That Secret You Keep

by Brenda Benny

  “Come on! My stomach can’t wait much longer, now that you’ve mentioned food.”

  We both realize, after a moment, that I’m holding her arm, and I drop my hand immediately like I’ve scalded her. As we stand motionless beside one another, rising upwards without effort, it’s like a curse has frozen us in the moment, and time moves on all around. We say nothing. Our feet hit the stationary platform at the top, and the spell is finally broken. We both seem to focus on putting one foot in front of the other as we make our way towards the exit.

  Once we’re outside, I take a big breath. “Which way is it?” I ask her.

  She tilts her head to the right, motioning for me to follow. “This way.”

  We stroll along wide walkways where gardens bloom in improbable bright pinks and yellows for this time of year. The paths are crowded, and several times Serena and I get jostled closer together. I’m exerting extreme control over my urge to reach out and hold her hand. We don’t talk much on the way there, and it’s possible she has a conversation going on in her head, the same as I do. My side of the conversation goes something like this:

  Why did you run out that night? Did you believe the story about Hayden and me? And, if you did, why are you talking to me now? Where is this all leading?

  I have no idea why Serena is suddenly here with me. And, yes, I desperately want to find out the answers to these questions. But she’s been about as wary as a stray cat, and I don’t want to scare her away. So, instead, I follow her lead and hope that my compliance will somehow tempt her to open up to me.

  The first pavilion that we come to is the Canada pavilion. It has an enormous longhouse and totem poles, the most authentic-looking built atop a raven. It’s bizarre seeing these symbols from home reaching up to the Florida sunshine.

  “We’re eating at the Canadian restaurant? Couldn’t we just have stayed home?”

  Serena shakes her head, walking in front of me to keep us moving.

  “Not here, hungry giant. Keep walking.”

  There are food smells coming out of every shop front and kiosk we pass, and by this time, my stomach is churning. Everywhere in Disney seems like a long walk – but this is torture. Fish and chips at the British pub would have been just fine with me. But clearly, Serena’s on a mission. Even though her legs are half as long as mine, she’s outpacing me.

  Finally, we’re walking across a bridge, moving from pretend England to what must be pretend France, since there’s a replica of the Eiffel Tower standing in the distance. It’s all so authentic looking, though, that I have to keep reminding myself these aren’t real places – which makes me, once again, consider whether this time I’m spending with Serena is real or make-believe.

  We approach an oblong-shaped fountain, and I notice the words “Les Chefs de France” on a sign. At the same time, the scent of mouth-watering fresh bread assaults my nose. I stop in my tracks, breathing it in, which conflicts with my animal urge to run inside and ransack the place.

  “Oh my God! That smells awesome.” I groan.

  “We’re not going in there, either. Come on!”

  She turns and holds out her hand, and I thrust mine forward to grasp hers, wondering how things could get any better than this. Then I see the word “Patisserie” ahead.

  She leads me inside the enclosed stone walls of the replicated old building until we are surrounded on three sides by the inner glow of glass-encased French pastries and sandwiches. If it’s possible to experience the humiliation of premature satiation just by thinking about food, I think it’s just happened to me.

  “See anything you like?” Serena asks coyly.

  I know I’m grinning like a four-year-old kid in a candy store. “Everything! Holy shit! Where do we start?”

  Her mouth curls up into a smile that resembles the strawberry tart behind her. “I knew you’d like it here.”

  Even though I’m desperate for something to eat, I’d still choose those lips first, any day. So far, being here with her is the highlight of my trip, hands down.

  The French staff approaches us, and we each rattle off our orders to them in our slightly French-Canadian accent. We carry the food outside and find a place on one of the benches that overlooks the canal beyond the maze-like shrub garden. Soon, I’m tearing through a large ham and cheese baguette sandwich, followed by a jumbo-sized chocolate éclair, with the strawberry tart next in line. She’s eating a cream-filled meringue pastry. I somehow end up with whip cream all over my hands, and notice that we are making ridiculous moaning noises that sound distinctly pornographic.

  “That’s disgusting,” she mumbles, with difficulty, through her cream-filled grin.

  “There is absolutely nothing disgusting about any of this,” I reply, though I’m not sure a single word I say is understandable.

  Soon, we’re both laughing so hard that we’re having trouble sitting upright. I remember the last time I saw her laughing this way – acting this carefree – it was up in the tree house with me. I wonder if she’s had any moments like this since then. My instincts tell me she hasn’t. A sudden thrill shoots through me that I can affect her this way. And I want her to choose me all over again. I don’t care what unspoken mess lies between us. I know, now, that whatever it is, we can get past it. I just want to be with her.

  I consider starting this conversation, but just then, her phone goes off. I can see that it’s Vanessa. I look at the time that’s flashed on the screen and realize we have only ten minutes until we’re supposed to meet everyone on the other side of the park. Serena looks up from her screen.

  “I guess we better go if we’re going to make it in time.”

  I sense some uncertainty in her words, but I’m not sure why. If she wants to stay here and just hang out with me, I’m more than happy to skip any ride, no matter how popular it is.

  “Do you still want to meet them?” I ask, deciding that I’ll let her make the choice for us.

  She shrugs, but then starts to get to her feet, wiping her hands clean with a napkin.

  “Yes. I want to do this,” she says with more conviction.

  “You mean, go on the ride with me?”

  Her eyes dart away from mine, and then return again. “Yes.”

  We have to hurry to get there, and it ends up feeling like we’re in one of those “race around the world” adventures, as we pass Norwegian villages, Chinese arches and Mexican temples. If we weren’t practically jogging, I might even risk another chance at holding Serena’s hand.

  As we approach the ride entrance, Serena looks up worriedly when we hear a loud “whoosh” above our heads. I never watched any online videos for this ride, so I’m not exactly sure what it’s like. It sounds like a roller coaster overhead, but I didn’t see any loops or sky-high death drops on the way here, so it can’t be as crazy as the one I was on yesterday.

  “What took you guys so long?” Grace is the only one that waited, apparently. “The pass was about to run out. Everyone else has gone in already. Come on!”

  Grace leads the way through the special entrance where we get our passes checked. We move quickly past screens showing designer cars, leaving the people with regular passes behind us like they’re stuck in a highway traffic jam and we’ve found a detour. We reach some of our group, and Grace makes it through a set of doors with Marianna, Lucy and the others. Serena and I don’t quite make the cutoff to get in with our classmates, so we have to wait until the next group is admitted.

  We finally pass through a set of doors that leads to a room where we design a car on our own individual touch screen. I invite Serena to help with the project, but she seems a little distracted, looking about the room. I begin to wonder if she’s become nervous about being alone on the ride with me. I design a totally badass car – not to toot my own horn, which is one of the only things you can’t include – and hope that this is what we get to ride in once we’re on the other side of this room. The design period ends, and we move on from there. After another short set of hallways,
I begin to think that we’re trapped inside a maze of sorts, and can’t imagine how you would ever escape from this point, if you wanted leave.

  I’ve been chatting all the way about the car I designed, wondering if the wheels should have been bigger, or if I should have chosen flames instead of stripes to go with the gold paint. Serena has been strangely quiet for all of this, hardly cracking a smile at my inappropriate jokes about airbags and blow-up dolls. When we finally make it to the ride’s loading area, I wonder if she’s reconsidering her choice to hang out with me.

  “Everything okay?” I ask her.

  “Yup,” she chirps back, finally trying on an ill-fitting smile. I notice the determined look on her face and wonder if I’ve said something to offend her.

  Serena and I get shuffled to the front row of an oversized bumper car filled with four other strangers. It looks nothing like the sleek race car I designed. I look over to her, unable to hide my excitement while we attach our seatbelts. As the automated voice begins to give the typical warning about keeping your arms and legs inside the vehicle, her eyes go wide. She ducks her head, and then I realize that she’s counting under her breath during long exhales. What the hell is she doing? I’m just about to ask her, jokingly, if she’s praying not to get into an accident.

  And then it hits me – like a Parisian meringue pie in the face.

  Oh, Jesus. I’m such an idiot!

  The car! She’s terrified to be on this car ride!

  Suddenly it all makes sense – all the times she didn’t want me to drive her home – all the times that she needed to “meet there” instead. Holy shit! What if I had it all wrong? Maybe all this time, it wasn’t that her dad wouldn’t allow her to drive with me. It wasn’t just that she was too emotional to talk to me about her mom and the accident. She was too frightened to be in a car!

  I turn to her, filled with this newfound awareness, and now I’m completely freaking out for her. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  She nods her head unconvincingly several times. But she is squinting her eyes and clenching her jaw, like she’s unwavering.

  The car jolts to a start, and I see her fingers squeeze around the safety bar across our laps. The ride begins, and we pull up to a flashing red light where an employee instructs us to yank on our seatbelt straps to ensure they are securely in place.

  I lean over to her ear, quietly urging her to reconsider. “Serena, we can get out. We just have to tell them. It’s no big deal. You don’t have to go through with this. You don’t need to prove anything.”

  “Yes, I do. I’m fine,” she says through gritted teeth, like she’s trying to assure herself.

  “Serena,” I plead with her, as it’s obvious to me that she’s totally not fine.

  The car climbs up a hill, and then travels through a series of dark tunnels. After a rough, bumpy patch, the car speeds up in the pitch black before slamming on the brakes a few times, like we’re in a psychotic haunted house version of student driver training. I wish I could reach for the steering wheel to pull us over to safety. I alternate between looking warily ahead for what’s looming, and looking over towards Serena, checking to see if she’s holding it together.

  There’s some bright lights and stuff, and then the car begins to pick up speed again through a twisty track of neon-emblazoned darkness. I place my hand on her leg, and squeeze it tightly, only hoping she can sense my effort to protect her through this small gesture.

  A low-pitched horn blares, and in a rapid, terrifying moment, there’s suddenly a transport truck careening towards us, about to crash directly into Serena. I instinctively reach out to throw my left arm around her, trying to pull her out of danger.

  That’s when Serena loses it. She lets out a bone-breaking scream before burying her face into my shoulder. The lights of the truck vanish into darkness, and we veer into a well-lit area that makes it seem as though the ride is about to end.

  But it doesn’t.

  The car bursts through a door hatch, and we are thrust outside onto a racetrack, barreling around corners, and reaching speeds of over 60 mph. Her hand has found mine, and she’s wrapped it around my fingers in a vice grip. Although the ride noise is too loud to hear her, I can feel her shoulders shake with sobs under my embrace.

  When we decelerate to re-enter the building through another dark tunnel, she is gripping my hand so tightly, I think the tiny gold heart from her ring has made an impression upon my skin.

  The car finally stops to release us and take on new passengers. When we click off our seat belts, Serena bolts out of her seat. She races through the post-ride monitors, past all the fancy cars, and out through the gift shop to escape to the refuge of the outdoors. I’m barely keeping her in my sights, calling out to her all the while, “Serena! Wait! Serena!”

  Our classmates scarcely take notice, too busy playing ride-related video games or snapping pictures of the designer cars. I’m berating myself all the way, feeling like such a complete and utter asshole not to have clued in that she’d have a problem with this ride. Not to have clued in, long ago, as to what she was still going through – how she felt – how traumatized she still must be! All this time, I was only concerned that she wasn’t talking to me, and why. How could I not have dug deeper into how she was suffering?

  Immediately outside the automatic glass doors, a whoosh goes by overhead, and Serena flinches, ducking and covering her head like she’s protecting herself from an air raid. My instinct is to go to her – to protect her – to wrap her in my arms. But I can tell she’s too agitated for that.

  She runs straight through a pathway to an alcove where there are some bushes. Finally, she stops at a dead-end, the concrete walls of the building and a fence cornering her, which is where I catch up.

  “Serena!” I gasp, out of breath.

  She spins around to face me, her eyes wild with terror.

  “It was me! Don’t you get it?” She is yelling this at me, crying inconsolably. “I killed her, Max! It was me!”

  What? Wow. I’m so utterly confused, I hardly know what to say.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She never would have died if it wasn’t for me!”

  I don’t know much about what happened, but this is nothing that I’ve heard before. “Are you saying you were driving the car?”

  She raises her hands up in the air, and then casts them downwards, as though she’s discarding my question. “No! I wasn’t driving! God! It’s just…”

  I wait, knowing there’s more – knowing that I have to give her the space to release whatever she’s held inside for all this time.

  “I told her I hated her! That I hated her!” She’s practically writhing, like she’s trying to shed a dirty layer of skin that’s covering her entire body.

  “I don’t understand. What happened?” I gently prod.

  “That’s when the car hit us!” she shrieks. “Don’t you see? She wasn’t watching. She was looking at me! And her eyes – oh my God,” she sobs, “Her eyes were so full of hurt!”

  Her hands reach up and grab fistfuls of hair around her temples. I’m desperate to inject some reason into her accusations before she lapses into self-flagellation.

  “But…Serena. You didn’t kill her.”

  She looks over at me like she’s been explaining a math problem for hours, and I still haven’t grasped the concept.

  “Max, you don’t get it,” she grinds out. “There was a boy. A stupid, meaningless boy!”

  She is pacing in the small alcove, radiating anxiety, and spitting out bits and pieces of the story, like a sickness that has filled her lungs all this time, making it impossible to breathe.

  “There’s got to be more to this. Tell me what happened – the whole story,” I say.

  She lets out a long sigh, but keeps up her pacing, shaking her head back and forth in quick movements the entire time.

  “I was hanging out with a group she didn’t like when we were in Spain. I’d gotten in with a crowd
that went from tapas to the late night discos. I was coming home after curfew all the time. I wasn’t studying. And I wasn’t doing any of my music. She basically forbade me to go out with them anymore – and she wasn’t going to allow me to see Pedro at all!”

  I freeze. Who the fuck is Pedro? I quickly decide it’s probably not the time for this question. She must somehow sense my apprehension, though, because she looks at me for the first time with any real connection.

  “He’s nobody. I mean, it was nothing. What I mean is – if only I hadn’t been acting so ridiculous, she wouldn’t have been so upset with me. God! The whole thing was my fault!” She drops her head into her hands.

  “Serena,” I say her name softly, trying to use a calm tone, not wanting to make her any more upset. She resumes her pacing, but I feel as though I need to sort out her ruminations. “It’s not like I listen to rumours, but, well… Wasn’t it a drunk driver that hit your car?”

  Still holding her head, she shakes it from side to side. She turns to look at me, then, tears spilling down her cheeks. I can see that, at least, this rumour is true.

  “That doesn’t matter,” she releases in a breath. “It was still me. I killed her.”

  She’s shrinking before my eyes, collapsing into herself. I have to reach in and pull her back, somehow – make her hear a different point of view.

  “Serena. That doesn’t sound like it was your fault – it sounds like a car accident. A shitty, life-sucking, senseless car accident. But it wasn’t your fault.”

  Isn’t there anyone else who has told her this? Hasn’t someone reasoned with her? Convinced her that it wasn’t her fault? I’m tormented by what she must have been going through all this time when it occurs to me that I may be the first person she’s talked to about it.

  “Have you ever told anyone that you feel like this?” I ask, aching for her. “Have you told your dad?”

  She’s looking away from me now, and wiping her nose. Man, she really believes this – deep down – where the dark, bilious shit lives.

  “I tried to tell your dad, but I just couldn’t.”