Liar (10 page)

Dad turns to Mom. “She belongs there.”

I force myself to eat the rest of my bacon.

“She should be put to sleep,” Jordan says.

“Quiet,” Mom tells him.

“You should be flushed down the toilet,” I say, without even looking at him. “With the alligators.”

“Mom!” Jordan wails.

“Quiet, please. You know she doesn't mean it.”

Dad looks at me. He knows that I do.

“You do not have to go where you don't want,” Mom says, her back against the kitchen sink. “But perhaps you could think about it. Things have been so . . .” Sometimes she struggles to find the right English word. “So . . .” She pauses again and notices Jordan pulling his bacon to pieces and then pushing it through the lake of syrup. “Stop, Jordan! Either you eat or you don't.” She turns her attention back to me. “Foul. Things have been so foul. Perhaps it would help to get away? It does not have to be with the Greats.”

“Where else would she go?” Dad says. “Are you proposing we send her to Club Med?”

“Well, couldn't you take her along on your next assignment?”

Dad and I look at each other. “No!” we say at the exact same time.

Mom starts laughing. “You two could not be more alike.”

Dad is wearing the same scowl I can feel on my own face. The sight of it makes me scrunch my forehead even more.

Mom leans forward over Jordan's head, ducking to avoid the bicycles, and kisses my cheek. “You do not have to go anywhere you do not want.”

“Did you take your pill?” Dad asks.

I don't bother answering.

AFTER

“I don't think he loved me,” Sarah tells me.

I am sitting alone. She slides in next to me as if we're friends. How can she have forgotten how much we're not? Why is she talking to me about whether Zach loved her?

“Did you?” she asks.

“Did I what?” I don't want her to sit next to me. I want to eat my lunch alone, undisturbed, unobserved. Ever since Zach disappeared—no, ever since Brandon blabbed—people have been watching me, talking about me. But me and Sarah sitting together for lunch? That's too weird. Everyone in the cafeteria is watching, leaning forward, trying to overhear.

“Did you love him?” she asks, lowering her voice.

I roll my eyes so I don't have to say out loud how stupid I think her question is. “He's dead, Sarah,” I say quietly. “Thinking about him, talking about him all the time, that's not going to make him come back to life. You do know that, right?”

She flinches but her eyes don't fill with tears. “I just asked you if you loved him. Why's that such a hard question to answer?”

I sigh. “It doesn't matter. He's dead.”

“You're scared of answering,” Sarah says. “That means you loved him.”

“If you say so. I suppose you think you loved him.” I don't want to talk about Zach with her. I don't want to talk about Zach with anyone. Saying his name hurts, thinking it . . . I realize then that neither of us has been saying his name. We say “he” or “him” or “his” but never “Zach.”

“Of course,” Sarah says.

“We weren't together, Sarah. Brandon was lying. And I've been messing with you. We'd run together sometimes. There wasn't anything else to it.”

“You have his sweater.”

“I was cold. He loaned it to me.” I wasn't cold. My head was in his lap. He was stroking the tiny curls on my scalp. All I could smell was him. I said I liked his sweater. He took it off, gave it to me. It stank of him. Zach reek. I love that sweater.

“I'm not stupid,” Sarah says, and I don't laugh. “You think you're so good at hiding things but I can read you. I know you were together. You can't keep the way you think about him off your face. I know you loved him. You did, didn't you?”

I shrug. Sarah starts to cry again. Quietly, but it doesn't matter. Everyone is staring. They can see. I wish I could cry.

“Why are you so cynical?” It's not an angry question. I think she really wants to know.

“Trying to be like my dad,” I tell her, which isn't even close to true. But she's seen my arms-dealing daddy so she probably believes he's all tough and cynical and worldly-wise. Dad isn't cynical at all. Not really. He's chock-full of hope and optimism.

I suspect my cynicism comes from pretending to be what I'm not; covering myself in lies makes me cynical. I know I'm not trustworthy. How likely is it that the world is true if I'm not?

But my dad lies as much as I do and he's not cynical.

“Do you think he loved you?” Sarah asks, wiping her eyes discreetly. I wonder who she thinks she's fooling.

“Who? My dad?” I ask, even though I know exactly who she means. “Of course he does. He's my dad.”

“No, Zach. Do you think Zach loved you?”

I have a strong urge to punch Sarah in the face.

She said his name.

Instead, I turn to my cold BLT, peeling away the damp bread, pushing the wilted lettuce aside. The bacon is burned. I have to chew hard to get it small enough to swallow.

“As much as he loved any of his running partners, I suppose,” I say at last, hoping that I never have to speak to Sarah again. But June is so far away.

FAMILY HISTORY

The family illness isn't just acne and excessive blood. There's more to it than that—yet another reason I take the pill every single day of my life.

Remember the fur I was born with? The light coat of hair all over my body?

It came back.

Along with the usual puberty horror, I got hair in all the wrong places.

No, you don't understand. In the
wrong
places.

Like my face and back and stomach.

My
face
.

Yeah.

So the pill. It keeps the hair away, as well as my period, and acne, too.

Without it, I'm a freak.

Though, according to the kids at school, even with it my freakishness is not well disguised. But there's no pill for that.

I blame my family for contaminating me with their weirdness and their tainted hairy genes. The family illness, they call it. If I were from a different family—a normal family—I wouldn't have it.

To my grandmother's credit, she did try to dilute the family disease. Instead of marrying her cousin Hilliard, she left the farm to find a father for her baby. Grandmother was convinced that too much cousin-marrying was responsible for the family illness. She was going to have a child whose father was as unrelated to her as she could find.

Grandmother went to San Francisco and got pregnant by a black sailor. She said they spent a week together and that he loved to gamble. He was from Marseille, she said. His English wasn't very good. That was all she could remember. She was relieved that Dad hadn't inherited the gambling love.

Or the family illness.

That was left for me.

BEFORE

One time I was walking along Broadway playing dodge the crowd. Which is me testing myself, moving as fast as I can, weaving through them all without accelerating into a run, and without touching anyone or having them touch me. Any time I make contact I have to go back to the beginning of the block.

It's a game.

I'm really good at it. When I play it I don't think about anything else. Not Zach, not anyone.

I only ever play it on crowded streets and avenues. Broadway works. But Fifth Avenue's okay as well. Times Square is the best.

This time it was Broadway. A Sunday.

I was weaving, concentrating on the muscles of my body, on the air around me. It was like those few inches of air above my skin were part of me, too. An extra layer. Antennas. Me, stretching into space.

When I spread like that I can go for miles and miles untouched and clear.

I could feel everyone as they moved through air, feel them and their clothes and their bags, swinging arms, hands clutching cell phones, sodas, other hands, closed umbrellas for the rain that wouldn't come even though my nostrils prickled with the smell of it.

Then there was someone looking at me as I slid past them. Looking straight at me. A stare more direct than my mother's. Like how the Greats stare.

I twitched and stopped and turned to look back at the person with the staring eyes.

Two people walked into me. They swore. I said sorry.

It was a white boy. Same age as me, I thought. Maybe younger. He was smaller than me, skinny.

He was standing and staring at me standing and staring.

Then he took off the way I would. And there was me, too befuddled to follow. How did he do that? How did he see me first?

AFTER

I force myself to go to school.

I regret it almost immediately. The first words I hear as I walk up the front steps: “I heard they were killed with an axe.”

The school is floating on rumors about what happened to Zach and Erin Moncaster. He's dead, so she must be, too.

An axe murderer did it.

A serial killer.

Her father's religious. He caught Erin and Zach together. If Zach went with that Micah girl he'd go with anyone.

Her boyfriend did it.

This, despite Zach and Erin not knowing each other. Despite no one knowing if she has a boyfriend. Or a religious father.

They were both locked in a basement. The serial killer tortured them and then dumped the bodies in Times Square. Or was it Rockefeller Center? Only Erin hasn't been found yet. And no one at school knows where Zach's body was found.

Maybe she's still in the basement. So are Zach's ears. The killer kept souvenirs.

The worst rumors are the ones about me. Some are saying that I killed him. That I killed them both. Everyone talks about me. Even the teachers. They stare. Some are not talking to me. Cutting past me on line. Averting their eyes, whispering:
We know she's a liar. A slut. Killing's what comes next.

Liar. Slut
.
Bitch
.
Murderer
.

Always whispering.

It doesn't matter that there are also whispers about Brandon. (Though not nearly so many.) And Sarah and Tayshawn. Were they sleeping together? Did Zach find out and Tayshawn accidentally kill him? But that doesn't explain Erin. Maybe Brandon killed her? A copycat killing and now he's waiting till he gets someone alone to do it again.