Promise Me Something (25 page)

As I wandered through the bowels of the school, past the art wing and the photo darkrooms, I stared absently at the newspaper in my hands. There was a photo on the front page of a mouse skirting past the leg of a chair, alongside a headline that read,
Poll Finds 47% of Students Have Seen Mice at Belltown
. Nothing newsworthy. But even as I read the article below the picture, my mind kept wandering back to the grainy photo of Olive Barton on page four, playing the piano when she was eight years old. She had a look of grim determination on her face, as though she wanted to prove something to herself.

I pushed open a door at the end of the art wing and stepped outside onto the paved path that wound around the perimeter of the school. It was cold out, and the air smelled like soggy grass. Hoping I wouldn’t run into any teachers, I headed down the sloping lawn toward the parking lot outside the cafeteria, where I’d spotted the teacher holding Olive’s journal the day before. There were dumpsters lining the brick wall, and they continued around the corner to an alcove with a couple of exhaust fans. Bags of trash had tumbled over the sides of the dumpsters and scuttled around on the ground with nowhere to blow. Heaps of old clothes and soggy textbooks and packets of paper sat staring at the sky, rippling in the path of the fans, waiting for someone to remember them.

It was only when I traced the path from the fire escape door to the hole in the fence beside the alcove that I wondered whether Grace had been running this way when her bag split open and Olive’s notebook fell out. Where was Grace hiding? Why was she still hanging around now that Olive was gone? Maybe she still had business to take care of—business with me. My mind spun around and around like a rim on a tire, going nowhere. And that was when I saw the stack.

Not a stack—a ream. A ream of printed paper straight from a photocopy machine. The print was small and crisp, and as soon as I got closer, I recognized the careful, loopy signature at the bottom of each page. It was Olive’s letter. A hundred—no, two hundred—copies of it. The top few sheets had scattered off and blown around the alcove with the other trash.

Grace had been here. I felt a chill pass through my body. She’d run this way—out the door, around the dumpsters, and through the hole in the fence. Whatever she’d been trying to achieve by pulling the fire alarm, she’d failed. The teachers had noticed her too soon. She’d fled the school grounds and dropped Olive’s notebook on the way out. And then the stack of letters. Or was this what the sticky note meant by
fair warning
?

There were no answers to be found in the alcove, only more questions, on and on like a train with too many cars to count. Gathering up the scattered pages, I added them to their original stack and then shoved the whole pile in my backpack, behind my math book. I would take it home and put it in the attic. And then I would decide what to do.

When my phone vibrated during lunch, I almost missed it. I was sitting in the handicapped stall in the bathroom munching on Cheez Doodles, and the girl in the stall next to me had just flushed. I heard the phone buzz as she unlocked her door and stepped out in front of the sinks, where I could see her through the crack. I watched her watch herself in the mirror, cocking her head to the side and frowning at a zit on her chin.

I knew the text was most likely from Lucy, wondering why the phone had been ringing off the hook all morning with automated messages from the attendance office. I took my time flipping open the phone, wondering how I was going to explain four consecutive absences in a row. But when the message loaded, it wasn’t from Lucy. It was from the same phone number that had texted me on Sunday, telling me to go to the tool shed. This time it said,
Where is the funeral?

I stared at it for a long time with my thumb hovering over the keypad. On Monday, the exact same number had texted asking if I was Rachael Ray,
the cookbook gal
—clearly not from someone our age. Was it possible Grace was borrowing someone else’s phone and then erasing her messages? With unsteady fingers, I typed back,
I don’t know. Where can we meet?

Her reply came back almost instantly.
At the funeral.

But the obituary hadn’t mentioned a date or location—only the fact that the family would be hosting a private affair.
When is it?
I wrote.

Five seconds later:
I don’t know. Don’t you?

My fingers felt sweaty and kept missing the keys as I typed back,
I’ll try 2 find out and text u soon.

Ten seconds later:
You can’t. This isn’t my phone.

Where r u? I typed. How can I reach u?

G2G
. I imagined her sitting in the food court of a mall, typing as fast as she could, just fast enough to slip the borrowed phone back into somebody’s briefcase before he noticed it was missing. But no—that couldn’t be. It was the same number as last time—the same number she’d written from on Sunday. It couldn’t belong to somebody random.

I almost got up right then to run a reverse phone number search at the library, but as soon as I stood up, crumpling the empty bag of Cheez Doodles in my fist, the bathroom door swung open and Lennie King burst in with two girls whose voices I didn’t recognize. None of them had come to use the bathroom. Instead, they touched up their makeup in front of the mirror and laughed about a joke I couldn’t hear the beginning of—something about a butt the size of a bulldozer.

I thought of all the inside jokes I might have been part of if I’d latched onto their group earlier in the year instead of making friends with a girl I could barely stand to be around. Who would I have been in that alternate universe, and what would have become of Olive? Would she be alive now, sitting in this bathroom stall instead of me, watching us apply lip gloss through a crack in the door? That’s where every firing synapse in my brain led me that afternoon. To a complex series of circumstances I could never untangle, even if I tried.

Mr. Duncan got on the PA a few minutes before the last bell. His voice had a grainy, crackling quality, like Neil Armstrong landing on the moon.

“It has come to our attention,” he said with every drop of gravitas he could muster, “that, in light of our recent loss, a non-denominational memorial service might allow our student body some closure regarding the incident over the weekend.” He was careful not to use the word
suicide
. “Those who knew Ms. Barton are invited to an assembly to be held in the auditorium this Friday during fourth period. If you’d like to speak at the service, please submit your name to the guidance office.” His voice trailed off for a second, and I wondered whether this was hard for him—whether he’d ever had to make this kind of announcement before. “Until then, please proceed as normal,” he finished gruffly. “If Olive were here, she’d want us to keep our spirits up.” Then the PA crackled off, and the bathroom was silent.

I decided it was time to leave the bathroom. My legs felt stiff, and the light outside my stall seemed oddly bright, like sunlight. I gazed at myself in the mirror for a moment; then I turned and left the bathroom. I knew exactly where I was going.

Crossing the train tracks this time on the way to Olive’s house, the world seemed to freeze. The sound of cars whipping past me in both directions faded to a pinpoint, and the crunch of my sneakers against the gravel filled my head like I was chewing on glass. When I was right at the center, in between the rails, I paused. The stillness stretched forever in both directions.

Without a phone number to text Grace, the tool shed was my only chance of reaching her. If she wasn’t there when I stopped by, I’d have to write the date and time of the memorial service on a piece of paper and slide it under the door. It was my only hope of getting her the information.

But I didn’t get a chance. When I showed up at Olive’s house, Mrs. Barton was standing on the front lawn, beating the dust out of an old rug with the stick of a broom. I’d almost forgotten that she lived there at all. The house seemed like an empty shell now that Olive was gone. “Rachael!” she called when she saw me, staggering backward into a bush. “Rachael Ray!”

The pavement seemed to drop out from below my feet, and I paused at the foot of the driveway to stare at her. Had I heard right?

“What are you doing here?” she called. Her voice was haggard. “Are you looking for Olive? She’s gone, you know. Dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I blurted, stepping forward onto the grassy lawn. “I came to say—I mean—I’m sorry for your loss.” I grimaced as I heard the words so many people had said to me after Mom died. Olive wasn’t a missing sock. She was dead.

“Go away.” Mrs. Barton leaned oddly to the left. “You’re not wanted here.”

I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

“So much work to do,” she continued, swaying a little. “So much to get the house in order—the carpets—”

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. I couldn’t tell if she was confused or just drunk.

“Who are you anyway?”

I stared at her.

“Who are you?” she repeated.

“I’m Rachael Ray,” I sputtered. “I mean, Reyna Fey—”

“Listen…” She gestured at me to come closer and then stuck one hand into the baggy pocket of her sweatpants. The piece of paper she pulled out was small and off-white, and I recognized it right away as a page torn from the red moleskin notebook. “You’re all over this note,” she said. “Fourteen years, and this was all she gave us. Can you believe the nerve of that girl?”

I took the note from her and glanced at it. There were only three short sentences, scrawled in large, wobbly letters as though they’d been written on the surface of a rock.

I’m sorry. I couldn’t take it anymore. Tell my parents good-bye.

It was Olive’s handwriting; there was no doubt about that. But it was so different from the carefully composed letter she’d left for me in the tool shed. Confusion washed over me in waves. “What do you mean I’m all over this note?” I asked. “I’m not anywhere on here.”

“Turn it over,” she said.

I did, and then I almost dropped it. There was my name, written in script, over and over on each line, crammed upside down and sideways to fill every last centimeter of the page except for an inch in the middle where a one-word question was underlined and circled twice:
Friends?

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t know.”

Mrs. Barton yanked the page out of my hand and stuffed it back into the loose pocket of her sweatpants. “Sorry doesn’t change a thing,” she snapped. “Sorry doesn’t change a phone call from the police. Sorry doesn’t change the drive to the coroner’s office to claim the body.”

“I know,” I whispered, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

“Do you have any idea what it was like?” Her eyes were gleaming now, her fists clenched. “Do you know what I saw when they unzipped the bag?”

I felt a wave of nausea as she staggered to the left and grabbed at the porch railing for balance. “My husband threw up, but I didn’t. I’m not squeamish.”

“Mrs. Barton, please—”

“At first I thought it wasn’t her,” she continued, steadying herself against the porch. “Skull was smashed, of course. Couldn’t recognize her face. But then I saw the raincoat. I’d recognize that coat anywhere. I bought it for her, you know. A gift for her birthday—”