Before I Fall

“Out,” Lindsay repeats. Cars are starting to pull around us now, everyone honking and rolling down their windows to yell at us. All of their words get lost in the roar of the engines and the bleating of the horns, but it’s still humiliating. The idea of getting out now, of being forced to walk in the gutter while all of those dozens of cars roll by me, with all those people watching, makes me shrink back against my seat. I look to Elody for more support, but she looks away.

Lindsay leans over. “I. Said. Get. Out,” she whispers, and her mouth is so close to my ear if you couldn’t hear her you’d think she was telling me a secret.

I grab my bag and step into the cold. The freezing air on my legs almost paralyzes me. The second I’m out of the car Lindsay guns it, peeling away with the door still swinging open.

I start walking in the leaf-and-trash-filled ditch that runs next to the road. My fingers and toes go numb almost instantly, and I stomp my feet on the frost-covered leaves to keep the blood flowing. It takes a minute for the long line of traffic to begin to unwind, and horns are still honking away, the sound like the fading wail of a passing train.

A blue Toyota pulls up next to me. A woman leans out—gray-haired, probably in her sixties—and shakes her head.

“Crazy girl,” she says, frowning at me.

For a moment I just stand there, but as the car starts to pull away, I remember that it doesn’t matter, none of it matters, so I throw up my middle finger, hoping she sees.

All the way to school I repeat it again—it doesn’t matter, none of it matters—until the words themselves lose meaning.

Here’s one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It’s like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there’s no one around to hear it.

You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That’s how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to bust out of orbit, to spin out to a place where no one can touch you. To lose yourself—to get lost.

Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe some of you already know.

To those people I can only say: I’m sorry.

I skip my first four periods just because I can, and spend a couple of hours walking the halls with no real goal or destination. I almost hope someone will stop me—a teacher or Ms. Winters or a teacher’s aide or someone—and ask what I’m doing, even accuse me point-blank of cutting and send me to the principal’s office. Fighting with Lindsay left me unsatisfied, and I still feel a vague but pressing desire to do something.

Most of the teachers just nod or smile, though, or give me a half wave. They have no way of knowing my schedule, no way of knowing whether I have a free period or whether class was canceled, and I’m disappointed by how easy it is to break the rules.

When I walk into Mr. Daimler’s class I deliberately don’t look at him, but I can feel his eyes on me, and after I slide into my desk, he comes straight over.

“It’s a little early in the season for beach clothes, don’t you think?” He grins.

Normally whenever he looks at me for longer than a few seconds, I get nervous, but today I force myself to keep my eyes on his. Warmth spreads over my whole body; it reminds me of standing under the heat lamps in my grandmother’s house when I was no older than five. It’s amazing that eyes can do that, that they can transform light into heat. I’ve never felt that way with Rob.

“If you got it, flaunt it,” I say, making my voice soft and steady. I see something flicker in his eyes. I’ve surprised him.

“I guess so,” he murmurs, so quietly I’m sure I’m the only one who hears. Then he blushes bright red like he can’t believe himself. He nods at my desk, which is empty except for a pen and the small square notebook Lindsay and I use to pass back and forth between classes, writing notes to each other. “No roses today? Or did your bouquet get too heavy to carry around?”

I haven’t been to any of my classes so I haven’t collected any Valograms. I don’t even care. In the past I would rather have died than be seen in the halls of Thomas Jefferson on Cupid Day without a single rose. In the past I would have considered it a fate worse than death.

Of course, that was before I actually knew.