Seven Ways We Lie (31 page)

After dinner, I walk Russ up to his room. We hop up the steep steps in rhythm. “
One
, two,
sound
off,” I say, a little marching tune, and his hands spread out, bouncing by his cargo shorts.

A tiny bathroom, an angular closet more than anything, sticks
off to the side of Russ's room. As we hunker down in it, brushing our teeth, I look down at the top of his head and get this rush of light-headedness, like vertigo, and I remember my dad standing beside me, brushing his teeth, back when I was a kid. He never missed a night, not for years.

I look back up at the mirror as my eyes start to burn, and I blink a few times, spit, rinse, swish, spit.

I usher Russ out and into his pajamas. “Read a story,” he says as I tuck him in. Mom just switched him from a crib to a twin bed a couple of months ago. I settle on the fading quilt beside him, scoop up
Where the Wild Things Are
from the dark space under the bed, and crack it open to where we left off last, a page with yellow eyes and a tiny scarlet boat and a set of loving, angry, wild things gnashing their terrible teeth. As I show him the illustrations, I say in my best growl, “We'll eat you up—we love you so,” and Russ's eyes are round and solemn, and he lifts his hand like the boy in the monster suit, stepping into his private boat, waving good-bye.

I WAKE UP THE NEXT MORNING AFTER THE LONGEST
sleep I've had in months, dreamless, no yelling down the hall. I shower under water so hot, my skin flushes, I drive to school under the speed limit, I take actual notes in US History, I walk through the halls steady and clear-eyed, and the whole time, my head feels so empty, it's as if somebody went in through my ear with a hook and tugged my brain out in one long string.

The lunch bell rings, reminding me how little appetite I have. I don't even want to smoke. Now that I think about it, I haven't wanted to smoke since, what, last Friday? That's a long gap for me, but for some reason, I'm not missing it much.

I walk to García's classroom—empty until 1:00 for his lunch period—and dump my stuff in my seat. The back of the room, where García has a sign reading
BOOK DEN
, has a huge bookshelf that I always see the Poetry Society kids ogling. I draw a chair up to the front of the bookshelf and stare down the spines, all the names in alphabetical order, deep-sounding hardbacks like
The Satanic Verses
and
Crime and Punishment
mixed in with thin paperbacks in big, goofy fonts that hardly look longer than chapter books. I run my finger over the spines, remembering that half hour on Sunday when I was finishing
Inferno
, when I'd gotten so used to Dante's poetry that it slid over my eyes as gently as silk over skin, and I only had to search for word definitions a handful of times. I'd forgotten how reading felt when I was young, mental images burning brightly in my mind, my imagination smoldering above the flint and tinder of the turning pages.

I pull out a gray-jacketed book called
The Black Glass Monarch
and open it.

On Vern's eleventh birthday, the Monarch's Chief Lieutenant came for her
.

The story pours over me like water, drips down onto my head until I'm immersed head-to-toe, transported between the covers. I've never read this fast, and it's no Dante, but every time the main character outsmarts a soldier or discovers something about her past, my grip tightens, and this world sharpens until I've left my own world altogether.

“Matt?” says a voice, jerking me out of the weird reading haze, and I look over my shoulder. Olivia stands in the doorway, her head tilted, her lips glossed cherry red.

I stand. “Olivia. Hey.”

She heads to her desk and drops her backpack in her seat. “What are you reading?”

“It's, uh, called
The Black Glass Monarch
,” I say, and she says, “Oh, I've heard of that. You like fantasy?” and I'm like, “Apparently.” She approaches the Book Den shelves, glancing from title to title. I take a paper clip from the shelf and mark my page, shutting the book.

“Listen,” she says, “I didn't want to say it over text, but thanks for Saturday night,” and I say, “Sure. Would've taken you two forever to clean that place alone,” and she says, “Oh, that, too, but I meant with Dan.”

I meet her eyes, which are careful and shaded by her short brown lashes, and I say, “Sure. He was out of line,” and after a second, she says, “Everything okay? You sound sort of . . .”

“Of what?”

She shrugs. “Distant, I guess,” and I say, “Yeah, well.”

“Something happen?”

“I don't know,” I say. “I mean, yeah, but you don't want to hear it,” and she says, “Sure I do.”

I lean against the bookshelf. “I found out last night that my parents are getting divorced.”

A dark gap parts her lips, her eyes crease with sympathy, and I stare down at my shoes. “I'm sorry,” she says, and I try to sort my thoughts, which have rushed back in an eager herd, all jockeying for place. “My parents—I want them to keep trying,” I mutter, embarrassed to say it, embarrassed even to want it. “They make each other miserable, so it's stupid. But I feel . . . I don't know. Betrayed? Not for
me
. I wouldn't give a shit, but it's Russ. I mean, they had a kid three years ago. I feel like that's some sort of promise to him, and they broke it.”

Olivia leans against the bookshelf's other side, messing with the frayed edge of her T-shirt. She has long fingers, covered in rings. “You going to talk to them about it?” she asks.

“I don't know. It's hard to
do
anything, you know? I've just been sitting in my room for, what, five years on and off, listening to them scream at each other about jack shit, and I feel like I'm stuck there now. I feel like it doesn't make sense to break the pattern or to . . . yeah.”

“No, I know,” Olivia says. “Breaking patterns. Not easy. But it's never too late to try fixing them.” She half smiles, and her voice turns dry. “In any case, you know somebody who's missing a parental figure, and she's turned out semi-okay, I think.”

I look down at the cover of the book—the sword and shield of the heroine—then back up at Olivia, watching me with her usual calm good humor. “She's turned out sort of amazing, I think,” I say, a scared, stupid thrill running down my arms into my fingertips. And then the most incredible pink tinge lights up in Olivia's cheeks, and she laughs, her fingers pulling harder at the edge of her shirt, and as she examines her dirty sneakers, I let myself look at the contours of her face, the wide, high expanse of her forehead and the uneven arches of her eyebrows that give her that careless expression and the slight cleft of her chin and the roundness of her cheeks. Every tiny thing that makes her herself. She's twisting her rings around her fingers now, and she takes a step closer, and she's hardly shorter than me, but with that step, I'm looking down into her eyes, and it's like looking down into a deep well at the very center of her, and something in there is glowing and pulsing and so alive, it swallows me like boiling water. Her thick brown hair falls over her forehead, and I see a bumpy patch where she's
spread concealer over an acne breakout above her right eyebrow, and I see the clots in her eyelashes from her mascara, and I love every detail, because it means I'm close enough to know these tiny secrets. I wonder what she's seeing on my face, too, and I swallow nervously and glance down at her mouth, and God, the way her lips glimmer makes me want to lean in and kiss her until I taste what she's tasting. I want to tuck her hair behind her ear and run my thumb down her jaw and cradle the side of her face in my hand—Jesus, I want to touch her.

“I'm, um,” she says, “I'm sort of,” and I say, “Me too. Nervous?” and she says, “Yeah, that's the, yeah.” And I laugh, and then we're both laughing stupidly and looking anywhere but at each other, and then like a light switch flicking off, we're both silent again, and our eyes are locked, and she says, “Look, I know that—”

Then the door opens, and a voice goes in my head,
Are you fucking kidding?
and we move back from each other so fast that I barge into the chair I was sitting in. García, heading for his desk, says, “Hey, Matt. Is that
Black Glass Monarch
?” And I say, “Yeah,” trying not to sound too filled with rage, even though I want to take García and shove him bodily back out the door. Could the guy
be
any more inconvenient these days?

He says, “That's a fun one. You can borrow it if you want to,” and I say, “I . . . thanks.”

As other kids bustle in, I look back at Olivia. Her blush has turned a brilliant red. She says, “Um, I'll text you later,” and hurries back to her desk, her brown hair swishing from side to side. Every muscle in my body is still tense from her proximity.

TO-DO:

• Make sure everyone knows it's not true.
None of my friends were in their usual spots during break.

• Eat lunch with Valentine.
Valentine was not by the trailers today. He is not texting me back. Figure out why.

• Place at swim meet.

I CRASH OUT OF THE WATER WITH A GASP. THE WORLD
roars back into sound around me, and cool air slaps my cheeks. My heart pounding, I check the clock.

Third. I came in third—and I've beaten my old best time by two seconds.

I gulp breaths and fight back a smile. As I clamber out of the pool, my muscles tremble. The team claps, some of them, and echoes ring off the arched ceiling. My toes squelch through puddles on the tiled floor. The announcer yaps on, deafening.

I shiver my way into a towel. Usually the guys would be clapping me on the back, but they're keeping their distance today. Doesn't surprise me. I gather they're not taking the innocent-until-proven-guilty approach. If I'd been accused of
being with Dr. Meyers, the very hot, very female econ teacher, would this be happening?

The meet closes well. Coach swaggers out of the building as if he swam every event himself. He whistles out of the auditorium onto the bus for the forty-minute drive home.

I'm one of the last up the bus steps. I edge down the aisle, the black-ridged rubber path, and nobody's eyes meet mine. Every so often, a backpack occupies a seat. Derek Cooper and Alison Gardner's bags. I could be sitting there, but they don't move their things.

I bring silence rippling up with me row by row, a cloak trailing from my shoulders, a sweep of averted eyes and concentrated texting. No room at these inns. As I pass Dean Prince, whose nose is weirdly swollen, he gives me an outright filthy look. I frown and move on.

Herman from Chemistry. Layna from Calc. Bailey, my relay partner. None of them says a word. My heart is deflating, a sad, old balloon.

I sit down in a seat in the back left corner, alone with my journal.

Everything I did to make these friends. Two years' worth of work, with no result. This might as well be my first day again. Fresh off the plane. A reset button, and I wasn't the one who pushed it. I wasn't the one who made the choice.

I grit my teeth and look down at the phone cupped in my hands, thinking of Valentine.

When I glance back up, I catch Sophie Crane looking away, whispering something to Bailey. Do they believe it? The accusation is so ridiculous. Under the layers of worry and hurt, I'm a
bit offended that people don't think I have better taste than Dr. Norman.

I stare out the window as the bus snails through the parking lot. Why would somebody do that to me? Make that up. Who would do it? Someone who wanted to out me, maybe? But if Matt only told Olivia, and Olivia only told Claire—

She wouldn't.

Claire wouldn't.

She wears her grudges like armor. But she wouldn't . . .

Would she?

The key's teeth chew down on the lock.

His door swings wide, an opening lid to a treasure chest. Light spills out like liquid gold.