Every Last Promise by Kristin Halbrook Page B

accident?”
    My head whips toward him. I stare for a moment, trying to slow my swirling mind. “Was it an accident?” I whisper.
    His face is blank. I try to remember him at Jen’s party. When he showed up, who he came with. But there’s nothing.
    As though he can see into my mind, where I’m sifting through memories of that night, he says, “I left before it happened. Had to take someone home. So I didn’t hear what people were saying. Not until later.”
    What they were saying. The moment they heard a truck had totaled Steven McInnis’s car. The moment they heard sirens speed down the road. Even then, Noah’s words suggest, they questioned whether it was an accident. I clutch the can until it dents. “The only people who know if it was an accident or not were in the car. Either way, T. J.’s right. I killed someone.”
    The moment I say it is the moment I want Noah to understand how much I mean it. How much the guilt eats at me. So much guilt. I killed someone.
    â€œAn accident,” he repeats.
    Without warning, my eyes begin to sting, my headbegins to ache. I watch him trace his finger along the place two boards meet. In another field, an engine roars to life. A breeze dips in and out of the boat.
    Noah looks at me. His face is soft, understanding. Different from my aunt’s stern strength, from my dad’s hesitant awkwardness, from my mom’s steady confidence. It’s kind, compassionate, exactly what I need right now.
    I struggle not to choke up when I ask, “Do you think people will ever forgive me?” He’s silent too long and I sigh. “People here are stubborn.”
    â€œI’m not,” he tells me. I raise my eyes to his even though I want to hide the tears gathering there. Because I want to see proof of what I thought I heard in his voice. And it’s there, in the set of his jaw, in the steadiness of his gaze on me: hope. A force that pushes my feet forward when I’m tired of moving against a current of people who hate me, who don’t understand. My hope combined with Noah’s makes me feel like I can take on this whole town and everything I’ve ever done wrong.
    He reaches for my hand suddenly and presses the pad of his thumb to mine. When he blinks at me, with the sunlight dying in the distance, his dark lashes make tiny shadows across the tops of his cheeks.
    I feel the pressure of his finger on my hand long after the sun has set over Missouri. Before I fall asleep, it’s his face in mythoughts that makes me feel like tomorrow can be different. Better. But in the morning, all that remains is a conviction that he is wrong.
    My feet drag me through the school hallways, past the stealthy glances and whispers that burrow under my skin. Every time I answer a question in class, Selena shoots me a disgusted look. Even worse, Jen ignores me like I haven’t said anything at all.
    There are moments when some other minor school scandal or joke takes attention away from me. But it always comes back. The names, the scowls, the low murmurs that surround me as I stand in the entrance to the cafeteria at lunchtime, scanning desperately for an empty table, the smell of egg salad drifting up from my bag and making my stomach roil until I turn away and dart for the bathroom, hacking spittle into the sinks.
    Earlier today, the Warrior Squad delivered goody packages to the football players. Eve Karkova brought three into my first period class. One for T. J. and one for Pete Sloan. And then she paused, pursing her lips and looking over at me. I recalled the last time I saw her at Jen’s party. Jay and Hailey were broken up by then and Eve had wasted no time swooping in on him. Her flirty, high-pitched laugh rang in my ears as she crossed the room now, frowning, and dropped the last spirit package on my desk. I froze, not knowing what to do with it while classmates’ eyes burned into my back. Iconsidered moving it