24: The Pact

The door slammed nearly thirty minutes ago, yet I continued to sit on the side of my bed and smile. When Cliff walked in, I was still laying down and crying. I wouldn’t answer the door, so he came right in. My aunt wasn’t home, so at least he didn’t have to worry about being mistaken as a burglar.

He walked in and dropped down beside me on the bed. It took nearly an hour of coaxing to even come out of the cocoon of blanket. When I did, we wrapped his arms around me, and we spent a good while just hugging while I dried my tears. 

Then something strange happened. Something I wasn’t expecting. Actually, it threw me off guard big time. Cliff apologized. Then, he asked if I would be his girlfriend.

For a while, I couldn’t answer, because a girlfriend in the eyes of someone like Cliff, in the eyes of a player, was something foreign, wasn’t it? It at least wasn’t something to be excited about. Not when the alternative is sleeping with a different girl every night, and not have to worry about the consequences. But he did with me. He had to worry. Yet that was only because of Austin. If not for him, I would still be alone, or at the store buying gallon jugs of ice cream. 

It still amazed me how fast emotions could transition, and how dramatically. After it settled in what he was asking, I began to laugh and cry at the same time. Then I said yes. Cliff probably thought I was psycho. I thought I was psycho. I probably was. How could I fall in love? I barely believed in love. 

It didn’t really matter anymore. I had Cliff again. This time, though, I actually had him, and it wasn’t something that was in my mind. Cliff was actually mine, and I was actually his. 

I smelled my arm, and smelt him. A big smile traced itself on my face, and I jumped up to put on some clothes. In my dresser, I picked out shorts that were long, especially for a girl. Though I was not one to dress like the average girl. Most of them would have shorts that went all the way up their a*s. Mine went to my knees, and they weren’t really shorts, but cut-off skinny jeans. I slid them up, and winced a little under the pain of the heart and couple slashes. 

Cliff noticed them. I think he knew about them. I wasn’t sure if he had felt them the other night, but he pulled the covers down to look at them today. Possibly it was Austin who told. 

I put on a tight white tank top, and stood staring at myself in the mirror. I was skinny. What the hell was I thinking earlier? Even if I had rolls when I was crunched in a ball, I didn’t now. I was as skinny as ever. I looked quickly at the wrapper in the corner of the room. It made me sick to look at, because every time I did, I found myself eating the entire thing again in my mind. Not because I wanted to, but because it was something I was ashamed of doing. Now my stomach growled viciously at me.

I turned back to the mirror and studied myself carefully. Small breasts, thin waist, small legs. Yet I had a tall shape to me. Once I thought about it, I realized I was probably taller than Cliff. My short hair crowded around and stuck out in random places, but I didn’t really care. In fact, I messed it up a little more before I headed out the door. 

It was probably nine o’clock, and the sun was completely gone from this side of earth. I held my stomach as I made my way down the street toward Juliet’s house. My leg was probably what I should have been holding, because the pain was much more acute. Yet I had grown to a constant pain in that spot, so it was hardly noticeable despite the pain. My stomach, on the other hand, felt like it was about to tear open under so much stress. It felt like it had surpassed its maximum saturated fat limit. 

I smelled, and was overcome by the strong smell of fresh rain. Lots of it, too. It poured down the sides of the streets in rivers. Everywhere the night air was filled with the noise of water running down gutters and streets and into sewer grates. Everything had a nice sparkle to it under the streetlights, especially the asphalt. There was a light trickle of rain, but the sky threatened more.

The sky had a strange tint to it with all the clouds. Everything was an odd color, almost as if in a sci fi movie on a far off planet. It gave everything a strange feeling, especially when lightening shot high up in the sky and illuminated them. 

As I trudged in a diagonal line down the street, I saw Juliet making her usual routine. She was walking up toward me, and didn’t seem to notice me at first. Her head was raised high up in the sky and she watched the clouds illuminate with the sudden bursts of electricity. Juliet was probably the only person I’d ever known that would walk down the middle of a street and stare directly above. 

“Juliet!”

“Ida!”

I picked up my pace, and even started to run. It pulsed into my wounds, and I swore I felt all of the food in my stomach bouncing up and down. A stitch grew in my side, so I slowed down to a swift walk the rest of the way.

“Oh, God, Ida... Are you OK?!”

At first I was confused, but then I realized my eyes must have been red. Also, this was the first time she had seen me since I’d cut my hair.

“Yeah! I’m great. Better than great! Cliff and I... well, I guess he’s sort of my boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?  Well why’d you cut your hair? I liked the dreads... now it’s sorta like what my hair looked like a couple months ago. Actually, your dye is probably my natural color.”

I touched the tips of my short hair. They were a light brown. My regrowth, now that it was showing so badly, was probably a paler version of what Juliet’s hair was. 

“Yeah. I just needed a change. The hair was getting too hard to manage.” Liar. “I just chopped it off, and then they just weren’t dreads anymore.”

“Oh... I guess it isn’t too bad. So you’re fine?”

“Yep... perfectly fine.”

“Wanna come over? I don’t have anything to do.”

“Yeah! Love to come over!”

“I’m hungry. Bacon?”

For a minute I froze. The grin must have left my face, because Juliet gave me a strange look.

“I don’t want bacon.”

“It’s your favorite, though.”

“Actually, I don’t eat meat anymore.”

Her eyes widened a little, and she pulled her right side closer, as if she didn’t hear me clearly, and she wanted me to repeat what I said. I did.

“I don’t eat meat.”

“Since when?”

“Um... yesterday.”

“You just... stopped eating it?”

“Yeah.”

“We just had meat, like, three days ago.”

“Yeah, but that was then. This is now.”

My cheeks were growing slowly red. I could tell she was forming the same idea that Austin was. She decided to drop the subject there, and so we made our way to her house. Then my phone rang.

“Hold on, can you give me a minute? This call’s sorta important.”

“Yeah,” she said with a cheery smile. “I’ll just go inside and wait.”

I could see her roll her eyes as she left. I pressed the talk button on my aunt’s phone and held it up to my ear.

“Austin?”

“Ida... so Cliff talked to you?”

“Of course. You told him, didn’t you?”

“Yeah... I just didn’t want you to... do anything.”

“Anything? Like what?”

“Well, I was walking at the cliff earlier.”

“In the rain?”

“Yeah... and I made my way to the cave.”

“So? What’s out there?”

“You’ve never been by the ocean in one of these storms, have you?”

“No.”

“I realized that I don’t really want to die. It was horrible out there, and I almost did die. You wouldn’t believe it!”

“How?”

“Trapped. The waves came into the cave. I almost drowned- look, Ida. That’s not the point. I don’t want you to die.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

And then I realized.

“Austin... I wasn’t going to kill myself or anything... I’m not really suicidal like I was before.”

“I wasn’t sure if you were still thinking about it...”

“No... not anymore, at least.”

“I don’t want to anymore, and you don’t want to...”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Same.”

“Well.. Then let’s make a pact. We won’t kill ourselves.”

“Right. Neither of us can.”

“If we do? What happens if one of us does?”

Both of us had been so close to death at one time, and we were both moving forward in the other direction. That was good, yet I knew both of us were thinking the same thing. A suicide pact. Austin was my friend. One of my only friends. There was him, Juliet, and Cliff. I didn’t want to lose one of them, and guaranteeing suicide if he died would reenforce it. Austin wouldn’t kill himself if it ended my fate as well. I knew I didn’t want to be the cause of his death, let alone my own. So the pact would guarantee us as friends, and it would guarantee our lives. 

“If one of us does... then the other will too.”

“Commit suicide? If the other does?”

“Yes.”

“Alright.”

Something like this would normally be so hard to commit to, yet the both of us knew just what the pact meant. It meant our lives were sealed. There would be no committing suicide. Suicide would kill the other, and if we had someone else on our shoulders, then we would have to think extra hard about suicide, because it would be ending two lives. The pact, though dark, was a serious way of letting the both of us live without any worry about wanting to kill ourselves, and living without worrying about the other killing themself. Perfect.

Though, I didn’t want to go into nothingness, not now. I had Cliff. I had Austin. I had Juliet. Oblivion wouldn’t come easy, at least not the way things were looking for the future. They looked bright. Maybe that was just the view from the roller coaster. Yet it was beautiful. 

“Look, I gotta go. I’m with Juliet right now.” I said.

“Mk... well, bye, then- so, it’s a pact?”

“It’s a pact. Bye, Austin.”

The line went silent and I jammed my phone back into my pocket. A cool breeze shot through the air. It was chilling, and I shivered in the hot summer weather. The pact would guarantee us, that was certain. I almost wanted to call Cliff and tell him he didn’t have to worry, because he knew about my cuts, and he though I would kill myself, too. He told me to stop cutting. I wanted to call him and tell him that everything was alright. Though I couldn’t. I’d be deemed crazy, and so would Austin, if anyone ever figured out about the pact. That meant that Cliff could never know. That meant that Juliet could never know. That meant that it was between me and Austin, and that was it. It was final. 

The pact felt like a huge relief. Suddenly, I didn’t have to carry anything on my shoulders. Suddenly, I had no fear- though it was small before- of killing myself. Neither did Austin. Now we didn’t have to worry. Now our own worlds were off of our shoulders. We didn’t put them on the other, but somewhere else. Somewhere where neither of us could get to them without the help of the other, in a sense that we would both go down together. 

I felt like a bird. I was high in my roller coaster. High off the ground. The pact. What a wonderful idea.