Seven Ways We Lie (30 page)

“I am looking at you,” she says.

“Look harder.”

“I see a loving mother, a caring sister. I see—”

“You see nothing,” I say. “I am nothing anymore except wasted potential. Nothing.” I take a step forward. “You were supposed to be my teacher. You said I was brilliant—a prodigy, you said. You were supposed to take me away, teach me everything,
but instead you ran the first chance you had!” My voice hits the yelling point.

And then García calls, “Hold.”

I hesitate, frowning out into the audience. He said we weren't going to stop this run for anything. I glance down—maybe Emily or I didn't hit our lights?—but we're well placed in the bright spots on the stage.

García leans over the lip of the stage, facing me. It's a jolt. I'm the problem? What did I do wrong?

“The objective here,” he says. “Your goal. What do you want from her?”

“An apology,” I say. “I . . . I tried to think of anything else. But that's all I have.”

His eyebrows knit together. His eyes are reddened, as if he's been rubbing them hard. He shakes his head. “Okay. If you're going to play it like that, you've got to find different tactics. You're just—watching this scene right now, it's like watching you scold her. Not the characters, either. It's like watching you, Kat, scold Emily. It's too harsh, too . . .” He snaps his fingers. “You've got to dial back the anger. It reads as one-note, repetitive. Boring.”

I stare at him. That's harsher criticism than he's ever given the rest of the cast combined.

Maybe he's saying that because he thinks I can take that sort of critique. I know I should say,
All right, I'll work on it
, and find subtler notes next time through. But what comes out of my mouth is, “So, am I not allowed to be angry?”

“Excuse me?”

“She left.” I point at Emily. “She left me, and what, I'm not
allowed to be angry about it? I think that's realistic.” My voice rises beyond my control.
Focus
, whispers the voice in my head, but I'm no longer outside myself. Kat has forced her way back to center stage, and her voice keeps going. “I think if someone came back after years, having abandoned me like that, yeah, I think I'd be a little mad.”

“Kat,” García says, a warning. It incenses me. First Olivia, now this. After last Tuesday, I thought García got it—understood me, like nobody had before—but no. Is anybody on my side?

“Why don't I get a reason?” I say, my heartbeat thudding in my palms. Emily looks at me, eyes wide and shining. “If someone can just tell me
why
I should stop being angry,” I say, “I'll do it. But the way I see it, I have plenty of things to be angry about. You keep telling me to rethink this apology thing. You know what? I don't buy it. She
deserves
an apology after getting stabbed in the back by someone she thought she could trust.”

Whispers from the side of the stage distract me. The rest of the cast has gathered to watch the new show.

García climbs onstage, striding toward me. The closer he gets, the taller I realize he is, and up close, he looks even worse. His hair is a mess. The red in his eyes makes thin veins visible along the edges of his eyelids.

“Stop it,” he says. His voice doesn't shake. It's solid ice. “This is a work space, and you leave everything else at the door, you hear? You drop your day there, and you don't bring it onto this stage. If I carried every problem I have into this theater, you know how many times I would've lost it in this rehearsal process?”

“Oh, I know,” I say.

“What?” His voice falters.

I don't stop to explain how much I know. “Besides, maybe you should lose it a little more. God knows
they
could use it.” I stab my finger at the side of the stage. The other actors stare at me, askance. “Yeah, that's right,” I snap. “Jesus, this is the most attention you guys have paid in any rehearsal. You realize how infuriating that is?”

And García loses it. “Kat!” he yells. “Please. You're here to act, not to bully the rest of the cast!”

His words resound off the back walls, and as they fade second by second, he deflates. The hard gleam fades from his eyes, leaving exhaustion behind.

There's my answer. He's not on my side—nobody's on my side.

Am I on my side?

No. No, I'm not. In the ringing silence, I realize that I hate every tiny fragment of what I've turned into. I should have realized it before, realized that I spend every second trying to escape myself. I'm all I've got anymore, and I don't even want me.

I close my eyes, looking inside myself. Staring at what's in there for the first time, I realize how hideous it is, all this hate. For everyone. For myself. A glaring yellow rage, pulsing there between my ribs.

I let out a breath, and it goes cold and gray like cooling metal.

When I open my eyes, my whole body feels limp. Punctured. All the anger has poured out. I have nothing left, nothing to give anymore—not even to this stage.

“Let's go back to work,” García says hoarsely.

“No,” I say, feeling detached. As if someone raised my anchor. I am drifting, rootless, in a stagnant sea. “I'm sorry,” I murmur. “I can't do this.”

I walk to the front of the stage, lift my backpack, drape my coat over my shoulder, and slide off the lip of the stage. Standing at the door, I glance back. Mr. García looks as if I've punched him in the stomach.

“Kat,” Emily bursts out. “Please don't. Please.”

I push the door open and step through. It shuts behind me with a final-sounding clank. The icy wind clutches at my bare arms, but I don't feel it. I am a drive wiped blank, everything erased.

I'M NOT SURE IF I FEEL BETTER OR WORSE NOW THAT
everybody knows Lucas is gay, because on one hand, I might've told Olivia, but at least I wasn't the one who made up that bullshit about him and Dr. Norman. But on the other hand, now his life
is
going to be as stressful as I thought it might be, and holy shit, it's setting in fast. The same afternoon the news leaks, as I'm walking through the swarm of people in the junior lot after school, I catch sight of Lucas. Angie Bedford, this hard-core, post-punk, dancer chick who's leaning against her car smoking a cigarette, calls over to him, “Hey, homo, how's Norman?” and the conversations in the sea of people flicker for a second, and a few people laugh, and others pretend not to have heard, and others give Lucas looks like,
What a loser
, and as for Lucas, he's stopped smiling and waving to people. He's motionless, looking lost and hurt.

I can't help it. Something grabs me somewhere in my chest and fastens tight—warm, escalating rage—and before I know what I'm doing, I'm beside Angie's car, and I'm snatching the cigarette out of her hand and flicking it to the asphalt and saying, “What's your problem?”

Her startled look twists fast into anger. All of a sudden, there's pepper spray in her hand—what the hell, did she have that prepared?—and she says, “Keep talking.”

“Like you're gonna hurt me with a million people standing around,” I scoff, and Angie says, “Self-defense, bro—you're seeming real aggressive,” and I say, “I'm not being aggressive; I'm telling you to shut up about my friend,” and she says, “
Friend
, huh?” and she gives me this stupid wink, and why does my neck feel hot with embarrassment? I'm not even gay, and it's just a type of person, for Christ's sake. There's nothing to be embarrassed about.

Before I can fulfill my heartfelt wish to give Angie the finger, some guy's voice calls from behind me, “Hey, fag, you his boyfriend?” and his friends laugh, and for a second I'm flabbergasted, like,
wow
, I thought that was the sort of dumb shit people only did in movies.

My opinion about gay rights has always been that it's none of my business. My mom raised me not to hate anyone for who they are. She said it, and they said it in church, so I learned it, and before this exact second, I sort of thought the rest of our school felt the same, because as far as I knew, nobody was getting beat up or bullied. But I guess I was wrong.

I turn toward the person who called me a fag—some zitty guy with glasses I think is on tennis—and say, “Man, someday you're going to have a friend you don't know is gay, and you're going to say some shit like that around him, and he's never going to trust you again.”

His smirk wavers for a second. He comes back with, “So . . . you
are
his boyfriend, is what you're saying?” and his friends hoot with encouraging laughter. My lip curls. “So what? Better
being someone's boyfriend than being some dumb-ass homophobe.”

People mumble to one another as I look around for Lucas, but he's already gone. I head for my car, disgusted with everyone and everything.

By the time I get home, my disgust has whittled itself down to tiredness. I hike up to the porch and yank open the door, letting a crack of afternoon light into our musty living room. The air smells like salt and boiling water, and Russell sleeps on the couch, his dark hair curling at the tips like mine used to when I was little, and I ruffle his hair before heading down the hall.

“Mateo,
ven aquí
,” comes my mother's voice from the kitchen. Weird. She rarely speaks in Spanish unless she wants to hide something from Russ. Weirder is the fact that she's in the kitchen at all. When I walk in, the lights are clouded with steam, and I dump my backpack on the faded rug, sit at the table, and say, “What's up? Why are you—” and she says, “Wash some plates, will you? I'm cooking dinner,” like it's obvious, like we don't eat out of the microwave seven nights a week, and I'm like, “Uh, okay, but why—” and then I break off, because her hands are shaking, and I'm embarrassed I didn't notice from the careful control in her expression that something's wrong.

“¿Qué pasó?”
I ask, standing, and she looks up at me and says, “Nothing,” still in that light, careless voice, and I say, “Mom, seriously,” and she says, “I asked you in here to help with the cleanup,” taking on a warning tone, and I say, “But tell me what—”

She slams the wooden spoon onto the stove and says, “Mateo, do what I told you, and stop asking questions!” and in the reverberating wake of the cold, empty clang, I turn, trancelike, to clear
off the table with clumsy hands, and there they are, the divorce papers, lying on top of the newspaper like any other printout. When I turn back to look at my mother, she's half facing away, her body held slouched like a sagging tent, and I can't do a thing but stare as she hunches over the counter. Her back gives one huge shudder. A tear drips down her baggy cheek. Her knuckles fly up to her mouth, and she bites on one hard, and then she starts shaking and trembling like water under thunder, and I think she might just dissolve.

I'm silent.

Sometimes you go a long time having fooled yourself into thinking that you're as grown-up as you'll ever be, or that you're more mature than the rest of the world thinks you are, and you live in this state of constant self-assurance, and for a while nothing can upset you from this pedestal you've built for yourself, because you imagine yourself to be so capable. And then somebody does something that takes a golf club to your ego, and suddenly you're nine years old again, pieced together from humiliation and gawky youthfulness and childlike ideas like,
Somebody please tell me what to do, nobody taught me how to handle this, God, just look at all the things I still don't understand
, and you can't muster up the presence of mind to do anything but stand there, stare, silent, sorry.

Or maybe this doesn't happen to everyone. Maybe it's only me waiting to learn all this, waiting to find a place where I'll understand everyone and everything and how it all works and why I'm fumbling through life's pages with too-thick fingers, and maybe it's only me who's stuck in this emotional paralysis because I'm so busy trying to seem grown-up and feel grown-up I haven't done any growing up, and maybe it's only me standing in a small, dimly lit
room, watching someone I love break down in front of me and not knowing what to do or where to turn or who I'm supposed to be.

7:15 COMES AND GOES, AND DAD DOESN'T WALK
through the door. I don't ask where he is. Something's wrong with my throat.

Russ, swinging his legs at the dinner table, says, “Mommy. Where is Daddy?” and I say, “Come on, Russ, eat your dinner,” and Russ turns his big, round eyes on me—Dad's eyes—and says, “Where is Daddy?” and I swallow and prod his little fork toward his hand, like, “Hush, just—here.” Mom's jaw moves mechanically as she chews, her eyes trained on the saltshaker as if she's trying to count every grain inside.

I watch Russ eat, my head filling up with worries. Maybe it's stupid to worry about my brother when a million kids get brought up between two houses and turn out fine, but it's still weird to think about how different his upbringing is going to be than mine was, how maybe Mom or Dad will remarry and Russ will call somebody else his parent, or he'll be my age and look back and never remember living in the same house with the three of us. And maybe it'll fade from my memories when I'm older, too, and from Mom's and Dad's, if they can ever forget, and once we all forget what this place felt like, it'll be like this family never happened at all. We'll be a new, different set of people, only me and Russell binding us together.