Promise Me Something

by Sara Kocek

  Nothing out of the ordinary happened until lunch. It had been easy up until that point to avoid Gretchen and the Slutty Nurses. I’d simply pretended every chance I got to be studying for my biology test. But once fourth period was over and the test was done, I was out of an excuse. As soon as Gretchen saw me in the cafeteria, she came over to the lunch line to offer me some baby carrots.

  “No thanks,” I told her.

  “Well?” she asked. “Why didn’t you call me back on Saturday?”

  I shrugged.

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “Who?”

  “You know what I mean, Reyna. Don’t play dumb.”

  “I’m not playing dumb,” I lied. Olive was right. I was a coward.

  Gretchen raised her eyebrows. “A certain somebody wasn’t in homeroom. Or were you studying so hard for biology, you didn’t notice?”

  “I have to go.”

  “Why?” She crossed her arms. “Where are you going?”

  I glanced over her shoulder and spotted Jamie Pollock wheeling her cello through the cafeteria. Gesturing vaguely in her direction, I said, “I have to go talk to somebody.”

  “Fine.” Gretchen rolled her eyes. “Let me know if you hear anything.”

  The minute she turned around and left, I felt my lungs burst open with air as though she’d been sitting on my chest. Then I ducked out of the line and carried my empty tray over to the table where Jamie was propping up her cello, getting ready to sit down.

  “Hi,” I said, sliding into the seat across from her. “How’s it going?”

  She looked at me quizzically, like I was a movie star with something in my teeth—like she couldn’t figure out what to say. Maybe she thought I was popular. Either way, she didn’t answer me. “I don’t know if you heard,” I began, “but on Friday night—”

  “I know.” Jamie sat down and pulled out a bag lunch from her backpack. Her voice was softer than I expected, like a child’s. “Everybody in orchestra is talking about it.”

  I waited, just to make sure she wasn’t going to tell me that Keat’s Concert Hall was offering discounted tickets. Then I asked, “What are they saying exactly?”

  “You know.” She looked down at her hands. “That it wasn’t an accident.”

  So I wasn’t living in a bubble after all.

  “Our viola player is absent today…” She didn’t need to glance over at Olive’s empty seat for me to fill in the rest of the sentence: And certain other people are too. “Why? Do you know who it was?”

  I opened my mouth to tell her I was just as clueless as she was, but then I stopped. Jamie wasn’t Gretchen. She wouldn’t judge me.

  “It was Olive,” I said quietly. The words floated out so easily they almost caught me off guard. Jamie brought her hand to her mouth and sat there staring at me.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I added after a moment. I almost told her about the letter—specifically that she wasn’t mentioned in it—but then I bit my tongue. If people knew I had a letter, they’d want to read it. All the worst parts of me would be on display for everyone to see.

  Tears were shining in Jamie’s eyes, and I realized with a stab of regret that I hadn’t even cried yet. What kind of friend was I? Even now, my eyes remained dry.

  Jamie said quietly, “I never got to say good-bye—”

  “It’s not your fault,” I repeated, like some kind of broken record. “It’s nobody’s fault.” But I didn’t believe the second part. Not a bit. Jamie was swiping at her eyes, sniffling loudly. “I just thought you should know,” I added. “Since you were her friend.”

  A look crossed her face that I couldn’t read—confusion, maybe. She started to say, “We weren’t really that close—” but then she changed her mind and looked down at her fingernails. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “You can tell the rest of the orchestra,” I said. “That the viola player is fine, I mean.”

  She let out a small sigh of relief.

  “I have to go.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Levi getting up from the table where he always sat with his friends—a group of guys who played trumpets in the jazz ensemble. He was cool enough to fit in with the athletes and the class clowns if he wanted to, but he didn’t. He preferred to sit with his jazz friends, and it was one of the things I admired most about him. Now he was headed in my direction, glancing down at his watch, so I slipped away from Jamie and headed toward the lunch line, where I lost myself in the crowd before bursting out of the cafeteria into the hallway. If Levi hadn’t already learned the news, Jamie could tell him herself.

  But I never found out whether she did because by the end of seventh period it was a moot point. Moments before the last bell, Mr. Duncan, the vice principal, got on the loudspeaker to ask the entire school for a moment of silence for a freshman named Olive.

  That was when the whispering started—during the silence.

  Tuesday

  An accident. That’s how Gretchen started referring to it. An “accident with a train,” as though a ten-ton chunk of steel had suddenly jumped out in front of her ex–best friend while she was out one evening on a stroll. Everybody agreed it was tragic. Worse, they wanted to talk about it. Mrs. Kushner, the school psychologist, urged the ninth grade faculty to give us time to recover collectively from the “trauma” of our loss.

  People who had never spoken a word to Olive suddenly recalled stories of eating lunch with her on the playground in kindergarten or riding the bus together in middle school or working alongside each other on a project for the fourth grade science fair. She was so smart and so kind and so mis-understood, they said. Everybody wished they’d known her better. A cheerleader named Lizelle Bluth worked herself into a fit remembering a time when Olive drew her portrait during seventh grade. “Did you know she was good at art?” she sobbed while her friends rubbed her back and offered her a box of tissues. Even John Quincy wore a dazed expression on his face as he shuffled into Mr. Murphy’s room for History that morning.

  Almost everybody understood that Olive had killed herself, but they followed Gretchen’s lead in not mentioning it. We were like Puritans living in the seventeenth century, and the unmentionable scarlet letter S was for suicide. Because it was widely known that Olive and I were friends—or that we had been friends, at least—people came up to me throughout the day to ask how I was doing. I told them all the same thing: that Olive and I hadn’t been speaking. Invariably, they narrowed their eyes at me like I was some kind of pariah. As for Gretchen, Lennie, and Emma, they made a point of advertising their sadness. Because I wasn’t crying and they were, somebody called me the Ice Queen during second period, and I heard people whispering it throughout the morning.

  By the time the fire drill happened, I was determined not to look anyone in the eye for the rest of the week, including Levi. For the first twenty minutes of History, I kept my gaze fixed carefully on my notebook, where my words swam around like fish, scrambled and nonsensical. When the fire alarm rang, I lingered at my desk so I could be the last person out the door, far behind Levi.

  But our single-file line disintegrated once we stepped outside and crossed the bus lane into the parking lot. John Quincy and his posse split off to the right; Tim Ferguson and Mr. Murphy wandered to the left, arguing about something I couldn’t hear. Levi came straight up to me and touched me on the sleeve. “Hey, Reyna,” he said. “Are you OK?”

  I almost couldn’t stand it. I pulled my arm away and looked down at the cracked asphalt beneath my feet. I wanted to say, I don’t deserve you.

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” he said after a moment, as though reading my mind. “What happened to Olive wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

  “It was,” I whispered.

  Didn’t he realize that while we were making out in front of a stupid movie about aliens, Olive was alone in the woods, removing her glasses, lying down on the train track like she meant to take a nap? I bit down and tasted metal.

  Levi looked like he wa
nted to say something, but Mr. Mancuzzi was walking by with a whistle in his mouth, ushering everyone downstream. We shuffled to the teachers’ parking lot, which wrapped in an L-shape around the cafeteria. There were still a few small puddles scattered on the pavement, reflecting the sky in bright blotches.

  As Levi and I moved wordlessly with the stream, we caught up alongside Tim and Mr. Murphy, who were still arguing. “Half the class got As for plagiarizing Wikipedia,” Tim was saying. “Yet I actually worked hard on my poster—”

  “Give me a break.” Mr. Murphy’s lip curled. “You worked hard on the bubble letters.”

  “I worked hard on the whole thing!”

  “Coming from someone like you, I would have expected glitter.”

  Tim’s face was a deep shade of red. “Someone like me?”

  Olive’s memory taunted me: What are you going to about it? What are you going to say? But she knew the answer as well as I did. Nothing. Slowing my pace, I let the crowd swallow me up, praying that Levi would loose sight of me and keep walking. But he didn’t. He kept slowing down to wait for me. I couldn’t stand myself.

  To my relief, the fire drill didn’t last long. After a few minutes, Mr. Mancuzzi blew his whistle and called out, “False alarm! Back inside!” A gust of wind blew through the parking lot, ushering us back toward the school.

  “You go ahead,” I told Levi when we were a few yards from the building. The fire escape doors were propped open, and I’d just noticed a tall, willowy teacher off to the side, asking a group of girls if they’d seen anybody run past with an unzipped backpack. What I found strange were the items she was holding up: a handful of mechanical pencils, a crumpled napkin, a Snickers wrapper, and a small, tattered moleskin notebook the color of blood. “Does anybody know whom this belongs to?” she was asking the girls.

  “It’s mine,” I said, pushing my way through the crowd. I would have recognized the notebook anywhere. “Sorry. I must have dropped it.”

  She looked over at me, surprised. “Just now?”

  “No, earlier.” I said, trying to ignore the stares of the group of girls.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Reyna.”

  “Reyna, will you follow me?”

  Heart hammering, I trailed after her through the fire escape doors, down an unfamiliar hallway, and into the cafeteria where the upperclassmen ate. When we finally stepped inside, the teacher stopped. At first, I didn’t understand where she was taking me, but then I looked behind her at the wall, and it clicked. We were standing in front of a fire alarm, its clear plastic casing open. Somebody had pulled it.

  “We believe the owner of this notebook is the person who pulled the fire alarm,” she said. “This is a very serious offense, Reyna.”

  I tried to look like I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Two custodians saw a girl pull it,” she said. “Her backpack was open, and these items fell out as she ran away from them. Tell me—if this notebook belongs to you, what was it doing in the backpack of our culprit?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have no idea how it got there.” Had Olive left it with Grace? Was Grace here now, lurking somewhere on the school grounds?

  “What’s in this notebook?” asked the teacher. “If it’s yours, you should know.”

  “Poems,” I said without thinking. And then, when I noticed several folded pieces of paper stuffed at the back of the journal, I added, “And homework.”

  She flipped to a random page near the middle, and I saw her eyes scan it from top to bottom. Then she handed it to me. “What’s this?”

  There was only one sentence on the page. It said: Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

  “Just something I was thinking about,” I said.

  The teacher frowned. “It’s a quote by Sylvia Plath.”

  “I’ve been missing the notebook for a while,” I lied, thinking fast. “Somebody stole it. They must have had it in their backpack when they pulled the alarm.”

  “Who would have stolen it from you?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “It’s been missing for months.”

  Triumph flickered in her eyes. “Flip to the last page, please.”

  I did and immediately felt my stomach sink. There was a date on top: February 21. The day I saw White Heat with Levi. Olive’s last day in the world.

  “Excuse me while I page Mr. Mancuzzi to discuss this.” She turned and spoke into her walkie-talkie, which important members of the faculty carried on their belts in case of emergencies. The minute she was facing away from me, I slipped the folded pages out of the notebook and shoved them into the pocket of my sweatshirt, linking my hands together inside the pocket to cover the bulge. No sooner had I pressed the wad of folded paper closer to my stomach than the teacher turned back to face me, her mouth set in a grim line.

  “Mr. Mancuzzi is busy,” she said. “I’m to confiscate the journal and send you back to class. If we determine that is your journal—which I doubt—then you’re in serious trouble, Reyna. In the meantime, I’d urge you never to lie to an administrator just to get your hands on someone else’s private journal.” She looked immensely pleased with herself.

  “Sorry,” I said, handing over the journal with one hand and holding the papers inside my sweatshirt pocket with the other. “I won’t do it again.”

  “You’re dismissed,” she answered, slipping the journal into a binder.

  I left without looking back, stopping only after I rounded the corner to duck into the girls’ bathroom by the stairs. It smelled like cigarette smoke in there, but I locked myself in the handicapped stall anyway and pulled out my cell phone. I knew it was a long shot, but I had an idea. Did you pull the fire alarm? I typed carefully. Then I found the number that had texted me on Sunday and hit Send.

  I didn’t expect an answer right away, so when the phone vibrated in my hand a moment later, I nearly jumped. The text was short: Who is this?

  Rachael Ray, I typed. Who are u? If Grace was as close to Olive as I was beginning to suspect, then she would get the hint. But this time the phone was silent for a while, and I began to wonder if my clue was too obtuse. Finally, just as I moved my thumb over the keypad to close the screen, a reply rolled in: The cookbook gal?

  My heart rose and sank in quick succession, first because she’d replied at all, and then because Grace would never have used the word gal. It probably wasn’t even her phone in the first place. She’d probably stolen it from some old man, and now I’d sent him a text. I could have pinched myself. Of course Grace wouldn’t have her own phone number. She was a runaway.

  There were five minutes left before the end of the period, and I had to get back to History to grab my backpack. But the folded wad of paper in my sweatshirt pocket stopped me. I knew it was probably just a bunch of old homework, but still—I had to know. Pacing back and forth inside the handicapped stall, I pulled it out of my pocket and unfolded the pages one by one.

  It wasn’t a bunch of homework. It was a series of conversations—twenty or thirty in total—some printed from g-chat, others from a forum called LGBTeen. The two people writing called themselves JarOfBells and KamikazePigeon. As I flipped through the pages, my eyes darted over the words. There was something about jumping into a pool on the count of three. Something about gay boot camp. Something about reading Sylvia Plath poems under a full moon. JarOfBells was obviously Olive.

  The bell rang, but I didn’t move. Feet frozen, I put the pages in order by date. Then I read them from beginning to end. A handful of the conversations revolved around me. Olive had dubbed me “Asshole of the Day” six times and referred to me once as “feckless.” But most of the time, she spoke about me with a mild, wistful sort of regret, as though I was part of a pattern of sadness in her life that she couldn’t figure out.

  At a certain point, maybe two-thirds of the way through the conversations, the skunky smell of the bathroom ceased to bot
her me. I grew vaguely aware of the sneakers coming and going outside my stall as I read, the second bell ringing in the hallway, the pipes creaking in the walls. I don’t know how long I stayed there.

  I didn’t expect Grace to be waiting for me at the Talmadge Hill train station like some kind of lost child swinging her legs on a bench, looking for a ride home. But I did hope—maybe foolishly—that she was trying to make contact with me, just like I was trying to make contact with her. After all, who was bringing her food now that Olive was gone? Maybe she wanted to text me again, but she couldn’t find a phone.

  But when I got to the train station, it was empty. Talmadge Hill was a commuter neighborhood, and the station serviced the local businessmen and women who left for Grand Central every morning around eight o’clock and returned at night in time for dinner. At three in the afternoon, it was practically a ghost town. Only one ticket window was open for business, and there was a tall, clean-shaven man sitting behind it, reading a book.

  I walked up to him and cleared my throat.

  “Where to?” he asked, barely glancing up from his book. He was younger than he looked from across the room.

  “Nowhere,” I said. “I just have a question.”

  He looked up this time and put down his book.

  “Would it be possible to talk to someone who was here on Friday?” I asked. “One of the people who was on the news, I mean?” I recalled two interviewees—a conductor and a janitor. The janitor had a potbelly and a white moustache.

  “After the suicide?”

  I nodded.

  “Sure,” he said. “That would be our janitor, Joe.”

  I set my backpack down on the floor next to my feet and gathered my courage. I was here to look for Grace, after all—or at least find out if anybody had seen her around. As for me, the last time I’d seen her was at the Valentine’s party, where she’d been wearing the long purple raincoat.

  “I’m here because of the interview Joe gave on TV,” I told the man behind the counter. “He mentioned a girl who came around here on Friday a few hours before the suicide. He said she was wearing a purple raincoat.”