Lie to Me

by Kaitlin Ward

  “Hi, Amelia,” she says.

  “I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” I answer, aggressively turning on the sink. “It was a freak accident. But even if I was, do you think it’s something hilarious for you to gossip about in a bathroom? And Maria isn’t here to defend herself. She’s gone, and her family has to mourn her. You don’t think they have enough to worry about without people spreading rumors?”

  Clarissa still doesn’t look ashamed, so as I rip a piece of paper towel to dry my hands I add, “I’ll be sure to tell Hunter I ran into you today. See you around.”

  “Amelia, wait—”

  I slam the bathroom door in her face.

  I’m still stewing about what Clarissa said when Hunter and I get home from school. Mom’s nearly done cooking dinner; Aunt Jenna is in the kitchen with her, and they’ve each got a glass of wine. Here’s the thing about Maple Hill: People who grow up here don’t seem to leave. Or if they do leave, something pulls them back. Mom and Aunt Jenna are no exception—they both went away for college and both convinced their husbands that this was the place where they should spend the rest of their lives. Aunt Jenna is a physical therapist at the hospital in Forestville. Uncle Cliff works at the local chicken farm, the only business that anyone outside this area’s ever heard of. I work there part-time in the summer, packing eggs.

  Sometimes I think that when I’m older, I’d like to live in a city. Grace talks about Manhattan so lovingly, it makes me want to see what it’d be like to live in a world so completely opposite to mine. But part of me also can’t picture living anywhere else. There’s a reason people come back, a reason they put up with spotty cell service and a town with literally zero stores. With tiny populations and petty gossip. I know I’m only sixteen, but I get it. It’s sort of an indefinable thing. A feeling of rightness in your heart. The sense that every ounce of love you feel for this place, it feels for you, too.

  Hunter dumps his smelly gym bag next to the kitchen table, but Mom glares at it for two seconds and he sheepishly carries it up to his room.

  “How was your appointment?” she asks me.

  “Good, I think.” I hand her the note from my doctor. She reads it and seems satisfied.

  “And how was school?”

  “Fine. A little boring. Finished all my homework while Hunter was at practice.” I slide onto one of the stools at the kitchen peninsula, eyeing the smudged lipstick on the rim of Aunt Jenna’s wine glass. I like that my mom still hangs out with her sister so often. I hope Hunter and I can be friends as adults, too, as dorky as that may be. “When’s Dad getting home? Tomorrow?”

  Mom pulls a lasagna out of the oven. “I can’t remember. Let me text him.”

  “Great job keeping track of your husband’s schedule,” Aunt Jenna teases.

  Mom laughs, her fingers busy tapping out a text message. “I’d like to see you try it.” Her phone buzzes about five seconds later. “Yep, tomorrow. Probably while you’re at school.”

  “Good. Maybe we can go hiking this weekend?”

  “I’m sure Dad’ll be up for it. Go tell your brother dinner’s ready.”

  “Hunter! Dinner’s ready!” I bellow in the direction of the stairs.

  “Amelia. Did your feet stop working, or were you just hoping to blow my eardrums out of my body?” Mom’s expression is less than amused.

  I shrug unapologetically.

  “Well, in case you worried about a lung injury,” says Aunt Jenna.

  Mom doesn’t have much of a sense of humor about any of my injuries, but Aunt Jenna seems to be an exception. I’m not allowed to make jokes, but whatever.

  “I am not the loudest person in our family,” I say coolly as Hunter bounds down the stairs like an entire herd of elephants.

  Aunt Jenna stays for dinner—Uncle Cliff and their son, Conner, who’s eleven, are preparing to go hunting this weekend, and Aunt Jenna says she’s trying to avoid getting sent to the store. It’s probably a good call. Every year, they end up needing something, and they always send her to get it, and she always gets the wrong thing. But I was sort of hoping to catch Mom alone this evening and ask her if she thought I was trying to hurt myself when I fell. I don’t want her to have even considered it, and if she did, I want to reassure her that I absolutely was not. But I don’t want to talk about it in front of Aunt Jenna, and I really don’t want to talk about it in front of Hunter, who would be furious to know what Clarissa had said. And hurt, too, probably.

  So after we help Mom clean up, I wander to my room with my phone for some good old-fashioned social media stalking. I feel weird looking at a dead girl’s Facebook page, but I type Maria Lugen’s name into the search anyway. She’s the top result—her profile picture is of herself with a calf and a blue ribbon at the fair. I don’t know much about her, but I know her family has a farm on the outskirts of St. Elm and that she and her brother always showed animals. We only have a few mutual friends and her page has good security, so I can’t see much besides her profile pictures. Her smiling face stares back at me from each one, and I feel ill.

  I find her brother, Steve, who’s a freshman at the academy. His page isn’t as secured, but he’s a fourteen-year-old boy, so there’s not a lot to see. Mostly it’s condolences from friends and pictures of himself fishing or hunting. Some memes and jokes. I don’t know what I expected. I just wanted to know something, anything, about Maria. Something that connects us. Doubt seeps into me. Maybe there really isn’t more here, and I’m making something of my accident out of nothing. I wish I could settle one way or the other—it was an accident, or it wasn’t—but I vacillate wildly instead. Sometimes I trust the instinct in my gut and other times I think my brain’s playing tricks on me.

  Discouraged, I try Instagram. But it’s no help, either. More pictures of her, alone and with friends, laughing and happy. Pictures of the sunset from her incredibly beautiful house. Flowers. Scenery. Typical stuff. The captions don’t offer much insight. She’s a “describe this picture exactly” kind of girl, not a “make an analogy about the fleeting glory of life” person.

  With a sigh, I back out of her profile to my feed. At the top is a picture of Grace standing in front of the library at school, arms open like she’s showing off its glass-and-brick facade. I double tap it, ignoring the way my stomach ties itself into a knot at the sight of her. My troll brain reminds me of what happened weeks ago, how much I messed up our friendship with my awkwardness, and my cheeks burn with shame.

  * * *

  A week before my accident, Grace and I were working on homework together in the library while I waited for Hunter’s practice to end. It was practically empty and we sat on one of the big, cushy leather couches in front of the faux fireplace in the lounge area. And I decided it was time to ask her advice about something I wasn’t sure I was really all that ready to talk about yet.

  “Hey, Grace,” I asked, setting my biology textbook on the arm of the couch. “Can I ask you a weird and personal question?”

  She set down her homework and turned toward me with a smile. “Uh, obviously. Always.”

  “How did you know you were a lesbian?” It came out a lot blunter than I’d meant for it to.

  “Oh. Well. That was … okay, that was not what I expected at all.” She straightened her ponytail and looked me directly in the eye. I had to command myself not to look away. It was me who’d asked, after all. “So I guess I … I don’t know. I just knew? I could tell when a guy was attractive because, well, we all know what makes someone appealing. But I didn’t want to do anything about it, I guess. I thought, ‘Okay, that’s a nice-looking person, good for him.’ But girls, I thought about. When I saw an attractive girl, I kind of like, felt it inside me, you know? I was interested. I guess that’s how I figured it out. It wasn’t a lightbulb moment or anything. Maybe it’s different for other people. But that’s how it worked for me. Why … um, why are you asking?”

  I broke eye contact then. “Well, I’m definitely attracted to boys, but I sort of think
… maybe not just boys. But I don’t know how I … How do I know? What if I’m … I don’t know. I feel confused, and I don’t know what to say or how to explain.”

  She smiled. “I understand. I mean, it is confusing. But you can just … You can let yourself figure it out, you know? You don’t have to put a label on how you’re feeling unless you want to.”

  “That’s true.” I stared down at my fingernails. What I didn’t tell her was that it was her who made me the most confused. That it’d started sometime last spring and had only gotten worse while she was home for the summer, when all I saw of her was from her Instagram feed, which was mostly bikini-clad selfies. That feeling this way about her made me look back on so many other things through a totally different lens. All the times I thought I was admiring girls because I wanted to be like them, when actually it was that I wanted to be with them.

  “I wish I had better advice,” she said. “I don’t think I was very helpful.”

  “No, you were. I—” My Fitbit beeped then, a text from Hunter to meet him in the athletic building in five minutes. I sighed. “Guess it’s time for me to head home.”

  “Okay.” She looked sort of worried, like maybe I made it up to get away from her. We packed our things in silence, but when we were done, she looked at me, biting her lip anxiously.

  “Thank you,” I told her, because I didn’t know what else to say. “This probably won’t be the last you hear from me about this. It felt … kind of good to say something.”

  “Good, I’m glad.” She hugged me tight.

  I had that fluttery feeling again, the same one as when I get a crush on a boy. And the fluttery feeling turns me into a true idiot.

  “It’s, um—you’re what made me wonder,” I blurted as soon as the hug was over.

  She looked at me oddly, an expression I couldn’t parse. “You mean, like, because …”

  I wanted to shrivel up and die on the spot. “Forget I said that. I just—I have to go.”

  She called after me, but I straight up fled.

  I didn’t want to hear her let me down, no matter how gently she did it. I didn’t want her to know in the first place. She lives in New York. She has a billion choices better than me. So I simply removed myself from the situation, and I haven’t been alone with her since.

  * * *

  Thinking about that incident makes me die inside all over again, and I need a distraction badly. Before I can think about it, I find myself searching for Liam. His Instagram is private, because of course it is. He and I don’t follow each other on social media at all, per the unspoken loyalty pledge I apparently made to my brother at birth. But I think about what he said the other day in the cafeteria. Whose fault is it that we’re not friends? Before I can talk myself out of it, I hit the follow request button and then throw the phone away from myself.

  I’m cleaning my glasses with my shirt and trying to figure out what to do with all my restlessness when my phone trills with a notification. Heart racing, I snatch it up.

  It’s a text from my brother. Science is stupid. Come help me.

  A follow-up text comes while I’m busy rolling my eyes at the first one: Please.

  I sigh and cross the hall to his room, phone in hand. “You know if you had taken anatomy like I told you to, you’d be finding sports medicine super easy.”

  “I doubt it.” He shoves his textbook toward me, open to a page with the muscles of the human body all labeled. “Why are all the names so similar? How am I supposed to remember where they are?”

  “Flash cards,” I answer. I set down my phone on his desk and pick up a stack of index cards that have probably been sitting there since the beginning of the school year. There’s dust on top of them. “Just keep cycling through them until you remember them all.” I start scribbling info on the first card and add, “It helps if you shut off Fortnite while you’re studying, by the way.”

  I expected a laugh or a snide response out of that, so when nothing comes, I look up. Hunter’s frowning at my phone, which is lit up with a notification. A pit of foreboding lodges in my stomach.

  “Liam Hawthorne has accepted your follow request,” he says aloud.

  I swipe my phone off his desk, which is fortunate because he misses the next notification: Liam Hawthorne followed you back.

  “Why are you following Liam on Instagram all of a sudden?” Hunter demands.

  “Because I want to,” I say coolly, still scribbling on his notecards. “He’s talked to me a couple of times recently, and I just kinda thought … why can’t we be friendly?”

  “Because he’s Satan, that’s why.”

  I scoff. “Hunter. Come on. You know he’s not that bad. And he’s friends with Roman, so, I don’t know. It’s not like I announced that we’re getting married next week or something.”

  Hunter turns back to his computer and quits Fortnite. That’s not a good sign. “Do you mean that you’re thinking about dating him? Is that what’s happening?”

  “Not really. I barely know him. But I need something to think about other than … other than my head and that murdered girl and—”

  “Murdered girl?” he interrupts. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, uh … that girl who drowned in the Passumpsic. I thought it seemed … It seems similar to what happened to me, is all.”

  Hunter picks up a pen and taps it against his desk. I wait, patient and quiet, while he mulls. “You think someone tried to murder you? Who would do that?”

  I shrug. “Don’t know. All I know is, I’ve sat on that guardrail a billion times and I’ve never gotten too close to the edge of that hill, and I’ve definitely never been careless while I was sitting there. And I know the doctors said it was my imagination, but I swear I felt someone … I don’t know, pushing me, I guess, right before I stopped remembering anything. So I just … Don’t worry about it, okay? Everything’s felt kinda weird since that happened to me. That’s all.”

  “Who else have you talked to about this? Sky?”

  I shake my head. “No, not Sky. Or anyone. I know it sounds a little crazy, and I don’t really need people thinking I’m, like, delusional or something.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” he says, brow furrowed. “I guess … I mean, it is sort of an odd coincidence.”

  He looks disturbed, and I feel bad that I even brought this up. “It probably is a coincidence. Please don’t worry about it. Maybe I just don’t want to be the girl who tripped and almost died, I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, probably. Just … be careful, all right?”

  I stand up and hand him the finished index cards. “Here you go. Science is easy when you have index cards.”

  I smile as I leave, but it’s strained. I wish he’d just told me I was being ridiculous.

  I decide to use my free period the next day to research, but the problem is, I have no idea what I’m researching. I’m not an investigator and I have no clues.

  I sit at one of the long tables in the library and open a notebook to a blank page. The longer I stare at the page, the blanker it seems. Like the blue stripes are taunting me. Like they know I have nowhere to begin.

  People who hate me

  I scrawl it at the top of the page, think for a moment, then cross it out.

  People I’m suspicious of

  That feels better, but who am I suspicious of?

  Sky, I think. I hate that her name comes to mind first, but why won’t she tell me what her big important secret was? And why don’t I feel like I can tell her my fears? I don’t know why I have such an untrusting nature; nothing’s happened in my life to make me this way, but I always suspect that people have ulterior motives or secret second lives. My imagination is too wild.

  Skylar Stewart

  Mr. Omerton

  Steve Lugen (or someone else in that family … ?)

  Clarissa Reed

  That last one is just me being petty. But Sky, my creepy neighbor, and someone in Maria Lugen’s family … that’s my
whole pathetic list. I frown down at the page. It’s too short. There are definitely more suspicious people than this in my life. I scratch absently at an itch on my palm, just inside my cast. No other names come to me.

  I flip to the next page and write:

  To-Do List:

  1. Add more suspicious people

  2. Start ruling out some of them

  3. Get better at this

  “What’re you doing?”

  Liam’s voice at my shoulder startles me entirely out of my skin. I cover the embarrassing to-do list with my palm.

  “What am I doing? Not sneaking up on girls in the library like a creep show.”

  He grins and pulls a chair up beside me. I shift in mine—they’re the uncomfortable kind, fake wood with a little ridge in the center as though my butt cheeks need to be kept separated.

  “You have free period now, too?” he asks.

  “Tuesday and Thursday, yeah.”

  “Okay, well, I wasn’t trying to be a creep, but that is one weird to-do list.”

  I grimace and remove my hand from the notebook. At least he didn’t see my pathetic list of suspicious people. “Yeah, I don’t think I know you well enough to explain this.”

  He tilts his head, rests his forearm on the table. “Try me.”

  He nudges my notebook with a finger until its edge is parallel to the table’s edge. This level of neurosis should probably be a turnoff, but I think it’s having the opposite effect on me. As it turns out, the giant barrier I kept between Liam and me all these years is all that kept me from being completely won over by his charms. And by charms, I mean his incredibly handsome face and compelling smile and intense attention to detail. I resist the urge to shut the notebook. He’s already seen the to-do list; it doesn’t matter now.

  I take a breath and start with what I think is a reasonable question. “How many accidents where people drowned after falling into the river—sober—can you remember in your whole lifetime?”

  “Uh, well …” He looks at me like he’s putting it all together, and I kind of regret saying anything. I’m trusting Liam Hawthorne of all people with my deepest fears? I’m barely okay with having told Hunter.