Before I Fall

Downstairs I stand just inside the door, waiting for Juliet, which is a bit like trying to stay on your feet in the middle of a riptide. People swarm around me, but hardly anybody looks my way. Maybe they’re getting a weird vibe off me, too, or they can tell I’m focused elsewhere. Or maybe—and this makes me sad as soon as I think it—they can sense, somehow, that I’m already gone. I push the thought away.

Finally I see her slip through the front door, white sweater tied loosely around her, head stooped. Instantly I jump forward and put a hand on her arm. She starts, staring at me, and though she must have imagined coming face-to-face with me tonight, the fact that I’ve found her, and not the other way around, throws her off guard.

“Hey,” I say. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

She opens her mouth, shuts it, then opens it again. “Actually, I, um, kind of have somewhere to be.”

“No, you don’t.” In one movement I draw her away from the crowded entrance and toward a little recessed area in the hall. It’s a little easier to hear each other here, though it’s so squished we have to stand nearly pressed chest-to-chest. “Weren’t you looking for me, anyway? Weren’t you looking for us?”

“How did you—?” She breaks off, sucks in a breath, and shakes her head. “I’m not here for you.”

“I know.” I stare at her, willing her to look at me, but she doesn’t. I want to tell her that I get it, that I understand, but she’s examining the tiling on the floors. “I know it’s bigger than that.”

“You don’t know anything,” she says dully.

“I know what you have planned for tonight,” I say, very quietly.

Then she looks up. For a second our eyes meet, and I see fear flashing there, and something else—hope, maybe?—but she quickly drops her eyes again.

“You can’t know,” she says simply. “Nobody knows.”

“I know that you have something to tell me,” I say. “I know that you have something you wanted to say to all of us—to me, to Lindsay, to Elody, and Ally, too.”

Again she looks up, but this time she holds my gaze, eyes wide, and we stare at each other. Now I know what the look on her face is, behind the fear: wonder.

“You’re a bitch,” she whispers, so quietly I’m not sure I even hear the words or am just remembering them, imagining them in her voice. She says it like she is reciting the lines to an old play, some long-neglected script she can’t manage to forget.

I nod. “I know,” I say. “I know I am. I know I have been—we all have been. And I’m sorry.”

She takes a quick step back, but there’s nowhere to go, so she ends up bumping up against the wall. She flattens herself, hands braced against the plaster, breathing hard, like I’m some kind of a wild animal that might attack her at any second. She’s shaking her head quickly from side to side. I don’t even think she knows she’s doing it.

“Juliet.” I reach out, but she shrinks an extra half inch into the wall, and I drop my hand. “I’m serious. I’m trying to tell you how sorry I am.”

“I have to go.”

She seems to break away from the wall with effort, like she’s not sure she’ll be able to stand without it. She tries to squeeze past me, but I shuffle around so we’re face-to-face again.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“You said that.” Now she’s getting angry. I’m glad. I think it’s a good sign.

“No, I mean…” I take a deep breath, willing her to understand. This is how it’s supposed to be.

“I have to come with you.”

“Please,” she says. “Just leave me alone.”

“That’s what I’m telling you. I can’t.” As we’re standing there I realize we’re almost exactly the same height. We must look like the dark and light sides of an Oreo cookie, and I think how just as easily it could have been the other way around. She could be blocking my path; I could be trying to slip around her into the dark.

“You don’t—” she starts, but I don’t ever hear what she’s about to say. At that second someone yells, “Sam!” from the stairs, and as I turn around to look up at Kent, Juliet darts past me.

“Juliet!” I whip around but not quickly enough. She’s swallowed by the crowd, the gap that allowed her to break for the door closing just as quickly as it opened, a shifting Tetris pattern of bodies, and now I’m running up against backs and hands and enormous leather bags.

“Sam!”

Not now, Kent. 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. When I’m almost at the door, the crowd thins and I surge forward. But then I feel a warm hand on my back, and Kent’s spinning me around to face him, and despite the fact that I need to catch Juliet and the fact that we’re standing in the middle of a billion people, I think about how good it would feel to dance with him. Really dance, not just grind up on each other like people do at homecoming—dance the way people used to, with my hands on his shoulders and his arms around my waist.