The Pact Read online

  He traced the pink of her ear, so fragile that Chris could see the slight blue veins webbing it, could imagine the traveling blood. "Hey," he said softly. "Wake up."

  She did, with a start, and would have smashed her head on the steering wheel if Chris's hand wasn't there to stop her. She struggled upright, Chris's hand still on the back of her neck.

  Emily stretched. There was a deep red furrow on her left cheek, a scar carved by the edge of his belt. "Why didn't you wake me up before?" she said, her voice husky.

  Chris smiled at her. "You looked too cute," he said, and he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

  It was nothing, a compliment like a thousand others he'd given her, and yet she burst into tears. Stunned, Chris reached across the stick shift, trying as best as he could to gather her into his arms. "Emily," he said, "tell me."

  She shook her head; he felt the slight movement against his shoulder. Then she drew back, wiping her nose with the back of her sleeve. "It's you," she said. "You're what I'm going to miss."

  It seemed a strange way to say it--"I miss you" would have made more sense--but Chris smiled. "We can visit," he said. "That's why colleges have long breaks, you know."

  She laughed, although it might have been a sob. "I'm not talking about college. I keep trying to tell you," Emily said haltingly. "But you don't listen."

  "Tell me what?"

  "I don't want to be here," Emily said.

  Chris reached for the ignition key. "It's early. We can go somewhere else," he said, a thrum of alarm working its way up his spine.

  "No," Emily said, turning to him. "I don't want to be."

  He sat in silence, his throat working, his mind replaying the other, dismissed things Emily had said that had been leading up to this. And he saw what he had been trying so hard not to see: For someone who knew Emily as well as he did, he saw that she'd been acting different. "Why?" he managed.

  Emily bit her lip. "Do you believe that I would tell you everything I could?" Chris nodded. "I can't take it anymore. I just want it to be over."

  "Want what to be over? What is it?"

  "I can't tell you," Emily choked out. "Oh, God. We've never lied, you and me. We maybe haven't always told each other everything, but we've never lied."

  "Okay," Chris said, his hands trembling. "Okay." He felt himself spinning out of his body, like the time he'd smacked his head on the edge of the high-diving board and had passed out--grasping at the most ordinary things, like the air and the view right in front of his eyes, and knowing he wasn't going to be able to keep it from dissolving. "Em," he said, swallowing, his voice just another shadow in the car. "Are you ... is this about killing yourself?" And when Emily looked away, his lungs swelled up like balloons and the bottom dropped out of his world.

  "You can't," Chris said after a minute, stunned that he'd made any sound at all, with his lips so rubbery and thick. I am not talking about this, he thought. Because if I talk about it, it will really be happening. Emily wasn't sitting across from him, pale and beautiful, discussing suicide. He was having a nightmare. He was waiting for the punch line. Yet he could hear his own voice, high and freaked out, already believing. "You--you can't do this," he stammered. "You don't just go and kill yourself because you're feeling crappy one day. You don't decide something like that out of the blue."

  "It's not out of the blue," Emily said evenly. "And it's not one day." She smiled. "It feels good to talk about it. It isn't so bad to think about, when I say it out loud."

  Chris's nostrils flared, and he yanked open his car door. "I'm going to talk to your parents."

  "No!" Emily cried, so much fear in that one word that Chris immediately stopped. "Please don't," she murmured. "They won't get it."

  "I don't get it," Chris said heatedly.

  "But you'll listen," she said, and for the first time in five minutes, something made sense to Chris. Of course he'd listen; he'd do anything for her. And her parents ... well, she was right. At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light-years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, "This too shall pass"--as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

  There were mornings Chris woke up in a sweat, full to bursting with life, panting as if he'd run all the way up to the top of a cliff. There were days when he felt like he could not fit inside his own skin. There were nights when he was terrified of living up to the model of what he was turning out to be, needing more than anything to breathe in the drugging shampoo scent of Emily's hair, and just as unwilling to admit it. But he could not explain this to anyone, least of all his parents. And Emily, just because she was Emily, clung to him and rode out the storm until he could come up for air.

  He was all at once panicked and proud that Em would take him into her confidence. It escaped him, for the moment, that she had not been able to tell him what was bothering her in the first place. Riding on the crest of her faith, he was tugged by the glory of shutting everyone else out, of being Emily's savior.

  Then he thought of her cutting her wrists open and felt something crack in his chest. This was much bigger than the two of them. "There has to be someone," he said. "A psychiatrist or something."

  "No," Emily said again softly. "I let you in on this because I've always told you everything. But you can't--" her voice faltered. "You can't ruin this for me. Tonight is the first night in--God, I don't know how long--that I've felt like I can handle this. It's like a really bad pain that you can take, you know, because you've already swallowed the medicine and you can see that it's going to stop hurting soon."

  "What hurts?" Chris asked thickly.

  "Everything," Emily said. "My head. My heart."

  "Is it ... is it because of me?"

  "No," she said, her eyes shining again. "Not you."

  He grabbed her then, oblivious of the hard knot of the stick shift between them, and crushed her against his chest. "Why would you tell me, unless you want me to help you?" he whispered.

  Emily panicked. "You won't tell?"

  "I don't know. Am I supposed to just sit around and pretend everything's okay until you go and do it? And then say, 'Oh, yeah ... she did mention something about killing herself.'" He drew back, his hand over his eyes. "Christ. I cannot believe I'm even talking about this."

  "Promise me," Emily said, "you won't tell anyone."

  "I can't."

  The tears that had welled in Emily's eyes spilled over. "Promise," she asked again, her hands grabbing small fistfuls of his shirt.

  For years he'd been cast as Emily's future protector, as her other half--and although he never imagined himself to be any less than that, he didn't really understand how to fully grow into the role. He suddenly realized that this was his test as much as Emily's, his chance to carry Em safely away. If she trusted him, he could damn well be worthy of it ... even if that meant something very different to each of them. He had time. He would get her to talk. He would find out this horrible secret and show her there was another, better way; and eventually everyone--Emily included--would praise him for it. "Okay," Chris whispered. "I promise."

  Yet even with Emily pressed against him, he felt a wall come up, so that skin to skin, he could no longer really feel her. As if she sensed it, too, Emily burrowed closer. "I told you," she said quietly, "because I didn't know how not to."

  Chris looked into her eyes, realizing the strength of her statement. But what difference was there between having Emily try to explain what she wanted to happen, or finding out from a knock at the door that Emily had committed suicide, when the end result was the same?

  "No," he said calmly, filled with purpose. He took her arms lightly in his hands and shook her. "I am not giving you up."

  Emily looked at him, and for just a moment he could read her thoughts. M