Little Blue Lies (2 page)

“Wrong side of history,” I would say prior to fourth period Wednesday and Friday. It was a favorite term of our history teacher, Mr. Lyons, whom everybody called Jake, and who talked with this fantastic squelch effect like he had a tracheotomy.
You don't want to wind up on the wrong side of histor
y, Jake would say whenever he was pointing out some of the greatest errors in judgment that hindsight could illuminate. I always thought hindsight gave history teachers the most lopsided advantage over pretty much everybody they ever talked about, but Jake was rather modest in his infallibility just the same.

In more practical terms the wrong side of our history was in the southwest corner of the room, where the window was drafty and the overhead light flickered like in a disco. I sat behind June and rubbed her shoulders when the wind blew, and that buzzing overhead fluorescent was a kind of sound track to our little wrong-side romance. Bzzzz.

The point, though, was that the back of English, the wrong side of history, wherever we were in May was a better place than where we were just a few weeks later, and I am none the wiser still as to why.

Bad overhead lighting makes me melancholy now.

My mother is a freelance
graphic artist, which means she works most of the time at home, which means the house is almost never mine. She does sketches of me from time to time, and of course they are technically very good, but in every single portrait I look like I'm trying to sell you something.

My father runs his own financial services business. He is always trying to sell you something.

I have the summer off, courtesy of my indulgent parents, to figure out just what I want to do with—

Wait. She's lying. Of course. How stupid of me. Of course she's lying. That's what she does, my Sweet Junie Blue Lies. That's what
we
do. She didn't dump me; she teased and provoked and tested me. It was like a grand graduation present, and I screwed it up completely by failing for all these weeks to recognize it.

I am not even worthy of the title Lyin' O'Brien. I am deeply ashamed.

It is with great relief and excitement that I text her:
I get
it. You almost had me there, ya Blue Lying Minx. Can I come over now and make up for lost time?

I sit back up against my headboard, dreaming like I used to dream, of Junie and me and all the better things. It's so great because it's a Friday and everything. Not too big a man to admit that I check my phone every four seconds or so, to see if I have my response. After twenty-four seconds or so the tension mounts, but then, bam, it's in.

It is not the response I expected.

Shitty timing,
it says.

What timing? I've given her forever.

Come on, June, this is stupid. Can't we stop it?

I sit on my bed some more and I wait for June to come to her senses. I think of several hundred more texts to add, to tip this thing in the right direction, texts about how we don't want to be caught on the wrong side of history, and changing my name to Cryin' O'Brien now, the kind of knockout material that cannot fail to tickle that Junie Blue spot that only I know about. But I hold back, not to be cool exactly, since there is nothing she would see through more quickly than me trying to be cool with her, but to keep something in reserve, to keep my powder dry for the all-out assault that may be necessary.

I wait, trying to pretend I'm not waiting, until waiting becomes not unlike plunging my whole head into a vat of icy sparkling water and keeping my eyes open to count all
the bubbles rushing at me. I am aware of shifting positions on the bed, twisting this way and that, with my phone on the night table as if it can be made aware that I am ignoring it and thereby provoked into ringing.

Knock, knock.

“Who's there?”

This is neither a knock-knock joke nor a real question, since we know this is my mother at the door. She works, like I said, at home, which sucks sometimes, and she has ears like a bat. She's kind of obsessive about something I'm not thrilled to talk about, but suffice it to say my
tossing and turning
just now provoked her into action. Somewhere along the line she got the idea that this summer I'm jerking myself to the point of hairy-handed criminal insanity, and so, by golly, as long as she is in the house, monkeys will not be spanked. Nor will there be any snapping the squid, flogging the dolphin, whacking the haddock, pulling the python, choking the chicken, or clubbing the baby seal. She's the World Wildlife Fund of self-pleasure.

Usually the ruse is a snack of some kind.

“It's me.”

“Hi, Mom. I'm a little busy right now.”

“I have tuna on toast and kettle chips, and bread-and-butter pickle slices,” she snaps, with such urgency that I expect to see the indentation of her face present itself in the door.

“Thanks,” I say, “but I'll—”

The phone beeps me off midsentence. I scramble across the bed to get it.

“Hello?” Mom says, a bit exasperated.

I grunt nonwords at her as I retrieve the text.

“Arggh,” she says, storming away.

“Sorry,” I say. I was rude. Though not as rude as she thinks.

Come over right now right now,
is what the text tells me to do.

Right now right now my feet are on the floor, through the door, and down the stairs, and I hear my mother crow something in my direction, but I have no time for that as I slam the big oak front door behind me, and because of a light rain falling and coating the pavement, I pretty well hydroplane all the way over to Junie's place with “stupid” surely smeared all over my face.

I have to say. I have to say. I think I like Junie Blue even more than I thought I did, and I am undecided about whether to tell her that.

As I turn the final slick corner onto June's street—rain always seems to rain rainier on her neighborhood than mine—I lose my legs. My feet shoot sideways in the slickness, and my whole self follows, until I feel like I'm sliding safely into third. In fact I am sliding unsafely right off the sidewalk and into light traffic that screeches and beeps. Somebody screams terror and somebody else laughs and cheers, until me
and a four-wheeler monstrosity skitter to a halt about three feet before death. Mine, most likely.

I am staring straight up into a wheel well when the lady who was driving comes running over to where I am, crying wildly—her—as if I am for sure already dead and murdering her insurance premium situation.

She stares down at me with her hands covering her mouth, but they don't filter out any of the blubbering. “Awwwwww,” she says.

“You've got some rust starting under here,” I say, so unbelievably composed that I fall instantly in love with myself and curse the fact that Junie Blue is not right here to see it. Actually, lots of neighbors seem to have gathered, so I squiggle around to see if maybe . . . but no. My heart, despite appearances, is running at about 8,000 rpm, so I can't be all that cool, although to be fair it's been at about 6,500 since I got the text.

“Wait!” the driver woman calls as I scoot off in the direction of the Blue house—it's brown—without even a little bit of further ado.

“Do it again,” a guy yells from the sidewalk. “I didn't have my camera ready.”

I get laughter and applause, and I wave over my head as I run, and realize my elbow is damn banged, but hey, what's an elbow but a broken arm with a hinge anyway, right?

The doorbell does not work at her house, but they never
bother fixing it or leaving a note or even putting a discouraging strip of tape across the thing, because the Blues would be just as happy if most people just went away, or better yet pressed the button a bunch of times and then went away, while the Blues watched from a window. So I knock, loud and fast and happy and nonstop until the door swings open.

Oh.

“Hey, Ronny.” Ronny is June's fatherlike substance.

“Hey, O. Were you the dickwad slithering under traffic there on the corner?”

“How the hell did you see that?”

“I was at the upstairs window. None of your business.”

Ronny and I don't get fantastically along.

“You going to let me in?”

“Why would I do that?”

Peeking around Ronny's shoulder is Leona, June's mom. I like Leona, more than a lot of people do. She's not bad, just mostly beat down by Ronny.

“Are you okay?” Leona asks me softly. “I heard Ronny at the window laughing something crazy, and he said you were squashed under a truck.”

“I wasn't squashed, Leona, but thanks.”

“Why are you here?” Ronny asks.

“I was summoned.”

“Let the boy in, Ronny.”

“Who summoned you?”

“Who do you think? June.”

“June ain't here,” he says.

“Let him in anyway. You want a drink or something, O?”

“She texted me. And told me to come here.”

“Not here,” Ronny says.

“Here,” I say. “When somebody says ‘come
over
,' if they don't say anywhere else, it means come over to the place where they live.”

“That's true,” Leona says, “but she really ain't here.”

“Hiya, O,” Maxine says, walking across my field of vision behind her parents. Maxie is June's older sister.

“Hiya, Maxie,” I say.

“So ya see,” Ronny says, “you weren't summoned here.”

“Okay,” I say. “So where is she?”

“She was here just a short while ago,” Leona says. “She was here when I went to the drugstore, but then when I got back, she was gone already. Where is she, Ronny? D'ya know?”

“She went away. For a vacation.”

This, is something. Ronny likes messing with me, always liked messing with me, even when he liked me, even though he never much liked me, but now when he clearly doesn't like me, he will mess with me beyond banter-type messing. And this, is something.

“Junie never takes a vacation. Never, ever.”

“Well, that was before,” Ronny says.

I hear a blender kick up and screamy-whine in the kitchen.

“Wouldja let the boy in, Ronny,” Leona says, but it's not really a request, since she reaches from behind him and pulls me by the hand into the house.

“You want a smoothie?” Maxine says as I am seated at one of the high breakfast stools at the bar that separates the kitchen from the dining area.

“No, thank you,” I say.

“How 'bout if I put a little rum in it?”

“Fine, I'll take the smoothie. But not the rum.”

Ronny takes a seat at the kitchen side of the bar, diagonally across from me. Leona excuses herself and is gone in a sad puff of sigh. Maxine sits across from me and pounds two smoothie glasses down on the bar.

“That'll be ten cents, pardner,” she says.

“Put it on my tab,” I say. We clink glasses. “What do you mean, Ronny, ‘that was before'? Before what? What was before?”

“Before she off-loaded you, of course. Ain't that obvious? I thought you was supposed to be smart. Maxie, wasn't this guy supposed to be smart?”

“He is smart, Dad. Shut up.”

“Anyway, yeah, like I was saying, ah, the life Junie's leading these days, you wouldn't recognize it. She does stuff, you
wouldn't believe it. Party stuff, guys . . . whoo the guys . . .”

I am boiling. I hate it when I'm boiling, because I have a face that announces to the whole world I am boiling. Fuchsia, I believe is the color.

“Look, he's boilin',” Ronny says, pointing and laughing like I'm in a glass display case.

“She does
nothin'
, O,” Maxine says. “Don't listen to this guy. Nothin'. No guys, nothin'. She works the stupid store, she walks the dumb dogs. That's it.”

The joy rising in my guts now, chasing the flush right out of my face, is something I should not be proud of. She should have a life. She deserves a life, and a fantastic one.

And she should be here.

“Where did she go, Ronny?” I ask with the slight crunch of demand in my voice that is never a good idea with this man.

“I told you,” he snarls, “vacation.”

I turn to Maxine, my palms upturned to catch some help.

“No idea, O. I just got home. Why don't you just call her?”

Ronny laughs and points a bread stick at me, and I realize the extra awfulness of making his day like I am.

“Because I'm a dope,” I say, pulling out my phone and pressing her number.

In a couple of seconds the room tinkles with small music. Small music and big laughter.

The music sounds just like one of those little kids' plinky toy pianos, playing “Hello, Dolly!” Junie's ring tone. The laughter is Ronny.

“June's phone,” I say, looking all around, at the counter and the floor and the Blues across the bar from me, because that's where the sound is coming from.

Maxine turns sideways in her chair, scowls, and reaches down into the vicinity of Ronny's back pocket. When she produces the phone and he produces a higher volume of laughter, she biffs him right on the side of the head with the phone.

“Was it you? Texting me?” I ask him.

That sucks the mirth right out of him. “Hell, no,” he snaps. “I don't think so.”

“Where
is
she?” I shout. I don't care how angry or violent he gets now, because this is not the way it should be going. “Junie never ever goes anywhere without her phone. She doesn't go to the bathroom without her phone. She doesn't even shower without it.”

“And you would know these things how?”

“Come
on
, Ronny. I'm really getting worried here.”

“Don't get worried. You got nothing to worry about. You know why? 'Cause you got no business with my daughter anymore.”

“Christ, just tell him where she is, Dad.”