Eleven Things I Promised

by Catherine Clark

  “Sure it isn’t.” He smiled.

  “Stella wanted me to say hi for her. Since you mentioned him, I thought maybe you could point him out to me?”

  “Sure, come on,” Max said. “I saw him grabbing some energy bars a minute ago when I was over there. His first name’s Earl or Stanley or something. That’s why he goes by Scully,” he explained.

  I followed Max over to the table labeled Provisions, where various sponsors had donated snacks to help us. I would not be taking any protein cubes. I was stuffed from lunch, besides.

  A tall, broad-shouldered guy who looked more like a football player than a cyclist was standing in a group of people wearing matching Salisbury High jerseys. Max wasn’t shy. He barged right in and pulled Scully aside.

  “Scully, this is Frances. She’s good friends with Stella. Who for some reason told her to look you up . . .”

  “Your reputation precedes you, is what he’s trying to say,” I told him.

  “Stella?” he asked.

  “Dark-brown hair, about five-ten, long legs, wears black a lot, and rides a super-expensive silver bike—some Italian brand I can never remember.”

  “Stella, the speed demon. Hey, where is she? She around?” Scully asked.

  “She couldn’t come. She got into an accident, broke her leg,” I explained.

  “No shit. That sucks. Whoa.” Scully rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, so, tell her I said hi. So you’re riding for Sparrowsdale?”

  I nodded and turned to Max for help, but of course he was chatting with another girl. “I was wondering if . . . you know. . . there’s any way you might know of somebody who might . . . possibly . . . have something to drink?”

  He grinned. “I’ll be hosting a little event tonight. Drop by around eight.”

  CHAPTER 5

  It was late afternoon when I finally arrived in Bath, crossing the huge bridge over the Kennebec River.

  Funny. If there was one thing I really needed, it was a bath.

  There were no words for how my muscles felt as Cameron and I drifted across the finish line. What muscles, actually? Maybe that was the problem. The small amount I’d built up over the past few weeks had been pummeled to smithereens.

  I’d always wondered about the word “smithereens.” Now I knew the right use for it.

  As I finished setting my bike in our group’s section of the big open field on Monday—we were staying at a campground that night—I nearly staggered after Cameron, following him to the truck where we could fetch our gear. I needed a shower. I needed new clothes.

  Cameron had kept pace with me the whole afternoon. He’d cheered me on. He’d laughed when I complained. He’d pointed out all the scenery, quite the tour guide, while I ground out the miles. Yes, Maine was pretty. Yes, the ocean view, when we saw it, was breathtaking. No, I didn’t ever want to see any of it again if it reminded me of how I felt right now. I’d move to the opposite coast, or somewhere way, way inland, like Ohio or something.

  Then again, maybe not. Whenever we turned inland everything got a little more hilly.

  But having him beside me had made a big difference. I’m not sure I would have finished if he hadn’t helped me. I was still at the back of the pack, but it didn’t matter that much. Until now, when I realized that even walking was painful. It was like my legs were so conditioned to riding a bike that they’d forgotten how to work without one.

  Cameron was being so nice—riding with me, giving me a leg massage, making sure I got enough to eat. If other members of the team didn’t like me because I was a much slower version of Stella, then at least Cameron was on my side.

  It almost made me wonder if Stella had hired him to take care of me. Or maybe my mom had slipped him a few twenties and asked him to look out for me.

  Of course, one other option was that he was actually interested in me.

  Since the leg massage, I’d found myself wondering if maybe I was interested in him.

  It was the kind of thing I’d want to talk over with Stella, if she were here. We usually overanalyzed anything involving crushes and boys—or at least, I did. When I was wavering about breaking up with Oscar, Stella got so sick of listening to me that she nearly broke up with him for me.

  Cameron was nothing like Oscar; there wasn’t anything about him that screamed sleazeball or even cheeseball. He was kind, slightly goofy, a slouchster but a good athlete who didn’t act conceited.

  But I was here on a mission, and it wasn’t to hook up with someone on the team; even if I did need to have an epic kiss, I’d try to have it with someone not from Sparrowsdale. Having one more romance on our team would make everything incredibly awkward—or more awkward. I could keep getting to know Cameron better without putting a label on it for the next little while. For all I knew, he had a girlfriend. That was the weird thing about this trip with a bunch of relative strangers; our lives at school hardly intersected, but suddenly here we were, relying on one another.

  I grabbed my duffel, Cameron got his, and we headed for the campground showers. We separated at the locker room entrances.

  Naturally, Margo was walking out of the locker room just as I was walking in; she’d probably been done for hours. She was wearing a short-sleeved tee, shorts, and flip-flops, her long, dirty-blond hair was swept into a braid, and she had full makeup on, with her cosmetics bag hanging from her wrist. I didn’t spot a single drop of sweat on her. She smelled like perfume and hair spray. I, on the other hand: indescribably rank.

  I tried to walk past her with a brief nod, but she stopped in front of me. “You’re not looking so good.”

  “Thanks so much,” I said. “That’s always nice to hear.”

  “Are you okay?” she pressed. “You’re limping.”

  “A little sore, that’s all.”

  “Hold on a second, I have something.” She unzipped her cosmetic bag and pulled out an unmarked orange prescription bottle. She shook a couple of red pills into her palm and held them toward me. “Here, have these. They’ll make you feel better.”

  “Um . . .” I studied the bottle as well as I could.

  “Relax. It’s ibuprofen. What did you think, that I was going to give you something prescription or illegal?” She acted as if this was the first time anyone had ever doubted her. About anything.

  “Well, you have to admit. ‘Have these, you’ll feel better’ is the phrase they warned us about in seventh-grade health class. Plus, you could be pulling a Lance Armstrong–type thing,” I said.

  She pressed the ibuprofen tablets into my palm. “Take these or don’t take them. You are an idiot.” She zipped up her little bag and sashayed away, leaving me with two melting pale-red pills in my hand. They looked like budget M&M’s, the color nobody wanted that failed.

  I went to the drinking fountain and washed them down with a couple of sips of freezing-cold water. If she was trying to poison me, I wasn’t sure I cared at that exact moment. And if it was something to give me a competitive edge, wasn’t that exactly what I needed?

  “All right, Franny!” Oxendale clapped me on the back just as I stood up, causing me to nearly knock my teeth into the faucet. “You made it.”

  I turned around and looked up at him. He was wearing a fresh cycling jersey; he’d explained his system of wearing a new one the night before to get him psyched for the next day. He’d gone on and on over breakfast about his theory of packing light, but I’d been too sleepy to care.

  I brushed the water off my mouth with the back of my hand. “I’m here,” I said to Oxendale. “For better or worse.”

  “I see.” He nodded. “Well done, mate. It’s going to get easier from here on out. Trust me.”

  Somehow, I didn’t.

  “Well. Maybe not technically easier. I could be wrong about that,” he admitted. “Say. If you talk to Stella later, tell her I said hello, would you?”

  “Sure, no problem.” That was, if she would talk to me. I wandered into the locker room, which was emptying out. All that much easier
to find a vacant shower stall, where I could collapse in private. The layers of dirt and sweat on my legs dissolved while I stood in the hot water with my face to the showerhead, enjoying every drop.

  “So what’s the deal?” Max asked as we headed across the field of tents that evening.

  I couldn’t believe I was actually about to do the most daring item on the list yet.

  I’d had to be subtle about asking Max to come with me. I didn’t want Margo asking where we were going. I didn’t want to invite anyone else and risk getting them into trouble. I didn’t have that worry about Max; he was used to handling himself in this kind of situation. In fact, I was trusting him to help me smoothly carry out this list item.

  “What do you mean?” I asked him. “There’s no deal.”

  “You’re not . . . I’ve never seen you at house parties or behind school or anything,” Max said. “You seem pretty straight and narrow.”

  “You just don’t know me,” I bluffed. “Anyway, we’re away from home. I want to have fun. I told Stella I’d live adventurously for her.”

  Max laughed. “I’m not sure if that counts as an excuse.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Then what’s yours?”

  “I’m not . . . I don’t . . . listen, don’t tell anyone. But I’m not a big partier. At all. I just hang out with some.”

  Before I could even react, we’d reached the Salisbury tent banner. I couldn’t follow up with a question like, Are you serious? How dumb do you think I am?

  “Scully?” Max asked. “Which tent are you in, man?”

  “Who goes there?” a deep voice replied.

  “Dude, it’s Max and Frances.”

  The tent unzipped and a tall guy with shoulder-length blond hair peeked out. I didn’t recognize him without his helmet. “Hey. What’s up? How’s it going?”

  If I were to be honest, I’d say that I felt like one giant mass of pain. But nobody would want to hear that. “Not bad,” I said. “How are you guys?”

  “Come on in,” he said, holding open the tent door for us. “Make room, make room. Incoming.”

  Max and I ducked into the tent, which was exactly like mine, except that seven people were inside of it now instead of four, making it a tight fit. The screens were open to let the breeze through, and I found a spot sitting between Scully and a girl I recognized from the first day.

  Scully made some quick introductions, then said, “As all of these Scullywags already know, we’re running low tonight, so we’ll have to share.”

  Scullywags? Okay. It might be the strangest name for a group I had ever joined, stranger even than being on the Sparks dance team. “Right, okay,” I said with a shrug, like it was something I did all the time.

  He shook a bike bottle like he was making a concoction in chemistry class. Then he squirted some into his mouth and handed the bottle to me. “Pass to the left,” he said.

  “What, uh, what is this?” I asked.

  “Spiked lemonade,” Scully said. “Think of it as Gatorade with a kick. A big kick.”

  I braced myself. I knew it wasn’t going to taste good.

  This was a big deal for me. Once upon a time, Stella and I had pledged not to drink in high school. We’d sworn to have as much fun as we could without breaking any laws. We both needed scholarships for college. Grade point averages and clean records were important to us. Or maybe they had been, until Stella shared her list with me and I learned she wanted to do things differently, on this trip at least.

  So here I was, throwing caution to the wind thanks to Stella’s list. If she could see me now, hanging out with this crowd . . . she’d laugh. Not that she was talking to me, or laughing, because she wasn’t. But someday, she would see or hear about this and it would make her happy. I hoped.

  “Cheers? Is that a thing?” I laughed nervously. Then I opened wide and squirted a stream down my throat.

  The sourness of it combined with whatever had spiked it made me instantly pucker my lips. I’d gulped way too much. I passed the bottle to my left.

  Scully leaned over to me, his longish blond hair brushing my arm. “What you do is, you pack one bottle already filled with something. Then all you need to find is a mixer,” he said.

  Great. Now Scully was taking me under his wing as, like, someone who needed to be educated in the ways of troublemaking. Which was kind of true. I didn’t veer off the beaten path very often.

  “What team are you on again?” he asked.

  “Max’s team. From Sparrowsdale,” I said. “Little town in northern New Hampshire?”

  “Right, right.” He looked at Max, who was in the middle of a very intense conversation on the other side of the tent with a girl with spiky black hair and a neck tattoo. “You’re not, like, with him, are you?”

  “Oh, no.” I shook my head. “Not even . . . close.”

  “Good. Love the guy as a friend, but he takes the word ‘player’ to a whole new level. I am not here to hook up, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I do. I do.” I nodded. “I’m way too busy trying to survive.”

  He laughed. “No, for real.”

  “For real,” I said.

  “Maybe this will help.” He guzzled another gulp of lemonade. “You know, you—we—we are all doing an amazing thing here. We deserve to kick back and unwind. This is nothing. Wait until we hit Phantom Park.” He handed me the bike bottle, which was nearly empty.

  I didn’t want to think about what would happen then. I took another drink and then handed it back to him. “I think this is empty?”

  “Time for a new batch.” He got out two more bike bottles, did some mixing, and handed me a fresh batch. “Taste this for me, would you?”

  Like I would know what it was supposed to taste like, I squirted some into my mouth. It tasted more bitter than the last one, which probably meant it had more alcohol in it. “It’s a bit strong,” I said as I handed it to the girl on my left. This was a weird ritual.

  “So back to Phantom Park,” Scully said. “I’m making plans with some friends to meet us there. Reinforce our supplies.”

  “Are we going into battle or something?” I laughed. I could feel the drink starting to affect me, which meant I should probably slow down.

  Phantom Park was a huge New England attraction. A man who made his fortune in baked beans or something ridiculous like that built this giant English castle for his family on a huge estate. When he went bankrupt, the castle was rumored to be haunted. Finally, some company bought the land and turned it into a massive amusement park—complete with a haunted house.

  “There are still rooms in that abandoned mansion that no one has ever gone into. But we—we will,” Scully said, and the girl beside me nodded in agreement.

  “It’ll be epic,” she said.

  “Is that going to be a problem—I mean, won’t we get in trouble?” I asked.

  “You. Need to live a little.” He handed me the bike bottle, which seemed to have made its last circuit in record time. “Your turn.”

  Max’s eyes met mine across the circle, and he lifted a bottled water in my direction.

  I never would have guessed that Max wasn’t a partier at all.

  Or that I, apparently, was.

  CHAPTER 6

  I left the party after a little while, but I didn’t want to head back to my tent. I wanted to stay outside in the fresh air until it got dark, until I had to go back into the land of the weird sleepover.

  I was pretty sure we’d be sent packing if we were caught drinking. Besides, I was worried that in trying to do good, I was setting a bad precedent. Just because Stella put it on the list as a whacked-out, crazy thing to do, that didn’t mean I had to see it through.

  But I knew I wasn’t doing anything super impressive by bailing early on the night. Besides, I had a feeling I was already a little too swamped and tipsy. When I walked, I didn’t always go in a straight line.

  There was really only one person I wanted to talk to right now.

  I stopped
on my way back to the tent and found a private place to sit, under a tree on the outskirts of the tent area.

  “Hey. Are you up?”

  “Of course I’m up,” Mason said. “It’s only nine thirty.”

  “Oh, I thought it was later. Really? It’s nine thirty?”

  “You’re probably tired because you rode all day. Makes it feel later,” said Mason.

  “Probably. Sure,” I may have slurred.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Sure I’m okay.”

  “You sound weird.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “If you say so. How did it go today?”

  “It was brutal. But I survived. How’s Stella? Is everything okay? I called her at lunch and she was really . . . mean, actually.”

  “You know. She’s, um . . . She had a setback today. The doctors wanted her to try some exercises in rehab, and it didn’t go well. But she’s fine.”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute. She was anything but “fine,” which Mason knew. There was no point bringing it up.

  “Mason?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s really pretty here.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “But when do you think Stella’s going to really get better?”

  “Nobody knows, for sure. But in a month or so—”

  “Before summer?” I asked. “By next Saturday night? ’Cause we swore we’d go to prom together,” I said.

  “Prom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” said Mason.

  “I know,” I said. “That’s why I wanna go. To see how awful it is. But she’s gotta go with me. I can’t go if she doesn’t. And I know it’s not important at all, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s important because we made these plans—no, she made these plans and—sometimes you really need to follow the plan.”

  “I think you should probably go to sleep now, Franny.”

  He was right. I was babbling. “I know. I have to go. Anyway, my battery’s dying,” I said. It had been beeping at me during our conversation, but I hadn’t wanted it to end. “G’night.”

  I knew I wouldn’t have time to charge my phone in the morning, so I got up from my secluded spot and headed for the charging station set up outside the campground rec center. It emitted a soft glow with the lights of phones, which was oddly comforting. I found a cord—thank goodness they had extra chargers, because I couldn’t have found mine in the dark in the tent. Especially since I was a little woozy.