Before I Die

Tessa’s friend Zoey visits her, summoned (as we later learn) by Tessa’s father. When Zoey sees that Tessa has written, “I want to feel the weight of a boy on top of me” on her wall (1), the two of them burst out laughing. Tessa wants Zoey to help her carry out her last wishes, one of which is to go out to a club and to find a guy. Zoey gives Tessa her red dress to wear and does her makeup, covering up the fact that Tessa is bald from her chemotherapy treatments.

On their way out the door, Tessa and Zoey run into Tessa’s father. He expresses approval that Tessa is going out and asks them to return by midnight. This ruins Tessa’s giddily expectant mood—she knows that her father is right, and that going out will exhaust her. However, Zoey tells Tessa that it doesn’t matter if they stay out until three in the morning: “There are no consequences for someone like you!” (10).

Tessa and Zoey go to a dance club. Zoey points out an attractive boy dancing by himself, and the two of them join him. He offers them both a toke of his joint, and they dance together. While the noise and action of the club initially exhilarate Tessa, when she stops dancing for a moment, the excitement is gone: “I pause to inhale, stupidly stand still a second too long, forgetting to move. And now the spell is broken” (14).

Tessa goes to the bathroom, where she collapses on the toilet. Zoey follows in a little while, explaining that the boy on the dance floor is Jake, and that he and his friend Scott have invited Tessa and Zoey back to their place. When Tessa refuses, telling Zoey that she wants her first experience of sex to be romantic and meaningful, Zoey gets angry. Zoey goes to the coatroom and collects Tessa’s coat, ready to call Tessa a cab and go to the boys’ apartment alone. Tessa eventually relents and agrees to go along.  

At Jake and Scott’s apartment, Zoey and Scott couple off. Tessa initiates and goes through sex with Jake, after first telling Jake that she is a virgin. Tessa is bewildered and disappointed by the experience. Jake notices her sadness, as well as the marks on her skin that her illness has caused but makes no great effort to comfort her or to find out what is troubling her. 

Tessa leaves Jake asleep in his room and goes downstairs. She finds Zoey asleep in Scott’s arms on the living room couch and wakes her up. Tessa and Zoey confer in the kitchen—Tessa says it is time to go home, but although Zoey sympathizes with Tessa, she is too “wrecked” to leave (28). Zoey goes back to sleep on the couch, and Tessa makes herself some tea. She adds whimsical wishes to a shopping list in the kitchen.

Tessa and Cal visit their mother, who has been divorced from their father since Tessa was 12. We learn that she is a feckless, adventurous character, who traveled around once she divorced Tessa’s father, communicating with her children only through postcards. When she found out that Tessa was sick, she moved into an apartment nearby.

Dropping off Tessa and Cal, their father instructs their mother to keep an eye on Tessa, as she has “refused to have her blood count checked for nearly two weeks” (30). He is clearly angry with Tessa for having stayed out all night with Zoey. Tessa’s mother laughs off her father’s concern. She, Cal, and Tessa play the board game “Game of Life” together; Tess loses, and declares it an overly demoralizing bit of symbolism: “It’s rubbish and I’m crap at it” (32).

Tessa needs to go to the hospital the following week for a “lumbar puncture” (32). When she asks her mother if she will visit her there, her mother is evasive. Tessa goes into her bedroom and phones Zoey, telling her that she feels strange after having had sex. Zoey, who is clearly high, reassures Tessa that this feeling is normal. Tessa calls Emergency Services but changes her mind about reporting an emergency when she reaches an operator. She then calls the Samaritan Hotline, but balks at talking to the operator there as well.  

Tessa goes to the hospital with her father to have her lumbar puncture. The doctor performing the operation is brusque and impersonal, addressing the medical students behind him more than he does Tessa. The attending nurse, however, is warm and humane. She asks Tessa’s father if he remembers what warning symptoms to look for in the days following the operation and is clearly impressed by his command of the facts.

Attempting to focus on something besides her own pain during the operation, Tessa stares at a picture on a wall. The old painting, titled The Great Plague Reaches Eyam, causes Tessa to meditate on time and death: “Over three hundred and forty years later, everyone who lived through [the plague] is gone. Of all the things in the picture, only the sun remains […] That thought makes me feel very small” (37). 

Tessa lies in bed, listening to the sounds of Cal and her father eating their breakfasts and getting ready for the day downstairs. Cal comes into her room and tries to rouse her from bed, but she refuses, telling him to “piss off” (41). Once she hears Cal go off to school, she expects to hear her father’s set routine: “After Cal leaves, he makes himself a coffee, then he tidies the kitchen table, rinses the dishes and puts the washing machine on” (42).

She is surprised when her father instead comes into her room and gets into bed with her as a way of motivating her to get out of bed. He also asks Tessa if anything has happened between her and Zoey, advising her to make new friends. She doesn’t want to meet anyone who would only befriend her out of pity: “I’m not interested in rubberneckers wanting to get to know me so they’ll get sympathy at my funeral” (44). Eventually, she angrily leaves her room, slamming the door behind her: “He can have my bed. Let him. He can lie there and rot” (45). 

Tessa goes outside and initiates conversation with Adam, the boy next door. Adam is older, disheveled, and mysterious. He seems to spend most of his time doing various types of lawn work. Now, he is tending a bonfire.

Tessa asks him if she can add to his bonfire, then fetches Zoey’s red dress, as well as a couple of shoeboxes that contain old photographs, as well as diaries from the first days of her sickness. She watches them burn and mocks her initial attitude towards her illness: “Four years of pathetic optimism burns well – look at it flare!” (47). Watching Zoey’s dress go up in flames, she suddenly feels queasy, and then realizes that she has fainted. Adam rouses her with a Coke. She asks him why he is always gardening, and he responds, “It’s for my mum more than me” (50). He tells her that he lives alone with his mother.  

Tessa and her father learn the results of her lumbar puncture from Doctor Ryan. The news is not good: “things are progressing more quickly than we first thought” (53), which means Tessa will not live much longer. Tessa resolves to go back to her list of last things: “All I know is that I have two choices – stay wrapped in blankets and get on with dying, or get the list back together and get on with living” (55). 

Tessa resolves that she is going to spend a day saying “Yes” to everything that people ask her to do. She takes Cal to the playground, where she concedes to his wishes to go on all of the scariest rides. Zoey meets them at the playground, and they go to the market together. Tessa discovers that Cal’s needs are often in conflict with Zoey’s, making her plan for the day more complicated than she had thought.

Zoey has taken them to the market because Scott and Jake have a stall there. Zoey has clearly told Jake about Tessa’s illness. Furious and embarrassed, Tessa runs away from the stall, taking Cal with her. Zoey follows, attempting to explain herself, but Tessa ignores her. She says yes to a homeless man’s invitation to go into the river, until a local café owner and pulls her out of the water. Once she tells the owner that she doesn’t know Zoey, Zoey leaves. 

When Cal and Tessa are alone, Cal asks Tessa if Zoey’s accusation that Tessa enjoys being sick is true. Tessa replies, “Sometimes” (71). Cal asks if this is why she went into the water, and Tessa tells him about her plan to say “Yes” to everything. 

Cal and Tessa go shopping. She buys him a number of extravagant toys with her credit card, such as a fancy alarm clock and a PlayStation game. She buys herself a dress, expensive lingerie, and a wheeled suitcase in which to store all of their purchases. They go out to eat at McDonalds, where Tessa suddenly feels faint: “It’s like someone suddenly scalps me with a spoon and digs about inside my brain” (73).  

Tessa wakes up in the hospital, with no memory of having fainted when she was with Cal. As a doctor tells her that she has hypercalcemia, a condition where her calcium levels get too high, Tessa sadly realizes that all of her doctors, including this one, have been bland and remote: “I keep hoping that in some hospital I’ll bump into the perfect doctor, but none of them are ever right” (76).

At the hospital, all three members of her family visit Tessa at once. She enjoys the rare chance to be around her younger brother and both of her parents: “It’s lovely listening to them talk, their words gliding into each other” (80). Her mother leaves with Cal, who needs some rest. Tessa’s father tells her that her mother is staying at their house temporarily. He asks Tessa about the list, but she wants to keep it secret: “The list is the only thing keeping me living” (81).

Tessa resolves that today will be her day to do drugs—another item on her list. She texts Zoey but receives no response. She recalls that Zoey and Scott visited her together in the hospital, looking like a married couple.

Outside, she sees Adam preparing to go somewhere on his motorbike. She confronts him about being out of touch, and he confesses that Cal told him about her illness, when he asked Cal why she had not been around. Tessa tells Adam about her list, and about her plan to take ecstasy with Zoey. Adam tells her that hallucinogenic mushrooms would be superior to ecstasy, and that he can provide some. He leaves on his motorbike, telling her that one day he will take her to the place where he gets the mushrooms. 

Zoey and Tessa go over to Adam’s house together. Zoey is skeptical about Adam’s plan, and is openly rude to him. His house is a “mirror image” of Tessa’s house, but is much cleaner and emptier: “It’s so clean in his kitchen it looks like something from a show home; there’s not even any washing up on the draining board” (91).

Adam serves Zoey and Tessa the mushrooms steeped in tea; he takes none himself. He then drives them out to the woods in his mother’s fancy car. Tessa and Zoey begin to feel the effects of the mushrooms before they get in the car. By the time that they reach the woods, they are both completely high. The drugs convince Tessa that if she stays away from the “modern world and all its gadgets,” and she will no longer be sick (101).  

A nurse named Philippa visits Tessa and her father at home. Philippa draws Tessa’s blood while lecturing her about her depressed and cynical attitude. Tessa’s father has a crush on her previous nurse, Sian: “Last time Sian was here he offered her supper and made a right idiot of himself” (104). 

Philippa then leaves, and Tessa’s father goes out for a coffee, telling Tessa that he needs “a bit of space” (108). Alone in her house, Tessa goes into her brother Cal’s room, writes a few words on his wall (“Parachutes, cocktails, stones, lollipops” (107)), watches television, and texts Zoey, who does not respond. Tessa wonders where Adam is—he had promised to give her a ride on his motorcycle.

Tessa visits Adam at his house, where she meets his mother for the first time. Adam’s mother is odd and withdrawn and does not acknowledge Tessa at all. Adam is solicitous towards his mother, telling her that he will be back soon and guiding her back into the house.

Adam takes Tessa for a ride on his motorbike. She loves the speed of the ride. They drive out to a clearing overlooking the town and sit together on a bench, smoking cigarettes. Adam tells Tessa that his mother has been depressed and psychologically fragile ever since his father died in a car accident eighteen months earlier. He likes Tessa but does not want to get involved with her because of her illness. She leaves in anger, saying that she has to meet friends and that she does not need a ride back into town. 

Tessa dedicates herself to breaking the law: another item on her list. On the bus back into town, she deliberately bumps into a woman, blames another passenger when the woman confronts her about it, and then does not pay her bus fare: “Three crimes in under one minute. Not bad” (119). 

Tessa asks Zoey to be her accomplice in breaking the law. Zoey is surly and standoffish but agrees to meet Tessa at the park. Tessa is transfixed by the park: “I like the tang of rain in the air and the row of birds lining the wall over by the dustbins” (122). She notices that Zoey looks tired and is dressed more sloppily than usual. Zoey suggests shoplifting.     

Zoey takes Tessa to a supermarket to shoplift, announcing that she will be a lookout. Zoey is distracted and bored, but Tessa takes eagerly to shoplifting, despite Zoey’s warnings about supermarket detectives.

In the middle of shoplifting, Beth and Fiona, two old high school acquaintances, approach Tessa. They ask Tessa awkward questions about her illness and possible cures. In order to change the subject, Tessa tells them that she is with Zoey. Beth and Fiona then mock Zoey for her relationship with Scott, suggesting that he is sexually promiscuous. Upset, Zoey leaves the store, ignoring Tessa’s pleas to stay.

When Tessa is leaving with her stolen loot, as well as a few perfunctory purchases, a supermarket detective accosts Tessa. He takes her to a backroom, where a woman named Shirley interviews her. Tessa tells Shirley that she is sick, hoping to win sympathy, but Shirley is unmoved. She makes Tessa phone her father, who takes Tessa home with the promise that he will give her a strict talking-to. Once home, Tessa’s father asks her again about the list and worries about how to protect her: “What happens if anger takes hold of you, Tessa? Who will you be then?” (136).

Cal and Tessa are outside in their yard. Cal buries a dead rook and tells Tessa about the maggots that will devour his body when he is gone. Tessa asks Cal if the same thing will happen to her, but Cal says it won’t.

Adam brings a bouquet of flowers for Tessa. He apologizes for the day before, and helps Cal bury the rook. Tessa has the sense that Adam is doing this in order to impress her. She relaxes against a wall and is suddenly overcome by dizziness. Adam tries to help her, and she snaps at him go to away. His flowers end up on the rook’s grave. 

Tessa hides in her closet, so that her parents will think that she has already left the house. From her closet, she watches her father come in, look for her, and look around her room. He discovers the list in her bedside drawer, but Cal calls him away before he can read it. Tessa speculates that her father will be shocked to see the next item on her list but does not tell the reader what that is.

Cal comes into her room, where Tessa bribes him into keeping quiet about her still being in the house. The two of them listen to their parents discussing her downstairs. Tessa puts on a dress and heels, and sneaks down the stairs while Cal acts as a distraction. She pauses on the stairwell and listens to Cal and their parents discussing her. Cal asks their parents if they can go on holiday once she dies.  

Tessa steals her father’s car. Although she has no driver’s license, she drives to Zoey’s house, making only a few mistakes along the way. Zoe is grumpy and distracted and doesn’t want to go with Tessa. The two argue, but then make up.

Tessa drives Zoey to the beach. While they are driving, the rain intensifies. The storm terrifies Zoey, but Tessa loves the chaos and the speed, feeling strangely powerful and invulnerable behind the wheel. They pull into a gas station for cigarettes. As she watches Zoey through the store window, Tessa has the sense that she has crossed to a different plane of being from her friend: “Poor Zoey […] I’ll let her drive, but only because I choose to. She can’t control me any more. I’m beyond her” (158).