Here We Lie

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  “Not me,” she said, rolling down the window a quarter inch to catch raindrops on her tongue. Then, after a beat, she threw open the door and ran into the rain, her jeans and sweatshirt immediately waterlogged. Come on, she gestured through the windshield. I shook my head, laughing, but after another minute I gave in. We danced in the rain until even our underwear was soaked, and dark streaks of mascara ran down Megan’s face. We dried ourselves in the bathroom of a gas station, angling for a spot beneath the hand dryer, and we were still laughing an hour later when we walked into our dorm, shoes squishing.

  * * *

  I was busy that fall with my classes, including the biology class that had finally caught up with me, complete with its lab requirement and a weekly study group. I was freelancing for the Courier, too, taking the odd shot of visiting speakers and students being recognized for one achievement or another. Megan worked Tuesday nights at the switchboard in the student union building as well as alternating Friday and Saturday night shifts. I usually joined her there on Tuesdays when I got out of my bio lab, sitting cross-legged on the floor directly beneath the counter, so I wouldn’t be visible in case her supervisor passed by. She helped me make vocabulary flashcards and quizzed me relentlessly; it was the only way I passed the random quizzes my instructor loved to hit us with at the beginning of class.

  “This is something I will seriously never use in my life,” I whined.

  “But we’re becoming well-rounded,” Megan said, parroting one of Keale’s basic tenets. “We know about history, philosophy, political science...”

  “Oh, yes,” I yawned. “We’ll be able to talk about anything at dinner parties.”

  The phone rang, and I listened as she gave directions to an out-of-town visitor, then some recommendations for places to eat on and off campus.

  When she hung up, I said, “That was impressive, Ms. Mazeros.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Do me a favor. Tell my supervisor I deserve a raise.”

  “You at least deserve an employee of the month plaque,” I said. “It’s outrageous that you haven’t earned wild accolades for the work you do here.”

  The phone rang again, and Megan connected the incoming caller to a student’s room.

  I secured my flashcards with a rubber band, tossed them into my backpack and retrieved from its depths a half-eaten bag of potato chips. “What are we going to do after we graduate?”

  “That’s three years away,” Megan pointed out. “And first you have to pass bio.”

  I ignored her. “No, seriously. We’ll travel the world. We’ll get one of those campers and live out in the middle of Arizona or something. We’ll be some kind of fearsome duo, like in Thelma & Louise.”

  “You mean we’ll drive off a cliff?”

  I reached into my backpack for a water bottle and took a long swig. “It doesn’t have to end that way.”

  She fielded two more phone calls and took a sip from my bottle. “I seriously have no idea what I’ll do with myself.”

  “You’re not going back to Woodstock?”

  “Hell, no.”

  I laughed. “Well, I’ve got it all figured out, you know. I’m just biding my time here before I run off to join the circus.”

  Megan rolled her eyes. “You could be a special exhibit. The senator’s daughter on a flying trapeze.”

  “You laugh, but that’s about the best idea I have.”

  Megan said, “We should make a pact. We’ll move somewhere together after we graduate.”

  “New York,” I said. “Or London or Paris.”

  “You’d have to teach me French.”

  “Please. I’d have to teach myself. I took four years of French and can barely read a menu.”

  “Pinky swear,” Megan said, hooking her finger toward me.

  I laughed. “Is that really a thing?”

  “It was all the rage at Woodstock High School. We pinky swore on anything important—not to get the same prom dress, not to sleep with each other’s ex-boyfriends, not to go to the fair without each other.”

  “Serious stuff, then,” I confirmed.

  “Only the most serious.” She waggled her finger significantly, and I hooked mine through it, and we made it official.

  * * *

  Holly, one of our suitemates, was dating someone from Yale that fall—a guy named Matt that she’d met at a party over the summer and talked to most weeknights, lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. It was driving our other suitemate, Bethany, crazy. “You should hear the two of them. It’s ‘I miss you’ and ‘I miss you more’ and ‘When can we see each other?’ It’s disgusting,” Bethany said, plunking herself down on Megan’s bed.

  We commiserated; that was the nice thing about Keale, after all. It was perfectly acceptable to spend a Friday night dyeing each other’s hair in the sink or watching an old Disney movie, or blasting one of Megan’s Nirvana CDs and headbanging until we gave ourselves whiplash. We didn’t have dates to plan, and we got along just fine without men.

  Eventually, during one of their nightly conversations, Holly and Matt realized that they each had three single suitemates and began planning a quadruple date—dinner, a movie and then, Holly winked significantly, “We’ll see where it leads.”

  “I thought one of the perks of being here was the absence of shit like this,” Megan protested, and I had to agree. It sounded like a bad idea.

  Eventually Holly and Bethany (who was apparently less disgusted by the idea of a boyfriend once one was suggested for her) wore us down. Megan swapped weekend work schedules, and the guys drove up from New Haven. They were all current economics majors and future MBAs, interchangeable, as far as I was concerned. “Any preferences?” Holly asked, giving us the rundown before they arrived.

  “No one shorter than me,” I said.

  “No one more of an asshole than me,” Megan said.

  We paired off, and at first it was friendly and casual—Holly and Matt and Bethany and Nate in Matt’s car; I offered to drive Megan and Jason and my date, Nicholas. Jason asked if we could listen to rap, which he claimed to love. In the rearview mirror, I glimpsed the whites of Megan’s eyes, midroll. Dinner in Litchfield was a somewhat formal and awkward affair that felt like going out with my parents—a nice Italian restaurant, fussy table linens, a giant round table with a towering centerpiece. Holly and Matt sat snuggled close, and the rest of us made awkward conversations about our majors and hometowns. We were all from the East Coast except for Megan, and after a few jokes about The Wizard of Oz and country music, Bethany chirped, “You know Lauren’s dad’s a senator, right?”

  “Seriously?” Nicholas asked. He turned to Matt. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Matt shrugged. “I didn’t know.”

  I glared at Bethany. Earlier, when we were jostling for position in front of our dinky bathroom mirror, I’d specifically asked if no one could mention my family.

  “That’s not a joke? He’s a real senator?” Jason wanted to know. Previously, he’d been staring at Megan’s boobs—everyone everywhere stared at Megan’s boobs, so this was expected—but now he half turned toward me, his shoulder blocking my view of Megan.

  “He’s real all right,” I said.

  Jason leaned closer to me, peering at my face. He snapped his fingers. “Mabrey. I thought you looked familiar.”

  With Nicholas closing in on one side and Jason on the other, I was beginning to feel claustrophobic. I reached for my napkin, fluffing it out in my lap. “You thought I looked like a fifty-four-year-old man? Thanks.”

  “Nah, it’s the pedigree. The...carriage. You know. You looked like someone important.”

  “She’s not a fucking racehorse,” Megan said.

  “Relax,” said Jason, not looking at her. “I’m allowed to call it as I see it.”

  Bethany darted nervous glances between us. “Hey, wh
at do you think about—” she began, but the question was interrupted by the arrival of our food, the servers hovering over our left shoulders. For a few moments, the tension abated as we picked up our utensils and started in on our plates.

  Nate asked, “So we’re going to see a movie after this, right? Did we decide what we’re seeing?”

  Bethany smiled at him gratefully. “There are three different movies all starting around nine.”

  We went through the selections, none of which sounded familiar to me. Nicholas put his arm on the back of my chair. “Did you want to see a movie?”

  I shrugged, picking at my ravioli. “I thought that was the plan.”

  Jason asked if there was anything else to do around here.

  “Not particularly,” I said.

  “Well, what do you normally do on the weekends?” He directed the question to me, but Megan answered.

  “Sometimes we go cow tipping,” she said. “We sneak out into a field, come up right behind a cow and wham.” She made a gesture with her fork, and a bit of red sauce fell onto the white tablecloth, spreading out like a bloodstain.

  I laughed. “She’s kidding.”

  Megan shook her head. “I’m not. We’ll take you, if you want.”

  Bethany said, “I want to see a movie. I thought that was the plan. But I guess we could split up. You guys could always go back with Lauren.”

  Jason and Nicholas glanced at each other, and I wondered if they were considering it. I tried to catch Megan’s eye, to get a read on her. There was something dangerous in her face, a warning sign. She reached for her water glass, the stem clanging loudly against her plate.

  The conversation circled back to my dad—if he knew the president, if I knew the president, what we thought about Bill Clinton, whether we thought it was odd that Monica Lewinsky had saved her navy dress. Nate made a joke about oral sex and Bethany laughed, slapping him on the arm.

  “These guys in Washington, they have all the perks,” Jason laughed. “Not your dad, I mean. Obviously.”

  “Thanks. Obviously.”

  Jason seemed to realize he’d offended me. “My dad’s a corporate attorney. He handles all these big clients, like Enron and Exxon.”

  Megan said brightly, “You must be so proud of him.”

  He half turned back to her, lip curled. “What does your dad do?”

  “My dad? I believe currently he’s fertilizing a cemetery.”

  It went quiet. Even Holly and Matt noticed the silence and looked up.

  “Megan,” I said, reaching around behind Jason’s back to touch her shoulder. She shook off my hand, not looking at me.

  “What does that mean?” Nicholas asked.

  “It means he’s dead, asshole.” Megan pushed back her chair. “Excuse me. I think I’m going to visit the powder room.”

  From the exaggerated way she swayed her hips, I knew she knew that we were watching her walk away.

  Bethany looked at me. “I didn’t know her dad was dead. Did you?”

  I bit my lip, glancing in the direction of the restrooms. There was a lattice wall dividing the restaurant in half, and I couldn’t see where Megan had gone.

  “Does she have a chip on her shoulder or what?” Jason turned to Matt. “Why did you pair me with her, anyway? Nico gets a freaking senator’s daughter, and I get—well, I don’t know what I get.”

  “You’re not getting anything,” I told him.

  Everyone but Jason laughed, somewhat nervously.

  He put his fist down heavily on the table. “I told you this was a mistake. There are plenty of girls at Yale. These ones are just freaks.”

  Bethany and Holly jumped on him, their voices loud enough to attract our server, who was suddenly there, asking coolly if he could get anyone anything. Matt jumped in to defend Holly, and I pushed back my chair.

  “It’s all right,” Nicholas said, reaching out a hand to stop me. “She probably just needs to calm down for a minute.”

  I snatched my purse from the back of the chair. “I’m going to check on her.”

  Megan was at the sink, washing her hands. Her cheeks were flushed. “Sorry,” she said. “Look—I’m no good in situations like this. Is there any way you could drop me back in Scofield before the movie? I’ll call someone from there.”

  “No way,” I said. “You are not leaving me with those idiots.”

  She smiled weakly. “I can’t go back out there.”

  I laughed. “You know what? Why don’t we just split? They don’t want us there, anyway.”

  “They want you there.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be there.”

  We grinned at each other.

  Megan went first, slipping out the bathroom door, keeping behind the latticework and disappearing out the front door. I followed a minute later, and we raced to the Saab like we were skipping out on the bill. Maybe we were; we’d never worked out in advance who was going to pay for what. I gunned the engine in Reverse, and we peeled out of the parking lot.

  A mile down the road, Megan asked, “Where are we going?”

  “Feel like seeing a movie?”

  She shrieked with laughter. “God, no.”

  * * *

  We ended up at a restaurant somewhere between Litchfield and Scofield—a burger joint with a definite smell of grease in the air.

  “This is more like it,” Megan said, sliding into a booth and reaching for a sticky menu.

  I grinned. “My kind of date.”

  “Like hell it is.”

  We ordered Diet Cokes and a giant basket of fries. Megan squirted piles of mustard and ketchup on her plate and swirled the fries through them, one by one, before they disappeared into her mouth.

  “Did I ruin everything?” she asked finally.

  “Not for me. Holly and Bethany are probably going to kill us, though.”

  She tilted her glass and fished out an ice cube, crunching it between her teeth. “I should never have agreed to it. It’s not my scene. Preppy guys, fancy restaurants, everyone’s pedigree on display. It’s so dull and—” She fished for the word.

  “Pretentious,” I supplied.

  “Right. Give me the Burger Barn every time.”

  I understood what she was saying, but I understood, too, that our lives were very different. The Yale guys were annoying, but I’d slipped seamlessly into their conversation. It was familiar and expected, Mabrey-esque.

  Megan crunched another piece of ice. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me?”

  I took a deep breath. “Is your dad really dead?”

  She nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought you said he was just—gone. I figured he’d moved to a different part of the state. I mean, I didn’t realize that was a euphemism.”

  She fiddled with her straw in her glass, bending it backward and forward, stabbing it against frozen chunks of ice at the bottom of her glass. “I haven’t told anyone here. He died the year after I graduated. He had cancer—mesothelioma. It’s from asbestos. It gets into the lining of the lungs.” Her words caught in her throat.

  “I’m so sorry. That must have been awful.” I did some mental math, some of the pieces of Megan’s life snapping into place. The “gap year” she’d taken after high school, not at all like the gap years my friends and I had discussed at Reardon, wondering if our parents might fund six months on a catamaran, a winter of being a ski bum in the Alps. Her dad had died, and her mom had started dating someone else, and she’d moved out here.

  “That’s not the worst part of it,” she said. “He was dying for so long. He got this diagnosis of eighteen months, but he could hardly breathe at the end. He was going to die no matter what. There wasn’t any help for him, for what he had. There weren’t any treatments, only m
orphine. It was going to happen anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  A single tear dripped from Megan’s right eye and trailed down her cheek to the corner of her mouth, where it quivered on her lip. She did nothing to brush it away. “I helped him along. He asked me to, and I did.”

  I realized I was holding my breath, trying to understand if I was hearing what I thought I was hearing. I had about a million questions, but I didn’t know how to ask any of them, or whether I really wanted to know the answers. Finally, I said, “But he was going to die, on his own?” The last syllable rose into a question, and Megan nodded.

  “That’s what I tell myself. That’s about the only way I can handle what I did.” She reached for the metal dispenser and plucked several single-ply napkins out, one after another, and blew her nose.

  “Why are you telling me?” I asked finally.

  “I don’t know. I was sick of not telling you the truth. And also I thought maybe you should know that about me, in case you wanted to—I don’t know. Rethink things.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Rethink things?”

  “Like, find another roommate. Or start hanging around with Holly and Bethany. I won’t be offended.”

  “What are you saying? And why would you say it? This doesn’t change anything between us. I don’t think less of you. I feel—I don’t know. Sympathetic. Kind of horrified, but not because I think you’re a monster. Just because you were in that situation, and that’s horrifying.”

  She gave me a nervous smile—and I had another flash of understanding, one that told me I was seeing the real Megan, stripped of bravado and pretense. It was how I’d felt seeing my old roommate Erin that morning when she was still asleep, when she was unaware and unselfconscious.

  “Okay,” I said, rushing before I could stop what I was about to do. “We’re telling secrets? I have one, too.”

  Megan laughed. “What—once you slipped a hundred-dollar bill from your mom’s purse and didn’t tell her? Somehow I don’t think you’re going to top mine.”

  “Listen,” I said, and I let the story come, even though some of the details had gone fuzzy. I told her about the summer I’d volunteered at The Coop, about having sex with Marcus on the sagging couch in the employee break room. Megan was still, her eyes wide. I told her how I’d pretended not to know anything about the quart-sized bag of pot in my backpack, how Marcus had gone to jail, what had happened to him there.