights up. She glances quickly at Ally, then back to me, snaking her arms around Oren’s neck. Oren looks extremely confused, probably wondering what happened to the suckfish on his face. “Sorry. Am I blocking the hallway?”
“Just your butt is,” Ally says cheerfully. I squeeze her arm and she yelps. The last thing I need is for Amy and Ally to get into it.
“You know there’s a much better spot,” I say, “if you and Oren want…you know, more privacy.”
“We want privacy,” Oren pipes up.
I smile at him. “Open bedroom. Bumper stickers on the door. Extra-soft bed.” I raise my fingers to my lips, blow a kiss to Amy. “Have fun.”
“What was that about?” Ally explodes as soon as we’re out of earshot. “Since when are you and Amy BFF?”
“Long story.” I’m feeling good, powerful, and in control. Things are turning out the way they should. I put my hand on the door to Kent’s room as I pass it. Sorry, Rob.
Ally and I weave through the hallway. I’m scanning the crowd for Kent, ducking into various side rooms, getting more and more frustrated when I don’t see him.
We hear someone scream and then there’s an explosion of laughter. For a moment my heart stops and I think, It can’t be, not tonight, not again, not Juliet, but then I hear Oren yell, “Dude, pull your pants up, for God’s sake.” Ally pokes her head out of the doorway of the room we’re in and looks back in the direction of Kent’s room. Her eyes get so big and round she looks like a cartoon character.
“Um, Sam? You might want to see this.”
I peek out into the hallway. Rob is booking it toward the stairs—or trying to, at least. It’s a little hard for him to move quickly since he’s (a) absolutely surrounded by people gaping at him and (b) more than a little unsteady on his feet—wearing nothing but his boxer shorts and his New Balance sneakers with mismatched socks. And his hat, of course. He’s clutching the rest of his clothes in front of his crotch and keeps barking at people, “What the hell are you looking at?”
I would feel bad for him if it weren’t for the sneakers. Like what, he couldn’t be bothered to take them off? He was too busy planning his method of attack on my bra or something? Plus, when he’s almost at the stairs, he lurches accidentally into a sophomore, but instead of pulling away he wraps her in a drunken hug. I can’t hear what he says, but when she untangles herself I can see she’s giggling, like getting mauled by a half-naked, sweaty senior who’s blitzed out of his mind is the best thing that’s happened to her all day.
“Yup,” I say to Ally. “We’re definitely broken up. It’s official.”
She’s looking at me strangely. “Kent.”
My heart flutters. “What?”
“It’s Kent.”
My brain taps out again. She knows. It’s obvious that I’ve been completely obsessing over him; maybe Lindsay said something after she found us together outside the cafeteria. “I—the Rob thing has nothing to do with—”
Ally shakes her head, jabs a finger over my shoulder. “Kent. Behind you. Weren’t you looking for him earlier?”
Relief washes over me. She doesn’t know. Then a tiny twinge of disappointment too. She doesn’t know because there’s nothing to know. He doesn’t even know. I spin around and search the hall for him.
“In there.” Ally points to a door ten feet down the hall. From our angle it’s impossible to see more than a few feet into the room, which, from the huge desk blocking over half of the doorway, looks to be a storage space or a study. People are flowing in and out.
“Come on.” I haul Ally off again, but she breaks free.
“I’m going to go find Lindsay.” She’s clearly tired of whatever mission I’m on. I nod and she scoots off toward the back room, using the vodka bottle like a cattle prod, poking people out of her way. A hand clamps down on my arm and I jump.
I turn around: Bridget McGuire and Alex Liment.
“You have Mrs. Harbor for English, right?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer before launching into her spiel. “Do you know if she handed out the essay assignments for Macbeth? Alex missed. Doctor’s appointment.”
Because I didn’t go with Lindsay for frozen yogurt after all—something was tugging at me, making me want to stay close to school, to the center of things—I’d almost forgotten about Bridget and Anna and Alex. And now the look on Alex’s face—the little, crooked smile that used to creep onto Rob’s face whenever he’d successfully gotten an extension from one of his teachers for some completely fabricated reason—makes me want to smack him. I think of Anna with her coal-black eye makeup and her improvised lunchroom on the floor of the abandoned bathroom. Even Bridget isn’t so bad. Annoying, yes, but pretty and nice and the type of person who probably spends her free time volunteering with sick children.
I can’t take it. I can’t let him get away with it.
Bridget’s still babbling about Alex’s mom being a health nut. I interrupt her. “Does anybody smell Chinese food?”
Bridget wrinkles her nose, clearly disappointed that I haven’t been listening. “Chinese food?”
I make a big show of sniffing. “Yeah. Like, like”—I stare directly at Alex—“like a big bowl of orange beef.”
His smile droops a little, but he shrugs and says, “I don’t smell anything.”
“Oh my God.” Bridget cups a hand in front of her mouth. “It’s not my breath, is it? I totally had Chinese food last night.”
I keep staring at Alex. “What’s wrong with you?” I ask, not even bothering to keep the edge out of my voice.
He blinks. “What?”
Bridget looks confused, and for a moment the three of us stand there, not saying anything. Alex and I have locked eyes, and Bridget is looking back and forth between us so rapidly I’m worried her neck’s going to snap off.
Then I smile. “You know, health-wise. Why did you have to go to the doctor?”
Alex relaxes visibly. “No big deal. My mom wanted me to get some weird shot. And you know, just a general checkup and stuff.”
“Mmm-hmmm. I hope they were thorough.” I shoot a pointed glance at his crotch. Fortunately Bridget is staring at him, watching him turn red, and doesn’t see.
“Um. Y-yeah. Pretty much.” He squints at me like he’s just noticed me for the first time.
“I’ve been looking for a doctor,” I breeze on. I feel bad for Bridget, but at the same time, she deserves to know what her lame excuse for a boyfriend is up to. “It’s so hard to find a good one, you know? Especially one that doubles as a restaurant with a $4.99 lunch special. That’s rare.”
“What are you talking about?” Bridget’s voice is a squeak. She whips back to Alex. “What is she talking about?”
A muscle is ticking in Alex’s jaw. I can tell he wants to curse me out but knows that would make it worse, so he just stands there glaring.
I put my hand on Bridget’s arm. “I’m sorry, Bridget. But your boyfriend is really a slimeball.”
“What is she talking about?”
Bridget’s voice shoots up another octave, and as I walk away I hear Alex start trying to calm her down, no doubt feeding her lies as quickly as he can come up with them. I should feel good about what I’ve done—he deserves it, after all, and in a weird way I’m only setting things right—but as soon as I walk away I feel strangely deflated. The feeling of control vanishes and in its place comes a tingly feeling of anxiety. I flip back through the day’s events like I’m scrolling down a computer screen, trying to find some lapse, something I’ve forgotten to do or say. Maybe I should have gone to Juliet’s house earlier, to check up on her. Then again, I’m not really sure what I would have said. Hi. Can you verify for me that you’re not going to throw yourself in front of any cars tonight? That would be great. No explosives, either. This is my life you’re playing with.
The music’s so loud, the notes are hardly distinguishable from one another. I fantasize about taking Kent’s hand and pulling him away somewhere quiet and dark. The room downstairs, maybe, or the woods, or someplace farther. Maybe we’ll just get in the car and drive.
“Sam! Sam!”
I look up. In the back room Lindsay’s climbed onto one of the couches, waving at me over the tide of bobbing heads. Ally’s next to her, and several feet beyond them I see Elody whispering something to Steve Dough.
I hesitate, a sense of hopelessness washing over me. It’s ridiculous for me to talk to Kent. I have no words to describe how wrong I’ve been about him, about Rob, about everyone. I don’t think I can explain to him how I’ve been changing. And maybe it’s all a lie, anyway. Maybe it’s impossible to change.
In that moment, while I’m teetering between two doorways, the people around me get all quiet and hushed, faces growing slack. Up on the couch Lindsay falters, her hand flapping uselessly to her side. Next to her, Ally begins opening and shutting her mouth like a fish. The buzzing is all through my body now, like the hum of an electrical wire.
And there she is, marching down the hallway. After all that: Juliet Sykes on a mission.
In a second the despair, the hopelessness, the sense of forgetting things or missing the point somehow, all gets transformed into rage. When she sees Lindsay she stops and opens her mouth, going straight into her “you’re a bitch” routine, but I don’t even let the first word escape from her mouth before I’m charging forward, grabbing her arm, and half dragging her backward down the hallway. She’s too surprised to fight me.
I pull her into the nearest bathroom—“Out,” I order two girls who are primping in front of the mirror—and slam the door and lock it. When I turn around to face her she’s staring at me like I’m the psychopath.
“What are you doing?”
She must misunderstand my question. “It’s a party,” she says with soft insistence. When she’s not busy freaking out and calling me a bitch she has a nice voice, musical like Elody’s. “I’m allowed to be here like everybody else.”
“No.” I shake my head, pressing fingers to my temples to keep them from pounding. “I mean, what are you really doing? Why are you here?”
Her eyes flutter to the doorknob behind me. I move over so it’s wedged into my lower back. If she wants to get out, she’ll have to move me out of the way.
Apparently she doesn’t like her chances, because she takes a long, slow breath. “I came to tell you something. You, and Lindsay, and Elody, and Ally.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“You’re a bitch,” she says quietly, not like an accusation at all, more like something she’s sorry about.
At the same time she says it, I say it with her. “I’m a bitch.”
She stares at me.
“Listen, Juliet”—I rake my hands through my hair—“I know we haven’t always been nice to you or whatever. And I really feel bad about it—I do.” I try to gauge what she’s thinking, but it’s like something has shut down behind her eyes, a button switching off, and she just stands there staring at me dully. I rush on, “The thing is, we never really meant anything by it, you know? I don’t think I—we—really thought about it. It’s just the kind of thing that happens. People used to make fun of me all the time.” She’s making me nervous, just staring like that, and I lick my lips. “All the time. And, like, I don’t think it’s really because people are mean or bad or whatever. I just think…I just think…” I’m fighting to find the words. Memories are colliding in my head: the sound of people singing as I walked down the hall, the smell of ice cream on Lindsay’s breath the day we threw Beth’s tampons out the window, riding a horse through a blur of trees. “I just think that people don’t think. They don’t know. We—I—didn’t know.”
I feel pretty proud of myself for getting all of that out. But Juliet hasn’t moved or smiled or even freaked out. She’s so still she could be carved out of stone. Finally a little tremor goes through her, a personal earthquake, and her eyes seem to focus on me.
“You haven’t always been that nice to me?” she says dully, and my stomach sinks. She didn’t hear a word I said.
“I—yeah. And I’m sorry about that.”
Her eyelids flutter. “In seventh grade you and Lindsay stole all my clothes from the locker room so I had to walk around in my sweaty gym clothes for the rest of the day. Then you called me Stinky Sykes.”
“I—I’m sorry. I don’t remember that.” The way she’s staring at me is awful, like she’s seeing in and through and beyond me to some void.
“That was before you came up with Psycho, of course.” Juliet’s voice has lost its musical quality. It’s completely toneless. She raises her arm and mimes slashing a knife through the air, emitting a series of high-pitched shrieks that send chills up and down my arms, and for a moment I think maybe she is crazy. Then she drops her arm. “Real funny. Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est. Catchy.”
“People used to tell this really dumb joke about me. Kind of sing it when I walked by. What’s red and white and weird all over…” I’m hoping to make her laugh or twitch or something, but she just keeps staring at me with that dumb, animal look on her face, a blank.
“I never sang it,” she says, and then, like she’s forced to keep reciting everything we ever did, continues. “You took pictures of me when I was showering.”
“That was Lindsay,” I say automatically, getting more and more uncomfortable. If she would get angry, it would be one thing—but it’s like she’s not even seeing me, like she’s just reading off a list she’s looked at a million times.
“You posted the pictures all over the school. Where teachers could see.”
“We took them down in, like, an hour.” I’m ashamed as soon as I say the words. As though the fact that we took them down makes it better.
“You hacked into my Yahoo account. You published my—my private emails.”
“That wasn’t us,” I say quickly, feeling a rush of relief that this, at least, was not our fault. To this day I’m not sure who did hack her account, and circulate email exchanges between Juliet and some guy named Path2Pain118 she’d obviously met in a chat room. There were dozens of emails, all of them long rants about how much high school sucked and how awful everybody was. The hacker had forwarded the emails to almost everyone in school after giving them a new subject line: Future School Shooters of America. I shiver, thinking about how easy it is to be totally wrong about people—to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it’s the effect or vice versa. And though I’ve now been at Kent’s house five times in six days I feel disoriented, confused by the bright bathroom light and Juliet’s impassive face and the sounds of the party coming through the door.
Juliet keeps going on like I didn’t even speak. “You started the rumor that I lost my virginity for a pack of cigarettes.”
Ally. That was Ally. I can’t say it. It doesn’t matter, anyway. It was us. It was all of us. Everyone who repeated the story and whispered “slut” and made a smoker’s hacking cough whenever she walked by.
“I don’t even smoke.” She says this with a smile, like this is the funniest thing in the world. Like this, her whole life, is one big joke.
“Juliet—”
“My sister heard that rumor. She told my parents. I—” Finally she loses it a little, balling her hands into fists and squeezing them against her thighs. “I’ve never even kissed anyone.” This comes out as a fierce whisper—a confession—and the intensity of it, the sadness and regret, makes a black well of anger break somewhere inside of me.
“I know, okay? I know we did horrible things. I know we’ve been shitty and things are bad and—” I break off, the words getting tangled in my throat. I’m on the verge of tears, full of blind fury that hits me like a cloud, blots out everything but a single burning point of frustration: I can’t make her see, can’t make her see that I’m trying to make things right. I feel like I’m watching both of our lives swirl down the drain, mine and hers, wrapped around each other. “What I’m saying is, I want to make it up to you. I’m trying to apologize. Things—things are going to get better.”
She presses her lips together, staring at me mute and white-faced, and I have to tense every muscle in my arms to keep from reaching out and grabbing her shoulders, shaking her.
“I mean…” I’m going on blindly now, groping, grabbing at words and ideas as they come buzzing up to me through my anger, trying to get through to her. “You got those roses today, right? Like a whole bunch of them?”
An enormous shudder goes through her. And now a light snaps on in her eyes again, but instead of gratitude, there’s hatred burning there.
“I knew it. I knew it was you.” Her voice is so full of rage and pain I rear back like she’s hit me. “What was that? Another one of your little jokes?”
Her reaction is so unexpected it takes me a few seconds to think of a response. “What? No. That wasn’t—”
“Poor little Psycho.” Juliet narrows her eyes, almost hissing at me. “No friends. No roses. Let’s screw with her one more time.”
“I didn’t want to screw with you.” I have no idea what’s happening or how things have gone so badly wrong. “It was supposed to be nice.”
I don’t know that she even hears me. She leans closer. “So what was the plan? What were you going to do with that ‘secret admirer’ crap? Bribe one of your friends so he’d pretend to like me? Ask me out? Maybe even to go to prom? And then—what? On the night that we’re supposed to go, he just won’t show up? And it will be so goddamned funny if I freak out, if I go crazy, if I cry or break down in the hallways when I see him in school.” She jerks away. “Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re repeating yourselves. Been there, done that. Eighth grade. Spring Fling. Andrew Roberts.”
She slumps forward as though her speech has exhausted her, the anger and the burning light disappearing simultaneously, all the expression going out of her face, her hands uncurling.
“Or maybe you didn’t have a plan,” she says, this time quietly, almost sweetly. “Maybe there was no point to it at all. Maybe you just wanted to remind me that I have nobody, no friends, no secret admirers. ‘Maybe next year, but probably not,’ right?” She smiles at me again, and it’s much worse than her anger.
By this point I’m so frustrated and bewildered I have to fight back tears. “I swear, Juliet, that wasn’t the point. I just—I thought it would be nice. I thought it would make you feel better.”
“Make me feel better?” She repeats the words as though she’s never heard them before, and now her eyes have a dreamy, faraway look. Every trace of anger and emotion is gone. She looks peaceful, even, and I’m struck by how beautiful she is—up close, just like a supermodel, with that ghostly pale skin and those huge blue eyes, the color of the sky very early in the morning.
“You don’t know me,” she says in little more than a whisper. “You never knew me. And you can’t make me better. Nobody can make me better.”
This reminds me of what I said to Kent only two days ago—I don’t think I can be fixed—but now I know I was wrong. Everyone can be fixed; it has to be that way, it’s the only thing that makes sense. I’m trying to figure out a way to tell Juliet this, to convince her of it, but very calmly, and with that floating grace she’s always had, she puts her hand on one of my arms and moves me gently but firmly out of the way, and I find myself stepping aside and letting her reach for the door handle. The tears are pushing at the back of my throat, and I’m still struggling for words, and the whole time it’s like her face is growing paler and paler, glowing almost, like the sheer white point of a flame; and I have this idea that I’m already seeing her sputter out, her life flickering in front of me, a TV on static.
She pauses with her hand on the door, staring directly in front of her.
“You know, I used to be friends with Lindsay.” She’s still speaking in that horrible, calm voice, as though she’s talking from a distance of miles and miles. “When we were younger we did everything together. I still have a friendship necklace she gave me, one of those hearts split down the middle. When you put them together the necklace spelled ‘Best Friends Forever.’”
I want to ask what happened, why they stopped being friends, but the words are stuck behind the lump in my throat. And I’m scared of interrupting. As long as Juliet’s talking to me, she’s safe.
“That was right before her parents got divorced.” Juliet shoots a quick glance in my direction, but her eyes seem to go directly over my face without actually registering it. “She was so sad all the time. I used to go to her house for sleepovers, and her parents would be arguing so badly we’d have to hide under her bed and stuff pillows everywhere to muffle the sound. She called it ‘building a fort.’ She was always like that, you know, always trying to make the best of things. But when she thought I was asleep, she would cry and cry and cry. She started having nightmares, too. Really bad ones. She’d wake up screaming in the middle of the night.”
Juliet’s staring at the door again, smiling a little. I wish I could walk back into her memories and see what she’s seeing, fix whatever is broken there. “She started to wet her bed again, you know? Because everything was so bad with her mom and dad. She was humiliated, of course. She swore me to secrecy—said she’d never speak to me again if I told anybody. We used to wake up in the morning and some of the pillows in the fort would be damp. I would pretend not to notice. One morning I came into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and she was sitting in the tub, scrubbing a pillow with so much bleach it made my eyes sting. She must have been scrubbing for half an hour. The pillow was all white-splotched and ruined, and her fingers were raw and red. They were burned, almost. But it’s like she couldn’t even see it. She just wanted it to be clean.”
I close my eyes, feeling the floor sway underneath me, remembering coming into the bathroom of Rosalita’s and seeing Lindsay on her knees, the chunks of food in the toilet. The mixture of shame and anger and defiance on her face.
“One time the fighting got so bad we even ran away from her house. We were only seven or eight, but we walked all the way to my house. It was March and pretty cold. The plan was for Lindsay to move into my room. I wasn’t going to tell anyone, just keep her safe and bring her food. Mostly she wanted gummy bears and Snickers bars. She loved chocolate then, and candy. Anything sweet, really.”
Without meaning to, I let out a little, strangled sound. I don’t know if I can listen anymore. I have the feeling that this is it: this bathroom, this story. That this is the root and bud of it all, the beginning and the end.
But Juliet keeps going in that strange, measured tone, as though we have all the time in the world. “Of course it didn’t work. We got upstairs and into the bedroom, but then we started arguing about who should sleep in the little trundle bed and who should get the big one, and my mom heard us. She was horrified that we’d walked all that way. She was screaming and crying that we could have been kidnapped or killed or whatever. I remember being really embarrassed.” Juliet turns her hands upward, stares at her palms. “It was nothing compared to Lindsay’s freak-out, though, when my mom said she had to go home. I’ve never heard anyone scream that loudly.”
She’s silent for so long I think she’s done. Her words keep buzzing in my head, flitting around and arranging themselves like clues in a crossword puzzle. She was always like that, you know, always trying to make the best of things…. She must have been scrubbing for half an hour…. Her fingers were raw and red. I feel like I’m on the verge of understanding something I’m not sure I want to know. The room feels tiny and stifling. There’s a crushing weight on my chest. I’m tempted to make a run for it, push past her into the party and go get a beer and forget about Juliet, forget about everything. But I’m rooted where I am. I can’t move. I keep seeing the endless darkness of my dream rising in front of me. I can’t go back to it.
“It’s funny when you think about it,” Juliet says. “We did everything together, Lindsay and me. We even joined Girl Scouts together. It was her idea. I didn’t want to do all that—cookies and campfires and stuff. We went away on a camping trip at the beginning of fifth grade. We slept in the same tent, of course.”
I watch Juliet’s hands. They’re trembling ever so slightly but so quickly you can barely see it, like the wings of a hummingbird. Out of the corner of her eye Juliet catches me looking, and she brings her hands down to her thighs, gracefully but with finality.
“You remember the name they gave me in fifth grade, right? The name Lindsay gave me? Mellow Yellow?” She shakes her head. “I used to dream that name, I heard it so often. Sometimes I forgot what my real name was.”
She turns to me and her face is radiant, almost glowing, gorgeous. “The funny thing is, it wasn’t even me. Lindsay was the one who wet her sleeping bag. In the morning the whole tent smelled. But when Ms. Bridges came in and asked what had happened Lindsay just pointed her finger at me and screamed, She did it. I’ll never forget her face when she screamed it—She did it! Terrified. Like I was a wild dog and I was going to bite her.”
I press back against the door, grateful for something to lean on. It makes perfect sense, of course. It all makes perfect sense now: Lindsay’s anger, the way she always held up her fingers in the shape of a cross to ward Juliet Sykes off. She doesn’t hate her. She’s afraid of her. Juliet Sykes, the keeper of Lindsay’s oldest, maybe her worst, secret.
And it all seems absurd now, the chance and randomness of it. One person shoots up and the other spirals downward—random and meaningless. As simple as being in the right place, or the wrong place, or however you want to look at it. As simple as getting a craving for Diet Pepsi one day at a pool party, and getting swept away; as simple as not saying no.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. My voice comes out hoarse from the effort of swallowing back tears.
Juliet shrugs. “She was my best friend, you know? She was always so sad back then.” Juliet makes a noise that could be a laugh or a whimper. “Besides,” she says more quietly, “I thought it would pass.”
“Juliet—” I start to say.
She shakes her shoulders like she’s brushing off the weight of everything, the conversation, the past. “It doesn’t matter now,” she says quickly, and just like that she snaps the door open and slips out.
“Juliet!”
There’s a huge clot of people standing by the door, and when I come out I’m pressed backward momentarily as two juniors scuffle for the bathroom, both of them yelling, drunk. “I was here first!” “No, I was!” “You just got here!” A few people give me dirty looks, and then Bridget McGuire charges past all of them, face red and blotchy and tear-streaked. When she sees me she sobs out, “You—” but she doesn’t finish her sentence, just swoops around the juniors and locks herself in the bathroom.
“Jesus Christ, not again,” someone yells.
“I’m going to pee my pants,” one of the juniors moans, crossing her legs and hopping up and down.
Alex Liment is right behind Bridget. He pushes up to the bathroom door and begins rapping on it, calling for her to come out. I still haven’t moved. I’m pressed up against the wall, penned in by people, paralyzed by how wrong everything is. I remember a story I once heard about drowning: that when you fall into cold water it’s not that you drown right away but that the cold disorients you and makes you think that down is up and up is down, so you may be swimming, swimming, swimming for your life in the wrong direction, all the way toward the bottom until you sink. That’s how I feel, as though everything has been turned around.
“You’re really unbelievable.”
I’m suddenly aware that Alex is talking to me. His lips are curled back, showing all his teeth.
“You know what you are?” He puts one hand on either side of my head so he’s blocking me in. I can see sweat on his forehead and smell weed and beer on his breath. “You, Samantha Kingston, are a bitch.”
Hearing that jolts me, wakes me up. I have to focus. Juliet is off somewhere in the woods, in the cold. She’s probably making for the road. I can still find her, talk to her, get her to see.
I put both hands on Alex’s chest and shove him. He stumbles backward.
“I’ve heard it before,” I say. “Trust me.”
I force my way through the hallway and am halfway down the stairs when someone calls my name. I stop dead so that the people behind me bump each other like dominoes and start cursing at me.
“Jesus Christ, what?” I whirl around and see Kent, who leapfrogs over the banister and swings down onto the stairs, nearly taking out Hanna Gordon.
“You came.” He lands two stairs above me, a little out of breath. His eyes are bright and happy. His hair is falling over his forehead, picking up light from the Christmas bulbs strung everywhere, bits of it the color of chocolate and some of it caramel. I have an almost uncontrollable urge to reach over and push it back behind his ears.
“I said I would, didn’t I?” There’s a dull pain unfurling in my stomach. All I wanted all night—all day—was to be standing this close to him. And now I have no time. “Listen, Kent—”
“I mean, I thought you were probably here when I saw Lindsay, et al. You guys usually travel in packs, you know? But then I was looking for you—” He stops himself, blushes. “I mean, not actively looking. Really just kind of perusing the crowd, you know, as I was walking around socializing. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you host. Socialize. So I was just keeping an eye out—”
“Kent.” My voice comes out sharp, mean, and I close my eyes just for a second, imagining what it felt like to lie with him in total darkness, imagining the touch of his hand on mine. It suddenly occurs to me how impossible all of this is—with me and him. When I open my eyes he’s just standing there, waiting, a little crease in his forehead: so adorable and normal, the kind of guy who deserves the kind of girl who wears cashmere sweaters and is really good at crossword puzzles, or plays the violin, or volunteers at soup kitchens. Someone nice and normal and honest. The pain in my stomach intensifies, as though something’s caught in there, snapping away at my insides. I could never be good enough for him. Even if I lived the same day into infinity, I could never be good enough.
“I’m sorry,” I force myself to say. “I—I can’t talk to you right now.”
“But—” He tucks his hands into the cuffs of his shirt, looking uncertain.
“I’m sorry.” It’s better, I almost say, but I figure there’s no point. I don’t look back, either, even though I can feel him watching me.
Outside I pull on my fleece, zipping it all the way up to my chin. The rain drives down my neck and spots my leggings immediately. At least tonight I’m wearing flats. I stick to the driveway. The pavement is icy and I have to reach out and brace myself against the cars as I pass. The cold tears at my lungs, and it’s so strange, but in the middle of all this I have the stupidest, simplest thought—I should really jog more—and as soon as I think it I almost come undone, torn with the dual desire to laugh and to cry. But the thought of Juliet crouching by Route 9, watching the cars whiz past, waiting for Lindsay, keeps me going.
Eventually the sounds of the party drop away, and then it’s silent except for the driving rain, like thousands of tiny shards of glass falling on the pavement, and my footsteps ringing out. It’s dark, too, and I have to slow down, moving from one car to the next with my hands, the metal so cold under my fingers it feels hot. When I find the Tank, hulking above all the others, I fish through my bag until my fingers close around cold metal and a rhinestone-encrusted key chain that reads BAD GIRL. Lindsay’s car keys. I blow air out of my cheeks. This, at least, is a good thing. There’s no way Lindsay can leave without me. Her car won’t be on the road tonight, no matter how long Juliet waits. Still, I lock and double-lock the doors.
Then the cars drop away, too, and I shuffle forward at a crawl, mentally cursing myself for not bringing a flashlight, cursing February 12, cursing Juliet Sykes. I see now that the roses were a stupid idea, an insult, even. I think of Juliet and Lindsay all those years ago in a tent, when Lindsay raised a finger and pointed, terrified, humiliated, and it all began. And for years Juliet kept Lindsay’s secret. I thought it would pass.
At the same time the more I think about it—the rain beating furiously—the angrier I get. This is my life: the whole big, sprawling mess of my life in all its possibilities—first kisses and last kisses and college and apartments and marriage and fights and apologies and happiness—brought to a point, a second, an edge of a second, razored off in that final moment by Juliet’s last act: her revenge against us, against me. The farther I get from the party, the more I think, No. It can’t happen this way. No matter what we did, it can’t happen this way.
Then the driveway opens up suddenly, and Route 9 is there, shining ahead of me like a river, liquid silver lit up by pools of light. I don’t even realize I’ve been holding my breath until I exhale and I’m gasping, grateful for the light.
I wipe the rain out of my eyes and turn left, scanning the edge of the woods for Juliet. A little part of me is hoping that talking to me did make her feel better—maybe she went home, after all, maybe it meant something. At the same time, the way that she spoke in that low, flat voice comes back to me, and I know that wherever she was in that bathroom, it wasn’t with me. She was lost somewhere, trapped in a fog, maybe of memories, maybe of all the things that could have happened differently.
A car roars behind me, making me jump. On the landing I lose my footing and go on hands and knees to the ice as the car speeds by, followed closely by a second car, its engine as loud as thunder. Then honking, waves of sound rolling toward me, getting louder and louder. I look up and see the headlights of a car bearing down on me. I try to move and can’t. I try to scream and can’t. I’m frozen, the headlights growing as big as moons, floating there. At the last second the car swerves a little, passing so close to me I can feel the heat of the engine and smell the exhaust and hear a line of music pumping from the radio. Light it, blaze it, tear it up. Then it’s gone, still honking, passing away into the night as the bass from the speakers grows dimmer and dimmer, a distant pulse.
My palms are cut up from the pavement, and my heart is pounding so quickly I’m pretty sure it’s going to leap out of my chest. Slowly, shaking, I stand up. Another car passes on the other side of the road, this one at a crawl, water from its tires pinwheeling in both directions.
And then, fifty feet ahead of me, I see a figure in white emerge from the woods, unfolding from a crouch like a long, pale flower. Juliet. I start going toward her, slowly now, trying to avoid the slick patches of dark ice. She stands there, perfectly still, like she doesn’t even feel the rain. At a certain point she even lifts up her arms, parallel to the ground, as though preparing to take a dive off the high board. There’s something beautiful and terrifying about seeing her in that position. It reminds me of when I was little and we would go to church on Christmas and Easter, and I was always afraid to look at the pulpit, where there was a wooden statue of Jesus mounted on the cross.
“Juliet!”
She doesn’t respond; I’m not sure if she doesn’t hear or is just ignoring me. I’m fifteen feet away, then ten. There’s a low rumbling behind me. I turn and see a big truck bearing down through the darkness. Again I have a random thought—he should totally have his license suspended, he’s going way too fast—and when I turn around again I see that Juliet is staring up the road, tensed, arms at her thighs, and she reminds me of something, but it takes me a second to realize what it is, just like it takes me a second to realize what’s going on—she looks like a dog about to go after a bird—and then everything clicks together, and as she begins to move, a white blur, I’m moving too, running as fast as I can and closing the distance between us as she’s sprinting out across the nearest lane. The truck blasts its horn, a sound so large it seems to fill the air with vibration, and then I slam into her with all my weight, and we roll, tumbling, backward into the woods. I’m screaming and she’s screaming and pain blooms in my shoulder. I roll over onto my back, the black branches overhead a thick net.
“What are you doing?” Juliet’s yelling, and when I sit up her face has finally lost its composure and is twisted with anger. “What the hell are you doing?”
“What am I doing?” My anger flares up too. “What are you doing? Jumping in front of random trucks—I thought the whole point was to wait for Lindsay—”
“Lindsay? Lindsay Edgecombe?” Juliet’s anger drops away and she looks completely confused. She brings her hands up to her head, squeezing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I’m suddenly uncertain. “I—I thought. You know, like this was your big revenge—”
Juliet laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Revenge?” She shakes her head, and again that veil seems to drop over her face. “Sorry, Sam. For once this isn’t about you.” She stands up, not bothering to wipe off the thick tracks of mud and leaves that are clinging to her. “Now please leave me alone.”
My head is spinning and I’m having trouble focusing on her, like we’re separated by miles instead of a few feet. The rain is coming down harder now, jagged pellets of it. Little snatches of things are whirling around in my head: Lindsay patting the hood of the Tank proudly, saying, “I could go head-to-head with an eighteen-wheeler and never feel it” the owner of Dunkin’ Donuts calling out, “That’s not a car, it’s a truck” the randomness of things, the way everything can change in a second; the right place at the right time, or at the wrong time; time; that enormous truck coming at us, its big metal grill shining like teeth, the impression of lights and hugeness. The only thing you can see: headlights, size, a sense of power. Not revenge. Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.
“But why…?” I struggle to my feet. “Why did you come here? What was the point?”
She doesn’t look at me, but she shrugs slightly. “There was no point, really. I just wanted to say it. I was always afraid to say it before—what I really thought of you. I’m not afraid anymore. Of you, of anybody, of anything. I’m not even afraid of—” She breaks off, but I know what she was going to say. Not even afraid of dying.
But I know what she’s saying isn’t totally true. Her decision to come to the party was more than that. Things are clicking into place, making a horrible kind of sense: she needed us here, needed that final push. I close my eyes against the memory of a wet and stumbling Juliet being shoved from person to person like a pinball. And tonight, I guess, she just needed to tell her story—needed to remember how bad things have been. I wonder if the day when we all slept over at Lindsay’s—the day that things ended differently for her, the day that they ended alone, with a gun—it took her longer to work up the courage. If she came to the party, unnoticed, ignored, and found she didn’t have the strength to go through with it. If later that night she sat and stared at the gun in her lap, and conjured up the faces of all the people who’d tormented her over the years.
Vicky Hallinan’s face hovers in the darkness suddenly, twisted into a grimace, and I snap my eyes open. Maybe before you die it’s your ghosts that you see.
“This isn’t the way,” I say weakly, feeling like the rain has seeped into my brain and made it soggy and useless. I can’t remember anything I was planning to say to her. I repeat it a little louder. “This isn’t the way.”
“Please,” Juliet says quietly. “I just want to be alone.”
“What about your family?” I say, my voice rising hysterically as I realize I’m losing her again, losing my chance. “What about your sister?”
She doesn’t answer me. She’s staring at the road, still. The rain has soaked her shirt so I can see her shoulder blades jutting out of her back like the wings of a baby bird, and I think of the moment when Ally’s mom came into the den and told us, “Juliet Sykes shot herself,” and I thought it was so wrong—that she, of all people, should have jumped or leaped or fallen through the sky. I again have the fantasy I did then, that she’ll suddenly sprout wings and go soaring up into the air, out of harm’s way.
The road has been unusually clear of traffic, but now from both directions I make out the growl of engines. Loud ones. Big ones.
“Juliet.” I take a step forward and grab her arm tightly. “I can’t let you do this.”
She turns to me, staring at me with eyes so empty it takes my breath away. They’re pools, liquid, nothing. Looking at her reminds me of that stitched-together mask with the holes cut away for eyes: monstrous, deformed, patched together, with eyes that look into and look out at nothing. I’m so startled I loosen my grip. There’s a roaring in my ears, and I dimly have a sense of cars, but I’m transfixed. I can’t stop staring at her.
“It’s too late,” she says, and in that second when I’m not holding on tightly enough she wrenches away from me and hurtles onto the road just as two vans converge, about to pass each other, and all I see is the shine of metal and something white suddenly launched into the air, and for a second I feel an overwhelming sense of joy, and I think she’s done it, she’s flying, and time seems to stop with her glittering in the air like a beautiful bird. But then time resumes, and the air doesn’t hold her, and as she drops there’s a piercing sound splitting the darkness and again it takes me a long time to realize it’s me, screaming.
GHOSTS AND HEAVEN

An hour and a half later I’m parked in Lindsay’s driveway, and the two of us are watching the rain turn to snow, watching the world go quiet as, in a moment, thousands of raindrops seem to freeze in the air and come drifting silently to earth. I’ve already dropped off Elody and Ally. On the way home from the party nobody spoke. Elody leaned back against the seat, pretending to sleep, but at one point I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the glitter of her eyes, watching me.
“Jesus. What a night.” Lindsay leans her forehead on the window. “So crazy, you know? I never would have thought…I mean, she was obviously screwed up, but I didn’t ever think she would…” She shivers, shoots a look at me. “And you were there.”
When the police came, and the ambulances—followed by all the people at Kent’s party, drifting through the woods, quiet, suddenly sober, attracted by the sound of the sirens like moths to a flame—they found me standing by the side of the road, still staring. I’d even been interviewed by a female police officer with a big mole exactly at the point of her chin, which I had focused on like a single star in a dark sky, something to orient me.
Was she drunk?
No.
Was she on anything else? Don’t be afraid to tell me.
No. At least—I don’t think so.
Lindsay licks her lips, fidgets her hands in her lap. “And she didn’t…she didn’t, like, say anything? She didn’t explain?”
It’s the same thing the police officer asked me earlier: the final question, maybe the only one that matters. Did she say anything to you? Anything at all to give you a sense of how she was feeling, what she was thinking?
I don’t think she was feeling much of anything.
To Lindsay I say, “I’m not sure it’s the kind of thing you can explain.”
She keeps pressing it. “But I mean, she must have had problems, right? Stuff at home, right? People don’t just do that.”
I think of Juliet’s cold, dark house, the TV shadows climbing the walls, the unknown couple in the hard silver frame.
“I don’t know,” I say. I look at Lindsay, but she keeps her eyes averted. “I guess we’ll never know now.”
I feel a sense of emptiness so deep it stops feeling like emptiness and starts feeling like relief. I imagine this is what it would be like to get carried off on a wave. This is what it would feel like in the moment that the thin, dark edge of shore ducks its head beyond the horizon, when you roll over and see only stars and sky and water, folding in on you like an embrace. When you spread your arms and think, Okay.
“Thanks for dropping me off.” Lindsay puts her hand on the door handle, but makes no further motion to get out. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”
“I’ll be okay.”
I watch patterns of snow coming down at an angle as though flowing, cresting, breaking on a massive current, a tide that leaves the world glittering. It’s beautiful. All I can think is that it’s the first of many things Juliet won’t see.
Lindsay is chewing on a nail, a habit she’s always claiming to have kicked in third grade. The automatic garage light has clicked on and her features are all dark.
“Lindsay?”
She jumps like we’ve been silent for hours and she’s shocked to see me still in the car. “What?”
“Remember that time in Rosalita’s? After you came back from New York? When I walked in on you in the bathroom?”
She turns to stare at me, not saying anything. Her eyes are a deeper dark than the rest of her face, two spots of total blackness.
“Was that really the only time?” I ask.
She hesitates for just a second. “Of course it was,” she says, but her voice is a whisper and I know she’s lying.
And now I realize Lindsay’s not fearless. She’s terrified. She’s terrified that people will find out she’s faking, bullshitting her way through life, pretending to have everything together when really she’s just floundering like the rest of us. Lindsay, who will bite at you if you even look in her direction the wrong way, like one of those tiny attack dogs that are always barking and snapping in the air before they’re jerked backward on the chains that keep them in one place.
Millions of individual snowflakes, spinning and twirling and looking, all together, like rolling waves of white. I wonder if it’s true that they’re all different. “Juliet told me.” I lean back against the headrest and squint so that everything disappears but the whiteness. “About the Girl Scout trip. When you were in fifth grade—when you were still friends.”
Lindsay’s still not saying anything, but I can feel her trembling a little next to me.
“She told me it was really you who—you know.”
“And you believed her?” Lindsay says quickly, but she does it automatically, dully, as though she doesn’t expect it to do any good.
I ignore her. “Remember how everybody used to call her Mellow Yellow after that?” I open my eyes and look at her. “Why did you tell everyone it was her? I mean, in the moment, okay, I get it, you were scared, you were embarrassed, but afterward…? Why did you tell everyone? Why did you spread it?”
Lindsay’s shaking is getting worse now, and for a second I think she won’t answer, or she’ll lie. But her voice is steady when she speaks, steady and filled with something I don’t recognize. Regret, maybe.
“I always thought it wouldn’t last.” She sounds as if it still amazes her after all these years. “I thought eventually she’d tell everybody what really happened. That she would stick up for herself, you know?” Her voice breaks a little, a note of hysteria creeping in. “Why didn’t she ever stick up for herself? Not once. She just—she just took it. Why?”
I think of all the years that Lindsay’s been holding on to this secret knowledge, this secret self who cried every night and scrubbed pillows clean of pee—the scariest secret of all, the past we’re trying to forget.
And I think of all the times I sat in squirming silence, terrified I would say or do the wrong thing, terrified the dorky, lanky, horseback-riding loser inside me would rise up and swallow the new me, like a snake feasting on something. How I cleared the shelves of my trophies and dumped my beanbag chair and learned how to dress and never ate the hot lunch, and, above all, learned to stay away from the people who would drag me down, and carry me back to that place. People like Juliet Sykes. People like Kent.
Lindsay rouses herself and pops the door open. I cut the engine and get out of the car with her, throwing the keys over the roof. She catches them in one hand. Headlights flare to life, and I turn, squinting, holding up a hand in the general direction of the car idling behind me. I mouth, “Two minutes.”
Lindsay nods toward Kent, who is parked behind us, waiting to drive me home. “You’re sure you’re all good? To get home and everything, I mean.”
“I’m sure,” I say. Despite everything that has happened tonight, the thought of sitting next to Kent for a whole twelve minutes on the way to my house fills me with warmth. Even though I know it’s not right—even if I know, somewhere deep inside me, that it won’t work out, that it can’t work out for me with anyone anymore.
Lindsay opens her mouth and closes it. I can tell she wants to ask about Kent but thinks better of it. She starts to walk up toward the house, hesitates, and turns.
“Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m really sorry. I’m really sorry about…everything.”
She wants me to tell her it’s okay. She needs me to tell her that. I can’t, though. Instead I say, quietly, “People would like you anyway, Lindz.” I don’t say, if you stopped pretending so much, but I know she understands. “We’d still love you no matter what.”
She balls up her fists and squeezes out, “Thanks.” Then she turns and heads up to the house. For a second the light falling on her face makes her skin look wet, but I’m not sure whether she’s crying or whether it’s the snow.
Kent leans over and opens the door for me and I slide in. We back away from Lindsay’s house and turn onto the main road in silence. He drives slowly, carefully, twin funnels of snow lit up by the headlights, both hands resting lightly on the steering wheel. There’s so much I want to say to him, but I can’t bring myself to speak. I’m tired and my head hurts, and I just want to enjoy the fact that there’s only a few inches separating our arms, the fact that his car smells like cinnamon, the fact that he has the heat on high for me. It makes me feel drowsy and heavy in my limbs, even as my insides are alive and fluttering and 100 percent aware of him, so close.
As we get near my house he slows down so we’re barely crawling, and I’m hoping it’s because he doesn’t want the drive to end either. This is the moment for time to stop, right here—for space to yawn open and fall away like it does at the lip of a black hole, so that time can do its endless loops and keep us forever going forward into the snow. But no matter how slowly Kent goes, the car moves forward.
Soon my street sign appears crookedly on the left, and then we’re passing the darkened houses of my neighbors, and then we’re at my house.
“Thanks for driving me home,” I say, turning to him as he turns to me and says, “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
We both laugh nervously. Kent pushes his bangs away from his eyes, and they immediately flop back into place, making my stomach dip.
“No problem,” he says. “It was my pleasure.”
It was my pleasure. Only Kent could say it and make it not sound like something cheesy from an old movie, and my heart aches frantically for a second as I think of all the time I wasted, seconds and hours spun out of my fingertips forever like snow into the dark.
We sit for a minute. I’m desperate to say something, anything, so I don’t have to get out of the car, but the words don’t come and the seconds run by.
Finally I blurt out, “Everything tonight was awful except for this.”
“Except for what?”
I tick my index finger once between us. You and me. Everything was awful except for this.
A light comes on in his eyes. “Sam.” He says my name once, just breathes it, and I never knew that a single syllable could transform my whole body into a dancing, glowing thing. He reaches out suddenly and puts a warm hand on either side of my face, tracing my eyebrows, his thumb resting lightly for one single miraculous second on my bottom lip—I’m tasting cinnamon on his skin—and then he drops his hand and pulls away, looking embarrassed.
“Sorry,” he mumbles.
“No…it’s okay.” My body is humming. He must be able to hear it. At the same time it feels like my head is going to lift off from my shoulders.
“It’s just…God, it’s so awful.”
“What’s so awful?” My body abruptly stops humming and my stomach goes leaden. He’s going to tell me he doesn’t like me. He’s going to tell me he sees through me again.
“I mean, with everything that happened tonight…it’s not the right time…and you’re with Rob.”
“I’m not with Rob,” I say quickly. “Not anymore.”
“You’re not?” He’s staring at me so intensely I can see the stripes of gold alternating with the green in his eyes like spokes of a wheel.
I shake my head.
“That’s a good thing.” He’s still staring at me like that, like he’s the first and last person who will ever stare at me. “Because…” His voice trails off, and his eyes travel slowly down to my lips, and there’s so much heat roaring through my body I swear I’m going to pass out.
“Because?” I prompt him, surprised I can still speak.
“Because I’m sorry, but I can’t help it, and I really need to kiss you right now.”
He puts one hand behind my neck and pulls me toward him. And then we’re kissing. His lips are soft and leave mine tingling. I close my eyes, and in the darkness behind them I see beautiful blooming things, flowers spinning like snowflakes, and hummingbirds beating the same rhythm as my heart. I’m gone, lost, floating away into nothingness like I am in my dream, but this time it’s a good feeling—like soaring, like being totally free. His other hand pushes my hair from my face, and I can feel the impression of his fingers everywhere that they touch, and I think of stars streaking through the sky and leaving burning trails behind them, and in that moment—however long it lasts, seconds, minutes, days—while he’s saying my name into my mouth and I’m breathing into him, I realize this, right here, is the first and only time I’ve ever been kissed in my life.
He pulls away too soon, still cupping my face. “Wow,” he says, out of breath. “Sorry. But wow.”
“Yeah.” The word catches in my throat.
We stay there like that, staring at each other, and for once I’m not feeling anxious or worried about what he’s thinking. I’m just happy, held in his eyes, buoyed up in a warm, bright place.
“I really like you, Sam,” he says quietly. “I always have.”
“I like you too.” Don’t worry about tomorrow. Don’t even think about it. I shut my eyes briefly, pushing away everything but this moment, his warm hands, those delicious green eyes, the lips.
“Come on.” He leans forward and kisses my forehead once, gently. “You’re tired. You need to sleep.”
He gets out of the car and scoots around to the passenger side to open the door for me. The snow has begun to stick, a blanket over everything, blurring the edges of the world. Our footsteps are muffled as we make our way up the front path and onto the porch. My parents have left the porch light on, the only light in a dark house on a dark street—maybe the only light in the world. In its glow the snow looks like falling stars.
“You have snow in your eyelashes.” Kent traces a finger over my eyelids and over the bridge of my nose, making me shiver. “And in your hair.” A hand fluttering, the feel of fingertips, a cupped palm on my neck. Heaven.
“Kent.” I wrap my fingers around the collar of his shirt. No matter how close he’s standing, it isn’t close enough. “Are you ever afraid to go to sleep? Afraid of what comes next?”
He smiles a sad little smile and I swear it’s like he knows. “Sometimes I’m afraid of what I’m leaving behind,” he says.
Then we’re kissing again, our bodies and mouths moving together so seamlessly it’s like we’re not even kissing, just thinking about kissing, thinking about breathing, everything right and natural and unconscious and relaxed, a feeling not of trying but of complete abandonment, letting go, and right then and there the unthinkable and impossible happens: time does stand still after all. Time and space recede and blast away like a universe expanding forever outward, leaving only darkness and the two of us on its periphery, darkness and breathing and touch.