Before I Fall: Days Four–Five

Anger is seething through me like liquid.

‘Emergency at the Tribulation. Printer problems. Malignant paper tumor in tray two. Had to operate immediately or risk losing it.’

I gesture to the trash can, and Becca casts a wistful look in that direction. She’s probably trying to decide whether the social boost she would get from having four extra roses is worth the ego hit she would take for Dumpster-diving to get them.

For a moment I feel a hot flush of embarrassment, like nausea or vertigo.

The vibration in the air is still there, but now it feels ominous, like the air is full of sharp things getting ready to drop.

The science wing is empty, as expected, and smells, as always, like chemical cleaners and sulfur. Today there’s something else, though: the smell of smoke and something earthier, more pungent.

Ms. Winters looked like she was going to have a massive coronary when I'd started going off about role models and my poor impressionable mind—I love that expression, as though everyone under the age of twenty-one has all the brain power of dental plaster—and the administration’s responsibility to set an example, especially when I’d reminded her about page sixty-nine in the R & R: it is forbidden to engage in lewd or sexually inappropriate acts in or around school property.

That one I know because the page has been torn out and hung up about a thousand times in various bathrooms on campus, the margins decorated with drawings of a decidedly lewd...nature.

Sure enough, when I slide my key in the back door and slip into the kitchen, I hear the patter of water upstairs and a few high, warbling notes: my mom is singing.

I hesitate for a split second, long enough to place the tune—Frank Sinatra, ‘New York, New York’—and say a prayer of thanks that the Pugs aren’t witness to my mom’s impromptu performance.

My mom’s Sinatra rendition drops off.

The place is so stocked with little carved wood statues and funky oil paintings and old books it could be a museum.

Tara and I skirt around the dining room table—my mom would have a coronary from excitement, it must seat at least twelve—and out into a kind of alcove.

Beyond the alcove is another dark room: from the sofas and bookshelves I can just make out, it looks like a library or a living room.

The plan was to go off to a party in the arboretum: a tradition on the first warm weekend of the year.

Parts of the room are lost in shadow, but I can sense something moving at its periphery.

A swath of sunlight ticks upward over the collage Lindsay made for me.

She slides up close to the edge and pries at something wedged in a fissure of rock.

She’s always developing new, better ways to sneak out, even though she has no curfew, and it doesn’t matter one way or the other when she leaves and when she comes home. I think she misses that, actually. I think that’s why she’s always meticulous about the details—she likes to pretend that she has to be.

I haven’t really thought through why I’m heading to Kent’s, or what I’m going to do once I’m there, and instead of driving there directly, I find myself turning on random streets and dead-end cul-de-sacs, circling up and down.

Houses sit hulking back on their lawns, brooding and alive.

It’s a woman’s face crafted from newspaper and red stitching, which is crisscrossed over the skin like horrible scars. Words run up the bridge of the nose and across the forehead, certain headlines visible or halfway visible, like BEAUTY REMEDY and TRAGEDY STRIKES, and little scraps of paper are unfurling from various places on her face, like she’s molting.

I remember when we were studying Dante in English, and Ben Gowan kept asking if the souls in purgatory ever got cast down into hell...

The road is empty, stretches of black interspersed with weak pools of yellow light from the streetlamps.

It’s another ten minutes before I see the faint twinkle of lights flashing sporadically beyond the trees—thank God, since I was beginning to think I was walking in circles—and another five before the woods thin out and I can see the house, a big pile of ice-cream cake sitting on that lawn, shimmering in and out as the rain bends and splits the lights from the porch.

He squats down, bends the safety pin backward, and uses it to jimmy the lock.

Then Kent nudges the door with his toe, calling ‘Juliet?’ as the door swings open—again, time stretches, it seems to take forever—and in that second, or half second, I somehow have the time to conjure up every horrible possibility, to imagine her body crumpled on the ground.

She shakes her head, an infinitesimal gesture.

He keeps me pressed tightly to him, and he’s making little noises into my hair, and before I totally let go of everything and succumb to the blackness washing through me, I have the strangest, dumbest thought—that my head fits perfectly in Kent’s shoulder.

‘No guest rooms.’ I shake my head resolutely. 'I want to be in a room room. A lived-in room.’