Promise Me Something (31 page)

“Just stick to the facts,” I said. “Say she had a teacher like Mr. Murphy. Say she was depressed. Say that a little tolerance goes a long way.”

Olive nodded and began to type.

“Say that there are millions of people in her shoes. Say that she—” I didn’t get a chance to finish. All at once, the door handle rattled behind me, and I whipped around.

“Girls?” called Mr. Mancuzzi. “Did you lock the door?”

“Quick!” I hissed. “Save the file.”

“It’s almost finished,” she said. “I just have to export it and then upload it.”

“It must be jammed, Mr. Mancuzzi!” I called through the door. “We didn’t lock it.” There was a rattling noise as he stuck a key into the door and twisted the handle. The knob turned freely, but the door didn’t open.

“Open the dead bolt!” he called, banging his fist against the wood.

“Stall,” said Olive.

“What dead bolt?” I called out. “I don’t see a dead bolt.”

“Don’t get smart with me,” he answered through the door. “They have the spare key at the front desk. Are you going to make me go get it?”

“I don’t see a dead bolt to unlock,” I said again. “Sorry!”

“Shit.” Olive was drumming on Mr. Mancuzzi’s desk with the pads of her fingers. “I can’t remember my YouTube password.”

I groaned.

“Do you have an account?”

“My name with three sevens at the end,” I said. “Password: bunny.”

Olive looked at me and rolled her eyes.

“Hurry up!” I dropped down on all fours and peered underneath the door. There was no sign of Mr. Mancuzzi’s feet. “He went to get the key,” I said.

“Well, it’s uploading.” Olive stood up. “I’ve closed all the windows except for YouTube, which I minimized. We need to make it look like we’ve been doing something else so he doesn’t check the computer.”

“The filing cabinet,” I said. “We could have been snooping.” I ran over to the big gray wall of cabinets, opened one of the drawers, and began pulling manila folders at random, scattering them on the floor like a careless burglar. When I was halfway through, Mr. Mancuzzi twisted the dead bolt and swung open his office door. I straightened at once like a puppet, an invisible hand yanking on a string connected to my spine.

“What in God’s name is going on?” He stared at the papers strewn around the floor.

“I made her do it,” said Olive, stepping forward from the desk. “I wanted to see my academic record.”

“No she didn’t,” I said. “It was me. I wanted to see mine.”

Mr. Mancuzzi yanked the walkie-talkie from his belt and called security.

“I take full responsibility for this,” said Olive, inching her way toward the door. “It was all my idea.” At first I thought she was going to make a run for the hallway, but then I realized she was moving toward me with something in her hand. Her smartphone. When she got close, I stepped sideways and positioned my hand to take it from her behind her back.

“I’m all yours, Mancuzzi,” she announced as soon as I had a firm grasp on it. She raised both her arms in the air like a criminal. “I surrender.” Her posture was straighter and more confident than I’d ever seen it as she glanced back and met my eye. I gave her the tiniest of nods.

Mr. Mancuzzi turned to me. “I don’t understand your role here,” he said. “But I don’t like it.”

“I was just looking for my file,” I lied again, shoving the phone into my pocket and following him to the receptionist’s desk in the lobby.

“Wait for me here,” he said. “Mrs. Latimer will be watching your every move.”

I nodded and sat down on the bench while Mrs. Latimer, an old Hispanic woman with a ruffled yellow blouse, pursed her lips at me in disapproval. The minute Mr. Mancuzzi left the lobby, I tapped on the phone and connected to the Internet, which was allowed at Belltown High outside of the classrooms. My fingers felt slow and clunky as I found the YouTube app and signed in. The upload Olive had started was visible in my account, but it wasn’t yet complete so I opened a separate tab, signed into my email, and composed a new message to [email protected]

It took exactly four more minutes for the video to upload. As soon as it did, I copied the URL and pasted it into the email. All that was left to do was choose a subject heading. I typed
watch this
, and hit Send as the fifth period bell rang.

A funny thing happened. Nobody went to fifth period. Through the big glass wall in the principal’s wing, I watched a classroom door open and a couple dozen sophomores wander out. But instead of heading to their next class, they hung around in the hallway. Everyone with a smartphone pulled up the video, and everyone else leaned over their shoulders, jostling for a better view. I pulled up the video again on Olive’s phone and watched it from start to finish, reading her words as they scrolled in white text over the photo of Grace. By the time it finished playing, more students and teachers had wandered into the hallway. Mrs. Latimer glanced at the commotion beyond the glass and frowned.

I didn’t see Levi come through the glass doors until they swung shut behind him. Then I looked up. He was carrying a hall pass and my backpack, which I’d left on the floor of the auditorium by my abandoned seat.

“Hey,” he said, flashing the pass at Mrs. Latimer. “I brought you something.”

“Thanks.” I stood up to take it from him and our fingers brushed. Immediately, my entire hand felt like someone lit fire to it. But this wasn’t the time for romance. Feeling guilty, I pulled my hand away and did my best to ignore the tingling in my fingers.

“Where’s Olive?” asked Levi, pulling his own hand away a little too fast.

“With Mr. Mancuzzi.” Sitting back down on the bench, I pulled out her phone again and refreshed the video. “Can you believe this?”

“That she’s alive?” Levi sat down beside me. “Not really.”

“No, this,” I said, holding out the phone. “We just posted it to YouTube.”

Levi’s eyes grew wide as the video began to play. Meanwhile, through the glass wall, I could see a crowd gathering outside the principal’s wing. Teachers and students were standing around with their backs toward us, looking at something in the lobby just out of my sight. When the crowd shifted, I realized what it was. Abby’s dad was standing in the main entrance, a microphone in his hand, his film crew just behind him. Someone with a camera the size of gallon of milk was stepping into the lobby, panning left and right to capture the chaos. Abby’s dad was speaking into the microphone, a deep crease between his eyebrows.

“How many hits has this gotten so far?” asked Levi, looking up from the video and following my gaze toward the lobby.

I took the phone back and scrolled down just below the video. “About a hundred,” I told him. “And I only sent it five minutes ago.”

“That’s crazy.”

“No wait.” I hit refresh. “Almost two hundred now.”

The second bell rang for fifth period, but nobody seemed to pay it any mind. The crowd in the lobby only grew more bloated. And then, without a word, Levi stood up.

“Hey, Mrs. Latimer?”

I watched him approach the reception desk, hands tucked neatly in his pockets. Mrs. Latimer looked up and put down her ballpoint pen. “I was just wondering,” said Levi. “Would it be possible to check online to see if Channel Four is streaming the news? They’re filming in the lobby.”

Mrs. Latimer looked tempted. She peered at the commotion outside and nodded her head. “Go ahead and check.”

Levi crossed to the other side of her desk, clicked around for a minute, and found the news channel’s website. And there it was. Abby’s dad, broadcasting live on the local news.

I looked back and forth between the fuzzy footage on the monitor and the scene unfolding in the lobby beyond the glass wall. Tim Ferguson had pushed his way to the front of the crowd, and Abby’s dad was holding out a microphone, interviewing him about homophobia at Belltown High. Tim looked the camera straight in the eye and said, “If you have a soul, watch this video.” Then he held up a notebook on which he had scrawled a long URL in permanent marker. “I challenge you,” he said. “I challenge all of you to watch this.” As the cameraman zoomed in on the notebook, I heard a clamor in real life and turned to see Mr. Murphy burst through the glass doors into the principal’s wing.

“Where’s Mancuzzi?” he demanded, marching straight up to Mrs. Latimer.

“You’ll have to take a seat,” she told him, barely glancing up from the monitor. “The principal is occupied.”

“Well, I have a letter for him.” He slammed a typewritten piece of paper onto her desk. “Please see that it gets delivered.”

But she didn’t have time to deliver anything. The News Channel Four crew had spotted Mr. Murphy through the glass and was rushing toward the principal’s office like a tsunami, six dozen students riding the wave. I had the odd sensation, as the cameramen pushed their way through the doors, of seeing a flash of myself on the news before Mr. Murphy’s face filled the frame.

There was a bead of sweat that rolled all the way from his forehead to the edge of his chin. When it disappeared past his collar, he resigned.

P
eople looked at me differently in the parking lot that afternoon. I sat by myself on the stone wall while I waited for Lucy to pick me up. Levi had just left to catch his bus, and I could still feel the warm tingle on my lips where he’d kissed me good-bye—right there in the parking lot for everyone to see. When we broke apart, I flipped his guitar pick necklace around so it was right side up, and he gave me one of his floppy, gentle smiles and said, “See you tomorrow.” Now I was alone, and most of the freshmen hanging around were people I only vaguely recognized.

But they recognized me. I heard whispering each time they passed and felt their eyes move over me from head to foot, as though in slow motion. At first I thought they must be calling me “that girl on the stage,” but then I realized they were saying my name. As for Gretchen and Lennie, they walked straight past me, whispering under their breaths as they crossed the parking lot. Either they didn’t see me, or they’d decided to dump me. The funny thing was, I didn’t care.

Lucy pulled into the driveway a moment later in her little red Jetta. She rolled up next to me in the fire lane, and I hopped off the wall wondering whether she and Dad already knew about Olive—whether they’d watched Channel Four during the day. “Hi,” I said, pulling open the door and dumping my backpack inside.

“Hi,” Lucy answered. There was something skittish about the way her eyes darted over to me and then back toward the windshield. At first I thought she was acting weird because she’d heard the news about Olive, but then I remembered how I called her from Dad’s car in the morning to make amends. She was probably just nervous around me.

I sat down and pulled the door shut. “How did your appointment go?”

She glanced sideways at me. “My hair appointment?”

“No,” I said. “The florist appointment.”

“Oh!” Her shoulders relaxed. “It was good.”

“Are you going to have violets in your bouquet?”

“Violets?”

“They’re purple.”

A slow smile spread across Lucy’s face. “Purple is my favorite color.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I asked.” Out beyond the parking lot, beyond the town of Springdale itself, the clouds shuffled in the sky to make room for pale blue patches the color of hope. I turned and looked at Lucy. “Guess what just happened.”

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 Sara Kocek

Cover design by Jenna Stempel
Cover image © mitarart/Veer

Published by Albert Whitman & Company

250 South Northwest Highway, Suite 320