Before I Fall Page 0,103
and completely alone. The ache in my throat intensifies until I feel like there’s an animal trying to claw its way out of my throat.
And I’m suddenly angry at Juliet—so angry I could punch her. I don’t see how she can be so selfish. No matter what—no matter how bad things are—she has a choice. Not all of us are so lucky.
That’s when I hear the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard in the entirety of my seventeen years of life (plus five days of life-after-death).
I hear honking.
The sound is far away, and it fades almost as soon as it begins—a low wail through the night as someone speeding by leans on the horn. I’m closer to the road than I thought.
I scramble to my feet and go as quickly as I can toward the source of the sound, keeping my arms outstretched like a mummy, slapping away branches and the slick touch of the evergreens. My heart is pounding with excitement, and I strain for a noise—any other noise—to guide me. After a minute or so I hear another honk, this one closer. I could sob with relief. Another minute and I hear the thudding bass of a stereo system, tuning in and then out again as a car speeds away. Another minute and I can see, faintly through the trees, the glimmer of the light from the streetlamps. I’ve found the road.
As the lights get closer and the trees thin, I can see a little better, and I start booking it. I’m so busy fantasizing about piles and piles of blankets—I’ll take every single one I can find in the house—and hot chocolate and warm slippers and showers that I don’t see Juliet Sykes until the last minute, when I nearly trip over her.
She’s huddled seven or eight feet from the road, her arms wrapped around her knees. Water has turned her white top totally transparent, and I can see her bra—striped—and all the bones of her spine. I’m so surprised to come across her like that, I forget, momentarily, that she’s the whole reason I’m out here in the first place.
“What are you doing?” I say, loudly over the rain.
She looks up at me. The streetlamps light up her face. Her eyes are dull. “What are you doing?” she parrots back at me.
“I’m, um, looking for you actually.” Her face doesn’t register any emotion—no surprise, no shock, no anger, nothing. It throws me. “Aren’t you cold?”
She shakes her head, just barely, and keeps staring at me with those dull, tired eyes. This isn’t nearly how I pictured it would be. I thought she would be happy that I’ve come to look for her—grateful, even. Or maybe she would be mad. In any case, I thought she would be something.
“Listen, Juliet—” I can hardly talk, my teeth are chattering so badly. “It’s, like, almost one o’clock in the morning, and it’s freezing out here. Do you maybe want to come over to my house for a bit? And talk? I know what happened in there”—I nod back in the direction of Kent’s house—“and I feel really bad about it.” I just want her to get in the damn car, but it’s true; I do feel bad.
Juliet stares at me for a long, hard second, the rain blurring the few feet between us. She starts to stand, and I feel sure that’s done it, but instead she turns away and takes several steps toward the road.
“Sorry,” she says. Her voice isn’t apologetic, though. It’s flat.
I reach out and grab her wrist. It feels impossibly tiny in my hand, like this one time I found a baby bird near Goose Point, and I picked it up and it died there, taking its final, gasping, fluttering breaths in my palm. Juliet doesn’t pull away, but she stares at my hand like it’s a snake about to bite her.
“Listen,” I try again. “Listen. I know this is going to sound crazy, but…” The wind rushes through the trees and releases a new volley of rain. “I have a feeling that we have something in common, you and me. If we could just go somewhere and talk about it…”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Juliet says. She stares out at the road, and I think I see a small, sad smile playing on her lips. Then it’s gone.
I’ve been outside too long. My mind is grinding to a halt. Nothing’s making sense anymore. Weird images keep flashing through my head, a bizarre fantasy reel of