Tell Us Something True (15 page)

“Yes?”

“You will tell us everything. No more lying. No more obfuscating. No more manipulation of the truth.”

I started with the sign. I asked them if they'd ever had a moment where it felt like the universe had stepped in front of them, blocked their paths, wrested the wheel from their hands and said:
Here. This. Now.

They looked at each other and nodded. I like to think they imagined the moment when Leonard, decked out in a mock turtleneck, got a call to bid on an office remodel and said
yes
even though it was a smaller job than he typically took because something about it just felt right.

I walked them through everything that had happened after I stepped into that first meeting, ending with Daphne and Juana at the baseball diamond. I told them that though I could maybe understand Mrs. Brockaway believing I was involved in some elaborate plot to worm my way back into Penny's life, she couldn't be further from the truth.

“What a mess you've gotten yourself into,” Leonard said, as if I didn't know this already.

“You're grounded,” Mom added.

I just sat there and nodded because I didn't have the will to fight for myself and because I knew Mom felt she had to do something, and this was far better than making me go talk to Sandra Brockaway or any number of other humiliating acts she could have forced me to do.

“And I'm taking away your phone.”

I saw a flash of disapproval cross Leonard's face, but he wasn't the disciplinarian. Despite the fact that he'd been in my life now for eleven years, some tasks still fell to Mom.

“Fine.” I handed it to her with one final fruitless glance at the screen to see if Daphne had texted me.

Mom stood up and left the room and Leonard lingered for a minute.

“You'll sort this out, River.” He ran his hand over his face and pulled on his chin a little. I'd exhausted him. “There is always a way through the thicket.”

“Leonard…I want you to know…that stuff about me Googling my father…I…”

He reached over and took hold of my shoulders, pulled me toward him and hugged me.

“Don't worry, kid. There's always a way through.”

Penny was waiting for me at my locker the next morning. I slowed to a shuffle as I approached her.

“Hi, Pen.”

“River. Oh my god.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I can't believe. I had no idea. When did you start with the drugs? Was it while we were together?”

I sighed. “I don't really have a drug problem.”

“And Daphne? Oh my god.”

“I know.”

“So when I rejected you, you decided to go after Juana's daughter? What if I'd had a sister? Would you have tried dating her?”

That Penny dared to compare Daphne to a sister demonstrated a whole new level of nerve. She'd seen me with Daphne at the dance and had no idea she was Juana's daughter because in the two years Juana had been working for the Brockaways nobody had ever asked to see a picture of her family.

“Did you even know Juana had kids?”

“Yeah. I knew she had some. We gave her extra bonus money at Christmastime and stuff. You know, for gifts.”

“How nice of you.”

“How creepy that you tried dating her daughter.”

“How convenient to flatter yourself when it had nothing at all to do with you.”

Her eyes turned icy and cold, a look I'd only seen a handful of times, when she thought I was paying too much attention to someone else, or if I said something rude. I'd never intentionally been rude to Penny, until this very minute.

“So if it had nothing to do with me, then what's this about?”

“It's about
me,
Penny. It's about what
I
want.”

“You just happened to want Juana's daughter?”

“Her name is Daphne. And I don't want
her,
because she's not…I don't know…an accessory. I just…want to be with her as much as I can and I want to know her in the way I never knew you.”

“You knew me.”

“I just wanted to please you. And do whatever I could to keep you. I was terrified you'd abandon me. Because, like you said, I have issues.”

“So you really didn't go after Juana's daughter to somehow get closer to me?”

“Penny…I loved you, okay? And you broke my heart. And I'd have done anything to get you back. Anything. That's why I kept showing up at your house with chicken soup or my sister, or anything to get you to remember what a nice boyfriend I'd been to you. I was desperate, yes, but not so desperate that I'd have tracked down Juana's daughter. For one thing: what kind of strategy is that? It's just plain stupid. Believe it or not, it was a total coincidence that I met Daphne. It was at a support group for a drug addiction I don't have—a whole long story I'll tell you some other time—but the important thing to know is that I love her. I
loved
you, but I
love
her. And I get it now, why you broke up with me, I get it, because you were right, I wasn't the person you deserved. I didn't think about things and I just did whatever you wanted me to do and in the end, who wants that? That's not what real relationships are about. The problem now is that I'm not so sure I'm the person Daphne deserves either, and that just makes me unbelievably sad.”

The bell rang right then but we just stood at my locker, staring at each other. More than the moment in the middle of the lake, or when I wouldn't let go of the rope, or when she didn't drink the soup I'd brought her, or when I saw her dancing with Evan Lockwood, this felt like the moment when my relationship with Penny Brockaway really, truly ended for good.

I had to go straight home from school as part of my punishment. Maggie drove me that first day, and maybe because she'd seen me through my major life transitions, she was the friend I wanted to come clean to first. All our lives together she'd felt a little like an older, wiser sister.

I took my time. We puttered along many miles under the speed limit—she couldn't listen intently and accelerate simultaneously. I hadn't even gotten to the part about Daphne being Juana's daughter when we pulled in front of my house. I was still explaining the meetings, and why I'd lied about the Instagram account, Daphne's arrest for shoplifting and my fake weed addiction.

“But I had to throw water in your face the last time you smoked pot. You're the world's most irritating stoned person.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She shifted into park and shut off the engine. “I guess I just don't understand how anyone could buy
you
as a drug addict.”

I sighed. “They didn't know me. I could be anybody I wanted to be.”

“You could be anyone you wanted to be and that's who you chose?”

She opened the door to get out of the car.

“I'm grounded. You can't come in.”

“What? Why are you grounded?”

“I'm getting to that part.”

It was important to me not to violate Mom's rules (straight home from school, no friends over, no phone calls or texts), so I'd found a loophole by sitting with Maggie in her car in front of my house, which we did for the next forty-five minutes. I told her everything, ending with me and Penny at my locker.

“Holy crap storm.”

“And I've got no umbrella.”

She sighed. “Oh, River…”

I knew there was a follow-up to this
Oh, River,
because Maggie always told it like it was. Once, when we were five, she asked if I wanted to borrow her dad. I said I already had one.
You don't have a dad,
she told me, just like that, full of blunt truth, and I never, ever thought about my father the same way again.

“…you can be such an egregious asshole.”

“Okay…not quite what I expected.”

“What
did
you expect? Why on earth did you think any of this was okay? In what universe did you think it was fair to go to meetings for kids with real problems and fake an addiction? And lie to everyone? Your family? Your friends?”

“I was confused. I was just trying to sort out my life. Make some sense of everything.”

“Great job with that.”

I put my head on her shoulder. I knew it would soften her, and also, I needed the closeness.

“How are you going to fix this, River?”

“I don't know. It doesn't really seem like flowers will do the trick.”

“Flowers never do the trick. They're totally lame. And who are these flowers for, anyway? Daphne? Is she the only one who matters here? What about everybody else?”

“You're right. But what do I do? I don't know what to do.”

She put her hand on my head and gave me the sort of squeeze that let me know that in the end, things would be okay. Between us. And I hoped everywhere else too.

“What you need to do, River, is grow up.”

The easiest place to start was the most obvious. If I wanted to grow up, I was going to have to get my driver's license. I couldn't continue to rely on other people. It was time to start navigating the city and my life on my own.

Because my eighteenth birthday was coming up soon, I could get a permit without taking driver's ed, which only proved that laziness and procrastination sometimes reap rewards. Leonard was so thrilled he immediately took me to get a permit, cleared his afternoons for the rest of the week, picked me up at school each day in his truck and took me out for practice. It wasn't anything like you see in the movies where a father and son kick up dust as they drive down a dirt road or meander in circles around a big empty parking lot. This was Los Angeles. There were no dirt roads, no empty parking lots.

We started in our neighborhood and ventured out a little farther each afternoon, finally ending our week in Westwood Village, where I parallel parked and we went to the deli for mediocre pastrami sandwiches. We chose a table by the window.

“I'll tell you something if you promise not to tell your mother,” he said to me.

“Okay.”

“I've been checking your texts.”

“And?”

He shook his head.

I shrugged. “She was never a big texter. It's one of the things I really liked about her. She preferred talking.”

“Well, she hasn't called you either.”

“Leonard, are you trying to kick me when I'm down?”

“No.” He popped open his can of cream soda and held it out. I clinked mine against his, as was our tradition. “I just wanted you to know that she's not trying to reach you and wondering if you're ignoring her.”

I pushed my pastrami sandwich away from me. “I've ruined everything.”

“Give it time.”

“I thought it was fate.”

“Fate?”

“Yeah. I thought it was fate that led me to her. I'd never believed in fate. Stars never aligned for me. But then I wandered in there that night. And there was Daphne. Fate, right?”

He nodded noncommittally.

“And now I've screwed it all up. I've ruined fate. I've pissed on it. Or worse—I've reversed it. She's never going to talk to me again.”

Leonard took his time chewing. “You know what I think, Riv?”

“Nope.”

“I think fate has nothing at all to do with any of this. I think fate is bullshit. You want to know the real force behind what happens to you in your life?”

“I guess.”

“Heredity. Who your parents are. Even who your grandparents were. And you've already bucked that force, because you're nothing like your father. You're someone who believes deeply in connection, in real human, person-to-person connection. That's what happened to you with Daphne. You connected with someone, and it might feel like that's because of some otherworldly force, like fate or whatever you want to name it, but you took risks, albeit some really stupid risks, and you opened yourself up to her and, well…that's what makes this life worth living. Connections like that. So you can't now go blame fate and shrug and say
I guess it wasn't meant to be.
Obstacles arose, as obstacles will. You have to go and hurdle them, because if you leave it all to fate you're ceding control to a force that's made up. You have to believe in the power of your connections.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes while Leonard ate his sandwich and I let what he'd said sink in.

“Thanks, Leonard. You know, for the driving lessons and everything.”

“If you don't stop thanking me I'll never let your mother give you your phone back.”

Mom and Leonard still referred to the “day college letters come,” everyone did, because language can't keep pace with technology, but the truth is that before letters would come I could log on to websites to which I'd been given passwords to uncover whether I'd been invited to be a member of the incoming freshman class.

That day was a Friday.

I knew I should have been counting forward to this day, but instead I counted backward: it had been 13 whole days, 312 whole hours since I'd spoken to Daphne Vargas. She was the person I wanted to call to tell that I'd gotten into four of the five schools I'd heard from.

Mom and Leonard were waiting for me out in the kitchen. Celebratory waffles were cooked. Powdered sugar on top. Natalie double-checked the spelling of the word
university
for a card she was planning on making later. It felt good, exciting even, but mostly I just saw my different futures at four distinct points on a map, four plane rides away from the city I was just learning to navigate on my own.

I hadn't heard yet from the University of California schools. Mom had gone to UC Santa Barbara and Leonard to Berkeley. I'd applied to both, as well as UCLA and San Diego, in addition to the five private schools I'd already heard from. It wasn't like Mom and Leonard had discouraged me from going to UC, it was more that they figured since tuition wasn't a concern, what with Thaddeus Dean footing the bill, why not an East Coast or Chicago school?

We had the day off. They called it teacher training day, but really the administration knew emotions in the senior class would be running high and they wanted to avoid the drama. Some would have gotten just what they wanted. Others would be crushed. Many would be recalculating. This wasn't a magic wish-granting bus where anything could happen. Some doors had opened and others had slammed shut.

What was next for me? What did I want?

I wanted more time. I wanted time to slow down. I wanted time to slow down so much that it moved backward so I could undo the mess I'd made.

Mom returned my phone. I was allowed to go out with my friends to celebrate our college news.

I called around but couldn't reach anyone. I sent texts. It was Friday night. A big Friday night. Will, Luke and Maggie had to be together figuring out their plans.

I dropped by Luke's house. His mom answered the door. She was dressed for work in a suit, but with a University of Michigan beanie on her head.

“Hi, Dr. Torres.”

“River!” She gave me a long hug. “How'd it go?”

“Pretty good. Still weighing options.”

She pointed at her hat. “So proud of Lukey. Go Blue!”

“That's great news.”

“They left here about a half hour ago. You must be running late? They took some pizzas with them. I think they were headed to the beach. Can you believe this weather? You must know where they're going. Which beach?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Do you need me to run you over to meet them?” Even Luke's mom had to give me rides sometimes.

“No thanks, it's okay. I can get there myself.”

I hopped a bus to Santa Monica. The sun was just going down when I found them at the same lifeguard tower where Maggie had thrown the water in my face so I'd stop asking, through my stoned haze, how much time was going by. They sat barefoot, legs dangling off the side of the tower, watching the sunset.

I stood below them, looking up. They'd finished off the pizza and half a six-pack of beer.

“You made it,” Will called down.

“It wasn't easy.” I picked up two fistfuls of sand and let it fall through my fingers.

“You lied to us,” Luke said. “About pretty much everything.”

“I know.” I sat in the sand. “I'm…beyond sorry.”

Will threw a can of beer down to me, but I didn't open it.

“I would have told you guys, but I didn't know how.”

Luke leaned over the railing. “How hard would it have been to say
I'm faking a drug addiction to get close to a girl
?”

“It was more complicated than that. But that's not an excuse. I should have told you.”

“Yeah, River,” Will said. “You should have.”

“I know.”

“Because,” he added, “we're friends.”

“Still?”

“At least until we scatter around the country to different schools and make newer, better, more lasting friendships.” Luke and Maggie slugged him.

I climbed the tower and sat next to Maggie.

“Dude,” Luke said. “Are you okay coming here? You aren't worried about flashbacks?”

“Are you thinking about using again?” Will leaned in. “Do I need to call your sponsor?”

The last of the light was leaving the sky. The ocean dark and vast before us. I lay on my back on the lifeguard tower with my legs dangling off the edge and looked up at the stars. There weren't many to see.

“So, you guys,” I said. “I don't want any of you to freak out or anything, but since I'm being honest now, there's something I have to tell you.”

“Okay,” they said. They waited.

“I'm getting my driver's license.”

“Whoa,” Will said. “That's harder to imagine than you as a drug addict.”

Maggie took a swig of beer. “This is not the world I know and inhabit. I'm feeling…unsafe.” I stood up and started unbuttoning my jeans. “Uh…what are you doing? Now I'm feeling
extremely
unsafe,” she said.

I dropped my pants and kicked them off and stood in Will's short-shorts. Will and Luke and Maggie stared for a minute before lifting their beers in a toast.

“Take a lap of shame, River Dean,” Will said.

I climbed down from the tower and ran toward the horizon, my friends cheering me on.