Лорен Оливер - Before I Fall

“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.

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.