Page 1 of Before You Fell

Chapter One

Willow

Thirteen Years

The song I wrote today feels too big for my hands.

It sits in my notebook with crooked lines, scratched-out words, and blue ink bleeding across the page as if I have cut something open and tried to make it rhyme. Which is dramatic for a thirteen-year-old girl sitting under a tree in the backyard, but apparently my heart has decided to be an idiot before the rest of me catches up.

I know nothing about love.

All I know is that it turns girls in movies soft and stupid. I know it makes people stare out rainy windows as if the weather personally betrayed them. I know it lives in sad songs and in whispered promises, in the quiet second before two people look away because looking too long might mean something.

But I don’t know what I have written. I only know my stomach twists every time I read it back.

If the world gets loud, I’ll be the quiet.

If your hands shake, I’ll hold the song.

Jesus.

I slam the notebook shut.

Nope.

Absolutely not. That is disgusting. That is feelings with their shirt off, standing in the middle of my page, making everything awkward.

The old tree behind our house towers over me, all thick branches and peeling bark, its roots shoved through the dirt as if even the earth got tired of trying to keep it down. Mum calls it ugly. Dad calls it a hazard. I call it mine, because no one else sits beneath it with a notebook pressed to their knees, a pen leaking all over their fingers, and shame crawling up their throat.

I read the first line again because apparently I enjoy pain. Then I want to crawl directly into the dirt and let the worms handle me.

This is the kind of thing girls write before they turn tragic. Before they become the sad little side character in a movie who says things such as, “I’ll wait for you,” while some boy with stupid hair ruins her entire life.

I am not that girl.

I’m just a girl sitting under a tree in the backyard, trying to write a song for a boy who will probably turn it into a joke before I can stop him. Because Phoenix Stone jokes about everything.

He jokes about my hair when it goes frizzy in the rain and sticks out around my face. He jokes when I trip over my own school bag because the universe hates me personally. He jokes when I get mad enough to throw a pencil at his head and miss by such a tragic distance that he spends three days calling me Sniper.

Phoenix laughs at the wrong times.

He grins when adults tell him off and smirks when teachers say his name with that tired, defeated sound. He acts as if the world is one big stage and he has already decided where the spotlight should go. Usually, right on him.

That is the problem with Phoenix. He has no respect for personal space, privacy, shame, or the basic human right to be embarrassed in front of anyone.

The other problem with Phoenix is worse. He is my best friend.

The side gate slams shut as Phoenix walks through it with the subtle grace of a drunk elephant and the confidence of a boy who thinks the whole backyard should make room for him.

Mom is at the kitchen window and I see her lift her head.

“Phoenix Stone, if you break that gate, you’re fixing it,” she calls as he passes.

“Love you too, Elise,” he calls back.

He keeps coming toward me with his battered guitar in one hand, the shoulder strap touching the grass beside him. His black hair falls over his forehead in a messy way, making him look as if he got into a fight with sleep and lost. His shirt is wrinkled and his jeans are ripped at the knees. There is dirt on his shoes, trouble in his grin, and too much swagger in a body that has not finished growing yet.

My mom laughs because she always does when Phoenix is around.