Before I Fall Page 0,130
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