I ASK MYSELF the age-old question: where to begin?
The obvious answer would be, when I met Juliet. But I've met Juliet a hundred times before I truly met her. We passed each other in school, in the same hallway, walking the same steps, barely looking at each other. We'd been going to the same school for our entire lives without acknowledging each other's existence. Years and years gone by without either of us having half a conversation. But she did exist. Like something out of reach, hovering around the room; a dream.
I knew Juliet Yancy. Everyone knew Juliet Yancy. Typical rich girl, not much personality, sort of an airhead—that was the general consensus. She didn't interest me, though she was pretty to look at, like china plates in a glass cabinet. Look, but don't touch.
I saw her around town plenty of times, outside of school. I saw her walk into the ice cream parlor I'd been working in for my summer job when I was fifteen. I saw her lounging by the public pool with her friends, ogling boys and soaking up the sun, when I'd been on cleanup duty. Whatever sighting I got of her were like glimpses into a different life, a life I could've had had I been born less brown, less poor, less me.
She was everything I wasn't. White and blonde and popular and a heartbreaker. The moment she stepped into a room you could feel everybody go tense. I didn't know her, I didn't know a fucking thing about her, only that someone like her wouldn't even have half a conversation with me.
This isn't to say that I was at the very bottom of the high school hierarchy. Like most, I was somewhere in the middle, had a few friends I could count on, got invited to the occasional suburban teenage party. I was nothing special. I thought Juliet was nothing special, too, despite the dreamy, almost languorous manner she carried herself with.
I didn't know a fucking thing.
But I did know Juliet and her friends—Rachel, Olivia, Wilhelmina and some other girls who I can't remember—were a pack. Tightly wound together, so close that it was near damn impossible to see one of them without the other. At first glance, you'd think that this was nothing more than typical teenage girl friendship. But it was more than that. They laughed like girls, they talked like girls, they spoke to each other like girls, but the thing about girls like them is that they're never what they seem.
Or maybe I'm deluding myself. But I know I'm not deluding myself when I say that Juliet was different than them. Sure, they were together more often than not, and sure, they hardly ever interacted with anyone apart from each other, but Juliet was—how do I say this? She kept a distance from them. She'd stand a little further away from them, sit a little further away from them, and sometimes hardly talk with them.
Sometimes I wonder how she became friends with them.
After her death, I scramble to pick up the signs. Should I have known sooner? Should I have done something? Should I have warned her?
But here I go again, putting the carriage before the horse, getting ahead of myself. Hyun and Ayah both tell me I jump all over the place, that I move in the same point, not going forward, not going backward, just spinning in eternity. Like a spinning top. I move and I move but I'm not fucking moving. It's a shitty analogy, if you ask me.
They have a point, I guess. I haven't moved on at all. I can still see it, you know. The lake. Juliet waist deep in the water. The crunch of rotting branches under heavy boots. And another boy, too. I see him, just as clearly as I see Juliet.
I'm getting ahead of myself again.
