Before I Fall: Prologue Summary & Analysis

Samantha Kingston states that, although people often say that “just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes,” that is not how things happened for her. Sam admits that actually, she would have been fine with skipping the “whole final-moment, mental life-scan thing,” but wouldn’t have minded revisiting her life’s greatest hits—her first hookup with her boyfriend, Rob Cokran, as well as her drunken antics and daily pranks with her friends Lindsay, Elody, and Ally. Before she died, however, Sam thought only of one thing, of one person: Vicky Hallinan.

Sam thought of a time in fourth grade when Lindsay announced that she didn’t want Vicky Hallinan on her dodgeball team because Vicky was too fat. Though Sam and Lindsay weren’t friends at the time, Sam found the moment hilarious back then—it was only in the instant before her death that Sam remembered Vicky’s embarrassed face with a sense of shame and sadness. As Sam reflected on the moment, she considered how “the whole point of growing up” was to learn how to place oneself on the side of the people doing the laughing, not the person being laughed at, and noted that over the years, Vicky had gained some modicum of popularity, and now she laughed herself about the incident in fourth grade whenever it came up.

Another “weird” thing that happened to Sam in the moments before her death was the realization that she and her friends had just been talking about death on the car ride home from the party they’d been at. Sam was sharing her “greatest hits” theory while Elody and Ally fought about the music playing in the car. Suddenly, there was a flash of white on the road ahead, and Lindsay yelled something that Sam couldn’t make out—"sit or shit or sight”—and suddenly the girls had flipped off the road and into the woods. It was at that moment that Vicky Hallinan’s face “came rising out of the past,” and then Sam heard and felt nothing at all.

Sam notes that “you don’t get to know” when you’ll die. The moment is unpredictable and unforeseeable. The morning of her death, Sam says, she woke up just seven minutes before she was supposed to get picked up for school, and was too busy worrying about how many roses she’d receive at her school’s Valentine’s Day celebration, Cupid Day, to even tell her parents goodbye.