Little Black Lies

EGMONT

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First published by Egmont USA, 2009

443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806

New York, NY 10016

Copyright © Tish Cohen, 2009

All rights reserved

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www.egmontusa.com

www.tishcohen.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cohen, Tish

Little black lies / Tish Cohen.

p. cm.

Summary: Starting her junior year at an ultra-elite Boston school, sixteen-year-old Sara, hoping to join the popular crowd, hides that her father not only is the school janitor, but also has obsessive-compulsive disorder.

ISBN 978-1-60684-033-7 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-1-60684-046-7 (lib. bdg.) [1. Popularity—Fiction. 2. Social classes—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Family problems—Fiction. 6. Obsessive-compulsive disorder—Fiction. 7. Janitors—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.C66474Lit 2009

[Fic]—dc22

2009014637

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

For Lisa Posluns,
who loved nothing more than life itself.

Special thanks go out to so many: Jacqui Goodman, for giving me an up-close glimpse of life at an elite school. Marysa MacKinnon, Max Cohen, and Lucas Cohen, for their ever sage adolescent counsel. John Lindsay, for reading with such enthusiasm, and to my husband, Stephen Cohen, for reading each new draft as if it were the first. Patry Francis, for janitorial wisdom and early reads, and Jessica Brilliant Keener, for her sharp eye, thoughtful reads, and familiarity with the neighborhoods of Boston. Regina Griffin, my editor at Egmont, for caring so much about the book. Elizabeth Law, Doug Pocock, Mary Albi, and all the terrific folks over on Park Avenue South. Lynne Missen, my editor at HarperCanada, for getting behind the book from the start. Also at Harper, Melissa Zilberberg, Charidy Johnson, and Liza Smith Morrison, for your support. As ever, Kassie Evashevski at United Talent Agency. I'm beyond grateful to my agent, Dan Lazar, at Writers House, for believing in me no matter what, and to the tireless Stephen Barr and the lovely Maja Nikolic, for all they continue to do for my books.

“What the …?” Gripping the vinyl passenger seat of the VW bus, I try not to hit the window as my father takes a corner too fast in his rush not to be late for our first day at Boston's illustrious Anton High School.

“Language, Sara,” he says, shooting me a stern look.

“I didn't say it.”

“You didn't need to.” He rolls his window halfway down. “It was implied.”

The rush of September air is so cool and crisp it almost shatters. You can practically hear the cracking spines of new textbooks in the wind, and my finger is already bleeding from the jagged bite my three-ring binder will give me in class later today.

Another corner so tight the van nearly flips. This time, my cheek hits cold glass. “Are we on the run?”

He pats my knee and I notice he smells like cologne. Upon further inspection, I notice he's shaved his normally short gray hair even closer to his head and carved his tidy beard's edge to perfection. “Didn't count on this much traffic. Rule number one for starting a new job: Be on time.”

Rule number one at Anton High—crowned “North America's Most Elite and Most Bizarre Public School” by
Time
magazine—no one is admitted after the ninth grade, no matter how thick their Coke-bottle glasses are.

Think about it. A tuition-free school that practically guarantees a kid's admittance to the Ivy League college of her choice. In a leafy, historical neighborhood with a low crime rate. Its doors flung open to kids from all walks of life. The American Dream with lockers, right? Wrong. Whoever created the place didn't count on the scholastic hysteria it would breed among the privileged. Regular families, no matter how brilliant their kids, can't compete with moneyed parents willing to do anything to guarantee little Thompson or Oleander's future. Even if it means paying $15,000 per year for a cram school created to prep their wheezing, sneezing urchins for one sparkly moment—the Anton High School entrance exam.

After writing the entrance paper—a brutal test some 11,000 gifted students take in March of their eighth-grade year—only 175 get in. They're the Cream of the Gifted Crop. The other 10,825, the Lesser Gifteds, have to live with that failure the remainder of their suddenly pointless lives. That Anton is tougher to get into than Harvard will do little to soothe their scrabbed-up egos. Ant grads go on to become U.S. senators, Nobel Prize and Academy Award winners, astronauts, Olympic athletes, and international chess champions. There was also that brainy Miss America who contorted her body into the Nike symbol for the talent segment, but rumor is she never finished senior year.

All of which explains why the school is considered elite. Why it's called bizarre is too obvious to mention. It's 100 percent stocked with nerds and brainiacs. Forget quarterbacks, starting pitchers, and pom-pom-wielding cheerleaders. If they exist at all, they're probably ashamed of themselves. The real royalty of the school are national robotics warlords, science wizards, and mathletes. I've even heard there are two kids who are published authors. With all this brain muscle crammed into one Boston high school, you've got to expect a whole lot of deviant behavior, right?

So how was I, Sara Black, long-standing math geek from Lundon, Massachusetts, allowed to take the Anton High School entrance exam the summer before eleventh grade and get admitted to the most sought-after school in North America?

Simple. My father is the new janitor.

“Rule number two,” Dad continues, “is dress professionally. I've even ironed my socks and underwear.”

I let out a long sigh. “You're going to fit right in.”

“Your wardrobe influences how you are adjudged by new people.” He glances over at my Dubble Bubble T-shirt, graffitied jeans, cherry red Doc Martens. Turning back to the traffic, he mumbles, “Your father wants to be seen as a sanitation professional right down to his underclothes.”

As nervous as I am, I allow myself a smile. “Adjudged?”

“Adjudged.”

You wouldn't know it based on his career choice, but my dad reads all the time. He practically lived at the Lundon library, hauling home every book ever written about vintage cars. When I was really young, he read me bedtime stories from
Car and Driver
magazine. Some kids' nightmares are populated by the bogeyman creeping out of the closet. Mine were haunted by the snaggle-toothed muscle car that growled at me from the garage.

Dad pulls the van onto Beacon Street, where we inch along in Tuesday-morning traffic. On our left is a sunken park, sheltered by towering trees all dressed up in velvety moss. Between their meaty trunks, a wading pond flashes and sparks with sunlight. This is Boston Common, one of the oldest parks in the country. An oasis of September-tinged nature wearing hot dog stands and T-shirt kiosks as ironic trash jewelry.

The sidewalk gets bushy with teenagers hauling backpacks and lunch bags, and we pull into a driveway between two buildings, passing beneath a polished steel sign announcing
ANTON HIGH SCHOOL
. Students—they call themselves Ants—stream along wide pedestrian pathways, and it isn't until now that I notice they're all wearing white shirts, navy vests, and plaid skirts or gray pants. I look at my father, shocked. “Uniforms?”

He shoots me an upside-down smile. “Sorry, sweet pea. There was a parental vote a few years back. They felt it would remove the disparity between the students' financial situations.”

Sliding down in the passenger seat, I close my eyes and try to ignore the battery acid in my stomach. The fear of walking around a new school without the comfort of my red Docs is rising up my throat like vomit.

The driveway opens into a courtyard at the back of the school, which looks just as jail-like as any other learning institution—about five stories of prison windows, flat roof, wide steps leading to a set of scratched metal doors. Concrete stretches right up to the base of the building, so right off the bat you know there'll be no digging out of this place with a click pencil and a protractor.

The lane circles around to the doorway, and parents slow their cars to spit out bright and shiny offspring. In the center of the roundabout is a parkland being trampled flat by backpacks, bicycles, and teenagers; wasps patrol the grass at their feet, inspecting discarded coffee cups and other bits of trash.

Homesickness pricks my eyes. I was nervous all weekend and thought my anxiety had peaked on Labor Day, but today, after seeing the kids, the uniforms, the school itself, I'm terrified. What if I'm not smart enough?

Dad looks at me as if he's read my mind. “It'll be a better life here in Boston, honey. I promise.”

I wish I could believe him. “I still don't get why you took another high-school janitor job. The other job would have paid way more money.”

“They didn't call after the interview.”

“Should you have called them, just to check? Maintenance manager of an office building would have been so much better. And it was in Lundon.”

“I don't have energy for people who don't have energy for me. Besides, Anton High School is a legendary establishment. I'm honored to come on board.”

“But you're supposed to avoid cleaning.”

Charlie has obsessive-compulsive disorder—a condition that launches him into pointless and repetitive rituals. But as with a tide choking on a flotsam of fish bones and jagged glass, OCD ebbs and flows. Sometimes you might think it's gone because he's stopped washing his hands until they bleed or stopped scouring toilet bowls until the brush snaps, but it's only because the problem has fooled you by morphing into another form. One behavior gets replaced by another. If you're lucky, that new behavior will be something inconspicuous. If you're not, that behavior could make an appearance in the most public of places.

School.

Last year he fixated on the liquid soaps in the Finmory restrooms. Draining them of liquid, scrubbing the containers, and refilling them every single morning just in case bacteria had bred in the soap overnight. He was warned several times to cut it out, but nothing could get him to stop. The principal kept Dad's behavior hidden from the students, which I appreciated beyond belief, but it was clear from my parents' repeated arguments that if the board hadn't switched to antibacterial soap a few weeks later, Dad would have been out of a job and my family would have been out of a house.

“Is this about leaving your old school?” Dad says. “Because Anton is a huge opportunity for you too.”

“I had a huge opportunity at Finmory. Everyone said I would have been valedictorian next year. Please know you're ripping that experience right out of my hands and annihilating my one and only chance to scar my enemies and frenemies for life.”

He pats my knee and grins, his clipped beard spreading thin across his jaw. “Sara, you're sixteen. You won't know what scars you need to inflict for another ten or fifteen years. Until then, it's your parents'—” He looks out the window, then back at me. His voice softens. “It's your
father's
job to tell you.”

An uncomfortable silence fills the van. The same uncomfortable silence that has filled our lives ever since the last day of school, when Mom's exit destroyed any hope of Dad staying in his comfy position of Finmory janitor. If only to break up the deafening quiet, he announced it was time to “start fresh.” So here we are and I have a formula to prove it. (Me + Dad - Mom) × (brainiacs + prison windows - beloved red boots) = starting fresh.

“She left another message for you last night.”

“Don't go there. Not today.”

“You have to talk about your mother sometime. You have to talk
to
her sometime.”

I say nothing.

“She walked away from me, Sarie-bear. Not you.”

I pull a sweater out of my book bag and tug it on—stupid when you think about it. I'll have to take it off again in about five minutes. But this isn't just any sweater. It's a vintage beaded cardigan with sleeves that end at the elbow. Itchy. Dark green. Smells like cigarettes. My mother picked it up at a flea market in Vermont and wore it all the time because it matched her green eyes and dark blonde hair. The day she announced this whole “trial separation,” she said I had the same coloring; maybe I should try the sweater on. She offered to try to find me one in Paris once she got there, then explained that overseas shipping rates weren't nearly as high as people think.

So I did what any other girl would do. I stole the freaking thing.

Dad pulls into an empty spot at the far end of the teachers' parking lot and kills the
putt-putt
sounds of the engine. After stepping out of the van in navy pants and a light blue short-sleeved shirt, he reaches into the backseat for the Anton High custodian jacket they gave him after his interview and pulls it on. The oversized patch on the left side, over his heart, says
Charlie
. He zips up. “So how antediluvian do I look?”

“If that means wicked ghastly, I'll give you a ten. Out of five.”

He pulls a huge key ring out of his pants pocket—strung from it are keys of every shape, size, and color—and jams it into his jacket pocket. “Let's go. First impressions.”

I slide out of the van and trot across the parking lot after him. An empty footpath leads us along the side of the school to the front, nose to headlights with a sleek black car that has just pulled to the curb. Dad nudges me. “Ever seen a Bentley up close?”

I shake my head. Amazing—this gleaming heap of metal, rubber, and polished glass probably costs more than our house back home.

“It's a bit new for my taste,” Dad says with a sniff. “Now if it were a '35 Bentley Cabriolet three and a half liter with six cylinders and a flying lady mascot hood ornament, that would get my attention.”

The driver's door swings open and a chauffeur climbs out. I can't get a good look at his face, but from behind he's a study in opposites. From the neck down he looks every bit the dedicated chauffeur, crisply outfitted in a charcoal uniform and shiny black shoes. But from the neck up he looks like a druggie—long reddish brown dreads tied back with string and dirty black baseball cap with a broken fastener at the back. He pauses to polish a spot on the hood of the car, then, keeping his eyes to the ground, he marches around the back of the Bentley to open the rear door by the curb. A long, muscular thigh emerges, followed by a student—a tall girl with magnificently wavy, summer-faded brown hair all flipped over to one side as if she's been hit by a major gust of wind.

I slow my step and try not to stare. Against toasted skin, her pale turquoise eyes shine like the community pool back home. Her face is strong and boyish—thick eyebrows, square jaw, long, sharp nose—refined against the wild hair. She swings a backpack over her shoulder and stares at the building. “Welcome to my nightmare,” she mutters in a voice that is deep, gravelly.

Her driver climbs back into the car, leans one arm out the window, and waves good-bye with a couple of fingers. She bends down and flips him off.

Halfway up the school steps, Dad looks back at me. “Hurry up, Sara.”

Dropping down on one knee, I pretend to fuss with my laces. “You go ahead. I'll find the office for myself.”

“Ask for Mrs. Pelletier, the vice principal,” he calls. The bell rings and he waves to me before trotting toward the main doors. “And remember the rule about cell phones. Turned off during the school day, just like at Finmory.”

I nod and he disappears inside.

The girl stomps toward the stairs, her jaw muscles bulging with fury, and slows to give me a long, aggravated glance that starts at my boots and travels up my shins, past my Dubble Bubble–covered chest, then up to my braided hair. I seem to bore her instantly and she looks away. Once the Bentley is out of sight, she lifts her jean jacket and rolls the waistband of her skirt way up. But when she hoists her backpack up again, the back hem of the skirt gets caught. It lifts high enough to expose her pink cotton underwear.