Promise Me Something (16 page)

From the other side of the curtain, Lucy asked, “Have you ever stopped to consider things from my perspective, Reyna? How bad
I
felt after the accident?”

I shrugged but of course she couldn’t see me.

“Your father was in a coma with a fractured skull,” she went on. “And I was the one who had to break it to you. Do you know how hard that was for me?”

I let out the breath I had been holding. “It couldn’t have been too hard after six hours.”

“What are you talking about?” She slid off a strappy silver sandal, and I imagined her standing there half naked, the wedding gown crumpled at her waist. Hate flowered inside me, huge and grotesque.

“Six hours,” I said. “That’s how many hours between the time you got in the accident and the time you called me to tell me about it.”

“
That’s
why you hate me? Because I didn’t call sooner?”

“No.” I wanted to say,
I hate you because you’re not my mom and you never will be
. But Abby was right. It was easier to blame her for the car accident or for not calling me sooner or for just about anything else.

“I waited to call you until he was stabilized.” Lucy said. “It was for your own good, Reyna. I was thinking of
you
.”

I couldn’t answer. A memory was pulsing behind my eyes—
the
memory—the one buried like a coffin beneath the others. It had been a chilly spring morning in March. Not a nice day, exactly, but a crisp one. Mom had dropped me off at school in the morning and never made it home. A drunk driver clipped her on the highway. Her car flipped over just once, but that was enough. When I got home from school, I found out from our next-door neighbor. I had a little pink lunch box with a Velcro flap on top, and it was the only soft thing I could find to wipe my nose against when I started to cry.

A train of shiny, white taffeta appeared in my fitting room for a second below the curtain and then disappeared as Lucy pulled it away. My chest felt like a room clouded with smoke, with nowhere left to breathe. I dropped the lavender dress on the floor and sat down next to it wearing only my underwear. Then I gulped in a big breath of air.

“Reyna?” Lucy stopped moving. “Are you crying?” I didn’t answer, so she started to pull open the curtain. “Reyna, we have to get to the bottom of this—”

“Stop!” I yelped. “I’m not dressed.”

She let go as I sucked in another deep, shuddering breath. Somewhere in the corner of my mind, I wondered if I was having a panic attack.

“You know what? Let’s go home.” Lucy’s voice came through the curtain softer than before. “I’ll make you some eggs and we can talk about what’s really bothering you.”

“It doesn’t matter how nice you are to me,” I burst out. “It doesn’t change the fact that you’re not my mom and you never will be.”

Lucy let the words hang in the air.

I couldn’t explain my hatred for Lucy, but it bubbled on my skin every morning when I woke up and made me into a person I wouldn’t like to be around. I knew I was being unfair—I knew she didn’t
mean
to cause the accident, I knew she wasn’t
trying
to replace my mom—but I couldn’t let it go. Dad got sick of hearing me say I was “just tired,” but I never felt like talking to him. Instead I spent my afternoons hanging out with Gretchen and the Slutty Nurses, who only made things worse. I didn’t realize it then, but they wanted something from me. Every heart on this planet holds a tiny bit of hate, like a bead of mercury, beautiful and dangerous. They were out to own mine.

Olive took the brunt, of course. She made it easy. During homeroom one morning, when John Quincy grabbed the attendance clipboard and called out, “Miss California? Miss Rhode Island? Miss Florida?” Olive turned toward Gretchen and me and said, in her haughty way, “I suppose you two get a kick out of this.”

“No,” said Gretchen, not missing a beat. “But we get a kick out of your outfit.”

Olive was wearing a dark denim skirt that looked like something the Gap might have sold before the millennium. Ignoring Gretchen’s comment, she glanced pointedly at John Quincy and said, “Naming women after states is sexual harassment. I don’t find it funny.”

“What’s funny?” countered Gretchen, “Your skirt?”

If Levi had been in our homeroom, he probably would have stuck up for Olive or said something funny to Gretchen about her own clothes. I would have too, if something clever had popped into my head. But the only thing I could think to say was, “Denim is very Florida.”

Gretchen laughed, prompting Olive to give her the finger as Mr. Lee wrestled the attendance book out of John Quincy’s grip. Once he began taking role call for real, Olive turned around in her seat and glared at the clock, waiting for the bell to ring.

Gretchen and I shared a look; then I felt my mouth open—quick and lethal, with a mind of its own. “Lesbo,” I said.

Gretchen laughed again, louder than before. It didn’t matter that
lesbo
was a word I hadn’t heard anybody use since fifth grade. That wasn’t the point. You didn’t have to be funny to make Gretchen laugh. You just felt on the safe side when she did.

There was only thing stopping me from turning into a complete monster, and that thing was Levi. We saw each other exactly eight times a week—once every day in History and three times a week during Gym—and I lived for our conversations. In the week since our ice cream date, we’d talked about which Harry Potter house we’d be sorted into, the best way to make Rice Krispies treats, and our favorite kinds of sushi.

When Levi showed up at my locker on Friday morning with a guitar case tucked under his arm, my first thought—absurdly enough—was that first period had been cancelled. Then, as he grabbed my hand and pulled me into the first-floor stairwell, I started to wonder if he was taking me to an assembly in the auditorium. I didn’t realize until I followed him up the stairs into the empty band classroom on the second floor that we were cutting Gym.

“So what’s up?” he asked, stealing the words right out of my mouth as he closed the door behind us and hit a switch. The lights flickered on one by one, illuminating a big, cluttered room I’d seen only once before at freshman orientation. There were music stands and plastic chairs crowded in a semi-circle at the center of the room. Levi grabbed one and spun it around to sit with his legs on either side of the back.

“Um—what about Gym?” I asked, glancing toward the door.

“We get two free absences.”

“Oh.” A thrill was passing through me, running like a current down the wire of my spine. I was cutting class with Levi. Everything else about my morning—the bad milk in the fridge, the strained silence in the car with Lucy—receded into the background.

“So are you friends with Gretchen Palmer now?” Levi asked, tapping his feet against the band room floor. “I saw you guys at lunch yesterday.”

“I guess,” I said. “I mean, she invited me to sit with her.”

He frowned. “How can you be friends after what she did on Halloween?”

“I don’t know.” I pulled up a chair and sat down across from him. “Why?”

“She’s scary.”

I laughed.

“No, seriously.” Levi ran a hand over his coppery hair. “It doesn’t seem like you.”

What would seem like me?
I wanted to ask.

“I can tell you’re not shallow,” he said. “Your favorite book is
The Little Prince
.”

I tried to smile—he must have stalked me online—but all I could muster was a faint twitch of the mouth. He was right. Every person has a best self and a worst self, and Gretchen was bringing out my worst self.

Desperate to change the subject, I glanced around for something—anything—to talk about. “Is that your guitar?”

“Yeah.” He kicked the case with his toe. “Talk about old friends.”

The wistful tone in his voice softened me. I relaxed into the back of my chair and imagined myself leaning in to kiss him on the lips—to let him know I belonged to him, not Gretchen. But all I could think to say was, “How long have you played?”

“As long as I can remember.”

“It looks hard.”

“Not really.” He pulled the guitar from its case and passed it to me. “Try.”

I didn’t even know where to place my hands. I wrapped my right arm under the curved base and reached up for the strings.

Levi laughed.

“What?” I asked. “Not like this?”

“No.” He came around and stood behind me, moving my arm over the top of the guitar so that my palm rested near the hole at the center. Then he guided my other hand over to the stem and pressed my pointer finger onto one of the strings. “Like this.”

“This?”

“Yeah.” He was leaning over me awkwardly, his guitar pick necklace dangling by my ear. I could feel the heat coming off his body. “Play,” he instructed.

I strummed for a few seconds while holding down the chord. It sounded pretty good, but then again, I’d never heard a guitar sound bad.

“That’s it,” said Levi. “You’re a pro.”

I would have kept playing all day as long as we could stay in the band room together, alone, almost touching. But the minute he took a step back, I fumbled the chord.

“Are you doing anything for Valentine’s Day?”

The question took me by surprise. I pressed my fingers onto the guitar strings to quiet them and looked up. Levi was watching me out of the corner of his eye.

“I don’t know yet,” I answered. “Are you?”

“Maybe.” He glanced down at his sneakers and looked, for once in his life, a little nervous. “Do you want to come to a party with my Ridgeway friends?”

“You have Ridgeway friends?”

“Yeah.” He grabbed a sheet of music off the floor. “But it’s not their party. Just some girl they know. Can I see the guitar?”

I handed it to him and watched as he started to strum the chords of “House of the Rising Sun.” It sounded twangy and full of omen and also pretty catchy.

“OK,” I said, tapping my foot on the leg of my chair. “I’ll be there.”

I can’t.

Why not?

They’d just send me back.

To your aunt’s house?

To boot camp.

What?

To cure me again.

GAY boot camp?

Bingo. The only place in the world where they leave notes on your pillow like, “The opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality. It’s holiness.”

Don’t tell me you believe that crap.

My dad’s a minister, Olive. My mom teaches Sunday school. You may think it’s crap, but I grew up believing it.

Hating yourself, you mean?

If I could change myself for them, I would.

There is nothing about you that needs to be cured.

I wish I could believe you.

M
y brain, as Valentine’s Day approached, became as flimsy and full of holes as a paper doily. I couldn’t seem to remember to floss my teeth or clean my room or study between periods at school. What I
did
remember was to make every possible excuse to hang out with Levi. I even dropped by the band room one afternoon to talk to Mr. Wilson, the music instructor and the only male teacher at Belltown High with a ponytail and earrings. He was sitting at his desk, sorting through CDs when I knocked on the door and asked whether there were any spots left in his advanced guitar elective.

“What do you play?” he asked, sizing me up. “Acoustic or electric?”

“Neither, but I’m a fast learner,” I said.

He gave me a big, crinkly smile that stretched from one silver-hoop earring to the other and then pointed at his wedding ring. “Ah, the things we do for love.”

I was too embarrassed to show my face in the band room after that, but I did purposefully leave my math binder in a classroom across the hall so I’d have an excuse to come back at the end of the day as Levi’s class let out.

And it worked. As I lingered by room 206, Levi stepped out of room 207 and waved at me. Waving back, I smiled and pointed at the classroom. “I forgot my binder in there.”

“What a coincidence,” he said. “I left my jacket in the library. Want to walk with me?”

“Sure,” I said, ducking into room 206 to grab my binder. The library was on the opposite side of school. It was the perfect excuse to spend time together.