Every Last Promise

by Kristin Halbrook

  Jen’s stack of bangles jangled when she raised her arm to eat her yogurt. The weather was warm enough for bare shoulders, if only the school dress code allowed it. We both wore cap sleeves. As close to tank tops as we could get and still slide by the rules.

  “What else did Jay say?” she said.

  “He said he’d take care of it.”

  “Jesus.” She slammed her spoon on the table and someone down the line jumped. “Seriously? He really thinks he can get Steven out of this just by being Jay fucking Brewster? He just has no concept of reality. I can’t even.”

  “Calm down,” Selena said, raising her eyebrows at Jen’s sudden outburst. “It’s just talk.”

  “Yup. Steven knows it. That’s why he’s looking for a tutor.” I nudged Jen’s shoulder with mine and she gave me a halfhearted smile. Most of the time, even she realized when she overreacted to her brother. But he did get away with a lot more than she did. I’d be frustrated, too, if I were her. “Anyway, I think you’ll look cute in pleats, Selena. Don’t worry about it.”

  Selena tossed her fork into the plastic salad container and stood. “Good. Because nothing is worth eating this crap.”

  Bean shook her head as Selena took her lunch to the garbage bins. “I like vegetables.”

  “Do vegetables silently cry when you pick them?” Jen teased.

  Bean was the only vegetarian we knew. Also the only one who came from a family that raised their own cows for meat. I knew those things were linked. They’re so cute, she’d tell us about her family’s shaggy Highland cows. Their big eyes and floppy hair. I just can’t eat them.

  “Ha-ha,” Bean said.

  Steven slid into an empty seat next to Bean from his end of the table. Most people towered over Bean, but Steven and his long chunky limbs did especially.

  “About helping with my test, Kayla,” he began, but I cut him off.

  “Have you asked Leo Marshall?”

  “He said no. I think he’s still mad about the bus incident.”

  “You mean the way you harassed him on the bus all last year? I remember some name you called him . . . Marshall Mincemeat?”

  Steven snorted and rubbed his neck. “Yeah. Okay, whatever. T. J. came up with that one. That’s his thing. And it’s history. We’ve moved on.”

  “Sounds like he hasn’t.”

  Steven closed his eyes and took a calming breath. “Kayla, come on. Help me out, please. I’m begging you.”

  I gathered the remnants of my lunch and stuffed them back in my paper bag. “I don’t really have time for that. I have chores and riding practice all week, then helping Jen get ready for her party.”

  “You’re coming, right?” Jen said.

  “If I’m not grounded forever,” Steven said. He pressed his palms against the table for a second. His letter jacket hung on his shoulders like he’d actually lost weight over the winter. I knew he had started working after school to help out at home after his mom went on disability. I didn’t know how he was going to juggle a job plus football this year. A pang of guilt squeezed my chest. He really wanted to pass this class.

  I sighed. “Look, I can’t do anything until Wednesday, but if you can come over and help me finish my chores, I’ll help you with the test.”

  His one crooked tooth pressed on the side of his lip when he grinned. He pushed himself to his feet with a little hop. “I will get you through those chores faster than lightning. And I’ll totally study as much as I can before then. You have saved my life, Kayla. I owe you.”

  “I’ll just give you the grossest chores,” I said to his retreating back.

  “That was nice,” Bean said, looking at me with a small smile on her face.

  “Too nice.” Selena towered over the table, her hands on her hips. “Like you said, he had his chance already. But whatever. I have to run to a cheer meeting. Someone has to try to vote down the pleats.”

  “I’ll walk with you.” Bean flung her leg over the bench. “Ms. Norris is giving feedback on our portfolios if we go in during lunch.”

  “Me too,” Jen said, slurping the last of her yogurt. “I found those library books I checked out at the beginning of the year. Nice timing, right? I can check more out just in time for the year to be over. Coming, Kayla?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sitting my butt right here for the next twenty minutes, then out on the lawn after because I have free period next. Getting As in physics, after all.” I couldn’t hide my smug smile.

  “Lazy,” Selena said.

  “Jealous,” I retorted.

  My three best friends laughed as they wove around cafeteria tables and into the school halls. I pulled out a book and tried to concentrate. After reading the same paragraph five times in a row, I realized the only voice in my head belonged to Jay Brewster.

  I’ll take care of it.

  FALL

  WE TOSS MY BIKE in the back of Noah’s truck.

  “Nice game, anyway,” he says as I fumble for a tissue in his glove compartment to shove up my still-bleeding nose.

  “Thanks.”

  My muscles are tight. I am bruised all over. A sickening feeling weighs me down. I trace a crack in his dash with one finger.

  Noah clears his throat and sneaks a glance at me. “Why did you go to that game?”

  “It’s a free country,” I tell him, searching the horizon beyond the playing fields. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, only that I can tell he hasn’t moved his warm brown eyes from me and I don’t want to look at him. I don’t know why he’s being so nice to me.

  “That’s not what I meant.” Noah starts the truck and pulls out of the parking lot. We’re quiet, and I know that even though he isn’t looking at me anymore, he’s waiting for some other explanation from me. He turns the steering wheel, aiming the tires for a pothole in the road so that we both jump in our seats and bonk the top of the cab with our heads. I want to laugh at his childish driving maneuver, but it feels strangely vulnerable to laugh with him. To share that kind of intimacy. Humor. To let him pull out a piece of the old, happy Kayla when so much about who I am now . . . aches.

  “Yeah,” I say, finally, with a sigh. I know what his question means. But I can’t tell him that game was all the reasons I did what I did and all the reasons I came back. He wouldn’t understand. Noah Michaelson has never been on the inside like I was. Never seemed to care about sports or spirit week or parties spilling across the banks of the river.

  I rub my head and look out the window into a dark, fallow field, imagining the listless brown soil bursting with baby green life. The promise of early springtime. Change and renewal.

  I push my long bangs out of my face, wondering if the dark shadows under my eyes hide the greens and yellows of my hazel eyes, and focus on the view out the window, judging how far I can see before a tall building mars the landscape. Here, in a patch between barns and houses, I can see a long ways away, the first flickering of light seemingly as far as the moon.

  We drive in silence another mile. The dust flies behind the tires of the truck, creating a cloud that rises, billows out behind us. Noah pulls off onto another dirt road. The dirt roads out here crisscross forever like the lines over the top of a ball of yarn.

  “I live on Sunview,” I tell Noah.

  He hesitates before answering and I realize he already knows that. Because I know where he lives, too. We all know where everyone lives in a town like this. But my memory tickles with something more. Playing together as children, a long time ago. The scent of food no one in this town but his mom cooks. He doesn’t mention a long-forgotten history. He says only, “Oh. Okay.”

  When we get close, I point out my house. Unnecessarily but for some reason I need this control. This pretending Noah isn’t as much a part of this town’s landscape as he is. His otherness draws me to him, to the idea that he won’t—can’t—hate me as much as everyone else. Because he is not like them? Or because he is like me? I don’t know which. None of the above.

  Maybe he’s j
ust a good person and that’s it.

  His hand on the steering wheel is sure as he slips into my driveway. I glimpse a movement in the front window. Ella, my family hound dog, watches us, her dark eyes flickering with interest. When we take too long to get out of the truck, she howls forlornly. My fingers tap the edge of the door handle silently, manically, a sporadic rhythm.

  “Okay. We’re here,” he says after a moment. Then: “You smell like bacon. Dirty, sweaty bacon.”

  I laugh like I haven’t for a long time.

  My laughter opens a space between us that he fills with his smile. It’s a great smile, lighting up his face, reaching to the corners of his eyes. His shoulders relax. “I remember you always being on a horse. You used to ride by my house a lot. Did you ride in Kansas City?” he asks.

  Those were quiet days, when Jen and I ambled for hours down the roads and trails that led past his house, only a mile or so from mine. I can picture the yellow siding and white trim. His mom gardening in the front yard, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat. A small woman. Skin the same color as Noah’s, but dark hair to go with it.

  The time I really knew him feels so long ago. But I can almost see the inside of his house. The cross on the wall. The thick rugs under bare feet. I don’t recall him being around at all much the last several years, as though he’d slipped into some quiet shadow place. As though people like me and my old friends put him there.

  I look at him again, surprised but grateful to see kindness in his eyes. “No. I don’t ride anymore. I’ve lost interest.”

  “Oh. I thought that was your thing.”

  It used to be my favorite thing. I loved the way the air combed my hair like invisible fingers when Caramel Star and I sprinted across the back fields and the way I seemed to grow wings as we jumped fences in gravity-defying weightlessness. The beautiful ache in my ab and thigh muscles. The coming down, catching our breath, as I slowly brushed her flanks after.

  But now, my injured ankle spasms even as I just think about riding.

  My heart bursts because my horse is boarded at Jen’s.

  “You know how they put down racing horses when they break their ankles?”

  “You’re not the horse, though,” he says. “You’re the rider.”

  My back stiffens. “It’s not that easy.”

  “Sure it is. Like riding a bike, right? Just get up there and—”

  “I can’t do it anymore.”

  Silence fills the cab of the truck. I check my tone. Open the door. Say, meekly, “Thanks for the ride, Noah.”

  I catch his “No problem” just before the door slams closed behind me.

  SPRING

  MY PRIMARY REASONS FOR showing up at school that last Wednesday of classes were to turn in my last paper for English class and to get my yearbook signed. Jen and Selena and Bean and I crammed our heads together over the yearbook at lunch, first checking our class photos—we laughed at how Bean wasn’t looking at the camera but at some point over the top of it—and then flipping through to count how many other club and social photos we were in.

  Selena was all over the cheerleaders’ page, while Jen and I were part of a special spread on “Horsemanship at Ulysses S. Grant High.”

  “Thank you, Noah Michaelson,” Jen said.

  The photo of Bean receiving her county art award for a pastel piece she’d done of the landscape viewed from Point Fellows in the fall was taken at profile.

  “Bean,” I said, “are you one of those people who believes looking directly at the camera steals your soul?”

  “Maybe. That would explain a lot about the three of you.” She hooked her hands into the big square pockets at the front of her circle skirt. Pulled out a half-empty tube of white acrylic paint, looked at it, puzzled, and replaced it in her pocket with a shrug.

  “Well, I don’t believe in souls at all,” Selena said.

  T. J. crossed the lunchroom and sat next to me, catching the end of Selena’s statement. “Why not?” he said.

  “Because it’s inconvenient. My Catholic soul is destined to burn in hell if I do anything wrong. It’s not worth the anxiety to believe when it’s so much more freeing not to. If I went to confession, the priest would die of shock.”

  “I doubt that,” T. J. scoffed.

  “Just tell her you agree.” Jen turned the page in the yearbook and squinted at the members of the French club. “She has a reputation to uphold.”

  I pulled the yearbook out of Jen’s hands and flipped to the back pages where the candid photos were. In the center of one page, a large photo of the four of us was framed by black swirls. It was taken at last fall’s homecoming carnival. Jen and I stood on the left and Selena and Bean on the right, but all four of us were held tightly together by arms around one another’s shoulders. Selena wore her cheer uniform. Bean wore a lacy, cream-colored dress, and Jen wore shorts and a flowery, button-up top over a T-shirt. I had on jeans slung low across my hips and a tank top. Each one of us was wearing a big grin. Even Bean was looking at the camera in this one. Behind us, the setting sun haloed our heads in a flare of reddish-yellow color.

  Looking at the photo raised sacred memories: the scents of fried foods and hay and the feeling of a breeze growing cooler as evening came. That was the night Caleb went six rounds at the dunk tank, sending Tory Worth into the water over and over again because he was too intimidated by her to just ask her out. She hated him from that day on.

  “This is my favorite picture,” I said, laying the book flat on the table and pressing my hands over the page. “I might have slipped it to Noah along with our riding photos.”

  “I love that,” Jen said softly.

  “Noah . . . Michaelson? He goes to my church,” Selena said. “Weird guy. Quiet.”

  “You say that every time I mention his name.” I squinted at her. “I thought you didn’t believe in church.”

  “Don’t believe in souls,” she corrected. She shrugged. “But church . . . it’s a thing. Being Catholic in a town like this, you all stick together because of community or something like that.” She nosed in close to see the photo, then sat back with a smug smile and nudged Bean’s shoulder. “And on that topic, there goes our theory about your soul. I guess you just can’t be bothered to look at the camera most of the time.”

  Bean shrugged and smiled at us.

  Behind her, Jay and Steven and the rest of the guys who sat on the other side of our table were getting to their feet. I shouted, “Hey, Steven, what time are you coming by?”

  Steven shoved a last handful of limp fries in his mouth and shook his head. His food was only half chewed when he opened his mouth to answer me. “Oh yeah. Don’t worry about it. I got this.” He tipped the rest of his milk into his mouth, swished it around his cheeks, and swallowed.

  “Did you find someone else to help?” I asked.

  “Something like that. Got to run, though. See ya.” He swept his tray off the table, dropping and ignoring half his food that had fallen on the floor, and followed Jay out of the cafeteria. I made a face at his retreating back.

  “Jerk. I left mucking out mom’s chicken coop till today because I thought he was coming over.”

  “They’re all jerks,” Jen said breezily. She closed the yearbook and handed it back to me, her dimple deep in her cheek. “Anyway, I love that picture of us. We look hot.”

  I stashed the yearbook in my backpack and zipped it. “Speaking of physics, I haven’t decided which science I’m taking next year. I should take health sciences because it’s more nurse-y, but that forensic sciences class Olson started last fall sounds so fun.”

  “I want to take the forensic class, too,” Jen said. “But I should probably go with AP bio. I want to get as many college courses out of my way as possible, and unless there’s a new AP forensics, it’s not going to happen for me.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Harvey teaches AP bio. That’s rough.” Mr. Harvey was older than the earth and yelled because he couldn’t hear himself speaking.

 
“Harvey teaches all the AP science classes,” Jen corrected. “And yeah, it sucks. I would want Olson, too.”

  We finished lunch under a steadily growing roar of sound, as we had all week. Students were restless during the last few days of school. I drilled the girls on our summer plans yet again. Selena had to go to cheer camp in August, but before that, planned to work all summer. Bean was visiting her aunt in California for a month. As for me and Jen, we had plans to travel to six states for riding competitions and then we were joining her parents for a cruise to the Bahamas.

  “I know it’s ages away,” Jen said, “but we can look at swimsuits tomorrow when we go shopping for outfits for the party.”

  “Sounds good.” I gathered my things, draping my backpack over my shoulder. “I have to run. I’m going to see if I can get in with my counselor before the lunch bell rings and ask for her opinion on next year’s science.”

  The hallways were jammed with groups of people signing yearbooks. A few senior guys high-fived over something—probably a yearbook quote they thought was particularly funny. Three girls smiled at their photos as tears streamed down their faces. Hailey Patterson and her best friend, Ingrid, pointed at a spot on a page. Ingrid tipped her head to the side with a little smile, but Hailey frowned. Hailey looked up to see me staring and I looked away quickly. I wondered if what made her eyes narrow like that was the photo of her and Jay at last fall’s powder-puff game, him raising her into the air in a victory move. I had done a double take when I saw that photo for the first time, too.

  I shouldered my way to the main office and checked my guidance counselor’s sign-up sheet. She was booked for the next two hours, but I knew I could get a late slip from her for sixth period, so I picked up the pencil to add my name to the list. I’d written the first K when a loud “What!” made me look up.

  Behind the secretaries’ desks, four figures shadowed the frosted glass windows into the principal’s office. Voices were raised inside, although now that I was paying closer attention, I could also make out another voice hissing at everyone to quiet down. For a moment, I thought someone would tell me to hurry up with my sign-up and get on my way, but the office secretaries’ fingers were paused over phones and computer keyboards. Everyone wanted to hear what was being said.