Before I Fall Page 0,41

said you felt sick?”

“I…I think I have the flu or something.” I know I look like crap so it should be believable.

My mom sighs like I’m being difficult on purpose. “Lindsay will be here any second.”

“I don’t think I can go in today.” The idea of school makes me want to curl up in a ball and sleep forever.

“On Cupid Day?” My mom raises her eyebrows. She glances at the fur-trimmed tank top that’s laid out neatly over my desk chair—the only item of clothing that isn’t lying on the floor or hanging from a bedpost or a doorknob. “Did something happen?”

“No, Mom.” I try to swallow the lump in my throat. The worst is knowing I can’t tell anybody what’s happening—or what’s happened—to me. Not even my mom. I guess it’s been years since I talked to her about important stuff, but I start wishing for the days when I believed she could fix anything. It’s funny, isn’t it? When you’re young you just want to be older, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.

My mom’s searching my face really intensely. I feel like at any second I could break down and blurt out something crazy so I roll away from her, facing the wall.

“You love Cupid Day,” my mom prods. “Are you sure nothing happened? You didn’t fight with your friends?”

“No. Of course not.”

She hesitates. “Did you fight with Rob?”

That makes me want to laugh. I think about the fact that he left me waiting upstairs at Kent’s party and I almost say, Not yet. “No, Mom. God.”

“Don’t use that tone of voice. I’m just trying to help.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not.” I bury deeper under the covers, keeping my back turned to her. I hear rustling and think she’ll come and sit next to me. She doesn’t, though. Freshman year after a big fight I drew a line in red nail polish just inside my door, and I told her if she ever came past the line I’d never speak to her again. Most of the nail polish has chipped off by now, but in places you can still see it spotted over the wood like blood.

I meant it at the time, but I’d expected her to forget after a while. But since that day she’s never once stepped foot in my room. It’s a bummer in some ways, since she never surprises me by making up my sheets anymore, or leaving folded laundry or a new sundress on my bed like she did when I was in middle school. But at least I know she’s not rooting through my drawers while I’m at school, looking for drugs or sex toys or whatever.

“If you want to come out here, I’ll get the thermometer,” she says.

“I don’t think I have a fever.” There’s a chip in the wall in the exact shape of an insect, and I push my thumb against the wall, squishing it.

I can practically feel my mom put her hands on her hips. “Listen, Sam. I know it’s second semester. And I know you think that gives you the right to slack off—”

“Mom, that is not it.” I bury my head under the pillow, feeling like I could scream. “I told you, I don’t feel good.” I’m half afraid she’ll ask me what’s wrong and half hoping she will.

She only says, “All right. I’ll tell Lindsay you’re thinking of going in late. Maybe you’ll feel better after a little more sleep.”

I doubt it. “Maybe,” I say, and a second later I hear the door click shut behind her.

I close my eyes and reach back into those final moments, the last memories—Lindsay’s look of surprise and the trees lit up like teeth in the headlights, the wild roar of the engine—searching for a light, a thread that will connect this moment to that one, a way to sew together the days so that they make sense.

But all I get is blackness.

I can’t hold back my tears anymore. They come all at once, and before I know it I’m sobbing and snotting all over my best Ethan Allen pillows. A little later I hear scratching against my door. Pickle has always had a dog sense for when I’m crying, and in sixth grade after Rob Cokran said I was too big of a dork for him to go out with—right in the middle of the cafeteria, in front of everybody—Pickle sat on my bed and licked the tears off one after another.

I