Jessica Martinez - The Vow

My least favorite question. She knows it, but can’t stop herself from asking it anyway. I’ve yet to discover how telling people how I feel makes anything better, and she’s yet to care that I hate it.

How. Are. You. Feeling.

Scared.

“Mad,” I say.

She stares at me for a moment, then turns so she’s facing forward again. We’re still here in the parking lot, and I’m not sure why until I remember I’m the one behind the wheel. I turn the key, wrestle the gear shift into reverse, and back out.

Inside Mr. Twister I can see a man’s silhouette and what looks like a mop handle coming out of his back. The outline makes him look like he’s been impaled by a broom or something.

Annie starts to cry. I haven’t seen her cry in years. She doesn’t make a sound, but her shoulders jerk and bounce, and I have the same gut-twisting feeling that I did the last time I saw her cry. I want to puke. It’s worse than getting kicked in the balls. I just I want her to stop. I’ll do anything to get her to stop.

Annie

It takes everything to stop. At first I don’t think I can, but then I realize Mo is in agony beside me and I need to just make it happen. I clench my teeth, take deep breaths through my nose, and push it down. He hears enough of it at home.

Besides, crying in front of people is always a mistake. It’s been a long time, but I know exactly what I’ll feel like afterward. Pitied. Pitiful.

What I need is to have already sobbed it out, to have that raw, scraped-clean feeling you get after the breakdown. Instead I’m sucking in tears and pretending the pressure isn’t building and building in my chest.

This can’t be real. I can’t lose Mo.

I’m sweating, and the air rushing through the cab makes me shiver. There’s got to be a solution, somebody who can fix this. Mo makes a left turn, way too fast, but I’m afraid if I yell at him I’ll start crying again. I take a breath so deep my lungs feel like they might explode.

I can’t lose Mo.

“I don’t have a choice,” he says, like he’s read my mind. “I know that. But I don’t know if I can survive it all over again.”

I look at him. I might throw up. The cab of the truck smells like mildew, like it always does after rain, and my stomach lurches with every twist of the road. I picture him lost and lonely in some scary foreign country, being shouted at in Arabic, being jostled in a crowd like the ones you see on TV.

My head is pounding now. I’m trying so hard to think, but nothing comes. I can’t look at him. Even with my eyes squeezed shut, I know he still has that expression on his face—sadness twisted with naked fear. Mo is so full of crap most of the time that when I see that look of bare misery, it nearly kills me. I still remember the first time I saw it, that day he peed his pants at the science center. That was maybe the best day of my life. It was the last day I was nothing but a dead girl’s sister.

Mo drives to his house. We both get out and meet around front of the truck’s bug-smeared grille. He hesitates, then hugs me.

“You suck at hugging,” I say into his chest. He really does. It’s a cage of bony arms and clavicle-to-my-forehead every time.

“I know.”

He drops one arm and stands with the other around my shoulder for a minute or two, and it’s odd because as close as we are, and as much as he feels like the other half of me, we don’t touch all that often. Tonight it feels right, though, if slightly like trying to snuggle with a tree.

“I don’t want to go in there,” he mumbles. “Everybody . . .”

I close my eyes. I’m such a jerk. I didn’t even ask about his family. “How did Sarina take it?”

“I don’t know. She’s so naive, I don’t think she really gets it. I was mostly just watching my mom teeter on the brink and then I had to leave to come get you.”

“Hmm.” Mo’s mom can lock herself in her room and cry for days over a sick cat or a fight between Sarina and her best friend. We don’t spend much time hanging out at Mo’s, but I’ve been there enough to know that there are two Mrs. Husseins. The one is gracious and lovely, and the other is holed up in bed wailing.

He doesn’t answer, but lets go of me to swat a mosquito off the back of my arm.

“I need to go,” I say. “They’re going to start freaking out soon.”

He nods. He knows. “Are you okay?”

I slap another mosquito on my arm, and it leaves a streak of fresh blood. I don’t know if it’s mine or Mo’s. “Yeah,” I say, but neither of us believes me. This conversation is so unnatural, so unbelievable, I wouldn’t believe anything I said right now. How could I be okay? “And you?”

“No.”

“I was lying when I said yeah,” I said.

“I know. You’d better go. Your parents.”

He walks away and I get back into the truck alone. Totally alone. That’s when the panic descends. I’m suffocating. There isn’t enough air inside the cab, even with the windows down. I begin backing out of the Husseins’ long, snaking driveway, watching the encroaching bushes race by in reverse.

At the curb, I roll past the mailbox and see the dent I made in it years ago illuminated by the moon. I backed over it the day after I got my license. The memory of that night—of Mo frantically trying to jam the post back into the ground before Mr. Hussein got home, of neither of us being able to stop laughing long enough to figure out what we were doing—makes me nauseous again.

I can’t lose Mo. If he leaves me, I’ll lose the only person who gets me. And then what’s keeping me from slipping backward into the old Annie? I don’t want to be that girl, the one everybody was afraid to touch.

I’m crying, whimpering at first but then sobbing in that wounded-animal way that only comes out when I’m alone—long whines interrupted with hard gasps for air. And I’m driving too fast, but I have no choice. I’ve got to get home. My cell phone is resting on my lap, and any second now it’ll ring.

I know they’re both pretending not to notice the oversized wall clock with its stoic hands and curled roman numerals, measuring the minutes until they’re allowed to worry again. But they’re counting down, individually of course. Mom has probably been doing something virtuous and disgusting, like scrubbing grout with a toothbrush, to keep her mind off everything, and Dad, no doubt, is watching baseball. He can watch game after game after game without thinking or feeling a thing.

I don’t want them to know I’ve been crying, so for the second time this evening I force myself to stop. It’s harder this time because I’ve already let it get out of hand. I’m snotty and out of breath and my face hurts from squeezing.

I take a deep breath, try out my voice with a few empty hello s, then call home.

“Where are you?” Dad answers. The synthesized SportsCenter theme blares in the background.

“I had to stay late to help close.” It isn’t until I hear myself that I realize I’m lying. I’m not sure why, since they’ll know Mo’s leaving soon enough. Maybe I’m just not ready for his reaction tonight. It’ll be too light, too encouraging. He doesn’t like Mo, doesn’t understand us—any guy who wants to be just friends with me must be gay or lying or both. He would not understand that without Mo I’m going to drown.

“When will you be home?” he asks.

“I just dropped Mo at his place.”

“Okay. I’ll tell your mom you’ll be home in ten minutes.”

I’m only a block away now, but I don’t correct him. I need at least ten minutes to get myself together.

I pull into an empty playground parking lot and stare at moonlit slides and gleaming monkey bars. The swings rock and squeal in the breeze. I grew up in this park, but I never realized just how creepy it is at night. I was never allowed to wander after dark. It’s like a children’s ghost town.