Promise Me Something (20 page)

“How would you feel if I shot myself in the face?”

“Yeah right.” I knew she was trying to goad me, and I wasn’t about to fall for it. The idea of someone as arrogant as Olive suffering from low self-esteem was laughable.

“You think I’m joking?” Her eyes widened. “I’m not the boy who cried wolf.”

“And I’m not the wolf,” I said.

“Maybe you’re more important to me than you think.”

“Well, I don’t want to be.” I turned off the faucet and wiped my dripping hands against the front of my jeans. “I’d prefer to be nothing to you.”

She stared at me.

“I never asked for any of this,” I reminded her. “And I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but it’s true. I never asked you to write that poem. I never asked you to be my friend.”

I expected her nostrils to flare. I thought she might say, “Get out,” or even, “You’re better than this,” which I knew deep down that I was. But she didn’t do anything except stare at me. So I left the bathroom with the toilet still gurgling. The door closed behind me with a swish.

Four times in one week?

Five, actually.

I’ve created a monster.

Shut up. Are you coming?

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually tired of reading Sylvia Plath.

Fine, then don’t come.

I have no choice.

Why?

I don’t trust you there by yourself.

You think I’d kill myself?

I wouldn’t put it past you.

Then come if you must.

I will. And I’m bringing you a beanie.

Olive, don’t.

It’s freezing.

You’ve already loaned me too many clothes.

The beanie is hideous. You’ll love it.

Fine, just hurry up.

Where’s the fire?

Nowhere. But the middle of the night is the only thing I look forward to anymore.

That’s what worries me.

I
put down the lip gloss that tasted like a Creamsicle. It was dark in my room—too dark to tell I was wearing anything on my face—so I stood up, crossed the room, and hit the light switch by the door. In the space of a heartbeat, my room glowed warm and yellow, like I was seeing it from outside on a cold night. I blinked a few times and walked back to the mirror, where I’d been sitting since before the sun went down, applying foundation to my cheeks and spraying clouds of body mist over my collarbone and throat.

When it was time to go, I called Dad and met him by the front door with the car keys in my hand. It was all part of the ritual humiliation of not having a driver’s license: the necessity of asking your father to drive you to your first real date. When Dad saw me, I think he was relieved that I was wearing jeans and a black scoop neck sweater, which was pretty much the same thing I wore to school every day. What he didn’t know was that I’d shaved my legs with baby oil and sprayed body mist into my armpits and the cups of my bra, which was most definitely not part of my everyday routine. I was also wearing eye shadow—turquoise, in honor of Mom.

We drove all the way to Oakwood Avenue in silence, our thoughts hovering in separate, unknowable orbits. It was one of Dad’s best qualities—the way he could be quiet without making people feel awkward. Only tonight, just this once, I would have liked a little distraction from my thoughts. I would have liked him to ask me about Levi or even about the movie we were going to see. In my nervousness, I grabbed Lucy’s moisturizing cream off the dashboard and rubbed some down the inner sides of my wrists, where the skin was milky and smooth. I liked the way the veins felt underneath, sliding up and down, but I stopped when I realized how strong I smelled—like body mist and deodorant and Creamsicle and now hand lotion. If Dad noticed the cloud of aromas around me, he didn’t say anything.

It was only when we were halfway to the theater that he spoke at all. He didn’t ask me how I met Levi or what made
White Heat
such a popular movie. Instead, he asked about Olive. More specifically, he wanted to know why he hadn’t seen her around the house in a while—had something happened?

I told him we weren’t friends anymore, and then I stared ahead of me out the windshield. If silence was Dad’s best quality, it was probably my worst. But he knew me too well. The longer I watched the double yellow lines disappear under our car, the more he pushed. He wanted to know whose decision it was to end the friendship—who broke up with whom—as though we’d been going out. Then he wanted to know how I felt about it, and whether I’d done anything like apologize or try to make things right. Worst of all, he wanted to know if Olive was lonely. Not me—his daughter. Olive.

“It’s not as if she doesn’t have other friends,” I told him, although I realized, as soon as the words hung in front of me in the air, that they weren’t true. Other than Grace, the only person I’d seen her hang out with was Jamie Pollock, the cello player. “She sits with someone else at lunch now,” I told Dad.

“Who?” Dad turned on his blinker and made a left turn into the parking lot of the movie theater. “Anyone I know?”

I shook my head. “Just a new victim.”

Dad frowned. “Friends aren’t victims.”

“I was,” I told him. “She picked me out of the crowd like I had a target on my head. I don’t even know what she saw in me.”

“A smart, thoughtful person?” Dad looked troubled. “Just a guess.”

I rolled my eyes, even though he couldn’t see my face. We were pulling up behind a long row of cars next to the entrance to the theater, which was packed for the opening night of
White Heat
. I considered hopping out of the car right there, a hundred yards away from the entrance. Unbuckling my seat belt, I grabbed my purse and put my hand on the door.

“I mean it, Rey.” Dad stopped driving even though the cars in front of us kept inching forward, leaving a gap in front of our Subaru. “Put things right.”

“There’s nothing I can do tonight,” I said, unlatching the door. I could already smell the buttered popcorn wafting out of the theater.

“Then we’ll talk about it later,” answered Dad. “When I pick you up.” I registered the disappointment in his voice and filed it away under Things Not to Think About.

The first thing Levi said when he saw me was: “You smell good.” We were standing three feet apart. As soon as he turned his head to look for the popcorn line, I rubbed my wrists against my jeans, praying he wouldn’t start sneezing once we sat down next to each other.

At the concession stand, we ordered an extra large cherry soda with one straw. Just when I was about to ask for a small bag of popcorn, Levi gestured at his bulging side pocket and whispered, “Peppermint patties.” I knew right then that he intended to kiss me.

“That’ll be all,” I said to the girl behind the counter, fumbling with my wallet. Of course, Levi handed her a five-dollar bill before I could even find my money. “Thanks,” I told him. “I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t be crazy,” he said. “It’s not like this is the twenty-first century.”

I laughed. It was the first time all night. We moved from the concession stand toward the long, winding line outside the biggest theater in the Cineplex. The people at the front had already finished their popcorn. I hoped we wouldn’t have to wait too long.

As though in answer to my prayer, the crowd started moving the minute we joined the end of the line. Levi kept his hand covering the bag of peppermint patties in his pocket, only lifting it once to grab two pairs of 3-D glasses—or 3-D kiss impediments, as I suddenly thought of them.

Inside the packed, dimly lit theater, finding two seats together was hard, but we managed, climbing over people’s feet and squeezing past their knees. By the time I sat down and set my phone to vibrate, Levi had already opened the bag of peppermint patties and was holding out a handful for me to take. As we slipped on our glasses and waited for the previews to start, my whole body buzzed with sugar. I was nervous, and the theater was too cold for comfort. Below the seat, my toes scrunched of their own accord.

Levi put his arm around me right from the start. He didn’t wait for some stupid, scary scene. For that, I was grateful; otherwise I would have had to pretend to be afraid. When I finally rested my head against the crook of his neck, I could feel his heart hammering down below in his rib cage.

The movie was stupid. Each time I bent to take a sip of our soda, Levi held the straw up to my lips and I lost track of the plot even further. The Creamsicle-flavored lip gloss I’d applied in my room had mostly rubbed off, and I wondered whether he could taste it when he sipped from the straw. Did it ruin the flavor of the soda? I had no way of knowing. Every now and then I glanced over and saw him looking at me. Once, he was even leaning toward me, but I lost my nerve and turned back toward the screen. It was midway through the movie when we worked up the courage to look at each other at the same time. Through the clunky 3-D glasses, I saw the pores on his nose up close.

Then we were kissing. His face was in my hands, and my heart was in my lap. At first, his mouth felt dry. Then he plunged his tongue against my teeth, and everything deepened. It took me a minute to discover how to breathe—in and out, separate from the kiss.

We kept going for the rest of the movie, never once moving our heads farther than a few inches apart. I think we were both too nervous that if we stopped, we’d notice the ridiculous glasses and laugh. We kept going even as the credits rolled at the end of the movie and the audience clapped. Only when the lights came on and the theater began to empty did we break apart to look at each other.

Somewhere in the woods behind her house, Olive was lying down on cold gravel, staring up at a moon that reminded her of a smudge of chalk. If Levi and I had known, what would we have done differently? Left the movie? Called the police? In everything that came after, I regretted a million things, but never once the kiss. In the cold theater, our toes came back to life. We pressed our foreheads together while Olive watched the sky swell out, opening above her like a mouth.

I
once heard a psychologist say on the radio that Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech gunman, had “suicidal ideations” for months before he killed thirty-two people and then himself with a semi-automatic handgun in the engineering hall. After that, the phrase kept rolling over in my head like a static cling sheet in the dryer, sticking to everything.
Suicidal ideations. Suicidal ideations. Suicidal ideations
. I wasn’t thinking about suicide itself—just the way the words sounded. Hard and clinical, like the Latin name of a wart. I repeated them so often, I actually grew worried. If somebody had hooked me up to a lie detector and asked, “What are you thinking about?” my mouth would’ve opened and out would’ve popped the phrase
suicidal ideations
.

But on the morning after
White Heat
, I wasn’t ideating anything at all. I woke up around ten to a dark, gloomy room. Through the slats of my blinds, I could see the sky outside, a deep shade of gray that looked almost purple. High above the house next door, a thundercloud was massing up, ready to burst.

I hadn’t even moved yet when my phone buzzed. It was still set to vibrate from the movie, and I thought it was Levi, texting me to say good morning. I reached toward my nightstand and yanked the phone under the covers, where it cast a blue light onto my pajamas. But the text was from Abby, not Levi. It said,
OMG, check the news
.

At first I just stared at the little blinding screen, surprised. Abby and I hadn’t talked since the Valentine’s party. But then I thought of all the millions of possible disasters that might have transcended our fight—earthquakes, tsunamis, terrorist attacks—and climbed out of bed. The house was eerily quiet as I walked into the living room and looked for the remote, disaster scenarios playing out in my head one after the other. More than anything, I wanted noise—something to blast away the unnerving silence in the house. I couldn’t call Levi because it was too soon, and I couldn’t call Abby because I’d betrayed her at a party I barely even remembered, and I couldn’t call Gretchen because she was the spider at the center of a big web and I was the fly.

So I dug out the remote from behind the couch and turned on the TV. It was already set to channel four, Springdale’s local news station, and there was footage on the screen of a stalled train with a news ticker running below it that said:
Grisly Suicide at Talmadge Hill
.

I actually thought for a second they meant a grizzly bear. That’s what gave me pause—the thought of a bear jumping in front of a train, rearing its claws at the bright headlights. I leaned toward the TV, searching for the bear in the footage. And then I remembered that
grisly
was a word on a vocab quiz I aced in eighth grade, and it meant something like gross or terrible or scary. That’s when I put down the remote and stared at the wreck on the screen. There were policemen standing all around, stringing up yellow tape, and the newscaster was interviewing a conductor who stood to the side with his hat in his hand.

“A young woman,” he told the reporter in a flat, stunned voice. The microphone barely caught the edges of his words. “All bundled up. Looked warm. Stepped onto the track and lay down like she was going to sleep.” The camera didn’t move off his face, even though he was gazing offscreen toward the train. “I’ve never had this happen before,” he finished, the sun rising behind him in a tight, angry ball.

The screen switched to another interview—a woman on the night train who felt a bump; a policeman who said he wouldn’t release the name of the minor; a janitor at the train station who claimed he saw a girl in a purple raincoat hanging around for twenty minutes outside the ticket booth, staring at the timetable, just three hours before nightfall.

I wasn’t listening. My eyes were scanning the footage, searching for clues. Nobody was saying anything specific about the girl. Nothing about the color of her hair or the contents of the handwritten note they found a hundred yards away. Nobody listed any identifying features whatsoever until the cop let slip that the girl wasn’t wearing her glasses at the time of the impact.
Glasses
,
I thought.
Olive wears glasses
. Then the station switched over to a commercial, and I thought to myself, before I had even consciously decided to believe:
wore
.