Before I Fall

“There’s always going to be a person laughing and someone getting laughed at. It happens every day, in every school, in every town in America—probably in the world, for all I know. The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.”

Sam says this to defend bullying a girl named Vicky, whose face is the last thing Sam sees before she dies. This also shows Sam’s outlook on her world at the start of the book—she believes she lives in a dog-eat-dog world.

“I wonder if by tomorrow everything will look different to me; I wonder if I’ll look different to other people. I hope so.”

Sam thinks about how she will change after losing her virginity. She doesn’t end up having sex, but she does die, and that drastically changes the way the world looks to her. The point of note here is that she doesn’t have to mold herself others’ expectations to become who she wants to be.

“The point is, we can do things like that. You know why? Because we’re popular. And we’re popular because we can get away with everything. So it’s circular.”

Sam begins the book unable to see any consequences of her actions. Even though she envisions the face of someone she bullied right before dying, she can’t see how it’s her fault because she gets away with everything.