Every Last Promise

by Kristin Halbrook

  “That’s some epic feeling sorry for yourself, Kayla Koala,” Caleb says, sitting next to me.

  I lean back on the porch, soaking the last warmth of the wooden boards into my back and sigh. “I know. I make myself cringe.”

  Caleb brushes a handful of dead, crushed leaves from the lower step. “I can imagine it hasn’t been easy since you’ve been back.”

  “For a while, I thought it was going to be okay,” I say. “Jay said in front of everybody that it was an accident. Jen and Selena and I are friends again. But . . . things aren’t so clear. I don’t know what’s real. Or right.”

  He sits with his back slightly hunched over and throws a stick for Ella. She bounds into the yard. “I know moving on’s the whole reason you came back, but things don’t always work out the way we want. Maybe it’d be better if you accepted, I don’t know, that other people might not be ready to get past this the way you are.”

  It’s more complicated than that is what I want to tell him.

  Instead I say, “That’s what Noah says.”

  Caleb nudges me in the side. “Who’s Noah? New flame for my baby sister?”

  Heat flares in my shoulders and I look away. “He’s not a new flame. He’s— I don’t know what he is. He’s different.”

  “Wait. Do you mean Noah Michaelson up the road? I didn’t know you two hung out. I think the last time I even talked to him was when you were in first or second grade. We used to barbecue with his family, remember? Then his mom took him to the Philippines for a year and we didn’t see much of them anymore after that.” Caleb leans back on his palms. “Yeah, he’s different all right.”

  I narrow my eyes at him. “You don’t mean because he’s half Filipino.”

  He makes a sound. “No. I don’t mean that. At least, that not why I think he’s different. Except that is part of why he’s different,” he muses. “Hm. Other people . . .” He shrugs. “I don’t know. He got quiet.”

  This time Ella brings the stick to me. I study it for a moment, looking at where the bark is discolored from her bites. Then I toss it into the yard. The porch shudders as she bounds off it. “He doesn’t seem to care that I was the person driving the car that night. And that makes him different to me.”

  “Everyone else will come around. It was an accident.”

  “Maybe.” I wipe my hands on my jeans and look over at him. “Tell me about school.”

  “It’s a good school.” He flashes me a mischievous look. “Lots of cute girls.”

  I snort. “That’s eighty percent of what you’re doing there, isn’t it? A class here and there, I guess. To make Mom and Dad happy.”

  “Just a few,” Caleb says.

  “You’re glad you went?”

  “Sure. That’s what we’re supposed to do, right?”

  “It’s not what I want to do.”

  Caleb throws the stick then runs his palm over his hair. “There’s a whole world outside this town, you know.”

  “I know. But this was always where I wanted to be. I know I’m supposed to be . . . I don’t know . . . finding myself. My place in the world. Or something. But I’ve always known this was my place.”

  “There are worse places. But . . . what if there are better places, too?”

  I sigh. I’m not stupid. I know there are all kinds of places out there. Things to like across the globe. But this is where I always want to come back home.

  “Want to see something?” I ask.

  “Is it gross?”

  “You wish.” I lead him to the boat, still propped up on two-by-fours but looking solid from the sand job. It makes me think of home, ties me to this town, somehow. Because I rebuilt it here. Because I imagine it drifting down this river. Because I can see the people I’ve known and loved my whole life sitting in it.

  Caleb whistles low. “Looks great, Kayla Koala.”

  I can’t hide a huge grin because something good, hearing praise, feels like everything right now.

  “Ella wants to go for a hike,” Caleb announces, pushing into my room without knocking. I look up from my pillow to the window—still dark outside—and raise my eyebrows sleepily.

  “It’s the middle of the night, you psycho. Why are you awake?”

  “It’s four forty-five. Enough time to get out on the trail and get you back here in time for school. Supposed to be a bee-utiful day!”

  Who is this guy with the chipper voice? I’ve never known Caleb to be up before lunch when he didn’t have to be.

  “Okay. Have fun. Take a picture of the beautiful day for me.”

  He puts his foot on Ella’s rear end and nudges her into my room. She gazes up at me mournfully, like she doesn’t really want to be awake, either. “She wants you to come along,” he presses.

  “Is that what she said? She doesn’t look it.”

  “Yeah. ‘Kaywa walk wif us.’ Exactly like that.”

  “You’re as dumb as she is, you know that?” But I’m already rolling out of bed and reaching for my shoes. Once awake, I can’t fall back to sleep again. It’s a curse.

  “Actually, she is highly intelligent. She says don’t get me and her mixed up. It’s insulting.”

  Ella bounds into the back of Caleb’s truck and he slams the rusty tailgate shut. We head out of town, filling the forty-five-minute drive with music and looking out at the scenery. The farther we get from our town’s river boundary, the more open my lungs feel, the fresher the air.

  We take the two-mile trail up to the bluff of Point Fellows; the path is well-worn after the summer season of hikers, and the last of the wildflowers scramble over one another on either side to reach highest and steal the most sun rays. Ella leaps into the flowers excitedly, nearly lost in the darkness, sniffing everything at a frantic pace before rejoining us on the trail with a wild bark and a coat full of petals and burrs.

  At the top of the rock, Caleb pulls two bottles of water out of his backpack and we sit on the edge, our legs dangling over the valley below, and wait for sunrise. Ella flops on her side and settles into a nap. The landscape rolls gently, water and a sage-green pasture dotted with yellow and lavender flowers, shadowed by lingering early-morning darkness. I feel like a different person. Free.

  “I love the view from up here,” Caleb says.

  “Me too.”

  “I miss it when I’m gone.”

  I would, too. I did, last summer. When real views were replaced by endless stretches of little mowed lawns and too-bright night skies.

  “I think there’s something I should tell you,” he continues. He tips back his head and finishes the last of his water, crushes the bottle, and stashes it back in his pack. “I wasn’t going to but . . . being up here clears my mind, you know? Or maybe it just loosens my tongue because my mind . . .” He shakes his head and sighs. “You know Hailey.”

  I lean back on my hands. “Bean’s sister. Obviously.”

  “Yeah. So, we were at this river party last year during spring break and people were pretty drunk. I was driving so . . .” He shrugs. “I wasn’t. Drunk. I was hanging out with Joe Davis and Karl Schmidt and they were acting like total asses. Karl ended up practically drowning in the river.”

  “And?” Already, this conversation is tiring me out quicker than the hike and the thinner air up here combined. “I was at that party, remember?”

  Caleb gives me a sharp look for interrupting. “I walked away from them, to be alone for a while. Headed over to the old storehouse up the way. You know the one. I don’t know. Even though I’d gone to the party and was having a good time . . . I started feeling like I kind of wanted to think. That was the morning I’d heard about the Ozarks camp job and there was this weird moment at the party when I realized I was leaving home for good in just a couple of months. But the storehouse wasn’t empty.” He lifts a leg and wraps one arm around the knee. “Someone was in there. Crying. I almost turned around and walked away. Partly not to disturb them but partly because I didn’t want to get involved in whatever drama was going
on. There’s always some kind of drama at those parties.”

  “Yeah,” I say, wondering how much of what he’s going to say has to do with our last conversation we had up here: the things we don’t do even though we’re supposed to.

  “But she said my name. Hailey did. She got up and came over to me and . . . she was kind of messed up. Her hair was everywhere and her makeup was smeared and her clothes were all wet and muddy. She asked me to take her home. But not to her house. She was really . . . insistent about that. So I snuck her into our house and she took a shower and borrowed one of my T-shirts. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened. She just said she and her boyfriend had gotten in a fight.”

  I squint at the horizon. The land is beautifully wild, edged in the distance with trees that give the view a shapely, finished feel, like eyebrows on a face.

  “She was with Jay then,” I say. “He’d dunked her in the river and she was pissed. Can’t blame her. They broke up after that party. It wasn’t a big deal. She was leaving anyway.”

  They were always up and down.

  “I’m not saying anything bad happened between them. . . .”

  I unscrew and screw the cap on the water bottle. Unscrew. Screw. Unscrew. “That’s what it sounds like you’re saying.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I am, maybe I’m not. I don’t actually know.”

  “Point is?”

  He turns his narrow gaze from the valley to me and releases his leg again. “Point is, smart-ass, I brought you up here because I’m worried. Why were you in that car with Jay and Steven? Are you . . . okay?”

  I take a long drink of water. What Caleb’s hinting at makes my forearms itch. If he has something to say, he should just put it out there. In the open. Stop tripping around like a dog with a burr in its paw. It’s not his style.

  Because yes, I’m okay. And also . . . no, I don’t know when I’ll ever be okay again. But not because my ankle throbs sometimes or because the glint of Jay’s eye against a black sky visits my nightmares or because I remember where the purple bruises bloomed on the inside of my bicep. It’s because I know Bean’s not okay. So, why isn’t knowing that enough? Why isn’t it bigger than my wanting to come home?

  “Driving,” I finally say, flatly. “That’s why I was in the car.”

  Caleb gives me a long look before deciding my answer is enough. He takes my water from me and shoves it in a side pocket of his backpack.

  We stand and brush the dirt off our shorts before turning back toward the trail. A rough wind rushes through the grasses and draws goose bumps over my arms. I reach up and tighten my ponytail. A surprising rush of anger warms my neck.

  “How come you didn’t confront Jay? About Hailey?”

  He plays with the strap hanging off the bottom of his backpack for a moment. “What do you mean?”

  “We both know what I mean. Something bad happened between them. Everyone knows it but nobody says it. And you saw something. So why’d you let it go?”

  “Everyone doesn’t know it.” But he pauses and somewhere in that pause we let truth take over. “She didn’t want me to do anything. She didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “How do you know that?” I say.

  What I want from him is something solid, something that would help me know I did the right thing by keeping my secrets to myself when, right now, I’m certain it was the wrong thing. But Caleb can’t give that to me. He doesn’t know how to be the brave one any more than I do. I’ve always liked being close to my brother. Being like him. Except now, when it’s as clear as the cloudless morning sky that we’re both cowards.

  “She never brought it up after that.” His excuse is too much like mine. “I mean, she would have told someone if she wanted to deal with it that way, right?”

  Not if it was her word against his. If she was worried what people would do. How they would harass her family. She wouldn’t say anything. As a survival tactic.

  It’s the route I took. The one Hailey took, the one Caleb took.

  I think about the way Bean’s looked at me since I’ve been back. The hope that fell from her eyes when I wouldn’t confirm my memory of that night last summer.

  It’s been pinching at the back of my mind for a while . . . this sense that what I’ve thought was true isn’t. The tenuous feeling of safety that came with keeping a secret I’ve argued wanted to be kept.

  Even if, really, it wanted to be free.

  I gnaw on the inside of my mouth for a moment, frustration building. He’s worried about me. What about Hailey? What about Bean? What do we owe them? I rub the inside of my wrist and my voice sounds far away when I finally speak. “Is that the excuse you make when you struggle with whether you did the right thing? With whether you’re a good person or not?”

  Caleb takes a step back, his expression loosened slightly with shock. But I’m not sorry I said it. Only sorry how well I understand it.

  SPRING

  “NOAH MICHAELSON GRABBED ME after school and asked if he could bring some of his friends to the party,” I announced as I brushed gloss across my lips. “I think guys he plays music with.”

  Jen paused with her mascara wand halfway to her lashes.

  The big round bulbs in her bathroom made everything look so glamorous: the hot curlers in her hair, the way we sat on stools in our lacy bras and underwear, the array of makeup scattered over the bathroom counter. We were pinups.

  She used the wand to separate two clumped-together lashes and shrugged. “As long as you told him we’re not turning off the good music to listen to his banjo. We have enough beer to invite the whole town. Jay called Matt and Herman and got them to order a bunch of kegs.” She closed the mascara cap and tossed it across the counter. “Those losers will do anything for him. Imagine staying here after graduation and just doing . . . nothing.”

  “Um, thanks?” I gave Jen a sideways look under the eyebrow pencil I held.

  “I don’t mean you.” Her hair hung in a pile over one shoulder. She pulled it back and up, testing hairstyles, before letting it fall against her spine. “I just mean . . . Honestly, I’ll be so glad when we get out of here and there’s half a country between me and my brother.”

  I dropped the pencil, wiped off with a tissue the dark red lipstick I was wearing, and tried again with a glossy, soft pink color. “Why are you so mad at Jay today?”

  “When am I not?” She laughed.

  I scooted closer to her and wrapped my arms around her shoulders. We stared at ourselves, cuddled up, in the mirror, her narrow cheeks and pointed chin and slender arms and my rosy cheeks and square chin and arms round with muscles.

  “School’s out, Jen. Be happy! Jay’s just . . . Jay. A little bit annoying, but what brother isn’t? Remember when he stayed up all night helping you fill out valentines for the entire junior class last February? And how he always washes your car when he washes his?”

  Her mouth twitched. “He sometimes does good things. True. But I don’t think . . .” Jen swallowed and brought her hands to rest on my forearm. In the mirror, her eyes changed. Losing their fight and softening into something like panic. The faucet dripped twice before she spoke again.

  She spoke quietly, as if her voice would shatter the mirror if she was too loud. “I think sometimes about how nice it will be to be my own person. Not Jay’s twin or one of the Brewsters. No one to tell me what to do or not to do . . .” Her laugh was so soft it almost didn’t exist. “That sounds so dramatic, right? I’m just looking forward to getting to choose who to have in my life.”

  “I hope you’ll choose me.” I squeezed her shoulders.

  The set of Jen’s mouth was beginning to worry me. Or maybe it wasn’t that. Not something physical I could see, but there was a tremor in the air, a feeling that her emotions had become blurry and pixelated. Confused. And hidden from me.

  Something had happened and she didn’t want me to know about it.

  “Kayla, I will always choose you. I can’t imagine going to college without y
ou. You’ll be my reminder of everything good about home when I get homesick. I wish you would just come with me.”

  “I’ll just have to send you pie when you get depressed at college.” I straightened up again and reached for the gold liquid eyeliner. She hated that I didn’t want to go with her. And her hate made me feel wrong.

  “You make the best pie. See? That’s exactly what I mean. Any time I feel down, you’re there with pie or you get my butt on a horse or you just . . . are you. And that’s what I’m going to need. But you won’t be there. You’re my favorite, you know?”

  I nodded airily and pulled the gold along my lower eyelash line. “How could I not be?”

  She giggled, and in a moment, the fragile mood that had settled over the bathroom dissipated like a cloud of shower steam out the window.

  FALL

  THE CLOUDS ARE GRAY with unshed rain as I wait for the school bus Thursday morning. I pull my hood up. I half expect Noah to come roaring by, tossing rust flakes off the side of his truck. But then I shrink at the idea that I’m getting used to him showing up when I most want him to. Or least expect him to. I don’t know how different those things are. If there are any differences.

  When I step off the bus at school, the skies open. I scan the students picking up speed to get into the school before they’re drenched. Just ahead of me, Bean tucks her hair behind her ear then brushes the back of her hand across her cheek. She’s not walking quickly. I’m not walking at all. My hoodie isn’t doing much of a job keeping out the rain. Neither are my shoes. Water trickles down the back of my neck and soaks into my socks.

  I sprint across the lawn to catch Bean before she enters the school, knowing conversations like this are easier outside where fewer people are paying attention, where words disappear into the wind whipping our bags and clothes, blowing someone’s homework into the parking lot.

  But before I can catch her, she mounts the one step and disappears into the building. It’s five minutes before first bell and the hallways are crowded. My shoes squeak. I stick close to Bean, falling into step behind her. She stops abruptly at her locker and I bump into her.