The Anti-Virginity Pact

by Katie Wismer

  “I never said you did—” His grip tightens around the steering wheel and he lets out a slow breath through his nose. “I was only worried for your safety. When Johanna’s calling me because she hasn’t seen you all day and your parents call because you didn’t come home, and then at that damn party—I don’t think it was so unusual for me to be concerned. You could have been kidnapped, for all I knew—and you actually kind of were. So if you want to get mad at me for caring about you, go right ahead. But don’t talk to me like I’m some overly-clingy boyfriend who can’t take a hint.” He shakes his head several times. “Why don’t you call Johanna and ask if she’s home? I’ll take you there.”

  My cheeks burn at his raised voice. Whether it’s from anger or shame, I’m not entirely sure. I pull out my phone, but my hands are shaking so badly I can’t even unlock it. Johanna’s going to want to know why I need to stay at her place, and she won’t be satisfied until she gets every detail, and I’m really not in the state of mind to be interrogated right now.

  “I’ll do it.” Sam pulls up to a red light, reaches over, and takes my phone. And I let him.

  The moment I hear the faint click of the phone unlocking, I realize what a huge mistake that was. Because the last thing I did on my phone was look at those pictures of me and James.

  I reach out to snatch the phone back. “Sam—”

  His entire body has gone still. His hand is tightly fisted around the phone, his eyes locked on the screen. “What is this?” he asks very, very quietly.

  In the back of my mind, I’ve always known that all these things I’ve been doing are wrong. That I’ve been on a self-destructive downward spiral. But now there’s so much momentum that I don’t know how to stop. I guess I always assumed that in the end, I would simply hit the bottom. I’d be a shattered, broken mess, yes, but I could accept that. If I was the only one who got hurt, I could live with that. But now, looking at Sam, I realize that I’m not the only one who got hurt. Not even close.

  “Sam, it’s not what it looks like, I swear—” I reach for the phone, but he jerks away.

  “Is this why?” he demands and holds up the phone for me to see, as if I don’t already know what he’s looking at. “Is this why you’ve been avoiding me and ignoring me? Why didn’t you just tell me that you met someone else? Yeah, I wouldn’t have been happy, but at least I could have accepted it and stopped making a fool of myself, chasing after you—”

  “Sam, no, you don’t understand—”

  “Then help me understand. Help me understand, Meredith. Because excuse me if I’m a little confused by the sight of you in bed with some random half-naked guy.”

  “I—” I freeze, mouth open, eyes wide. I had a reason. I had an explanation. There are a million things I could say, a million ways to try to explain this, but none of them seem good enough anymore. None of them make as much sense as they had at the time.

  I’ve spent all this time feeling sorry for myself, thinking I’m the victim. And maybe I am or maybe I’m not, but either way, that’s no excuse. That doesn’t give me permission to crash land my life and take everyone around me down, too. That doesn’t make any of this okay.

  Tears fall down my cheeks.

  He tosses the phone back to me and looks away. “I’ll take you to Johanna’s.”

  “Sam,” I plead. I don’t know what I’m pleading for, what I want him to say. “Sam, I can explain,” I say helplessly.

  “No, I really don’t think you can.”

  We sit in silence for the rest of the ride.

  ✦✦✦

  Sam doesn’t stay. He drops me off outside Johanna’s house, and the second I close the door, he pulls way without looking at me. The moment he leaves, there’s an empty space in my chest where his presence used to be. The farther away he gets, the more the ache spreads.

  I sink onto the porch step, staring at the end of the driveway where Sam’s car disappeared behind the tree line. My chest aches so badly that I clutch at it with my hand as if I can physically push away the pain. But it doesn’t stop. And this overwhelming fear that it never will washes through me.

  When the door swings open and Johanna steps onto the porch, I turn my head, just a little, and ask: “Do you have anything to drink?”

  She hesitates in surprise, her lips pursed, but eventually nods her head to the side, motioning for me to follow her to the kitchen. “Water? Soda?”

  I heave myself up and shuffle after her. “No, I mean like a drink drink.”

  A single eyebrow lifts. “Damn. It’s that bad?”

  I collapse into a barstool and lay my head on the counter. “Get me drunk and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “I can do that.”

  She sets a cup down in front of me. I don’t even ask what it is before swallowing it in a single gulp.

  “My dad kicked me out of the house,” I say, motioning for her to pour me some more. “And Sam just found the pictures.”

  “What?” she demands. “We’ll deal with the Sam thing in a minute, but what the hell do you mean, your dad kicked you out?”

  I stare at the glass. “What do you think I mean? He said get the hell out of my house and slammed the door in my face.”

  Johanna shakes her head, her expression still stunned. “What on earth did you do to make Pastor Beaumont angry enough to throw his own daughter out? He’s, like, the least angry-prone human being on the planet.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” I mutter, waving my empty glass around, still desperately waiting for a refill.

  “You know I’m all for the poor decisions,” she says, taking the glass from me and filling it with a brown liquid, “but maybe drinking away your problems isn’t the answer.”

  Ignoring her, I eagerly down the second drink. It burns when it reaches my chest, and for a moment, it’s almost enough to block out the other pain lingering there. “I think it’s a wonderful solution.”

  “What happened?” she pushes. “With your dad?”

  His angry face flashes behind my eyes again, the red tint to his neck, the vein popping out of his forehead.

  The way he slammed the door in my face, no emotion in his eyes.

  “Someone left a copy of the pact in my mailbox for my parents to find,” I say hollowly, staring at the red numbers of the clock on the oven until my eyes unfocus. “They flipped out, of course. Quoted some scripture. Told me I was going to hell. Accused Sam of deflowering me, then told me to get the hell out of their house.”

  “‘Someone?’”

  I shrug. “Ashley, I’m assuming.”

  Jo’s face scrunches together. “I know she’s a bitch and all, but didn’t she have her fun spreading it around the school? What pissed her off enough for more retaliation?”

  It was a warning. I can feel the alcohol burning through me, and already I feel lighter, as if maybe I won’t suffocate under the weight of all the shit going on today after all. But the very next second, it all comes crashing back, and suddenly the weight is even heavier than it was before.

  “Are you okay?” Jo asks when I don’t respond. She reaches over and gently plucks the glass from my hand.

  I stare pointedly at my confiscated glass. “Another one of those would make me more okay.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so,” she says. “I’m cutting you off.”

  “I’ve only had two drinks!”

  “Drinking for fun, I endorse. Drowning your sorrows is a completely different story. This,” she jostles the glass and gets up to put it in the sink, “isn’t going to make your problems go away or make you feel better.”

  “You don’t know my problems, so how do you know what’s going to make me feel better?” I mutter, too numb to flinch at the bitterness in my words.

  “Talk to me,” Jo offers.

  I shake my head and press my face to the counter.

  “Your parents will come around. You know that. They’ll cool down, apologize for overreac
ting, and you’ll work it out.”

  I’m glad she’s so sure, because I’m not. She also doesn’t mention Sam because there’s nothing comforting to say about that one.

  She takes a deep breath and blows the air out of her cheeks. “Okay, so you don’t want to talk. That’s fine. How about we just hang out tonight then? We’ll get our minds off everything. It’ll be a girls’ night, just like old times.”

  “Jo—”

  “I’m not taking no for an answer.” She hops up and heads toward the stairs. “I’ll get the DVD, you grab the ice cream in the freezer, and meet me in the TV room.”

  She disappears before I can protest.

  The setup is the same as always: Johanna starts The Princess Bride and angles the TV toward the plush couch in the corner, where the two of us snuggle into the blankets until we combine to make one giant burrito. We demolish the pint of cookie dough ice cream within the first ten minutes, then break out the potato chips, though I can’t taste any of it. I rest my head against Jo’s shoulder and blankly stare at the TV, desperately trying to muster up some laughter at the funny parts, but all I feel is numb.

  I don’t talk, and she doesn’t ask me to. When I sniffle, she just tightens her arm around me and shoves more food in my face. I can’t help but think of my first date with Sam, snuggled under the blankets, his arm around me, the movie in the background. He was the first person I’d actually let see me since Johanna. And he’d taken everything I said in stride, so I have no idea why I thought I couldn’t trust him with any of this. It’s like I knew I finally had something good, but I was so comfortable with the way things had always been that I subconsciously self-sabotaged myself to keep things as they were. And now, nothing is like it was. I don’t have Sam or Squirt or the respect of my teachers or parents.

  “Can you slap me?” I mumble.

  Jo pulls her head back to look at me. “Huh?”

  “I’m wallowing in self-pity and I need something to snap me out of it,” I explain, voice flat.

  She purses her lips as she considers this. “Okay.”

  I close my eyes, bracing myself, but instead of slapping me, she gives me a little shove, and I roll straight off the couch, taking the blankets with me. I hit the ground butt first, my arms so tangled in the blankets that they’re stuck to my chest.

  Johanna lets out a snort of laughter. “You look ridiculous!”

  I try to wrestle my way out of the blankets, fail, tumble onto my side, and my laughter joins hers.

  Just then, the doorbell rings.

  “Just leave it,” Jo says, waving her hand. “Nothing is interrupting girls’ night.”

  But then it rings again. And again.

  I finally untie myself from the blankets and stand.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Johanna mutters and jumps up from the couch. “This better be a girl scout with free cookies.”

  I search through the blankets for the remote to pause the movie as Johanna shuffles down the hallway. After locating the fallen bag of potato chips, I resituate myself on the couch.

  I wait several minutes, but Jo doesn’t come back. I strain my ear to hear what’s going on down there, but can’t make anything out. And now I’m starting to get restless, so I pad over to the front of the house to investigate. As soon as the front door swims into view, I freeze. Sam is standing on the welcome mat with a strained expression.

  “You came back,” I say. I almost smile as I glance to Jo for an explanation, but her face matches his. The color is gone from her complexion, and the creases around her mouth and forehead are deep.

  There is nothing kind about the way Sam looks at me. “I didn’t come back for you,” he says. “It’s Squirt.”

  “Squirt?” I ask, surprised. Of all the things I was bracing myself for him to say, that one hadn’t even crossed my mind. But the loss is still fresh enough that hearing her name sends a twinge through my gut.

  “I think…” Sam trails off, his forehead creasing. “I think she may be in trouble.”

  26

  Sam’s been on the phone for more than twenty minutes. He’s standing by the front door with his back to us, speaking fast, gesturing around wildly with his hands as if the person on the other line can see him.

  “Who does he know that can help us find a dog fight?” Johanna whispers.

  “No idea,” I mumble, my eyes tracing his form as he paces back and forth. Every few moments, my gaze flickers to the large iron clock above the television, as if by monitoring it I can force the seconds to pass more slowly. Every second we stand here waiting for whoever Sam’s speaking with, the anxiety crawling under my skin gains velocity. I have never fully appreciated how precious time is until now. Anything can happen in a second, a minute, an hour. Life-changing things. Life-ending things. And with each passing moment, the possibility of there not being anything left to find of Squirt expands cruelly in my mind.

  I didn’t come back for you.

  Despite everything, I can’t keep replaying those words in my head, and the cold look in his eyes when he said them.

  “Hey.” Jo nudges me with her shoulder. “Stop torturing yourself. There’s nothing else we can do right now but wait.”

  “You heard what Sam said.” I rub my temples with my fingers. “Ryan was arrested for dog fights. They found dozens of dogs in his possession, but Squirt wasn’t one of them. He could have sold her off anywhere. Jo, she could be anywhere.” I trail off as my hands begin to shake. “Why is it that everything that could possibly go wrong seems to happen all at once?”

  “On the bright side, at least you know you’re getting it all over with at once. Once all this clears up, what’s really left to happen?”

  If her words were meant to make me feel better, they failed.

  “Maybe we should call the police again,” I offer.

  Jo rubs my back and sighs. “They’re already doing everything they can, Mare. Everyone is going to do everything they can.”

  “I have a lead,” Sam says as he hangs up the phone, though his face hasn’t seemed to catch on to the good news.

  “Then why do you look like someone just clubbed you?” Johanna asks.

  “There’s just no guarantee, okay? I don’t want to get your hopes up—”

  “You have an address?” I interject.

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go.” When he doesn’t move, I take the car keys out of his pocket. “We can talk about this in the car, but please can we just go? If I have to stand here for another second I think I might explode.”

  “Okay, okay.” He takes the keys from me.

  The sky is already the color of a bruise when we step outside, the sun well into its descent behind the heavy cloudbank. Johanna hops in the backseat while Sam slides behind the wheel and I join him in the passenger seat, punching the address in my phone for directions.

  He hesitates for a second, looking sidelong at me. I wonder if he’s also thinking about the last time we were sitting here.

  But then my phone starts barking out directions, and Sam peels out of the driveway, spitting up dirt and rocks as he goes. We fly through the neighborhood and head straight to the highway. Luckily, the roads are relatively empty.

  Normally, the way Sam is driving right now—swerving and pushing the speedometer well past the speed limit—would make me nervous. Tonight, I’m grateful.

  Sam and I lock eyes, just for a moment, but that look seems to communicate everything we haven’t been able to say. He’s still angry with me, hurt. And I still don’t know how to fix everything. How to fix me. But tonight is about Squirt. I don’t have enough emotional capacity to worry about anything else. For now, we’ll put it aside.

  “So who exactly did you call?” I ask, breaking the eye contact. My phone informs me our destination is over an hour away, and I try not to let that freak me out.

  Sam makes a face, his eyes snapping back to the road.
“He’s an old…acquaintance from school. I haven’t spoken to him in at least two years.”

  Not that it really matters right now—the only thing that matters is finding Squirt—but I can’t help my curiosity. “How does he know about this? And where exactly are we going?”

  “He said it’s some sort of warehouse. And. Well.” Sam lets out a long, slow exhale, as if bracing himself for his next words. “He’s not a good guy, okay? He’s always been messed up with some pretty sketchy stuff.”

  “You mean he participates—?”

  “No,” Sam says firmly, then sighs and rubs his eyes. “Kind of. In his own way. He would never actually hurt the dogs, but he’s the kind of person with dollar signs in his eyes, you know? He’s always working whatever system he can squirm into to make a buck. Bets, mostly. That’s always been his thing. He said he’s only ever been to a few of these, but apparently this warehouse is the closest one to us where these kind of people frequent, so it’s our best bet if Ryan lives around here. His best guess is it’ll start around ten or eleven.”

  “And you’re sure there’s even one going on tonight?” Johanna pipes up from the back seat.

  “He seemed pretty sure.”

  “Did you ever go to one of these things with him?” Jo demands.

  “No, of course not.” Sam shakes his head, his face twisted in disgust. “I never even knew about this part of his life until tonight. I just hoped with his track record he’d know something, or at the very least know someone else who could help us.”

  “How do you even know this guy?” Johanna asks, propping her elbows against the center console and leaning forward. “Sounds like a total skeeve.”

  Sam shifts in his seat, his grip tightening on the wheel. “I made some bad decisions my first two years of high school. I wasn’t…myself.”

  As much as my curiosity is screaming and clawing in the back of my mind for more details, it’s clear from Sam’s face and body language that the last thing he wants to do is talk about this.