She loves me too…
Then a nurse came to do a fingerstick and showed me how to gather the drop of blood into a reader that measures the sugar levels. Vi watched closely, mentally taking notes.
“Can I see it?” Vi asked when the nurse was done. “I’m going to be a doctor someday.”
“Throw it in the bin when you’re finished.” The nurse gave her the fingerstick and left the room. Violet waited until she was gone and then punctured her own finger.
“What are you doing?”
She took my hand ,pressed the ruby red drop of blood on her fingertip to mine.
“Promise me,” she said. “Promise me, we’ll always be friends. I can’t lose you again. Not ever…”
Always be friends.
I wanted to laugh and tell her how impossible that is. How I crossed a boundary the night we met. How all the broken pieces of my life come together when I’m with her, even for a little while. How we’d been hanging out for months and every minute I tried to find the courage to tell her that this poor homeless kid with nothing to offer would die for her.
I swallowed hard, swallowed down what I want to say, because I’m thirteen and I’m not supposed to love a girl like this. So soon. So completely.
“I promise…”
Part II
four years later
Chapter One
“I promise…”
The bus hit a pothole, jostling my forehead off the window and jarring me from my thoughts. From the memory of that morning in the hospital that was the best and the worst, because the day I knew I loved Violet was also the day I let her go.
“Stupid fucking promise.”
I glanced around at the mostly empty seats; it was dark, and no one seemed to have heard me. Or cared if they did. My guitar case sat on m
y lap, and I gripped it tighter, nerves lit up.
We now lived at opposite ends of the school district. Turns out, my hospitalization and diagnosis four years ago had an upside. A charity program worked with the hospital for kids like me and their families to help get us on our feet so that I wouldn’t die in the back of the station wagon trying to inject my insulin. They moved us out of the car and into low-income housing in a shady neighborhood on the rocky cliffs overlooking Lighthouse Beach.
I took the bus to see Violet instead of hiking through the dark woods at night, but I still saw her as much as I could. As much as she had time for, which felt like less and less with every passing year.
She’s slipping away because you’re a jackass with no backbone.
After Violet brought my guitar back, she asked me to play for her every night that I snuck into her room. I’d never played in front of anyone before. She was my first. Sitting in her room at night, we’d study or talk, and then she’d ask me to sing. So I did. Instead of telling her how I felt, I sang and played, and she never knew. Never suspected. She thought she was too nerdy for a guy to actually like her and I was too chickenshit to tell her how wrong she was.
I hid behind other people’s songs, too. Like “Yellow” by Coldplay. That was her favorite. It became “our song.” She thought I’d chosen it because it sounds good on an acoustic guitar. She never suspected that every lyric was a dedication to her. And she always cried, saying over and over again how talented I was. Gifted. Destined for greatness.
I didn’t believe her, but I knew I wanted to make music for the rest of my life. Violet showed me the way and I loved her for it. I loved her in a thousand ways, but she cherished our friendship above all else and so I gritted my teeth and respected that.
I let her feed herself lies about how terrible love was and how it ruined everything.
I let her listen to her parents argue and think that’s what happened to everyone.
And I’d promised to be her friend. Sealed it in blood.
To plunge the knife deeper, she still carried a torch for that bastard, River Whitmore. I suspected she kept her crush going because it was safe. Violet carried her shit close to her heart too, just in a different way from me.
But I couldn’t do it anymore. Tomorrow was the first day of school. I was about to face down another year—our senior year of high school—with Violet never knowing how I felt. I had to tell her before it was too late. Convince her to set aside her fear and see how right we were together. How fucking perfect.