Seven Ways We Lie (33 page)

“Hey, all I'm saying is, you can't act like a slut and expect people not to treat you like a slut. It's just false advertising.”

Sweet Jesus
.

I've felt my share of anger. There are some kinds you can't hold in your body. Some types burst out of your every pore at once, and you feel yourself expanding and twisting and turning into something that isn't human. You feel hot waves of rage punching their way out of your skin. Right now, I swear I could melt metal just by breathing on it.

False advertising?
I am done. I'm done with the stares and the rumors and the lack of basic human decency, let alone privacy. I'm so done with being defined by this single part of me.

“I'm not advertising anything!” I yell, my words ringing off the living room walls. “My body is
not yours
. I don't owe you, I don't owe boys some fucked-up compensation for my reputation, I don't owe the public an apology for my personal life, I don't owe anyone a goddamn thing, so get out of my life and stay out!”

I punch end call so hard, a discolored spot shows up on the phone screen. For a second I tremble, my teeth buried deep in my lip. Then I make for the stairs, my hand pressed against my mouth. I feel ill.

I walk into my room, shut the door with agonizing calm, and
twist the lock. I fling my phone at the
Star Wars
pillow on my bed. The muscles in my arm ache in recoil, the phone sinks deep into Han Solo's face, and I let out a strangled, animal noise of rage. I stand there staring at myself in the mirror, my red cheeks, my sleeve askew, my torn expression. My face is hot and swollen and furious, and I feel like a melting wax candle.

Lightning flashes like a strobe in the window. The overcast day has turned thunderous.

A photograph sits on my dresser. It faces the wall 365 days of the year. I've gotten used to the sight of the black backing of the frame, a cardboard square collecting a gentle sheen of dust. But now I turn it around.

Mom, Dad, Kat, and I stand behind the glass, preserved in a summer afternoon. Every year, Dad insisted on taking our Christmas photo six months before Christmas to the day, to mark the point at which we started getting closer to the holiday. Kat's smile is radiant, Dad's grin pushes dimples into his cheeks, and I'm in the middle of a huge laugh. Mom always got a joke ready so our smiles weren't canned. That year, it was, “What do you call Santa's helpers? Subordinate Clauses.”

God, I want our family back. I would kill right now for Kat's quiet understanding or Dad's gruff reassurances. I want Mom to tuck my hair behind my ear, or make up a bedtime story on the spot, or rub my back and promise it's going to be all right. She could speak quickly, quietly, for hours on end, until there was nothing but her voice wrapping me up in warmth and acceptance. I used to have the knowledge that the world could hammer at me all it wanted, but she would always be there to lift me up. Mom
with her bitter-smelling perfume and her jangling bracelets and her full, wild laugh.

But the good memories of her are soured by the ones that hinted she would leave. In hindsight, it seems so obvious. She took random trips without warning, overnight drives and weekend sojourns, unable to stand Kansas for longer than a few weeks at a go. She scooped up and dropped hobby after hobby, everything from tennis to painting. She never held down friends, either, always dropping out of touch for one convincing-sounding reason or another.

I force myself not to fling the photo away. I drop the frame back into place and crumple onto my bed, trying to deaden the anger. Thunder grinds to life outside, lazy and languorous and so deep, my house shudders.

My phone tempts me. I can't call Juniper—I can't add this to her plate. Claire? God knows what she would say.

My finger hovers over Matt's contact for a second. He just found out about his parents' divorce, for God's sake. Can I load this on him, too?

Apparently I can.
God, I'm selfish
, I think as I hit call. It rings once, twice, three times before he picks up.

“Olivia?” he says. “I—hi.”

“Hey,” I say, my voice thick.

“What's, um, what's up?”

My throat ekes out a tiny noise, and I crush my hand to my lips.
Don't be so weak. You don't get to cry. It's bad enough that you're making this call
.

For a second, I can't talk. I can't even breathe. Weight presses
on my chest, tangled up in my ribs like thick hair gnarled in a comb. My heart pounds, every beat a burst of pain.

“H-have you talked to your parents?” I manage. “About Russ?”

“No. I will after dinner, once he's asleep.”

“Good. Good, great.” I look up at the ceiling, breathing in and out on eight-counts.

“What's going on?” Matt says. “Hey, you can say.”

“It's not—there's not—”

“Yo,” he says. “Talk.”

More lightning. The lights flicker. Looks like night outside already, and it's barely 5:45.

“Just . . .” I shake my head. In the absence of words, the rain splattering on my window is louder than a snare drum.

For a minute I stay quiet on the line, wondering how I can feel this outside myself.

“Sorry,” I say. “I'm sorry, I just . . . Dan called me and . . .”

“Oh Jesus. What did he say?”

“That I'm a slut and deserve to be treated like one. And by ‘treated like a slut,' he means ‘treated like I'm open for business at all times to everyone.' ” I wipe my nose on the back of my hand. This is so self-indulgent.

“He's a dick,” Matt says.

“I mean, I wouldn't care if it were just him, but everyone thinks that. Richard Brown's a huge man-whore, but girls never say, ‘He'll probably sleep with me if I give him the time of day, and if he doesn't, well, false advertising.' Why doesn't it work like that? Why is it just
me
?”

Matt pauses for a second before saying, “ 'Cause guys think
about sex all the time, so it seems normal when they see girls in terms of . . . you know. Sex?”

“But some girls think about sex all the time, too. So why do boys get to be like, oh man, bro, dude, I'm gonna get mad pussy tonight, and people are like,
ah yes, so normal
, but if a girl goes out like, yeah, I'm trying to get some dick, everyone gets all puritan?”

Matt's quiet.

“Also,” I say, in full steam now, “
you
don't think about sex all the time, do you?”

“I mean, not all the time,” he says. “A lot, sure. But it's not, like, a problem.”

“So why do people act like all dudes are sex-obsessed maniacs? That's messed up, too.”

“I guess?” he says, sounding bemused.

“Sorry. I'm ranting. I just—thinking about hooking up with Dan now is so gross. My track record is so, like, besmirched by his presence.” I pull my covers over my head.

“I used to be friends with him in middle school,” Matt says. “He ditched me and Burke freshman year, which is fine. I mean, not like I'm Einstein, but Dan never had more than about point-eight brain cells, so, not a huge loss.”

I can't even get any vindictive satisfaction from the insult. “He's not even unique,” I mumble. “He's the same.”

“As what?”

I curl up around my
Star Wars
pillow. “I don't know. The other guys I've hooked up with.” I sigh, sending a brush of static into the phone. “Sometimes it's, like, what's the point anymore? Why am I trying to fill this space with boys? It's—”

“What space?” he asks.

“I—what?”

“You said, trying to fill the space. What space?”

“I don't know. I guess it's kind of . . .” I bite my lip, but I can't keep it back. “Sometimes it feels like I'm not enough. For anyone to stay. You know?”

“Oh. I . . . yeah.” He lowers his voice. “I don't think you're right, but I get it.”

“It's stupid, anyway.” I force a hard laugh. “Like guys could compensate for me feeling unwanted and whatever.” The second the sentence comes out, I want to yank it back. Why am I rambling about my insecurities with the boy I have a crush on, of all people?

Matt stays quiet for what feels like several months, prolonging my humiliation.

Finally, he says, “You are wanted.”

A shiver darts down my arms. His voice is low, but what's underneath comes out loud and clear:
I want you
.

I don't say anything. Can't say anything. In the commanding quiet, we lay every basic function bare for each other: the stir of our breath, the pump of blood in our veins, the air mixing in our eardrums. The softest nothing sound either of us could make. And something deep in me calms, cocooned in a wellspring of evening silence.

I open my mouth, intending to say something hopelessly witty. Instead, after a second of strangled hesitation, what comes out is, “Tell me something.”

“What?” he says.

“Tell me something. Anything. I don't—it doesn't need to be a—really, anything.”

“Okay,” he says, clearly bewildered. “Uh, in seventh grade I broke my wrist, and this guy Adam something was like, using your right hand too much? And everyone called me ‘Matt Jackoff' for, like, two years. With hand motions included. So that sucked ass.”

I can't help but laugh. “God, middle school kids are even worse than high school kids.”

“I don't know. High school kids are pretty bad.”

“Some of them are all right.” I let my usual teasing tone seep back into my voice. “Like, you're all right.”

Another pause.

“You tell me something,” he says, but the words sound so careful, I get the sense he doesn't mean just anything.

“Something?”

“Can I ask about your mom? Like, what happened?”

I pull back the covers, staring at my ceiling, allowing the absence of my mother to ache. Thoughts of her sit on the surface, pulsing like reopened wounds.

“Okay, so my family went to New York when I was fourteen,” I say. “End of eighth grade.” I still remember the sight of Mom on Fifth Avenue—it's an image cut sharp and hard, a facet deep in a gem. Her smile is stamped against the twilit gloom of the city, her blond hair whitened by the glow of a neon sign. Her hands are in the pockets of her jeans, her scarf nestling her chin in loose-woven linen. In my mind's eye, she looks so much like Kat. Sometimes I think there's nothing of Mom's face left in my mind, that Kat's snuck in and replaced my memories of her, that I've fooled myself into thinking I remember the sight of her.

“We were there for one weekend,” I say, “staying at this hotel in Brooklyn. We were supposed to be flying out Monday morning,
one of those stupid early flights that—we had to get up at four or something. We had two separate rooms, one for me and Kat, and one for my parents, so I woke up at four, and I heard their voices through the wall, right? They'd been fighting for years at this point, and now they were just screaming at each other in this hotel—probably woke up the whole floor. And Kat was sitting there with her arms around her knees looking terrified. So I got up, and I went out to knock on their door, but it, like, slammed open, and my mom sprinted out and ran down the hall. She was crying all the way down the stairs.”

I draw my knees up to my chest. “I go into their room, and Dad's sitting there on the bed, staring at the tiny hotel TV, and there's some stupid show playing, something about tearing down old houses, and it has this obnoxious, fake-smiling host, and Dad's looking at the screen, obviously not watching it at all. God knows what he said to make her run like that. I still kind of wonder, but he's never said, so I can't help but think . . .” I swallow. “Anyway, so I ask him, like, ‘Should I go see if she's okay?' and he gives me this look filled with . . . like,
wow
, little tiny fourteen-year-old Olivia, you don't understand what just happened. You don't get it at all. But I sort of got it.”

My throat aches. I've spoken too long already. I rush on. “So I run down into the lobby, and I'm just in time to see the back of a taxi driving off. And me and Kat are like, okay, Dad, let's call another cab, let's go, but we can't get him to move until after the plane's supposed to take off. So we get a flight back in the evening, and by the time we get home, all her stuff's out of the house. Never saw her again. Took a few weeks for Dad to get a number she'd pick up from, but they only talked once, and apparently she,
um. Apparently she didn't want to talk to Kat or me. Thought it'd be too painful.”

Matt doesn't say anything.

I try to smile. I can't quite manage it. “What's your mom like?”

“I mean, not that bad. All I do is complain about her, but she's not . . . I don't know.”

“What's her deal?”

He makes a noncommittal noise. “I guess all you need to know is that we visited Yale last summer for her twenty-fifth reunion, and at the end she basically said, ‘I'm humiliated that U of M is your reach school.' ” He sounds uninterested. “She's always thought I'm stupid. I'm smart enough to see that much. But you get used to being a disappointment when you bring home my grades every year, so at this point, not a big deal.”

The resignation in his voice depresses me. Claire's got a 4.0 GPA, but she has the people-smarts of your average twelfth-century warlord. And Juniper's dad has a PhD, but God bless him, he couldn't find an ounce of common sense if it jumped screaming out of his cereal bowl. Maybe Matt's the world's best judge of character. Maybe he's one of those people you can drop into a giant city and they'll know their way around within thirty seconds. I've always thought everybody's a genius at something; you just have to dig it up and polish the hell out of it.

To me, right now, he seems a little bit of a genius at making me feel normal again.