Promise Me Something

by Sara Kocek

  I shook my head. “Just a new victim.”

  Dad frowned. “Friends aren’t victims.”

  “I was,” I told him. “She picked me out of the crowd like I had a target on my head. I don’t even know what she saw in me.”

  “A smart, thoughtful person?” Dad looked troubled. “Just a guess.”

  I rolled my eyes, even though he couldn’t see my face. We were pulling up behind a long row of cars next to the entrance to the theater, which was packed for the opening night of White Heat. I considered hopping out of the car right there, a hundred yards away from the entrance. Unbuckling my seat belt, I grabbed my purse and put my hand on the door.

  “I mean it, Rey.” Dad stopped driving even though the cars in front of us kept inching forward, leaving a gap in front of our Subaru. “Put things right.”

  “There’s nothing I can do tonight,” I said, unlatching the door. I could already smell the buttered popcorn wafting out of the theater.

  “Then we’ll talk about it later,” answered Dad. “When I pick you up.” I registered the disappointment in his voice and filed it away under Things Not to Think About.

  The first thing Levi said when he saw me was: “You smell good.” We were standing three feet apart. As soon as he turned his head to look for the popcorn line, I rubbed my wrists against my jeans, praying he wouldn’t start sneezing once we sat down next to each other.

  At the concession stand, we ordered an extra large cherry soda with one straw. Just when I was about to ask for a small bag of popcorn, Levi gestured at his bulging side pocket and whispered, “Peppermint patties.” I knew right then that he intended to kiss me.

  “That’ll be all,” I said to the girl behind the counter, fumbling with my wallet. Of course, Levi handed her a five-dollar bill before I could even find my money. “Thanks,” I told him. “I’ll pay you back.”

  “Don’t be crazy,” he said. “It’s not like this is the twenty-first century.”

  I laughed. It was the first time all night. We moved from the concession stand toward the long, winding line outside the biggest theater in the Cineplex. The people at the front had already finished their popcorn. I hoped we wouldn’t have to wait too long.

  As though in answer to my prayer, the crowd started moving the minute we joined the end of the line. Levi kept his hand covering the bag of peppermint patties in his pocket, only lifting it once to grab two pairs of 3-D glasses—or 3-D kiss impediments, as I suddenly thought of them.

  Inside the packed, dimly lit theater, finding two seats together was hard, but we managed, climbing over people’s feet and squeezing past their knees. By the time I sat down and set my phone to vibrate, Levi had already opened the bag of peppermint patties and was holding out a handful for me to take. As we slipped on our glasses and waited for the previews to start, my whole body buzzed with sugar. I was nervous, and the theater was too cold for comfort. Below the seat, my toes scrunched of their own accord.

  Levi put his arm around me right from the start. He didn’t wait for some stupid, scary scene. For that, I was grateful; otherwise I would have had to pretend to be afraid. When I finally rested my head against the crook of his neck, I could feel his heart hammering down below in his rib cage.

  The movie was stupid. Each time I bent to take a sip of our soda, Levi held the straw up to my lips and I lost track of the plot even further. The Creamsicle-flavored lip gloss I’d applied in my room had mostly rubbed off, and I wondered whether he could taste it when he sipped from the straw. Did it ruin the flavor of the soda? I had no way of knowing. Every now and then I glanced over and saw him looking at me. Once, he was even leaning toward me, but I lost my nerve and turned back toward the screen. It was midway through the movie when we worked up the courage to look at each other at the same time. Through the clunky 3-D glasses, I saw the pores on his nose up close.

  Then we were kissing. His face was in my hands, and my heart was in my lap. At first, his mouth felt dry. Then he plunged his tongue against my teeth, and everything deepened. It took me a minute to discover how to breathe—in and out, separate from the kiss.

  We kept going for the rest of the movie, never once moving our heads farther than a few inches apart. I think we were both too nervous that if we stopped, we’d notice the ridiculous glasses and laugh. We kept going even as the credits rolled at the end of the movie and the audience clapped. Only when the lights came on and the theater began to empty did we break apart to look at each other.

  Somewhere in the woods behind her house, Olive was lying down on cold gravel, staring up at a moon that reminded her of a smudge of chalk. If Levi and I had known, what would we have done differently? Left the movie? Called the police? In everything that came after, I regretted a million things, but never once the kiss. In the cold theater, our toes came back to life. We pressed our foreheads together while Olive watched the sky swell out, opening above her like a mouth.

  Saturday

  I once heard a psychologist say on the radio that Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech gunman, had “suicidal ideations” for months before he killed thirty-two people and then himself with a semi-automatic handgun in the engineering hall. After that, the phrase kept rolling over in my head like a static cling sheet in the dryer, sticking to everything. Suicidal ideations. Suicidal ideations. Suicidal ideations. I wasn’t thinking about suicide itself—just the way the words sounded. Hard and clinical, like the Latin name of a wart. I repeated them so often, I actually grew worried. If somebody had hooked me up to a lie detector and asked, “What are you thinking about?” my mouth would’ve opened and out would’ve popped the phrase suicidal ideations.

  But on the morning after White Heat, I wasn’t ideating anything at all. I woke up around ten to a dark, gloomy room. Through the slats of my blinds, I could see the sky outside, a deep shade of gray that looked almost purple. High above the house next door, a thundercloud was massing up, ready to burst.

  I hadn’t even moved yet when my phone buzzed. It was still set to vibrate from the movie, and I thought it was Levi, texting me to say good morning. I reached toward my nightstand and yanked the phone under the covers, where it cast a blue light onto my pajamas. But the text was from Abby, not Levi. It said, OMG, check the news.

  At first I just stared at the little blinding screen, surprised. Abby and I hadn’t talked since the Valentine’s party. But then I thought of all the millions of possible disasters that might have transcended our fight—earthquakes, tsunamis, terrorist attacks—and climbed out of bed. The house was eerily quiet as I walked into the living room and looked for the remote, disaster scenarios playing out in my head one after the other. More than anything, I wanted noise—something to blast away the unnerving silence in the house. I couldn’t call Levi because it was too soon, and I couldn’t call Abby because I’d betrayed her at a party I barely even remembered, and I couldn’t call Gretchen because she was the spider at the center of a big web and I was the fly.

  So I dug out the remote from behind the couch and turned on the TV. It was already set to channel four, Springdale’s local news station, and there was footage on the screen of a stalled train with a news ticker running below it that said: Grisly Suicide at Talmadge Hill.

  I actually thought for a second they meant a grizzly bear. That’s what gave me pause—the thought of a bear jumping in front of a train, rearing its claws at the bright headlights. I leaned toward the TV, searching for the bear in the footage. And then I remembered that grisly was a word on a vocab quiz I aced in eighth grade, and it meant something like gross or terrible or scary. That’s when I put down the remote and stared at the wreck on the screen. There were policemen standing all around, stringing up yellow tape, and the newscaster was interviewing a conductor who stood to the side with his hat in his hand.

  “A young woman,” he told the reporter in a flat, stunned voice. The microphone barely caught the edges of his words. “All bundled up. Looked warm. Stepped onto the track and lay down like she was going to sle
ep.” The camera didn’t move off his face, even though he was gazing offscreen toward the train. “I’ve never had this happen before,” he finished, the sun rising behind him in a tight, angry ball.

  The screen switched to another interview—a woman on the night train who felt a bump; a policeman who said he wouldn’t release the name of the minor; a janitor at the train station who claimed he saw a girl in a purple raincoat hanging around for twenty minutes outside the ticket booth, staring at the timetable, just three hours before nightfall.

  I wasn’t listening. My eyes were scanning the footage, searching for clues. Nobody was saying anything specific about the girl. Nothing about the color of her hair or the contents of the handwritten note they found a hundred yards away. Nobody listed any identifying features whatsoever until the cop let slip that the girl wasn’t wearing her glasses at the time of the impact. Glasses, I thought. Olive wears glasses. Then the station switched over to a commercial, and I thought to myself, before I had even consciously decided to believe: wore.

  Olive wore glasses.

  There was always the possibility that I was being paranoid. It wouldn’t have been the first time. For almost all of second grade after Mom died, I spent my bus rides imagining new and horrific ways that Dad might’ve died while I was at school. Every time he left me alone in the house to grab groceries from the A&P, I visualized a yellow Hummer backing out of its spot and running him over in the parking lot, his paper bags splitting as they hit the pavement, cans of beans and alphabet soup rolling every which way.

  Now the paranoia was back in full swing. Reaching for my phone, I attempted to come up with a text that wouldn’t give me away. Nothing as obvious as are you alive? because if she was I wasn’t ready to give her the satisfaction of knowing that I cared. Instead, I wrote, I have a sweater of yours. Do you want it back?

  Waiting for a response, I felt the familiar restlessness, the rush of dread, the urge to walk somewhere fast. Dad’s old treadmill skulked in the corner of the living room like a hunched, forgotten monster, so I walked over to it in my pajamas and stepped onto the end of the rubber mat. The front was piled high with a stack of sweatshirts from Dad’s company, so I kicked them onto the floor and turned the knob. Soon I was running in strides, sucking in gulps of air, listening to my heart thud.

  I ran for three minutes—not even half a mile—when my phone buzzed. I lunged forward to turn off the treadmill and reached into my pocket. There was a new text from Abby. Dad says it’s a BHS freshman. Do u no her?

  The stitch in my side throbbed. Abby’s dad was a reporter for the local news station, so he would be one of the first to know the details. I breathed in deeply and stared out the window. The thundercloud over the house next door had burst open while I was running, and now loud, fat raindrops were hammering against the street. Definitely not bike weather.

  “Dad!” I called, craning my neck around. “Are you up?”

  No answer.

  I thought I could hear the shower running in the bathroom at the other end of the house, but the noise was faint, and it might have just been rain. “Dad!” I called again.

  There was a rustle from the direction of his bedroom. I got off the treadmill and slipped one of the company sweatshirts over my pajamas. Then I hurried to the front door, where my sneakers were pushed up against the wall with their tongues wide open, waiting for my sweaty feet. “Dad!” I shouted again. “I need a ride!”

  There was a creak in the hallway as Lucy rounded the corner in her bathrobe. “Morning, Reyna,” she said. “Where do you need a ride to?”

  “Nowhere,” I answered automatically. “Where’s Dad?”

  “He’s in the shower.” She frowned at me, a faint crease between her eyebrows. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  I didn’t want her to see my face, so I turned around and pretended to stare out the peephole in the front door. “Could you tell him I need a ride to Olive’s house?”

  “You can ask me, you know,” she said. “I can drive.”

  I pressed my forehead harder against the cool door.

  “If you give me a second, I’ll put on my shoes—”

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’ll wait for Dad.”

  I could tell even with my back to her that she was turning around to leave, and I was glad. But as soon as she was gone, I felt a shudder move through me, slow and deep, like an earthquake before a tsunami.

  “Reyna?”

  I startled. She had paused at the end of the hallway.

  “Are you OK?”

  I wasn’t. It was just like my panic attacks in elementary school. I could be climbing a jungle gym or eating birthday cake, but if I even thought about Dad dying, I’d start shivering from head to foot, not really crying—just freaking out.

  I felt Lucy come up behind me and put a tentative arm around my shoulder, which I shrugged off.

  “Reyna, sweetie…What’s wrong?”

  “Please get my dad,” I said.

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “A girl killed herself last night.” My teeth were clattering so loudly in my skull, I could barely hear myself. I reached over and started to turn the knob on the front door as though I’d walk by myself to Olive’s house, even though it was pouring rain and I was shivering like a hypothermia patient.

  “And you think it’s Olive?”

  “She’s not answering her phone.” Another shudder moved up my spine. “I don’t know what to think.”

  An expression of resolve settled over Lucy’s features. “I’ll drive you,” she said, removing the towel from her hair. “Let’s get in the car. Now.”

  “No,” I said again. “I’ll wait for Dad.”

  “You need my help, Reyna. I can do this just as well as your dad.”

  I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t some kind of convenient opportunity for her to parent me; that giving me a ride to Olive’s house wasn’t her chance to prove that she could replace my mom. But she was already grabbing her car keys off the console table by the door, and I realized that she intended to drive me in her slippers and bathrobe, even though the front walkway was slick with rain and it was freezing outside.

  She and I both shivered as we got into the car. I could feel the wind blow through my flannel pajama pants as I pulled the door shut and held my fingers out toward the vent, waiting for the heater to start up. Lucy turned the ignition and backed out of our driveway without a word. “It’s on Cedar Street,” I told her, managing to breathe properly for the first time since I started panicking. “All the way at the north end.”

  She nodded and reached over to turn on the radio, but the story on the air was something about a peanut butter recall, not anything to do with Talmadge Hill, so I turned it off. The same questions were flopping over and over in my head: Why are you so sure it’s her? Maybe she’s just sleeping late. Why are you so morbid? Then it hit me. “The stove is hot.”

  “What?” Lucy glanced over at me.

  “The stove is hot,” I repeated.

  “What does that mean?”

  The realization was coming in waves, little by little, what the title meant. “She wrote me a poem,” I said. “In the lit mag.”

  “A poem about a stove?”

  “It was called ‘Disappearing.’” I swallowed quickly. “It was a warning.”

  Lucy pressed her lips together, and I stared straight ahead through the windshield at the thin rows of birch trees that ran parallel to the road. The white tree trunks sped by in a blur, the knots in their bark fixing me like a hundred unblinking eyes.

  When we got to Olive’s house, Lucy didn’t pull into the driveway. The garage door was open, and we could see a fancy white Lexus pulling out. I leaned forward, hoping to make out the shape of Olive sitting in the backseat, listening to a pair of headphones, staring out the window.

  But she wasn’t there. The backseat was empty and the only people in the car were Mr. and Mrs. Barton, sitting up front. They seemed to be figh
ting about something. Or rather, Mrs. Barton seemed to be yelling while Mr. Barton stared ahead through the windshield, his mouth set in a grim, straight line. They turned out of the driveway and sped down Cedar Street, the car leaving two little clouds of smoke hanging in the air where they had accelerated.

  “Wait for me here,” I told Lucy, unbuckling my seat belt. “I’ll be back in two minutes.”

  “Take as long as you need,” she answered.

  I didn’t thank her. I couldn’t. Instead I ran around the back of the house and up the porch steps toward the sliding glass door where Mrs. Barton had once galloped out with a toy horse between her legs. I headed straight for the gas grill on the side of the porch and lifted up the cover to look for Olive’s spare key, which I’d seen her use a few times after school.

  “Olive!” I called, ramming the key into the back doorknob and twisting. It opened with a soft click. “Are you here?”

  No answer.

  I ran through the hallway on the first floor, checking every room. Then I bounded up the hollow wooden stairs, two at a time, shouting her name. She wasn’t in the sunroom or her father’s study or even the bathroom where I’d stared at myself in the mirror on the night everything had fallen apart between us. The only room left to check was hers, but she wasn’t there either. The bed was perfectly made except for a faint depression near the front, as though she’d sat there not long ago, tying her shoes.

  When the weight of that empty spot hit me, I knew I had to leave. The tidy room, the cold sheets, the frilly bedspread—all of it rose up in my throat. I swallowed over and over as I ran down the staircase, trying not to feel sick. Outside, it was raining hard. I almost forgot to the lock the door behind me.

  When I was halfway to Lucy’s car, my sneakers and sweatshirt soaked with rain, I remembered. Grace. Her name exploded in my head like a firework. Running toward the tool shed at the edge of the lawn, I called, “Grace! It’s Reyna!” but she didn’t answer, and the door was locked. I ran around the side of the shed, banging my fist against the wood. “Grace!” I shouted again. “Open up! Are you there?”