Before I Fall(52)

Juliet Sykes.

In the second-grade yearbook, Lindsay is kneeling in the front row of her class. Again, Juliet Sykes is next to her.

In the third-grade yearbook, Juliet and Lindsay are separated by several pages. Lindsay was in Ms. Derner’s class (with me—that was the year she invented the joke: “What’s red and white and weird all over?”). Juliet was in Dr. Kuzma’s class. Different pages, different classes, different poses—Lindsay has her hands clasped in front of her; Juliet is standing with her body angled slightly to the side—and yet they look exactly the same, wearing identical powder blue Petit Bateau T-shirts and matching white capri pants, which cut off just below the knee; their hair, blond and shining, parted neatly down the middle; the glint of a small silver chain around both of their necks. That was the year it was cool to dress up like your friends—your best friends.

I pick up the fourth-grade yearbook next, my fingers heavy and numb, cold running through me. There’s a big Technicolor portrait of the school on its cover, all neon pinks and reds, probably painted by an art teacher. It takes me a while to find Lindsay’s class, but as soon as I do my heart starts racing. There she is with that same huge smile, like she’s daring the camera to catch her looking less-than-perfect. And next to her is Juliet Sykes. Pretty, happy Juliet Sykes, smiling like she has a secret. I squint, focusing on a tiny blurred spot between them, and think I can just make out that their index fingers are linked together loosely.

Fifth grade. I find Lindsay easily, standing front and center in Mrs. Krakow’s classroom, smiling so widely it looks like she’s baring her teeth. It takes me longer to find Juliet. I go through all the photographs looking for her and have to start over from the beginning before I spot her, far up in the right-hand corner, sandwiched between Lauren Lornet and Eileen Cho, shrinking backward like she wants to suck herself out of the frame altogether. Her hair hangs in front of her face like a curtain. Next to her, both Lauren and Eileen are angled slightly away, as though they don’t want to be associated with her, as though she has some contagious disease.

Fifth grade: the year of the Girl Scout trip, when she peed in her sleeping bag and Lindsay nicknamed her Mellow Yellow.

I put the yearbooks back carefully, making sure to order them correctly. My heart is thumping wildly, an out-of-control drum rhythm. I suddenly want to get out of the basement as quickly as possible. I shut off the lights and feel my way up the stairs blindly. The darkness seems to swirl with shapes and shadows, and terror rises in my throat. I’m sure that if I turn around I’ll see her, all in white, stumbling with her hands outstretched, reaching for me, face bloody and broken apart.

And then I’m upstairs and there she is: a vision, a nightmare. Her face is completely in shadow—a hole—but I can tell she’s staring at me. The room tilts; I grab on to the wall to keep myself steady.

“What’s your problem?” Lindsay steps farther into the hall, the moonlight falling differently so that her features emerge. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Jesus.” I bring my hand to my chest, trying to press my heart back to its normal rhythm. “You scared me.”

“What were you doing down there?” Her hair is messed up, and in her white boxers and tank top she could be a ghost.

“You were friends with her,” I say. It pops out like an accusation. “You were friends with her for years.”

I’m not sure what answer I’m expecting, but she looks away and then looks back at me.

“It’s not our fault,” she says, like she’s daring me to contradict her. “She’s totally wacked. You know that.”

“I know,” I say. But I get the feeling she’s not even talking to me.

“And I heard her dad’s, like, an alcoholic,” Lindsay presses on, her voice suddenly quick, urgent. “Her whole family’s wacked.”

“Yeah,” I say. For a minute we just stand there in silence. My body feels heavy, useless, the way it sometimes does in nightmares when you have to run but you can’t. After a while something occurs to me and I say, “Was.”

Even though we’ve been standing in silence, Lindsay inhales sharply, as though I’ve interrupted her in the middle of a long speech. “What?”

“She was wacked,” I say. “She’s not anything anymore.”

Lindsay doesn’t respond. I go past her into the dark hallway and find my way to the couch. I settle in under the blankets, and a little while later she comes in and joins me.

Lying there, convinced I won’t be able to sleep, I remember the time in the middle of junior year when Lindsay and I snuck out on a random weeknight—a Tuesday or a Thursday—and drove around because there was nothing else to do. At some point she pulled over abruptly on Fallow Ridge Road and cut the headlights, waiting until another car began to squeeze its way toward us on the single-lane road. Then she roared the engine and blazed the lights to life and began careening straight toward it. I was screaming at the top of my lungs, the headlights growing huge as suns, certain we were going to die, and she was gripping the steering wheel and calling out over my screams, “Don’t worry—they always swerve first.” She was right, too. At the last second the other car jerked abruptly into the ditch.