Before I Fall

Before I Fall Page 45

“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—