The Vow (4 page)

That makes me sound crazy.

There’s no reason I shouldn’t want to tell Mo about Reed. Mo’s been my best friend before, during, and after both of my boyfriends (if we’re counting that three weeks of holding Jordan Mailer’s sweaty hand in ninth grade) and all the insignificant crushes in between. Sure, he mocks—he’s Mo—but I’ve never had a problem shrugging it off before. I shouldn’t be embarrassed just to admit that I think someone is interesting.

Interesting. Another good word for Reed.

He makes me want to know things. I want to know what his favorite song is, and if he’s ever been in a fight, and what kind of movies he likes, and why he isn’t friendly with the college girls at Mr. Twister. I want to know if he’s ever had his heart broken.

He has no idea that every time he walks by, my spine tingles and my stomach drops, or that I’m trying not to stare at his hands and wondering if his neck smells like what I’m imagining it might. Interesting is indefinable, but it’s what keeps me imagining what it would feel like if he touched my cheek. Or the insides of my arms, the ticklish side. Or my back.

I should stop myself. I have jingling bracelets that are supposed to remind me why. Maybe I’m ignoring them because I really could feel him looking at me, and it felt kind of sweet.

By the time I pull into the driveway, I’m certain. I’m never letting Mo at Reed. He’s a genius at finding faults, and if he rips Reed apart, that sweet feeling might turn sour. It didn’t matter so much with the other guys—I already knew they were all cocky idiots—but Reed just might be different.

I’m not going to feel guilty about it either. Just because Mo’s my best friend doesn’t mean he has to know all my secrets.

Chapter 4

Mo

A
nnie knows all my secrets. Every single one of them. I can’t trust Bryce with my locker combination, and whatever I tell Sarina in confidence has at least a 20 percent chance of being accidentally blabbed to Dad, but Annie’s different. Since the fifth grade I’ve been telling her things she could’ve easily fed to the bloodthirsty masses in a weak moment, but she’s never leaked. Not once. She’s tighter than a submarine.

I’d say the first secret was a mistake, but that’s too mild. It was a calamity, a natural disaster so horrific I’m still amazed it didn’t kill me.

We’d only just moved to the States, and I was certain life could not possibly suck more. Chemically speaking, if my life was a solvent, and misery the solute, saturation point had been reached. I missed Jordan so bad my whole body ached, and unlike Sarina, who kept asking when we were going home to Teta and Jido’s (Grandma and Grandpa’s), I was old enough to really get it. We weren’t going back.

There were the obvious things to miss: the pack of boy cousins I roamed our neighborhood with and our cutthroat war games; fat Teta with her paper-soft skin and her sugared dates that left my fingers and tongue sticky; the boys next door, Ali and Barzy, and Barzy’s deaf dog, Hoda, that was so old his hair was falling out. I don’t even know why I missed that ugly dog, but I did.

And the food. The
food
. I was dying for the crispy hot falafel and chewy manakish Teta’s cook would let me eat fresh from the oven, and baklava so sweet it hurt a little. I hadn’t really known it until the move, but Mom’s cooking skills were crap. I guess she wasn’t really up to cooking at that point anyway. That first year was mostly crying for her.

But I think I missed the intangibles even more. I missed being cool. I missed being around people who didn’t tell me I smelled like skunk spice, whatever that even meant. It felt like I’d been kidnapped from the predictable calm of my Jordanian private school and delivered into a foreign war zone: Lincoln Middle. Here nothing was certain, except the fact that I had no allies. Predators were ruthless. Anything could happen.

And outside the chain-link fence of Lincoln, I missed being smiled at. Ten-almost-eleven is old enough to feel the uneasy stares of grown-ups you don’t even know. It’s old enough to understand that you make people uncomfortable.

I thought I’d learned English at my school in Jordan, but I guess that was British English, and the garbled Kentucky drawl around me sounded nothing like it. Just breaking up the flow of foreign sounds into words required brain-aching levels of concentration. And I, apparently, sounded like Harry Potter on crack—again, whatever that meant.

So I practiced. Southern-speak made my cheeks and tongue ache, but I did it. Every night I’d lie in bed and say things properly, drill the words that I’d been teased most recently for first.
Ha
not
hello
.
Deyesk
not
desk
.
Bayethrum
not
loo
. Never
loo
, unless I wanted to be stuffed into one during recess again.

Accent turned out to be nothing, though, because that at least I could change. My new names, however, may as well have been tattooed on me.
Iraqi boy. Sand nigger. Saddam. Terrorist.

My parents should’ve warned me. Or somebody should’ve warned them. Now I see how it had to happen, but at ten, how was I supposed to guess that my classmates were going to hate me no matter what? Their dads and uncles and brothers had been in Iraq killing and being killed by people that looked like me. And not just looked like me, but talked like me and prayed like me. Hating me was practically their patriotic duty.

At first I tried to correct false assumptions one at a time, but I learned pretty quickly that talking back only ended in getting shoved against my locker or leveled by a kick to the back of the knee. It didn’t matter how firmly I insisted my name wasn’t Saddam and that we weren’t even Iraqi, because my real name, Mohammed Ibrahim Hussein, was bad enough. And after a few attempts at trying to explain we were less-than-devout mainstream Muslims, barely likely to go to mosque, let alone to suicide-bomb the local Kroger, I gave up. My brown skin, my accent, my stinky lunches, my too-dressy khakis shorts and lame button-up polos—I was worthy of a shunning.

It hurt. But it made sense too. Ostracizing the weird one is what ten-year-olds do best. I’d seen it done back in Amman to the kid with the small head and the lisp. Maybe I’d even joined in. Maybe I deserved this.

After that first month of school in Kentucky, when I realized how bad it was going to be, I just wanted it to be summer so I could float around in our swimming pool in peace without having to field angry questions about why my soggy falafel looked like dog crap and why my God wanted me to hijack airplanes and kill people.

I just wanted to be left alone.

And then I went and did the unthinkable: I pissed myself.

You can’t piss yourself. Not in Amman, not in Elizabethtown, not anywhere. It’s the unpardonable sin, trumped only by crapping yourself, which I thankfully did not do.

We were on a field trip to the Louisville Science Center, and I’d been too nervous to ask an adult where the bathroom was. I figured I could hold it. All day. At ten I was clearly not aware of my physical limitations. By the time I realized that holding it all day was absolutely not going to happen, I had a wet spot blooming over the front of my khakis and hot piss running down my legs and into my socks.

It was the albino boa constrictor that saved me. All the kids were standing around a science center employee, mesmerized by the grotesque yellowish snake draped around his shoulders, and by some act of God, or maybe just an act of exclusion, I was behind them.

At first the physical relief was too sweet to feel anything else. But then pleasure was swallowed whole by panic. I couldn’t move. I should’ve been running to find the bathroom, or hiding somewhere, or at the very least, looking for one of the parent volunteers, but my urine-soaked legs were frozen.

Standing helplessly, waiting for people to notice what I’d done, I realized that my isolation was about to turn into something much, much uglier. I had been a pariah. Now I’d be prey. I’d have a better chance of survival with that snake than with my classmates after this.

That’s when I saw Annie. Birdlike. Pale. Silent. Her sunken eyeballs were like marbles, staring unblinking from the far side of the cluster of students. I didn’t notice then that she was just as separate from them as I was. I only saw that she was inches taller than the crowd and practically incandescent. Later, I learned how phobic she was of snakes, how she’d been close to throwing up, trying not to stare at its glistening body or hear the
shlip, shlip
of its flicking tongue. But in that moment, her paleness made her look like a ghost, or maybe an angel.

An angel who was staring at my crotch.

I shuddered, feeling the paralysis breaking and a rush of tears flooding my eyes. But before I could even start crying, she was in front of me, pushing me hard, driving me backward, whispering,
Go-go-go-go-go!

I turned, stumbled along with no choice—she was skinny but surprisingly strong—and even if I did have a choice, I didn’t have any ideas of my own. Bewildered, I let her shove me all the way to the women’s bathroom and into a stall.

“Stay here!” she hissed, her pink lips quivering, sky-blue eyes wide and fierce. Then she was gone.

I slid the metal lock shut with a quivering index finger and waited. Forever. I stood shivering in the overly air-conditioned ladies’ room, afraid to sit on the toilet, afraid to move, afraid that Annie had left me there to die, afraid she was about to throw open the door and bring my classmates through one by one to laugh at the pants-pissing freak show.

Someone came in and I tensed every muscle, bracing for whatever was about to be done to me. Orthopedic shoes and enormous ankles appeared in the stall next to mine. Not her. I listened to the stranger pee and sigh, flush, use the sink, and leave.

Maybe Annie wasn’t coming back. Maybe she’d found her friends and forgotten about me. She had lots of them. Everyone liked Annie Bernier, or at least they were nice to her, which from what I could tell, was the same thing. She never smiled, but she wasn’t like the pouting popular girls. Not viciously pretty or loud-talking or hair-twirling—and yet everyone treated her like royalty.

I didn’t know then about Lena. I didn’t know that they weren’t her friends any more than they were my friends, that we were both being ostracized, just in different ways.

The door swung opened again, and Annie’s pale-pink Chucks appeared on the mottled tile just beyond my stall.

I held my breath.

“Put these on,” she whispered, even though we were alone.

A pair of black sweatpants appeared on the floor, and she slid them under with her foot. I snatched them greedily. I didn’t even ask or care where she’d found them. They were too big, but not so big they’d fall down unless someone gave them a yank.

I opened the door. Annie stood in front of me, spindly arms crossed, examining the fit.

No place to look. I stared at the wall, cheeks burning as the mortification returned, mixed with the overpowering relief of being rescued.

She held out her hand and waited. What did she want, a high five? Money?

“Your pants,” she whispered finally.

I stared at the piss-soaked khakis on the ground. I didn’t ask what she was going to do with them when I handed them over, and I didn’t argue when she stuffed them into the garbage can. I just followed her out of the restroom.

We rejoined the group together, as if nothing else needed to be said. And when she inexplicably saved the seat beside her on the bus back, I was too shocked to ask why.

She didn’t tell a soul. I didn’t know why then, and I only sort of know why now.

Lying in bed that night, I felt the change. Something had happened to me. I’d pivoted, and while one foot was still firmly planted in misery, the other was somewhere else. And the view from my new stance was not entirely desolate.

I’d been saved.

Only then did I realize I’d forgotten to say thank you.

Chapter 5

Annie

T
hey all forget to say thank you. Every single kid who walks through the door manages to remember we have an unlimited sample policy, though. Sometimes a mom will squeeze out some gratitude with a nudge or a
What do you say?
after I’ve handed over twenty or so mini spoonfuls of custard, but in general, the adults don’t do much better.

And in general, I just smile and keep scooping.

But right now the smile is slipping. The arches of my feet ache, and my arm is burning, and I’m still several hours away from the end of my shift.

Reed warned me when I clocked in this morning that it would be nuts. “Swim camp starts today,” he said.

I continued wrapping the apron straps around my waist, double-knotting them in the front. “Okay.”

“That means right after three it’ll get crazy.”

“How crazy?” I stood watching him peel the brown wrapper from the coins, waiting to see if he’d say more, and noticing his paint-speckled hands. For a moment I thought he was an artist and felt almost giddy. I even opened my mouth to say something stupid, but then I remembered he’d mentioned painting his grandma’s house.

“Really crazy,” he said, and let the curl of paper fall into the trash. The nickels clattered as he dumped them into the register.

“Got it.
Really
crazy.”

And right when I thought he was going to say more than a couple of words to me, he left to go turn the
OPEN
sign around and sweep the porch.

A week of working side by side, and he still isn’t looking me in the eye.

He was right about the crazy. Since 3:07 we’ve had a steady stream of overtired, undersupervised middle schoolers who reek of chlorine. The one in front of me now—a tubby little freckle-face with bloodshot eyes—looks unnaturally swollen, like he’s swallowed a gallon of pool water.

I hold out his mint chip double scoop, and he stares at me like my head is on fire. He won’t even take the cone, but I keep my hand outstretched, smiling.

“I said
waffle
cone!” he whines.

He didn’t.

His lip quivers, and I wonder for the thirtieth time today why I’m here and not answering the phone at my dad’s office, or even better, organizing the tubes of acrylic paint on display at Myrna’s Country Craft.

Why did Lena choose this job? Wouldn’t she have rather worked for Dad too? But she and Dad argued a lot. That much I do remember. So maybe she didn’t want to make his coffee and take his messages and buy his socks. Their arguing—that was why the police spent so long calling her a runaway.

Maybe she liked how custard makes people happy.

The lips stops quivering, and the kid glares.

Okay, makes some people happy.

I exhale, grip the lip of the countertop with my free hand, and hold the smile. Soup is pretty chill, but the one thing he rants about is customer service, and I’m not losing my job over this little turd. Freckle-face sticks his lip out a little farther and sniffs. I blink, waiting with my arm out. If I stand here long enough, maybe he’ll take it or at least
ask
me to make him a waffle cone. Maybe even say please.

I don’t hear Reed come up behind me, but suddenly he’s got one hand on my shoulder, the other prying the cone from my grip. I let him take it. His hand slides down over my shoulder blade and stays there for a second before he dumps the sugar cone into the trash and begins scooping more mint chip into a waffle cone.

“Sorry,” I mumble, feeling scolded. “I was sort of in a daze there.”

“It’s okay,” Reed says.

Freckle-face gives me a smug smile.

I turn to Reed, my back still burning where his hand was. I start to explain that it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t actually screw up the order, but stop myself. It doesn’t matter. We both know the customer is always right even when the customer is a lying, chlorine-marinated brat, and I’m not so sure Reed wouldn’t rat on me if he thought I was being rude to the customers.

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” I repeat and wipe my hands on my apron even though they’re not wet.

Reed gives his glasses a nudge upward. “You get used to it. The kids, I mean. The noise.”

I nod. I doubt it. My house is quieter than death, and I hate it, but it’s a madhouse in here. Right now I just want to be alone in my room, listening to bluegrass and painting sea anemones.

“Where are the tickets?” an elderly woman barks, tapping the old-fashioned ticket dispenser. It’s a glossy red box with rounded corners and slots like a vintage toaster. Soup calls it the Relic.

“It’s broken, ma’am,” Reed says. “The line is there.” He points to the end of the snaking procession of people.

The Relic busted an hour ago, right as the hordes descended from swim camp. The three of us—Reed, Flora, and I—have been shouting “Next in line” instead, trying to keep shoving matches from breaking out.

I glance over at Flora. She’s older than my mom and looks like an aging showgirl, but I like her. I like how she teases Reed. Her hair is a metallic burgundy, the exact same shade as her lips, and she’s wearing gold hoops the size of CDs that stretch her holes in her lobes into half-inch slits. It’s hard not to stare at them.

Flora winks at me and chews her gum, unfazed by the chaos. According to Soup she’s a lifer: scooping at Mr. T’s for decades and perfectly happy to keep at it until she dies. Or retires, I guess. She told me last shift that she goes straight from Mr. T’s to the Lucky Lil’s slot machines every night, so I’m guessing her retirement plans involve some luck.

Reed hands freckle-face the waffle cone, and the kid turns and leaves without a word.

“Next in line!” he calls, then to me, “Do you need a break?”

I shake my head. It’s not my turn, and even if it was, it doesn’t seem like a good time to leave them with the low-blood-sugared mob.

He squints at me for a moment, and I almost think he’s actually going to hold my gaze and not look away.

“Next in line,” Flora’s phlegmy voice rattles, and his head jerks around before either of us can acknowledge the moment with I don’t know what—A nod? A smile? Probably not.

He takes a banana-split order from a girl with dripping pigtails, and I call, “Next in line,” but my voice gets swallowed up. Nobody steps forward, so I do it again. This time a sunburned girl wearing a towel like a toga steps forward and asks for samples of watermelon, mango, lime, and tangerine sorbet.

I won’t be admitting it to Mo any time soon, not with the
I told you so
waiting for me, but working here is harder than I thought it would be. The aching biceps, cold-cracked knuckles, swollen feet, sore back. I wonder if Lena’s back hurt too.

At the end of every shift I’ve dragged myself home and curled up in bed with a romance novel. Mo, of course, makes fun of them, calls them Novocaine for the estrogen-hampered soul, but I don’t care. I love them anyway, and not for the sex, either. It’s the stories. They’re full of perfect people and chivalry, and at the end, the right thing always happens.

The crowd thins until it’s the usual weekday evening trickle. Flora leaves for Lucky Lil’s an hour before closing, rubbing the Mr. Twister mustache on her way out. “For good luck,” she calls over her shoulder.

I nod. I kind of envy her for the superstition. That takes optimism.

I’ve spent the week imagining talking to Flora about Lena. She must remember her. She’s the only employee still around from seven years ago. But each time I work up the nerve, something happens. She takes a smoke break. Or the place fills up and we’re too swamped to see straight. Or Reed’s there, and I definitely don’t want him to know. Or it doesn’t feel right. I haven’t actually said Lena’s name in . . . I don’t know. Years.

Why would I? Nobody wants to be reminded of Lena. She’s a symbol of horrific truths—that unthinkable things can happen in our quiet town, that a beautiful girl can disappear and be gone forever. People don’t want to think about that. It’s easier to pretend she just never existed and that there isn’t a gaping hole where she used to be, so big an entire family could fall into it.

I’ll talk to Flora another time. Maybe tomorrow.

Closing time comes, Reed flips the sign, and I start wiping things down.

“How long is swim camp?” I ask, pushing my rag over the countertop in big, circular sweeps.

Reed holds up a finger. He’s cashing out the register, counting change.

“Oh, sorry.”

“It’s okay. If it’s like last summer, it’ll be three weeks of insanity.”

I nod and keep wiping. I don’t think I came to Mr. Twister once last summer. Or the summer before. Actually, I know I didn’t. Mo hates it, and who else would I go with?

Not my parents.

They used to take us to Mr. Twister when there was an
us
to take. Lena and Mom and I would get cones, and Dad would get a milk shake. Unless we were celebrating something, and then they’d let us order one of the Colossal Twister Towers or a Triple Banana Split Supreme to share.

Over the years, my memories of Lena have gone from razor-sharp to blurred to nearly vapor, but I do remember her here. In the corner booth. Me sitting next to her, and Mom and Dad sitting across, and all four of us devouring a mound of custard like lions over a kill. Lena let me have the cherry, but I don’t know if it was because she didn’t like them or if she knew I loved them. Seems like I should know that.

There’s a lot I don’t know. Mom would have answers, but I can’t ask. Was that family trip to Mr. Twister after one of her flute recitals? Or was it a good-report-card event? I can’t remember.

And her face. I can barely remember that, either. Waves of dark-blond hair, brown eyes, freckles—but the correct elements don’t always add up the right way. It makes me nervous to try, so I don’t let myself unless I’m at home and can stare at the silver-framed picture I keep on my desk. It’s her last school picture. Junior class.

To my knowledge, Mom and Dad haven’t been to Mr. Twister in eight years, since the night Dad swerved into the parking lot, tires squealing. We were on our way home from my fifth-grade Thanksgiving production. I’d been the perfect pilgrim, but I knew we weren’t stopping for banana splits.

Dad went inside “to get some bloody answers.” Mom and I waited in the car, as instructed, watching our breath fog up the windows. We didn’t talk. We were like zombies or whatever paranormal creatures have brains and lungs but no hearts.

It’d been three months already, but nothing had been added to the case since the first day. She was last seen walking on the shoulder of Highway 22, the stretch between Mr. Twister and the library. She’d been going from work to her SAT prep class. It wasn’t too far—fifteen minutes, maybe—but the trees on both sides made it dark. And that was it. The end that we knew.

The police had stopped coming by the house to give Dad updates long before that night. According to conversations not meant for my ears, they’d interviewed half the population of Hardin County and still had nothing. It happened this way with runaways, they said.

For Mom, finding nothing meant hope, a reason to brush her teeth and remulch her flower beds.

But for Dad, it was unacceptable, evidence of half-assed police work in a backwoods hole of a community that needed to catapult itself into this century before he sued every last law enforcement officer in the county. I’d heard it more than once. It was usually shouted into the phone, though I remember hearing it delivered to an unfortunate detective who stopped by the house to deliver the latest batch of nothing.

That night while he interrogated everyone in Mr. Twister—probably standing right where I’m standing now—Mom and I sat silently, me still wearing my stiff pilgrim’s bonnet that smelled like glue, Mom gripping a cornucopia of plastic vegetables.

When he came out twenty minutes later, Dad wasn’t shouting anymore. I guess he was done. He was silent all the way home, but from my spot at the top of the stairs, with my face pressed between the banisters, I heard him telling Mom what he’d learned: no secret boyfriends, no wild behavior, no motives, no runaway plans. Nothing.

I was too young to be told what nothing really meant and too stupid to guess. Mo calls it naive, but he wasn’t there. It was trickier than that. It was wanting to know, being on the edge of understanding, then backing away intentionally.

Ten should have been old enough—I’d been taught not to talk to strangers because there were bad people in the world who kidnapped children and did bad things to them.
Bad things.
Those words made my stomach twist and my skin tingle, even though I didn’t know what they meant.

But that didn’t have anything to do with Lena. Those warnings were strange and thrilling, like ghost stories and the psychopath-on-the-loose tales told at sleepovers, but I knew those weren’t real. The gaping hole where Lena used to be—that was real. The color and smell of her that was only a smudge now, the roar of silence in our house where she used to be, the tragic stares that followed me around—that was all real.

Once the investigation was over, the police stopped coming by, which meant the steady flow of curious neighbors with their cashew chicken casseroles and their gentle, probing questions dried up. Understanding came in tissue-thin layer over layer: whispers, sad smiles, shoulder squeezes from teachers I barely knew. People reached for their children like they couldn’t help it when my family shuffled into our church pew. Girls at school got quiet when I joined them.

The shame was chilling. Lena was missing, and even if I didn’t know how it was my fault, the rest of the world did.

Eventually, TV dragged from the shadows what I was refusing to see. There was that
CSI
episode I watched at a friend’s house, then a story on the evening news before Mom could scramble for the remote. And then that Amber Alert for a thirteen-year-old girl in Louisville screamed over every channel and radio station in Kentucky and seemed to ring in my ears for days. That one ended with a naked, broken body found on the banks of the Ohio River, my mother locking herself in her room and sobbing loud enough that I couldn’t sleep, and my father going on a week-long hunting trip to Tennessee.