Before I Fall: Day Six–Epilogue

I lean over impulsively and kiss her cheek.

Juliet’s rose is thin and young, delicately tinged with pink.

My heart shoots into my throat every time I think I see his loping walk, or catch sight of some floppy brown hair on a boy—but it’s never him, and each time it isn’t, my heart does a reverse trajectory down into the very pit of my stomach.

After life skills, I stop in the bathroom, and spend the three minutes before bell primping in front of the mirror, ignoring the s’mores chattering on either side of me, and trying hard not to focus on the fact that I’ll come face-to-face with Mr. Daimler in less than five minutes.

AC=WT. I’m pretty sure Lindsay wrote it on a whim—four measly letters, stupid, meaningless—probably to test out a new marker and see how much ink it had.

I feel so good once I’ve gotten them off that first door, I go down the row and scrub the remaining two, even though my arm is aching and cramping and I’ve actually started to sweat a little bit in my tank top, mentally cursing Lindsay the whole time for her whims, for using permanent marker.

I’ve never broken up with anybody before, and all the clichés keep running through my head. It’s not you, it’s me. (No—it is him. And me.) We're better off friends. (We were never friends.)

I keep going anyway, threading past tables piled with food and roses and bags, everyone talking and laughing, oblivious.

Lindsay lumbers over, being really melodramatic about the fact that she’s carrying two bags, like they’re both made out of iron.

‘Five minutes,’ I say, holding up my right hand with my fingers splayed.

When I turn away from Rob it’s a struggle to keep from bursting out laughing, and all the nervousness I feel about talking to Kent dissipates.

I tap Amy’s shoulder and she extricates herself from Oren’s mouth.

She doesn’t wait for me to answer before launching into her spiel.

I flip back through the day’s events like I’m scrolling down a computer screen, trying to find some lapse, something I’ve forgotten to do or say.

The music’s so loud, the notes are hardly distinguishable from one another.

I try to gauge what she’s thinking, but it’s like something has shut down behind her eyes, a button switching off, and she just stands there staring at me dully.

And though I’ve now been at Kent’s house five times in six days I feel disoriented, confused by the bright bathroom light and Juliet’s impassive face and the sounds of the party coming through the door.

We got upstairs and into the bedroom, but then we started arguing about who should sleep in the little trundle bed and who should get the big one, and my mom heard us.

‘I mean, not actively looking. Really just kind of perusing the crowd, you know, as I was walking around socializing. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you host. Socialize. So I was just keeping an eye out—’

It reminds me of when I was little and we would go to church on Christmas and Easter, and I was always afraid to look at the pulpit, where there was a wooden statue of Jesus mounted on the cross.

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.

I’m just happy, held in his eyes, buoyed up in a warm, bright place.

I open them, feeling silly, and at the same time a hundred thousand butterflies take off around me, so many of them in so many brilliant colors they are like a solid rainbow, temporarily obscuring the sun.

And when I wake up it’s wonderful, like I’ve been carried quietly onto a calm, peaceful shore, and the dream, and its meaning, has broken over me like a wave and is ebbing away now, leaving me with a single, solid certainty.

In my head I’ve been saying good-bye to everything, all these places I’ve seen so often I start to ignore them: the deli on the hill with perfect chicken cutlets and the trinket store where I used to buy thread to make friendship bracelets and the Realtor’s and the dentist’s and the little garden where Steve King put his tongue in my mouth in seventh grade, and I was so surprised I bit down.

Even the yellow walls—what we used to call the vomit hallways—strike me as pretty now, the slender bare trees in the middle of the quad elegant and sparse, just waiting for snow.

He doesn’t smile, but there’s a teasing lilt to his voice and his eyes are bright.

I’m telling you, I can't have any more flower homicides on my conscience, I said. You could take them home. Do you have a vase?

‘What’s up, Sam?’ he drawls.

‘Give me something?’ She curls her lip back, skeptical, and the resemblance to Juliet is no longer so strong. She must think I’m crazy. As far as she knows we’ve never exchanged a word in our lives, and I can only imagine what she thinks I want to give her.

She peels one hand off her ear tentatively, experimenting.

‘You know what my favorite flavor of yogurt is?’ I say, hoping to appease her.

‘Trust me. It’s just been a weird week.’ Understatement of the year.

I’m fighting my way toward the door, every few steps being carried backward as people drive relentlessly toward the kitchen, holding up cups that need to be refilled.

He sounds so emphatic I’m momentarily thrown off guard.