Before I Fall

Elody put on “Splinter” by Fallacy to piss Ally off, maybe because she was sick of her whining. It was Ally’s song with Matt, who had dumped her in September. Ally called her a bitch and unbuckled her seat belt, leaning forward and trying to grab the iPod. Lindsay complained that someone was elbowing her in the neck. The cigarette dropped from her mouth and landed between her thighs. She started cursing and trying to brush the embers off the seat cushion and Elody and Ally were still fighting and I was trying to talk over them, reminding them all of the time we’d made snow angels in May. The tires skidded a little on the wet road, and the car was full of cigarette smoke, little wisps rising like phantoms in the air.

Then all of a sudden there was a flash of white in front of the car. Lindsay yelled something—words I couldn’t make out, something like sit or shit or sight—and suddenly the car was flipping off the road and into the black mouth of the woods. I heard a horrible, screeching sound—metal on metal, glass shattering, a car folding in two—and smelled fire. I had time to wonder whether Lindsay had put her cigarette out.

Then Vicky Hallinan’s face came rising out of the past. I heard laughter echoing and rolling all around me, swelling into a scream.

Then nothing.

The thing is, you don’t get to know. It’s not like you wake up with a bad feeling in your stomach. You don’t see shadows where there shouldn’t be any. You don’t remember to tell your parents that you love them or—in my case—remember to say good-bye to them at all.

If you’re like me, you wake up seven minutes and forty-seven seconds before your best friend is supposed to be picking you up. You’re too busy worrying about how many roses you’re going to get on Cupid Day to do anything more than throw on your clothes, brush your teeth, and pray to God you left your makeup in the bottom of your messenger bag so you can do it in the car.

If you’re like me, your last day starts like this:

ONE

“Beep, beep,” Lindsay calls out. A few weeks ago my mom yelled at her for blasting her horn at six fifty-five every morning, and this is Lindsay’s solution.

“I’m coming!” I shout back, even though she can see me pushing out the front door, trying to put on my coat and wrestle my binder into my bag at the same time.

At the last second, my eight-year-old sister, Izzy, tugs at me.

“What?” I whirl around. She has little-sister radar for when I’m busy, late, or on the phone with my boyfriend. Those are always the times she chooses to bother me.

“You forgot your gloves,” she says, except it comes out: “You forgot your gloveths.” She refuses to go to speech therapy for her lisp, even though all the kids in her grade make fun of her. She says she likes the way she talks.

I take them from her. They’re cashmere and she’s probably gotten peanut butter on them. She’s always scooping around in jars of the stuff.