by Emma Scott
He nodded reluctantly. “But I didn’t sell it, I pawned it. There’s a difference. If it’s sold, it’s gone for good. If it’s pawned, I can get it back.”
“What if someone else buys it?”
Miller’s eyes widened, fear burning in them at the thought.
“We have to get it back,” I said. “Because you haven’t been yourself. Like a piece of you is missing, and I just think—”
“Don’t think, Violet,” he said, suddenly out of breath. His face turned ruddy, as if he’d just run a sprint. “Don’t do anything. Just leave it alone. Promise.”
“Okay, okay, I promise,” I said in a low voice, mostly because this conversation was making him upset.
“I’m sorry I got angry at you,” he said. “You’ve been…really good to me. Hell, you’ve made life bearable.” His hand came up as if he wanted to brush the hair that had come loose from my ponytail, then jammed it in his pocket. “You’re the best thing to happen to me in a really long time. I’m just not used to…having things. A long shower. A bed. And it just makes me miss what I don’t have even more.”
“I want you to keep having those things,” I said softly. “At my house. Any time. And your mom too. Whatever you need.”
I touched my fingertips to his wrist and then slipped my palm against his. To my shock, Miller’s eyes filled with tears as he glanced down at our touching hands. His rough fingers twined with mine and held on so tight…
Then he quickly let go and turned away. We continued down the street in silence. After a block, Miller’s steps grew uneven. Weaving slightly, he had to push off the wall of a restaurant or shop when he veered too close.
“Hey.” I grabbed his arm. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. Just thirsty. I need…water.”
He crossed the street toward the 7-Eleven on the opposite corner in shuffling steps and without looking for traffic. A pick-up truck hit the brakes, horns blaring, but Miller paid no attention.
I hurried to catch up. “Miller, hey. You’re scaring me.”
He ignored me, his gaze fixed on the 7-Eleven. Inside the convenience store, he headed for the drink refrigerators and grabbed the largest Gatorade they had.
“You want anything?” he asked, his voice sounding tight, as he fished in the front pocket of his jeans for a fiver tucked there.
“No, thanks.” Warmth infiltrated my worry for him because he was trying to take care of me, even when he’d had to pawn the most valuable thing he owned.
Miller paid for the drink, and we rounded the corner to the side of the building. He slid down against the wall and chugged the neon yellow liquid. I watched him down half the bottle in a few huge gulps and then close his eyes in relief.
“Better?” I asked, crouching beside him. Please tell me you’re better.
He nodded but then drank the other half, draining the bottle.
I stared. “That was thirty-two ounces. Miller…”
“I’m fine, doc,” he said, tiredly. “I should get back.”
He started to haul himself to his feet, but I held him back. “No. You need help. Your face is flushed, and your eyes are kind of glassy.”
“I’m fine. I promise. Go meet your friend without me.” He smiled wanly. “I’ll see you at school on Monday. Christ, won’t that be fun? First day of school. Can’t fucking wait.”
I studied him closer, again wishing I could read these symptoms, and that I had the clout to make him listen to me. But he pushed off the ground and went down the way we had come, the empty Gatorade bottle still in his hand. But he was walking steadily, like normal.
He’s okay, I thought.
Because he had to be.
It made sense, I told myself as I headed for the café. The fact that Miller was living out of a car with his mom was going to take a toll on him. Stress. Hunger. Cold. He was probably coming down with a fever from inadequate shelter. One night in my house clearly wasn’t enough.
That has to stop. They need help.
But Miller had sworn me to secrecy. Demanded it. He’d never speak to me again if I tried to get him help—not that I even knew how to do that. If word got out he lived in a car, it’d kill him. There were poor kids in our district, but that wasn’t the same as being homeless.
There has to be a way, I thought. I can borrow money from Dad. Or earn it fast. Maybe take it out of my college fund. Enough for a deposit and first month’s rent on an apartment.
My thoughts hit a brick wall.
And if they can’t pay the rent every month after that?
Shiloh waved at me from inside the Brewery Café, her many silver and coppery bracelets glinting over her arms. I replaced my worried frown with a smile. She couldn’t know about Miller’s situation either, even though I was dying to tell her. She’d say I had to tell someone else, immediately. But I’d promised Miller, and I always tried to keep my promises.
But sometimes keeping a promise wasn’t good or right. Sometimes, it was the worst thing you could do.
That night, I left my bedroom window open to hear Miller in case he showed up. All was quiet until nine or so, and then it sounded like someone crashing through the woods. I looked down to see him stumbling and mumbling to himself. Like he was drunk.
“Miller?”
He turned his face up and a gasp stuck in my throat at how pale he was. Ghostly white. Confused. Like he didn’t know who I was.
Oh God, this is bad. So very bad…
He mumbled something and fell to his knees. I climbed down the trellis as fast as I could, slipping once. My palms scraped the wood, then I hit the ground just as Miller turned on the faucet to our garden hose. He drank from it as if he were dying of thirst. As if he’d been in a desert for months. The scent of urine—his pants were dark with it—hit me, mingled with a fruity smell that didn’t belong there.
“Miller, wait… Please, stop.”
I reached to take the hose away from him. The way he needed it was terrifying—like a rabid animal, water flooding his mouth, choking him, spilling all over his face and shirt. He shoved me aside and kept at it until his eyes rolled up in his head to show the whites. Then his body went limp, and he collapsed to the ground, hard. Not moving.
A strangled cry tore out of me. My heart crashed against my ribs. I tossed the hose aside and crawled to put my ear on Miller’s chest, damp with water. He was still breathing, his heart still pumping but faintly.
“Someone help!”
The night was dark and swallowed my scream. I rocked in helpless desperation, feeling around my pockets for a cell phone I was sure I’d left upstairs.
It was in my back pocket.
“Oh, thank God.” My hands trembled as I dialed 9-1-1. “Hold on, Miller. Please. Hold on…”
They say your entire life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die, but they don’t tell you that it also flashes when someone you truly care about might die, too. Like a movie on fast forward, I saw Miller’s funeral, the first day of school and me crying all day, sitting in my room alone…
It’s now two in the morning and I just got back from the hospital.
Yesterday, Miller drank a huge Gatorade like a frat boy chugging beer on a dare.
Tonight, he passed out in my yard while sucking down water from our garden hose as if he were trying to drown himself in it.
I called 9-1-1, and then Mom was screeching down at me from my bedroom window, and Dad was running around from the backyard. The firetrucks showed up, EMTs, and everyone was asking me what was going on. All the while, Miller lay in my lap, hardly breathing, not moving, his face pale as death.
They wouldn’t let me go in the ambulance with him, and since I had no way to contact his mom, he rode alone. He was all alone. On the way to the hospital, my parents grilled me about why Miller was outside my bedroom window late at night, and did this happen frequently, and just what the hell was going on?
And because my parents were my parents, they started screaming a
t each other that no one had been paying attention so now the “lawn boy” was sneaking into my room every night.
Good. Let them fight like assholes, because at least then they weren’t asking me about Miller.
But at the hospital, the cops asked. The doctors, a social worker… They all wanted to know about him so they could contact his parents while he was rushed into the ICU for who-knew-what treatment. Did he have a stroke? An aneurism? No one would tell me anything.
Crying until I could hardly see straight, I told them what I knew. That Miller’s mom, Lois Stratton, worked at the 24-hour diner on 5th during the day. I said she worked nights too, but Miller hadn’t told me where. That was mostly true, at least.
Where did he live? Address?
I cried harder as I told them he didn’t have one. I didn’t want to break my promise, but a part of me was relieved. Like maybe now, someone would help them.
I held a little bit of hope we could keep the kids at school from hearing about it, but one of the police officers was Mitch Dowd, Frankie’s dad. He would tell Frankie, and Frankie would blab it everywhere, riding around on his skateboard like he was Paul Revere.
In the waiting room, I silently told Miller I was sorry, but he could be mad at me all he wanted if only he’d wake up and be okay.
After what felt like years of terrified waiting, they finally told us. Type 1 or juvenile diabetes. Miller’s blood sugar levels nearly topped six hundred milligrams, and the term ‘diabetic hyperosmolar syndrome’ was floated by one of the doctors. I’d heard of diabetes, of course, but had no idea what the rest meant, except that he’d nearly died.
The doctors said Miller was stable. The police said they’d find his mom. There was nothing left to do but go home.
In the car, my parents were too tired to do more than snipe at one another, and they sent me to bed with the promise that “We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
But no sooner had I shut the door than they started up again, blaming each other for not knowing what was going on under their own roof.
I hate them.
I love Miller.
I’m saying it now for the first time, writing it down in black and white, because it’s absolutely true. I’ve never felt like this before. Like my body and all my senses are lit up, but I’m scared too. I’m sure he doesn’t feel the same. Why would he? I’m the geeky, annoying girl who meddles in his business. He’s always saying so. But we’re friends. He’s my best friend. My soulmate, if a soulmate is the person you can’t live without. The person you’d do anything to keep safe and happy.
That’s what I know for sure. I can’t lose him again, and the more pressure you add to two people, the more crushed they became under the weight. Just look at my parents. They were best friends once too.
I’m not going to mess things up by adding more to us. But I can take care of him and make sure he’s safe.
That’s how I’ll keep him forever.
iv
That’s when I knew I’d love her forever.
The doctors left. They explained my diagnosis, and the weight of it sank into me, pressing me down. For the rest of my life, I’d have to watch what I ate and drink as if I were on Weight Watchers, constantly measuring and counting carbs and grams of sugar to keep my numbers stable. Exercise is good, they said, but I have to be careful about exerting myself or I could go blind, lose a foot, or fall into a coma and die like Julia Roberts did in Mom’s favorite movie. A ball and chain of rules and diets and restrictions, needles and pills that I’d have to carry across a tightrope without a net, for the rest of my life.
Then Violet stepped into my hospital room, dressed in a yellow T-shirt and jean shorts. Her shiny black hair is in a messy ponytail and her dark blue eyes behind her glasses are filled with worry and care. For me.
And in her hand was my guitar.
My body weighed a thousand pounds, but in that moment, a heavy burden lifted off of my soul.
“You promised…” I croaked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, trying to smile around shaky, watery words. She laid the guitar on my lap. “Do you even like guitars? I had no idea. This is a get-well present. I saw it in a window and decided you had to have it.”
A dam broke and sobs shook her shoulders. I couldn’t lift my arms to hold her as she buried her face against my side.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she cried. “I should’ve…done more. I want to be a doctor for God’s sake, and I didn’t know. I didn’t see the signs.”
“You saved me.”
Violet abruptly sat up and took off her glasses to wipe her eyes. “No. I called 9-1-1. But it wouldn’t have gotten that far if I’d done something sooner.”
I shook my head against the pillow. My fingers reached for the guitar, feeling its smooth wood, and the weight of it on my lap. Dad gave it to me when I was ten years old, in the good times. The first time I held it, I’d felt as if some part of me that I hadn’t even known was missing, had been restored.
Violet had been right—pawning the guitar had been like tearing off a limb and handing it over to that sweaty guy behind the counter. I didn’t think I’d ever hold it again.
And now it was back. Now I could play for her all the songs I’d been writing in her room, with her sitting not a foot from me, oblivious to how perfect she was…
“But I’m never going to be so ignorant again,” Violet said, putting her glasses back on and sitting straight. “Type 1 diabetes means insulin shots and monitoring your glucose and keeping track of your diet. I’m going to study up on it. I’ll learn how to do the shots and the finger pricks and how to read the monitors and make sure that you stay level. And I’m going to make sure you do it, too. That you take care of yourself so that you don’t… You don’t ever…”
Hiccupping sobs took over and the tears came again.
“Vi, don’t…”
“I was so scared, Miller,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
Guilt that she had to see me like that ripped through me, even as hope bloomed in my chest. Her tears, her anguish… They can only mean one thing.
She loves me too…
Then a nurse came to do a fingerstick and showed me how to gather the drop of blood into a reader that measures the sugar levels. Vi watched closely, mentally taking notes.
“Can I see it?” Vi asked when the nurse was done. “I’m going to be a doctor someday.”
“Throw it in the bin when you’re finished.” The nurse gave her the fingerstick and left the room. Violet waited until she was gone and then punctured her own finger.
“What are you doing?”
She took my hand ,pressed the ruby red drop of blood on her fingertip to mine.
“Promise me,” she said. “Promise me, we’ll always be friends. I can’t lose you again. Not ever…”
Always be friends.
I wanted to laugh and tell her how impossible that is. How I crossed a boundary the night we met. How all the broken pieces of my life come together when I’m with her, even for a little while. How we’d been hanging out for months and every minute I tried to find the courage to tell her that this poor homeless kid with nothing to offer would die for her.
I swallowed hard, swallowed down what I want to say, because I’m thirteen and I’m not supposed to love a girl like this. So soon. So completely.
“I promise…”
Part II
four years later
Chapter One
“I promise…”
The bus hit a pothole, jostling my forehead off the window and jarring me from my thoughts. From the memory of that morning in the hospital that was the best and the worst, because the day I knew I loved Violet was also the day I let her go.
“Stupid fucking promise.”
I glanced around at the mostly empty seats; it was dark, and no one seemed to have heard me. Or cared if they did. My guitar case sat on m
y lap, and I gripped it tighter, nerves lit up.
We now lived at opposite ends of the school district. Turns out, my hospitalization and diagnosis four years ago had an upside. A charity program worked with the hospital for kids like me and their families to help get us on our feet so that I wouldn’t die in the back of the station wagon trying to inject my insulin. They moved us out of the car and into low-income housing in a shady neighborhood on the rocky cliffs overlooking Lighthouse Beach.
I took the bus to see Violet instead of hiking through the dark woods at night, but I still saw her as much as I could. As much as she had time for, which felt like less and less with every passing year.
She’s slipping away because you’re a jackass with no backbone.
After Violet brought my guitar back, she asked me to play for her every night that I snuck into her room. I’d never played in front of anyone before. She was my first. Sitting in her room at night, we’d study or talk, and then she’d ask me to sing. So I did. Instead of telling her how I felt, I sang and played, and she never knew. Never suspected. She thought she was too nerdy for a guy to actually like her and I was too chickenshit to tell her how wrong she was.
I hid behind other people’s songs, too. Like “Yellow” by Coldplay. That was her favorite. It became “our song.” She thought I’d chosen it because it sounds good on an acoustic guitar. She never suspected that every lyric was a dedication to her. And she always cried, saying over and over again how talented I was. Gifted. Destined for greatness.
I didn’t believe her, but I knew I wanted to make music for the rest of my life. Violet showed me the way and I loved her for it. I loved her in a thousand ways, but she cherished our friendship above all else and so I gritted my teeth and respected that.
I let her feed herself lies about how terrible love was and how it ruined everything.
I let her listen to her parents argue and think that’s what happened to everyone.
And I’d promised to be her friend. Sealed it in blood.
