Seven Ways We Lie (18 page)

A minute passes. Then my phone buzzes, skittering over to me like a hopeful pet. I snatch it up, sliding open her response.
You beat me!! I'm on Canto 27. No spoilers, thanks
.

Burke grabs my phone. I flail across the table, trying to snatch it back, but he holds it out of reach, crowing, “Two exclamation points! Not one, but two! Be still, your beating little heart!” and I say, “
Shutupshutupshutup
,” and wrench the phone out of his beefy fingers. “Shit, you are so embarrassing.”

As I settle back into my chair, I type,
Spoiler, everybody's already dead
, and hit send.

Burke peers at the screen, squinting as he reads upside down. He doesn't say anything, but when he flips his econ book open again, he's wearing a private little smile, and I say, “The fuck are you smiling at?” and he says, “Just nice to see signs of life,” and I'm like, “The fuck is that supposed to mean?” and he says, “Hey, cool it with the f-bombs—your little brother's, like, twenty feet away,” and I sigh, 'cause he's right, as always. I lower my head to the table, one finger resting against my phone, waiting to feel it the split second she answers.

IT'S A NEW FEELING, AVOIDING THE CAFETERIA DURING
lunch on Tuesday. The rigid social structure of the caf makes it easy to navigate: the tables along the front wall are for football, lax, field hockey, and swimmers. The tables on the side wall belong to what douchebags refer to as the Lesser Sports: tennis, track, soccer, and cross-country. The tables in the middle have their own system, an unofficial order I still haven't deciphered. Although I do know that Matt Jackson and Burke Fischer sit closest to the lunch line. It's impossible to miss Burke, with the clothes he wears. Sometimes I get jealous of the guy—he seems so at home with his weirdness. I can't help thinking that if I had his confidence, maybe I'd be out already.

Today, though, I don't get the chance to see Burke sporting fluorescent pants or a suede cowboy jacket. I jog downstairs, head out the front door, and stride across the green.

Kansas can be beautiful. High's a solid sixty degrees today, the sky cloudless. Whistling, I head down the gym pathway, which twines past the auditorium hill. I skip over the roots of the Climbing Tree—a huge oak the swim team climbs after every meet we
win—and turn past the trailers. The tiny white huts are clustered at the bottom of the hill, set apart for specialized classes like AP Latin and Creative Writing. Valentine Simmons sits behind them on the hill, alone, his white-blond hair winking like a comet in the sun.

Nobody's ever talked to me the way he did.
I don't care
—a blunt interruption in the middle of my sentence. I don't know what his deal is, but I'm curious to find out.

“Hey,” I call, jogging toward him with a lifted hand. As I approach, he gives me the appalled expression of someone who's been interrupted mid-prayer. With a satisfied sigh, I plop down on the grass beside him, shrug off my backpack, and pull out my lunch. He doesn't stop staring at me until I look back at him.

He's dressed the same way as yesterday: brown corduroys, a knit sweater, a leather belt, and an accusatory expression. He looks normal, until you notice the Velcro sneakers and orange socks. It's as if J. Crew handled everything above his ankles, and then a five-year-old took over.

“What are you doing?” Valentine asks.

“Sitting,” I say.

“Hilarious. Why are you here?”

“'Cause you said you ate here, and I thought it sounded nice, so I was like, hey, maybe he wouldn't mind if I joined.”

“I mind,” he says.

“You do?” I unclip my water bottle from my backpack and take a few huge gulps, not breaking eye contact.

He looks away, letting out a sigh that's way too dramatic to be real. “Fine.”

Smiling, I fish my journal out of my backpack, open it out
of Valentine's sight line, and cross off a few items from today's to-do list.

• English quiz

• Hand in math homework

• Surprise lunch with Simmons

I shove my journal back in my bag. Valentine, eyes trained on the trailers, drinks his juice box mutinously. I didn't even know it was possible to drink a juice box mutinously.

I let him have his little moment, and then I dive back in. “Your mom works in the guidance center, right?”

“Yes.”

“Is she the one with the huge earrings? Earrings lady is super nice. It's got to be—”

“What were you writing?” he asks, destroying the only line of conversation I prepped.

“Hmm?”

“In that book.”

“Oh,” I say. “It's got my to-do list.”

He tilts his face up, an angular receiver for the sunlight. He looses a soulful sigh.

“Why, what'd you expect?” I ask.

“It looked like an important book.”

“It is an important book. Lots of lists in there.” I pull out the book, flipping to a page filled through the margins with increasingly tiny words. “This one's fun. It's my favorite words that I'm probably never going to use but that I want to hang on to anyway.”

He peeks over at the page.

My Favorite Words I'm Probably Never Going to Use but That I Want to Hang on to Anyway

• Hwyl—a sudden, ecstatic inspiration!

• Balter—to dance without grace, but with joy!

• Swallet—a sinkhole!

• Clamjamfry—rabble; rubbish!

• Olisbos—a dildo!

I can tell when he reads
olisbos
, because his face goes red all the way up his forehead, right to the roots of his white-blond hair.

“The Greeks, am I right?” I say.

He clears his throat. “Illuminating.”

I grin, shutting my journal. The trees around the trailers are bathed in gentle wind, their fingers twitching at me. “So,” I say, “what do you usually do out here, huh?”

“Homework. Or read.”

“What are you reading?”

He brandishes a thick book at me before dropping it back to the ground. I catch a picture of an astronaut and something about Mars in the title. “Space,” I say.

“Space,” he agrees.

“I've got a list of constellations in here somewhere,” I say, flipping through my journal. “I messed up drawing Orion's Belt, like, three times.”

He doesn't laugh or even smile. He hasn't smiled at all yet—his face is perpetually still and serious. “How do you mess up drawing Orion's Belt?” he says. “It's three dots.”

I grin. “I mislabeled them.” I find the right page and show him the list. The three-pointed Leo Minor buckles across the bottom
right; Delphinus stretches across the top; Orion sprawls across the middle with my crossed-out mistakes above the belt.

“Hmm,” Valentine says dismissively, but his eyes linger on the page. After a second, I close my journal again, and without warning, he grabs it. With a pitiful little
nff
sound, he pulls hard, trying to wrest the book out of my hand.

“What are you doing?” I say, bemused. Whatever he wants with my journal, he's never going to get it. I've seen celery with more defined muscles than this guy has.

He gives up, scowling. His hair falls over his forehead, and he pushes it back. “I feel like you're hiding some sort of plan for world domination in there.”

I flip through it. “I do have a plan to buy an island someday. Does that count?” One of the kids at Pinnacle inspired that plan. She had a family island; her grandfather bought it and named it after himself, and he has a statue of himself at the highest point on the island. I can't decide whether that makes me want to throw up or whether it's my ultimate life goal.

Valentine gives me a pitying look. “How are you planning on purchasing an island?”

“I'm going to be a banker. And make bank.”

“You're a math person?”

“Hey, no need to sound so skeptical.”

He shrugs. “That . . . may just be my voice.”

I laugh. “I feel you. According to some people, my voice is ‘scary upbeat.' So. Sorry if it makes you uncomfortable.”

“Meh. I've been uncomfortable since you decided to invade.”

It's another shot of honesty, catching me off guard. “What? Why?”

He shrugs, staring out at the track. The sun glares off the numbers
1
through
6
painted on the lanes. After a long silence, he says, “I can't believe people find this interaction game anything but stressful, though maybe that's because I don't like people.”

“But . . . is it that you don't like people or that they stress you out? Because those are two very different—”

“Spare me the psychoanalysis, please.” I can practically see a shield folding over him.

“Hey, sorry,” I say. “I'm curious, is all.”

“Curious . . . about me,” he says, as if it's inconceivable.

“Sure.”

“Why would you be curious about—” He sighs. “Forget it.” I can't read his voice, which is almost impressive—I can get a lock on nine out of ten people I meet within five minutes.

It's mostly practice. When you move a lot, you get used to people. Faces start to look the same. Their patterns are eerily similar on the surface, and lots of them are eerily similar down deep, too. You start letting go of people as soon as you find them, crossing them off as soon as you write them down. Picking them up like shiny objects and tossing them away like fool's gold. Eventually, you start detesting yourself for doing that, seeing people that way. Mercenary.

Valentine, though—I get the feeling he's something other than fool's gold. He's a fragment of something different. Topaz, or tiger's eye, or petrified wood.

I tuck my journal back into my bag. “It's fine not to be good with people.”

“I mean, it's not like I'm envious. I'm perfectly fine.” He flicks his hair back. “Still, people like you are so lucky, and you don't
even realize it. It's impossible to fake being good at socializing. I get trapped inside my thoughts. I get ensnared in here.” He knocks the side of his head with the heel of his palm. “And people only like people they can understand and people who'll be nice and accommodate them, and I couldn't care less about that.”

“Are you sure?”

“What?”

“You sure you don't care? I'm just saying.”

He meets my gaze properly. His eyes lay me open with a demanding and invigorating edge. I hope that wasn't going too far.

Eventually, he shakes his head. “Why am I telling you this?
You
don't care.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“What?”

“I care.”

“Why? What, do you care because I'm here? Is that how your mind works, you just go around throwing your
care
at whatever's within range?”

“Why not? Not like I'm going to run out.”

Valentine unleashes a mighty sigh. “Okay, Lucas. All right.”

In spite of the exasperated tone, the sound of him saying my name feels like a tiny acceptance. His voice hangs in the air a minute, bobbing in the wind. We both turn to our lunches, letting the silence settle.

“So,” I say after inhaling my sandwich, “you think you'll go to Juniper's party this weekend?”

“No. I'm sure I'll be able to talk to her before then.”

“About what?”

He tightens his thin lips. “Something personal.”

“Ah,” I say. It makes sense, his being interested in Juniper. She was always a different kind of smart from Claire—the quiet, terrifying sort of smart. Seems like Valentine's type.

Strangely, something near my heart feels deflated, but I keep my voice bright. “I could get you her number, dude. She texted me yesterday, asked if I could hook her up.”

“Hook her up?”

“With drinks. Liquor.”

“What? You're responsible for all that?”

“Oh yeah. Dealing is kind of my bad hobby. I should've taken up, like, scrapbooking or something.”

“Is it profitable?”

“Yeah, that's sort of the point.” I unzip the front pocket of my backpack and pull out a rubber-banded roll of tens and twenties. Valentine stares. Then he laughs a surprisingly clear, loud laugh. “What?” I say. “What's funny?”

“Nothing's funny. It's just, no wonder you like everyone, when they're throwing their money at you.”

“I'd like them anyway. Most people are harmless.”

He lets out a disgusted, mumbling noise. “If by ‘harmless' you mean boring, hypocritical, and self-serving, then sure, they're—”

“Dude. That's really mean.”

His mouth snaps shut.

“Don't give me that look,” I say, laughing. It's like somebody smacked his whole family. “I mean, you don't have to love everyone in the world, but you don't have to be all,
I detest humanity and all it stands for!
”