Promise Me Something (10 page)

“Are you OK?” she asked.

I stared at a random equation in my book. “Of course.”

“Do you feel like you’re being replaced? Madison said you might feel that way.”

“You talked about this with Madison?” I knew I should be happy for Abby, but instead I felt like I was being left on a desert island and she was my boat, speeding away.

“The important thing is, you’re still one of my best friends,” she said.

Really?
It didn’t feel that way. This stung worse than Dad giving Lucy the diamond necklace. “Stop acting like a psychologist,” I said after a moment, staring down at my math book. I refused to cry over something so stupid.

“I’m not acting like anything,” she said. “I’m just trying to be sensitive to your situation.”

“What situation? Not having a boyfriend?”

“No, going to Belltown with what’s-her-name.”

“Her name is Olive,” I said with a stab of anger. “And she thinks you guys hate her.”

“We don’t hate her.” Abby sighed. “She’s just not our type.”

Our
type? What the hell was that supposed to mean?

Abby noticed the look on my face and rephrased herself. “I mean, she just seems too serious. You said it yourself when you first met her.”

“Well, she’s my friend now.” The force in my voice surprised me. “And you’re right that she’s serious—that’s what I like about her.” I looked down at my half-finished sheet of homework and sighed. “Anyway, I have to finish this problem set. I should go home.”

“Reyna, come on.” She leaned over and hugged my shoulders. “Why are you being so touchy? Do you have your period?”

I almost rolled my eyes like Olive.

“Are you upset that I’m going out with someone?”

“Not at all,” I lied. “I’m happy for you and Jordan.”

“It’s Jeremy.”

“Right,” I said. “You and Jeremy.”

When I got home, I looked up Levi Siegel’s name online and clicked on the first twenty-seven hits. Most of them were about a plastic surgeon in San Francisco, but I found a local newspaper article with a picture of Levi holding up a tennis trophy when he was nine or ten. He looked pretty much the same, only chubbier. I also found his name in a list of honor roll students at his old middle school and on the Temple Beth Shalom of Connecticut’s website.

I didn’t look up his screen name or send him a friend request. I wouldn’t have known what to say. Instead I signed online and listened to Madison complain about Abby’s boyfriend. She wasn’t happy for them either but for a different reason than mine. She didn’t like watching them make out every morning on the bus. We signed off after that—or rather, we both turned our statuses to invisible and sat there watching to see who else would come online—and I tried to determine whether I felt good or bad about my prospects.

This morning?

Yeah.

Without a word to anyone?

Sort of.

You just got up and walked away?

I left a suicide note.

Wow.

A decoy.

WOW.

I needed to buy myself time to think.

Where are you now?

A public library in Bridgeport.

What are you going to do?

I’m headed to New York City.

To do what?

Be free, I guess.

Wow.

I might need a place to stay for a while.

In Connecticut?

I’m sorry to ask you.

Don’t be.

I know we’re basically strangers.

We’re not strangers, Grace.

Yeah, I guess.

Not anymore.

T
here was no question when Mr. Murphy assigned a group project on ancient Greece that Olive and I would work together. I could recall dimly the period in October when I looked forward to never working with her again, but now everything before Thanksgiving felt like a different era. Thanksgiving—or rather, drinking together—had been the line of demarcation in our friendship: the point at which BC had turned into AD. I didn’t even consider asking Levi to join our group because I knew Olive would hate it. Everything was finally comfortable between us, and I didn’t see any point in shaking things up.

We decided to film a fake documentary about the Peloponnesian War. It was my idea this time, not hers, and our main challenge was figuring out how to produce footage of a battle between two armies when we had only two actors. In the end, we decided to use life-size cardboard cutouts and do the filming in Olive’s backyard.

We met at her house on a crisp afternoon in early December to shoot the footage. We’d already written the script and decorated the cardboard soldiers in the art wing at school; now the task was to film the whole project without letting it slip into a farce. It could be funny, but not too funny—silly, but still factual.

We set up the tripod on her back porch, overlooking the yard, a small storage shed, and the train tracks off in the distance, barely visible through the trees. Olive used a rusty trowel to dig holes, and I planted the base of a cardboard cutout in each one. We arranged them in rows across the lawn to create the illusion of a crowd.

The only problem was our lack of soldiers on horseback. The cardboard slabs we took from the art wing were only two feet wide—not big enough for horses. I knew it was a corny idea, but I asked Olive whether she had any stuffed animals or My Little Ponies. “We can always zoom in on them,” I told her. “You know—to make them look big?”

“As stupid as that sounds, it might actually work,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” Then she ran up the porch steps and disappeared through a sliding glass door into the kitchen, calling, “Mom? Where’s that big stuffed horse from when I was little?”

A breeze blew through the yard, and I tightened my jacket at the waist. It was windier out than I expected—windy enough to whip my hair into my eyes—and when I stopped blinking, I saw that one of the cardboard cutouts had blown over on the lawn. The base that was supposed to stay wedged in the ground had come loose, and the whole thing was scuttling along the grass in the wind. I ran over and grabbed it, trying to shove it back into the ground, but the bottom of the cardboard had become soggy, and the hole wasn’t deep enough. I put a rock on the soldier’s leg so he wouldn’t blow away and then stood up to look for Olive’s trowel.

I couldn’t find it, but I did see that the door of the tool shed was slightly ajar, so I headed toward it. Even if I couldn’t find another trowel, I could I always use the pitchfork from our Halloween costume—Mr. Barton was bound to keep it in the tool shed. I stepped closer, tightening my jacket again around the waist, and pushed open the door.

And then I jumped back.

In fact, I almost screamed. On a foldable cot at the front of the shed was a teenage girl lying face-up with her eyes closed, creepily dead looking. At the sound of the door opening, her eyes flickered open and snapped toward mine. She wasn’t dead—just sleeping—and her face was so pale she looked like a corpse.

I tried to back away from the door, but my feet were frozen. I might have been in shock. I barely noticed that the whole shed was set up like a bedroom. Next to the cot, there was a nightstand with an old laptop resting on it, and the power cord was plugged into a surge protector in the wall. I felt my heartbeat thud in my ears. The girl had dirty-blond hair like Olive’s, and I wondered for a second if they were related.

“Relax,” she said. Her voice was faint and cracked, as though she hadn’t used it in a couple of days. “Olive knows I’m here.”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“Relax,” she said again. “Are you Reyna? I’m Grace.”

Something about her voice made her sound older than she looked—like a thirteen-year-old with a sixteen-year-old’s baggage. She sighed. “Look, Olive’s parents don’t know I’m here. I’m mooching off their wireless for a few weeks. And Olive loaned me this laptop; I didn’t steal it like I can tell you’re thinking. So if you could just close the door and forget about me—”

“I—I need a tool,” I said.

“Oh.” Her face relaxed a little. “Be my guest.”

I stepped forward and reached for a trowel that was hanging off a hook on the wall. It was a different shape than the one Olive had been using before, but I took it anyway. “Thanks,” I said. “I won’t tell her parents.”

“Bye.” She held up her hand with the palm facing me, and I saw a swollen, pink scar wrapped around her wrist.

I didn’t say bye in return; I just stepped backward out the door and pulled it shut it with a click. Turning around to look for Olive, I saw that the sliding glass door leading into the kitchen was open a crack. Raised voices were coming from inside.

Before I had time to digest what the argument was about, Mrs. Barton came galloping through the back door and down the steps of the porch. She had a toy horse between her legs, and she ran out into the yard shouting, “Giddyup! Giddyup, cowgirls!”

“
Mom!
” called Olive, running out after her. “
Stop!
”

I froze where I was, a few feet from the fallen cardboard soldier, and watched as Mrs. Barton bucked her hips against the big stuffed animal. “Yeee-haaaw!” she called, staggering into the flowerbed by the side of the porch. “You want your horse, you better come get it!”

Olive’s face was a deep shade of purple as she ran toward her mom and tackled her onto the grass. “
Stop it!
” she shouted. “
Get inside now!
” but Mrs. Barton just gave her a crazy smile and pretended to mount the horse again. I’d never seen anyone so drunk.

“Um…” I stepped forward slowly. “Can I help?”

“
No!
” Olive’s hands were balled into fists.

I looked down at my feet as she began pulling her mother up the steps toward the house, and then I glanced over at the tool shed, wondering if Grace could hear what was going on. But if she was listening, she didn’t come out to help. I waited by myself on the lawn as Olive pulled her mother back inside and yanked the sliding door shut behind them.

I didn’t dare follow them into the kitchen. Instead I used the trowel to dig a deeper hole in the grass, and by the time Olive came back out a few minutes later, the fallen cardboard soldier was standing upright again. I dropped the trowel onto the grass as I hurried over to meet her. She had a glazed look in her eyes—a sort of dumbstruck horror.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. She just plunked herself down on one of the porch steps and rested her forehead against her knees so I couldn’t see her face. When I didn’t say anything else, she croaked, “She must have found the stash in my room.”

“What?” For a second, I thought she meant a stash of drugs.

“The alcohol. Everything we didn’t finish on Thanksgiving.”

“Oh.” I draped my arm awkwardly over her shoulder and rubbed her back the way Dad would have done to me. “It’s OK.”

She was quiet for a second. Then she lifted her head off her knees and stared out into the forest behind her house. “Reyna, do you think your dad would let you sleep over tonight?”

I wasn’t sure at first; it was a school night. But it reminded me of the Tuesday night Leah’s parents got divorced in sixth grade, and Dad let me sleep over at her house that time.

“I can ask,” I said, digging around in my pocket for my cell phone. When I found it, I dialed our home number, praying Dad would pick up, but I was out of luck. Lucy answered the phone on the second ring. “Helllooo?” she sang. I could tell just from the tone of her voice that she was wearing the diamond necklace.

“Hi, Lucy,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “Is Dad there?”

“Hi, Reyna!” Her cheer was almost too much to bear. “He’s in the shower. What can I do for you?”

I made up a lie on the spot. I said Olive and I needed to finish our project and that it was going to take all night. Then I told her I could get a ride to school in the morning with Mr. Barton, and she said she would call me back in a few minutes once Dad got out of the shower.

“You know, we do actually need to finish our project,” sighed Olive once I hung up. “If we don’t want to fail, that is.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do it now, before dinner.” But my phone buzzed as soon as I suggested it, before we even stood up. It was Lucy again, saying that on second thought, I had her full permission to spend the night.