Lie to Me (an OddRocket title) (4 page)

The doors swung open and Nick walked in. I cringed, hoping he hadn't overheard me.

"Hey, Mariah, I need a Little Pirate cheese sandwich, a chicken Caesar and another bacon cheese. Hey, Cassie." He smiled at me as if I was just a normal co-worker.

Mariah pointed to the order rack where we were supposed to stick the tickets. "Great." She cracked her gum. "Now, did you write it all down like I asked you?"

"Totally. Wrote it." Nick clipped the ticket into place. "Oh Cass, thanks again about tonight. I won't head out until after the rush."

"Sure. No problem," I said, shrugging, my voice sunny, cheerful, never revealing the scream sitting in my belly waiting to be let out.

"You're the best," he said, winking as his cell phone rang. "I gotta get this..."

"No problem," I said, waving him off as if I couldn't care less who he was talking to. I turned and put on strawberry lip gloss so I could watch him in the mirror behind me.

"Hey, yeah, it's on." Nick stepped out onto the back porch with no further apology, no explanation. My mouth felt dry. He was leaving early and now he was getting calls. It was probably the slutty new girl wondering what color thong she should wear.

"So you're covering, huh?" Mariah asked, eyebrows rising as she nodded toward Nick outside.

"I don't want to talk about it," I said, feeling embarrassed. I pulled my hair into a ponytail and brushed a few stray strands behind my ear. "I'm just being a good co-worker and Nick has a right to go where he wants with who he wants. I'm sure it is important and I'm not going to be that girl who gets all angry just because I'm not his girlfriend anymore."

"It's normal to get mad, Cassie, and it's not mean if you're standing up for yourself."

"I'm just trying to be nice, Mariah," I sighed and looked at myself, wondering who RD had seen when he'd called me beautiful. Dark brown hair, thick and straight, pale skin, my nose was too long, my face too square and angled, my lips never looked luscious enough even with those stupid lip puffing glosses. Besides being tall, I was an ordinary girl named Cassandra Safire. The whole summer would go by and no one would ever call me beautiful again.

Mariah snapped her gum. "You look for the best in people, Cass. You just need to figure out how to do that while being true to yourself at the same time. You'll figure it out. Just don't let tall, dark and clueless walk all over you."

I stopped in front of the swinging red doors that led to the dining room. I didn't want to push them open and go out there and face my shift. It felt like a prison sentence. Cassandra Safire doomed to serve a three-hour shift for having no backbone. "Come on. Admit it. He is seriously the worst waiter you've ever seen, right? I'm right, I know it."

"Well," Mariah hesitated. I knew she felt loyal to my mom. "He's pretty bad. You should have at least had him do a trial run before you got your mom to hire him."

"I know, but you'd think she'd be more worried about the business. How can she not notice..?"

"Your mom has a lot on her mind."

"Cassie." Mom pushed the doors open, almost knocking me over. "Sorry, hon’. I need you out here. Now."

"Fine," I said. "Nick is taking calls, so I should probably cover his section." It was so easy to be mad at my mom and so much harder to go confront Nick.

"Take table two," Mom said and pointed to a guy sitting alone in the booth right underneath the buzzing neon "Open" sign.

It was RD. He still wore his black baseball hat. Raindrops glistened in the light of the neon, his shoulders and head dusted with tiny drops. I took a deep breath and told myself to relax. So he'd come to the restaurant. Big deal. He needed to eat and he'd probably forgotten my name already.

"Hey, Cassandra," RD said, smiling at me as if I was a long lost friend. "Looks like destiny has brought us together again beautiful.”

I was wrong. RD remembered my name and being called
beautiful
startled me every time.

When RD said the word
beautiful
, my anger at Mom and Nick dissolved. Suddenly, I was grateful at my ex for being too busy to have picked up this table. I wanted to get RD's order in before Nick resurfaced. Then the table would be mine. "Well, hello, sir," I said, pretending to be oh-so-professional. "Welcome to the Hideaway, home of the famous Jekyll Burger and San Sebastian fish fry."

"Sounds like a very gourmet place." He pronounced it like
gore-met
, which made me giggle. He had a notepad in front of him and a set of colored pencils. It looked like he'd started sketching the dock. I could make out the silhouettes of boats through sheets of sideways rain. "Bring me your finest cut of beef.”

"Well, the Reunion Burger is the best, Tillamook cheddar, caramelized bacon and grilled Walla Walla sweets."

"Done!" He closed his menu dramatically. "Burger, fries and I'd like a coke."

"Sure."

"Actually, make that a beer. How about a Mac and Jack?"

"Right," I said, writing it down. "I will not be delivering your beer since..."

"Ah, that's right," he said, doodling on his notepad. "You aren't twenty-one yet, right?" He wrinkled his nose. "What are you, like eighteen?" He appeared to be considering me like an artist framing me with his hands, sketching and adjusting his paper.

"Sixteen," I said.

"Sixteen?" He deadpanned. "You can’t be serious."

"Well, almost seventeen. Seventeen this August."

"You do not look sixteen."

"I'm tall," I shrugged. "It confuses people."

"I’ll say." He shook his head.

"So, what are you drawing?" I said, trying to sound casual, but I was dying to know what he was hiding.

"Nothing for you to worry about." He covered the sketchpad with his arm, eyebrows raised. "And aren't you supposed to card me?"

"No." I felt embarrassed at the idea of carding RD. Mom told me I had to card anyone who didn't look like a grandparent and normally I did, but it just felt so rude. "It's cool," I said, waving him off as he reached for his wallet.

"I'm twenty-three," he said, leaning forward to whisper. "And I can show you ID, if you insist. You are the law."

"I trust you."

"That's your first mistake." He winked.

"I'll go put your order in." I headed back to the bar. When I glanced over my shoulder, I caught RD watching me. He smiled as if we were sharing some sort of inside joke.
Were we?
I wondered. Was he really drawing my picture? No one had ever drawn my picture. RD was twenty-three, which wasn't that big of a deal, but it was older than sixteen and something about the way he talked to me made me wonder if this was him flirting. Grown-up flirting, where guys know how to talk to a girl and open doors and insist on walking on whatever side of the street Mom was always saying boys in her day did. I'd known RD for about an hour and he'd already made me laugh more than Nick ever had when we were dating. I put his order in with Mariah so she or Mom could deliver his beer.

"So, it's getting slow," Nick sidled up next to me, placing his cell phone on the bar. He was right. The Chardonnay table was standing up to leave.

"You can go," I said, smiling. "I took table six's order already and I can manage the rest."

"You sure?"

"I got it." I didn't want to put RD's dinner in the hands of Nick and the sooner he left the restaurant, the sooner I'd stop wondering who he was meeting. Every time I glanced over at RD, I found I cared a little less.

Nick undid his apron. "The lady at table three, her order..."

"Solitaire lady? Yeah, she ordered a grilled cheese and will drink only water." I eyeballed the room; I knew the regulars like the back of my hand. "Booster chair family will be out of here in ten minutes. The kid is about to have a meltdown. You can see by the way he's spilling his milk shake on the table. And Otis will sit at the bar all night drinking light beer which I can't deliver anyway. You're good."

"You're like a waitress wizard," Nick said, actually sounding reverent. His cell phone buzzed and I glanced down at the screen. I knew that number. I'd known that number ever since we'd gotten matching cell phones in sixth grade. Priya. Why was Priya calling Nick? They knew each other, but they weren’t phone friends.

"I should take this,” Nick said. Eyes wide, he reached for this phone fumbling. It slid my way on the bar. Without thinking, I picked up the phone.

"We need to talk," I heard Priya say. “I can’t stand this.”

"Cassie, don't," Nick said, reaching.

I held up my hand to silence him. "Priya?" I whispered. A wave of dizziness moved through me.

"Wait, Cassie? Did I call you?"

"You called Nick," I said, my voice
rising
"Why are you calling him? What can’t you stand?"

"It's nothing. It’s just," Priya said, her voice trailing off. "Why don’t I come to the Hideaway, we should talk."

"No," I said, the word suddenly unlocked for me. "Tell me now. What can’t you stand?"

Over my shoulder, Nick leaned over the bar, his head in his hands.

"I tried to tell you today on the dock. I really did.”

"What did you try to tell me?"

"Things just happen sometimes, and even if there was a girl that night, she is not your problem…"

Silence. I sat there breathing, my shaking hand holding Nick’s phone to my ear.

"It was you," I said, the pieces of the puzzle sliding into place. "You were the girl."

"Cassie, he was going to break up with you that night. I tried to stop him, we were talking and things just got weird."

"That was your pink lip gloss," I said, remembering Nick’s face. Tears burned in my eyes.

"I didn't mean for anything to happen and I stopped it right away. You have to believe me."

"Does everyone know but me?"

"No, I swear."

The night of the bonfire, Priya and Nick had both disappeared around the same time. I’d never suspected. I’d never even considered that they’d been together. When Nick finally re-surfaced, he'd walked through the whole party to find me with lip gloss on his face before disappearing again. I'd been too stunned to make accusations. I'd wanted to believe his mumbled excuses, so I'd pretended everything was okay. By the time I got his text message an hour later, somehow the whole class already knew I'd been dumped. I was the last to know.

"I didn’t mean for anything to happen between us and I feel sick about it. I'm so sorry. I should have told you that night. Please talk to me."

"I can't," I whispered. "I can't talk to you anymore."

"Cassie, please."

"You were lying to me this whole time. I trusted you."

"It was a mistake.”

“Here, you called Nick.” My voice felt thick with tears as I spoke. “Talk to him. I’m done with you both.”

I handed Nick the phone and ran out the back door. I knew everyone in the restaurant heard me crying, even RD. I figured this would ignite a new wave of rumors. Cassie Safire was dumped for her best friend and she found out the truth while working the dinner shift at her mom's restaurant. She had a meltdown right in front of the whole crowd. Sobbing on the back porch, it suddenly made sense. For two weeks, I'd thought that the sympathetic glances from other students were about Nick, but it was probably because everybody knew about Priya. For two weeks, I'd wondered who had replaced me. For two weeks, Priya had tried to talk me into just moving on, focusing on Nick and not the girl.
Forget the girl, Cassie. The girl is innocent in all this. Things just happen, Cassie. The other girl is not your problem.
I had thought my best friend was mature and smart. She was actually just manipulative and a liar.

Mom didn't make me come back inside. She made Nick stay and helped finish out my tables. I think Addie may have helped her, too. I wanted to go back inside and see if RD liked his burger, but the idea of talking to someone when my eyes were bright red and my cheeks splotchy did not sound fun. I'm not pretty when I cry. I get pink and puffy and look like I'm having a bad allergic reaction.

I sat on the back porch off the side of the restaurant that overlooks the Sound and the mainland. I wanted to go home, but I didn't want to go inside and get the keys. I think I was too shocked to move, so I just sat there until I couldn’t cry anymore.

When most of the cars in the parking lot were gone, I heard the screen door creak open behind me. "You okay?" a voice asked. It was RD.

I turned. He stood in the doorframe with one foot inside and one outside. "Can I join you?"

I shrugged and scooted over on the step. He sat down beside me.

"Was that the guy?"

"Yeah." I nodded. "He hooked up with my best friend."

"Ouch." He inhaled sharply. "Sorry."

"Yeah." I felt as if the tears might come again, so I breathed deep and closed my eyes beating them back.

"You're going to be okay," he said.

"I don't know." I half-laughed. "I think the summer is pretty much ruined."

"Nah," he said. "You're a smart girl and a very good waitress. Much better than your ex, I can tell you that."

"Did he mess up your order?" I said, feeling bad that I'd left RD with Nick. I sniffed and wiped my nose. I had snot on my face. I did not want to talk to him with snot on my face.

"No, he didn't mess it up. The burger was great. It lived up to your fabulous description," RD said. "He just forgot to bring me ketchup, brought me someone else's cheese sandwich and then totally failed on the bill."

"He's not good at math," I said, smiling.

"No, he is not."

"I usually help him with that."

"You help everyone, it seems.”

It felt like a compliment. I wanted it to be a compliment. I did help people and a part of me liked knowing that even though Nick didn't deserve my help, he could never say I wasn't nice.

"Well, I'm here for the whole long summer, so if you have any more tips for a mainland boy who is drifting in these islands, I could use some direction. I'm a bit lost at sea right now, too."

"Sure," I said. I wasn't sure how I could help him at all, but it felt good to be paid attention to and I wanted RD to like me, especially in a world where it seemed no one else did. Priya was basically the center of my social universe. We shared friends, but I was definitely a supporting player. Without Nick, I figured I was going to have a loveless summer. Without Priya, I'd just be lonely.