I Swear (2 page)

3. How much it hurt that your daddy was never home enough.

4. Tell everyone how sorry you are that you won’t be at prom this year, so someone else will have to be “worst dressed.”

5. A thank-you to all your best girlfriends, who were so nice to you. (Oh. Wait. There weren’t any because you were a slut who stole people’s boyfriends.)

6. Who you’re leaving all your craptastic earrings to.

7. How sad you were that your boobs never grew in.

8. A line from one of those stupid country songs you listened to.

9. Why we shouldn’t be sad now that you’re gone. (Not that we would be.)

10. Tell Jake how you’re doing this for him so that he won’t have ugly babies.

“Is ‘craptastic’ a word?” I asked.

“Oh, who cares? It’s not like she’s clever enough to use a word like that in a book report, let alone a suicide note.” Macie was very pleased with herself. I could tell that this week at school would be easier. She’d been begging for a sleepover since last Monday. Finally, I’d invented a chemistry exam that required a study group so my mom would buy into a Sunday-night slumber party. Now if we could just get this message sent before Jake got home, we’d be set.

“Looks good,” I said. “Our weekly missive appears to be ready.”

“Oh, Beeeeeth . . . ,” trilled Macie. It was a silly tradition that we’d established. Macie typed, I proofread, Beth pressed send every week.

“Ta-
da
!” squealed Beth, the tiny gymnast in our midst, who jumped in a single fluid motion from the floor to the chair at the computer desk, somehow joining me on a seat I didn’t realize had room for the both of us.

She clicked.

She clapped.

And as she turned around, the door to my room swung open with such force that it bounced against the wall and knocked the lamp off my dresser. Krista screamed as the bulb flashed purple and burned out. Suddenly, all six feet, two inches of my twin brother, Jake, were standing in the doorway.

“Where did you get this?” he asked. His voice was so still, no one dared to breathe. There was no air left in the room.

I tried to act nonchalant. I squinted at the silver chain dangling from his fist as if I couldn’t quite make out what he was holding, as if I didn’t know.

But I knew. We all did. And Jake’s knuckles were white.

Katherine was typically the quiet one, but she must’ve noticed me flinch under Jake’s gaze, because she was the only one to jump in.

“What is that?” she asked, sitting up on the knees of her plaid pajama pants and reaching for the anchor dangling from the chain in Jake’s hand.

Without moving his eyes from mine, he pulled the chain out of her reach as a cloud crossed his clear blue eyes.

“Jills, you know exactly what it is,” he said.

The short sleeve of Jake’s green polo strained against the biceps of his right arm as he gripped the necklace. The pendant trembled on the chain from the tension in his hand. His whole body was on a slow boil.

“Dang, Jake.” Macie whistled. “You’re so sexy when you’re angry.”

For one moment, Jake’s eyes left me and fixed on Macie in a look of such contempt that even Macie withered backward from the heat.

“Don’t ever speak to me again,” he spat at her so slowly it felt like the words were separate explosions from an armful of
hand grenades he’d lobbed into each corner of the room. “I want you out of my life.”

Then he turned on his heel and headed back down the hall.

I’ll never forget how we sat there in silence for what seemed like an eternity as we listened to the front door slam, then the car door, then heard Jake squeal away from the curb. I didn’t realize it then, but that was the moment it all began—or it all ended, depending on your point of view, I suppose. In the span of time between his tires peeling out and Krista’s next giggle, I sat in the eerie quiet and understood two things:

I didn’t know exactly how we’d gotten here.

But I knew exactly where Jake was going.

2. KATHERINE

I knew Leslie was dead before I opened my eyes. It was Beth’s crying that woke me up, and my very first thought was
Leslie’s gone and killed herself
. As I lay there listening to Beth cry, I felt that familiar knot in the pit of my stomach. It’s the same one I got the day we left Atlanta almost two years ago. I had cried that day while I was hugging my old aunt Liza good-bye.

“No use crying when life hands you different cards than the ones you wanted,” Aunt Liza always said when I was little. “Besides, if you show folks your hand by the look on your face, they’ll call your bluff.”

I lay as still as I could on the pull-out couch in the corner of the TV room in Jillian’s huge upstairs suite and listened for clues. Krista tried to comfort Beth on the edge of the air mattress across the room.

“Beth, it’s okay,” she said.

“No, Krista, it’s not okay. This is not okay.”

I heard a rustling as Jillian jumped up and closed the door of the TV room all the way. “You guys, we have to keep it down.”

“Keep what down?” Beth was crying so hard that she could barely choke out the words. “This isn’t a secret, Jillian. It’s all over Facebook.”

Beth was sobbing too loudly to ignore, and even though I didn’t want to, I opened my eyes and sat up. They had forgotten I was there, because Jillian jumped about three feet in the air, and Beth stopped crying for a second.

“Leslie is dead, isn’t she?” I said.

No one moved for what seemed like an eternity. I realized later that this was the first time any of us had said the word “dead.” For some reason, saying it out loud made it real. The word hung there in midair and I wished that someone, anyone, would grab it and hide it, or hurl it out the upstairs window into the pool out back. Instead it tumbled end over end with a gathering velocity, like a frigid wave, and as it crashed over us, Macie walked into the room from the bathroom that Jillian shared with Jake.

Macie was showered and dressed and looked like she’d stepped out of the window at the Barneys in Pacific Place. Her dark-blond hair was perfect and framed her face in long, shiny layers.

“Yes, Katherine. Leslie killed herself. She died last night huffing exhaust in her own garage.”

Macie took a box of tissues from a shelf next to the television and handed it to Krista.

“Beth, darling, when you dry your eyes, feel free to leave a post on Leslie’s Facebook page along with the hundred and seventeen of us who have already done so. I can’t help but think that our true sympathy should go to her parents, though. I simply can’t imagine how anyone could be so selfish.”

She turned around and fished a small zippered pouch from her Louis Vuitton overnight bag on the floor. She produced two diamond stud earrings, which she put in as she made her way to the full-length mirror next to the couch, where I was sitting. She narrowed her eyes as she surveyed her own reflection. When no one spoke or moved, she suddenly turned and looked at each of us in turn.

“What?” she asked.

Beth grabbed a tissue and blew her nose. Jillian looked at me; Macie followed her gaze and smiled.

“I know it’s only seven, but you need to look alive, VP. You’re going to want to join me at school early this morning. There may be news crews. This sort of stuff is a local anchor’s wet dream. Dress for the cameras.”

She picked up her bag and headed toward the hallway. When she reached the door of Jillian’s suite, she turned back toward Jillian and frowned.

“I don’t know what Jake’s issue was last night,” she said, “but I know I can count on you, right, Jillian?”

There was a tense silence, and I watched as Jillian sputtered and blushed under the heat of Macie’s gaze.

“Wha—? Yes, I mean, yeah. Of course,” she choked out.

Macie nodded once. Then she was gone.

Jillian glanced over at me as I stood up and walked toward the bathroom. I shook my head and smiled at her, then rolled my eyes after Macie with a little sigh. Jillian almost smiled at me, and took a deep breath—the first one I’d seen her take since I sat up and opened my eyes. Her relief was like the wiggle of the catfish my grandpa used to take off my fishing line and toss back into the water at the pond out behind his house during the summer when I was little.

You can always read Jillian’s cards. That girl’s face is a full house.

3. BETH

By the time I got to school my eyes were so red and puffy from crying that they were almost swollen shut. I looked like Mary Alice Splinter that day in eighth grade when she bobbled her approach on the springboard and smacked the vault with her forehead. It was the last practice before the winter invitational, and Mary Alice was our strongest all-around competitor. I remember watching her hold her head and wail into the mats. I stood there, helpless, while the coaches tended to her. The worst part of all was the sickening feeling that we’d already lost before we’d had the chance to compete—like everything was over before it ever started.

I remember feeling helpless as I stood there watching life buzz by around me. All the other girls seemed to know what to do. One went to the school office to get a secretary to call
Mary Alice’s mom. Two more went to her locker to get her things. Another helped the coaches apply cold packs and talk to Mary Alice while we waited for the ambulance.

Then there was me. Helpless little me.

I had my growth spurt in sixth grade. It lasted exactly three months. I got my period, grew four inches, and stopped. I will forever be exactly five feet tall. I’m a gymnast chick. I’m tiny. Those girls with no boobs you see on TV, who stand on the balance beam during the Olympics and their knees and elbows look like they’re bending the wrong way? That’s me.

Most of the girls on my gymnastics team will get too tall or too fat or too bored to keep training. Not me. I’m the perfect size and shape. I’ve got NCAA Division I lines. And the scouts are interested.

On that day back in eighth grade, feeling helpless, watching them wheel Mary Alice down the hallway to the ambulance, I made a list in my head of things I needed to do that day. When I got back to class, I wrote them down:

1. Send Mary Alice a get-well card. Or balloons. Or something.

2. Run through floor routine again tonight after practice.

3. Call Mom, tell her I’ll be late because I’m working the floor routine.

4. Make sure red competition leotard is clean.

The list made me feel like I was doing something, like life wasn’t happening around me, or to me. The list made me feel like I was in charge of something in those moments after Mary Alice went to the hospital.

It made me feel not so small.

We lost the meet that weekend in March, but a high school coach from across town saw me compete. Afterward he came up and handed my dad his card.

“Your girl is Division One material, Dad.” When the coach smiled, he had a dimple on one side of his face. “Guy Stevens. Give me a call next week. I’m at Westport High. Best public school athletics department in the Northwest. Our girls have taken the Class 4A championship at state the last three years.”

My Dad thanked him, and then the coach turned to me.

“You got killer moves, little lady. If you can convince your dad to send you my way, we’ll get you in shape for the Olympics.” Later that summer, Coach Stevens invited us to a cookout. “My niece will be there,” he said. “She’s Beth’s age and she’ll be playing volleyball at Westport this fall.”

And that’s how I met Leslie Gatlin.

She wasn’t as petite as I was, but I remember taking one look and thinking how delicate she looked. And tan. She seemed to be spun out of brown sugar and air, like a heavy rain might wash her away completely. Her dad was an asshole who talked about housing prices and market values without anyone
else getting a word in edgewise. Her mom was slurring good-byes when they left that night, plastered on white wine spritzers.

Leslie and I talked about school at first—where she’d gone, where I’d gone—and at some point during that evening, my dad decided that I could change districts and go to Westport to train with Leslie’s uncle. For some reason, I told Leslie about Mary Alice and about the list I made and how the list made me feel powerful and unafraid even in the midst of chaos.

Then we laughed and made a list together. It was a list of silly things that we would never do in high school:

1. Run when we weren’t in a practice or competition.

(It makes you look like you’re not in control.)

2. Let any boy get to second base on the first date.

(It makes you look desperate.)

3. Miss a game, a meet, or a practice for any reason.

(It makes you look lazy.)

4. Drink booze before we were twenty-one.

(It makes you look like a loser.)

We were in the driveway, lying on the hood of her dad’s truck, staring up at the stars. The metal was still warm from baking in the summer sun all day. I asked Leslie how she’d gotten so tan, and she explained that she’d come back from vacation the day before. She told me all about her trip to Cape Cod and the sand and the sun and the sailing.

And a boy named Jake.

Thinking of that night made me cry again, this time harder. My head hurt so badly from the snot and the tears and the pressure that I could barely see.

I pulled up to the rear entrance of the school so I could go in the back door between the gym and the music building. The traffic out front seemed a little crazy and I knew I’d have a better shot of making it to the bathroom to wash my face and put on some mascara without being seen if I went in the back way.