I Swear

33. JILLIAN

I took tulips because I wasn’t sure what was appropriate. Roses felt like something a boyfriend should bring, and the daisies at the place where I stopped looked really picked over. The tulips were bulbs in a pot, and the guy at the shop said that they might actually sprout again next year if I put them in the ground. He was cute, and when I told him I was going to a grave, he let me borrow a spade as long as I promised to bring it back before they closed.

Who does that? Let’s you borrow a spade?

So I got to the cemetery and I dug a little hole. Then I gently pulled at the base of the tulips, wiggling them slowly back and forth until I had worked the whole dirt clump out of the pot. I placed it carefully into the hole and pressed the dirt back into it with the spade.

The headstone that Leslie’s parents had chosen was about three feet tall and smooth granite. Nothing rough-hewn—it was all sleek lines and clean edges. And as I sat and looked at it, I thought about how it was so unlike the way she lived and died. There had been no clean edges for Leslie’s life, no solid lines, nothing sleek. It had been rough and messy—full of ups and mainly downs and a lot of broken hearts.

This was the first time I’d been to see her grave. I thought about writing a note to her, or preparing something to say to her, but it just felt silly.

Katherine thought that Leslie was in heaven. She’d said so in her op-ed for the Westport Star, our school paper. She’d caused a big stir last week when she wrote an open letter of confession for her part in bullying Leslie Gatlin. She told the whole story, named names, and resigned from her position as student council vice president. Macie was furious.

Macie had immediately called for new elections so that she could get Krista installed as the new VP, but Principal Jenkins actually put his foot down and appointed Kelly from the volleyball team. Macie was furious.

Macie was angriest with me. When she’d found out that Katherine and Beth and I had agreed to testify against her in the event of a criminal trial, she’d stopped talking to all three of us immediately. Almost instantly, two new junior girls who wore too much makeup started following her everywhere.

Beth Patterson had been sick to her stomach the morning of the state competition, but decided to perform anyway. She stepped out of bounds on three of her four tumbling passes, and earned her lowest score in three seasons. She’s started attending Gay-Straight Alliance meetings. Katherine and I have started going with her.

Of course, this makes Macie even more furious.

But it’s made the rest of us free.

It’s a strange thing when you spend so much time and energy fearing the worst will happen. Turns out that when it finally occurs, it’s pretty much as bad as you thought it would be. In fact, some parts are worse. Then an amazing thing happens.

You see clearly for the first time what made the terrible thing so frightening in the first place: You didn’t think you’d survive.

But you do. Or at least I did.

I sat at the grave and looked at the orange tulips against that clean-edged gravestone and wondered why Leslie didn’t survive.

I don’t understand what makes you lose hope. What was the moment when Leslie decided to walk toward the garage? What makes the difference between the choice to move forward and the choice to stop choosing forever?

I thought about asking the question out loud, actually talking to Leslie, but I couldn’t. I don’t believe she exists anymore. Katherine says that’s the saddest thing she’s ever heard, and maybe it is. I don’t believe she’s in heaven—not because I believe she’s in hell; I just don’t believe in either of those places. Beth says that she thinks Leslie will be reincarnated and come back as something else—though if you press her on the issue, she isn’t sure what.

I guess I think that Leslie died. She really died. Her body is in the ground here, and the only place that she lives on is in the memories of those of us who knew her.

So I sat and thought of our trip to Cape Cod four years ago. I remembered how we swam, and laughed, and lay on the beach talking for hours as the waves crashed across the sand.

I wished Leslie was here again, sitting right beside me. I wished she was someplace where she could hear me when I said I was sorry for all the choices I made one way that I wish I’d made another.

I thought it would fix things for Jake and me when I went to the DA with Katherine and Beth, but it didn’t. Jake nodded silently when I told him we were going. He said, “I’m glad,” then walked down the stairs. Other than that, he hasn’t spoken a word to me beyond, “Excuse me,” and “Pass the salt, please.” I feel like I’m missing something inside, and I don’t know how to fix it.

I put the spade into the empty pot and reached up to the chain at my neck. I unhooked the clasp and gently lifted the tiny captain’s wheel out of my shirt. Slowly I laid the chain across the top of the headstone. I opened my mouth to try to say something out loud to a girl who couldn’t hear me, but suddenly I couldn’t speak. There was a knot in my throat, and tears welled up in my eyes.

“I’m sorry, Leslie,” I whispered. “I’ll never be the same because of what happened. I swear.”

I wiped my eyes and reached down to pick up the pot and the spade. I had to get it back to the guy at the shop before six p.m. tonight. I tucked my hair behind my ear and stood up to head back to the parking lot. That’s when I turned around and saw Brad.

He was parked at the curb closest to Leslie’s grave. He was leaning up against the passenger side of his truck, hands in his jacket pockets. His bangs were blowing into his face, but he didn’t move his hand to push them aside.

I stood frozen to the spot for a minute, and then took a deep breath and started slowly toward him. I stopped a few feet away, unsure of what to say. So I just stood there. Waiting.

He looked past me, to the grave. “Haven’t been out here yet,” he said.

“How’d you find this place?” I asked.

“Jake told me,” he said.

I looked back over my shoulder. I could see the orange tulips marking Leslie’s plot with a little flame. When I met Brad’s gaze again, we stared at each other for a minute that felt like an eternity. Then he blinked up at the brightness. The clouds were big columns of white against electric blue.

“Surprised Jake talked to me at all,” said Brad quietly. “We haven’t really even hung out since I went with him to see Mr. Gatlin. He still upset with you?”

I nodded, and when I did, a stream of tears escaped from my right eye. I tried to brush them away quickly, but Brad saw.

“Are you guys still going to prom?” I asked.

He frowned. “Me and Jake?” he asked.

“Yeah—I mean, you were going to double date and get a limo together, right?”

“Jillian. He won’t even get a burger with me.”

I smiled in spite of myself.

“He’ll get over this,” Brad said. “I promise.”

“I don’t think so.” My voice cracked. “I’m sorry, Brad. I should go.”

I turned and walked toward my car in the parking lot.

“Jills?” Brad’s voice stopped me. “I broke up with Macie.”

I turned around. “When?” I asked.

“The day you guys went to see the DA. When Merrick went to the Gatlins and convinced them to drop the case, I left his office and never went back.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I didn’t feel right about it.”

“You won’t get the internship,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Taking a class at Wash U instead this summer.” He looked down and kicked at the curb with the toe of his high-tops. “Macie was pissed. I broke up with her the day Brown called to rescind her acceptance.”

“What?” I said. My mouth was actually hanging open.

“Lucky them, really,” Brad said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He jammed his hands deeper into his jacket pockets. “Doesn’t matter what school she goes to, Jillian, it won’t change who she is. It’ll just change the people around her. She has to be worshipped. She’ll always have minions. She’ll always make somebody miserable. It just won’t be me and you anymore.”

“So . . . where is she going to go?”

Brad shrugged. “I don’t really care,” he said. “Her dad is making calls for her. Last I heard, she was trying to get late applications to state schools. It’s kinda nice to be out of the Merrick loop. I don’t miss the drama.”

We were quiet for a minute, then he looked right at me, hands still in his pockets. “I miss you, Jillian.”

When he said it, I could hear the longing in his voice and see the fear in his eyes—the fear that I would walk away; the fear of all that we had lost in the last few months; the fear that after weeks of things falling apart, this one last thing would slip away from us, and that for all the time after this, we would wonder what would have happened if we had chosen differently.

Slowly, Brad took his hand out of his pocket and held it out toward me, and as he did, something snapped into focus. That one simple gesture made it all clear to me: that every click of a mouse, every tap of a button on a cell phone, every post of a picture on a website, every thought, every word, every action, was a choice. Some big, some small, some better than others—and every one of them had brought me here to this moment.

I had no power over what Leslie had chosen in the past, or what Macie would choose in the future. I couldn’t make better choices for either of them, or change the choices I had made before. I could only move forward by making sure the choice I made in this instant was the best one I could possibly make.

I stared at Brad’s outstretched hand. I hadn’t let myself imagine this moment after he’d told me it was over. He had hurt me too badly. The question now was not one of whether I loved Brad; it was a question of whether Brad had changed.

Do people change? Maybe Macie hadn’t, or Krista. I thought of all the things that were different inside me since Leslie’s death. When I thought about all that had changed in Katherine and Beth, it gave me the hope that maybe Brad had too. Just enough hope to take a chance.

And take his hand.

“Can we start over?” he whispered.

“No,” I said. “But we can keep going.”

Then he helped me into his truck, and we drove toward my car in the parking lot.





Lane Davis is a writer and actor living in Los Angeles. This is his first novel.

Jacket design by Laurent Linn

Jacket photographs copyright © 2012 by Thinkstock



Simon & Schuster • New York

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