Before I Fall

PART TWO
PART 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 been laid 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, Hailey
Steinfeld-Sykes, the argument with Lauren—
“Kaki!” My door swings open, banging once against the wall, and Sofia 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 Sofi 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.
“Mami 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 happened to
Dinah or Mani or Ally, and just thinking about it makes me sick.