Every Last Promise

by Kristin Halbrook

  “. . . cannot make that call . . . am the teacher?” It was a woman’s voice.

  “New . . . understand . . .” came Principal Brady’s voice.

  “Your incomplete syllabus . . . can’t penalize a student . . . having responsibilities.”

  “That syllabus was approved by you, Chuck,” the female said over the other voices, referring to Principal Brady. “And this has nothing to do with football! He’s failing!”

  The principal’s door opened. I dropped my head quickly, taking a full minute to write the “a” on the end of my name.

  “Steven has one more chance to pass, is that right, Ms. Olson?”

  “He has to pass tomorrow’s test with a ninety-five,” she said. Only her hand and the tip of her red pump were visible around the frame of the door. Principal Brady still hadn’t looked up into the main office.

  “Let me know when he does that,” a slick voice said. Coach Hillyer.

  “If he does, I will be more than happy to,” Ms. Olson said. “I want my students to succeed.”

  “Look,” the coach said. “I’m on your side. I don’t want to fight. If he doesn’t pass, I’ll make him do some work around the locker rooms. We’ll call it anatomy, you can give him extra credit for it, and it’ll be sorted out.”

  Finally, Ms. Olson came into full view. Her mouth was set in a thin line and her eyes blazed with anger. “I’m not passing him just because you tell me to. Anatomy has nothing to do with physics. Nor do you have any say in whether or not my students get extra credit. I have principles. I’ll leave this school before I let you push me around.” She brushed by Principal Brady and slammed through the swing door past the secretaries’ desks. She didn’t look at me when she passed.

  In the principal’s office, the coach made some laughing comment about having all summer to find a replacement. Vice Principal Green slipped out between them, rubbing the deep wrinkles in his forehead between his thumb and forefinger.

  I looked down at my name on the sign-up sheet. I’d written it so slowly that the markings were thick and dark. With a sigh, I flipped the pencil over and erased my name. There would be no fun forensic science for anyone. Because I knew how it worked around here, even if Ms. Olson didn’t. Unless she passed Steven, she and her principles weren’t going to be back next year.

  In the hallway, Jay Brewster lounged against a water fountain, waiting for Steven to finish his drink. He looked up at me and grinned.

  “Hey, Kayla, I think you’re off the hook for tutoring Steven. He’s going to be doing some extra-credit stuff with Coach.”

  Steven stood upright and wiped the back of his hand slowly across his mouth. When his eyes caught mine, I saw some mix of hard resilience and shame in them. Or maybe that was just my imagination. Maybe all that was really there was triumph. Or even nothing at all. It was just the way of things.

  “Too bad,” I said. “I was saving cleaning my mom’s chicken coop for you. Now I have to clean it myself.” I poked out my bottom lip.

  Jay pushed off with his hip and crossed the hall. Someone had drawn hearts and flowers and peace signs on the back of his left hand with a blue pen. A girl with a crush on him, probably. His abashed grin showed off his straight, white teeth.

  “Sorry about that. Know what? We’ll do it anyway. Won’t we, Steve?” Jay nodded over his shoulder. “Coop’s on the side of the house, right? Just leave the supplies out for us and we’ll come after practice and get it cleaner than it’s ever been. It’s the least we can do since you were so cool about tutoring, right, man?”

  “Absolutely.” Steven stuffed his hands in his jeans pockets and nodded.

  I wanted to feel irritated. Most of the time, the football program’s weight tossing around here didn’t affect me. But I also really didn’t want to muck out the coop.

  As Jay snaked his arm across my shoulders and nodded at a couple of cheerleaders passing by, I debated. Did I want to make a point, say something that would piss Jay off, or did I want to let it go, knowing anything I said wouldn’t matter anyway? I reached into my bag and fidgeted with the edge of a notebook. At least he’d offered to clean the coop.

  I blew out a huff of air. “I’ll leave the cleaning stuff out for you. I expect it to be sparkling, though.”

  “You’re a cool girl, Kayla. We’ll dedicate next season to you or something.” Jay squeezed my shoulders.

  I made a dismissive noise and went off to hang out on the hill.

  FALL

  I FLIP OVER ONTO my stomach, drop my arm down so that my fingers graze the floor, and look around my bedroom. It’s a mess and I still haven’t gotten out of bed, even though Dad’s been in the field for hours by now.

  Mom made breakfast. I know because I could smell it, because I heard her when she came upstairs and opened my door, prepared to invite me down. I wasn’t sleeping. I just pretended to be.

  Without riding practice, my weekends are wide open. At my aunt’s, I’d head to the park a few blocks from her house and lie on the grass for hours. Or I’d go downtown and explore, trying to make a map of the city in my head. Anything to take up mind-space. Here, though, after chores, there’s little else to do. But that doesn’t mean I want to stay in bed all day. My toes wiggle on the cold wood floor as I get up and get dressed.

  Downstairs, Mom is organizing jam in the pantry. I open the dishwasher and start to unload clean dishes.

  “What does Dad want me to do today?” I say to Mom’s back.

  She pulls her head out of the pantry to peek at me. “Thanks for unloading that. But I don’t think he’s expecting you out there today. You should take a couple of weeks off. Settle back in. Your Aunt Bea called this morning and I told her you’re taking it easy. Don’t want to make a liar out of me, do you?”

  I think about the third text Bea had sent last night, after Noah Michaelson dropped me off. She asked me to call her to check in. “What else did you tell her?”

  I hear a canister of something small—beans or rice—shift. “I told her your nightmares don’t seem to be giving you trouble.” Another canister slides across a shelf. I never talked to my parents about the nightmares, so Aunt Bea must have told them. I can imagine the exact tone Mom’s voice would have had in that conversation. The calm acceptance that almost conceals her concern. She probably brought up the possibility of therapy again, even though I refused to go twice already. Now, Mom doesn’t press. She leaves her statement as fact and moves on. “Do you have homework this weekend?”

  “Some. Not a lot.” I carefully stack plates on the shelf above me. “I could move bales of hay—”

  “No.” Mom turns away from her organizing and closes the pantry door. “Just relax, Kayla.”

  “Right.” I finish unloading the dishwasher, pull a soda from the garage fridge, and head out back to the boat. It’s exactly as I left it months ago. The boards replaced and waiting for sanding. It’s not the only thing waiting outside.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask Noah Michaelson, who is standing beside my boat. There’s a line of sweat rolling down his temple and he lifts the bottom of his T-shirt to wipe it away. I stare, unabashed, at the narrow line running down his abdomen until he drops his shirt again, a tinge of red building across his cheekbones.

  “Helping your dad move hay. Have to really start saving this year for college. Just finished, actually. Saw the boat on my way out. Cool project.”

  “I could have helped with the hay. We didn’t need you.”

  Noah raises his dark eyebrows and I shrug.

  “Sorry for being rude.”

  “Sorry and a Coke would be nice.”

  I snort and orange spittle flies from my nose. I wipe my face and say, “The garage fridge. Help yourself.”

  I sit and pick up the sander, then set it down again when Noah comes back with his Coke.

  Instead of turning on the power tool, I climb into the boat and rest my head on the bench. “Have you been in a boat before?”

  “Sure.” He shrugs. �
��Lake vacations. Whenever I go to the Philippines. My uncles are fishermen.”

  “Do you like it? Being on the water?”

  “I take pills so I don’t get seasick. But otherwise . . . it’s fine.”

  “Oh, I haven’t thought about getting seasick. Hm.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be fine.” He sips his Coke. Is silent for a moment. Blurts out, “Why’d you come back, Kayla?”

  I look up at him, shielding my eyes from the bright sun with my hand. “Should I not have?”

  “I don’t know.” He looks down at his feet. “Should you have? I don’t really pay attention to what people say, you know. Call it a defense mechanism after so many years of . . .” He pulls off the tab on his Coke and sticks it in his pocket instead of finishing his sentence. “So, why come back? Why did you leave in the first place?”

  “I think everyone knows why I left.” I pause. Shouts from the workers in the fields distract me and I have a hard time forming thoughts. “I came back because . . . I’m not entirely sure. Because this is home.” I pause. “And I deserve to be here.”

  “Because you can’t let other people drive you away from what’s yours,” he says.

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  Noah balances on the edge of the boat. “It was an accident.”

  “That’s what they say. Some of them.”

  I turn the orange soda can in my palms, bringing it close to my face so I can stall while I read the ingredients label. Nothing to get excited about. Not a single mention of actual fruit.

  “Aunt Bea is pretty great,” I continue. “She took me in even though she didn’t know what to do with me. She’s older than my dad and never had any kids. So, here’s this niece coming to stay. To hide. After doing something horrible. But it didn’t even faze her. She said it was an accident. That towns like this . . . people here just need time.”

  “Was it an accident?”

  My head whips toward him. I stare for a moment, trying to slow my swirling mind. “Was it an accident?” I whisper.

  His face is blank. I try to remember him at Jen’s party. When he showed up, who he came with. But there’s nothing.

  As though he can see into my mind, where I’m sifting through memories of that night, he says, “I left before it happened. Had to take someone home. So I didn’t hear what people were saying. Not until later.”

  What they were saying. The moment they heard a truck had totaled Steven McInnis’s car. The moment they heard sirens speed down the road. Even then, Noah’s words suggest, they questioned whether it was an accident. I clutch the can until it dents. “The only people who know if it was an accident or not were in the car. Either way, T. J.’s right. I killed someone.”

  The moment I say it is the moment I want Noah to understand how much I mean it. How much the guilt eats at me. So much guilt. I killed someone.

  “An accident,” he repeats.

  Without warning, my eyes begin to sting, my head begins to ache. I watch him trace his finger along the place two boards meet. In another field, an engine roars to life. A breeze dips in and out of the boat.

  Noah looks at me. His face is soft, understanding. Different from my aunt’s stern strength, from my dad’s hesitant awkwardness, from my mom’s steady confidence. It’s kind, compassionate, exactly what I need right now.

  I struggle not to choke up when I ask, “Do you think people will ever forgive me?” He’s silent too long and I sigh. “People here are stubborn.”

  “I’m not,” he tells me. I raise my eyes to his even though I want to hide the tears gathering there. Because I want to see proof of what I thought I heard in his voice. And it’s there, in the set of his jaw, in the steadiness of his gaze on me: hope. A force that pushes my feet forward when I’m tired of moving against a current of people who hate me, who don’t understand. My hope combined with Noah’s makes me feel like I can take on this whole town and everything I’ve ever done wrong.

  He reaches for my hand suddenly and presses the pad of his thumb to mine. When he blinks at me, with the sunlight dying in the distance, his dark lashes make tiny shadows across the tops of his cheeks.

  I feel the pressure of his finger on my hand long after the sun has set over Missouri. Before I fall asleep, it’s his face in my thoughts that makes me feel like tomorrow can be different. Better. But in the morning, all that remains is a conviction that he is wrong.

  My feet drag me through the school hallways, past the stealthy glances and whispers that burrow under my skin. Every time I answer a question in class, Selena shoots me a disgusted look. Even worse, Jen ignores me like I haven’t said anything at all.

  There are moments when some other minor school scandal or joke takes attention away from me. But it always comes back. The names, the scowls, the low murmurs that surround me as I stand in the entrance to the cafeteria at lunchtime, scanning desperately for an empty table, the smell of egg salad drifting up from my bag and making my stomach roil until I turn away and dart for the bathroom, hacking spittle into the sinks.

  Earlier today, the Warrior Squad delivered goody packages to the football players. Eve Karkova brought three into my first period class. One for T. J. and one for Pete Sloan. And then she paused, pursing her lips and looking over at me. I recalled the last time I saw her at Jen’s party. Jay and Hailey were broken up by then and Eve had wasted no time swooping in on him. Her flirty, high-pitched laugh rang in my ears as she crossed the room now, frowning, and dropped the last spirit package on my desk. I froze, not knowing what to do with it while classmates’ eyes burned into my back. I considered moving it to the windowsill, but my hand felt like stone as I reached for it, for the tag with his name on it, too heavy to lift.

  Steven McInnis.

  In the end, I leave it on my desk the entire period, my belly muscles clenched and breath held in spurts of one or two minutes at a time until I see black fuzz and stars at the edges of my vision.

  When the bell rings, I wait until everyone else has left the room and slip away, relieved, from the reminder of a dead boy. I’m wearing big hoop earrings for ’80s Day, the kickoff to Spirit Week. They swing fiercely as something hits me from behind in the hallway, slamming me into my locker. I bite back a cry and spin around. T. J.

  His back is to me. A tall, muscular back ending sharply at his shoulders. I remember wanting my hands on those shoulders once.

  T. J. turns and faces me slowly, his eyebrows raised. Pretending he hadn’t known I was there. The football he’s just caught cradled in his hands.

  “Oops. Toss went a little long, I guess.” He slams into my shoulder hard enough to knock my bag on the floor. He almost knocks me on the floor. “Oops again. Slipped.” He watches me for a second, his full lips twitching with a humorless smile.

  I squat to gather the papers that scattered across the floor. My hair shades my face. It drapes across my shaking shoulders. When I look up, T. J.’s reached the end of the hallway.

  Jay Brewster waits there for him. He’s watching me. How long has he watched me? I can’t help my gaze moving to his arm, the one that was fractured in the crash. It’s fine now. Still throws a great long ball. He’s fine. He didn’t die. I didn’t die. The crash was only enough for me to get away . . . and months later, an opening just big enough for me to crawl back home. When I look back at his face, his chin juts out under a frown.

  He’s supposed to see, understand, the pact I’ve made: I give him my silence and he gives me my life back. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

  But it’s like he can’t see it. Or won’t.

  My hand pauses on a homework assignment, and my breath comes quickly. I feel like I have a second, one moment to do the perfect thing. Mouth something that will show everyone how sorry I am or make some kind of motion to express how I feel, but I can’t think of anything.

  And then my mind is taken over by a redness, a rage, a fear. Remembering the last things Jay said to me. Remembering wanting to hurt him . . . more than I had. Wanting
to hurt him as much as I hurt Steven.

  T. J. tosses Jay the football back, and the steely look Jay gives me is a warning. He spins around, and by the time I’ve caught my breath again, the moment is gone.

  Noah finds me down the back hallway to the gym. The one no one uses except to skip class. I spend half a second wondering how I’ve seen him more in the days I’ve been back home than I did in three years of high school before saying, “I’ve decided to go to the pancake breakfast.”

  He clucks his tongue and joins me on the floor. “Why?”

  “To talk to Jay.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “Oh, good word,” I say.

  He ignores me, fishing around in his backpack for something.

  “I just feel like . . . I mean, it’s going to take this huge burst of courage to talk to him, you know? Tell him I’m sorry. About the accident . . . Steven. But if I do it while I’m showing him support at the same time, maybe it’ll go better than if I went to his house or something.”

  He brings forth a Twix and lets out a low whistle. “You’re ready to face Jay and everyone else? I’m not sure if you’re brave or stupid.”

  The annual pancake breakfast comes at the end of Spirit Week and the whole town shows up. The homecoming court serves the food, raising money for the town’s scholarship fund.

  “Probably both. But what’s the worst he could do? Refuse to talk to me?”

  “Yeah, that’s probably the worst he could do.”

  “If nothing else, Erica Brewster can’t be horrible to me in public.”

  “If she is, I’ll remind her about the time she drove her car into the side of Mackleby’s Diner.”

  “You know about that?”

  He gives me a look. “Everyone does.”

  I bite my lip and look away from him. There’s a thick coating of grime where the wall meets the linoleum floor. An empty, crushed water bottle rests within reach. He holds out the open Twix package and I take one of the pieces, letting the chocolate melt over my fingers.