Free Promise Not to Tell: A Novel by Jennifer McMahon

sitting down to communal dinner in the big barn, tried to picture how she might look as Gabriel served her a wooden bowl full of lentil soup. She would make faces, kick me under the table, think she’d gone to sleep then woke up on Mars.
    But Del was my secret as much as I was hers and I never did invite her home. Instead, we agreed to view the tepee from a distance, to spy on my own home like a couple of Peeping Toms.
     
     
     
    W E HAD BEEN WALKING through the woods for ten minutes when we passed the turnoff for the old cabin. I wondered if Nicky was there, smoking and looking at magazines, and I hoped we’d run into him on our way back to the Griswold place.
    That’s when Del said, “I know someone who’s got a crush on you.”
    I had this eerie feeling she’d read my mind—but maybe she’d just caught me glancing down the tangled trail.
    My face flushed.
    “Who?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.
    “Kate and Nicky, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” she sang. “He’s got it real bad for you. Ain’t you the lucky one? But before you count your lucky stars, you should know a thing or two about my big brother. See, he’s got his share of secrets. A few of ’em, bad. B-A-D spells bad.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like maybe I’ll tell and maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll let you find out on your own. I’m just saying things ain’t always what they seem.” She fiddled with her sheriff ’s badge. She wore a stained pink T-shirt with the same corduroy pants she’d had on for days. Her hair was wet from a shower she’d taken just before I met her. She smelled like moist earth dusted with baby powder.
    “Who says I want to know anyway? Who says I’m even interested in your big, ape-y brother?”
    “You sure seem interested when you’re with him, Desert Rose. You two are acting like little love birds already. It’s enough to make a person wanna puke.”
    It was true that I thought about Nicky a lot, felt a strange, live-wire sort of excitement when I was near him. But the idea that this was visible to Del embarrassed me.
    “Is Desert Rose really the color you painted your room?” I asked, eager to change the subject.
    “Nah. Daddy said I can’t.” She paused for a beat, looked at the ground, frowned like she’d just remembered something. Then she was back. “I’ve got the paint sample from Thurston’s Hardware, though! I’ll show it to you sometime. It’s real pretty. I named you after a real pretty color.”
    “I’d like to see your room sometime.” I had tried often to imagine what it might look like. If she really did have all the wonderful things she bragged about—the four-poster bed, a collection of more than one hundred plastic horses, the tails from those baby pigs in a canning jar full of rubbing alcohol.
    “Can’t. Daddy says we can’t have friends over. Stevie and Joe can have their girlfriends sometimes, that’s okay with Daddy, but they’re almost grown up anyway. Daddy says family should be enough.”
    As strange as things were at my house—if you could call a circle of canvas draped over poles a house—things seemed stranger still at Del’s. I lived in a world of almost no rules—Gabriel believed kids would do a good job raising themselves if they weren’t confined by adults and their hang-ups. Del, I knew, got slapped around when she didn’t clean her plate at dinner.
    As we walked, I told Del about my life at the top of the hill—camping out in the tepee, eating dinner in the big barn with the other New Hope members. I told her how Lazy Elk would turn on the little battery-operated radio in the tepee at night and pull my mother up to dance. Sometimes they’d get me to join them, too, all of us doing these crazy moves—pretending to be robots, snakes, birds. We’d swoop circles around the tepee, cawing like a family of ravens.
    Lazy Elk was trying hard to be a dad, but I couldn’t take him seriously. He told me stories every night about Trickster Coyote and began