Before I Fall(12)

“.22 miles!”

We all bust it out at the same time and then start giggling like maniacs.

“Don’t worry, Lindz,” I say. “If you guys throw down I’m totally putting money on you.”

“Yeah, we’ve got your back,” Elody says.

“Isn’t it kind of weird how that stuff happens?” Ally says in this shy voice she gets when she’s trying to say something serious. “How everything spirals out from everything else? Like, if Lindsay hadn’t stolen that parking space…”

“I didn’t steal it. I got it fair and square,” Lindsay protests, bringing her hand down on the table for emphasis. Elody’s Diet Coke sloshes over the side of the can, soaking some fries. This makes us start laughing again.

“I’m serious!” Ally raises her voice to be heard over us. “It’s like a web, you know? Everything’s connected.”

“Have you been breaking into your dad’s stash again, Al?” Elody says.

This is all it takes to really get us going. This is a joke we’ve had with Ally for years because her dad works in the music industry. He’s a lawyer, not a producer or manager or musician or anything, and he wears a suit everywhere (even to the pool in the summer), but Lindsay claims he’s secretly a hippie stoner.

As we’re laughing, doubling over, Ally turns pink. “You guys never listen to me,” she says, but she’s fighting a smile. She takes a fry and throws it at Elody. “I read once that if a bunch of butterflies takes off from Thailand, it can cause a rainstorm in New York.”

“Yeah, well, one of your farts could cause a massive blackout in Portugal.” Elody giggles, throwing a fry back.

“Your morning breath could cause a stampede in Africa.” Ally leans forward. “And I do not fart.”

Lindsay and I are laughing, and Elody and Ally keep throwing fries back and forth. Lindsay tries to say they’re wasting perfectly good grease, but she’s snorting so hard she can barely get the words out.

Finally she sucks in a deep breath and chokes out, “You know what I heard? That if you sneeze enough you can cause a tornado in Iowa.”

Even Ally goes crazy at this, and suddenly we’re all trying it, laughing and sneezing and snorting at the same time. Everybody’s staring at us, but we don’t care.

After about a million sneezes, Lindsay leans back in her chair, clutching her stomach and gasping for breath.

“Thirty dead in Iowa tornadoes,” she gets out, “another fifty missing.”

This sets us off again.



Lindsay and I decide to cut seventh period and go to TCBY. Lindsay has French, which she can’t stand, and I have English. We cut seventh period a lot together. We’re second-semester seniors, so it’s like we’re expected not to go to class. Plus I hate my English teacher, Mrs. Harbor. She’s always going off on tangents. Sometimes I’ll zone out for a few minutes, and all of a sudden she’ll be talking about underwear in the eighteenth century or oppression in Africa or the way the sun looks rising over the Grand Canyon. Even though she’s probably only in her fifties, I’m pretty sure she’s losing it. That’s how it started with my grandmother: ideas swirling around and colliding with each other, causes coming after effects, and point A switched with point B. When my grandmother was still alive we would visit her, and even though I was no more than six, I remember thinking: I hope I die young.



There’s a definition of irony for you, Mrs. Harbor.

Or maybe foreshadowing?



Technically you need a special pass signed by your parents and the administration to leave campus during the school day. This wasn’t always true. For a long time one of the perks to being a senior was getting to leave campus whenever you wanted, as long as you had a free period. That was twenty years ago, though, a few years before Thomas Jefferson got the reputation for one of the highest teen suicide rates in the country. We looked up the article online once: the Connecticut Post called us Suicide High.

And then one day a bunch of kids left campus and drove off a bridge—a suicide pact, I guess. Anyway, after that the school forbade anyone from leaving school during the day without special permission. It’s kind of stupid if you think about it. That’s like finding out that kids are bringing vodka to school in water bottles and forbidding anyone to drink water.

Fortunately, there’s another way to get off campus: through a hole in the fence beyond the gym by the tennis court, which we call the Smokers’ Lounge, since that’s where all the smokers hang out. No one’s around, though, when Lindsay and I slip through the fence and get started across the woods. In a little while we’ll come on to Route 120. Everything is still and frozen. Twigs and black leaves crack under our shoes, and our breath rises in solid white puffs.