Promise Me Nothing (Hermosa Beach Book 1)

by Jillian Liota

  Part of me wants to file a complaint, though I don’t have any real proof and I’m not sure anything would come from it.

  And, with mid-terms coming up next week, I decide to just take the night off for what it is: a much-needed opportunity to study and try to pass this pointless class.

  Campus is only a fifteen-minute bus ride away, and I just can’t afford any distractions. Even though I feel completely lost, and I’m struggling to keep up with everything, I still have to do my best.

  My parents always wanted my brother and I to go to college, and there’s something inside of me that won’t allow myself to give up on their dream. Especially since I’m the only one left to try and live it into reality.

  So, instead of calling Sienna or trying to do something interesting with my night off, I trudge my butt onto the next bus that stops at my station, and head to campus.

  I truly do have good intentions when I get to the library. It’s a weekend, so the building is fairly empty. Only a handful of other students are wandering around or slumped over textbooks, their lives just as pathetic as mine if we’re finding ourselves studying on a community college campus on a Friday night.

  Knowing I have a reflection paper to write for my Intro to Literature class, I wander over to the textbooks that are available to check out – because I definitely can’t afford to buy my own – and grab the one for my class. Then I spend an hour reading a collection of poems. A bunch of flowery shit by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

  When I get to Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, it takes everything in me not to roll my eyes.

  I don’t despise literature. But I do aggressively dislike shit that’s stated as fact without any consideration for what someone else’s perspective might be.

  Like, why would you encourage people to intentionally take the more difficult road, Robert? Maybe I’m pretty exhausted because my road is full of branches to climb over and I’ve got scratches from limbs and bruises from tripping and falling.

  A well-traveled road that’s easy to navigate sounds pretty damn great to me. And who says you get to choose? Sometimes, life gives you one shitty road and that’s what you have to walk. The end.

  I slam the book closed, maybe a little louder than I should in a space that’s supposed to be quiet. Glancing around, I catch one girl’s eyes. Sorry, I mouth at her, but she just looks away without acknowledging me.

  Cool, cool, cool.

  I carry my stuff over to one of the computer stations and log myself in to the system, gearing up to write this reflection paper that’s due on Tuesday.

  And it’s then I make my first mistake.

  I open my email.

  There, sitting towards the top, sandwiched between a reminder to pay my tuition and – I can’t make this up – a Bed, Bath & Beyond coupon, is the email I’ve been avoiding.

  I minimize the screen, attempting for just one more minute to pretend that it isn’t there. I crack open the literature book again and glare at Robert Frost’s name, as if everything about this is his fault.

  But all I can think is just get it over with.

  Choosing to let impulse guide me, I quickly reopen my email browser and click on the message that has dominated so much of my thoughts today.

  And it’s here, in a quiet library, sitting at a computer, next to a printer that’s whirring out what must be someone’s entire dissertation, that my world does exactly what I thought it would.

  It changes forever.

  I barely even hear it when someone sits down at the computer to my right. Hardly notice when someone finally comes to collect the printed pages out of the printer to my left.

  Because the words in this email have robbed me of my ability to use my legs. My hands. My mouth. Even my eyes, which have gone blurry and unfocused.

  I blink a few times, trying to adjust my vision, the bright light of the computer screen feeling now too aggressive in my face.

  But even as I blink, and blink, and try to refocus my eyes, those words never shift, change or disappear.

  Your brother has joined MatchLink. Do you want to connect?

  It shouldn’t make a lick of sense. But it does.

  My brother.

  My brother.

  My brother.

  No. Not my brother.

  My brother died when I was twelve. My brother’s name is Joshua. My brother is… was. He was everything. He was the man I looked to for support and guidance in a world where we both felt so lost. He was my constant support until he was taken from me. Too soon. Too quickly after our parents.

  So this? This isn’t a way to connect with my brother. My brother has been gone for years, and I have mourned him and the life I thought we’d have one day.

  Whoever this is? On the other side of this screen?

  He might share blood with me, but he is not my brother.

  And he’ll never take Joshua’s place.

  My cursor hovers over a green button with a tiny DNA link on it and a few simple words.

  Do you want to connect?

  And then, before I can think better of it, before I can question myself, scold myself, feel ashamed about the fact that I might be replacing my brother … I click yes.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hannah

  I stay seated as everyone shuffles around, slowly grabbing their things and filing noisily off the bus.

  When Sienna found out I was taking a Greyhound, she told me to make sure I carried sanitizer in my hand at all times. I’d actually laughed at her, though the occasion didn’t have much room for laughter. We’d been drowning our sorrows in a goodbye cheesecake while crying and saying our goodbyes at the time.

  Then, as I rode on the 1353 bus route from Phoenix to Union Station in Los Angeles, I finally understood what she meant. The blue micro suede seats weren’t an issue. Neither was the bathroom in the back. Everything about the bus itself was totally fine.

  The bus wasn’t what Sienna had been referring to.

  It was the people.

  Specifically, it was the kid in front of me picking his nose and wiping it on the window. And the guy a few seats away who was dipping and spitting noisily into a water bottle.

  And then there was the woman sitting next to me that pulled a full-size bucket of KFC out of her bag and proceeded to eat the entire thing as I watched in mortification out of the corner of my eye.

  Part of me marveled at her ability to put it all away. She was a tiny little thing, so I couldn’t imagine where she stored it all. And the precision with which she went after every last little bit of chicken was nothing short of impressive. But after she was done – two hours later – she never wiped her greasy hands and proceeded to touch everything around her.

  I have some mild issues with cleanliness. It doesn’t matter what the situation is. My room? Impeccable. My clothes? It’s an intentional choice to wait three days between washing things, and that’s only because I’ve never lived somewhere that doesn’t charge for laundry and the expense of doing it daily would have been too much.

  When you’re a kid who isn’t in control of the environment you’re in, when you’re surrounded by dozens of different habits and levels of hygiene and just have to deal with overall dirtiness, having a clean environment to exist in becomes important.

  At least to me.

  So I’d practically jumped through the window when her hand moved in my direction once or twice on the seven-hour ride.

  Now, as I sit in my window seat, my eyes staring through the glass unseeing towards the platform while everyone waddles off this beast of a bus, our bodies tired from having to sit uncomfortably for so long, I’m starting to have second thoughts about my decision.

  Fears that I made the wrong choice. That I gave up too easily and took the simple way out.

  I gave Frost the middle finger and darted down the path more travelled the second I saw an indicator that maybe the branches had been trimmed back and the fallen trees cleared away.

  Does that make me weak
? That I don’t want to be on my own anymore? That carrying around the weight life has handed me is starting to buckle me at the knees?

  I close my eyes. Count to ten. Pull in a long breath. Hold it. Let it out slowly.

  And then I remember Lucas’ voice over the phone.

  God, he’d sounded just like my dad. I’d had to mute the damn thing so he didn’t hear me trying not to fucking cry. I haven’t really cried in – I quickly try to do the math – nine years. Since the day I watched as Joshua’s body was lowered in to the ground.

  My brother was many things to me. My best friend. My secret keeper. In some ways, he was my guardian, even if not legally. It was just the two of us against the world. After our parents died, we both went in to the system. Being eight years older, he aged out within a year and tried to get custody of me.

  It didn’t work. He might have seemed so strong and mature to me when I was so young and unsure and filled with grief. But an eighteen-year-old with almost no money was too young to take care of a squirrelly elementary school student, at least in the eyes of any Child Protective Services representative he could get to listen to him.

  But that didn’t stop Joshua from being involved in my life. He was always kind-hearted, thinking of other people, trying to make our lives better. He helped me with homework and made sure my foster parents were doing right by me.

  Which is why his death was so startling. So unfair.

  I’d already lost enough, hadn’t I? What had I done to deserve this new cruel twist?

  Rationally, I know now that life just happens, and you can only control how you react to it. But when you’re just about to turn ten and you lose your parents, and then the center of your universe is ripped away less than three years later... it’s hard to think the world doesn’t have it out for you.

  I’d lost my breath, nearly keeled over, dry heaved. The woman from CPS that came to tell me about Joshua’s death tried to be empathetic, but if I could have killed her in that moment, I would have.

  She promised me everything would be okay. But I felt so small. And so lost. I’d just lost the last person in the world that mattered, and it was hard to believe anyone who promised me anything.

  It wasn’t hard to believe Lucas though, a voice whispers in my mind.

  It’s been an awkward month and a half, trying to get to know the brother I’d never known about.

  Well, I guess that’s not entirely honest.

  I might not have known about Lucas, but finding out about him allows some of my memories to make a lot more sense.

  Like the fact that dad always took a ‘business trip’ to California every summer, even though he mostly worked at a local hardware store that probably wouldn’t have sent him anywhere.

  Or that one time when I was seven and he disappeared for a few months. My mother cried at the sink as she did the dishes. Joshua, typically a jovial and friendly teenager, changed into this moody and sullen creature that slammed doors and stayed out past dark with friends even though my mom told him not to.

  Eventually he came back. And I guess I just blocked some of those things out, or at least pushed them aside. Because it wasn’t until my first email exchange with Lucas that any of that even popped back in to my mind, a written indicator that I’d known something was amiss all along.

  And then there’s the fear that I’ve been somehow complicit in covering it up. I wonder how much Joshua knew about Lucas. If he’d known anything more than what I did.

  The only real and true thing I know about this whole fucked up situation is that now I have a brother who is two years older than me, but would have been four or five years younger than Joshua. Which means my dad had an affair.

  “I’m the bastard child,” Lucas joked when we talked on the phone for the first time, sounding way too relaxed when everything inside of me was squirming with discomfort.

  We’ve talked a few times. Well. He did most of the talking. I responded awkwardly in fits and stammers and one-word answers. Are you in college? Yes. Have you ever been to the beach? Never. Do you know what you’re doing for the summer? No clue.

  “Come to California,” he’d said, surprising the hell out of me the second time we talked on the phone. “You’re in between things and there is more than enough space for you here. And I’d love to really get to know you. There’s only so much you can understand about someone on the phone, you know?”

  I’d sat on my bed, legs crossed and head leaning back against the wall, thinking it all over while Lucas rambled on and on. About what his house was like and how I could have my own room and bathroom and he’d help me get a summer job if I needed one. All the ways we could make it work.

  I only heard part of it, thinking instead about my own situation. Melanie and Lissy had left the week before for New Mexico, leaving me behind to finish out the lease, which was almost up anyway. School was going to be out for the summer soon and my hostess hours continued to go down thanks to Paul being a disgusting pig.

  I could have stuck around in Phoenix and tried to keep things going. Tried to find a new place to live, new roommates, a new job that replaced babysitting Lissy as well as the discounted rent and my declining hours at the restaurant.

  I could have done it.

  But sometimes, when you’ve been treading water for so long, it feels easier to slip beneath the surface, even just for a minute, to give yourself a break.

  So it felt normal to wonder if that’s what I’d done when I agreed to abandon my life in Arizona and spend the summer with my new brother at some beach house in California. If I’d given up. Given in. Accepted that I couldn’t make it on my own. That I needed someone else to keep me afloat. Someone else to help me find that easier path.

  “You awake?”

  My head whips to the side, and I see the bus driver hovering over me, a confused look on his face.

  “Sorry,” I say, shuffling awkwardly out of my seat and into the aisle. I swing my backpack onto my shoulders. “I was just…” I trail off, shake my head. “Thanks.”

  He nods at me, steps in between two seats to let me pass, and I walk through the bus and down the steps, out on to the platform. I grab my duffle bag, the only one still sitting on the ground next to the bus, and pull the strap across my shoulder, holding it tightly against my stomach.

  Today, everything I thought I knew about life… is going to change.

  Time to go meet my new brother.

  It doesn’t take long for me to realize something’s wrong.

  I look at my watch, a cheap thing I got when I was eleven. Joshua won it at the arcade near my school the weekend before it shut down. Replaced by a pet shop full of animals desperate for somewhere to belong. Being one of only a few small things I have that remind me of my brother, I haven’t ever had the heart to get rid of it.

  I’ve been waiting over two hours for Lucas to get here and pick me up, the hunger in my stomach starting to pinch and pull. Taking another sip from my water, I dig my phone out of my backpack to check again that my data is working, that there aren’t any missed emails or phone calls.

  Nothing.

  It’s strange that he isn’t here, especially since I called him yesterday to make sure that everything was still good-to-go. That he had my bus’ arrival time and knew what I’d be wearing. A comfortable pair of jeans and a loose red Diamondbacks t-shirt that I got when Sienna took me to a game for my birthday last year.

  I try calling Lucas’ number, but it goes straight to voicemail again, and I let out a sigh.

  There are plenty of people who would probably call me stupid. Running off to California to live with someone I don’t know at all, regardless of how simple he made everything sound on the phone. Having some of the same blood running in our veins doesn’t mean I’ll be safe.

  There’s a point of pride I have, though, in still trying to trust people, even though it doesn’t come naturally. It would be so easy to give in to the idea that everyone I meet has an ulterior motive. My entire life so far
has done nothing but shove that idea in my face. Over and over again.

  But that doesn’t mean I have to believe it’s true. I might not be able to be as bubbly and positive as my mother usually was, always able to see the bright side in every situation, but I can still try to believe that people are worth trusting. And I’m hopeful my time with Lucas will help prove that.

  Letting out a sigh, I wander over to the information booth and grab a map of the bus system, resigning myself to the idea that I’m probably going to have to find my own way to Lucas’ house. He might not be here to get me, but I literally don’t have anywhere else to go, so I’m thankful I was at least smart enough to get his address for mail forwarding so I’m not just stuck here, completely helpless.

  I close my eyes and look up, letting the sun wash over me, the air a bit more humid than I’m used to. Arizona has that dry, desert heat, devoid of any kind of moisture. You never feel like you’re sweating because it evaporates faster than you notice the dampness on your skin. The humidity of the beach cities in LA is going to be an adjustment.

  I take a seat against the building on the patterned brick that stretches across the passenger pickup area, making sure to get in a sliver of shade provided by a handful of palms clustered together, and take a look at the bus routes, trying to figure out a way to get to Lucas’ house.

  Once I’ve sorted out a route for myself, I feel a little better, the bit of tightness in my chest that had been forming finally starting to loosen. Maybe by the time I get on the subway, then transfer between a few buses, he’ll be able to answer his phone if I call again.

  I’m digging around in my wallet to double check the amount of cash I have, cringing as I remember that I spent a few dollars on snacks for the trip, when I hear my name.

  I turn my head sharply, surprised, my eyes darting to the curb with the faintest glimmer of hope. Towards a truck parked at the curb and a blond guy rounding the back and looking in my direction.