Every Last Promise

by Kristin Halbrook

  “Hey,” he says quietly as I’m just about to turn away. His eyes rise, finally, to catch my gaze. “Welcome home.”

  My words lodge themselves in my throat. I inhale the cayenne sprinkled on the top of my drink’s foam and that startles my senses enough to make me cough. I give Noah a small smile. Because despite the way people are looking at me, despite being afraid to see Selena, despite Noah being no one important to me, his welcome means everything.

  “Thanks.”

  I take a sip of my Mayan Revenge and my lips prickle. The rush that dances through my veins gives me goose bumps before settling into a comforting, slow burn down my throat. But it’s not enough to forget where I am. To stop wondering if Selena’s seen me yet. What she’s thinking if she has.

  Selena was always Bean’s best friend first, the way I was Jen’s. But it was rare for any of the four of us to split that way. We all were bound together by girlish secrets told under starry skies. Who we had crushes on. Crying together over heartaches from stupid fights that never lasted long. Our dreams for what our lives would be like after we graduated. Jen talked about starting her own business and watching it grow from a big-city high-rise. Bean wanted to be an art teacher, was always joking about warping the minds of the next generation. Selena craved getting in front of the camera to give the sports report. And I always said that I would stay behind, because the idea of leaving home was unbearable. Study nursing at the community college. Always keep a spare room for when my best friends came back to visit.

  I set my drink down slowly, turn, and lock eyes with Selena.

  She rises out of her chair and my stomach flutters as she approaches. Her expression is carefully neutral, but that doesn’t stop my smile from beginning, growing, stretching from my face down to my heart. I pick up my drink.

  “Selena,” I begin when she gets to the counter.

  She faces the menu. And hip checks me.

  I stumble backward, my heels thudding against the tile floor as I try to catch myself. My hot drink sloshes over the front of me, soaking into my shirt and searing my skin. I pull my shirt away quickly, gasping. Tears prick the corners of my eyes. I bite my tongue and battle them back. The other customers cradle their coffee mugs and look from me to their companions and back, not knowing what to do. One rises halfheartedly, then changes his mind and sits again. Selena stares straight ahead. Noah is grabbing a wet towel and heading around the counter and I think he’s going to bend down and wipe the puddle on the floor but he doesn’t. He holds the towel out to me.

  I shake my head and leave my drink on the counter, my hand trembling so that I’m sure the mug’s rattle can be heard across the coffee shop. My face burns. It is everything I can do not to cry as I move back to my table, forcing my feet not to run. A black hole opens in my chest and I want to curl into it and hide.

  I stuff my things into my backpack, crushing paper, snapping the tip off my pencil because my body can’t stop trembling, and push through the door. The damned bell alerts everyone to my escape. The sound rings through my head long after the bell stops moving.

  Kayla Martin. Running away again.

  I don’t care. I hurry away. People are watching. My movements are staggered, jagged-edged like a broken window. My shoes slam against the concrete of the sidewalk, and I wish my skin was thicker, dense enough to not care about what I know everyone’s thinking. What they’re all saying.

  About the girl who killed a boy then skipped town.

  A sob escapes and my shoulders quake and I can’t help it. I wish I could. I don’t want sympathy.

  I don’t.

  I want home.

  I want this place so much.

  But they don’t want me back.

  SPRING

  “ALMOST FORGOT TO TELL you before, I invited Noah Michaelson to your party. Told him to bring his banjo,” I said to Jen as we watched T. J. pull his truck next to Jay’s SUV.

  “When were you talking to him?”

  “Between third and fourth. He asked me for riding photos for the yearbook ages ago and he wanted to tell me that they ended up making them a full-page spread. He’s nice.”

  “He’s a nerd. Didn’t Jay beat him up in middle school?”

  “Him and everyone else. But so? Everyone’s coming, right?” I stepped off the porch to meet T. J. on the driveway.

  “I guess,” Jen said to my back.

  I’d showered and changed into a T-shirt that I’d left at Jen’s after our last sleepover, so I didn’t feel as much like something my horse had rolled around in.

  T. J. noticed. His eyes swept me appreciatively head to foot. I fought back a smile. “Mind if I ride with you?” I asked.

  “Think you can handle this bad boy?” He raised an eyebrow and I laughed.

  “You’re talking about your truck, right?”

  “Obviously,” he said.

  “Selena and Bean are coming together and Selena’s driving, so I’m going with you two because Selena is crazy,” Jen said, slamming the front door behind her as she came out of her house. “But you have to knock off the flirting when I’m around.”

  “Harsh,” T. J. said. “Okay, but I get to pick the music.” He jangled his keys in his pocket.

  “No.” I flashed a playful glare at Jen. “I’ll pick the music.”

  “Who’re we still waiting on?” Jay yelled out the window. He’d already started his car, and it was filled with guys from the football team hollering for him to get going. Behind Jay, Steven McInnis had another four guys crammed in his Ford. People loved riding with Steven because he knew, completely, that his car was a pile of crap, which meant he held nothing back on the slick gravel.

  Just then, Bean’s car rounded the corner in the distance, with Selena at the wheel. Bean never drove during joyriding, and Selena didn’t have a car but loved driving, so they traded places on nights like this. Bean was belted in and shrank down in the passenger seat and Selena whooped it up out her window as the Honda approached.

  “Just Pete and whoever he’s bringing, but he’ll have to meet up with us there. I’m tired of waiting,” Jen hollered back as I slid across T. J.’s seat. Jen pushed in after me. She slammed the door shut and grinned. Her light brown hair was covered with a turquoise cowgirl hat. “Giddy up, pardner.”

  T. J. hopped back in and fired up the old truck. We peeled out of the driveway after Jay and Steven. Selena and Bean sped toward us, bringing up the rear. A quarter mile past Jen’s house, we took a right and headed out to the gravel county roads. Just as Jen said, there was machinery out there and bright orange Fresh Oil warning signs on the sides. The workers had gone home for the day and we were out here alone.

  I rolled the truck radio dial between my fingers, honing in on a rock station through the static.

  “Why don’t you ever replace that radio?” Jen said, putting the window up so her hat didn’t fly off her head.

  “It’s vintage,” T. J. said. I snorted. But I loved this old truck. Its half powder-blue, half red-brown-rust paint job, the long crack running across the bottom of the windshield, even the manual door locks. The way the guy driving it fit the whole image, with his perfectly faded T-shirt and jeans.

  “Yeah, right,” Jen said. “I’m just hoping we don’t break down out here because Jay’s car is going to stink with all those boys in there, and I do not want to ride home with him.”

  “There is a well-loved machine under this hood,” T. J. said.

  Jen rolled her eyes. “Pull your machine over. Jay’s going first.”

  T. J. took the truck to the side of the road behind Steven’s Ford and let the engine idle. We watched Jay’s SUV pick up speed, then, with a suddenness that slammed bodies against doors, launch into a doughnut. The guys inside yelled and stuck their heads out the windows as they spun. When the car stopped, Jay returned to the middle of the road and shot off into the dark for a second spin on the next stretch of road. Steven pulled his car out and followed Jay’s tracks, his car spinning, catching enough
air to spin on two wheels for a split second. When they landed, his passengers pounded their fists on the roof of his car.

  Then we were up.

  T. J. pulled out. His foot pressed harder on the gas. The truck bellowed in response, pushing our backs against the seat as we went faster and faster. My pulse pounded with the thrill of sixty, seventy, seventy-five miles per hour. Gravel flew up behind us, blurring my view of Selena and Bean in the rearview mirror. When we got close to the spot where Jay and Steven had spun out, I needed air.

  “Trade with me!” I said to Jen.

  I flung my body over Jen and she skidded underneath me. Our limbs knotted up for a brief moment, but then we were free again and she was fixing her hat. I clutched the window crank and pumped. As the window lowered, cool air—the temperature caught somewhere between winter and summer—filled the cab.

  Before I could think too much about it, I grabbed the edge of the truck roof and hauled myself through the window to sit in the doorframe. My heart pounded in my shoulders and neck. In the distance, the soft lights of my hometown glimmered. The heady scent of hot oil filled my nostrils, lying heavy in my lungs.

  “Kayla!” Jen screamed. A light on the dashboard illuminated her face with green. “I’ll kill you if you fall!”

  “Hold on to her legs,” T. J. yelled, not looking from the road, his face screwed up with concentration. I felt Jen’s arms wrap around me. Wind whistled around my upper body, filling my ears with so much sound I almost couldn’t hear Jen’s uncontrollable laughter or the shocked screams coming from the other cars.

  My long blond hair whipped around my face and neck, the rushing air pricked at my skin. I felt free, like I was soaring. With my chin tipped back, I saw a black sky full of pin-drop stars. They were so still, the enormous backdrop of them, and I was moving so fast. Blood rushed to my head as I threw it back farther, exposing my throat to the night.

  “Spinning!” T. J. hollered.

  On cue, my hands gripped the truck as tightly as I could. T. J. turned the wheel and, like magic, his tires caught on enough oil to send us spiraling across the gravel. But I felt weightless. Floating. I closed my eyes against the beautiful dizziness that was building inside me. Car horns honked their approval. Inside the truck, Jen still laughed. With her holding my legs, I was secure. Safe. And even if I did slip from her grasp, the blanketing sky above me, I knew, would catch me as I went flying out of the truck. Would cradle me gently. In a moment that felt like time had stopped for me, that nothing bad could ever happen to me, not in this town, not with these people holding me tightly to them, I let go of the truck, raising my palms to the air, and shouted my joy to the sky.

  FALL

  KANSAS CITY BUSTLES. IT is a place with noise and concrete and highways made up of more than two lanes, and Aunt Bea lives on a street where the houses face off from one another across streets where lawns are square and tidy. I already knew that I was a small-town girl, born and bred and content to stay there. I couldn’t hear in that city. Couldn’t think. Breathe. When my sleep wasn’t full of nightmares, I dreamed about land that went on forever and how an autumn sunset over the fields contained a thousand shades of orange and gold.

  When I woke, sweating, I remembered that I was hundreds of miles away from home in a room that was stark, without anything that could identify it as mine: competition trophies, half-used cakes of eye shadow, photos covering more of the mirror than they let through—of me and my friends, me sitting tall on my horse, me against the backdrop of the river or an endless turquoise summer sky.

  Hundreds of miles and a million worlds away from home.

  Mom drives me to school on the first day, those lines of worry I’m getting used to deep around her eyes. I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car since May. Thinking about it makes my muscles seize.

  I stand in the doorway to first period math class and stare at the empty desk next to Pete Sloan, uncertain if it’s the seat I should take. It’s in the middle of the room and all around him are people. My people. Once upon a time. My old friends, the ones who would cluster around me to defend me from anything the world could throw at me. Even Pete, who was never anyone special to me. Just another guy on the football team. Last year, I would have taken that center-of-it-all seat without a second thought.

  Now, my old friends see me and quickly turn away or stare too long, challenge or disgust pooling in their eyes. I fight back tears. I fight back the inclination to run. Again.

  I nibble the tip of a pen then draw myself up to every bit of my five-seven height, cross the room, dump my bag on the desk next to Pete, and slide into the seat, focusing on a hangnail on my left hand like it’s the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen. Pete’s stopped talking to the person sitting on the other side of him and I know he’s looking at me, his brows drawn together, perplexed.

  “Jesus.” He draws it out. “You’re back.”

  It’s better than the other things he could have said.

  “I am.” I’m back. I’m here. In this school, in this class, in this seat in the middle of the room. With everyone staring at me, my skin crawling, trying not to choke on the lump in my throat.

  He stares at me for a few seconds. An uncomfortably long time. Is he mapping the face of a killer? Is he wondering if saying anything else to me would taint him?

  “I’m saving that seat for T. J.,” he says, glancing to the front of the room as though seating assignments are written on the board.

  “Oh. Sorry.” For some reason, my body doesn’t want to move, and I realize I crave talking to someone I used to know. Our conversation spikes a high that I’m scared to come down from. It’s a taste of the girl I used to be, the one who was friends with everyone, the one without a care in the world.

  But he stares at me as I twist the pen again, grinding it against my lips. I want to pull my arms in close to my sides, my knees to my chest, become too small to see. But I need to spread out, claim space. Tell everyone, I’m here. I’m not leaving again.

  Pete leans across the aisle toward me. Every breath I take is air filled with his scent: boy sweat and grass. He says something, but I have no idea what it is because my ears are suddenly buzzing. My chest plummets and I lean forward to hide my need to breathe like a girl trapped under dark river water. Every morning until graduation, I will see these people in my first period class, in second period, in third. How long until I stop feeling this way?

  I turn back to Pete, my temples throbbing, and interrupt whatever he was saying. “I’ll move. Don’t want to take T. J.’s seat.”

  His eyebrow twitches. I jump to my feet and snatch my backpack as T. J. trips through the doorway and spies me at his desk.

  “No way, she’s back?” His voice travels across the room. A chorus of noise—coughs, incomprehensible words—rises behind me. Does he even remember that night we spun in his truck, the hundreds of flirtatious one-liners he had tossed my way? “Killer Kayla. Ha. I didn’t even have to work for that one.”

  I meet Pete’s eyes again. They’ve softened around the edges. He frowns, looks at T. J. and back at me, hesitating. As though he doesn’t want to agree with T. J. but doesn’t want to stand up to him, either. The misshapen bones in my ankle seize and I swallow back a rise of emotion. “Don’t—never mind.”

  I spin away from the desk and sit at another empty one in the far row. I hope I haven’t taken someone else’s spot.

  Killer.

  As though I had intent.

  Bean is in the seat across the aisle from me. I see her and my mouth tastes like sawdust, like the dry air at a horse meet. I want my horse near me now so I can climb into the saddle and escape. Seeing Bean makes me forget why I came home. Makes me scared of the things I know, things I’ve witnessed. She peers at me, her wide eyes seeming to convey some secret message that I refuse to pick up. She looks different somehow. All color and no form. A cloud of red, a wall of green. Paler than usual but her cheeks and lips brighter, like a slushy spilled on snow. But Bean never wea
rs makeup and I can’t look at her, flushed like that.

  “Hi,” she whispers.

  I look around the room at everyone pretending not to see me.

  “Hi,” I say, letting my eyes stop on the whiteboard.

  My tongue trips over the words I want to say—I missed you, I have questions I don’t want the answers to—so instead of talking I take out a piece of paper, unfolding and smoothing it on the tabletop so that I look like I have something to do. I look up to see Pete still staring at me, turned around in his seat, his sharp-jawed face softened with a mixture of curiosity and sadness, and I don’t want it.

  Selena walks into the classroom and I sink down in my seat. Even when we were friends she had an edge. A personality that rolled like a pot of boiling water. Moods that changed with every pop of a bubble. But she was always loyal to her friends. I was hoping, maybe, she might have moved on from hating me for what I did.

  But of course she hasn’t. I’ve never tested her loyalty like this before. No one has. And now I know there’s a line. A limit.

  When she spots me, Selena pauses between me and Bean.

  “You really are back,” she breathes.

  “I’m back.” There is too much hope in my voice. She pounces on it.

  “You should have stayed away. Nobody wants you here.”

  I know. And knowing makes my next breath catch low in my lungs so that I have to strangle it out. I hate faltering in front of Selena and Bean and everyone else staring at us. In another world, these are the moments we would have watched other people have, the ones that would sustain gossip for days at a time. I never imagined I would be at the center of those stories.

  Bean rubs at a spot on her desk with her thumb. Listening but slouched over the wood. Hiding.

  “You’d better move along, then,” I say. My voice is tight. I bite the inside of my mouth and remind myself that I’m the one in the wrong. I’m the one who ran. I’m the one who killed a boy. And now, instead of begging for my friends back, I’m pushing them further away. I take a slow, deep breath and hold my hands toward her, palms open. “Look, Selena—”