Here We Lie

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  “I wish I could just disappear,” I told MK, staring out at the water, the cigarette turning to ash in my hand.

  He narrowed his eyes, giving me a faux push, as if it might send me not only toppling over the edge of the gazebo but out to the Atlantic itself, to the blue-green forever that waited beyond the rocky edge of The Island.

  “Very funny,” I told him.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and flicked the butt, which bounced on the railing and disappeared into the vegetation below. There were thousands of cigarette butts there by now, the accumulation of our idle summers. “Poor kid, condemned to a life of luxury.”

  I tapped off an inch of ash, watching it crumble before it hit the ground. “Easy for you to say. You’re doing what you want to do.”

  MK shrugged. He was starting law school at Princeton in the fall, following in Dad’s footsteps. The only difference was that he didn’t seem to mind that his life had been planned out for him, the way I did. “Well, what do you want to do?”

  I shrugged.

  “There must be something you’re half-good at,” he said, knocking his shoulder into mine in a way that suggested he was joking.

  “Nope.”

  He was quiet for a minute, as if he were trying to dredge up some hidden skill I didn’t know I possessed. Eventually, he said, “You used to draw people’s faces all the time. Remember? It made Mom furious. Instead of taking notes in class, you would basically just doodle.”

  I laughed. “I could be a professional doodler.”

  “Artist, dummy.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. You’ll get the lingo down.”

  Except I knew that the little faces I drew really weren’t more than doodles, and certainly not the sign of artistic talent. I’d taken a drawing class at Reardon, and the instructor had been less than enthusiastic about my work. The proportions were all wrong, she said—the necks too skinny, the shoulders too broad. At The Coop, I’d watched Marcus capture the essence of a person with a few brushstrokes, not needing to pencil in first or leave room for erasure. I might have liked doodling, but it clearly wasn’t a skill that was going to get me anywhere.

  Every day on The Island, I’d read the classifieds in the Boston Globe, scanning for options: education, engineering, medicine, social work—anything to get me away from the predicted Mabrey track. I didn’t even meet the qualifications to be a night clerk at the 7-Eleven, which required previous cashier experience. I’d entertained briefly the idea of the Peace Corps—a lifestyle that would have suited me for about five seconds—but there was a surprisingly long list of requirements, none of which I met. It turned out no one was looking for a spoiled eighteen-year-old with an unimpressive GPA.

  Finally, I gave in.

  It was easier to accept that I was nothing more than a cog in a machine that had been set in motion long before I was born.

  * * *

  Keale College in northwest Connecticut was the perfect choice from my mother’s viewpoint—far enough away that we wouldn’t bump into each other, but close enough to keep me under her thumb. Since it was an all-girls school, she must have figured I was less likely to become romantically involved with the resident pot dealer. She filled out my application, requested housing, registered me for classes and signed my name to everything: Lauren E. Mabrey. It amazed me to think of the strings she must have pulled to get me into Keale with my dismal grades and my spotty list of extracurricular activities. Had she begged administrators, promised to endow a scholarship or fund a new wing at the library? Or had the Mabrey name—as in Charles Mabrey, freshman senator from the great state of Connecticut and already something of a dynamo on Capitol Hill—done all the talking?

  Mom drove me to campus at the end of August, the trunk of her Mercedes stuffed with the accoutrements for my dorm room: a new duvet, two sets of Egyptian cotton sheets, down pillows, thick blankets in zippered plastic bags. We were silent for most of the trip, the two hours stretching painfully between us. Mom’s face was stony behind her Jackie-O getup, the dark glasses and headscarf she wore whenever she was at the wheel of her car, as if to announce that she was someone, even if she wasn’t instantly recognizable. In the passenger seat, I closed my eyes against a pulsing headache and waited for the inevitable lecture, the Mabrey rite of passage, delivered on momentous occasions, like when I’d first gone away to summer camp, and every fall when I left for Reardon. Since my disaster at The Coop, her warnings were no longer vague but specific, centered on staying away from “certain kinds of people” and promising to yank me out of school if she caught so much as a whiff of pot. She wouldn’t have believed me if I told her I’d sworn off all that, that I wasn’t planning to get into any kind of trouble she would need to rescue me from, that I’d learned my lesson.

  It wasn’t until we were in Scofield itself, just a few miles from Keale, that Mom cleared her throat. I waited, steeling myself.

  “Your father and I disagree on certain things,” she began. “He’s willing to give you more chances, Lauren. He’s willing to excuse what you’ve done, saying you’re young and you’re still learning. He thinks we might have made some mistakes ourselves, taken our eye off the ball.” Her eyes were dark shadows behind her lenses. “But not me. I don’t agree with him, not for a second.”

  I looked from her face with its slightly raised jaw to her white-knuckled hands on the wheel, a two-carat diamond winking in the sunlight.

  “As far as I can tell, we’ve given you plenty of opportunities, and you’ve squandered all of them. You’ve had chance after chance to do anything, one single thing, to make us proud. But even when you were under our noses, you were involved in unspeakable things—”

  Speak them, I thought, like a dare. Say his name, the one we promised never to say.

  “—and we had to scramble to cover for you, in the midst of all the stress of the campaign. But I won’t do that again. I’m ready to cut you loose. The first time you get in any kind of trouble at Keale, I’m going to say, ‘Too bad, so sad,’ and let you figure it out on your own. What happens if you burn through all the money in your bank account? Too bad! What if you get caught for drinking and doing drugs because you haven’t learned your lesson? So sad! I’ll tell the officer to let you sit in jail until you figure it out on your own.”

  I closed my eyes, as if I could ward off her words. I wondered if she really believed them, or if she had already come to accept that Dad’s career would always be paramount, the mountain that would bury all our sins.

  “Can you at least nod to let me know you understand?”

  “Mom,” I said, “I’m not going to—”

  She waved a hand, like she was swatting away a fly. “Or you could choose to see this as a fresh start, a chance to fall in line. And if you do that, of course, there will be rewards. There are benefits to being in a family like ours.”

  The laugh escaped my mouth before I could stop it. If MK had been here, we would have quoted lines from The Godfather to each other and talked about family with a capital F.

  Mom’s voice was icy. “You’ll make your bed, Lauren, and you’ll lie in it. And maybe then you’ll see what it’s like to be cut off from all of this.”

  We were heading out of Scofield by this time, in stop-and-go traffic on the tiny main street. I made eye contact with a little girl on the sidewalk holding a balloon in her chubby fist. Don’t let go, I thought.

  “Lauren!” Mom snapped. “Are you listening to me?”

  Behind us a car honked, and Mom pressed on the gas. The Mercedes jerked forward, only to come to a halting stop again a few feet later. I focused on what was outside the car—the hair salons and antique stores, a building with a giant tacky ice cream cone pointing toward the sky.

  I already hated Scofield.

  * * *

  By the time we arrived on campus, Mom was back in loving mom/senator’s wife mode, schmoozing with the
other incoming freshmen and their parents, shaking hands and commiserating about “our babies going off to school,” like she hadn’t rushed to ship me off to Reardon each fall and to sleepaway camp each summer. A few Keale upperclassmen were on hand to help lug things from the parking lot to the elevator bank, and Mom asked them polite questions about their hometowns and majors. “Oh, let me help you,” she said, holding the elevator for a harried-looking woman carrying a giant plastic bed in a bag. And then she held out her hand, introducing herself in her full, hyphenated glory.

  “Elizabeth Holmes-Mabrey,” one of the upperclassmen repeated as we stepped out of the elevator. “Isn’t that—” The question was cut off by the doors closing, and by the time I caught up with her, Mom was already halfway down the hall, pushing open the door of room 207.

  There were already two women in the room, wrestling with the corners of a fitted sheet. From the doorway, it was difficult to determine which was my roommate and which was her mother—they were both tall and slim in jeans and saltwater sandals, blond hair spilling to the middle of their backs.

  I dropped my bags on the other twin bed and said, “Hi, I’m Lauren.”

  One of the women stepped forward, holding out a hand with a perfect French manicure. Up close she was clearly the younger of the two, wearing only slightly less makeup than her mother. “I’m Erin.”

  “Oh, goodness,” Erin’s mom gushed, clasping her hands together nervously. “I know who you are. I voted for your husband in the last election. Carole Nicholson.”

  Mom beamed. “Oh, that’s wonderful. It’s so nice to meet you, Carole.”

  The four of us bustled around each other, unpacking boxes and trying to navigate a space designed for two. Then Carole Nicholson let out a squeal and clapped her hands. “Oh, look, you two have the same sheets! Those are from Garnet Hill, aren’t they? The flannel ones?”

  Mom looked back and forth between Erin and me, as if we’d pulled off a noteworthy accomplishment. “Well, this couldn’t have worked out better.”

  “We’re practically twins,” I said drily.

  When Mom stepped around me to begin organizing my toiletries, the heel of her sandal ground into my instep as a warning.

  * * *

  That night Erin chattered away in her bed about her boyfriend back home and how amazing it was to meet all these other girls, and my thoughts drifted to Marcus, who had been dead for almost a year. If he had lived, we would have broken up at the end of that summer and gone on to the rest of our lives. If he’d lived, he would have finished the mural and gone on to other projects, other dreams. Instead, I was here, and I had no dreams at all.

  Erin’s questions interrupted my thoughts. “Were you a good student in high school? Did you have straight A’s and everything?”

  “I did okay.”

  She laughed. “I bet you’re just being modest, and you were like class valedictorian or something.”

  “I wasn’t a valedictorian,” I assured her. It occurred to me that the Keale girls had probably all been at the tops of their classes, the sort of motivated girls who took seven classes a semester, played two sports and one musical instrument and spoke conversational French. Basically, they were just younger versions of my sister, Kat.

  “Don’t you think it’s exciting?” Erin gushed, and I realized that I had no idea what she was asking, or what was supposed to be so exciting.

  “I guess,” I said. From her silence, I knew it was the wrong answer.

  “Maybe it’s not so exciting for someone like you,” Erin said, and she snapped out the light.

  * * *

  The day before the semester was scheduled to begin, I made an appointment with the registrar. Mom had scheduled me for five general education classes, and there wasn’t a single one that interested me.

  “My parents are concerned about my class load,” I told Dr. Hansen, who had a severe white bob and owlish eyes behind her oversize frames. I leaned close to her desk, keeping my voice conspiratorial. “I was hospitalized for stress last fall.”

  Dr. Hansen raised an untrimmed eyebrow, frowning at her computer screen. “There was no mention of a hospitalization due to stress,” she murmured, tapping keys.

  “No, there wouldn’t be. My parents were trying to protect me, I think. They probably said it was mono or something.”

  “Ah,” Dr. Hansen said, nodding. “Well, of course it’s best for you to talk with your academic advisor, but—”

  “Oh, I’ll absolutely do that. But for now, with classes starting tomorrow...”

  Dr. Hansen said, “Right. Well, let me pull up your schedule and see what we can do.”

  After a bit of searching and waiting for the appropriate screens to load, she agreed that with my medical history, it might be best to drop Biology for now, and switch my math class for Introduction to the Arts. Half an hour later, I left her office feeling decidedly better about life.

  * * *

  Intro to the Arts was taught by a team of professors, each quirkier than the last: a visual artist, a theater director and a musician. The goal was to spend five weeks studying in each discipline and finish the semester with a portfolio of critical and creative work. I completed a shaky landscape sketch and a self-portrait that looked more like the face of a distant cousin before attending a presentation on basic photography skills. Fill the frame. Align by the rule of thirds. Look for symmetry. I watched pictures flash by on the giant screen at the front of the room, subjects so close that I could see the crackly texture of leaves, the blood vessels in a woman’s eyes. Afterward, on a whim, I wandered up to the front of the lecture hall where Dr. Mittel was packing up his equipment.

  “Hi, I’m Lauren. I’m in this lecture,” I began.

  “Dr. Mittel,” he said, his lower lip almost lost in an enormous beard. “But I imagine you know that.”

  I looked down at the table, where a binder was open to a page of detailed notes. I wasn’t used to chatting with instructors eye-to-eye; I had never been the kind of student who was distinguished for academics, admirable work ethic or even, for that matter, decent attendance. “I was just wondering. You mentioned there was a darkroom on campus.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Are you a photographer?”

  “No. I mean—I’m interested, though.”

  He gave me a quick glance before closing the binder and zipping up his bag. “Do you have a camera?”

  “Not a very good one,” I acknowledged. Most summers, when I’d gone off to camp, Mom had sent me along with a cheap point-and-click camera and several rolls of film with the understanding that neither might survive the summer. Somewhere, in my jumble of unpacked belongings, I had a 35mm Kodak.

  “Tell you what,” Dr. Mittel said. “Why don’t you shoot a roll or two and bring it by my office? I’d be happy to develop your film and look at it with you.”

  “Is there something...” I hesitated, afraid the question would be stupid. Knowing it was. “I mean, in terms of a subject, is there something I should focus on?”

  Dr. Mittel’s smile was kind, and behind it I read a sort of mitigated pity. Poor little rich girl, trying hard for that A. “Shoot what speaks to you,” he said. “People, scenery, whatever.”

  * * *

  That weekend, I rode the shuttle into town and bartered with the owner of an electronics repair store over a forty-year-old Leica, all but draining my bank account.

  Erin whistled later, finding the receipt I’d placed on my desk. “You spent nine hundred dollars on that thing?”

  “The owner said it was the best,” I told her. The camera and its accessories were spread out on the bed, and I was figuring out the lenses and attachments from the store owner’s scribbled notes. The Leica came with a somewhat battered case that I instantly loved, thinking of all the places it must have gone with its previous owner.

  “But this is just for one assi
gnment, right?” she asked. I could see her mind clicking like a cash register. She would tell her friends, all the other Keale girls who were just like her, and I would be an anecdote to their stories, an inside joke. The girl who tried to buy her way to an A.

  “For now, but I might take a photography class next semester,” I said, the idea just occurring to me.

  Erin frowned. “Isn’t everything supposed to be switching to digital?”

  I raised the camera to my eye, locating Erin’s perfect, pouty face in the viewfinder. She raised a hand in protest, and I snapped a picture, relishing the smart click of the shutter, the dark curtain spilling over the lens.

  “Lauren! I don’t even have my hair done.”

  “Relax,” I said. “It’s not loaded.”

  I spent the next week shooting rolls of film all over campus, looking for interesting angles and tricks of light. I lugged my camera bag to the chapel to shoot the sunrise streaming through stained glass, and onto the roof of Stanton Hall at sunset to catch the last wink of sun as it disappeared over a row of elms, the branches backlit. I stopped some girls on the way to class, and photographed them with their arms around each other’s shoulders. “Is this for the yearbook?” one of them wanted to know, and I told her it just might be. What I liked most was the feeling of authority that came with the camera hanging from my neck, and the way I could instantly disappear when I looked through the viewfinder.

  Dr. Mittel developed two rolls for me and we met in his office to look at the contact sheet through his loupe, a cylindrical magnifying lens that he kept on his desk. He passed over the smiling girls in their stiff poses, the sunrises and sunsets. “This is good for a first attempt,” he said finally. “You’re looking for all the right things—angles, lighting. And you must have a good lens on that camera of yours.”