The Pact Read online

  "What do the other half think?"

  Chris turned slowly. He knew perfectly well what the other half of kids believed--anything that could be escalated into a juicy story would be, in the rumor mill. "I don't know," he said as off-handedly as he could manage. "Probably that I killed her."

  "Why would they think that?"

  "Because I was there," he blurted out. "Because I'm still alive. Christ, I don't know. Ask the cops; they've thought that since day one."

  Chris did not realize until he'd spoken how bitter he was about the accusation, veiled as it had been.

  "Does that bother you?"

  "Hell, yes," Chris said. "Wouldn't it bother you?"

  Dr. Feinstein shrugged. "I can't say. I guess if I knew I was being true to myself, I'd want to believe that everyone would come around sooner or later to my way of thinking."

  Chris snorted. "I bet all the witches in Salem were thinking that, too, when they smelled the smoke."

  "What is it that bothers you the most?"

  Chris fell silent. It wasn't that he was not being taken at his word; if the situation had been reversed, he too might have his doubts. It wasn't even that everyone in the whole goddamned school was treating him like he'd grown six heads overnight. It was that, having seen him with Emily, they could believe he would ever willingly hurt her.

  "I loved her," he said, his voice breaking. "I can't forget that. So I don't see why everyone else can."

  Dr. Feinstein motioned again toward the wing chair; Chris sank into it. He watched the tiny cogs inside the tape recorder chug in slow circles. "Would you tell me about Emily?" the psychiatrist asked.

  Chris closed his eyes. How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turned the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, but as long as Em was with him, he was at home?

  "She belonged to me," Chris said simply.

  Dr. Feinstein's eyebrows lifted. "What do you mean by that?"

  "She was, you know, all the things I wasn't. And I was all the things she wasn't. She could paint circles around anyone; I can't even draw a straight line. She was never into sports; I've always been." Chris lifted his outstretched palm and curled his fingers. "Her hand," he said. "It fit mine."

  "Go on," Dr. Feinstein said encouraging.

  "Well, I mean, we weren't always going out. That was pretty recent, a couple of years. But I've known her forever." He laughed suddenly. "She said my name before anything else. She used to call me Kiss. And then, when she learned the word kiss for real, she'd get it all confused and look at me and smack her lips." He looked up. "I don't remember that, exactly. My mom told me."

  "How old were you when you met Emily?"

  "Six months, I guess," Chris said. "The day she was born." He leaned forward, considering. "We used to play together every afternoon. I mean, she lived right next door and our moms would hang all the time, so it was a natural."

  "When did you start going out?"

  Chris frowned. "I don't know the day, exactly. Em would. It just sort of evolved. Everyone figured it was going to happen, so it wasn't much of a surprise. One day I kind of looked at her and I didn't just see Em, I saw this really beautiful girl. And, well ... you know."

  "Were you intimate?"

  Chris felt heat crawling up from the collar of his shirt. This was an area he did not want to discuss. "Do I have to tell you if I don't want to?" he asked.

  "You don't have to tell me anything at all," Dr. Feinstein said.

  "Well," Chris said. "I don't want to."

  "But you loved her."

  "Yes," Chris answered.

  "And she was your first girlfriend."

  "Well, pretty much, yeah."

  "So how do you know?" Dr. Feinstein asked. "How do you know that it was love?"

  The way he asked was not mean or confrontational. He was just sort of wondering. If Feinstein had been bitter, or direct, like that bitch detective, Chris would have clammed up immediately. But as it stood, it was a good and valid question. "There was an attraction," he said carefully, "but it was more than that." He chewed on his lower lip for a second. "Once, we broke up for a while. I started hanging around with this girl who I'd always thought was really hot, this cheerleader named Donna. I was, like, totally infatuated with Donna, maybe even when I was still together with Em. Anyway, we started going out places and fooling around a little and every time I was with Donna I realized I didn't know her too well. I'd hyped her up in my head to be so much more than what she really was." Chris took a deep breath. "When Em and I got back together, I could see that she had never been less than what I'd figured her to be. If anything, she was always better than I remembered. And that's what I think love is," Chris said quietly. "When your hindsight's twenty-twenty, and you still wouldn't change a thing."

  As he fell silent, the psychiatrist looked up. "Chris," he asked, "what's your earliest memory?"

  The question took Chris by surprise; he laughed aloud. "Memory? I don't know. Oh--wait--there was this toy I had, a little train that had a button on it which honked. I remember holding onto it and Emily trying to grab it away."

  "Anything else?"

  Chris steepled his hands and thought back. "Christmas," he said. "We came downstairs and there was an electric train running around the tree."

  "We?"

  "Yeah," Chris said. "Emily was Jewish, so she'd come over to our place to celebrate Christmas. When we were really little she'd sleep over Christmas Eve."

  Dr. Feinstein nodded thoughtfully. "Tell me," he said, "do you have any early childhood memories that don't include Emily?"

  Chris tried to run backward in his mind, replaying his life like a loop of film. He saw himself standing in a bathtub with Emily, peeing in the water while she giggled and his mother yelled bloody murder. He saw himself making a snow angel, swinging wide his arms and legs and hitting Emily, who was doing the same thing beside him. He caught glimpses and snippets of his parents' faces, but Emily was off to the side.

  Chris shook his head. "Actually," he said, "I don't."

  THAT NIGHT WHILE CHRIS was in the shower, Gus ventured into his bedroom to clean up. To her surprise, the mess was contained--basically a pile of dirty dishes covered with meals that remained uneaten. She smoothed Chris's covers and then fell to her knees, instinctively checking under the bed for mismatched socks to place in the wash, for food that had unobtrusively rolled beneath.

  Her thumb pricked the hard edges of the shoebox before her mind could consciously register what she'd stumbled across. She reached inside; her fingers ruffled over pages of secret codes, filmy 3-D glasses, invisible lemon juice ink messages that had been decoded over a bare lightbulb. God, how old had they been? Nine? Ten?

  Gus picked up the secret message on the top. In Emily's daisy-chain handwriting, it emphatically announced that "Mr. Polaski is a dork." She traced her finger over the word is, the "i" punctuated by a fat circle, as if it were a balloon that might light off the page at any moment. She scrabbled beneath the loose pages and found a flashlight, batteries dead, and a mirror. Smiling, heartsick, Gus sat down on the bed and wiggled the mirror in her hand. She watched the reflection bounce off, skittering over the woods.

  In the window of Emily's bedroom, there was a mated flash of light.

  With a gasp Gus came to her feet, walking toward the sill. She saw the silhouette of Michael Gold at Emily's bedroom window, holding in his hand a small silver square of mirror.

  "Michael," she whispered, raising her hand in greeting, but even as she did she could see Emily's father drawing down the bedroom shade.

  ON WEDNESDAY BAINBRIDGE HIGH SCHOOL staged a memorial for Emily Gold.

  Her artwork--a legacy--dotted the auditori