Free Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver Page B

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 andI’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: iswhat 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 me—
    Then I wake up.
    My alarm has been blaring for twenty minutes. It’s six fifty A.M.
    I sit up in bed, pushing away the comforter. I’m covered with sweat even though my room is cold. My throat is dry and I’m desperate for water, like I’ve just been running a long way.
    For a second when I look around the room everything seems fuzzy and slightly distorted, like I’m not really looking at my room but only at a transparency of my room that’s beenlaid down incorrectly so the corners don’t match up with the real thing. Then the light shifts and everything looks normal again.
    All at once it comes back to me, and blood starts pounding in my head: the party, Juliet Sykes, the argument with Kent—
    “Sammy!” My door swings open, banging once against the wall, and Izzy comes galloping across the room, stepping all over my notebooks and discarded jeans and my Victoria’s Secret Team Pink sweatshirt. Something seems wrong; something skirts the edges of my memory, but then it is gone and Izzy is bouncing on my bed, throwing her arms around me. They are hot. She curls a fist around the necklace I always wear—a thin gold chain with a tiny bird charm hanging from it, a gift from my grandmother—and tugs gently.
    “Mommy says you have to get up.” Her breath smells like peanut butter, and it’s not until I push her off me that I realize how badly I’m shaking.
    “It’s Saturday,” I say. I have no idea how I got home last night. I have no idea what