Swear on This Life

  Jackson’s full-throated sobs evened out into painful whimpers. My shirt was drenched with tears and snot, but I didn’t care. In the smallest voice he said, “You’re all I have left. You’re holding my whole world together, Em.”

  “But you have your mom. She loves you a lot,” I whispered.

  “My mom is a shell, and she’ll be even less than that now that her golden boy is dead.”

  “That’s not true, Jax,” I said, but I wasn’t sure I believed my own reassurances.

  LATER ON, AFTER the EMTs, police, and coroner arrived, Jax and I sat side by side on the fence, as we’d done so many times before. Jax was sniffling, but he had calmed down a bit. We were watching Leila, who was wrapped in a blanket and sitting on a bench on their porch, speaking to an investigator.

  “When she looks at me, all she sees is my dad, and she hates him. She loved Brian more than me. She’ll wish that was me in the river.”

  “Stop it, Jackson Fisher. You stop that right now. You’ve been reading too much. Don’t ever talk like that,” I said.

  “I guess now you can’t marry him.”

  I hopped off the fence, turned, and looked at him pointedly, but I had no words. He got down too. We were face-to-face. I felt crushed, and Jackson looked tormented. I started crying again. “Don’t, Jax. Don’t do that.”

  He started to cry again too, and then he hugged me and buried his head in my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “He’s gone. I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  That moment was followed by days of grieving. Jax and his mom sat inside of that dark, dank house, now further tainted with loss and tragedy. When the investigation was over and foul play was ruled out, Leila had Brian cremated. We all went into town for a short service at the funeral home. The cause of death was never once mentioned.

  We sat in the front row while a stranger spoke from notes that Leila had written about Brian, detailing his musical achievements and how kindhearted he was. His girlfriend, who we later found out was a street kid, sobbed in the row behind us. Other than that, there were only a few people he worked with and went to high school with in attendance. The whole event made Brian seem so insignificant. I wondered how long it would take for the dirt road to end Jax or me. How long it would be before any chance at a legacy would be robbed from us.

  Jackson was dressed in slacks that I knew he’d had since he was a kid because they were high-waters on him. He wore one of his brother’s black Led Zeppelin T-shirts and the wallet chain Brian had handed down to him a year before.

  Leila looked like she had aged ten years. On the car ride home, she just kept mumbling, “It’s not natural.”

  From the passenger seat, Jax said, “What’s not natural, Mom?”

  “To bury a child.”

  Later that night, Jax told me that Leila got high and drunk and said that she wished it had been him who’d drowned. We both knew it was coming. He didn’t cry like I thought he would. He said, “She’s pathetic, Em. I can’t hate her because I pity her too much.”

  “You’re the smartest person I know, Jackson,” I told him, and it was true. The comment earned me one of his cute smiles. Even though he tried to act tough, I knew Leila had wounded him. I vowed never to hurt him in that way.

  That week, I went home each night to my despondent father, who said little about Brian’s death except that the kid was a druggie. I thought that it was sad that my father judged Brian based on Leila’s actions. Beyond pot, Brian wasn’t a druggie at all. He was just a guy who’d lost his father young and grown up in a shit-hole town with an addict for a mother. Who knew what he could have become.

  Jax and I weren’t surprised when the autopsy came back with the result that Brian had simply drowned. He was likely pulled under by the strong current created by a season of rainstorms.

  No one knew what frame of mind Brian was in the night he died, or why on earth he would go swimming in the middle of the night, fully clothed, with his damn boots on. We just knew that he was gone forever, and things would never be the same for any of us.

  4. Things I’ve Put Away

  I was crying when Trevor came into my room in the middle of the night. He was groggy and squinting. “What’s wrong, Emi?”

  I closed the book and pushed it to the side. “I’m just confused about some things.”

  He flipped off the light and got into my bed. I scooted under the covers and let him spoon me.

  “Talk to me,” he said gently. His voice was soothing next to my ear.

  I buried my face in his arm. “On my thirteenth birthday, I found my neighbor dead, floating in the river behind my house.” Jeff was his real name and he was magical. In what felt like a single breath he was gone. His death affected Jase deeply, as well as myself.

  Trevor paused for a moment, absorbing my words. “Oh Jesus, Emi. I’m so sorry. That must have been horrible for you. Is that why you never want to celebrate your birthday?”

  I nodded in the darkness and told him the whole story. He just listened and held me tighter, his silence a comfort after all the fighting we’d been doing. It wasn’t long before I fell asleep in his arms.

  Telling Trevor what happened didn’t heal me, but reliving that day did in some way. Jason’s insights in the book and his view of me, and what I was going through in that moment, gave me a sense of closure. His brother’s death had to have been much more traumatic for him, but he was still aware that I was experiencing the horror along with him. He was always so perceptive and compassionate.

  Too bad I was so pissed off at him.

  WHEN I WOKE up the next morning, Trevor was gone, but the memory of the night before lingered. I turned to his pillow to see he had left me a note. I had finally shared something from my past with him, something he’d been asking me to do for years. I wondered if the moment had meant as much to him as it did to me.

  The note simply said he’d had to go to PT. Nothing else but an “xo, T” at the end.

  I felt hollow, but that empty feeling was too much to confront. So I went back to the book.

  From All the Roads Between

  For a few years, I was the tallest kid in school, but by the summer going into ninth grade, everyone was catching up and passing me by, including Jax. His voice was changing, and he was getting hair on his face. He still acted like a five-year-old every now and then, but despite the fact that he was living with a junkie, had lost his brother a couple of years before, and had no father, Jax somehow managed to keep getting sweeter and sweeter.

  I knew he was dealing with a lot, but he held it together and focused on his schoolwork. When Leila wasn’t working, she was comatose on the couch. When she’d clean up her act a little and go to work, there’d be an endless stream of sleazy men hanging around the house for days.

  Jax and I spent more and more time in the shed. We both found things we could steal to make the place more habitable, like it was our own house.

  “What have you been writing in that journal?” I asked. Jax was lying on the cot in the corner and scribbling notes in a black leather-bound notebook.

  “I’m just outlining my novel.”

  I was sitting in one of the wooden chairs with my arms wrapped around my legs, staring out the window at the swaying trees.

  “The one about the ant family?”

  “No, I ditched that. I’m writing about a boy and girl who become superheroes and save the world.”

  “The Adventures of Jax and Em?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You want to go swim in the creek?” The water in the creek had settled down for the season, and one of Leila’s short-lived boyfriends had built a deck and rope swing for us. We had carved our names, along with Brian’s, in the wood. It was our memorial to him. Jackson would go down there alone a lot; I knew he was talking to his brother.

  “I’m kind of busy,” he said. I got up and yanked the journal out of his hands. “No, Em. I’m serious, give it back.”

  “I want to read it,” I whined.


  “Please don’t.” His voice cracked, and his face was red. He wasn’t playing around.

  “Why won’t you let me? You let me read the ant story.”

  “Because this is different. It’s not done yet. You can read it when it’s done.”

  I handed the journal back. “I’m bored. I just want to find something to do.”

  “Fine, let’s go swimming.”

  I went home and got my swimsuit. It was a purple, tattered one-piece that I had bought at the Goodwill for two dollars, but it did the job. By then we were on welfare and food stamps, so it felt like I was living the life. We had cereal and cheese and milk and juice all the time. My father would give me twenty dollars every month to buy the things he had too much fucking pride to buy, like tampons and dish soap.

  No wonder my sad excuse for a mom had left, but why couldn’t she have taken me with her? Besides the fact that my dad was a bigot and a belligerent alcoholic, I was especially saddened when I realized I was being raised by a misogynist. Jax had taught me that word. He basically called every man Leila brought home a misogynistic creep.

  “Where are you going in that?” My father spoke from the hallway as I stood facing the bathroom mirror. I didn’t make eye contact with him as I wrapped my hair in a ponytail.

  “I’m going swimming with Jax.”

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

  I turned and faced him. His beard and hair had grown thick, and there was always a yellowish tint clouding his eyes. Was it terrible that I wished his liver would finally call it quits once and for all?

  “Put a shirt over that.”

  “It’s a one-piece, Dad. It doesn’t show that much.”

  Smack! He slammed his hand on the wall. “Are you talking back to me?”

  “No, sir,” I said, stiffening.

  “I said put a shirt on. I don’t want you slutting yourself around with that boy. Why don’t you have any girlfriends? Why are you always with Jackson?”

  “I don’t know.” My father knew exactly why, but he liked to make me feel bad about my life anyway. I would never bring anyone to my house, even if I did have other friends. I would never subject some poor kid to the kind of crap that went on here at the end of the dirt road. But besides that, I liked Jax more than anyone else. Our friendship was easy and we cared about each other. Even though we didn’t have the words back then, he was the only person I trusted.

  “Out of the bathroom. I need to shave,” he said, finally dismissing me. But I lingered in the hall, confused. “Why are you shaving your beard off?”

  “Your dad got a job, kid.”

  “Really?”

  “You didn’t think we were gonna live on food stamps forever, did you? We’re better than that.” He lathered up from an old can of shaving cream and pressed the razor to his face. Honestly, I had thought we’d be on food stamps forever, and I was kind of okay with it, but I had noticed that my dad was trying to pull things together lately. He was still a mean drunk, but it wasn’t as bad as it was right after my mom left, and he’d mellowed some with time. “Where’d you get a job?”

  “Doing maintenance at the motel.”

  “Did Susan get you that job?”

  “No, I got me the job.”

  I’d wounded his ego, so I had to flee. “Okay, I’ll be home later. I’ll put a shirt on.” As I walked away I said, “I’m glad you got a job, Dad.”

  I got to the shed before Jax. When I lay down on the cot, I felt a lump under the blanket. I pulled it out from under me and saw that it was his journal. My stomach did a little flip. Just a little peek wouldn’t hurt anyone.

  She sat there holding her smooth legs to her chest, staring out the window, popping her gum, bored, and saying inconsequential things. But still . . . she was the center of the universe. She could make the whole world go around without even breaking a sweat.

  The wooden door swung open. I closed the journal and looked up to see Jax in the doorway, scowling at me.

  “What the hell is the matter with you? Have you no respect for my privacy?” He marched up to me and tore the journal out of my hands.

  “I didn’t read any of it.”

  “Liar. I can tell you read it. Your face is beet red.”

  “I only read one line.”

  “It’s not about you.”

  It’s totally about me, I thought.

  He turned and headed back out the door.

  “Who’s it about then?” I called after him.

  “Not you. I’m going home.”

  I ran after him and yanked his shoulder back and spun him around in the field of weeds. “Talk to me, Jax.”

  “It’s about Desiree Banks. She’s my girlfriend. Go home, Emerson, and mind your own business.”

  “We’re not little kids anymore, Jackson,” I said to his back.

  “Yeah, exactly! I don’t have time for your kid games.”

  My kid games? “You can tell me how you feel about me. I’m here. I’m listening.”

  He said nothing, so I followed him until he went inside of his house and slammed the door. I turned around and dragged my feet home, regretting what I had done. My dad had already left to go to his new job, so I was alone, left to think about the passage Jax had written.

  IN THE MORNING, I waited fifteen minutes for him to come outside, but he didn’t, so I had to run all the way down the road to catch the bus. The white Converse I had bought with my own money from my new weekend job were covered in dirt. I was pissed. When I got to the mailboxes, Jax was already there, waiting for Ms. Beels.

  “Why didn’t you wait for me?”

  He looked up from his book and then looked back down and said, “I don’t have to do everything with you.”

  “These shoes were five Saturdays at Carter’s, and now they’re all dirty.” Jax and I had been doing odd jobs around Carter’s egg ranch on Saturdays for three dollars an hour. We were grossly underpaid, and we had to walk two miles to get there, but at least it was a job.

  “That’s what you get for spending all your money on shoes.”

  I stomped my foot. “Ugh! You’re not being fair.”

  Still staring at his book, he said, “I’m not doing anything to you.”

  “I said I was sorry. You left your dumb journal in our fort, almost like you wanted me to find it.”

  “I’m not fighting with you because I don’t care, Em. I told you ten minutes earlier not to read it. You can’t even apologize the right way.”

  “Sorry I’m not perfect like you.”

  “Oh, and by the way, it’s not a journal, it’s a novel, and it’s going to kick ass when I’m done with it. And the fort is mine, Emerson, not ours. It’s on my property.”

  I turned my back to him and stared down the road, fuming silently. When the bus pulled up, I took our normal seat at the front. Jax passed me and went all the way to the back.

  “Real mature, Fisher,” I called out. We were acting like our ten-year-old selves, but we weren’t ten anymore.

  The freshmen at Neeble High had their own hall, so it would be impossible for Jax to avoid me all day. And avoid me, he didn’t. Coming out of English class, I saw that he was standing in the spot he always stood to walk with me to math, except he wasn’t alone. He was leaning against a row of old lockers no one used anymore with his arm around Desiree Banks.

  STUPID BOY.

  “Grow up,” I muttered as I passed him. Desiree shot me her best stink eye, which made her look constipated.

  Jackson could get any girl he wanted, and he knew it. He was the only boy at that age with perfect skin, strong arms, and the beginnings of a six-pack. And he was tall. He had grown fast. He’d outgrown all the goofiness of his preteen years by the beginning of our ninth-grade year—or maybe I just didn’t see it anymore. I had developed early too. Not that I had nice breasts—they were barely there, but by the end of ninth grade, I was done growing in every direction. Unfortunately, the same could be said for Desiree, who had grown
in certain ways that I never would.

  I sat in the library at lunch and talked to Ms. Lilly, the librarian.

  “Where’s Jax today?” she asked. Even the teachers knew we were inseparable.

  “I don’t know. He has a girlfriend now.”

  The small gray-haired woman in her sixties looked surprised. “A girlfriend? I thought you were his girlfriend.”

  “When we were kids people used to say that. It was just dumb kid stuff.”

  “Oh.”

  I held up a copy of She’s Come Undone. “Thanks for getting this for me.”

  “It’s not exactly on the reading list, Emerson. Keep it hush-hush.”

  “Always, Ms. Lilly. Thank you.” I went to a table to read, but I was distracted. I wondered why, in all of the time that Jax and I had spent together, he hadn’t tried to kiss me. He never even brought it up. I wasn’t the prettiest girl in school—no butt, no boobs, just a beanpole with a mop of dark hair—but I had nice skin and he’d told me once that I had pretty eyes. Actually, he’d said they were weird and so big, he felt like he could dive in and swim around in them. So maybe “pretty” wasn’t the right word . . .

  Maybe he really was writing about Desiree. Maybe I was just his buddy from childhood that he used to play in the mud with.

  On the bus on the way home, he was sitting in the front seat. “Hey, Em!”

  He looked far too chipper for Jackson. As I took the seat beside him, I peered closer at his neck. “What in god’s name . . . Is that a . . . oh, gross.” It was a big, purplish-brown hickey. “I didn’t take you for a boob guy, Jack-son.”

  “Whatever do you mean, Emer-son?”

  I held my hands up to mimic big boobs. “Desiree, you idiot.”

  He smirked in that shit-eating kind of way. “Oh. Yeah, hmm. I hadn’t really noticed.”

  I huffed and then scurried to the back of the bus, thinking two could play this game. I ran home and threw my backpack down in the entryway. Racing past the kitchen, I glanced in and saw my father sitting at the table, reading the paper and drinking coffee. I stopped abruptly and backed up to the doorway. He looked up and smiled. “How was your day, honey?”