The Pact Read online

Melanie crushed the cigarette beneath her heel. "Did the judge rule yet?"

  "Bail was denied."

  Melanie exhaled. "Wow," she said softly. She felt as if she were floating an inch above the ground. "I think I need another cigarette," she said.

  Lou dug into his coat again. "How about an even trade? You get the cigarettes." He handed her the whole pack. "And I get a front-page story."

  CHRIS CHANGED BACK INTO a jumpsuit in the booking room of the jail. An officer led him to the pod where he'd spent the night. The TV was still on, and there were two new men in the area. One, who looked to be violently drunk, was throwing up in the toilet in Chris's cell.

  Heedless of the sound and the smell, Chris crawled onto the mattress where he'd slept the night before. He stayed there for a few minutes, curled into himself. "I want to go home," he said. The drunk stared blearily at Chris. "I want to go home."

  He stood up, walking out of the cell toward the end of the pod where the officer stood behind a locked metal door. Like the door of a fucking cage. He was an animal now. Chris grabbed at the bars and rattled them hard.

  The officer stared at him. The other inmates ignored him; a few snickered. Chris rattled the bars again, and then more, until his hands hurt from clenching them. He fell to his knees and stayed that way for a long while.

  Then Chris stood up. Dry-eyed, he walked past his cell toward the TV at the end of the catwalk. He sat down in a chair behind the black-eyed man with the goatee. No one spoke to him; no one even indicated they'd heard his tantrum. Sally Jessy Raphael was on. Chris let his eyes go wide and he stared at the screen until he was seeing absolutely nothing.

  THEN

  April 1996

  "Swimmers, take your marks."

  Emily leaned forward at the edge of her seat in the middle of the high school bleachers. She watched Chris snap the band of his goggles twice, for luck, and shake out the muscles of his arms and legs. Then he hooked his toes over the edge of the starting block. As he bent down, he turned his head and unerringly found Emily's face in a sea of others. He winked.

  There was a buzz, then Chris bulleted into the water, streaking beneath the surface of the water to emerge halfway across the pool. His shoulders rose like a great whale, and his arms windmilled in a powerful butterfly stroke. He reached the fifty-meter mark before any of the other swimmers.

  Then he turned, the soles of his feet flashing silver as he raced home.

  The gymnasium swelled with the yells of the crowd, and Emily found herself smiling. Chris reached the wall in an eruption of sound. Over the cheers, the student announcing the meet warbled Chris's time. "A personal best," he crowed, "and a new school record for the hundred-meter butterfly!"

  Panting, Chris hauled himself out of the pool. He was grinning from ear to ear. Emily stood up and pushed past the other people sitting on that row of the bleachers. Walking down the aisle, she made her way to the floor, where the next race was about to start.

  Chris hugged her and buried his face in her neck. Emily could feel the exertion of his heart and his lungs. She imagined the crowd watching as they embraced. The fact that everyone knew someone like him had picked someone like her was one of the things she loved about being Chris's girlfriend.

  Unfortunately, there were also things she hated.

  CARLOS CREIGHTON, WHO WAS nearly as legendary a breaststroker as Chris was a butterflyer, had the locker beside his. "Nice race," Carlos said as Chris emerged from beneath a towel, his hair sticking up in spikes.

  "Thanks. You too."

  Carlos shrugged. "'Course, I could have probably gone faster if I had a hot little piece waiting for me at the finish line, too."

  Chris smiled tightly. It was no secret that he and Em were going out--they had been for almost three years--but that led to assumptions that were not necessarily true. Like the fact that Emily put out, or why else would Chris have stuck around so long?

  The thing was, if he chose to set Carlos straight, it made Chris look like a fool.

  "Bet you get some tonight," Carlos said.

  Chris shrugged into his shirt. "Who knows," he said, just off-handed enough to sound modest.

  "Well, when she gets sick of you give her my phone number," Carlos said.

  Chris buttoned his fly and swung his knapsack over his shoulder. "Don't hold your breath," he said.

  EMILY KNEW THAT her relationship with Chris was very different from most of the other teenage relationships she saw at school. First, it was not a fleeting thing--she had known Chris her entire life. Second, it was truly love, and not infatuation: Chris was practically a member of her family.

  That was why Emily could not understand what was the matter with her.

  When she and Chris had first started going out, two whole years back, it had been an amazing exploration. There was no safer way to stumble through intimacy than with a good friend. But then something had changed. Chris's hands moved; Emily found herself fighting him off. At first it was fear, which gave way to curiosity. The problem was, curiosity gave way to something else.

  Em did not know what sex was supposed to feel like, but she guessed it wasn't having your skin shrink back from his, your stomach roll, your head pound out that this was wrong. Every time her body betrayed her like that, she was embarrassed. It was clear that Chris loved her; of course he'd want to make love to her. And certainly it was right--for God's sake, she'd been hearing her name linked to Chris's since before she could speak. She could not imagine exposing herself so vulnerably to anyone but Chris. Unfortunately, she could not see exposing herself so vulnerably to Chris, either.

  He'd yelled at her when she pulled away; once he had even called her a cocktease. But Emily didn't mind, because the alternative was having Chris ask what was the matter. When that happened, she went silent, unwilling and unable to hurt him with the truth.

  With a vicious yank of the brush through her hair, Emily turned away from her bedroom mirror. Dinner had been a quiet affair, her father off on house calls and her mother absorbed in the nightly news. She dropped her brush on her bed and gathered up her math books.

  "Where do you think you're going on a school night?" her mother asked, as soon as Emily came into the kitchen wearing her coat.

  "To Chris's," she said. "To study."

  "Oh. All right." Melanie poked at several buttons on the dishwasher; it hummed to life. "Call when you're ready to come home. I don't want you walking through the woods when it's dark."

  Emily nodded and zipped up her jacket. It was still cool for April. She felt her mother's hand on her shoulder. "Are you feeling okay?"

  "Yeah. I guess." She lifted her eyes, staring into her mother's, willing Melanie to put together pieces that Emily could not fit into place by herself. "If it was someone else--not Chris--would you let me go?"

  Melanie smoothed her daughter's hair. "Probably not," she said, smiling. "But why talk about something that isn't going to happen?"

  FOR A MOMENT THEY both stood at the threshold to Chris's bedroom, afraid to enter.

  Chris swallowed. How come he'd never noticed how little furniture was in here? The dresser, the tiny desk, and that bed. "Why don't we sit on the floor?" he suggested.

  Relieved, Emily sank down and immediately began spreading out her notes. "I think that McCarthy's going to try to get us on the proofs. So I thought we could go over some of the--" She broke off as Chris leaned down and kissed her. "We're supposed to be studying," she whispered.

  "I know. I just had to do that."

  Emily's mouth twitched. "You had to."

  "Like you can't imagine," Chris said. He settled behind her, curved into the shape of her body, one big hand protectively slung over her ribs.

  This she liked. Being close to Chris, and being held, and well, just being. It was the other that upset her.

  She stared at a carefully printed page of graphs, wiggling because of what Chris was doing to her. She could feel his teeth scraping the tendons of her neck. Emily thought of the wavy sine curve