Friends and Liars

by Kaela Coble

  Things have gotten better in the six weeks since I said goodbye to Murphy. Not great. Not good even. But better. I’ve remained in hibernation, licking my wounds. Danny still comes over to watch TV with me, not talking about anything important. I take an occasional phone call from Ally, but list any number of excuses why I can’t hang out. Work. Family obligations. Trips to Drummond with Nancy to fight in Bed Bath & Beyond over the price of linens for the extra-long twin mattress NYU insists I need special sheets for. The trusty “summer reading assignment.” The crippling pain has settled into a dull, constant ache, but I fear that an in-person visit with anyone connected to Murphy will turn the intensity back up.

  “Aaaaally, darlin’!” I hear my mother exclaim from the door in that sugary-sweet southern hospitality way that makes me cringe. “Ruby! Ally’s here!”

  I freeze. This was inevitable, I know, but still I’m unprepared.

  “I’ll just go up and see her, Mrs. St. James,” I hear Ally say. I stand up amongst the rubble of my books, actually contemplating whether I could hide in my closet without being found. But who am I kidding? It’s Ally.

  So I go on the offensive. “Hey, Al! I’m sorry I’ve been so busy—it’s been forever,” I say brightly when she opens the door, moving toward her with my arms wide. But she’s onto me. Instead of returning my embrace, she holds her hands up in front of her.

  “Don’t,” she says. “Don’t. You. Dare.”

  I step back, shocked by the bumpy but measured tone of her voice. I have never seen Ally this mad, and that includes the time Emmett called her the C-word when she wouldn’t let Aaron go to a strip club in Montreal for his eighteenth birthday.

  “Al—”

  She ticks off on her fingers. “You have ignored my calls. You have blown me off every chance you get. You missed my birthday party. Thanks for the card, by the way. That was real swell.”

  “Ally, I’m sorry, I’ve been—”

  “—busy.” She nods, her lips pursed. She looks around at my piles: linens, clothes, toiletries. For such a frugal spender, in the end Nancy sure has stocked me with a year’s supply of literally anything I could possibly need. “I don’t know what the hell is going on with you,” she says. “You won’t talk to me. And Murphy, for once, doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, either. Not that he would tell me.”

  Just the mention of his name flares up something inside me.

  “And you know what?” she cries, flinging her arms up in surrender. “I don’t even care anymore. My oldest friend is leaving, and she doesn’t even care enough about me to try to . . . see me before she goes.” She falters and walks over to my nightstand, where a (miraculously full) box of tissues sits, and blows her nose. “It was bad enough the first time, Ruby.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “With Hardy. The sneaking around. The lying. But I excused it, because you were going through your parents’ separation, and I knew you were hurting. But now . . . I mean for God’s sake, Ruby, you’re going to college. Why are you wasting your time on that scum, instead of hanging out with the people who love you?”

  Oh my God. She thinks . . . she actually thinks . . . Well, never mind. Let her think it. Let them all think it. It doesn’t matter anymore. In fact I might as well stop pretending things can ever be the same.

  “Ally, you really need to grow up.”

  She reels back as if I’ve slapped her.

  “I’m sorry, but this whole loyalty-to-the-crew crap you spout off . . . don’t you think we’re a little old for it? Maybe it’s important to you, since you’re sticking around, but I’m going to New York next week. I’m getting the hell out of here. And I don’t plan on coming back.” I hope she doesn’t hear the falter in my voice at the end. I feel a wave of nausea, knowing exactly what I am doing to my friend. To our friendship. All because of something that isn’t at all her fault.

  She inhales sharply through her nose, finally resigned that this is the way it will be. “Well. Good luck, then.”

  I want so badly to stop her, to go after her as she leaves the room. But in her haste to escape the venomous bullshit I’m spewing, she knocks into a stack of sundries my mother has piled on my dresser, and a huge box of tampons falls to the ground.

  Tampons.

  When’s the last time I used one of those?

  Oh. Shit.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  RUBY

  Now

  My hands search behind my back for the support of the wall and I lean against it, trying to recover from the kiss Murphy has just planted on me. We are in a dark hallway outside Ally and Aaron’s bathroom, where he has followed me. I look to him, eyes wide. “What was that?”

  “Mistletoe,” he breathes into my ear, his hands still on my hips.

  I look up. “There’s no mistletoe in here!” I exclaim.

  He pulls back, but only slightly. Shrugs. “We were both under it in the living room, but I couldn’t kiss you like that in front of everyone. Might cause some confusion,” he says. His eyes twinkle with the mischief of days long ago, and I wish I didn’t have to push him away.

  “Why have you been ignoring me all night?” he asks. It’s a fair question; every time I’ve seen him coming toward me, I’ve made a beeline in the other direction. Now that I’ve told Nancy the truth, I know I also have to tell Murphy. But not yet. Not tonight.

  “Because I don’t want to deal with your crazy girlfriend, honestly,” I say, copping out.

  He points to himself. “I’m dating someone in the living room?” With mock interest, he adds, “Is she hot?”

  Now I’m working not to smile. Trying to have this much control over my face is exhausting, not the way I ever used to feel around my best friend. “Don’t play dumb, Murphy. You know I’m talking about Krystal.” I hate myself for adding, “And no, she’s not, in my opinion.” What is wrong with me? This guy doesn’t just make me feel like I’m sixteen; he makes me act like it, too.

  Murphy slaps his palm against the wall, genuinely angry. “Krystal is not my girlfriend,” he says firmly.

  “You might want to tell her that,” I say, my arms crossed against both his bullshit and his sexual advances.

  He rolls his eyes. “What now?”

  I point to the opposite wall, indicating he should go stand over there and keep his hands to himself. He puts his hands up in surrender and obeys. I tell him about all the obnoxious conversations I’ve witnessed over text messages and about Krystal’s behavior when she was in New York. As I talk, a familiar calm settles over me. It starts to feel like before we messed everything up with sex, and Murphy was just the person I complained to about stuff. I’m not talking to a man I’m sleeping with about a woman he’s sleeping with. I’m talking to my best friend about a girl who pisses me off. He is listening intently, laughing in places where I add dramatic storytelling flair, his jaw tensing during the parts where my feelings were hurt.

  “I’m sorry, Ruby,” he says when I finish. “I guess she thinks we’re a little more involved than we are. But it’s not my fault. I’ve always been clear with her that I’m not interested in a relationship.”

  He has either chosen his words carefully or lucked into them, but I find myself wondering whether he’s not interested in a relationship in general, or just not with Krystal. How ridiculous that I even care. “Why not?” I ask, hoping this will encourage him to clarify his point without sounding like I’m fishing for a relationship myself.

  He considers this for a few seconds. “She’s just not the one.”

  I arch my eyebrow at him and his face lights up with recognition. He tries unsuccessfully to arch one back at me, resulting in a look like he’s trying to poop. It’s an inside joke from ninth-grade studyhall, when I had tried to teach him how to control his brows individually, alternating between serious instruction and uncontrollable giggling. Frustrated, I had used my fingers to help guide his right eyebrow up. It was the first time I had ever touched his face, and I remember the way h
e looked at me when I did it. Was that when everything started to change? After that day, whenever I arched my eyebrow at him (which was quite often), he would do the same little wiggle, and it made me laugh every time, no matter how angry I was at him. Unable to stop myself, I cross the hallway to touch his eyebrow and guide it upwards. This time we’re not giggling.

  They’re both really good at ignoring problems.

  “What are you guys doing out here?” Krystal’s voice pierces through the bubble that surrounds two people with history when they are left alone. I draw my hand back, but not sharply. I don’t care if she sees. Murphy will always feel more mine than anyone else’s, and, in Krystal’s presence at least, I’m not going to apologize for it.

  “Just trying to teach this old dog a new trick,” I say without looking at her, and duck into the bathroom to sidestep whatever hissy fit Krystal is about to throw. When I come out, the hallway is empty.

  “I swear, Rube, I didn’t tell anyone it was your secret,” Ally whispers to me in the same hallway where I was pressed into a corner by Murphy not an hour ago.

  She doesn’t really need to whisper; our conversation is more than disguised by the volume of the Christmas music and the whoops of laughter coming from the living room. We are the only two not drunk, although I have had two of my allotted three glasses of wine and am secretly wishing Ally wasn’t pregnant just for this one night, so we could sneak out to share a smoke. But since neither of us is drunk, there’s no justification for being outside in this particularly brutal December night, the kind where it’s too cold to snow. People think that’s a myth, but it’s not.

  “What?” Ally asks, offended by my knit eyebrows and pursed lips.

  “But . . .?” I prompt her.

  “But what?” She has one arm across her body, one hand in the crook of her opposite elbow, one forearm raised, as if we were indeed outside sharing that smoke. I half expect her to flick the butt, scattering ashes to the wind. I remember the way she was always able to flick ash out of the window at the precise angle that prevented any from flying back into the car. I never possessed this skill, and Blue suffered from frequent burns in her upholstery as a result of stray embers.

  “Al, I love you, and you know I would understand if you told everyone what you know. I can’t expect you to take that hit for me.”

  Ally’s face turns to a pout. “I swore to you I wouldn’t tell anyone about your secret, and I didn’t. How could you think I would lie about something like that?”

  “Maybe you didn’t tell people it was my secret, but you must have told them the secrets got mixed up. How else would they believe it wasn’t you? And how hard would it be to figure it out, once they knew the secrets were switched? I am the only other one of us with a uterus, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  Ally’s face hardens as I speak. “First of all, I would like to think the people I’m closest to in this world believe me when I tell them the truth. That goes for you—” she jabs a finger in my direction, “and for all the assholes out there,” she jabs her finger toward the living room. “If they don’t believe I didn’t have an abortion, then I don’t really care. They can think what they want. And if you don’t believe I can’t keep a secret to protect one of my oldest . . .” her voice breaks, “friends, then I don’t know what to tell you.” She starts to move past me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, catching her arm. And I mean it. I realize I’m treating Ally like a person she clearly isn’t anymore. A person she maybe never was. She looks into my eyes and must know I am sincere, because she softens. I pull her into a hug. “I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything,” I say. “I’m acting crazy.”

  She lets me hug her for a moment before I feel her stiffen. When she pulls away, her face is quizzical. “Why are you acting so crazy?”

  I freeze. In that instant, I know she’s got me.

  “Seriously,” she continues, “if I don’t care that much what people think of choices I made in high school, why would you care? You’ve never cared what anyone thought about you. Except . . .” her face goes to a faraway place, remembering, calculating, watching as my eyes widen, “. . . Murphy,” she finishes. “Oh . . . my . . . God. Hardy wasn’t the father.”

  I stare into her eyes, my breath caught in my throat.

  “It was Murphy. Wasn’t it?” she asks.

  I don’t move.

  “Ruby!”

  Slowly, I nod my head. This isn’t how it was supposed to go, but this is how it’s going. I wait for Ally to scream at me, to scream for Murphy, but she doesn’t. Her face wrinkles. She shudders. “Ewwwww!” she cries. She starts hopping around, flicking her hands as if trying to shake off the visual image. “You let Murphy see your boobs? And you, like, did it?” She shudders again and continues to jump.

  I can’t help myself, I break into giggles. She starts to laugh, too, and before we know it we’re clutching our bellies; hers swollen, mine empty. It’s not until she starts to sing, “Ruby and Murphy, sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G” that I stop laughing.

  “Ally, shhhh. Shhhhh,” I say, covering her mouth with my hand. Just like when we were kids, she licks my palm. “Jesus, Ally,” I say, wiping my hand on the back of her dress. “Listen, you can’t tell anyone.”

  She stops playing then. “Really, Ruby? More secrets?” She says it like she’s disappointed in me.

  “I’m going to. I decided today that I would. But not until after the wedding, okay? If he’s mad, I don’t want it to ruin the wedding. After I tell him, you can tell—”

  “ —no one. Then I’ll tell no one. It’s a secret between you and Murphy. It’s no one else’s business.”

  I want to kiss her with relief. “Thank, you, Ally.” I think back to the night in the field by her house, flashlights at our feet that we had brought for one last game of tag, our hands in a circle. Reeling from her parents’ divorce, Ally’s impossibly tortured face as she made us vow to fight for our friendships and always to be honest with each other. She had needed us to do what her parents could not. “I appreciate you understanding. I know how important honesty is to you.”

  I did not mean it sarcastically, but I realize after I say it that she is, of course, lying to us all, too. Something strange appears on her face. “Yeah, well,” she says, “some things are better left in the past.” She looks beyond me, beyond the walls of the beautiful house her husband built for her. What are you hiding, Ally?

  When it comes to things that really matter, you guys barely even know each other.

  Even without knowing what her secret is, I suddenly understand something about Ally that I never did before. Behind each of her backhanded whisperings there is a little girl desperate to confirm that her beliefs are right, her choices are beyond reproach. When Ally makes snide comments about New York, or looks at the bookcases of my apartment and asks me where my Great American novel is, she’s really looking for confirmation, if only from herself, that she was right to stay in Vermont, to marry young, to pursue the career she’s in. She deals with the fear of judgment by going on the offensive, so she never has to play defense. I, on the other hand, have chosen to sit out of the game entirely.

  She turns back to me. “Is that why you didn’t come clean and say the secret was yours? You knew Murphy would figure it out, because obviously he would have known if Hardy had knocked you up.” There is so much pain in her eyes—the old pain that I always favored Murphy’s company over hers, the pain that I lied again. The pain of knowing how little trust I’ve placed in the girl who always saved me a seat.

  I nod. “I never even slept with Hardy. I mean, I did, junior year—all that happened. But the night of that party, the one after we graduated? I was just trying to prove a point to Murphy, but when I got in the car I realized I was taking a giant leap backward and asked him to drive me home.”

  “And he did? Just like that? You’re lucky he didn’t—”

  “He might have, but I was so drunk I threw up in his middle console. He dumped me a
t my house pretty soon after that.”

  We share a laugh, conspirators in the systematic destruction of a boy who treated us both badly.

  “Let’s get back to the party,” Ally says, brightening in preparation for her audience. “It’s time for the group photo. Maybe we should ask Krystal to take it. Would that cheer you up?”

  I move to protest, but am ashamed to find myself nodding as I follow her back into the living room.

  It ends up being a four-glass night.

  I lie awake all night, every memory I have of Murphy running through my head. At seventeen, watching him hit home runs in his starched white baseball uniform, feeling a confusing secret thrill when he winks at me after crossing home plate. At ten, telling me my haircut makes me look like a mushroom, or a boy, and he’s not sure which one is worse. At fourteen, confessing in a whispered late-night phone call that he’s been having nightmares about Danny stabbing Roger in the chest. At twenty-eight, the pressure of his hands, now calloused from his work, on my bare skin.

  I hate myself for what I’ve done. For what I am.

  Now I remember Danny, the way he looked that first night he came to me for help. Roger had practically yanked his arm out of his socket, and Danny hobbled toward me in the dark like a wounded bird. If I had been smart enough then, or had trusted Nancy not to break under the stress, if I had called out for her instead of keeping Danny’s secret, would everything be different? Would Roger have been sent to jail? Danny freed from his abuse? Could Danny have had a better life? Gone to college with me, even? If Murphy and I hadn’t shouldered the weight of Danny’s secret together, would we ever have become best friends, and then lovers? Would Danny still be alive? And what if things had gone differently when he came to New York? I could have saved him one last time. Or, really, for the first time.

  None of you bothered to try to help me when I was alive, when it counted.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  RUBY