Seven Ways We Lie

by Riley Redgate

  After a minute of typing, Valentine tucks the phone back into his pocket. “Then it isn’t statutory rape. The age of consent in Kansas is sixteen.”

  Olivia speaks up. “That doesn’t make it okay,” she says sharply. “Just because there’s some arbitrary number they pick for consent doesn’t mean he can’t be pressuring her.”

  “Did he say they’d had sex?” Valentine asks. “Did she? Did anybody describe to you the level of their sexual involvement?”

  “I mean, no, but—”

  Valentine folds his arms. “Then we need to at least talk to her.”

  “Dude,” Matt says, “why are you trying to put this off?”

  Valentine shoots back, “And why are you so avid to indict Juniper? Look: telling anybody about this has as much of an impact on her life as on his. We don’t know nearly as much as you all seem to think, and if this is happening, I presume it’s been happening for a while now. So what difference does a few days make? Not a lot in time, but vast amounts in terms of the information we could learn by, oh, I don’t know, talking to either of these people.”

  Valentine’s outburst leaves a heavy silence behind. His face turns red, that complete red that reaches up to the roots of his hair.

  “Yeah,” I say. “You’re right. We should wait.”

  Valentine glances up at me, and I catch a split second of gratitude in his eyes.

  “I . . . okay,” Olivia says helplessly. “I’m so worried, though.”

  “Well,” Valentine says, “the best course of action is not to ruin her life while she’s got a tube up her nose in some hospital bed.”

  Always the picture of tact, Valentine. I raise my hands, aiming for a gentle intervention. “It’s going to be okay, Olivia,” I say in my most reassuring voice. “We’re going to figure this out sometime when it’s not one in the morning, all right? Once she gets out of the hospital and rests up a bit, you can talk to her, and we can go from there. Sound good?”

  She half smiles. “Thanks, Lucas.”

  “Great. So let’s clean this place up, yeah?” I look around at the others and rub my hands together, offering them the biggest smile I can muster. “Where should we start?”

  But in my head, everything is a hundred percent serious. I picture myself walking onto the set of The Confessor, this secret locked away, worth the full $50,000. The five of us have been shackled together, forging an imperfect but unbreakable circle.

  This bed isn’t mine.

  These crisp sheets, looking in the light as if they’ve been frosted with dust. (Is it dust? Is it sugar? Is it ground-up hounds’ teeth? Christ, my head, my head)—

  This sunlight, spotty and broken. Every fragment—

  bang

    bang

  on the back of my skull.

  My rubbery fingers find an IV plugged into my body:

  if they yanked it out, would I jerk

  slump

  shut down?

  I am frail, I am fragile, I am flawed, yes—and for once, God, for once the world is treating me as such.

  I find the clock,

  remember how to read 4:00 PM.

  Remember everything and nothing at all.

  But David . . .

  I whip up. Bad night. Last night.

  Eyes piece the world together: rubber and tiled floor and thin, brittle blinds . . .

  Hospital. Alcohol. Caught.

  Kiss my past future away. (So much for it.)

  I’m crying, like I can afford the saline extract.

  My mother keeps vigil by my bed.

  The newspaper flops, a dead bird in her lap.

  She is so confused. It hurts to see.

  “Sweetie . . .”

  Stop tiptoeing, I want to scream. Stop tiptoeing and storm at me. I deserve it. Do it.

  This, her feeble tempest: I hope this won’t happen again.

  “You,” I say, “have got to be kidding me.”

  People have said I have her eyes,

  but I hope I don’t look that cowardly,

  readjusting at the first hint of steel

  the first flash of fire.

  Where is the hard-faced professionalism she slips on for work each morning?

  She should be raging. Don’t you dare, she should be saying. Don’t you talk back to me.

  You know better.

  (I do know better.)

  “Juniper,” she says, “tell me how you’re feeling.”

  “I can’t believe you,” I mumble.

  “Sweetie—why?”

  A hell rustles inside my skull and pours out. “Are you even angry at me? I did everything wrong—why aren’t you mad? Aren’t you going to ask how I got here? Why don’t you stop me?”

  I don’t realize I’m screaming until a door hinge complains and I

  slam back to the bed,

  the pillow engulfing my peripheral in a puff.

  (When did I sit up?)

  They make her get out, and she looks lost.

  I’m home three hours later. My mother’s eyes are a swaying pendulum that cannot fix on me. Her mouth seems wired shut.

  My father will be back this evening. If he so much as raises his voice,

  it will signify a radical revolution, shaking me from power.

  My mother tucks me into

  my bed’s warm embrace.

  The second she vanishes, I pull out my phone to find

  twelve calls, a neat dozen, lined up from last night.

  Flashes linger past midnight. The dim memory

  of the screen pressed to my cheek, heated as a kiss,

  and the static whisper of his sigh. (I picture his narrow shoulder blades

  folding in on themselves like origami.)

  I tap voice mail. It conjures up the sound of him:

  “Juniper. Are you okay? Please call me back. Call me as soon as you get this. If I don’t hear from you in three minutes, I’m calling an ambulance. Text, call, anything. Please.”

  (a tight pause.)

  “June, I need you. To be all right.”

  (click.)

  I listen to it over, over, and over.

  It takes titanic willpower to set the phone down.

  “I need you,” he said. I am alight with it.

  David.

  I ache to go back to your home—

  (I still have the key burning inside my pillowcase—)

  just one more time,

  to your bare living room where I shrugged my jacket onto your sofa, or the kitchen where we drank coffee and murmured lavender words at 3:45 AM, or the bathroom where you brushed your teeth bleary-eyed the morning after I dared to stay the night, or the bedroom where you held me, just held me, where I tried to touch you a thousand times and you said, “No, June, we can’t,”

  we can’t,

  or the rooftop where we froze together and my fingers kissed your wrist, our words kissed each other, there hanging in the air so softly, mingled like breath in the black sky.

  David.

  I nurse your name like a wound.

  How excruciating, how much I command you, how much you command me,

  the power we have over each other.

  God in heaven, I wonder what a healthy relationship feels like.

  We need each other too much.

  Or maybe love is never healthy, and we should guard our hearts in hospitals

  for preemptive healing.

  AS THE SUN SETS ON SUNDAY, I HEAR MY SISTER heading downstairs to set the table. You can always tell when it’s Grace. She limps down the steps patiently. A car accident messed up her foot when she was young, so she wants to be a nurse. She’s selfless like that. Good at turning bad into good.

  I sit at my desk and stare out at the sunset for a second. It’s been a strange, quiet weekend without Olivia and Juniper. The solitude doesn’t feel good—it aches—but what does feel good is having told them how I feel. Having laid my insecurities bare for once.

  I cap the Sharpie, place it beside my post
er, and slide back from my desk to admire my handiwork. I’m not the most artistic person, but I’ve made enough posters for clubs that I’m used to designing them. A MAN WITHOUT A VOTE IS A MAN WITHOUT PROTECTION, this one says. LYNDON B. JOHNSON.

  They’ll take the vote on Thursday, and the results will come in on Friday. Mom asked me earlier why I wasn’t running. After all, Claire, if you want something done right . . .

  I couldn’t explain it to her. Elections aren’t like a sport, where you practice until you improve. Some people are blessed with innate likability, and let’s be honest: nobody’s winning a high school election without it. Me winning a popularity contest? Laughable.

  I was a mess in middle school. More of my face was acne than clear skin. My braces went on in sixth grade and didn’t come off until sophomore year. My clothes clung to awkward places on my body, as if they’d been stretched over a poorly sized mannequin.

  Things are better now, but I’m still not class president material. Politicians have to be stately. Not short and tactless and a size ten.

  “Dinner,” comes Grace’s voice from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Coming!” I yell back, but my phone buzzes. I check it—the number of texts from Olivia has grown since morning. And now four missed calls top the list.

  I nearly called her and Juni today, but I chickened out. I kept thinking about that look on their faces, the exasperation. It stings to remember. That’s me: a frustration waiting to happen. They probably wished they’d never told me about Lucas.

  Still, that’s a lot of notifications.

  “Fine,” I mutter to myself, and I unlock my phone. Olivia’s texts pop up in a long line.

  12:38 am: Hey Claire. Juniper’s in the hospital right now. I’m at her house cleaning up with a few people. Her parents are there with her.

  Something seizes in my chest. I sit up straight, thumbing downward. God, I leave them alone for one night, and this happens?

  2:24 am: Her parents texted me and said it looks like she’s going to be all right.

  2:32 am: I’m heading home

  11:08 am: Claire? It would be good to hear from you

  1:54 pm: So she got discharged. I heard from her mom and J is “drained and irritable” but doing fine, she’s going to sleep it off. Might miss school tomorrow but they’re not sure. I’m going to visit her tonight after dinner if you want to come with.

  My mind spins. My first instinct is to jump in the car and drive to Juni’s house. A call is the least I should do.

  But a tiny, hidden part of me whispers, Don’t bother. From this text saga, it’s clear she’s all right. This is just another story to tell, just another bad night.

  I read and reread Olivia’s texts. In the end, I set down my phone without replying.

  WHEN I POKE MY HEAD AROUND JUNIPER’S DOOR, she’s propped up in a mountain of pillows, reading a tattered copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

  “Hey,” Juni says, sliding a bookmark between the pages. She looks normal. I don’t know what I expected—for her to look like a disaster, suddenly, now that I know about her and Mr. García? But no. People don’t change because you learn more about them. Even the ones you think you know are brimming over with foreign matter in the end.

  “You’re still in bed. You feeling okay?”

  “I’m completely fine, but Mom hasn’t let me leave my room.” She flicks her hair out of her eyes. “She’s acting like I’m dying of consumption or something.”

  “Alas!” I fake-swoon onto the bed. “If consumption taketh thee, I shall perish from grief!”

  “Yeah, don’t perish or whatever.”

  “Your concern is overwhelming.” I sit back up, bracing myself. Nothing for it. “So. What was that about, last night?”

  “What was what about?”

  “The . . . why did you lock yourself in?”

  “No reason. Drunk and stupid, I suppose,” she says without a flicker in her expression. I didn’t realize how good she was at lying.

  I avoid her eyes, my thoughts cluttered with ridiculous theories I cooked up in a sleepless haze last night. (What if this has been going on since freshman year? What if Juni has a second cell phone stashed in her toilet tank, like on Breaking Bad? What if Juni is secretly fifty years old?)

  I remember the day of the assembly—her wide-eyed expression as she sat beside me. I’d assumed it was shock, but now, in my mind’s eye, it looks like fear.

  “Is something up?” she asks.

  My heart flops in my chest like a dying fish. I grope around for words. How do I phrase a question this potentially life-ruining? “Yeah. Can I talk to you about a thing?” I say, keeping my nerves out of my voice.

  “Of course. What’s the thing? Are you all right?”

  “No, yeah, I’m fine.” I swallow hard. “Look. We were cleaning up last night, five of us. It was me, my sister, and Lucas and Valentine Simmons and Matt Jackson. And we were . . . and we found your phone. When it rang.”

  Staring into her eyes, I can pinpoint the exact second she realizes what I’m saying. Her face goes blank. My heart squeezes up tight, like a sponge, quits, and leaves me bloodless.

  “Right,” she says. “My phone.” The words are so calm, it could be a recorded message. The number you have reached has been disconnected.

  Juniper looks back at the book in her lap. I float in the silence, up toward her ceiling, this tacit admission loosing us from the gravity of the real world. This changes things, changes us. We’re going to carry this together now, until graduation and past.

  “Five of you,” she whispers. “Oh God, that’s—this is bad. Did you say Valentine Simmons? And Matt? That’s not okay—he’s an utter douchebag. What am I going to—”

  “It’s okay; he’s not an actual douche,” I say, struggling to sound encouraging. “I found out he’s, like . . . I don’t know . . . a crustacean? He’s got this hard shell, but he’s soft on the inside.”

  Juniper stares up at me from her army of pillows. A disbelieving quiver in her lips gives her away. “A crustacean? I’m panicking here, and that’s the best you can do?”

  The tension snaps. “Hey, that comparison was fine by my extremely low standards.”

  Juniper tucks her hair behind her ear. “Okay. So. I . . . how did you find out?”

  “Your phone was ringing, so I picked up and said one word, and he, like, exploded. He was all, Thank God, I was so worried, and he kept going on and on.” I bite my lip. “The others were in the room. I should’ve left when I recognized his voice. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. There’s no reason you should’ve known how to react.” She’s ashen-faced. “So. Did someone tell the school?”

  “Most of us wanted to, but Valentine got all logic-y and talked us into staying quiet.”

  The relief that spreads across her face is so instant, so full, I feel a weight lift off my own chest. “Oh, thank God,” she says. “I was sure someone would’ve talked.”

  “Valentine made us promise to talk to you first.”

  “I’ll make sure to thank him,” she says. “You can’t get David in trouble.”

  “David,” I repeat, the name feeling alien on my tongue. “David? Sorry, Juni, but this is so frickin’ weird.”

  Juniper chuckles. The seriousness in the air tilts, but it thuds back into place as her laugh fades. “How did this happen?” I ask. “You’re not even in his class.”

  “Remember when I worked at Java Jamboree over the summer?”

  “ ’Course. Glorious weeks of free lattes.”

  “Well, he came in for a straight week in June. Trying to work up the nerve to talk to me, he said.” Juni looks as if she’s trying to suppress a smile. It makes her eyes shine. “He’d just moved here, and on day five, he ordered some idiotically complicated coffee, then came back up to me. And I said, ‘Is something wrong with that?’ and he said, ‘No, I just wanted to say I’m glad I found the best coffee shop in this town. And the prettiest barista.
’ ”

  “That was his line?”

  “Yeah,” she says dryly. “Barely stammered it out, too. For a theater person, he’s pretty awful with lines.” She sighs. “Anyway, since he’s new this year, I didn’t know he was a teacher at the time. I mean, we knew there was some sort of age difference, but I kept putting it off, avoiding the subject whenever he tried to bring it up. The first time he told me where he worked, I couldn’t deal. I locked myself in my car. I couldn’t . . .” Her voice peters out.

  She rubs her forearm. A stray bit of tape is tacked near her elbow, beside the puncture mark where the IV went in. I wait, not wanting to push her.

  “So,” she says. “Start of school, I switched into AP to get out of his honors class. We didn’t see each other at school. Maybe two or three times, so it’s just our shit luck someone found out. And when he heard what the assembly was going to be about, he broke things off.” Her voice falters. “Right now we’re . . . I don’t know what we are anymore.”

  Juniper sinks under her covers. I don’t move. I doubt I could if I tried.

  “I don’t know.” She stares ahead at the mirror above her bureau. She looks like a specter, drained and pale. “I feel like I’ve been doing this forever, not five months. Not just covering it up; I mean needing him. Being in love with him is like this steady . . . like music playing in the background. All the time. Sometimes it’s comforting, and sometimes it drives me insane.”

  She frowns, as if trying to understand her own words. “He’s brilliant, you know. There’s some people—you don’t get how they fit together, they’re so full, there’s so much there. That’s how he is, and I knew it from the first time we talked.” She takes her hair out of its messy ponytail, letting it fall in a thin blond line over one shoulder. “It’s funny, because I never believed in the whole . . . but sometimes you just know, I suppose.” Her gray eyes glow in the lamplight. For the first time, I see the full weight of exhaustion behind them. I feel as if I might cry, looking at her.

  Her eyes plead with me. “You can’t tell the school, Olivia. Nobody’s going to care that we met like two normal people over coffee; nobody’s going to care that he ended it. Nobody’s going to care that we haven’t even—” She clears her throat. “You know. Had sex. All they’ll hear is ‘teacher-student affair,’ and his life is over.”