Before I Fall

By the time we get to Lindsay’s car I really don’t care about the awful way the night turned out. We’re laughing hysterically, soaked and shivering, woken up from the cold and the rain. Lindsay’s squealing about wet butt marks on her leather seats and mud on the floor, and Elody’s begging her to go to Mic’s for an egg and cheese and complaining that I always get shotgun, and Ally’s yelling for Lindsay to turn on the heat and threatening to drop dead right there from pneumonia.

I guess that’s how we get started talking about it: dying, I mean. I figure Lindsay’s okay to drive, but I notice she’s going faster than usual down that awful, long, penned-in driveway. The trees look like stripped skeletons on either side of us, moaning in the wind.

“I have this theory,” I’m saying as Lindsay skids out onto Route 9 and the tires shriek against the slick black road. The clock on the dashboard is glowing: 12:38. “I have this theory that before you die you see your greatest hits, you know? The best things you’ve ever done.”

“Duke, baby,” Lindsay says, and takes one hand off the wheel to pump her fist in the air.

“First time I hooked up with Matt Wilde,” Ally says immediately.

Elody groans and leans forward, reaching for the iPod. “Music, please, before I kill myself.”

“Can I get a cigarette?” Lindsay asks, and Elody lights one for her off the butt she’s holding. Lindsay cracks the windows, and the freezing rain comes in. Ally starts to complain about the cold again.

Elody puts on “Splinter,” by Fallacy, to piss Ally off, maybe because she’s sick of her whining. Ally calls her a bitch and unbuckles her seat belt, leaning forward and trying to grab the iPod. Lindsay complains that someone is elbowing her in the neck. The cigarette drops from her mouth and lands between her thighs. She starts cursing and trying to brush the embers off the seat cushion, and Elody and Ally are still fighting and I’m trying to talk over them, reminding them all of the time we made snow angels in May. The clock ticks forward: 12:39. The tires skid a little on the wet road and the car is full of cigarette smoke, little wisps rising like phantoms in the air.

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

And then—

That’s when it happens. The moment of death is full of heat and sound and pain bigger than anything, a funnel of burning heat splitting me in two, something searing and scorching and tearing, and if screaming were a feeling it would be this.

Then nothing.

I know some of you are thinking maybe I deserved it. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent that rose to Juliet or dumped my drink on her at the party. Maybe I shouldn’t have copied off Lauren Lornet’s quiz. Maybe I shouldn’t have said those things to Kent. There are probably some of you who think I deserved it because I was going to let Rob go all the way—because I wasn’t going to save myself.

But before you start pointing fingers, let me ask you: is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserved to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?

Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does?

Is it really so much worse than what you do?

Think about it.

TWO

In my dream I know I am falling though there is no up or down, no walls or sides or ceilings, just the sensation of cold, and darkness everywhere. I am so scared I could scream, but when I open my mouth nothing happens, and I wonder if you fall forever and ever and never touch down, is it really still falling?

I think I will fall forever.

A noise punctuates the silence, a thin bleating growing louder and louder until it is like a scythe of metal slicing the air, slicing into meThen I wake up.

My alarm has been blaring for twenty minutes. It’s six fifty A.M.