probably him. He better grovel.”
While she takes the call I swallow the Advil, downing all of the water in the mug in a few long gulps. My head is totally throbbing. I feel like death warmed over. No, scratch that. Like death left out on the counter for two days and then reheated in the microwave for thirty seconds. That’s exactly how I feel.
There’s an issue of National Geographic lying half-open on the table. I pick it up and leaf through it idly. I’m not a big recreational-reader type, other than celebrity gossip blogs and Us Weekly, but Kristen’s a talker, and I’m sure she’ll be arguing with Warren for a while before he gives in and promises to buy her something shiny in exchange for bailing. The magazine is open to a striking photo of an old Buddhist monk swathed in a yellow robe kneeling in prayer. Below the picture is a profile on the monk, who’d taken a vow of silence and hadn’t spoken a word in sixty years. I guess the idea was that by not speaking and staying in a constant state of contemplation, it made him closer to God, or enlightenment, or whatever.
I’m too preoccupied skimming the article and nursing my hangover to eavesdrop on Kristen’s conversation, but then she lets out an especially sharp “What?” that makes me snap to attention. When I look at her, she’s speechless, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. But she turns her back to me and lowers her voice so I can’t hear whatever it is she says next. It isn’t until she hangs up the phone and drops into the seat next to me, the shocked expression etched into her features, that I get an answer out of her.
“What’s going on?” I demand.
She drags her eyes off the phone in her hand and meets my gaze. “Noah Beckett is in the hospital,” she tells me.
“Wait, are you serious?” Kristen just nods, and my mouth goes dry again. I wrap my hands around my empty mug and ask, “What the hell happened?”
“He was in the parking lot of the Quality Mart, and he…he got beat up really bad,” she says. She pauses for a long time. “I guess he’s unconscious.”
My heart kind of stops, thinking about Noah like that. Who would do that to him? And then I realize.
I don’t want to ask the question because I’m so afraid I already know the answer, but I have to. “Did Warren and Joey do it?”
Kristen doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. The look on her face says it all.
“Oh, my God,” I breathe, slumping back in my chair. “Oh, my God.” I cover my mouth with one hand. “I thought they were just going to talk to him!”
“You can’t say anything.” Kristen’s tone has a careful edge to it.
“But—”
“I mean it,” she says, more emphatically this time. “I’m not kidding. If anyone asks, nothing happened. You don’t know anything. Got it?”
I stare down at the open magazine, but the words there are a jumbled mess. I can’t wrap my mind around this. I’m an expert at finding out secrets, but keeping them—especially a secret of this magnitude—is something else.
“Yeah, I got it,” I say. “Nothing happened.”
* * *
Except I know better. We both do. Warren and Joey are behind this. They have to be.
Kristen wants me to pretend like last night never happened. Like I should just push it out of my mind and ignore the fact that her boyfriend put a boy in the hospital. I drive home in a daze, trying to do just that. But no matter how loud I crank the radio, I can’t escape my thoughts, and they keep circling back to Noah. What the hell was Warren thinking? I know he was kind of drunk, and I know that he’s not the nicest guy under sober conditions, but still.
I promised Kristen I wouldn’t say anything. If I do, I’m going to be in so much trouble—a kind of trouble I can’t even fathom. My parents will kill me. Kristen will disown me. Everyone will hate me. Besides, why should I have to be the one to rat them out? There were other people at that party who heard my story about Noah, who saw Warren and Joey get mad and leave. They have to know. Or they will, soon enough, once word spreads about what happened. So why should the responsibility to tell fall on my shoulders?
All the rationalizing in the world isn’t making me feel better about this decision.
Mom’s doing dishes when I walk into the kitchen. Dad sits at the table, reading the newspaper. It’s so perfectly normal I want to cry. I lean against the doorway and watch them, swallowing against the crater-size lump lodged in my throat.
“How was your night, kiddo?” asks Dad.
I shrug one shoulder. “Fine,” I lie.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Mom says. She wrings the sponge and raises an eyebrow at me. “Did you get the milk?”
Oh, shit. I totally did not even remember she asked me to pick that up.
“Sorry,” I mumble, rubbing my forehead with one hand. My head is killing me. “I forgot about it.”
“Chelsea.” Mom sighs. “I ask you for one thing, and you can’t even—”
“I forgot, okay?” I snap. “God. I said I was sorry.”
Dad shakes out his newspaper and lays it flat on the table. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, standing up and coming over to me. He plants a kiss on the top of my head, and I hold my breath, hoping the three mouthwash rinses and obscene amount of Kristen’s perfume I doused myself with are enough to mask any lingering smell of alcohol.
It must be, because he doesn’t comment on it. “I can make a grocery run,” he offers. Always the peacemaker.
Mom sighs again, louder this time, and I take it as my cue to slink upstairs without further interrogation. I shut the door and toss my purse onto my bed. The issue of National Geographic comes tumbling out—I snuck it in my bag before I left Kristen’s. I couldn’t ask to borrow it because she’d think I was a freak, but I really did want to finish reading that article about the monk.
I flop down on my bed and fumble through the pages until I find it. Being silent for sixty years—I can’t fathom it. Hell, I can’t fathom being silent for sixty days. Even sixty minutes would be tough. This monk guy, his silence is used to better himself. My silence about Noah—it’s the opposite. It’s because I’m a coward.
I don’t want to think about this anymore, but even when I pull a pillow over my head and squeeze my eyes shut, I’m consumed with the memory of Noah’s eyes, the way they’d been filled with shock when I opened that bedroom door, and then panic as he realized what I’d caught him doing. And with whom. I wonder if that’s the same look he had when Warren and Joey kicked the shit out of him in that parking lot.
When I found Noah—them—on the bed together, Noah’s mouth had opened like he was going to say something, but I’d turned and hightailed it back downstairs as quickly as possible. Maybe he was going to say “Wait,” maybe he was going to ask me not to say anything about what I’d seen. Or maybe he wasn’t going to say anything at all, realizing that kind of request was futile, even if I was there to hear it.
After all, everyone knows Chelsea Knot doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut.
I
