The Keeper's Vow

by B. F. Simone

  “Stupid girl. I’m your family. They’ll get you killed!”

  Katie shook to the bone. It was true she was scared—she was a coward, and a liar—but she wasn’t stupid. She hadn’t had a choice. Not a real one. She had made the right decision. “No.” She said barely audible.

  “What?”

  “I’m not stupid.” Tears started to fall. Her throat burned with all the anger and fear she’d been keeping inside. It was his fault she was in this situation.

  “Well, you’re not smart.”

  “How the hell is this my fault?” she screamed. It came out like fire.

  “Listen to me. And Goddamnit you better hear me. You’re done. This little game you think you’ve been playing is over. Never go to that house again.”

  “You can’t stop me. They’re my family. They took care of me when you wouldn’t.” Katie never thought she’d throw that in his face. Her childhood wasn’t all roses and rainbows. Her and her dad had a tough time when she was young, sometimes she had to stay with the Anderson’s for months because he worked at odd times of the day—and sometimes drank too much. It wasn’t like that now, they were fine now. At least that was the silent agreement they’d come to.

  “I can make you forget your family,” he spat.

  In his eyes she saw a monster who’d take her memories away—in his eyes she saw Glock.

  She turned and ran.

  Katie smacked into Tristan as she flew out of the house. She didn’t stop to access the damage. She couldn’t stop. She had to keep running, her book-bag slapping against her back. It was amazing how much farther she could run when it wasn’t around a track and when her legs pumped with rage. Rage she didn’t know she still had about things that didn’t matter anymore.

  When she finally stopped Tristan wasn’t far behind her. What was she going to do? She had just officially ran away from home. She laughed trying to release whatever was making her shake, but stopped when it almost turned into a sob.

  She sat down on a bus bench. She was still clenching her book-bag. “I take it you know what happened?” she said. There was a girl with blue hair walking down the street. There were a lot of cars out. Rush hour maybe. She looked for other things to focus on.

  “Don’t have to read your mind to know how that went.” Tristan stood next to her.

  She fidgeted on the bench. There was so much anger swirling in her body she thought she was going to explode. She gripped the wood, it was making her hand gritty and dirty.

  “Come on,” Tristan said. He grabbed her book-bag and started to jog. She followed.

  Her legs pounded on the concrete. Her feet hurt but the pain was better than the one unpacking all of her childhood memories. Calling Lucinda once in the middle of the night because her dad never came home. Who did that to a ten-year old?

  Tristan jogged into Findley Park and sat her bag down. “Come at me, like I showed you yesterday,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt. He threw it on the tall grass and untucked his undershirt.

  “I’m not in the mood to practice,” she said. Her dad had never even apologized. All the years she’d spent growing up with the Anderson’s. One day he picked her up and pretended like she hadn’t been there for an entire month. He never mentioned where he’d gone, no one had bothered to tell her her father was probably on a bender. She had to figure that one out on her own.

  Tristan kicked her leg and pushed her off balance. She caught herself before she hit the ground.

  “Don’t,” she yelled. “I’m so not in the mood.” Katie ground her teeth and dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand.

  He did it again. She swung to slap him and he pushed her arm away. She tried to shove him and he slapped her arms out. She could feel her throat burning again. She swung at him and landed a punch on his arm.

  He laughed.

  “Asshole,” she yelled and swung again, and again and again. Each time he blocked and tried to push her off balance.

  With out thinking she faked a punch and went for an uppercut. It landed on his chin.

  Tristan cursed and rubbed his chin. “I didn’t teach you that one,” he smiled. “Try it again.”

  Tears fell from her eyes, but she didn’t care if he saw them. Not while she was punching at his face and everything she’d keep bottled up for years.

  They fought in the park until they couldn’t see each other. Sweaty and tired, she laid out on the grass and stared at the stars between the trees. A weight was lifted and she could breathe. It didn’t matter that she was laying in the middle of a park and homeless.

  Tristan sat down next to her.

  “You stayed at my house that entire time?” she said.

  Silence.

  “You’re such a creeper,” Katie laughed.

  “If I hadn’t been there where would you be now?”

  She couldn’t tell if that question was directed at her or himself.

  “Where did you come from?” Katie said it before she thought it. She couldn’t imagine what his life was like, who he was, or is.

  “I left from Idaho after my parents died. Since then I lived in New York.”

  “With other family members?” Lucinda did have a big family.

  “No.”

  She couldn’t see his face, but she imagined that blank mask he wore. “When did they—how old were you?”

  “Seven.”

  Katie felt a deep unease slowly slide into her. “Sorry,” she whispered. She wanted to know more, but she couldn’t say it. Not out-loud.

  They listened to crickets and the wind rustle the black leaves.

  “Do you hear all of my thoughts?”

  “I try not to.”

  “When did you start hearing them?”

  He was quiet for a long time. She figure he didn’t want to talk about it.

  “I had just turned seven—when it happened.”

  Katie’s eyes widen. A thousand questions flew through her mind. How? Why? Did it have something to do with his parent’s death? Could he hear her this whole time? All these years?

  His breath quickened. “It depends on how close you are,” he said, answering only one of them.

  “What?”

  “I hear your thoughts better when we are closer. The farther you are the less I hear. But the last week has been like listening to talk radio nonstop.”

  Katie thought about what Allison said, that night, after her first training session. He probably didn’t get a kick out of it like she thought.

  Tristan laughed, “You can be really annoying.”

  Katie grunted.

  He laughed harder when she hit him. It struck her that she’d never heard him laugh like that before. It was light and unguarded.

  He stopped.

  Silence passed between them. Katie smiled. She couldn’t help it. “You’re so awkward. Oh my god. You really are. You make everything so much weirder than it has to be.”

  “Maybe if you didn’t scrutinize everything I did,” Tristan said, defensively.

  “That’s what people do. That’s how you—I don’t know—learn about a person.”

  “You’re learning me?”

  She could hear him smile. “See, you just made the most natural thing sound weird.”

  She laid there and he sat there for hours. Like two homeless vagabonds. They spent most of the time arguing about movies, songs, and video games. Everything with him was an argument. She liked cowboy space operas and he thought they came from a special place in hell. She liked art, he thought it was a waste of time and energy. She thought it was perfectly normal to want to smack politeness into him and he thought she was a lunatic for trying. Nonetheless, he talked more in those hours than he had since she met him.

  They were quiet for a while before she said aloud what she was thinking. “I heard you, the other day. In my mind.”

  “I know.”

  “So it works both ways?”

  “Yeah,” he breathed.

  “Then why can’t I hear you now?”r />
  “I don’t know. Maybe you forgot how—” He clipped the last word.

  More questions rushed to her mind.

  “Katalina,” he begged.

  Katie could make out his silhouette. He held his head in his hands. “Sorry,” she said, trying to still her mind. It was the hardest thing—trying to not think.

  “You can think. It’s just I can’t focus on what you’re saying without hearing your thoughts too. Then, throw in your acute ability to think fifteen things at once…”

  Katie sat up. “Maybe that’s it.”

  “No,” Tristan said at the same time.

  “Why not? I only want to try.” She stared at him. If she thought about hearing him, maybe she would.

  “What if I don’t want you in my head.”

  She didn’t have to voice how much of a double standard that was. She ignored his protest and stared at him. His dark eyes glinted in the moonlight.

  “You call me creepy? You should see your face right now.” He turned away

  Katie scowled. “I’m concentrating.”

  Tristan blurted out a laugh. “Don’t ever do it again.”

  Katie pushed him but he didn’t budge. “Is that a vampire thing?” She had noticed how solid he was. He was like a wall most of the time. She watched the way he made an effort to relax his body.

  “Sort of. Stop watching me.” He turned away from her and played with the grass between his fingers.

  “You know, you were right,” Katie said. “In the grand scheme of things, Sports Day really doesn’t matter.” Katie reached for her bag and pulled out her cellphone. It was past four in the morning. She had no missed calls or messages. “So much for being concerned about my safety. He didn’t even call.” The way her dad said he’d make her forget, set her on fire again.

  “He knows you’d go to Lucinda’s.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Tristan turned to face her.

  “Am I there now?” Katie said, realizing she could in fact be dead in a park and her dad would never know it.

  “Touché.”

  She laid back on the grass and stared at the patches of deep blue and stars—until she was waking up. The sky was morning-blue and hazy. She sat up and Tristan’s button-down shirt fell off her. He was sitting in the same spot. She checked her phone. It was half-past six.

  “Thanks,” she said, stretching. She handed his shirt to him.

  “Actually, you just took it,” he said, brushing loose dirt and grass off it. “What time does your dad go to work?” he asked, pointing at a bit of grass stuck to her face.

  Katie wiped off the grass and drool. Under normal circumstances she would have been mortified, but she had just spent the night in a park after running away from home. She was over having shame.

  Tristan laughed under his breath.

  “He has an early morning shift on Saturday’s. He’s already gone.” Katie wondered if he had been looking forward to going to the zoo with her after work. I think it’s fair to say that’s no longer on the agenda. She stood up and grabbed her bag.

  “I’m going to go home and grab some stuff—wanna’ come?” Katie half-expected him to pass.

  He shrugged. “Sure.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  She slipped into her house to pack a bag. Tristan followed her up to her room and analyzed it like an art gallery.

  “I wouldn’t exactly describe it as an art gallery,” he said, touching the robot stickers on her dresser. He touched her giant green bean bag and stared at her purple-fur rug. “Nothing matches. It’s like a whole bunch of crap thrown together. It suits you,” he said, giving the room another survey. He stopped at the orange cat-shaped lamp.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Katie said, trying to figure out what else to take. What did people take when they ran away? How long was she supposed to run away? Almost none of her clothes were clean, she’d neglected laundry all week. She grabbed the only clean tank-top left and went to the bathroom.

  She took a quick shower and washed her hair. She hated dressing in a steamy bathroom but she had no choice. When she went back into her room, she caught him looking through her book collection.

  “Is this what you buy at that weird bookstore?”

  She nodded, looking for a pair of socks. For some reason she always forgot socks. It was a little nerve-racking having him in her room. She tried to pretend like it was fine, but it was odd how he studied her stuff.

  “I’m ‘learning’ you,” he said. Even though she knew he was mocking her, she blushed. She turned from him to hide her face, knowing that it was pointless.

  Katie rummaged through her dresser drawers for her old middle school gym clothes. She was going to do laundry last night—

  “We could always skip the Preliminaries,” she said, finding the old shirt. She pulled it over her head. It was a little tight, but she was wearing the tank top too.

  Tristan was staring at her, she could feel his eyes burning into her. “Something tells me it would be tight even if you took off the other shirt.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  He blinked.

  “Stop calling me fat! I’m not fat.”

  “I never said fat.” He shook his head as if to get rid of a buzzing fly. “That shirt looks like it belongs to a six-year-old.”

  Katie looked at herself in the mirror. Her old shirt was faded and clinging to her. To be fair, she was the size of a blade of grass in middle school. It wasn’t until the last two years that she actually grew anything…

  Tristan’s eyes grew wide.

  “EW!” Katie yelled. Had she been thinking about what she looked like naked? Had she thought about it clearly enough for him to see. Thinking about what she could have been thinking made images flash in her mind. She was just in the shower. He probably heard her in there washing herself….She smacked her head. “Get out! Get out!”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “GET OUT OF MY ROOM!”

  It was thirty minutes before she opened her room door and peeked down the hall. He was gone. Completely. She sat down on her bed next to her packed duffle bag. It overflowed with clothes, a tube of play-dough, her first edition, Peter Pan, and her “Hang In There” kitty poster. She was kidding herself. How long could this last. She wasn’t adult-enough to run away. Adults packed essential things. Adults had essential things. Where was she running away to? Lucinda’s? Sure, they’d take her, but it wasn’t her home anymore. She couldn’t sit around all day in pajamas collecting cereal bowls in front of the TV. They didn’t watch Star Wars from start to finish on random weekends. Lucinda would never try eating Flaming-Cheetos and sardines for dinner.

  Katie breathed back the tears that were welling up inside of her. He still hadn’t even called. He wasn’t supposed to actually let her run away. He was supposed to be here when she got back. Angry, but glad she was okay. For the second time in her life she hated him.

  She hugged her pillow and laid against her headboard. She needed to be angry again. Angry was always better than crying like an idiot.

  Her phone rang. She jumped up and searched her room. It was under her duffle bag. Her heart sank when she saw Lucinda’s name.

  “Hello?”

  “Katie. Hi, Sweetheart. I hope you’re excited for the Preliminaries this morning”

  “Well—”

  “I don’t mean to cut you off sweetie, but I need to know if you’ve seen Tristan?” There was a light strain in her voice. Katie left her room and looked through the house for Tristan. Her heart sank. Lucinda was obviously worried about the self-sufficient-totally-independent nephew who didn’t show up last night. Her dad didn’t even send a text message. Father of the year goes to—

  “Uh,” Katie looked in the living room. She didn’t know what to say. The whole truth? A half-truth? A lie?

  “Katie, have you seen him? What’s going on?”

  “Well, I did see him—” She opened the
front door. To do what? Look up and down the street? Why couldn’t she just tell the truth?

  “Katie? Katie, do you know something? Katie, talk to me.”

  She didn’t have to say anything. He was sitting there on her porch. Katie handed him the phone.

  She could still hear Lucinda on the other end. “Katie?”

  “She’s not here at the moment but I can give her the phone back,” Tristan said, looking unenthused. “No, I stayed out late—I don’t have a cell phone—Katalina has a weird thing about people using her phone—I’m not at her house, she just so happened to find me. We’re at a bar—I’m kidding. I’m kidding—It was more funny than you’re giving credit to.” He held the phone away from his ear and rolled his eyes. “I’m not a kid—fine, whatever—I’m not going to the Preliminaries—well I don’t have a change of clothes—are you serious? I can wash my own clothes—I—Okay—OKAY.” Tristan handed the phone to Katie.

  “—This is completely unacceptable. It may come as a surprise to you, but people worry about you. Do you understand me?” Lucinda’s voice was high pitched and thin.

  Katie tried to hand the phone back to Tristan. He ignored her.

  “Hello? Tristan? Tristan?”

  “Hi,” Katie said in a small voice. “He—”

  “I’ll see you both at the school nine o’clock sharp.” Lucinda hung up.

  The only thing that pissed Lucinda off that much was politics. Now, Katie was implemented in the disappearance of Tristan. “Please, try not to make her fly of the handle. At the moment I’m very homeless and in need of a place to stay.”

  “Are you kidding me? That woman smothers. We’re better off sleeping in parks.”

  The streets were busy as they walked to the school. Katie felt like everyone knew she was running away. Her book-bag was full to the brim with toiletries and knick-knacks, and her duffle bag full of resentment, guilt, and play dough. By the time they arrived at the school her shoulder hurt and she felt a little annoyed that Tristan hadn’t offered to help her as she fumbled around with both bags.

  “Pack lighter next time,” he said, walking up the steps. The school was busy. People chatting in groups, mainly adults.