Vengeance (18 page)

There must’ve been some school football game starting soon, because the street and the sidewalk flooded with people despite the rain. Drunk people, happy people, sad people. People. And suddenly I could see my future as clearly as she was seeing hers. I saw her disappear. I saw people come and go. I saw us swept in opposite directions. I saw her look for me for a minute, lose sight of me, and start moving.

I saw her leave.

We all slept in our regular rooms that night. I hadn’t seen Justin or Janna all day. I didn’t see Kevin until later at night, when we were going to sleep. I hadn’t gone on any tours, just wandered the city, feeling lost. I told Mrs. Adams that I had a stomach bug, and since nobody else skipped, I guess she believed me.

The next morning, it was still raining, but our flight left on time. On the back of the shuttle from the subway to the airport terminal, I heard Justin saying, “But how can they fly in the rain?”

And a collective groan rose from over half the bus.

I smiled to myself.

Delaney was in the front row, sitting next to this girl, Tess, from her classes. After we got to the airport, as we were all going through security, I pulled Tess back by the elbow.

She scrunched her face and looked around. Yeah, we probably had never had a conversation before. “Are you sitting with Delaney?” I asked.

“Uh, yeah,” she said, throwing her shoes onto the conveyer belt. “Unless you were planning on it?”

“She hates to fly,” I said, ignoring her question.

“I noticed,” she said.

“So this time how about you try to distract her or something.” Then I threw my bag in front of hers and jumped her place in line.

I walked past Justin’s row on the plane and said, “Hey.” He had a cut on his bottom lip, but it didn’t look too bad.

“Hey,” he said. I slid into the row behind him. Conversation over.

Janna had a ball cap on and her hair flew wildly out of the bottom in every direction. I saw Justin grin at her, saw her eyes go wide, watched as she passed his row and slid in beside me instead.

I must’ve been smiling at her because she snapped, “What?”

“Nothing,” I said.

She pulled the brim of her hat lower and slouched in her seat. “Shut up,” she said.

Kevin slid into the seat beside Justin, but not before turning around and resting his chin on the back of his chair with a huge smile. “Hiiiii, Janna,” he said. Justin punched him in the arm, and he turned back around.

“Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I think he’s a great guy, and I hear he’s totally—”

“Shut. Up,” she said. But it was too late. Kevin and I couldn’t stop laughing, even though Justin smacked him over the head in the seat in front of us.

“You know what
I
heard,” Kevin said. And that set us off again.

Joanne picked us up at the airport, and home started seeping in, straight to my bones. We arrived at her house, and I realized that this was it. The last time we’d be together. The last time I’d sneak over to her house or she’d sneak over to mine, or we’d sit on the floor of her room doing nothing or different things or the same thing. That next year, not too long from now, this will be done.

That she was going to leave. And maybe I’d go somewhere, be some guy that nobody knows. Never knowing the version of me before my father died. Never knowing the guy who once loved the girl next door. Or maybe I wouldn’t go anywhere. It all felt the same anyway. I could go clear across the country, hear a drip of water, and be right back here again.

This place wouldn’t change. But we would.

In a year, I won’t be mad at her. I won’t be so angry I can’t look at her, won’t feel the panic clawing at my throat. I won’t feel any of those things because I will not see her at all.

I felt my breath coming fast, felt the panic coming on. I saw Delaney watching me in the rearview mirror. Because now she knew. She knew I was thinking about her. She turned around in her seat and said, “Hey,” like she was reminding me that she was still here.

“I’m okay,” I said, leaning my head back against the seat. But couldn’t she see what was coming? She was still going to disappear from my life. And it would be because of me. She was going to be exactly where she said she’d be. But I wouldn’t.

I promised her I would. Months ago. Even though I’d meant it when I said it, I wondered whether—like everything else between us—it now counted as a lie.

Chapter 11

July Fourth. I hadn’t seen her for two days—my dad and I had been camping, and we’d been stuck in holiday traffic, so I didn’t get home before we were supposed to meet up with everyone for the fireworks. She’d texted that she was going to wait for me. I told her to go. There was this field, two blocks past Main Street, and everyone, my parents included, took picnic blankets and hung out before and then after. I told her I’d meet her there.

It was dusk when I arrived, hours after I was supposed to meet her, and the fireworks were getting ready to start. I saw her standing with Kevin and Tara and Maya—this was right before Kevin dumped Tara and hooked up with Maya, but you could feel it starting already.

I saw her back, the way the breeze lifted her hair up off her back for a second before it settled back down. I saw her turn her face and smile at something Maya said. I pushed around people. Past people. She didn’t hear me coming.

I was standing right behind her, and she was watching the sky, like she was waiting for something to happen. I brushed her hair to the side. Kissed her shoulder. Felt her melt back into me. She didn’t turn around at first—I was embarrassing her, with everyone standing right there, watching. I knew I was. I didn’t care. I wrapped my arms around her waist and kissed her neck.

Then she spun around, threaded her arms around my neck, pressed herself to me so hard I almost stumbled backward, and she kissed me. I mean she
kissed
me.

Guess I wasn’t embarrassing her. Someone cleared their throat. We ignored them. She was still kissing me.

We were standing in the middle of a field in the middle of a crowd in the middle of an event and I didn’t care. She didn’t care.

“So, you missed me,” I said, still so close that my lips brushed over hers as I spoke.

She pulled away from me for a second. Got this look like she was coming up with one of her epic plans, and I braced myself for her idea: maybe to climb a tree to get a better view, to run to the store and get snacks, to time the fireworks for some project I didn’t understand. I’d say yes, what ever it was. I’d say yes.

“Do you want to go?” she asked.

I’d just gotten there. The fireworks were about to start. It took me a second to realize what she meant, with her fingers hooked into my belt loops, and the way she was pressed up against me, and the way I could tell she was blushing, even in the dark.

My stomach dropped. I thought,
Please mean what I think you mean
. “Yes,” I said. “Yes. Yes.”

“So … yes?” she asked. She was smiling, and she was nervous.

“I mean maybe, I don’t know, let me think about it. …” But I was pulling her by both hands, and I was laughing. I was practically running.

Nobody watched us leave—they had all turned away; we were probably embarrassing ourselves. I didn’t care.

She stopped in the middle of the street before we got back to my house and said, “I love you,” with this really serious expression, like she hadn’t said it before.

“I know,” I said.

“No, I mean …” She waved her arms around like she couldn’t come up with the word she was looking for.

“Delaney,” I said, and my arm was around her waist, and my face was an inch from hers. “I
know
.”

I remember thinking I was the luckiest person on earth.

I told her I couldn’t stand to be away from her.

I told her I’d follow her anywhere.

“Promise me,” she said, with her arms wrapped around me.

I promised her over and over and over.

I looked at her now, sitting in the front seat of the car. That was only three months ago. I’d been so stupid to think that anything lasted forever. Not a promise. Not a life. Not us, either.

Not in the way we had been, anyway.

Joanne pulled the car into her driveway, but I was looking at my house. It was Sunday, so nobody was working, but I could tell there’d been progress. I wondered how much longer it would be before we could move in. I walked in the front door, and my mom tilted her head toward our house and said, “Shouldn’t be long, now,” like she could read my thoughts. “How was Boston?”

“Big,” I said at the same time that Delaney said, “Crowded.”

I’d planned to go to Boston for her. I was making every decision about my future for a girl. And one I wasn’t even seeing anymore. I was a cliché. It had never even occurred to me to go to Boston before she mentioned it. I hadn’t even attended a single tour. It wasn’t for me.

“I think,” I said, “I want to stay in Maine.”

I knew Delaney heard me when I said it. I felt her pause. Felt the whole room pause. But it was true. In that moment, with my mom ruffling my hair, and looking at that house I’d grown up in, where my dad had lived, I wanted to stay.

Or maybe this was all part of the curse. It got a hold of my ankles, tethering me to the earth. Taking and taking, like I had taken from it, taking and making me watch:
everyone but her
.

I pulled the recorder out of my luggage after everyone had gone to bed and listened to the last recording. He’d started it after we entered the room, and Delaney’s discomfort, his curiosity, my annoyance whispered around me. I hit Delete.
Then I went to the saved files and listened to the previous recording, to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

It was his voice.

“Delaney,” he said. “A high school senior. Claims to have an affinity toward sickness.”

Delete.

The one before it, I could hear Delaney’s voice. “Ten? Yes, yes, I can make it.” He had taped their phone conversation.

Delete.

And before that, another phone call. Dr. Josh was fishing for information. “Tell me about the accident that led to the brain injury.”

“I fell through the ice,” she said. “I was under for a long time.”

“Where was this?” He was searching for something—he was searching for
us
.

“A lake. I was walking across a lake.”

“And the EMS team managed to pull you out and revive you on scene? That must have made the news.”

“No, no, I was in a coma. And no, not them. My …” I could hear her searching for a word. “My best friend rescued me.”

“She must be very brave,” he said. I winced.

“He is,” she said.

The tape cut for a second, and then the doctor’s voice was back. “The subject won’t tell me who or where she is exactly, but her area code suggests Maine. The subject evades questions, and she has not told her personal physician. Which begs the question: Why?”

This whole recording was a study of Delaney. It was her story and mine. It was our history. I listened to the whole thing, everything that was left, three more times before wiping it clean.

I waited for her in my driveway Monday morning, like I’d been doing since last week. After being away from here, after being able to talk to her in Boston, it felt a little like sliding back to normal. The
normal
we had been before we were together. Before everything.

She seemed to sense something had shifted, too. She hopped in the minivan and held her hands in front of the heating vent. “Morning,” she said.

“You know you have to wait for the car to turn on for that to work,” I said.

“New idea,” she said as I turned the key. “College in Florida.”

I turned the heat up, ignoring the fact that she obviously wanted to talk about the whole staying-in-Maine thing. “Which school did you end up seeing?” I asked.

She bent and flexed her fingers in front of the vents a few times before speaking. “I was heading for Harvard, and then I got … I don’t know. Distracted. Or overwhelmed. Both.” She sat back in her seat and turned to face me. “I think I messed up,” she said. “What if that guy comes looking for me? What if he talks to my parents, or my doctor?”

“Easy. You call him a lying pedophile and it’s your word against his.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell she was giving me that
you’re-being-ridiculous
look. “I’m serious.”

So was I. “Delaney, do you really mean to tell me you skipped a college tour because you’re worried about some sketchy guy?” Totally unlike Delaney, who did her homework in the hospital after almost dying so she wouldn’t fall behind.

I thought of how the choice to leave her on the ice had changed me.

And that this choice had somehow changed her, too.

And I thought that maybe it
was
possible to forgive someone for anything.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I got there, but did you notice? Everyone in Boston walks so
fast
.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.

“So I wandered around,” she said. She shrugged. “Maybe Boston isn’t for me, either.”