Promises I Made by Michelle Zink Read Free Book Online

conceal me from a casual observer.
    I’d been there about a half hour when a fine mist started to fall from the sky. I pulled the hood up on my jacket and tucked myself farther back into the arbor, keeping my eyes on the small stucco house that belonged to Selena and the father who’d raised her. I flashed back to my dream, to the woman underwater. I had somehow known she was Selena’s mother even though she’d been long gone by the time we came to Playa Hermosa. I was contemplating the subconscious meaning of her appearance in my nightmare when I saw a flash of red on the sidewalk across the street.
    I squinted, trying to focus through the water netting the air. A lone figure walked down the sidewalk. The person was almost completely obscured by a red raincoat, but I would have known it was Selena even without the strandof curly dark hair that escaped from the hood. It was something in the way she walked, body leaning forward like she always had somewhere important to be, gaze focused like she was so far inside her own head that she wasn’t aware of the world around her. Until she looked at you. Then there was never any doubt that she was really there.
    I watched her hurry toward the walkway leading to the house across the street. She was alone, and I wondered what had happened to Nina, the girl who’d walked home with Selena before I’d pulled her into Logan’s crowd. Selena hadn’t had a lot of friends, but the ones she had were consistent, people she could eat lunch with every day or walk home from school with. Had they turned on her because of her association with me? I could hardly stand to think about it.
    I took a step forward as she turned onto the landscaped path leading to her house. I needed to talk to her. We’d been friends first, before I’d been accepted into Logan’s group. I don’t know why that made me think she might give me a chance to make things right. Maybe because it was the only hope I had.
    But I couldn’t make my feet move, and I stood helplessly by as she stepped onto the stone porch. She put a hand into her bag, then reached for the door. It swung open, and a minute later she disappeared behind it, as lost to me as I’d been to her when we left Playa Hermosa the night everything had gone so wrong.

Seven
    I walked back to the Town Center, the rain falling harder and more insistently. The sky had turned a darker shade of gray, and somewhere in the distance I thought I heard the low rumble of thunder. I felt closed in and cut off by the rain, by the hood pulled up around my face, by my isolation.
    I stood back in the Plexiglas shelter while I waited for the bus. I knew I was hardly visible from the street, but I still felt exposed, and I was relieved when the bus finally pulled up in a cloud of exhaust and a screech of brakes.
    I looked out the window, thinking about Selena as we wound our way down the peninsula. I should have approached her. Asking her for help was the only option I had. Waiting wasn’t going to change that, and it wasn’t going to make talking to her easier, either. Nothing would do that. I didn’t want to talk to her, not just because it was a risk tomy freedom—and by extension Parker’s—but because she didn’t deserve it. Didn’t deserve to be pulled back into the mess I’d made. It was just another way of victimizing her, of punishing her for caring about me.
    I ran through all the other possibilities, returning to Detective Castillo. I didn’t think Selena would call the cops, but I couldn’t be sure. Detective Castillo could tell me if turning myself in would help Parker. If it would, I’d do it today, and I wouldn’t need to approach Selena at all. If it wouldn’t, I’d be back at square one. But it was worth a shot.
    I rode the bus past my stop, all the way down the Pacific Coast Highway into Lomita, a mean-looking city close to the San Pedro waterfront.