Every Last Promise (18 page)

“It takes a lot of energy to love it, too,” I say. “Sometimes
I feel exhausted. Like this town sucks everything out of me. And for some reason . . . I'm willing to give it everything.”

“Does it? I didn't know that. I feel very . . . neutral about this town.” He lets the grass fall back to the earth through his fingers. “I don't want to give everything to this place. I'm never going to be like the other people here, but I've decided that's okay. I don't have to look a certain way or play certain sports or eat certain things to be okay. I can do my own thing.” He shrugs. “I'll get out of here soon enough, so in some ways it's just about biding my time.”

“But isn't that lonely?”

“I have friends, Kayla. People call me quiet. They think I'm invisible. But they don't realize that I've just chosen who and what's important to me. . . .” His voice hitches and I wonder if he means me, at all. I want him to mean me. “I ignore all the rest. And they don't even see how doing that is subversive.”

“I see you,” I say, turning my head to look at him. “I'm sorry I didn't before. I'm sorry I ever stopped seeing you. I was wrong.”

“The only thing that's making me start to regret not caring about this town . . . is you.”

He raises his hand and tangles his fingers in my hair. My hands go to his strong shoulders as he angles himself halfway over me. And when he kisses me, it doesn't matter if either of us belongs or if we're invisible to everyone outside
this riverbank. All that matters is the realness of us, here, right now.

We stay on the banks of the river until the night chorus awakens and river-chill sets in. When he drives me home, our small talk interspersed with lingering breaks is as comfortable as it can be with all the thoughts lurking at the edges of my mind. Our hands, clasped in the center of the seat, are warm. When we turn onto Sunview, a heaviness comes over me.

It never used to feel this way. Coming home from anywhere—a doctor's appointment, a competition, spring break in Florida—once rejuvenated me. Now, I want to slump in my seat and hide.

“Hey,” Noah says when we get to my house. “I know you don't want to talk yet about what's going on. But are you going to be okay?”

I tug on the bottom of my hair. It feels like past time for honesty. “I don't know.”

“It's going to be okay.” His hand reaches for the back of my neck and he draws me to him and I press my forehead to his and wonder why he gets to get away with lying. It's not okay—I can't ever see a time when it will be okay. But he kisses me and for a few seconds, it's better.

“OH MY GOD.”

I froze.

The boys froze, too. Steven, with his fucking camera. Jay and that beer bottle.

The part of the beer bottle I could see. Over the top of Bean's slender, white thigh, disappearing into blackness. Her hand moved dazedly up and down, swatting at Jay, but she couldn't reach him where he sat back on his heels, the grin slowly fading from his face.

“Shit.” The phone light went out and our eyes adjusted to the dark in silence.

“Kayla?” Bean turned her face to me, rolled her eyes in my direction. Mascara smeared across her cheeks. Hair clung to her temples. She put a hand down on the ground beside her, quickly, trying to keep her balance. A sob escaped her. She heaved once. Twice. Tried to kick at Jay, who was on his feet by now. Another sob and my name again, drawn out in two awful, heartbroken syllables.

The ice that had taken over my veins melted. Slowly at first, then rapidly, stoked by anger, fury, rage.

“Get your car,” Jay's voice said.

Steven took off for the house.

I stepped forward, fists clenched and raised. My mind was in a free fall, and I couldn't capture any real thought but the need to hit Jay and to claw his face and press my nails into his eyes and come away with blood.

He met me halfway. His hands curled around my arms, digging into the flesh underneath my biceps and I was certain he was going to rip the muscle and tendon from the bones and I cried out from the pain and the need to destroy him.

Bean got to her hands and knees, and where her dress was still hunched up around her hips, I could see a dark streak. If Jay hadn't been holding me up by my arms I would have fallen to my knees and gathered Bean to me.

“Shut the fuck up, Kayla,” Jay said, because I'd screamed, as if anyone could have heard it over the sounds of the party. But I took another breath to scream again. It faltered into a moan as his fingers tightened on me. “You don't even know what's going on here.”

Jay pulled me hard, away from Bean, out of the barn, toward Nickerson Road on the far east border of the Brewster property. I managed to turn my head and I saw the party fading into the landscape. His strides were long and sure, and I tripped behind him because he would drag me, I knew, if I fell.

I saw a car driving on the road alongside the Brewster property and then bumping over the shallow trench divider between the gravel and the grass, coming onto the fields
before stopping abruptly in front of us.

Steven got out, leaving the engine running, and Jay pulled me around to the driver's seat. His hand was atop my head, so fucking heavy, like a concrete block, pushing my neck, every vertebra in my spine down, down, down, compressing my whole body into something inches tall, too small for my lungs to find room to expand. I gasped at air, smelled the beer on Jay's breath. I couldn't get enough oxygen. Any.

Jay shoved me forward, and I wasn't quite small enough because the side of my head collided with the frame of the door and bursts brighter than the stars exploded across the darkness of my vision. He slammed the door closed. I reached for the handle and pushed, but Steven blocked it from the outside.

“Drive,” Jay said as he slid into the passenger side and held my right arm, keeping me in place. Steven jumped in the back.

“Or what?!” I screamed.

“Just drive down Nickerson.” His voice was calm, except for the telltale way his “v” sound was slightly slurred. Even after everything else, he wouldn't drive drunk. My brain twisted maniacally, focusing on stupid thoughts like that, instead of formulating a plan, figuring out what to do to get out of here and help Bean. I needed to . . . I needed to . . . His fingers dug into my bicep again.

I crumpled into the driver's seat. Steven's battered old
Ford. My palm hovered over the stick shift and I concentrated on commanding my hand to stop shaking and grip it. I blinked red haze.

Jay reached his other arm forward and I thought he was going to grab me so I yelped, but he was just turning the music off. I wanted to put my seat belt on. An oddly clear idea when every other thought made me feel like shattering. But I was afraid of making any movement that Jay hadn't told me to. I ground the gear into first and pressed on the gas so hard the car lurched forward. I squinted into the distance, trying to find the road until the car bounced over the unevenness of gravel.

“You'll keep your mouth shut. You didn't see anything,” Jay said. His voice was slurred but hard.

“Uh, yeah, she did.” Steven. From the backseat.

Jay turned around and smacked him. “She didn't see anything!” he yelled.

“I didn't see anything,” I repeated. I didn't know what I was saying. All I knew was that I needed time.

I had seen everything.
Everything
. People would know about it. I'd make sure of that.

But we were driving. Where? Why? Where did they want me to drive them?

Jay took his hands off me. Rolled the beer bottle between his palms and looked at me. “You're a good girl. My sister's best friend.” He stopped.

A good girl. His sister's best friend.
In the part of my head that was swimming with hope, I understood that to mean he wouldn't . . . couldn't . . . do anything to me. But the rest of my mind was suffocated with images of what he did to another of his sister's best friends. To another good girl.

“She wanted that,” he said. He slammed the bottle against the dashboard. Glass flew everywhere.

“Dude!” Steven yelled. “My car!”

“It's a piece of shit.” Jay laughed.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the jagged, sharp-teeth edge of the bottle. If I told what I'd seen—and if that meant his life as he imagined it could be over—how hard would he try to keep me quiet? How much could my life have meant to him?

I shifted into fourth, carefully keeping the car steady on slick, oily gravel. We were leaving the field landscape and approaching a stand of trees, thin and spindly at first but thickening quickly.

Maybe miles behind us now, Bean was crying, alone, sprawled in the dirt. Or crawling back to the house. I prayed that whoever found her first would, please God, do something to help her.

I
had to do something. I had to get out of this car. I had to stop them.

My eyes felt glued to the road, as though if I looked away for one second I could lose the tiny bit of control I had being
in the driver's seat. As if they'd finally realize I could turn back, drive where
I
wanted to go, not them, do
something
. If only I could push through that panic and figure out what. But a movement in my peripheral vision commanded my attention. I turned my head. Jay brushed the tip of a bottle shard across his thumb. Shadows glinted off the glass and then in his eye when he slowly looked over at me.

A sound halfway between a sob and a cough escaped my mouth.

I had to save myself. Then save Bean. Like the way the flight attendants said on planes: put my oxygen mask on first then help others. In the strange mix of wild and calm in my head, crashing the car was the right thing to do. If I turned into the ditch so that the tree hit their side . . . blocked their doors. I would have time. Enough to get back.

Our eyes locked.

He saw everything in the set of my mouth, in the dark hate in my eyes, in the white of my knuckles around the steering wheel.

“Bitch—” He lunged across the car for me. His whole body: foot wedged in and slammed into mine on the gas pedal, hands over hands. But I had already turned the car and the gravel was so accommodating, loving these kids and the doughnuts they pulled on this road late at night and it was as easy as falling into a cloud.

Steven's car always spun beautifully.

The truck cresting the hill just ahead of us tried to spin, too. The truck almost managed to turn enough, its headlights cutting across the surprise on my face for less than a second. It turned far enough away to hit the back of our car instead of the front, connecting with metal and glass and Steven's flesh and bones. The doors on my side flung open and gravel and bark embedded in my skin everywhere and the hood slammed into a tree and blood slammed into my head and my chin slammed into the ground. Salty warmth burst over my teeth.

There was no lingering car horn, only a vague memory that the truck had blared its horn before we crashed. There were no voices, only the vague idea that some voices might be silenced for good.

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.

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 does 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.