The Safest Lies (9 page)

“No,” I said, “you don’t understand. She called and—”

Mom fixed her eyes, cold and hard, on my own. “She called? Where was I during this phone call? Were you trying to hide this from me?”

“God, Mom, you’re completely overreacting! You were in the office with Jan!”

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, but I could tell it wasn’t working. “You don’t just
pick up the phone,
” she said, like I’d done something akin to handing over the nuclear launch codes to an enemy state. “That’s what the answering machine is for.”

“I thought it was someone I knew,” I said. “Sorry!”

“Who? Did you think it was that
boy
?” I was starting to see my mother like someone from the outside—like she was being completely irrational, like this whole conversation was embarrassing and frustrating and
not
normal. Which was completely and totally true. “I raised you better than this. I raised you to
think
—”

“I thought it was Annika,” I said. “Because I wasn’t answering my cell.” I wanted to tell her to get a grip, to
listen to herself,
but her hand kept reaching for the scars on her back, and I remembered that she had limitations, that it had taken her seventeen years, and this was as far as she’d come.

Something impossible to shake, a memory she could not reach—proof that bad things did happen. People were taken, hidden, hurt. Danger was everywhere.

And here I was, standing before her, living proof.

The oven dinged, and she strode back to the kitchen and pulled out a pungent casserole. I couldn’t be in a room with this stench anymore. I couldn’t be in a room with
her
anymore.

“I have homework,” I said. But she reached for me with an oven-mitted hand, and I lingered near the sink.

“I feel like I’m…” She let the thought go, but I could tell, with the way she was still reaching for me, and the way I’d been moving back.
Like I’m losing you.

Like I was slipping, falling…

It was the car, and the pictures, and me in the paper—everything out of her control.

“I’m here,” I said. “And I’m fine.” I took a deep breath, swallowed the lump in my throat, hated that I had to say the next part. But I did. “We’re safe.”

She nodded, but her hair fell in front of her face, and I couldn’t read her expression. She took a knife and started hacking at the dish, and I left.

—

We ate in silence, both of us pushing green beans around the plate. “Mom,” I said, seeing as she’d had some time to cool off. “I’m sure you saw, there’s the mayor’s ceremony tonight, and Ryan—”

“So, this Ryan in the paper. Is this the same Ryan that had you glued to the phone yesterday?”

“I guess,” I said. “We’re…friends.” At least, I’d hoped we were. Now I wasn’t so sure. Which was part of the reason I wanted to be there tonight. It felt like I needed to—the moment had become something bigger than the both of us. It had left its mark on him, too, and I was pretty sure I was the only one who could see it.

She raised her eyes, sharpened them, like she knew what I was about to ask.

“I should be there tonight,” I said. “I was going to see if Annika could take me.”

“Absolutely not,” she said. “I don’t want you on television,” she said. “You know how I feel about privacy.” Oh, didn’t I.

And then the walls felt too close, and the gates too high, and everything too narrow and constricting. And I wondered, for the first time, whether Jan was right—whether Mom made me this way. Whether she
kept
me this way, so I wouldn’t want to leave her.

“You have to let me out of the house,” I said. “You
have to
—”

“I don’t
have
to do anything, Kelsey. You were just at school. That sufficiently counts as
out of the house.
The rest? That’s up to the parent. That’s up to
me.
”

This was the first fight that I could remember truly having with her. Usually I agreed with her decisions, her ideas seeping into me, becoming my own, like fear itself.

“Just let me explain—”

“You’re not going. From now on, you go straight to school, you come straight home. The discussion is over.”

I took my dish to the sink well before she was finished, and slammed my bedroom door.

I turned on the music, turned it up loud enough to rattle the windows.

I called Annika and asked her what she was doing tonight.

And I prepared to do the one thing that every normal teenager must do at one point or another: I was going to sneak out.

I
set the music on a loop and kept it loud, hoping Mom would let me wallow in my anger. Sometimes the house felt too big for just the two of us—each of us on a separate hallway—but other times, like now, it felt too small. Walls closing in, stale recirculated air, doors opening, doors closing, in unnecessary ceremony.

I watched the clock from my seat at the edge of the bed, tapping my heels twice as fast as the beat.

I checked my email on my phone to pass the time. Only one, from Annika a few days earlier:

Are you okay, doll? I’ve tried calling. And calling. I heard you almost died, and I would like confirmation that you aren’t, in fact, dead. Call me soon as you get this. xoxo—An

I loved that about Annika—how she could make everything big and small at the same time. It was so different from my own life—everything over-examined and weighty.

At seven-thirty, I took the key from my desk drawer and unlocked the metal grate outside my bedroom window, swinging it open. I held my breath, listening for signs of my mother. My room faced the front, which worked in my favor, because Mom’s room was down the other hall and faced the back. The dining room was the only other room with windows toward the front. Everything else—the kitchen, her office, the living room—had a clear view back to the mountains.

I sat on the windowsill, willing myself to jump the four feet to the ground, and my heart beat wildly. Everything about this moment felt magnified. The night, crisp and unexpectedly alluring. My stomach churning. The feeling of spiders crawling out from the corners of the room, coming for me.

At the last moment, I took my new cell phone from my purse and tossed it onto my bed. I wasn’t sure whether my mom had some sort of alert set up, but better to play it safe. Either she had ESP for when I diverted from my route (like the time she called when I took the wrong exit and went an extra ten miles before I noticed, or the time I craved a burger and drove until I found one, with the newfound freedom of my driver’s license), or she actively tracked me whenever she knew I was out, or—and this was what I was worried about—she had a perimeter set up that sent an alert to her computer when I wandered out of it.

I counted down, and tried not to think—not to let myself hear all the
maybes
circle and dig and circle some more. It was my
mother’s
voice, my
mother’s
warnings, my
mother’s
fears, I reminded myself.

Not my own.

And then I jumped.

I braced for impact, crouching low, expecting some unknown alarm to sound—but there was nothing. I eased the metal window grate shut, but couldn’t lock it from the outside. The front lights were off, which meant she was probably back in her room, or in the living room, watching TV. Maybe the office. Hopefully, she wouldn’t hear the gate. Hopefully, she wouldn’t see the green light next to the front door for the thirty-second span that it remained unlocked.

I hit the code in the keypad beside the fence, and the gates eased open, the mechanical gears humming in the still night. I slipped through the opening as soon as I could, then crouched in the bushes, counting to thirty. Counting, and watching the front door.

But nothing happened.

No alarm, no yelling, no Mom.

I was free.

—

Annika was waiting for me in her driveway, leaning against the blue sedan that she and her brother shared when they were home from school, texting on her phone. I’d had to take the long way—down my street, right on the main neighborhood road, right again on her street, which backed to mine—instead of hopping the wall connecting the backs of our properties. She jumped at the sound of rocks kicking up in her driveway as I jogged toward her.

“Well,” she said, slouching against the hood, one hand on her hip, “look who’s the little rebel. Honestly, after you hung up I wasn’t sure if you’d actually show.” She wore leggings and boots and a dress with lace trim, and I felt completely unpresentable in dark jeans and a nice shirt.

She handed me the keys.

“You’re not coming?” I asked.

“Change of plans,” she said, smiling. “I have a date. His name is Eli, and he does landscaping work in the neighborhood, and I think I’m in love.”

“I’ve never heard of any Eli.”

“Well, I kind of just met him. But we only have the week, so we’re on an accelerated schedule.” She smiled.

She slid her phone out of a disguised pocket in her dress, scrolled through, and pulled up his contact—
Eli.
His photo showed a slightly hooked nose and deep-set eyes, a bunch of mismatched parts that somehow worked together. He was looking off to the side, and his mouth was open, like he was caught midsentence, and he was vaguely squinting into the sun. Annika did this—took stealth pictures of people for her phone. Mine, I once saw, was me from a distance, sitting on the stone wall, head tipped back and eyes closed. “Stalker much?” I’d said to her the first time I saw it. But the truth was, it was my favorite picture of me that existed. For one thing, I was outside. For another, I looked completely carefree and at peace. In truth, I think I’d been about to sneeze. But, like a magician, she had somehow captured the essence of the person I wanted to be instead.

“He’s picking me up at eight,” Annika said. “Just do me a favor and bring this baby back in one piece.”

“You’re giving me your car?” I asked.

“No, I’m not
giving you my car.
I’m letting you drive it. Figure you’ve already driven off a cliff once, what’re the chances of that happening again?”

“Not funny,” I mumbled.

“Too soon?” She nudged my shoulder. “Oh, come on, it is a little bit.”

I grinned. “Thank you, Annika. You’re a good friend.”

“Well, I heard there was a boy involved. Do me a favor, when you get back, leave the keys in the visor, yeah?”

“Okay, I won’t be late,” I said.

“Don’t go making any promises,” she said.

Annika swayed back up the front walk, and then she lingered near her door, like she was waiting for me to get in and drive off. I was frozen. I knew, in theory, I’d have to drive again. Otherwise, I’d become trapped like my mother, each of my fears chipping away little by little at the world, until all I had left was the bubble. The world shrinking, twisting, slipping—I’d always be stuck in that moment. I’d always be falling.

Annika, maybe sensing as much, called over to me, “Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice, Kels.”

Which wasn’t really true—turns out, despite popular opinion, lightning did not discriminate. But I got the point—what were the chances?

Take comfort in the logic,
Jan would tell me.
Chance is on your side.

—

I had to drive down the windy mountain roads into town, to the community center, where the ceremony was being held. I took the turns about ten miles under the speed limit, not caring that there was a car on my tail that eventually blew by me on a rare stretch of straightaway. I gripped the wheel, eyes on the yellow line, hovering so close to the center that a car on the other side honked. Any time I saw headlights, I flashed back to that foggy moment—a flash of light, a car on my side, jerking the wheel, the panic closing my throat.

I wondered if it was possible that the panic itself had knocked me unconscious. I wouldn’t doubt it.

Eventually I had to pass the site of my accident. I crawled by it, overcompensating each turn of the wheel—worse than my first driver’s ed lesson. The metal barrier on the side of the road had already been replaced. There were no signs anything had ever happened, except the stretch of metal was fresher, with no imperfections yet. If I’d died, there would’ve been flowers or teddy bears or a cross on the roadside.

We did not fall. We did not die. Everything was fine.

It wasn’t until I hit the lights in town that I relaxed my grip on the wheel. Wasn’t until I exited the car and stared at my hands, slightly trembling, that I began to laugh. I’d have to tell Jan about this one day, when it was far enough away. When I wouldn’t get in trouble. A fear I overcame, the picture of progress. Standing there, in the middle of the packed parking lot, I’d never felt so powerful.

—

I recognized a bunch of student parking stickers on the cars around mine, and some fire department bumper stickers on others as I walked up the steps to the community center. The reception area—the gymnasium, actually—was pretty crowded, with rows of folding chairs set up and reporters with cameras and notepads standing along the wall.