Seven Ways We Lie (11 page)

Going years without talking to anybody—talking about anything that matters—seems hard in theory, but when you give one-word answers to anyone who approaches you, people piss off pretty fast. The last time I had a legitimate conversation was in eighth grade, before Mom decided we weren't worth her time and energy.

To be fair, it's not as if she didn't have a reason to leave. By the time Liv and I hit seventh grade, our parents got into screaming matches every week, about everything from what we ate for dinner to the clothes Olivia and I wore. It always ended with Dad snapping, “Great,” sinking into a capital-
M
Mood, and not talking for hours. Mom would run off in an anxious frenzy and lock herself in their room. She was a ball of energy, our mom, and she used to electrify our dad. But year after unhappy year, she grew more unreliable, like a knot of wires fraying through.

I could forgive her wanting to leave. What's unforgivable is the way she did it.

Mom left our last family vacation early, after an all-night fight. By the time the rest of us got back home, she'd disappeared, leaving
zero evidence that she'd ever lived there. Fluttery clothing, sketchbooks, tchotchkes that used to line the shelves—gone, gone, gone. She didn't leave a note. She didn't reply to the texts, calls, and emails we sent for weeks afterward.

What gets me the most is that she didn't have the decency to say good-bye. I knew Mom had her issues, but I never thought she was a coward.

Eventually, Dad tracked down her new number out west. Clear message there: she needed distance. But did she need 1,500 miles of it? If she wanted to start over, couldn't she have started over in Kansas City and seen me and Olivia on weekends? She chose the most selfish avenue and sprinted down it, right out of our lives. As far as I'm concerned, she can stay out.

I don't know what Mom said the one time she talked to Dad, but he never called her again. After that, a part of him packed up and left, too. He's hardly a shadow of himself now, worked to death, silent when we see him. Part of me still hopes my actual dad might come back, the dad who obsessively tracked weird sports like badminton and Ping-Pong and who started getting hyped for Christmas in August. When we put up the tree, he'd stuff tinsel in his beard and puff out his cheeks—
Ho, ho, ho! Merry Tinselmas!
Back in the day, it wasn't hard to tell where Olivia got her horrible sense of humor.

I never catch a glimpse of that man anymore. He's gotten lost in there somewhere, lost inside his own body. And I hate Mom for doing that to him. She had so much power that she ended up breaking him completely.

Nobody will ever do that to me.

· · · · · · ·

AFTER REHEARSAL ENDS, I HEAD BACK TO THE GREENROOM
to collect my things. By the time I get my stuff and come back out into the theater, everybody else is gone.

“Shit.” I needed to ask for a ride. My phone says it's already gone down to thirty-seven degrees. With today's wind, I'll be half frostbitten by the time I get home.

“Kat? Everything okay?” asks Mr. García, wheeling the ghost light toward the stage. Supposedly, ghost lights—left out to illuminate deserted stages—are for safety purposes, but I bet they're mostly for appeasing superstitious theater people.

I squint in the glare of the exposed bulb. “Yeah, everything's fine. Just realized I have to walk home.”

The ghost light's sticky wheels squeak forward as García sets it center stage. “But it's freezing,” he says. “You don't have a ride?”

“I was going to ask the others. Forgot.”

“Well, I could drop you off.”

“Really?” I stick my hands in my hoodie pockets. “I, uh, that'd be great.”

“Okay, then. This way.” He hops off the side of the stage and heads down the aisle to the faculty lot. I hurry after him, slipping through the door. Outside, the wind grasps at my hair, clutching it. García stops by a tiny white two-door that looks about an inch from collapse. It makes a clunking sound as I slide in. Still, getting out of the wind is an instant relief.

“So, where am I headed?” García asks, reversing out of his spot.

“Left here. And then a right up at the light.” I glance around the car, which smells like Windex. The seats are bare, every inch clean and empty. A long row of CDs, stacked between the driver and passenger seats, are preserved in spotless plastic cases and alphabetized.

“Good rehearsal today, huh?” García says.

“Decent.”

He smiles. “You're tough to impress. I'm guessing you want to do theater in college? Maybe a conservatory or something?”

“Yeah.”

García turns right. “Well, they'll be lucky to have you.” We accelerate down the widest road in Paloma, which runs through the entire city, top to toe. We pass a strip mall on the left. “I did a drama double-major in school,” García says. “English and drama.”

“Oh. Did you want to act?”

“No, I was a stage manager, mostly.” García grimaces. “I got exactly one part in college, and I had two lines, and I messed both of them up opening night. So that went well.”

I bite my tongue. I can't imagine college. It feels so far away—not even a distance in time so much as a physical distance. As if I'm trying to cover thousands of miles on foot.

“Left on Cypress Street,” I say. García slips into the turn lane and rounds onto a narrow street filled with potholes.

“Out of curiosity,” García says, “do you have a sister? Olivia?”

“Yeah. We're twins.”

“Ah, okay. I was wondering. She's in my honors class.”

“Of course,” I say. “She's the smart one.”

“Hey, you're just as smart. A different kind of smart,” García says. “Believe me, Kat, it takes a lot of intelligence to show a character like you do onstage.” He considers for a second. “I guess you can't put it on a scale, but in my book, it means more than a couple points on the SAT. It's definitely going to mean something to the audience on opening night.”

I sneak a glance at him. He looks unconcerned, as if those
words weighed nothing at all, but they settle and fasten themselves somewhere deep inside me. I've never felt smart beside Olivia. She's two math classes ahead of me. Even in the subjects I actually like—history and English—schoolwork never feels effortless, not like it seems for my sister.

These days, my grades are circling the drain. I don't have motivation anymore, just exhaustion. I don't
care
anymore, about anything besides the play, anyway.

I sink in my seat, resolving not to answer anything else. This shit's getting too personal.

Mr. García seems to sense me fortifying my walls. He stays quiet.

He probably thinks I'm jealous of my sister or that I hate her. I'm sure that's what Olivia thinks, but it's not true. I'm not going to braid Olivia's hair and make daisy chains with her, but God knows I don't hate her.

We used to be close in middle school, back before she blossomed out and I shrank in, before high school sent us down different roads. I guess we were close up until the second Mom let the door slam on her way out. That did something to Olivia: she got all bright-eyed and optimistic about Mom coming back, but I knew it would never happen. The first time Olivia talked about calling Mom back up, trying to stay in touch, I walked out of the room. Fucking delusional. Sometimes she still seems to be in denial, as if we're still some happy family with anything in common besides living under the same roof.

These past two years, I've gotten so exhausted with everyone, including my sister. It's so much simpler to fall into computer games and solitude, where, sure, nobody offers consolation, but
nobody's going to hurt you, either. And at least the enemies there are clearly labeled.

I watch the houses outside my window shrink, the yards dwindling to small green-gray rectangles. The houses here on the western outskirts of Paloma are tiny and dilapidated.

“Left here,” I say as we clunk over the eight hundredth pothole. “I'm on the right. Number 243.”

“Great.” A minute later, he pulls up our concrete driveway. Our house waits to the right, flat-roofed and beige. The sight of it fills me with resignation.

“I'll see you in class,” Mr. García says.

“Yeah,” I say, getting out. “Thanks for the lift.”

“Sure.”

I shut his door and head inside, already aching to collapse into bed.

IT'S 10:00
PM
ON A THURSDAY, SO OF COURSE MY PARENTS
are yelling at each other down the hall in the kitchen, and I have more homework than I want to admit, so of course I'm dicking around on the Internet. There's a point where procrastination turns into resignation that you will never do what you need to do, and I hit that point, like, two hours ago, after opening a Word document in a short-lived fit of optimism. At this point, anything I write will seem like one hundred percent bullshit when I read it over tomorrow morning, so is this even worth it? Signs point to no.

The voices down the hall rise to a cracking point.

“We never should have left St. Louis!” my mom yells. “I would have stayed with my family, stayed near my parents, but no, you wanted to—”

“Oh,
I
wanted to? Who was it who—”

Sighing, I get up to block the gap under my door. My clothes, strewn across the floor like storm debris, tend to come in handy at this time of night. I kick a couple of hoodies against the crack as a makeshift silencer, glancing back at my bed. Russell lies asleep between the sheets, his thumb lodged deep in his mouth. If he
wakes up, I'm going to kill my parents. They're not even trying to keep it down these days.

I sit back down, put my headphones on, and open Spotify, twisting the volume up. Avril Lavigne belts out some inhuman high note over my dad's muffled voice. I will guard my Spotify page into the afterlife, because if anyone saw it, I would probably resurrect from shame. I have this thing for whiny pop-rock, lots of Nickelback and Avril and latter-day Weezer, and it's morbidly embarrassing, but it can't be cured, not by my mom's classic rock or Burke's hipster Bon Iver shit. Besides, nothing's better for drowning out an argument than Avril Lavigne yell-singing about how much of a crazy bitch she is, which, like, I guess if that's how you want to describe yourself, go for it.

A red notification pops up at the top of my Facebook page, announcing a message from Olivia. My stomach does acrobatics, and my brain aches as if someone's slammed a block of wood against my forehead. Jesus, crushes are so humiliating.

Hey, Matt
,

Following up for the project thing. We should probably meet over the weekend to practice the actual presentation, sort out who's going to say what. I can get supplies for a poster or something. Go ahead and call me at 476-880-1323—we'll sort it out faster that way
.

Also, here's a link to read
Inferno
online—www.bartleby.com/20/101.html

Olivia

Without thinking, I take a joint from my drawer. My fingers move like rubber, thick and clumsy, as I open my window and
light up. The first hit mellows in my lungs for a moment before I exhale into the night wind, leaning out to keep the smoke away from Russ. It's not long before I feel it: the world engulfing me in its arms. Guitar chords ring deep in my headphones, every note dissipating out into its own rich, vibrating melody.

When I'm sufficiently stoned, I grab my phone, tap in Olivia's number, and hit call. As it rings, I pause the music, sinking onto my desk chair, and the quiet presses in. Voices rise and fall outside my door, lapping against my awareness in gentle waves. My eyes fix on the trail of smoke twining from the joint out through the window, and Olivia's phone rings and rings, and it occurs to me that maybe 10:00
PM
is a little late to call somebody I don't know—should I have waited, talked to her tomorrow in class?

The line connects. “Hey, it's Olivia,” she says, her bright, quick voice as awake as if it's early morning. I say, “Hey, Matt here.”

“Yeah, I guessed,” she says. “So, when are you free to work on this thing?”

I want to say
Slow down
; I want to wait; I want to savor the sound of her voice. I reply so slowly, the words barely feel like words at all, just lazy, meaningless streams of syllables. “I'm free all the time. Whatever works.”

“Let's get it out of the way this weekend,” she says, and I'm like, “Yeah, how 'bout Saturday?” and she says, “Okay. I'm not going to have a car, though, so.”

“We could meet at your place,” I say, trying not to sound too into the idea, and she's like, “Not advisable,” and I'm like, “Why not?” and she's like, “Kat's going to be home. My sister.”

“I won't be loud or anything,” I say, and she says, “That's not what I mean.” And I say, “Then what do you mean? Don't want to
embarrass yourself by letting me in your house?” and the second it comes out, my eyes fall shut, and my mind goes,
Shut up, Matt. Shut up
.