Before I Fall(71)

I take a big swig of beer, wishing I could just go blotto. I want the world to drop away. I take another big gulp. The beer is cold, at least, but tastes like moldy water.

“Sam!” Tara’s coming up the stairs, her smile like the beam of a flashlight. “We’ve been looking for you.” When she gets to the top she pants a little, putting her right hand on her stomach and bending over. In her left hand she’s holding a cigarette, half smoked. “Courtney did recon. She found the good stuff.”

“Good stuff?”

“Whiskey, vodka, gin, cassis, the works. Booze. The good stuff.”

She grabs my hand and we go back down the stairs, which are slowly getting clogged with people. Everyone’s moving in the same direction: from the entrance to the beer and then up the stairs. In the kitchen we push through the clot of people gathered by the keg. On the opposite side of the kitchen there’s a door with a handwritten sign on it. I recognize Kent’s handwriting.

It says: PLEASE DO NOT ENTER.

There’s a footnote written in tiny letters along the bottom of the page: SERIOUSLY, GUYS. I’M HOSTING THE PARTY AND IT’S THE ONE THING I ASK. LOOK! THERE’S A KEG BEHIND YOU!

“Maybe we shouldn’t—” I start to say, but Tara has already slipped through the door so I follow her.

It’s dark on the other side of the door, and cold. The only light comes from two enormous bay windows that face out onto the backyard.

I hear giggling from somewhere deeper in the house, then the sound of someone bumping into something. “Careful,” someone hisses, and then I hear Courtney say, “You try to pour in the dark.”

“This way,” Tara whispers. It’s weird how people’s voices get softer in the dark, like they can’t help it.

We’re in the dining room. There’s a chandelier drooping from the ceiling like an exotic flower, and heavy curtains pooling at either side of the windows. Tara and I skirt around the dining room table—my mom would have a coronary from excitement, it must seat at least twelve—and out into a kind of alcove. This is where the bar is. Beyond the alcove is another dark room: from the sofas and bookshelves I can just make out, it looks like a library or a living room. I wonder how many rooms there are. The house seems to extend forever. It’s even darker here, but Courtney and Bethany are rooting around in some cabinets.

“There must be fifty bottles in here,” Courtney says. It’s too dark to read labels, so she opens each bottle and sniffs it, guessing at the contents. “This is rum, I think.”

“Freaky house, huh?” Bethany says.

“I don’t mind it,” I say quickly, not sure why I feel defensive. I bet it’s beautiful during the day: room after room of light. I bet Kent’s house is always quiet, or there’s always classical music playing or something.

Glass shatters next to me and something wet splatters on my leg. I jump as Courtney whispers, “What did you do?”

“It’s not me,” I say as Tara says, “I didn’t mean to.”

“Was that a vase?”

“Ew. Some of it got on my shoe.”

“Let’s just take the bottle and get out of here.”

We slip back into the kitchen just as RJ Ravner yells, “Fire in the hole!” Matt Dorfman takes a cup of beer and starts chugging it. Everyone laughs and Abby McGail claps when he’s drained the cup. Someone turns up the music, and Dujeous comes on and everyone starts singing along. All MCs in the house tonight, if your lyrics sound tight then rock the mic….

I hear high-pitched laughter. Then a voice from the front hallway: “God, I guess we came at the right time.”

My stomach jumps into my throat. Lindsay’s here.





THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS YOU NEVER SAY


Here’s Lindsay’s big secret: when she came back from visiting her stepbrother at NYU our junior year, she was awful for days—snapping at everybody, making fun of Ally for having weird food issues, making fun of Elody for being such a lush and a pushover, making fun of me for always being the last to do things, from picking up on trends to going to third base (which I didn’t do until late sophomore year). Elody, Ally, and I knew something must have happened in New York, but Lindsay wouldn’t tell us when we asked her, and we didn’t push it. You don’t push things with Lindsay.

Then one night toward the end of the school year, we were all at Rosalita’s, this crappy Mexican restaurant one town over where they don’t card, having margaritas and waiting for our dinners to come. Lindsay wasn’t really eating—hadn’t really been eating since returning from New York. She wouldn’t touch the free chips, saying she wasn’t hungry, and instead kept dipping a finger into the salt that was rimming her margarita glass and eating the crystals one by one.