Promises

Porch lights turn on with any sudden movement from our bodies, summer is turning into fall, and the air is clawing at our appendages, drying out our lips, painting the cartilage on our ears red, making our noses run and toes curl under in our shoes. Stephanie speaks in her usual mannerisms, flailing her arms around, using her hands to tell stories, stories of falling to the ground when she ran into a guy that she met at a concert. It is stories like this that make our stomachs ache, and it impossible to risk taking a drink, fearing that it might end up all over each other.

            The porch is still white, they haven’t painted it yet, and the metal flower patterned chairs leave imprints on our legs and butts, the kind of imprints leotards leave when I leave them on too long, but when we stand up from the chairs, it’s like pulling the leotard off. It pulls against your skin until it realizes that it is not a part of your body, and lets go, giving relief to the imprinted parts. Stephanie ends the story without taking a breath, I stood up with my tray on the counter and I saw him starring at me in confusion. So I dropped back down to the ground. We doubled over, faces pressed against the patterned metal table, choking on our spit and snot running out of our noses, laughing to the point of tears.

            We know nothing else but laughter, because we are young enough that our hair colors are all still natural. I have not colored my hair 4RV, Chloe has not had the chop yet, Sophia’s braces are still on, and Stephanie’s hair is past her shoulders. Becca, that laugh, breathe. You sounded, breathe. Just like your mother, breathe. The smile stops, turning my wide stretched cheeks into straight dry lips, the cracks in my lips closing back up as if they were never separated, my corrugator wrinkles, bringing my eyebrows close together, my orbicularis oris rises. The look that says, yeah, I remember that night on the trampoline all those years ago, the bugs were buzzing around the porch light, we were whispering because your parents bedroom window was right in front of us, you were telling me family secrets, such as why my Dad married my Mom, for the money, or the real reason we moved back to Ohio, family services. Stephanie raises her head. I wondered. You are the only one that knows that conversation took place, and it will remain that way.

            That’s cute, she laughs just like her mom! We put our cups of hot chocolate into the kitchen sink, take a seat around the living room, cover ourselves with old quilts made by Chloe and Sophia’s grandma when she had the free time to make them these kinds of things. We pull out the beanbags that take up a fifth of the living room, we let Suzanne turn on the worship music, we pull out our bibles, our notebooks, our pens, the book we are reading Every Young Girls Battle, Sophia puts popcorn on the table, chocolate-chip cookies, Root beer, glass cups, vanilla ice cream, and spoons.

            So you remember? Stephanie whispers without turning her head to look at me while everybody is preoccupied with the food. I nod slowly up and down; I remember asking her, making her promise me. I’m sure I’ve done it twice, one when we were four and five, I’m not even sure of the circumstances that lead to it, it was not a good night though probably a lot of yelling, throwing of inanimate objects or animated objects, I can tell you, it wasn’t a good night. The second time was on the trampoline when we were seven and eight, thinking that college was lifetime away, an impossibility, that my escape would be death, not college, that it would never change, not that it ever did. I came home with her from church one Wednesday night with the cicadas chirping in the trees, the windows of their mini van down, we were reciting bible verses for next week because we were young and that was our highest priority, but when we arrived at the house it was one of the first times I had ever been there. They had just moved in, it’s the same house she lives in now. The one with the big pool that we would swim in all summer, and jump into from the roof of their one story house. The house that was simple, but yet it was everything that I wanted and she got to have, we snuck out to the trampoline, laying on our backs, I explained how my day went. It started at home, with inanimate objects flying. First laundry that was sitting on the couch, socks, shorts, t-shirts, pants, then onto the empty pitcher sitting on the coffee table, the play station remotes sitting by the T.V., the mail on the counter, the shoes by the door, the toy mouse on the stairs, the vase at the top of the stairs, the picture frame hanging outside the upstairs bathroom, the coats in the closet, the glass owl that I put all of my change in that sits on my desk, as it shatters against the wall, and all the change falls to the golden carpet, the yellow bumble-bee bag of nail polish, the bottle of hand sanitizer on my dresser, the pictures that are framed sitting on my dresser – pictures of days that are way better than this day - and finally her spit in my face, as I hide in the corner on the top bunk of the white metal bed. It creaks under her weight, and I hide under the cherry blankets, shaking, crying, and determined not to yell back, not to make it worse.

            We then went to church, where the private then became public.

            You’re keeping your promise, right? I whisper to her, making my root beer float.

            To never let you turn into your Mom? Until the day I die.