33 pages • 1 hour read
Lauren OliverBefore I Fall
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Sam Kingston, the narrator, begins the prologue by talking about end-of-life moments. She states that she wouldn’t want to revisit the fifth grade because she was forced to wear both glasses and braces during that year. The first day of middle school is out, as are boring family vacations. Algebra class, period cramps, and bad kisses also rank high on her list of moments she wouldn’t want to revisit at the end of her life.
Moments she would want to revisit at the end of her life include kissing Rob Cokran for the first time at homecoming, her sixteenth birthday, pranking a girl named Clara Seuse, and getting drunk with her three best friends: Lindsay, Elody, and Ally.
Sam reveals that in her last moment of life, she didn’t think of any of those things. She didn’t see a montage of her entire life. She saw a face—Vicky Hallinan’s face. More specifically, Vicky’s face after Lindsay announced in the fourth grade that Vicky was too fat to play on their gym class dodgeball team. As it happened, Lindsay and Vicky ended up on friendly terms, but it’s that moment, when Sam just stood by and observed before joining in with Lindsay, which revisited her in her last moments.
At the end of the prologue, Sam is talking about end-of-life memories and visions with Lindsay, Elody, and Ally in Lindsay’s Range Rover, which is nicknamed “The Tank.” Lindsay is behind the wheel when she loses control of the car and careens into the woods. The car rolls and Sam dies.
Chapter 1 Summary
Sam wakes up to her alarm and her little sister, Elizabeth, or Izzy for short, shaking her. Izzy speaks with a lisp but refuses to go to speech therapy to learn how to correct it. When she wakes up Sam, it’s because it’s time to go to school. Sam reflects on the morning, not yet knowing that this is the day she will die. Lindsay picks her up for school and brings her coffee and a bagel, and they go to get Elody. The girls are excited because it’s Friday, February 12th—Cupid Day. On Cupid Day at Thomas Jefferson High School in Ridgeview, CT, students buy roses for one another and attach notes to them. The notes are delivered during the day by “Cupids,” or underclassmen dressed in costume. On the way to school, Sam remarks on Lindsay’s driving, which is distracted at best and dangerous at worst.
Lindsay hopes that her boyfriend Patrick will send her a rose. Sam thinks about how they couple has broken up and gotten back together at least a dozen times in the first half of the school year. Sam’s boyfriend, Rob Cokran, has been the object of her affection since the sixth grade, though they only started dating in October of their senior year. Sam is looking forward to getting roses, but she’s more focused on her decision to lose her virginity to Rob later that night. His parents are out of town and she plans to sleep at his house.
Sam ruminates on how wonderful it is to be popular because she can do what she likes, and she always gets away with it. Once they reach school, Lindsay almost gets into an accident trying to steal a space from another senior. They want to park in Senior Alley—a row of twenty parking spaces in the faculty lot. It’s closer to the school and considered a VIP privilege, even though it’s first-come, first-served.
In period two, Sam receives five Valograms, or roses, which disappoints her a little but doesn’t make her feel too desperate. For students at Thomas Jefferson High, anything less than five roses over the course of the day is pathetic, while the most popular students receive nine or more. Sam is expecting to fall into the more popular category as she and her friends are considered the most popular girls in school. In chemistry class, Sam is faced with a pop quiz. Worried that flunking will hurt her chances of acceptance at Boston University, her dream school, she cheats off of Lauren’s paper. Lauren is a classmate of Sam’s who has also struggled in Chemistry. She receives another four roses in fifth period math class, where she often flirts with her 25-year-old teacher, Mr. Daimler. She gets a rush from doing something she knows is wrong and getting away with it.
One of the roses she gets is from Kent, a boy she’s known since childhood. Technically, he was her first kiss, but once Sam started hanging out with Lindsay, she stopped hanging out with Kent. After class, Kent invites her to a party he’s hosting that night. Sam wants to decline until she learns that Lindsay is eager to attend the party. Then, at lunch, Sam joins Lindsay, Elody, and Ally in making fun of a girl named Juliet Sykes, whom they dub “Psycho Killer.” Sam cuts class seventh period to go to TCBY (a frozen yogurt shop) with Lindsay.
Afterward, Sam starts to feel nervous about sleeping with Rob, but plans to do so anyway. She only wants to have sex with him to get her first time over with, since she’s scared of it. At Kent’s party, Rob convinces Sam to let him kiss and grope her in a room full of their classmates. Juliet Sykes attends the party and confronts Lindsay, Elody, Ally, and Sam about their years of torturing her, calling them all out as “bitches”—and is then humiliated by being shoved and drenched in beer. Later on that evening, Sam gets drunk and yells at Kent. She accuses him of being obsessed with her, and decides she’s too upset to want to sleep with Rob. She and her friends leave the party and that’s when Lindsay crashes the car, killing Sam.
Prologue-Chapter 1 Analysis
The prologue opens the framework for the story; Sam is already living her last few minutes in this section. Her lists of memories that she would or wouldn’t want to relive provide insight into her initial character. She’s a popular teenager with little regard for the rules. She’ll break them, knowing she’s breaking them, but also she’ll get away with it, as she always has in the past. She hasn’t had to deal with consequences.
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t know consequence exists. She was bullied as a child and understands those actions can leave deep marks, but she considers it something everyone goes through—something everyone must survive. Her focus during her last moments is not her education or her family. In fact, she shuns memories of family vacations, calling them boring. She holds the same disdain for her hometown of Ridgeview, and expresses that she and her friends must drink and party because it’s the only way to have fun in a boring town.
As Sam goes through the day leading up to her death, the reader catches a glimpse at a crucial insecurity: Sam’s two closest friends, Lindsay and Elody, are already sexually active and she is not. She feels like she’s last to cross that finish line, and exerts pressure upon herself to fix that. Her friends also exert pressure on her to sleep with Rob, and she feels pressure from Rob himself because they’ve already been dating a few months and she feels like it’s something she owes him.
Sam’s insecurity also comes out when she’s talking about how many roses she expects to get during Cupid Day. She remarks on how lowerclassmen try to salvage discarded roses, but that the upperclassmen can always tell when they’ve done this, making them just as pathetic as if they hadn’t received the roses to begin with. Sam’s flirtation with Mr. Daimler also show her insecurity. She feels a sense of power and control doing something forbidden, but even more so because she receives validation from him in the way he speaks to her and winks at her. That validation works to counter her insecurity.
