Promise Me Something (21 page)

Olive
wore
glasses.

There was always the possibility that I was being paranoid. It wouldn’t have been the first time. For almost all of second grade after Mom died, I spent my bus rides imagining new and horrific ways that Dad might’ve died while I was at school. Every time he left me alone in the house to grab groceries from the A&P, I visualized a yellow Hummer backing out of its spot and running him over in the parking lot, his paper bags splitting as they hit the pavement, cans of beans and alphabet soup rolling every which way.

Now the paranoia was back in full swing. Reaching for my phone, I attempted to come up with a text that wouldn’t give me away. Nothing as obvious as
are you alive?
because if she was I wasn’t ready to give her the satisfaction of knowing that I cared. Instead, I wrote,
I have a sweater of yours. Do you want it back?

Waiting for a response, I felt the familiar restlessness, the rush of dread, the urge to walk somewhere fast. Dad’s old treadmill skulked in the corner of the living room like a hunched, forgotten monster, so I walked over to it in my pajamas and stepped onto the end of the rubber mat. The front was piled high with a stack of sweatshirts from Dad’s company, so I kicked them onto the floor and turned the knob. Soon I was running in strides, sucking in gulps of air, listening to my heart thud.

I ran for three minutes—not even half a mile—when my phone buzzed. I lunged forward to turn off the treadmill and reached into my pocket. There was a new text from Abby.
Dad says it’s a BHS freshman. Do u no her?

The stitch in my side throbbed. Abby’s dad was a reporter for the local news station, so he would be one of the first to know the details. I breathed in deeply and stared out the window. The thundercloud over the house next door had burst open while I was running, and now loud, fat raindrops were hammering against the street. Definitely not bike weather.

“Dad!” I called, craning my neck around. “Are you up?”

No answer.

I thought I could hear the shower running in the bathroom at the other end of the house, but the noise was faint, and it might have just been rain. “Dad!” I called again.

There was a rustle from the direction of his bedroom. I got off the treadmill and slipped one of the company sweatshirts over my pajamas. Then I hurried to the front door, where my sneakers were pushed up against the wall with their tongues wide open, waiting for my sweaty feet. “Dad!” I shouted again. “I need a ride!”

There was a creak in the hallway as Lucy rounded the corner in her bathrobe. “Morning, Reyna,” she said. “Where do you need a ride to?”

“Nowhere,” I answered automatically. “Where’s Dad?”

“He’s in the shower.” She frowned at me, a faint crease between her eyebrows. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

I didn’t want her to see my face, so I turned around and pretended to stare out the peephole in the front door. “Could you tell him I need a ride to Olive’s house?”

“You can ask me, you know,” she said. “I can drive.”

I pressed my forehead harder against the cool door.

“If you give me a second, I’ll put on my shoes—”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll wait for Dad.”

I could tell even with my back to her that she was turning around to leave, and I was glad. But as soon as she was gone, I felt a shudder move through me, slow and deep, like an earthquake before a tsunami.

“Reyna?”

I startled. She had paused at the end of the hallway.

“Are you OK?”

I wasn’t. It was just like my panic attacks in elementary school. I could be climbing a jungle gym or eating birthday cake, but if I even
thought
about Dad dying, I’d start shivering from head to foot, not really crying—just freaking out.

I felt Lucy come up behind me and put a tentative arm around my shoulder, which I shrugged off.

“Reyna, sweetie…What’s wrong?”

“
Please
get my dad,” I said.

“Tell me what’s going on.”

“A girl killed herself last night.” My teeth were clattering so loudly in my skull, I could barely hear myself. I reached over and started to turn the knob on the front door as though I’d walk by myself to Olive’s house, even though it was pouring rain and I was shivering like a hypothermia patient.

“And you think it’s Olive?”

“She’s not answering her phone.” Another shudder moved up my spine. “I don’t know what to think.”

An expression of resolve settled over Lucy’s features. “I’ll drive you,” she said, removing the towel from her hair. “Let’s get in the car. Now.”

“No,” I said again. “I’ll wait for Dad.”

“You need my help, Reyna. I can do this just as well as your dad.”

I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t some kind of convenient opportunity for her to parent me; that giving me a ride to Olive’s house wasn’t her chance to prove that she could replace my mom. But she was already grabbing her car keys off the console table by the door, and I realized that she intended to drive me in her slippers and bathrobe, even though the front walkway was slick with rain and it was freezing outside.

She and I both shivered as we got into the car. I could feel the wind blow through my flannel pajama pants as I pulled the door shut and held my fingers out toward the vent, waiting for the heater to start up. Lucy turned the ignition and backed out of our driveway without a word. “It’s on Cedar Street,” I told her, managing to breathe properly for the first time since I started panicking. “All the way at the north end.”

She nodded and reached over to turn on the radio, but the story on the air was something about a peanut butter recall, not anything to do with Talmadge Hill, so I turned it off. The same questions were flopping over and over in my head:
Why are you so sure it’s her? Maybe she’s just sleeping late. Why are you so morbid?
Then it hit me. “The stove is hot.”

“What?” Lucy glanced over at me.

“The stove is hot,” I repeated.

“What does that mean?”

The realization was coming in waves, little by little, what the title meant. “She wrote me a poem,” I said. “In the lit mag.”

“A poem about a stove?”

“It was called ‘Disappearing.’” I swallowed quickly. “It was a warning.”

Lucy pressed her lips together, and I stared straight ahead through the windshield at the thin rows of birch trees that ran parallel to the road. The white tree trunks sped by in a blur, the knots in their bark fixing me like a hundred unblinking eyes.

When we got to Olive’s house, Lucy didn’t pull into the driveway. The garage door was open, and we could see a fancy white Lexus pulling out. I leaned forward, hoping to make out the shape of Olive sitting in the backseat, listening to a pair of headphones, staring out the window.

But she wasn’t there. The backseat was empty and the only people in the car were Mr. and Mrs. Barton, sitting up front. They seemed to be fighting about something. Or rather, Mrs. Barton seemed to be yelling while Mr. Barton stared ahead through the windshield, his mouth set in a grim, straight line. They turned out of the driveway and sped down Cedar Street, the car leaving two little clouds of smoke hanging in the air where they had accelerated.

“Wait for me here,” I told Lucy, unbuckling my seat belt. “I’ll be back in two minutes.”

“Take as long as you need,” she answered.

I didn’t thank her. I couldn’t. Instead I ran around the back of the house and up the porch steps toward the sliding glass door where Mrs. Barton had once galloped out with a toy horse between her legs. I headed straight for the gas grill on the side of the porch and lifted up the cover to look for Olive’s spare key, which I’d seen her use a few times after school.

“Olive!” I called, ramming the key into the back doorknob and twisting. It opened with a soft click. “Are you here?”

No answer.

I ran through the hallway on the first floor, checking every room. Then I bounded up the hollow wooden stairs, two at a time, shouting her name. She wasn’t in the sunroom or her father’s study or even the bathroom where I’d stared at myself in the mirror on the night everything had fallen apart between us. The only room left to check was hers, but she wasn’t there either. The bed was perfectly made except for a faint depression near the front, as though she’d sat there not long ago, tying her shoes.

When the weight of that empty spot hit me, I knew I had to leave. The tidy room, the cold sheets, the frilly bedspread—all of it rose up in my throat. I swallowed over and over as I ran down the staircase, trying not to feel sick. Outside, it was raining hard. I almost forgot to the lock the door behind me.

When I was halfway to Lucy’s car, my sneakers and sweatshirt soaked with rain, I remembered.
Grace
. Her name exploded in my head like a firework. Running toward the tool shed at the edge of the lawn, I called, “Grace! It’s Reyna!” but she didn’t answer, and the door was locked. I ran around the side of the shed, banging my fist against the wood. “Grace!” I shouted again. “Open up! Are you there?”

But there was no answer. I couldn’t hear anything coming from inside the shed—not even a cricket. A desperate, terrible hope was pulsing in the back of my head, almost too awful to bear.
Let it be Grace
, I thought.
Let it be her they found
. I remembered her empty eyes from the Valentine’s party, and the way she stared at me like she wanted to hate me but couldn’t even find the energy. Maybe Olive was already at the police station, identifying the body, filing a report for the weird homeless girl she met online.

I ran back to the porch, grabbed the house key from the grill, and brought it over to the shed. My fingers were numb from the cold rain, but I managed to jam the key into the slot on the door handle. I thought at first that I was in luck. Pressing my weight into the door, I twisted the handle to the left, but nothing happened. Then I twisted it to the right. It still wouldn’t budge. The key fit roughly inside the slot, but not enough to unlock the bolt.

Worried that someone would see me wrestling with the door, I returned the key to its hiding spot and ran back to Lucy’s car, drenched to the bone, my hair as wet as if I’d just come out of the shower. Ducking into the passenger seat, I caught my breath as Lucy watched me, waiting for my verdict.

“Drive,” I said. “She’s not here.”

“Reyna?”

“What?”

“I’m sure Olive is fine.” She meant it to be reassuring, but I could’ve screamed, it was so much the opposite. “I’m sure it was someone else.”

“How can you be sure?” I snapped. “Did you see her just now?”

Lucy glanced sideways at me and said something so quickly I couldn’t understand it. Something like “Safari.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I’m sorry I’m not your mom.”

For a second, I had no idea what she was talking about. All I could think of was Olive, and whether I was ever going to get a chance to put things right between us.

But then Lucy went on, “You probably think if your mom were here, she’d know what to say. Well, I’m not her, but I’m trying the best I can.”

Now?
She wanted to have this conversation
now
?

“I never asked you to be my mom,” I said through gritted teeth.

“I know that,” said Lucy.

“Please just drive me home.”

But she didn’t budge. “I’m not driving anywhere until we talk.”

“Fine!” I exploded. “About what?”

“About us,” said Lucy, calm as ever. “And about your mom.”

I could barely see straight through my rage. “You mean how you wish she never existed in the first place?”

Lucy looked stunned. “Of course I don’t wish that—”

“Well, I do,” I said. “Then I wouldn’t have to sit around watching you treat my family like an Etch A Sketch.”

“I’m not trying to erase your mom, Reyna. Or you.”

“Please! You’d love it if I disappeared,” I said. “You and Dad could go on your honeymoon without worrying about who’s going to stay at home with me—”

“No.” She gripped the steering wheel tightly, even though the car was still in park. “I’m tired of being treated like this, Reyna. I don’t deserve it. In the ten months we’ve known each other, I’ve been nothing but a friend to you.”

Olive’s voice came back to me, echoing through my head like a whisper in a microphone.
I’ve been nothing but a friend to you…All you ever do is mope around wishing you went to Ridgeway
…The memory of that sleepover—how she cried, how she showed me her dad’s office, how she trusted me—hit me so hard I almost reeled.

She was right. They were both right. Olive and Lucy had only tried to be my friends. So why had I looked for every possible reason to hate them? I felt the familiar prickling sensation in my cheeks that always happens when I’m about to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice came out as a squeak.

Lucy let out the breath she had been holding. “It’s OK.”

But it wasn’t OK. There were so many things wrong, I didn’t know where to start. “None of it matters,” I told her. “My dad’s not ready for someone else.”

“He’s not ready, or you’re not ready?”