Read Online The Vow by Jessica Martinez - Free Book Online

survive it all over again.”
    I look at him. I might throw up. The cab of the truck smells like mildew, like it always does after rain, and my stomach lurches with every twist of the road. I picture him lost and lonely in some scary foreign country, being shouted at in Arabic, being jostled in a crowd like the ones you see on TV.
    My head is pounding now. I’m trying so hard to think, but nothing comes. I can’t look at him. Even with my eyes squeezed shut, I know he still has that expression on his face—sadness twisted with naked fear. Mo is so full of crap most of the time that when I see that look of bare misery, it nearly kills me. I still remember the first time I saw it, that day he peed his pants at the science center. That was maybe the best day of my life. It was the last day I was nothing but a dead girl’s sister.
    Mo drives to his house. We both get out and meet around front of the truck’s bug-smeared grille. He hesitates, then hugs me.
    “You suck at hugging,” I say into his chest. He really does. It’s a cage of bony arms and clavicle-to-my-forehead every time.
    “I know.”
    He drops one arm and stands with the other around my shoulder for a minute or two, and it’s odd because as close as we are, and as much as he feels like the other half of me, we don’t touch all that often. Tonight it feels right, though, if slightly like trying to snuggle with a tree.
    “I don’t want to go in there,” he mumbles. “Everybody . . .”
    I close my eyes. I’m such a jerk. I didn’t even ask about his family. “How did Sarina take it?”
    “I don’t know. She’s so naive, I don’t think she really gets it. I was mostly just watching my mom teeter on the brink and then I had to leave to come get you.”
    “Hmm.” Mo’s mom can lock herself in her room and cry for days over a sick cat or a fight between Sarina and her best friend. We don’t spend much time hanging out at Mo’s, but I’ve been there enough to know that there are two Mrs. Husseins. The one is gracious and lovely, and the other is holed up in bed wailing.
    He doesn’t answer, but lets go of me to swat a mosquito off the back of my arm.
    “I need to go,” I say. “They’re going to start freaking out soon.”
    He nods. He knows. “Are you okay?”
    I slap another mosquito on my arm, and it leaves a streak of fresh blood. I don’t know if it’s mine or Mo’s. “Yeah,” I say, but neither of us believes me. This conversation is so unnatural, so unbelievable, I wouldn’t believe anything I said right now. How could I be okay? “And you?”
    “No.”
    “I was lying when I said yeah,” I said.
    “I know. You’d better go. Your parents.”
    He walks away and I get back into the truck alone. Totally alone. That’s when the panic descends. I’m suffocating. There isn’t enough air inside the cab, even with the windows down. I begin backing out of the Husseins’ long, snaking driveway, watching the encroaching bushes race by in reverse.
    At the curb, I roll past the mailbox and see the dent I made in it years ago illuminated by the moon. I backed over it the day after I got my license. The memory of that night—of Mo frantically trying to jam the post back into the ground before Mr. Hussein got home, of neither of us being able to stop laughing long enough to figure out what we were doing—makes me nauseous again.
    I can’t lose Mo. If he leaves me, I’ll lose the only person who gets me. And then what’s keeping me from slipping backward into the old Annie? I don’t want to be that girl, the one everybody was afraid to touch.
    I’m crying, whimpering at first but then sobbing in that wounded-animal way that only comes out when I’m alone—long whines interrupted with hard gasps for air. And I’m driving too fast, but I have no choice. I’ve got to get home. My cell phone is resting on my lap, and any second now it’ll ring.
    I know they’re both pretending not to notice the oversized wall clock with its