Sometimes We Tell the Truth

by Kim Zarins

  “It’s okay.” I touch his shoulder, and he jerks away.

  “It’s fucking not. You don’t know what I’m hiding. You’re killing me.”

  He grips his hair and makes this high, thin noise that’s terrible to hear.

  I awkwardly pat his stiff back. “What’s eating you? Are you blaming yourself for her?”

  He barks a laugh. “Hell yes, I am.”

  “Just tell me. I won’t judge. I’ll listen. Pard . . .”

  He flinches when I rest my hand on his shoulder, then closes his eyes and lets me stroke him there, over and over. He’s like clay under my fingers. Softening. And I keep doing it because he needs it and because I need it.

  I’m softening too.

  I’m not ready for a boyfriend. “Love” is a word that sneaks up on you, love is a thing that sneaks up on you, but “boyfriend”—that word, that thing, is pure terror. If I really am bisexual, I’ll just stick with girls. They’re scary enough.

  Friendship, though—it’s scary too. This longing to see inside of him rushes through me hard and loud like we’re on trains passing in opposite directions, and I focus on staring through window after window, trying to get another look inside before these trains part forever. As trains do.

  He takes a breath like he’s willing himself to up and say something.

  He says, “I love you.”

  Heat rushes up and down and fills my ears, fills my whole body to overflowing. My atoms go haywire.

  Then I blink, because he didn’t say that. He said, “I lied to you.”

  When my voice returns, there’s a wobble in it. “Okay.” But he shakes his head. He fishes out the plastic bag from his pocket, opens it.

  So he lied, although I have no idea what about. I’m in such a haze that I can’t process it.

  He looks surprised when he sees the cigarette in his hands, like he had no idea how it got there. He turns it end over end and talks to it instead of me, which means I can stare at his downcast face all I want.

  “This lie . . . I had reasons. Good reasons. And I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Okay,” I say, but I’m not okay. I feel so weak. I’m still rubbing his back, willing him not to feel so much pain. I can’t stop looking at him.

  I’m in love. In love. When I fan out my fingers over his shoulder blade, it’s an act of rebellious love against everything I’ve ever told myself. And it feels so good to admit the need to know the bones in him, every angle, every curve.

  Still looking at his cigarette, he nods, like he’s given himself a quick pep talk. “I’ll just say it. I never had a sister.”

  He hunches over his unlit cigarette, and I wonder if I heard right, because I’m not hearing very well with this roar of the ocean pounding inside my ears. He said nothing about love, and my brain is relieved, while in a fog my heart replays the words over and over, failing to recall the word “love” anywhere. There must be some mistake. Or maybe he never loved me, ever, and I’d just imagined it? Why would he love me, after all?

  I shake my head to snap out of it. What is he talking about?

  “Um, of course you had one.” I try to fit the pieces together. “The photo . . . Ellie . . . I mean, no one would lie about—”

  “You put me on the spot, reaching for Mom’s phone to check the time, then asking who that person on the screen was. So I lied. End of story.”

  I can’t think in this fog. “But she . . . she’s not your sister?”

  “No.” By the line of his mouth, I can see that it’s major, admitting this.

  Suddenly, my brain wakes up. If that wasn’t his sister, who was she? This was an important photo.

  “Okaay,” I say. “So Ellie’s your cousin?”

  “A little closer to my gene pool.” His face hardens into something so defensive he looks outraged. Then, after avoiding my face for so long, he stares at me with his art-stare, as if to memorize every facial muscle I make as I process his words.

  “Then who? She looked just like you. Exactly like . . .”

  You.

  My hand drops from his back, and everything in the world shifts. After all this time . . . I never really knew him at all.

  He sees enough of my shocked expression and turns away. Blinking hard, he rips at the cigarette, picks at it like one of those love me/love me not daisies. “Look, you practically ambushed me with the picture. Who’s this girl? What was I supposed to say? It just popped out that she was my twin. I didn’t know about your sister, and then you told me about her death, and it was too late to go back. It’s agony whenever you bring this up. I’ve had this cheap claim to sharing something deep and important that didn’t even happen to me. I hated myself for it. But then you dumped me, and it was good you didn’t know. If word got around, the guys here would have assaulted me just like at my old school. But I never got outed—four years in high school, and I coasted. Why mess with success? Why have a heart-to-heart and tell you that was . . . me.”

  He’s talking fast, almost a whisper, but my brain is numb. I remember finding that box with his dead sister’s stuff in it and feeling awful for him, but not daring to bring it up. His sister’s things. That box of stuff was something like my sleeping box, his way of dealing. But, no, he wasn’t dealing with Ellie.

  There was no Ellie. No mourning someone he loved. Just dressing up.

  When I speak, I hear the accusation in my voice, but I’m not sure how I really feel. Confused, mostly. “So, those girls’ clothes in the closet—those are yours?”

  He looks pissed, like I’d done something wrong. “You went through my closet?”

  From a distance Mr. Bailey calls out that it’s time to go in five.

  Pard and I stare each other down, the walls between us thick and hard and strange. “The Rube Goldberg project. Remember? You were in the shower, and I was looking for boxes to use. I thought, you know, you saved some clothes to remember her. I didn’t know you were wearing them.”

  With a vengeance, the Balrog fire’s back in his eyes. “Fuck this.” He launches to his feet. He flings the disintegrated cigarette pieces and we head back, out of sync.

  “You can’t tell anyone,” he says. “No one.”

  “This is the last thing I’d tell anyone, believe me.”

  “Because I’d make your life hell. This is huge, telling you.”

  “Whatever, I get that.”

  He shakes his head, like I don’t get it at all. Which I don’t. At all.

  We step out from the shadow cast by yet another bus, and I steal a glance at him. I can’t imagine him in a bikini top, like in the photo. All that skin. That’s not him. Dammit, I told him the girl in the photo was pretty. His face got this look I’d never seen, eyes averted, cheeks glowing, but I thought I knew what conversation we were in. I thought he was pleased her memory was being honored. Now even that moment is screwed up.

  That’s the thing about him. He screws every memory we share. I think we’re friends, and it’s more than that. I think he’s this guy, and he’s this guy who cross-dresses and pretends to have a beautiful dead sister.

  Pard catches me staring and kicks the gravel. A few small rocks ping on a bus. “You said you’d listen—what bullshit. I show my feelings for you three years ago, and you ghost me. I try to kiss you just now, and you wuss out. I say this incredibly personal thing about my body to you—and you’re the first person I’ve ever told—and all you seem to care about are some clothes in my fucking closet. Every gut-wrenching part of me I offer you gets rejected, ignored, mocked. Well, fine. I have no more guts left to spill. Now you know that we don’t have sisters in common. We have nothing in common.”

  “I guess not.” I’m going to blow up from the way he’s turning on me, with his shoulders in knots, and the way it’s all ruined so fast I can’t stop it.

  “You think you’re more of a man? I never played with a dollhouse.”

  I’m not a fighter, but I draw back my fist, my body ready for it, because all I want to do is make him shut
up, make his mouth just stop. He stiffens, eyes wide, his little hands palms out to block me. I’m horrified and drop my fist, and we both stand there, shocked. Minutes ago I wanted to kiss him and now this impulse. Both options are impossible. “I didn’t play with it, dickhead.”

  He half reaches for me, his eyes all apology, though I was the creep making a fist. “It’s okay if you did play with one . . . but, no, you weren’t playing. I’m sorry, I was mouthing off, because this hurts. I’ve never told someone I’m intersex, and it’s hell.”

  He says a weird word, like he’s so into sex he’s intosex. Not an image I need.

  He notices my confused look and groans. “God, you don’t know, do you? You . . . you think I’m a boy who puts on girl clothes, is that it?”

  I shrug, but his question scares me. “Isn’t that what you said?”

  Pard rapid-blinks like he’s tearing up, though I can’t tell in the shade of this bus. He leans one hand on the bus and rests his forehead on his hand, like he’s suddenly old and tired and in far too much pain. His voice is quiet and sad. “Out of all the imaginary conversations I’ve had with you on this topic, it never turned out like this. I just . . . listen. Forget the photo—forget the clothes. Forget my journey in genderland. We’ll stick to the basics. Intersex is the sex I was born with. You know, some babies are girls, some babies are boys, and a very special few are betwixt and between.”

  He stops leaning on the bus and wipes his hand of the dust, and I stare at his handprint. I’m completely lost. “There’s no such thing.”

  He sets his jaw and glares at me. Nervously, I babble an infomercial. “I mean, sure, there’s that myth about the god Hermaphroditus. A lovesick nymph threw herself at him whether he wanted it or not, and the gods merged their two bodies into one, male and female.”

  That face of his—brittle, polished, harrowed, smooth, and slightly amused at my obtuseness, even now. His voice carries the understatement of a lifetime. “I’m familiar with the myth. That’s right . . . This is my myth.”

  I don’t know what to say. Mr. Bailey is shouting something, or maybe I’m just pretending I can hear him shouting. “We better go.”

  “Right.”

  I sneak glances at his smooth face as we walk, and the pieces start to fit together. We’d slept over at each other’s places countless times freshman year, and I’ve never seen him with his clothes off. He always emerged from the bathroom fully dressed in pajamas or clothes. Always covered up, top to bottom. Kind of modest for someone who would become this flirty gay guy. It hits me that this is all real.

  The words fly out before I can stop them. “You have both kinds of parts?” And heat burns my face like I’ve said a bad word.

  His eyes bug out at the rudeness of my question. He crosses his arms over his chest and walks a bit faster. “Like you deserve to know.”

  “Believe me, I don’t want to know. God. Isn’t being gay interesting enough without—?” I wave a hand wildly. I can’t even say it.

  He laughs bitterly as we round the last row of parked buses. Our bus waits parked in front of the rest stop, and I look around nervously, because we’re getting too close to our group to be talking like this.

  “Ha. Don’t get me wrong. I kind of aim at being a straightforward gay guy—get it? It’s easier. I mean, gay or straight aside, people expect you to be male or female. Less is more, they say. Which I guess implies that more is less.” He pauses as we line up and then adds, “Yet I think more can be more if you focus on my winning personality. Right, Rooster?”

  “Right, little dude!” Rooster absentmindedly punches Pard’s shoulder in a brotherly way and goes back to chatting with Bryce.

  Everyone starts filing onto the bus, and Reeve marks us off on his trusty clipboard.

  Pard and I inch forward without talking, thank God. I don’t think I can have another conversation like this one. I’m all done. I’m all messed up.

  If someone liked Pard, would he be gay, bi, or straight? Or would it even matter, because what does sex even mean for someone like him? And why couldn’t he just be gay when I was almost getting used to the idea that I liked a boy?

  It’s like losing him all over again. And losing his sister—I need Ellie to exist too, in her dead-sister way. Which is a creepy thing to want.

  None of this should be real.

  “Sit with me?” Pard asks. He steps on the bus and turns his head sideways to pose the question without facing me. His voice is level, like he’s playing poker and it doesn’t matter to him if I’m in or out.

  But asking means he probably wants me in.

  I look at his hand on the rail, the hand he covered his weeping face with an hour ago. The hand I held when he poked it with his corsage, and touched again just now before we almost kissed. Such tiny fingers, delicate yet calloused with lizard skin where the pencil rubs him.

  My chest tightens like it’s asthma.

  “I don’t think so,” I say, brushing my face of the cobwebs I sometimes feel there.

  And I’m alone outside the bus.

  It’s not easier to breathe with him gone. It’s worse.

  Everything is worse.

  SAGA’S TALE

  I don’t think about it. I get on the bus and sit in the row behind Reeve, that empty seat no one wants because it’s behind him. Social death means nothing. I’m dead inside.

  Mr. Bailey puts a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Do you need anything?”

  I shake my head without looking up. My breath comes out shaky, and I want to cry, but I don’t even know why. I don’t know what’s happening to me, what this all means.

  Mr. Bailey walks down the aisle, and when he comes back, he gives me my backpack. Probably in case I need my medicine.

  The bus driver pulls out, and everyone starts chatting and, except for Mr. Bailey keeping an eye on me from time to time, I become invisible. Even Reeve doesn’t seem to see me as he scans the back rows for infractions. I thought I wanted to disappear from everyone else, but that’s not enough. I want to disappear from myself. I envy Tolkien’s elves. They have the ability to off themselves with a mere thought. No mess, no failed attempts. Their souls go to the otherworld, the Halls of Mandos, and don’t return until the world has changed beyond recognition.

  I could handle that.

  When Reeve faces forward again, I check my phone. Cannon has left a text.

  Cannon: U coming?

  I don’t know if he’s referring to Drew this afternoon or the party tonight, or something else entirely. It doesn’t matter. I text back, Yes.

  Because I can’t take this anymore. I can’t spend the whole weekend with Pard hating me. With me hating myself. It’s not Mandos’s kingdom, but it will do.

  Mr. Bailey draws a name. “Saga, you’re up.”

  I no longer feel like part of the gang. It’s like a switch has turned off, and I’m out of the group. My inner monologue is back, the voice that tells me I was never a part of the group to begin with. I’m a dumbass to think otherwise. This is how things really are.

  I listen to Saga’s story like my life depends upon it, because I need less of me and more of these people and their stories right now.

  Once upon a time there was a prom.

  “Nice,” says Briony in that high-heeled, prom queen way of hers, and Saga smiles back with her typical cat burglar elegance. Everyone on the bus is mostly back to their original seating arrangements. In the back Briony snuggles into Kai, while Alison kicks back in the center, both boots up on Rooster’s knee.

  And our heroine will be . . . Reiko. So, Reiko was gearing up for prom. She had her dream date and just needed her dream gown.

  At Saks Fifth Avenue, while trying on different styles, she found The Dress.

  She was with her friend Lupe at that magic moment.

  Lupe pointed out the obvious. “You rock that dress.” And, no lie, Reiko did. Reiko had never put on a dress before that felt so right and looked so good.

  “But the price is goin
g to be a bit of a problem,” Lupe added.

  Reiko looked at the tag then back to Lupe. She was screwed.

  So she came back to Saks with her stepmom, Erin. Reiko came out of the changing room wearing The Dress after showing a couple awful ones for comparison. The plan was that when Erin saw how perfect The Dress was compared to the others, she’d realize Reiko had to have it.

  Reiko coughed a little, but her stepmom still didn’t look up from her phone.

  “Erin?”

  Erin looked up, still not really paying attention. “Yeah? Oh! That’s a nice one.”

  “Super nice, don’t you think? Isn’t it perfect?” Reiko pressed.

  “You look lovely. Well, how much? Oh . . . oh no. Honey, we’re saving for college. We can’t do this.”

  But Reiko had one final hope. Her boyfriend, rich and handsome . . . um, Franklin.

  With his arm around Mouse, Franklin says, “Saga, I already have a girlfriend.”

  “And who’s Erin?” Reiko asks.

  “Oh, come on, guys,” Saga says, looking around. “This is all just fiction. Erin’s my stepmom. Get over it!”

  “I’ll be the boyfriend,” Frye offers. His coaxing moocher’s voice is dialed up a few notches, and he gives Reiko a flirtatious grin, like he’s looking forward to the story with this new change.

  “No can do,” Saga says. “My story needs a guy with money.”

  Frye looks away, bitter.

  Reiko worked on Franklin. She said she wanted to look really hot for prom, and if he bought her The Dress, she’d be all too happy to take it off for him after. That made him smile, but the smile faltered when she said the price.

  “You’ll look hot whatever you wear,” Franklin said.

  It was a no-go.

  Reiko wasn’t living in a modern-day Cinderella story. No fairy godmother was going to give her that dress.

  It was up to her to get it for herself.

  Theft was out of the question. The long skirts made it impossible to slip into a bag, and this was a high-security item.