Every Last Promise (4 page)

KANSAS CITY BUSTLES. IT
is a place with noise and concrete and highways made up of more than two lanes, and Aunt Bea lives on a street where the houses face off from one another across streets where lawns are square and tidy. I already knew that I was a small-town girl, born and bred and content to stay there. I couldn't hear in that city. Couldn't think. Breathe. When my sleep wasn't full of nightmares, I dreamed about land that went on forever and how an autumn sunset over the fields contained a thousand shades of orange and gold.

When I woke, sweating, I remembered that I was hundreds of miles away from home in a room that was stark, without anything that could identify it as mine: competition trophies, half-used cakes of eye shadow, photos covering more of the mirror than they let through—of me and my friends, me sitting tall on my horse, me against the backdrop of the river or an endless turquoise summer sky.

Hundreds of miles and a million worlds away from home.

Mom drives me to school on the first day, those lines of worry I'm getting used to deep around her eyes. I haven't
been behind the wheel of a car since May. Thinking about it makes my muscles seize.

I stand in the doorway to first period math class and stare at the empty desk next to Pete Sloan, uncertain if it's the seat I should take. It's in the middle of the room and all around him are people.
My
people. Once upon a time. My old friends, the ones who would cluster around me to defend me from anything the world could throw at me. Even Pete, who was never anyone special to me. Just another guy on the football team. Last year, I would have taken that center-of-it-all seat without a second thought.

Now, my old friends see me and quickly turn away or stare too long, challenge or disgust pooling in their eyes. I fight back tears. I fight back the inclination to run. Again.

I nibble the tip of a pen then draw myself up to every bit of my five-seven height, cross the room, dump my bag on the desk next to Pete, and slide into the seat, focusing on a hangnail on my left hand like it's the most interesting thing I've ever seen. Pete's stopped talking to the person sitting on the other side of him and I know he's looking at me, his brows drawn together, perplexed.

“Jesus.” He draws it out. “You're back.”

It's better than the other things he could have said.

“I am.” I'm back. I'm here. In this school, in this class, in this seat in the middle of the room. With everyone staring at
me, my skin crawling, trying not to choke on the lump in my throat.

He stares at me for a few seconds. An uncomfortably long time. Is he mapping the face of a killer? Is he wondering if saying anything else to me would taint him?

“I'm saving that seat for T. J.,” he says, glancing to the front of the room as though seating assignments are written on the board.

“Oh. Sorry.” For some reason, my body doesn't want to move, and I realize I crave talking to someone I used to know. Our conversation spikes a high that I'm scared to come down from. It's a taste of the girl I used to be, the one who was friends with everyone, the one without a care in the world.

But he stares at me as I twist the pen again, grinding it against my lips. I want to pull my arms in close to my sides, my knees to my chest, become too small to see. But I need to spread out, claim space. Tell everyone,
I'm here
.
I'm not leaving again.

Pete leans across the aisle toward me. Every breath I take is air filled with his scent: boy sweat and grass. He says something, but I have no idea what it is because my ears are suddenly buzzing. My chest plummets and I lean forward to hide my need to breathe like a girl trapped under dark river water. Every morning until graduation, I will see these people in my first period class, in second period, in third.
How long until I stop feeling this way?

I turn back to Pete, my temples throbbing, and interrupt whatever he was saying. “I'll move. Don't want to take T. J.'s seat.”

His eyebrow twitches. I jump to my feet and snatch my backpack as T. J. trips through the doorway and spies me at his desk.

“No way, she's back?” His voice travels across the room. A chorus of noise—coughs, incomprehensible words—rises behind me. Does he even remember that night we spun in his truck, the hundreds of flirtatious one-liners he had tossed my way? “Killer Kayla. Ha. I didn't even have to work for that one.”

I meet Pete's eyes again. They've softened around the edges. He frowns, looks at T. J. and back at me, hesitating. As though he doesn't want to agree with T. J. but doesn't want to stand up to him, either. The misshapen bones in my ankle seize and I swallow back a rise of emotion. “Don't—never mind.”

I spin away from the desk and sit at another empty one in the far row. I hope I haven't taken someone else's spot.

Killer.

As though I had intent.

Bean is in the seat across the aisle from me. I see her and my mouth tastes like sawdust, like the dry air at a horse
meet. I want my horse near me now so I can climb into the saddle and escape. Seeing Bean makes me forget why I came home. Makes me scared of the things I know, things I've witnessed. She peers at me, her wide eyes seeming to convey some secret message that I refuse to pick up. She looks different somehow. All color and no form. A cloud of red, a wall of green. Paler than usual but her cheeks and lips brighter, like a slushy spilled on snow. But Bean never wears makeup and I can't look at her, flushed like that.

“Hi,” she whispers.

I look around the room at everyone pretending not to see me.

“Hi,” I say, letting my eyes stop on the whiteboard.

My tongue trips over the words I want to say—
I missed you, I have questions I don't want the answers to
—so instead of talking I take out a piece of paper, unfolding and smoothing it on the tabletop so that I look like I have something to do. I look up to see Pete still staring at me, turned around in his seat, his sharp-jawed face softened with a mixture of curiosity and sadness, and I don't want it.

Selena walks into the classroom and I sink down in my seat. Even when we were friends she had an edge. A personality that rolled like a pot of boiling water. Moods that changed with every pop of a bubble. But she was always loyal to her friends. I was hoping, maybe, she might have moved
on from hating me for what I did.

But of course she hasn't. I've never tested her loyalty like this before. No one has. And now I know there's a line. A limit.

When she spots me, Selena pauses between me and Bean.

“You really
are
back,” she breathes.

“I'm back.” There is too much hope in my voice. She pounces on it.

“You should have stayed away. Nobody wants you here.”

I know. And knowing makes my next breath catch low in my lungs so that I have to strangle it out. I hate faltering in front of Selena and Bean and everyone else staring at us. In another world, these are the moments we would have watched other people have, the ones that would sustain gossip for days at a time. I never imagined I would be at the center of those stories.

Bean rubs at a spot on her desk with her thumb. Listening but slouched over the wood. Hiding.

“You'd better move along, then,” I say. My voice is tight. I bite the inside of my mouth and remind myself that I'm the one in the wrong. I'm the one who ran. I'm the one who killed a boy. And now, instead of begging for my friends back, I'm pushing them further away. I take a slow, deep breath and hold my hands toward her, palms open. “Look, Selena—”

“Don't,” she cuts me off abruptly. Selena's eyes shift.
When she sees the approval in the faces of our classmates, her voice rises. “You did a horrible thing. I can't even talk to you.”

She walks away and I stare at my desk as talking rises again in the classroom. Selena says the things she's supposed to. The words that prove she's on their side, not mine. But she's not wrong. I
did
do a horrible thing. I look away. Catch Bean's eye again, finally. Her neck is covered with red splotches. It's not exactly strange, the way she's sitting there quietly while Selena says these things to me. Bean never teased or mocked anyone. It isn't like her. But that she's not pulling Selena away, telling her to stop being mean or even that I'm not worth their effort?

She's acting like Selena isn't her best friend.

She's acting like they don't even know each other.

Bean looks at the floor. Her fingernails pick at a fraying thread at the hem of her shirt. Her spine curls, like she can make herself smaller. Like she can disappear.

The pen in my fist scribbles a tiny oval on my paper, through my paper, drilling a tiny hole in my desk. The manic doodling is the only way I can keep my hands from shaking.

My head remains lowered until the sound in my ears dies down, my brain wills my chest to rise and fall slower . . . slower . . . slow enough that they can't tell if I'm still breathing, how I'm feeling, if I feel anything at all. Numbness, when it settles over me, is a relief. I fold the paper into tiny squares,
hoping the passing minutes cause everyone to forget what they just heard Serena tell me.

My parents call what happened an “accident” so much that even I've started to believe them, believe that it was all something that I had no control over.

Coming home means I have to tear the word “accident” apart and face the ripped-edge truth of each little piece, whatever that is. I stash the square of paper away as class starts. When I finally look up, I'm startled to find Bean watching me.

“It must be weird,” she whispers, and the way she's looking at me, intently, and the way her back is straight again, her body leaning toward me, make me realize that she's not trying to avoid
me
. She's looking for something. What? No, I know what, in a way. But what . . .
exactly
? I can't meet her eyes. I don't want to know the exact thing, so instead I connect the freckles on the bridge of her nose like they are constellations. “Weird . . . not remembering something that happened to you.”

The sheriff might have been camping in the hospital hallways, the way he showed up in my room only moments after I woke up from the accident the day after it happened. He asked questions, and I answered them as best I could. My best wasn't very good. Scenes from the night before were an aching jumble. I was honest then, telling him the events were mostly in a fog. He was understanding. Patted my hand, made some comment about oiled gravel, and wished me a
quick recovery before he left.

“Memory loss is weird,” I say, twirling my pen between my fingers.

“Do you think you ever will? Remember?”

“The doctor said it is possible.”

“When?” Her fingers aren't rubbing anything anymore. They're clutching to the sides of her desk. “I mean, if it comes back.”

“It's hard to say. Brains take time to heal.”

“But it
will
heal,” she says.

“I don't know.” I shift to the left and look exaggeratedly toward the front of the room, but the teacher is arranging piles of books and doesn't seem to care about the pockets of chatter throughout the room.

Bean makes a noise in the back of her throat and pulls her hair forward, over her shoulder. I expect her to twirl a piece around her finger or comb it absently, maybe, things she would have done months ago while we had a conversation, but she doesn't. She just holds the thickness of it in her fist. As though it steadies her. She frowns. “That must be frustrating.”

“Frustrating,” I repeat. “Yeah.”

She releases her hair. Her voice softens. “Sometimes things happen for the best. Maybe not remembering . . . is a good thing.”

My pulse begins to speed up. Because if she's saying I
shouldn't remember what happened that night, it means there's a possibility that I'm doing the right thing by coming home, by keeping my secrets. That even though I've stayed silent because I've wanted to, I'm not the only one.

Then again, Bean is exactly the kind of person who would keep bad things secret, if just to spare anyone else the trouble of dealing with them. Is that what's happening here? If so, that means I'm a certain kind of person. Not just a girl who kills. A girl who lets others fall on swords for her.

That's not who I want to be.

But I'm scared to ask and find out for sure.

“Maybe I will remember. Sometime.”

Bean's entire body perks up.

“But maybe not. Brains are weird.” I jab the tip of the pen into the cover of my textbook.
I just want to come home
.

Bean deflates again. “I'm sorry, Kayla. This is probably upsetting you.”

“Yeah . . .” I tug on a strand of hair. She doesn't know why it's upsetting to me. Not
all
of the reasons. But then she doesn't know what I know—remember—either, which is everything. And that makes me question who should be more upset, between the two of us.

I have to move the conversation away from that night. To anything else. I take the book Malcolm Hart passes over his shoulder back to me, open it, and pretend to read the intro. “Precalc is supposed to be pretty hard, right? And Mr. Klein
is a beast. Not looking forward to it.”

Bean bites her lip and looks down, a sheen of disappointment covering her features. But I push it out of my mind and start taking notes.

Yeah, I was honest when I woke up at the hospital.

Less so now. But is telling Bean that I remember clearly what happened that night the right thing to do? Or does she want to bury it, pretend it never happened, as much as I do?

I get through my next two classes, keeping my head down, only speaking when I absolutely have to, before I see them. The figures, siblings, standing by my locker are as familiar as anything else at home. Jay Brewster in his letterman jacket, Jen Brewster with her brown hair trailing down her back. Her shirt is new, the straps rounding over strong shoulders, but her fitted jeans are old. Perfectly faded. A year ago, it's an outfit we would have planned together. Now, she looks me up and down, taking me in without a change in her expression. She is unreadable. I don't know what Jen's thinking—something that would have been impossible last spring—because, unlike everyone who had something horrible to say to me after the accident, Jen had said nothing. No texts, no emails, no calls. That was the worst thing that could happen between us.