I looked up to see a small dark object within arm’s reach. My right arm wouldn’t move, no matter how much I willed it to, but my left hand finally grabbed the phone. Evidence. I took it and fumbled it into my shorts pocket.
And I promised everything to Bean before letting the song of the cicadas lull me to sleep.
FALL
MOM’S HALFWAY UP THE stairs when I come in and she asks how my drive was.
“All right. We just went to the river for a walk.”
She watches me closely until I turn away. How much does she read from my face, gone pale, from my hands clutching my upper arms? Probably everything.
My phone chimes at me as Mom’s steps recede and I dig it out of my pocket.
It’s still not Bean.
“There’s still going to be a bonfire tonight,” Jen says.
“I’m pretty tired,” I tell her.
“We’ve barely . . . and you’re already ditching me?”
I stick one hand in the back pocket of my jeans and look out the window next to the front door. I don’t want to ditch Jen, but I also don’t want to see her right now. It doesn’t feel good. Thinking I’m going to do the right thing doesn’t make the likelihood that I’ll lose Jen again hurt any less.
She takes my hesitation as the okay and I let her because, God, it hurts to think of these as our last moments, but it’s even worse to think our last moments have already passed.
“I’ll pick you up in half an hour,” she says.
I slip out the back door and Jen picks me up half a mile down the road from my house. I didn’t tell my parents I was heading out. Something tells me they won’t want to know. A ghost whisper in the air: Keep your daughters close.
Selena takes up the front passenger seat in Jen’s compact SUV so I squeeze in the back, pushing aside a pile of school papers and horse brushes.
“Jay needs the big one for his football equipment,” Erica Brewster had said on Jay and Jen’s sixteenth birthday, even though Jen hadn’t asked for an explanation as they both stood on their driveway and took in their presents, side by side. Never mind that Jen’s riding equipment took up more room than Jay’s football pads.
It should feel roomy, but the ceiling threatens to cave in on me. I am stifled by the things the three of us know and aren’t talking about.
After a couple of minutes of driving, we catch up to another familiar SUV. My chest caves in on itself when I realize Jay’s out already. Gliding through town in front of us. Did they even question him at all?
I lose count of the number of heads I see bouncing around inside through the rear window of his truck as we trail him. The windows are rolled down to take advantage of cool autumn air. The people we pass on our way don’t care that the music is obnoxiously loud or that there are more people in his car than seat belts. They grin and wave.
They’re just boys out having a good time.
The farther we get from Third Street, the more my stomach tightens. Jen is quiet, her fingers tapping anxiously on the steering wheel. Selena stares out the window.
I realize the music in Jay’s car has been turned off and the heads aren’t bobbing around anymore. The boys are still.
Clouds roll in and windows roll up and we keep driving. We pass two crumbling concrete silos on the left. My teeth grind together. We take a right. There are only two farms out on this road, and I can’t come up with a reason for us all to visit old Mr. and Mrs. McNaughton.
“The bonfire’s behind the community center,” I say. I’m reminded of a night this past spring and a panic that made my thoughts trip over one another. “We’re going to Bean’s.”
Jen gives me a sharp look in the rearview mirror. Selena doesn’t move.
“Why are we going there?” I ask.
“Because Jay said let’s go make nice, Kayla.”
The cars pull off the road, parking parallel to the cross-fenced field behind Bean’s house. I’ve seen her cows grazing out here before. When we were friends. They aren’t here now. Tucked away for the night.
Boys start piling out of Jay’s car.
Jen cuts her engine and hops out. “Let’s go.”
Selena and I are slower to move, hesitating with our fingers on the handles. After Jen shuts her door, I swallow.
There’s going to be a bonfire tonight.
Selena folds her arms across her chest and looks to the distance. “Bean filed a report.”
“Obviously.” I stare at the sky so she can’t see the way my hands are shaking. The clouds are thick now.
“Did you get your memory back or something?” she asks.
I toy with a loose piece of broken fingernail. She wants to know what I know. She wants to know if I know what she knows. If we’re the same.
“I’ve known for a long time. Since Kansas City.”
Selena’s fingers move along the underside of the bottom hem of her dress, pulling at loose threads. When she realizes she’s ruining her skirt, she rubs her palms on her knees and shakes her head.
Selena meets my eyes in the rearview mirror. In them, I see steeliness. Unshed tears. Shame, because we want to be safe more than we want justice for one of our best friends.
Apprehension, because Bean has broken the rule of silence.
And the understanding that we have to pick sides.
This is why Selena and Bean aren’t best friends anymore. Because Selena’s self-preservation is stronger than her loyalty to her best friend.
I think about the smells of wet grass and the freshness of moving water down by the river. I think about the taste and comfort of Mom’s Sunday dinners and the Mayan Revenge at Toffey’s. I think about the sounds of cheering at football games and the whinnies of the horses in Jen’s barn.
I think about my time in Kansas City, feeling like my insides had been turned inside out with missing home. How the air there didn’t fill my lungs like the air here does. How my aunt was nice, but that she wasn’t my mom.
“I won’t tell Jen about this. About . . . what you don’t know.”
I’m reminded of a night this past spring and an anger that set my chest ablaze. I say, “She was your best friend.”
Finally, Selena moves. Just enough to stiffen her shoulders. “Don’t. She was your best friend, too. But here we are.” Her chin swivels toward me. “Because we both know, that what they’re going to do to her? They’d do it to us, too.”
I’m reminded of a night this past spring when Jay looked at the broken glass in his hand and then looked at me. When my thoughts blurred with fear about what he could do to me. When I made a choice that ended up killing a boy.
I can’t grasp what logic it was that led me here now. Hiding a souvenir of that night. Silently defending those boys after what they did to her, to me. Fear has pushed logic aside.
“Us, our families . . . So, shut the fuck up and get out of the car, Kayla,” Selena finishes.
I try twice to grab the door handle before it takes and I slide into the overgrown grasses at the side of the road. When my feet touch down, a whoop rends the sky.
“Go, go, go!” Senior Brian White, the kicker on the football team, screams as a horde of boys hurdle the fence and dash for the barn. One of them carries a plastic red jug.
Moonlight pokes through the clouds for one split second, landing on Jay like grace from heaven, like it’s supposed to, and I bite back a scream. Jen and Selena sit atop the fence but I put my hands on it and my foot on it and I don’t try to lift myself up.
Bean’s brother, Eric, comes tearing out of his house as the boys start throwing gasoline on the barn. His mouth is open but I can’t hear him over the others and I want to scream at him to go back, stay away, to save himself, but he won’t hear me over the others, either.
How often did Caleb think he was protecting Eric when he kept his silence?
When the guys see him, two grab him and hold his arms behind his back. He struggles and squirms. He’s fifteen, but tiny.
Jay isn’t the one who d
oes the honors. It’s T. J. who lights and drops the matches. One, two, I lose count, as he walks around the barn lighting and dropping matches.
Dry wood catches quickly. I love the smell of burning wood, but tonight it is laced with gasoline and something worse, too. It burns my lungs.
I trip over the road before I realize I’ve been slowly walking backward while watching the burning barn.
“He’s saying . . .” Jen swallows, and I know it tastes like smoke and I wonder what else it tastes like. If it’s bitter and acidic like the flavors in my mouth. “That the cows are still in there.”
Where is Bean? Where are Bean’s parents? I hope they are far, far away.
Selena stares at the ground, flicking her phone on and off repeatedly.
Jen watches, flames reflected in her glazed-over eyes.
Me . . . I am not like Jen. I can’t look.
And yet, I am these people and this is my home and I am complicit.
I belong.
The barn crackles and pops, sending sparks high into the sky. Some of the guys have retreated closer to the fence, but the others stand close, still holding on to Bean’s little brother, who is trying to hold back sobs in front of the older boys.
My nostrils are thick with smoke; Selena’s eyes are hard and shimmering.
Jen’s hair is pulled back in a tight, low bun. It makes her eyes look enormous. Or maybe, I think, that’s just the intense way she’s staring right at me.
The impulse I had to run to Kansas City after the accident is nothing like the compulsion to run away that I have at this moment.
I don’t understand how this could have happened. How one night could have ruined all of us. I want to be able to go back to my best friend as she was. To all my friends. To my perfect, perfect home. The place it was before that party.
The place, I know now, it never really was.
I’ve taken several steps backward.
“Where are you going?” Jen says.
I shake my head and wrap my arms around myself. “The smell is bothering my throat.”
“You’re going to ditch me. . . .”
The same argument. Just like that. Like nothing happened.
My fingers clench into fists. “How can you do this? How can you know and just . . . be here now? Watching them do this!”
Jen’s hands go to her forehead and I think she’s going to crumble, but then they smooth over the top of her head and she calmly begins to unwind her bun. “I’m not the one doing it,” she says.
“Jen. Oh my God. Listen to you.”
“Me, Kayla?”
“Yes, you! Pretending you’re not part of this, just because you didn’t light the match. Like nothing happened to one of our best friends.”
Flames’ shadows lick across Jen’s face. “I have to be here . . . I have to do this.” She clears her throat. “I’m caught between Bean and my family. I have nowhere to go. No auntie to cry to. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to react when a night gets out of hand? When everyone has something different to say about it?”
“It wasn’t just that night, Jen. And Bean is one of us!” I scream.
Jen throws up her hands. “Us? What does that mean? Because in the morning, this town will be split into two sides. Bean on one and Jay on the other.” A tiny gasp escapes and here it is. A release of all the things she’s known these past months and never said. They make her scream: “And my side has been picked for me!”
“It doesn’t have to be. . . .”
Except for her, it does. And that’s when I look at Selena. At the way she covers her face with her hands, the way her shoulders shake.
Jen drags the back of her hand across her face. “But you. You get to choose. You can choose me and Selena and whatever it is you see in that guy Noah and your parents and your brother. Or you can choose to tell. And have nothing.”
I take a breath. “I’ll have—”
“Nothing! Because I can promise you that people will take Jay’s side. To them, you’ll be a liar and a slut and God knows what else. And those people who will want Jay’s head on a stake? They’ll want nothing to do with the girl who sat on that secret for months, either. And that’s not even counting all the people who will realize the accident wasn’t as much of an accident as you let them believe it was. There’s only one way you can win.”
I stare at her with my mouth hanging open, my insides as cold as my skin. Killer Kayla.
We’re both quiet for a minute.
I pull out my cell phone and back away. I call the fire department. The woman on the line doesn’t ask how the fire started or who set it, only where it is. If there is anyone in the barn.
“No people,” I say.
“Are you a safe distance from the fire?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Assistance is on its way. Please stay where you are until help arrives.”
I ignore her. I hang up then call home, walking down the road, away from the fire engulfing Bean’s barn. And into the flames filling me.
The sky opens on the drive home and I hope it helps put out the fire fast enough to save the cows. Raindrops batter the windshield of my mom’s car, but I don’t mind because the noise covers the sound of my legs shaking against my seat. I will the car to go faster, take the curves in the road like a race car, run through the few stop signs. I want to be home.
I promised my mom when she picked me up I would tell her exactly what happened once the fire department was done putting out the fire. As the rain continues to fall, I hear Jen’s words again and again. The accident wasn’t as much of an accident as you let them believe it was.
I wonder if I will keep that promise to my mom. I’ve lost track of the promises I’ve made.
I lie back on my rug, staring at the way beams of light filter through my curtains. I’ve been here for hours. Long enough to see night turn to dawn turn to day. Closing my eyes plays scenes I don’t want to see so I don’t close them except to blink.
When slow steps begin on the stairs, I roll over, my back to the door. I’ve told my parents I’ll be down soon. I just want to be alone now.
My door opens and I wait for one of their voices. Dad’s low, soft timbre or Mom’s confident declarations that at least I walked away from what they were doing at Bean’s. At least I called her. It was a start.
It’s neither of them.
“Your parents told me to come up. Are you awake?”
Noah must know I am from the way I suck in a breath and hold it, waiting. I keep my back to him because if I turn over and see his face and feel the warmth he radiates and talk to him, like we do, like I can, I don’t know how I’ll be able to go back to pretending.
But he crosses my room and sits on my bed, and in my peripheral vision I see him taking up my old koala stuffed animal, tufting the fur on its ears, rubbing his thumb over its stomach.
“I know what it’s like to carry a secret,” he says. “At least . . .” He sets the koala down carefully, moving it a half inch to one side, then the other, obsessively looking for the center of my bed. “What I thought it might have been. I was never sure. I tried to get her to go to someone. The police. But Bean never said anything so I wasn’t positive I was right about what happened. If I’d known for sure . . .”
“Because you were the one who drove her home that night,” I say softly. Something I figured out a while ago but couldn’t admit to myself. “Is that why you talked to me that first day of school? Because . . . you suspected and you thought I knew and . . .”
And what? Am I supposed to be upset?
Noah was the friend Bean needed all along, when the rest of us failed her.
I know I’m right because he doesn’t answer.
Jen’s right, too, and I’ve known it all along. If Noah knows what I am, the secrets I’ve kept, he will walk away. Because if he’d known for sure, he would have told.
He would be disgusted to know that losing him as a friend was on my list of reasons not to tell. T
hat he could be a reason for me not to do the right thing.
He scratches the top of his ear and strands of hair fall in his eyes. His shirt is open at his collarbone and I want to reach for the skin exposed there. With my fingers, with my lips.
When he raises his gaze to me, I look away. Certain the dark truth can be read in my eyes.
I pull my knees into my chest. “I can’t.”
And he doesn’t even know what I’m talking about.
He nods. “Okay.”
He moves off the bed, sits close to me. He strokes my head, once, and kisses my forehead, once.
His touch and his patience nearly undo me.
God, why can’t he yell and rage at me and force me to action instead? But no . . . no, he can’t make this decision for me or force me to be the good person I’m supposed to be.
I clutch at my shins, hold myself tightly even after the soft click of the door closing tells me he’s left.
SPRING
ON THAT NIGHT IN May, I drove the car into the ditch on purpose.
Because I wanted to get away. Save myself. Then to get back to help Bean.
Maybe it would have been easier if all of us had died.
But no. Only one of us did.
Not me.
FALL
I PAINT, STROKE AFTER stroke, not stopping, even though paint fumes start to burn my eyes. It’s an excuse for the tears.
My wrist hurts and my forearm feels dull so I switch hands and go at it lefty, splotching and splattering, letting the paint run in rivulets down the side of the boat I’d painstakingly sanded smooth.
I drop the brush in the grass and roll onto my back beside it, staring into the sun. When I can see nothing but black blobs surrounded by an aura of yellow-orange, I close my eyes and count the number of seconds until graduation. Days divided by hours divided by minutes divided by seconds . . . and it still feels too short, it still feels too long, the seconds nearly in the millions, too vast to comprehend.
My ankle throbs and so I try not to move, instead keeping still.
I run through all of it again, because I always do.
The fight Jen and I had, the long walk across the yard before I found Bean and Jay and Steven, blackness, blurriness. I’m behind the wheel of a car, Jay beside me, Steven behind me. Going somewhere, going nowhere. Sure, in that moment, they could have done anything to me.
Every Last Promise Page 18