Jessica Martinez - The Vow

“Sorry.”

“Apology not accepted. This guy’s melted your brain already. Where’s he from? I don’t know any Reeds.”

“Nashville, I think. He goes to culinary school there. His grandma lives next door to the Cleets—you know, on Newberry. He’s helping her out with some painting and stuff for the summer.”

“Wow, older. Way to go. More mature .”

I shudder. “Please stop trying to girl-talk before you sprain something. Just go back to rambling about European capitals.”

I don’t point out that at nineteen, Reed is only a year older than me. Sometimes Mo forgets about my lost year.

“Fine,” Mo says. “But if you aren’t going to tell me anything about him, why did you bring him up?”

“Temporary insanity. I’m better now.”

“Good. You want to come get me for a 7-Eleven run? I am in dire need of high-fructose corn syrup. The higher the better. I’m thinking Sour Patch Kids and cream soda.”

“I’m just pulling into my driveway,” I lie. “Mom is waiting for me to help her mulch stuff.” I’m still a good ten minutes from home, and my mom wants my gardening help even less than I want to give it. I’d screw something up.

“You’re lying.”

I sigh. He can always tell. He says it’s because I’m crappy at it, but I lie to other people just fine. “Okay fine. I’m ten minutes from home, and my mom won’t let me near her garden. I’m just dying to crack open these cans of paint and start on the coral.”

“Lame. Fine, work on your mural. I’ll go suck on a Froot Loop or something. Or maybe I’ll just eat straight sugar. Yeah, I’ll do that.”

“Good-bye, Mo.”

“A raisin. We probably have raisins. I’m sure nature’s candy will hit the spot.”

“Good-bye.”

“Bye.”

I drive the rest of the way home listening-but-not-listening to the radio. Out my window, sunlight rolls over the bluegrass hills of horse farms. It’s distractingly pretty, with velvet green slopes and regal white fences. Before I’d started the mural, maybe I’d have pulled over and taken a few pictures to work from later.

But it’s different now. I’ve got winding ocean currents waiting at home and fresh paint begging to be used. I’ve never even dipped a toe in the real ocean, but I can almost sense waves pulsing when I stand in the center of my room.

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.

Mo

Annie 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.