Three Stories About Romy I Promised Never to Repeat

6 days ago
6 min read

by MB Valente

We met when I was even smaller and dumber than I am now and she was already papercut sharp and stinging between my fingers. Romy showed up to the first day of fourth grade with a black eye and wouldn’t tell the teachers how it happened. She was a head taller than all the other kids with a big nose and black hair and a muddy splatter of freckles. At recess that first day she told me to punch a boy she pointed out and I did. He hit me back and got in trouble but nobody yelled at me. I just crouched in her shadow and felt its warmth fall over me like a wing.

I never wanted to leave that shadow again. I felt naked without her and hated being at home because she wasn’t there. My mom and brother made fun of me but what they thought didn’t matter. All that mattered was whatever would make her sit by me, whatever stopped her from walking away. That meant doing what she told me to do, or sometimes—I could tell by the way she drained out of herself while saying it—not doing that thing, just waiting and watching until she came back to me again.

Do you want to know how I got this, she asked and pointed at her eye when I was finally allowed to invite her over to my mom’s weedy yard after school. Mom called it our yard—technically it belonged to the whole trailer park. But it was ours because my brother was the one who mowed it and only we went there.

By then Romy’s black eye had faded to green. Even the teachers had been too afraid to know, so I was afraid too. Teachers don’t know what to be scared of, she said. They’d pee themselves if they saw the stuff I’ve seen. Like what, I asked, and she made me promise not to tell anyone ever. She made me swear—not on my life but hers. She knew that would be stronger. That I was too dumb to worry about dying myself but I’d never survive without her. Tell anyone and I’ll drop dead, she said. Tell anyone and you kill me.

Then she stood up, yellow stars swerving around her knees. She grabbed my arm and folded my fingers into a fist. It was you, she said. You climbed up the walls of my house like a lizard, you opened my window with your tongue. You slithered into my room and hit me a bunch of times, not very hard, but so many times that when I woke up my eye was all puffy.

She glared down at where I was sitting crisscross-applesauce in the dandelions. She was still holding my arm. A mosquito landed on my leg but I didn’t dare swat it away. I’m sorry, I gasped. She said she forgave me, but not to tell anyone, or else instead of crying in this ugly weed patch I’d be crying at her grave.

Then there was the time when we were thirteen in the basement of her big brick house on the hill. It was the biggest and quietest house I’d ever been in. I couldn’t believe anyone lived there. Food and games and clothes appeared in it by magic and I worried it could take things away too—that it had swallowed her parents for example, since I only heard their voices through the walls. From her bedroom you could see our elementary school playground all doll-sized, tiny enough for her to pick up in her hand.

The basement was dim and smelled like a museum. There were all these wooden boxes that had to be full of interesting stuff but she said they weren’t. What do you think is in there, she asked, and I said dinosaur bones, gold bars smeared with old blood, a wedding dress covered in long gray hairs. She said, So open one and see. But she said it while staring into the deepest-darkest reaches of outer space, so I shut my mouth and focused on the curve of her cheek I could just make out in the dark.

When she’d shivered her way back to Earth, she said: You already know what’s in the boxes, Kylee. I can hear you digging at night. I fall asleep listening to you scrabble in the dirt every night, all quiet at first, when you started in your own basement, then louder the closer you came, and every day those dark lines under your nails. I heard when you broke through and I heard you rummaging, I heard you pry open every box and whine like a baby when you couldn’t get them shut right. I know you’ve seen, so don’t pretend you’re curious. Just don’t tell anyone what you saw.

Then she told me to close my eyes, and while I waited with them closed I wondered how I could have dug a tunnel from my basement to hers when my mom lived in a trailer and my dad lived in an apartment and neither had basements and she knew that. When I opened my eyes again she was gone. Dust spun in the air like expelled breath. I yelled her name and started crying. I groped for her in the dark and cried harder, until a light winked on at the top of the stairs and she said, Up here, dummy.

This last one is the worst and I know the others are bad. You think I don’t know the others are bad? We started playing this game as soon as we learned to drive. (We’d taken Driver’s Ed together and snickered through the videos of fuckups with gnarly scars saying to always, always stop at railroad crossings.) We played the game while she was driving me back to my mom’s trailer, in the afternoon after school or at three in the morning after watching murder shows at her house. The Audi her dad bought her was always the only car on the two-lane highway snaking us out of town. She’d bleached her hair over the summer and it made her freckles stand out darker. Her knuckles turned blue when she drove, that’s how hard she gripped the wheel.

This is the game. She invented it, obviously. First she’d lock eyes with me and unbuckle her seatbelt, let the car drift into the oncoming lane. I had to unbuckle too. Then she’d stare at me with her chin on her shoulder, never looking back—she was so, so good at that, like she wasn’t even tempted. She’d smile wider and wider as I tried to keep my eyes on hers, but I always ended up glancing away with each curve of the road, until I saw headlights in a sudden blast or born as a tiny star and yanked her arm to pull us back into the right lane.

Before we played the game for the very last time, she said, I know what you did, Kylee. I probably rolled my eyes. By then I knew what a dumb kid I’d been, swallowing it all. I was still too scared of her to say she was full of shit, a fibber, always talking for me in her own voice, forever holding me like a toy in her hand. I wanted to ask how she would feel if I made up stories that turned her into something monstrous.

She said she knew I’d told my mom about the game. I said I didn’t even tell my mom what I ate for lunch. She sneered, shrugged out of her seatbelt, changed lanes. Her nose was wrinkled like she smelled something bad. I didn’t unbuckle. I didn’t want to play. I told her to knock it off, that I was tired of doing whatever she told me to do, that I was tired of being afraid.

She closed her eyes then and smiled. A little twist, a little curl, a little cut. In that moment I think I hated her. For the first time I saw how ugly she was and couldn’t look away. I didn’t see the tiny star growing larger until its light shattered over everything. The truck hit us head-on with a terrible crunching sound and flipped us over the barrier.

I was missing her before we hit the ground. I knew why it was happening, it’s not like she didn’t warn me. You see how it was my fault—for telling you now. I promised I wouldn’t, and just look what I’ve done.

MB Valente is a writer and translator based in Marseille, France. Her stories have appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Pithead Chapel and JAKE, among other places, and her translations of graphic novels have been nominated for Eisner Awards and the Sophie Castille Award for Comics in Translation. Her first novel is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2027. Find her at mbvalente.com.