Safe With Me (18 page)

“We all have our secrets,” she says. “I promise, yours will be safe with me.”

On my second day of school, there is a piece of paper stuck to my locker. I grip the strap of my backpack tighter and slow my pace, wondering if someone crafted an image of what they thought a “Franken-babe” might look like and pasted it in the hallway for everyone’s amusement. People mill around me, chatting and laughing, totally oblivious to the tears stinging the backs of my eyes. I knew a stupid haircut wouldn’t make a difference. I got up an hour early this morning just so I’d have time to style it the way Hannah had shown me; I picked out what I thought was a pretty decent outfit of jeans and loose-fitting blue blouse—I even put on some of my mom’s mascara and lip gloss, but none of it matters.

I keep my head down as I take the final few steps to stand in front of my locker. “Excuse me,” I murmur to the couple of kids in my way, and finally, as they step aside, I put my shaking fingers on the combination lock and force myself to look up. It’s a standard piece of white paper, eight and a half by eleven
inches, and on it is a detailed cartoon sketch of a guy who appears to be Noah, kicking himself in the butt. In the corner, written in tiny, chicken-scratch letters is this:
I’ll kick my own ass so you don’t have to. Sorry for being a jerk. Peace, Noah.
Careful not to tear the paper, I take it off my locker, fold the small bits of tape over the edges, and read the words again.

“You like it?” Noah asks, and I whip my head to the right, realizing that he was hiding around the corner, watching me. Today he wears black skinny jeans and a black T-shirt with the words
THINK OUTSIDE OF THE QUADRILATERAL PARALLELOGRAM
beneath the picture of a cube.

“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “You’re a good artist.”

“Thanks.” He swishes his bangs out of his eyes and squints at me. “You changed your hair.”

I nod again, and he smiles, showing his silver braces. “Nice.” He pauses and I’m quiet, too, unsure of what to say. He glances down at the piece of paper in my hands, then looks back to me. “I
am
sorry if I hurt your feelings, you know. I’ve just never met someone like you.”

“Someone like me, how?” I feel my face start to flush, bracing myself for another insult.

“Like, you defied
death
. Which is totally awesome.”

I shift my backpack on my shoulder and smile. “I guess I’m just not really used to thinking about it that way.” I pause. “Or talking about it with people I don’t know. So what you said . . . what you called me . . . it kind of took me by surprise.”

“Well, now you know me. And you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I just didn’t want you walking around thinking I’m a jerk.”

“I don’t,” I say, a little surprised to realize that I mean this. A
real
jerk wouldn’t admit he had been one—he would have pasted an
actual
picture of Frankenstein’s monster on my locker instead of an apology.

“Cool.” The muscles in his face visibly relax. “So, I’ll see you in computer science?”

“Oh. Okay.” I hadn’t noticed him there yesterday, but that probably had to do with me avoiding eye contact with anyone in the room other than the teacher. I glance at the clock on the wall above my row of lockers. “I should probably get to class.”

“Yeah, me, too.” He stiffens his posture and raises a single hand in a mock salute. “Later,” he says, then takes off down the hall.
People make mistakes,
I think, and decide to try and let it go. There have been plenty of times I’ve said things to my mom that I didn’t mean—words pop out of my mouth that I don’t even know I’m thinking. I wonder if my dad has ever apologized to Mom for all the times he’s said she is stupid or fat; I also wonder if at this point, if he did, would she even be able to forgive him?

After I hung up with Dirk last night, I heard my parents continue to fight in their room. My dad’s low, rumbling voice reverberated through the walls. “You coddle her too much,” he said. I couldn’t hear my mother’s response, but I did hear her sharp, strangled cry a moment later. My stomach clenched, certain that he had hit her again.

I don’t understand why she lets him treat her this way—why she lies to herself, to
me,
about what he does to her. Knowing he hits her is like carrying a sharp black stone around in my chest. I’m afraid that someday, I’ll take too deep a breath and it will slice my already damaged insides to shreds. I’m often
torn between wishing my father were dead and being terrified that if I speak up to anyone—if I tell a counselor or call the police—his anger might turn toward me. And then I feel guilty for keeping my mouth shut, like I’m not the kind of person who deserves anything good. I wonder what the parents of the girl who gave me her liver would do if they knew how selfish I am—what lengths I go to in order to protect myself instead of my mother.

Last night, instead of going to help her, I lay on my back in bed with my bottom lip trembling, pulling the covers up to my chin and trying to pretend I didn’t hear my mother crying. I stared at the ceiling, remembering when I was eleven and went through a phase of being fascinated with the solar system—entranced by a night sky I was so rarely healthy enough to step outside and see. Mom came home one afternoon with ten packages of those glow-in-the-dark sticky planets and stars. “For your very own universe,” she said, then spent the afternoon climbing up and down a ladder, carefully adhering each and every sticker to the ceiling. A woman like her deserves better than my dad.

As I sit through my morning classes, I try not to think too much about my parents. I try to listen to my teachers, but much of what they talk about I already learned from Mrs. Beck last year—I wonder if I can talk to the school counselor about graduating a year early.

I don’t see Hailey until I’m in the lunchroom, after I’ve already stopped by the office and taken my meds. I’m waiting in line for the salad bar when I feel her standing next to me—or rather, I
smell
her—the sickeningly sweet scent of watermelon gum. She’s flanked by two other girls, both as pretty as she is, one with wavy brown hair and the other, stick-straight blond.

“Hi, Maddie,” Hailey says, popping a bubble inside her mouth with a loud snap. “This is Kyla”—she gestures to the blonde first—“and this is Jade.” Both the girls nod at me, and I give a brief bob of my head, too. It seems safer than talking.

Hailey peers at me. “Your hair looks way better.”

“Thanks,” I say, gripping my tray tightly so it doesn’t shake. I hate that smug look on her face, like she’s well aware that the only reason I
changed
my hair was what she said to me about it yesterday. She is wearing a short black skirt and tight white sweater. Her legs look like pale stilts.

“I saw you talking to Noah Bedford this morning.” She pauses to blow a pink bubble, sucking it back into her mouth before it pops. “You know him?”

“Not really,” I say. “I just met him yesterday.”

“He’s such a
geek,
” Hailey says and then looks at me expectantly. I know I’m supposed to agree with her, but my phone buzzes in my pocket, saving me. I’d turned it to vibrate after I left the office a few minutes ago, in case my mom sent me a text during lunch. There hadn’t been any marks on her face this morning, but she moved a little more slowly than usual and I wondered if she had injuries I couldn’t see.

“Sorry,” I say. “I should check this.” Quickly setting my tray on the table next to me, I pull out my cell and see Dirk’s name and picture on the screen. “Thinking about you today,” his text says. “Hope everything is okay. I’ll call you tonight.”

Hailey peeks over my shoulder. “Is that your
boyfriend
? He’s totally hot.”

“Yeah,” I say, the lie slipping out before I can stop it. “He’s super-smart, too.” This part isn’t a lie—Dirk didn’t go to college; instead, he taught himself everything he knows about
computers by hanging out in online, geeked-out chat rooms. He was twenty when he landed his first job at Google, and over the last four years, he moved up from an entry-level position to being one of the top programmers in his department.

“What school does he go to?” Kyla asks, pulling a wisp of hair out of her overly mascaraed eyelashes.

I straighten and pick up my tray again. “He doesn’t. He works at Google.” I say this proudly, as though I had something to do with it.

“He does
not,
” Jade says, rolling her blue eyes. “How old is he?”

“Twenty,” I say, thinking this is more plausible than the twenty-four Dirk actually is. “We met online.”

Hailey looks skeptical, too. “You’re a junior, right? And he’s cool with that?”

I shrug again. “It’s only four years’ difference. If he was twenty-four and I was twenty, no one would care. So it doesn’t really matter to us. We just like each other.” I’m a little terrified how easily this blatantly false explanation comes to me. Maybe pretending to be Sierra Stone has turned me into a professional liar. Maybe I should become an actress instead of a graphic artist.

“Do your
parents
know?” Kyla asks.

I shake my head. “No
way
. So you can’t tell anyone, all right? It’s a secret.”

All three girls look at each other, as though gauging if they are willing to agree to my request, and then, as soon as Hailey nods, Jade and Kyla do, too, and I know that I may have managed to win them over. Even if I’m not one of them—if my hair isn’t perfect and my body is far from lean—they think I have a hot, older boyfriend, and for now, that’s all the power I need.

On Friday night, Hannah’s cell phone rings just as she’s locking the front door to the salon. She fumbles for it, worried that it’s Olivia, canceling their plans for the evening. After their lunch earlier in the week, Olivia invited Hannah to her house for dinner, and for the first time in months—even if it is for the wrong reasons—Hannah is actually looking forward to something other than going to sleep.

“Hi, honey!” her mother chirps. “Did I get you at a bad time?”

Hannah wedges the phone between her shoulder and ear as she makes her way to her car. “I’m just locking up,” she says. “And I’m on my way to a friend’s house for dinner.” Friend
might not be the exact right term,
she thinks. But what else should she call Olivia? She wants to tell Olivia about her suspicions of who they are to each other—she knows she
has
to—but she doesn’t know how. She’s worried now, too, considering that Olivia said James doesn’t want any contact with the donor
family. The way Olivia talked about him, Hannah got the distinct impression that James’s word was pretty much law in the Bell household, and she wonders what would happen if Olivia went against it. Hannah doesn’t want to do anything that might put Olivia in a bad place with her husband, so until she’s absolutely positive Emily was Maddie’s liver donor, she’s decided to keep her mouth shut.

“How nice!” her mother says, sounding as enthused as she might have if Hannah had just told her she won the lottery. “I won’t keep you long. I just want to know if we’ll see you for Thanksgiving this year.”

Leave it to her mother to be planning a holiday meal almost three months ahead of time. “I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to see how busy things get at the salon.” Hannah climbs into her car and starts the engine, slipping her earpiece on so she can continue their conversation while she drives. “Is Isaac planning to come?” She feels like the only way she’ll survive the holiday with her parents is having the protective layer of her brother there, too.

“Oh, you know your brother. It’s always last minute with him.” There is a melancholy edge to her mother’s voice, and immediately, Hannah slips into an all too familiar sense of I’m-a-bad-daughter guilt for living so far away from her parents. She thinks about how much she misses Emily—how it feels as though there is a gaping, aching hole in her life—and she wonders if, even though she and Isaac are still alive, her mother feels the same way when they both can’t wait to escape the confines of the farm. She has always seemed supportive of their decisions and proud of their accomplishments, but Hannah knows all too well that parents often wear a mask to protect their children from how they really feel.

“I’ll try to make it work, okay, Mom? I promise.” Hannah slowly backs out of her driveway, more of a cautious driver than she ever was before Emily’s accident. It took her almost a month after the funeral to be able to get behind the wheel of a car, and now, she tends to ride her brakes and take corners in slow motion.

“Okay, honey. Thank you.” Her mom pauses a moment to clear her throat. “So, your father had his yearly checkup the other day.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Well, mostly. His blood pressure is a little elevated and his cholesterol levels could be better. Dr. Warren thinks he needs to slow down. That he shouldn’t be doing this much heavy labor at his age.” She pauses again, for effect. “I told him we’ve asked you to move home to help out, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon.”

“God, Mom.” As though Hannah isn’t already feeling guilty enough.

“What? I’m simply telling you about my conversation with your father’s doctor.”

“Uh-huh.” Hannah leaves her response at this, knowing the more she engages her mother on this subject, the more her mother will push.

“Who are you having dinner with?” her mother asks brightly, apparently satisfied that she’s accomplished whatever she meant to with the story about her father’s checkup.

“Just a woman I met at the salon,” Hannah says, thinking the fewer details she gives, the better. Even over the phone, her mom has a way of sniffing out when Hannah is hiding something. “We hit it off and she invited me over.”

“Well, I think it’s wonderful you’re making new friends.” Hannah hears her father’s voice in the background, and then her mother speaks again. “Dad sends his love, honey. Call me soon, okay?”

“Okay,” Hannah says, grateful to hang up. As she drives along, the guilt Hannah felt during the phone call nags at her. She worries that she is being too selfish. If her parents did lose their farm, would she be able to live with her decision to stay in Seattle? She isn’t sure that she could. Now that the second salon is up and running, could she find a way to make living back in Boise work? Maybe she could let herself be lulled into the simplicity of planting a garden and watching it grow. She loved helping her parents when she was a child—riding on the tractor with her dad and pulling weeds with her mother—but as soon as she turned fourteen, all she could think about was a life beyond digging her hands in the dirt, a life without the constant scent of manure in the air. For years she was happy—happy living in Seattle with Emily, happy with her career and being a mother. But now that Emily is gone and Isaac still traveling so much, is there really anything keeping her here? Sophie could easily buy out Hannah’s interest in their business and run both salons, then Hannah could put the profits from the sale into the farm. She could lose herself in learning how to manage a new business, just as she lost herself in the renovation. She could keep her parents happy and her mind busy. She could keep her grief at bay.