I Will Save You

by Matt De La Peña

  ALSO BY MATT DE LA PEÑA

  Ball Don’t Lie

  Mexican WhiteBoy

  We Were Here

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

  Text copyright © 2010 by Matt de la Peña

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint lyrics from “I Didn’t Understand,” words and music by Elliott Smith, copyright © 1998 by Universal Music-Careers and Spent Bullets Music. All rights administered by Universal Music-Careers. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Peña, Matt de la.

  I will save you / Matt de la Peña. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Seventeen-year-old Kidd Ellison runs away to work for the summer at a beach campsite in California where his hard work and good looks lead to friendship and love but painful past memories surface in menacing ways.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89742-9 [1. Emotional problems—Fiction. 2. Schizophrenia—Fiction. 3. Mental illness—Fiction. 4. Cardiff by the Sea (Encinitas, Calif.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P3725Iam 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010021186

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  for Caroline

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  First Page

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  You once talked to me about love

  and you painted pictures of

  a never-never land

  And I could’ve gone to that place,

  but I didn’t understand

  I didn’t understand

  —ELLIOTT SMITH,

  “I Didn’t Understand”

  I was on the beach with everybody else, all of us in hoodie sweatshirts and flip-flops, waiting for the grunion to run how the papers and news-show people all talked about.

  It only happens a few times a year, late at night, and goes like this:

  Post–full moon and after high tide the entire beach goes silver like a thousand tiny mirrors with female grunion fish riding swells onto shore and scurrying up the sand and digging in with their tails, and then the males, sometimes seven or eight at a time, wrapping around the females and releasing their milt and then all of them scurrying back to sea together, leaving their eggs buried in the sand to hatch during a future post-full-moon high tide.

  I read it in the paper at the campsite coffee shop.

  In one picture from last summer the whole beach was shimmering, like a rich woman’s dress going down a red carpet. Before I left the shop, Lea, one of the workers, cut out the picture for me with scissors and now it was with me on the beach, folded up and stuck inside the pages of my philosophy of life book. Next to the good-luck tiger whisker I planned to give Olivia.

  I flipped the book open and looked at the picture and the whisker and got excited all over again.

  Since the entire event was supposed to last less than a minute we were all just standing around, waiting, saying how cool it was gonna be, even Mr. Red, my boss, and Peanut, the campsite dog.

  Then I looked up the cliff.

  And I saw it.…

  Devon sitting with Olivia at the top of the stairs, talking close like flirting people talk.

  I choked on breath.

  I almost squatted down on the not-yet-silver sand ’cause my knees went wobbly and I couldn’t tell which way was up, like when a wave takes you underneath and spins you around the ocean’s washing machine.

  Olivia and Devon.

  Together.

  The beach sky was black except for a moon oval that lit up their position on the cliff like a stage spotlight in some romantic play, and I set right off for them, my heart knocking in my chest and stomach and even my neck. My philosophy of life book shaking in my hand. I walked at first like everything was normal ’cause I knew if Mr. Red thought something was happening he’d call me back and take off his old sombrero and fire off question after question (“What’s going on, big guy? You all right? Somebody stressing you out?”).

  When I made it around the bend I jogged, then I ran up the stairs, two at a time, thinking I had to get to her before something happened and what if something happened.

  I saw them through the bushes and stopped cold.

  Peanut ran into the back of my leg.

  Devon slowly tracing the mark on Olivia’s cheek, the one she showed me, and her just letting him.

  “You can’t do it,” I said under my breath.

  Olivia didn’t turn to look at me.

  But Devon did.

  Devon stared and even got a tiny grin on his face and I told him: “Get away from her!” But he didn’t get away from her. Instead he ran his fingers through her long blond hair and leaned in to whisper something in her diamond-earringed ear and then kissed her a real kind of kiss, like two people who were committed together as a couple.

  She kissed back.

  Somebody else’s tiger whisker was already pinched between her thumb and forefinger. A shopping bag and card by their feet in the dirt.

  My whole body lost its feeling and then went jumpy, like I was freezing cold, but I was in my hoodie sweatshirt and warm. I clenched my jaw to stop its chattering and made my face into steel. Then I crashed through the bushes and started marching toward them, one foot up and down and then the other up and down like I was going into a war, wearing my fatigues and a rifle on my shoulder, never taking my eyes off Devon, who was still looking back at me even though he was kissing Olivia.

  I stopped in front of them and Olivia still didn’t look at me. I was some kind of ghost that made no tracks in the sand, or that Jesus poem “Footprints,” but then I reached out and took Devon by the hood of his sweatshirt and moved him away from the only girl I’ve ever loved or ever will.

  I shoved him from the steps toward the part of the cliff where the fence was weakest. I should know ’cause I fixed the whole thing with Mr. Red earlier in the summer and this was where we ran out of material and had to just leave the old part. This was where Mr. Red shook his head and told me, pointing at the fence, how the only thing between some person and falling forty feet down the ice plant face of the cliff to the beach and his most likely death was whether or not he was stupid enough to test it.

  I walked me and Devon toward that test, him by the hood of his sweatshirt and me gritting my teeth, still clutching my philosophy of life book, meaning this more than anything I’d ever meant, and Olivia screamed: “Oh, my God, Kidd! What are you doing!”

  “I can’t let anybody hurt you,” I told her.

  “Kidd! You’re scaring me again!”

  When I turned and looked at her, something wild leapt in her eyes, out-of-control flames that no amount of fireman’s water could’ve ever extinguished or even slowed down.

  My heart lowered its head, ashamed.

  Olivia.

  For a second I got confused
and thought, Am I maybe wrong to do this?

  “Please!” she said. “Kidd!”

  “I have to make sure you’re okay.”

  “Why do you keep saying that? Nobody’s hurting me.”

  But I already had Devon’s back against the part of the fence that wasn’t new, and he was grinning in my face ’cause of his death drive, and he told me: “So, here we are, eh, Kidd? I knew you’d show up.”

  His laugh.

  Him looking down the cliff, at all the people on the sand.

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” he said. “All of these people here, man. They think they’re better than us.”

  I was only half listening, though, the other half still seeing Olivia’s trembling lip behind me, which made me think of my mom’s trembling lip when she sat across from me at the kitchen table the day I turned ten, seven years ago. Saying how I was a man now and how I deserved the truth about my genes and what was about to happen with her and my dad. I remembered her long-nailed fingers digging into her own hands and her right knee going up and down and up and down, the poor man’s shake Mr. Red calls it whenever he catches mine doing the exact same thing around his campfire—usually ’cause I’m thinking about myself and if I’m good enough for Olivia.

  My mom looked at me that birthday morning like she was telling me something brand-new about my dad, and to protect her feelings I acted like I didn’t know.

  “I’ll do it,” I said to Devon, making my face into the hardest possible frown.

  “You won’t.”

  “I will.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I have to.”

  Peanut stared up at me, his tongue going and one of his ears standing in a point like it was hearing something too high for humans.

  “Kidd, stop!” Olivia said.

  She took two short breaths and told me: “Just—just come back here a minute. I wanna talk to you.”

  Olivia was pretending calmness now, her voice quieter and deeper and more desperate. Her eyes darting in their sockets and her lip still going like my mom’s lip when she sat me down in front of my ten-candle cake and said how I had a right to know and how I was a man now.

  “They may have just stuck you in this special program at school, honey, but I know you’re just as smart as you ever were. Now I want you to listen, okay?”

  Her pushing loose strands of long black hair behind her ears and glancing at the ceiling and taking a deep breath. When she looked back at me her eyes all jittery and building tears.

  “This is who you are,” she said. “And you can never forget that.”

  I watched that first tear slide down my mom’s cheek and fall onto the collar of her light blue shirt in a circle, that part going instantly darker.

  Below me and Devon the ocean massive and making its constant fuzzy sound and yawning up onto the already wet sand and then rolling back into itself, all its secret eternity buried beneath and calm like Olivia was pretending to be calm behind us, and its whispering of how meaningless the three of us were above it on the cliff, the sand still not silver like the picture folded in my book, but dull and gray and sad.

  I stood there, gripping Devon’s sweatshirt.

  My philosophy of life book, on the ground now, with all my answers and me with no time to read ’em.

  “Please,” Olivia said in a tiny voice.

  “You won’t,” Devon said.

  “I have to,” I said, and I drove him harder into the weak part of the fence until it broke like I knew it would break and I shoved him down the cliff and watched his body bounce-tumble-fall-stretch-fetal-thud into the thick sad sand and lay motionless, and everybody who was once waiting for grunion was now racing to his side and touching his arm, his back, his leg, and looking up the cliff at me and Olivia.

  Peanut took off down the stairs.

  I studied Olivia’s hysterical crying face as she hurried to the edge of the small cliff and crumpled to her knees, sobbing and looking down at Devon’s limp body and screaming “No!” and then looking at me and shouting my name, “Kidd!”

  Over and over like that.

  “Kidd!”

  “Kidd!”

  A bad feeling slowly dripping into my stomach, warm, and how I couldn’t move or feel anything.

  But then I pictured what Mr. Red said. “A man’s gotta take care of his woman.” I’d just put it as #5 in my philosophy of life book.

  And that was all I did.

  Take care of Olivia.

  The human crowd now gathered around Devon and flashlights shining and combined talk rising up to us and fingers pointing and cell phones opening and going to people’s ears. Olivia sobbing, her long blond hair now back under her ski cap, the flap again covering the mark on her cheek.

  My heart hanging from the edge of the ice plant cliff by its fingertips and slipping.

  I stepped back and watched it all like a show on TV, and right that second it happened.…

  The grunion came from the ocean.

  All at once they wiggled out of an especially heavy swell and rode up onto shore, blanketing the sand like real-life glitter and everybody who was touching Devon turned to watch the silver fish digging into the sand and circling around each other and some scurrying all the way up to people’s flip-flop feet and climbing over Devon’s motionless body.

  And me on Mr. Red’s secret part of the cliff, above everything, out of breath and in awe, thinking how could such a good thing like a sparkling beach next to the girl of my dreams come at the exact same time as such a bad thing, my ex–best friend, Devon, broken in the sand ’cause I pushed him and the sound of sirens in the distance and Olivia burying her face in her hands, sobbing.

  Before all the silver had time to fade back in the ocean I closed my eyes to keep freedom pictured in my head and waited for them to come take me away.

  I keep picturing it over and over in the pitch black of solitary confinement. With my arms and legs strapped down and my head taped in place so I can’t move or barely even breathe.

  I see me pushing Devon off the cliff.

  Him in the air reaching, ricocheting off the ice plant cliff, hitting the sand, people circling his crooked body.

  The grunion coming from the ocean.

  Olivia crying in her hands.

  And every time I picture it a worse feeling goes in my stomach, like my whole body is unbalanced, or when you drop straight down in your roller-coaster cart and everybody has their hands up, screaming.

  Except for me there’s no end of the ride where I can get off and just sit on an empty bench with my soda watching people. This kind of roller coaster keeps going.

  ’Cause what if I was wrong about Devon?

  What if the whole time he wasn’t trying to hurt her, he just loved her? Same as me. What if that’s the reason he was always wandering around alone in the middle of the night like he was depressed?

  And what if Olivia actually loved him back, and I got in the way of people’s fate?

  That doesn’t make sense, though. ’Cause he kept telling me she thought she was better and he would use his gun on her.

  And Olivia liked me.

  She even said it at Torrey Pines Beach while we sat together on her special rock and watched the sunset colors spread over the ocean.

  They put me in Horizons after my mom died ’cause they said I had post-traumatic stress. They believed it was the reason I was always so tired and confused and bad to myself.

  But right now it’s even worse.

  I can’t think.

  I can just stare at the total darkness in front of me, which feels like being inside a black hole. Or if your boat drifted into the Bermuda Triangle.

  Solitary confinement is like you don’t exist.

  If I had my philosophy of life book and a pen I’d try to write about what happened on the cliff, and how maybe now I understand why some people have to be put in jail. They’ve shown they’re capable of crossing a line, like pushing another person off a cliff, and mayb
e it wasn’t even for the right reasons, which shows you their judgment, and what if they did it again.

  But I can’t write anything ’cause the police didn’t put my book with me.

  That’s the first thing I checked when I woke up in this blackness. I tried to reach, but my arms were strapped too tight. My whole body ached after I just barely shifted, parts I’d never even thought about like in between my fingers and behind my knees.

  The police must’ve pounded me with their billy clubs when they loaded me into the back of their squad car and drove me to prison. They probably thought I was evil for what I did to my best friend. Everybody probably did.

  Even Olivia.

  But they didn’t know Devon.

  They’d never heard him talk about rich people, especially girls. They’d never seen his gun or how he made a throat-slashing sign at Olivia or how he’d stand there staring at her tent in the middle of the night when she was sleeping.

  They’d think different if they knew.

  I wake up and try to reach out my hand again, to feel for my philosophy of life book, ’cause I need it, but I still can’t move. The straps feel even tighter. My breaths barely have room. And it’s still the blackest black you could ever picture, like everything got burned up.

  I keep thinking if this is the form of torture that happens in solitary confinement, even though you’re not supposed to torture people in the United States.

  And then it really sinks in.

  Where I am.

  Strapped down in a bed behind bars.

  Locked up.

  And all my mom ever said was for me to be a good person. And be polite. And respect my elders.

  I imagine her looking down from heaven right now. Her only son in solitary confinement, being tortured. And I see from her expression how heartbroken she is. Tears running makeup stains down her cheeks and her chin quivering and her eyes so sad, like two cat’s-eye marbles nobody wants to shoot for.

  Just thinking about my mom crying makes my lungs start going too fast. Like I’ve just sprinted up the campsite stairs. And now I’m gasping for air and my heart’s pounding my ribs and it feels like I’m lifting out of my own body, floating above my prison cot.…