A Step Toward Falling Read online

  Now everything is different. Now Nan is trying to help me forget. Instead of going to school, she lets me stay home every day and watch Pride and Prejudice. If Mom asks her when I’m going to go back to school, Nan says, “For God’s sake, Lauren, let her be. At least we know she’s safe here.”

  Usually Mom and Nan don’t fight in front of me. Usually they don’t fight much because Mom has limitations and depression. Mom does what she can to help me but I don’t need much anymore so she doesn’t do a lot. For instance, I used to make my own lunch and pack it in my zipper lunch bag. But that was back when I went to school and took a lunch. Now I don’t go to school anymore so I don’t pack my lunch either.

  I watch the screen, where Jane is trying not to cry after Mr. Bingley leaves town without saying so much as a word. Just watching her try not to cry makes me start to cry. Even in Pride and Prejudice people are mean. They don’t think about other people’s feelings. Usually I like imagining I am Elizabeth, but today I close my eyes and feel just like Jane, who thought she’d made a friend and turned out to be wrong.

  Sometimes I do things that make other people have uncomfortable thoughts. If I talk too much about Colin Firth, for instance, it gives teachers uncomfortable thoughts. Once Rhonda, my speech therapist, told me her uncomfortable thought: “I’m bored with Colin Firth! I don’t know him. He lives far away and I don’t want to talk about him anymore!”

  We both laughed even though I didn’t think what she said was funny. I can’t imagine being bored with Colin Firth. That’s because I love him and sometimes when he looks out at me from inside the TV screen, I’m pretty sure he loves me, too.

  I know I’m not supposed to say this out loud. Because then people will think many uncomfortable thoughts like I’m crazy. They’ll say I’ve never met Mr. Firth and that means he can’t love me. And I’d have to say what my mom told me: that love is a feeling. And you don’t always kiss people you love. “Sometimes you just love them,” she said.

  When I asked her, “Does that mean they love me, too?” she said, “Oh sure, Belinda. Everyone loves you.”

  I think she meant teachers at school mostly, but I think it could also mean Colin Firth. When he looks at me, I feel it. I just do. I know it in my heart.

  Rhonda, my speech teacher, doesn’t agree: “He’s a character. He’s not real. He’s on TV but TV isn’t real.”

  I’m not sure what to say to that. To me he’s real. Doesn’t that make him real?

  I don’t always watch Pride and Prejudice. Sometimes I watch different old movies. I like Gone with the Wind and The Sound of Music except I don’t like it when Maria and the Captain kiss because he’s too old and looks like her father. I like Liesl and Rolfe’s song even though Rolfe turns out to be a Nazi which is a terrible thing to be. In my mind afterward, I make him not a Nazi and I let them get married and live happily after.

  Same with Scarlett from Gone with the Wind. In the beginning she loves Ashley who has a girl’s name but is a man. Ashley is very nice but doesn’t love her back. Then she meets Rhett who is dangerous and handsome and loves her right away. In my imagination, I make Ashley change his mind and decide to love Scarlett. Then she’ll have someone she knows she can count on. She can’t count on Rhett. He is exciting but not dependable. Sometimes exciting is exactly what you don’t want in a boy.

  I learned this from other movies about exciting but undependable boys. You have to be careful with them because a lot of times they’re handsome, too. So that’s confusing.

  “I get around some of those men—they’re so handsome, I can’t talk,” Mom says. “I mean it. My tongue gets all dry. It’s like someone put glue in my mouth.”

  I know this feeling. I have it every time I watch Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth. I can’t talk at all. Sometimes I try to watch without blinking and I can’t do that either. I get light-headed which my mom says happened to her once on a date. When she stood up to go to the ladies’ room, she fell back into her chair and felt embarrassed.

  “That’s what happens when I like the man,” Mom says. “I don’t act very likeable.”

  I know how this is. I’ve had it in real life, too, not just watching Colin Firth. I felt it every time I was around Ron Moody. Sometimes, just being near him, I felt like I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. Or my heart might explode.

  I didn’t feel like myself. I felt like someone having a heart attack. Except it happened every time I saw him so it wasn’t a real heart attack. It was love. That’s what Mom said when I told her about him. “You’re in love, Belinda, and that’s a wonderful, special feeling . . .”

  She didn’t say it was bad to feel that way, or wrong. She didn’t even say, “Be careful, Belinda,” which she probably should have. She said, “You deserve love as much as anyone else,” which got me confused for a while. It made me think maybe Ron loved me, too.

  EMILY

  THE TRUTH ABOUT LUCAS—AND why we’re being punished—is a little more complicated than I want to admit to anyone, especially Richard, who loves to hate what he calls “the heteronormative class structure embodied by the football team.” I’m not sure exactly what he means by this, except for the obvious part. Football players have too much power at our school, especially this year with their winning record. I’ve seen lunch ladies wave them through the line without paying a dime for a full tray of food. I’ve seen kids they don’t know buy them sodas and carry their backpacks; anything to win three seconds of a football player’s approval.

  Richard thinks our group of friends is different but we aren’t really. We might not prostrate ourselves to win the football team’s attention, but we still spend some amount of time every lunch period staring over at their table. Just because we can see the problem doesn’t mean we aren’t part of it.

  Lucas and I have never talked about what happened with Belinda, so I have no idea if he feels guilty the way I do or if he feels like he’s being unfairly punished. I assume it’s the latter—that he thinks what happened was terrible, of course, but not his fault. At the very least, he probably thinks it’s more my fault than his, which—though I don’t admit this to anyone—might be true.

  It’s still hard for me to understand what happened.

  On the surface, it’s a simple story. Three weeks ago, I was at a home game with my four best friends: Richard, Barry, Weilin, and Candace. Ordinarily we aren’t big football fans, but this year everyone goes to home games. Every week, with every victory, the crowds get bigger.

  That night, I was in a terrible mood, though I feel stupid admitting it now. Toby Schulz, a boy I thought I’d been flirting with for the last two weeks with funny texts and Facebook messages, was sitting two rows down from us, on a clear and obvious date with Jenny Birdwell, a cute sophomore with a blond ponytail. Three days earlier he’d sent me a message saying, “We should do something some time,” which I had stupidly thought meant with each other. Apparently it didn’t. Apparently it meant we should sit near each other at a football game and wave hi while I’m on a date with someone else.

  It wasn’t that I was so in love with Toby. He’d seemed smart and a little more engaged than our typical new recruits to Youth Action Coalition, who usually show up angry about one issue and bored by all the others. At the first meeting Toby came to, he stayed after to say he was impressed by the range of our “actions” and all “the cool things we were up to.” He had curly brown hair and slightly crooked teeth that for some reason made him even cuter. LGBT support wasn’t his main issue, he told us, not looking at Richard, but he was certainly on board with that. His main issue was the environment. He loved backpacking and wanted the mountains to still be around for his children to enjoy. How could I not get a crush on him? And when he messaged me three times over the next week, how could I not think maybe he liked me back?

  If I’m being honest, though, I’d have to admit: it wasn’t Toby being there with a cute sophomore that bothered me as much as a long series of Toby-like misjudgments on my
part. It felt like I kept making the same mistakes over and over—thinking classroom joking was flirtation, thinking guys who asked for my phone number to get a homework assignment wanted my phone number more than they wanted the assignment.

  I partly blame Richard for this. He loves to pretend that everyone is at least a little bit gay and might have a crush on him. He’ll sit beside Wayne Cartwright, our gorgeous quarterback, in the main office waiting for a late pass and claim their arm hairs were reaching out for each other. He knows nothing will happen but he still dwells on these moments. “Arm hairs don’t lie. They can’t, actually. They don’t have individual brains. Just instincts.”

  For him it’s funny. Nobody expects Wayne Cartwright to miraculously come out of the closet and mix arm hairs with Richard, but when I try to dream big and jokingly say, “I think Toby Schulz wants to ask me out, but he’s too shy,” it’s sad the next week to sit behind the evidence of how unshy he is. Richard didn’t say anything, which made me feel even more pathetic, if that was possible. Like suddenly I’d become someone people tiptoed around.

  This is one of my explanations for what happened that night. Not an excuse or a justification. Just a way for me to understand how I could be such a disappointment to myself. Toward the end of half time, I slipped away from my group to buy a soda at the snack stand and on the way back to my seat, I started to cry. Ridiculous, embarrassing tears of self-pity. I never cry in public—ever—and I didn’t want my friends to see, so I went around the back of the bleachers. I thought if I let myself cry for a minute, I’d get it out of my system and be fine for the second half.

  Then I couldn’t find my way back. I was near the field house where the players spend half time. It was late; the team had run onto the field to thunderous applause five minutes earlier. We were behind by seven points, which was different for us. We’d gotten so used to winning by comfortable margins that the crowd was anxious and screaming and stamping their feet.

  Even with all the commotion, though, I heard a strange noise under the bleachers. It sounded like an animal. A dog maybe, who’d fallen and was stuck in the latticework below the bleachers. That made no sense, of course, but that’s what it sounded like. It was dark under the bleachers, and striped with light, which meant my eyes took a minute to adjust. I couldn’t see anything at first, so I moved closer. It must be a dog, I thought. I could hear a whimpering sound. Then gradually, in the darkness, two figures took shape. I recognized one. Belinda Montgomery, a girl I’d known years earlier in a children’s theater program, was pressed against a fence with a boy standing in front of her. It looked like her hair was caught and her dress was torn. For a second I thought: She’s stuck on the fence and he’s lifting her off.

  Nothing else made sense. The last time I saw her, she was playing Little Red Riding Hood.

  Then I realized the boy was Mitchell Breski, someone who’d been arrested once at our school and taken away in a police car. We never knew for what, but there were plenty of rumors, mostly about drugs. Knowing that much made the whole scene more frightening and, somehow, less comprehensible. Wait, I kept thinking. Wait a minute.

  I should have screamed that, I know now.

  I should have screamed anything to make it clear this didn’t seem right. I knew Belinda, but my brain couldn’t process what it was seeing: her pressed against the fence like that, powerless behind him. They couldn’t have been a couple, couldn’t have even been friends. I should have said her name. I should have called out, “Belinda, is that you?” even if I hadn’t said hello to her once in the last three years. I didn’t do that, though. I was struck mute in that instant and I remember very little after that. I know that at some point, a football player ran out from the locker room, which must have jolted me momentarily out of my panic. Maybe I thought, It’s okay to leave because he’s here now and will take care of this. I honestly don’t remember.

  I know I staggered out from under the bleachers to a roar of noise and light from the crowd. I know I found a teacher, Mrs. Avery, wearing a scarf and pompom earrings, screaming “DEFENSE!” between cupped hands, and I touched her elbow. “There’s something happening under the bleachers!” I said. The roar behind us got bigger.

  “WHAT?” she yelled.

  “There’s something happening. To a girl. Under the bleachers.” My heartbeat was louder than my voice at that point.

  All at once, everyone in the stands was up on their feet screaming. Later I learned, we’d made an interception and carried the ball for a forty-five-yard run. We’d taken a losing game and turned it around. Everyone was ecstatic—screaming and hugging and pounding their feet.

  Then I saw the football player from under the bleachers jog onto the field and felt a great flood of relief. He took care of it, I thought. He stopped whatever was about to happen.

  I sat for a few minutes so my heart could slow down. When it did, I walked back to the far end of the bleachers where I’d just come from and saw the flashing lights of a police car pulsing red in the parking lot near the snack stand. I was surprised at first and then relieved by what it meant: Yes, the football player called the police.

  I didn’t sleep much that night, which meant my nerves were raw when I read the newspaper the next morning and saw a small article on the fourth page under the headline INCIDENT BRINGS POLICE TO HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL GAME. Neither student was named, nor were many details given, but seeing the headline made me break down on the spot and confess to my parents what had happened. “I saw this. I walked in on it and—I don’t know what happened—I froze. I didn’t do anything.”

  My parents were quick to reassure me. “You were frightened for your safety, sweetheart. You were following your instincts. No one can blame you for that.”

  “Yes, they can,” I told my mother. The more I thought about it, the worse my actions seemed. “I didn’t help her. I ran away and let the other guy take care of it. It was terrible.”

  My mother tried to argue with me, but what could she say? I hadn’t done anything. Finally she squeezed my hand and said, “Well, thank heavens that other boy was there. It sounds like the girl is going to be fine and it’s time for everyone to put this behind us. It’s okay, Em. Next time will be different.”

  It was impossible to know if Belinda was okay. I didn’t see her in school, but then our paths hardly ever crossed, so maybe that didn’t mean much. That whole week afterward, I looked for her at school, wandering past the Life Skills classroom where I assumed she spent most of her day. I never saw her, but I saw some of her classmates, joking around with one another, wearing aprons one morning. When one of them looked up and saw me, I asked, “Is Belinda here?”

  “No,” he said. “We haven’t seen Beminda in a while.”

  What else could I do to find out if she was okay? Instead of going to lunch that day, I stood outside the athletic office and studied the roster of football players. I wanted to figure out which player had saved her. I hadn’t seen his face but I remembered his number, which meant it was Lucas Kessler, who I’d never had a class with and didn’t know except for his size. I remembered someone once saying he wore size sixteen shoes that he had to special order because no one mass-produced shoes like that.

  It wasn’t until the end of that day, when a summons to the guidance counselor told me I would no longer wrestle with my guilt in private but would have to discuss it—extensively, with various authorities, as it turned out—that I also learned this: I wasn’t alone. Lucas hadn’t done anything either.

  It took another week to get the whole story, but when I finally did, I could hardly believe it. It turned out Belinda had saved herself.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BELINDA

  PRIDE AND PREJUDICE HAS many parts that I love. My favorites aren’t the same as Nan’s favorites and sometimes she talks right straight through my favorite parts even though I’m careful and never do that to her. It especially bothers me when she makes me answer her questions because I don’t want Mr. Firth to look out from th
e TV and see me not paying attention to his show.

  Nan says he can’t see me and I shouldn’t be ridiculous, he doesn’t even know who I am. Mom says you never know, he might have read one of the letters I’ve written to him. The first time I wrote him a letter, he sent me a typed note thanking me for my letter and saying if I want an autographed picture I should write him back and enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope.

  I wanted to do that, but then I worried that if I got an autographed picture I might have a hard time thinking about anything else. I know I would stare at it all the time and worry about something happening to it. I’m not sure I could fall asleep in the same room with an autographed picture of Mr. Firth, but if I had one, I couldn’t imagine sleeping in a different room. I’d want to frame it of course and Mom would probably say frames are too much money, just use a sheet of plastic, which would upset me. Nan would probably buy me a frame but not a very nice one. She’d get one from CVS where she goes once a week to get her prescriptions filled. It would have plastic instead of glass and price stickers on it and it would make me sad to put Mr. Firth in something like that. Then Nan would say she lives on Social Security and what do I expect?

  I decided it was better not to get any picture at all than to get something so special that it would only create problems, so I never sent him a self-addressed stamped envelope but I have kept writing him letters, usually about once a month.

  I’ve told him about my family situation and a little about my health. He’s one of the few people who know that as a baby I had three operations on my heart. I don’t talk about that with other people because I don’t like to think about being in hospitals. After a year of writing to him, though, it was something I thought he should know about me.

  I’ve also told him a few hard stories about my life. I always get the feeling he isn’t bothered by hearing them. I told him the terrible things that happened on the school bus when I first started riding it in seventh grade. How people pretended to be my friend so they could take my milk money and food from my lunch. That went on for a long time before I could figure out how to stop it.