Seven Ways We Lie

by Riley Redgate

  There’s my answer. He’s not on my side—nobody’s on my side.

  Am I on my side?

  No. No, I’m not. In the ringing silence, I realize that I hate every tiny fragment of what I’ve turned into. I should have realized it before, realized that I spend every second trying to escape myself. I’m all I’ve got anymore, and I don’t even want me.

  I close my eyes, looking inside myself. Staring at what’s in there for the first time, I realize how hideous it is, all this hate. For everyone. For myself. A glaring yellow rage, pulsing there between my ribs.

  I let out a breath, and it goes cold and gray like cooling metal.

  When I open my eyes, my whole body feels limp. Punctured. All the anger has poured out. I have nothing left, nothing to give anymore—not even to this stage.

  “Let’s go back to work,” García says hoarsely.

  “No,” I say, feeling detached. As if someone raised my anchor. I am drifting, rootless, in a stagnant sea. “I’m sorry,” I murmur. “I can’t do this.”

  I walk to the front of the stage, lift my backpack, drape my coat over my shoulder, and slide off the lip of the stage. Standing at the door, I glance back. Mr. García looks as if I’ve punched him in the stomach.

  “Kat,” Emily bursts out. “Please don’t. Please.”

  I push the door open and step through. It shuts behind me with a final-sounding clank. The icy wind clutches at my bare arms, but I don’t feel it. I am a drive wiped blank, everything erased.

  I’M NOT SURE IF I FEEL BETTER OR WORSE NOW THAT everybody knows Lucas is gay, because on one hand, I might’ve told Olivia, but at least I wasn’t the one who made up that bullshit about him and Dr. Norman. But on the other hand, now his life is going to be as stressful as I thought it might be, and holy shit, it’s setting in fast. The same afternoon the news leaks, as I’m walking through the swarm of people in the junior lot after school, I catch sight of Lucas. Angie Bedford, this hard-core, post-punk, dancer chick who’s leaning against her car smoking a cigarette, calls over to him, “Hey, homo, how’s Norman?” and the conversations in the sea of people flicker for a second, and a few people laugh, and others pretend not to have heard, and others give Lucas looks like, What a loser, and as for Lucas, he’s stopped smiling and waving to people. He’s motionless, looking lost and hurt.

  I can’t help it. Something grabs me somewhere in my chest and fastens tight—warm, escalating rage—and before I know what I’m doing, I’m beside Angie’s car, and I’m snatching the cigarette out of her hand and flicking it to the asphalt and saying, “What’s your problem?”

  Her startled look twists fast into anger. All of a sudden, there’s pepper spray in her hand—what the hell, did she have that prepared?—and she says, “Keep talking.”

  “Like you’re gonna hurt me with a million people standing around,” I scoff, and Angie says, “Self-defense, bro—you’re seeming real aggressive,” and I say, “I’m not being aggressive; I’m telling you to shut up about my friend,” and she says, “Friend, huh?” and she gives me this stupid wink, and why does my neck feel hot with embarrassment? I’m not even gay, and it’s just a type of person, for Christ’s sake. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.

  Before I can fulfill my heartfelt wish to give Angie the finger, some guy’s voice calls from behind me, “Hey, fag, you his boyfriend?” and his friends laugh, and for a second I’m flabbergasted, like, wow, I thought that was the sort of dumb shit people only did in movies.

  My opinion about gay rights has always been that it’s none of my business. My mom raised me not to hate anyone for who they are. She said it, and they said it in church, so I learned it, and before this exact second, I sort of thought the rest of our school felt the same, because as far as I knew, nobody was getting beat up or bullied. But I guess I was wrong.

  I turn toward the person who called me a fag—some zitty guy with glasses I think is on tennis—and say, “Man, someday you’re going to have a friend you don’t know is gay, and you’re going to say some shit like that around him, and he’s never going to trust you again.”

  His smirk wavers for a second. He comes back with, “So . . . you are his boyfriend, is what you’re saying?” and his friends hoot with encouraging laughter. My lip curls. “So what? Better being someone’s boyfriend than being some dumb-ass homophobe.”

  People mumble to one another as I look around for Lucas, but he’s already gone. I head for my car, disgusted with everyone and everything.

  By the time I get home, my disgust has whittled itself down to tiredness. I hike up to the porch and yank open the door, letting a crack of afternoon light into our musty living room. The air smells like salt and boiling water, and Russell sleeps on the couch, his dark hair curling at the tips like mine used to when I was little, and I ruffle his hair before heading down the hall.

  “Mateo, ven aquí,” comes my mother’s voice from the kitchen. Weird. She rarely speaks in Spanish unless she wants to hide something from Russ. Weirder is the fact that she’s in the kitchen at all. When I walk in, the lights are clouded with steam, and I dump my backpack on the faded rug, sit at the table, and say, “What’s up? Why are you—” and she says, “Wash some plates, will you? I’m cooking dinner,” like it’s obvious, like we don’t eat out of the microwave seven nights a week, and I’m like, “Uh, okay, but why—” and then I break off, because her hands are shaking, and I’m embarrassed I didn’t notice from the careful control in her expression that something’s wrong.

  “¿Qué pasó?” I ask, standing, and she looks up at me and says, “Nothing,” still in that light, careless voice, and I say, “Mom, seriously,” and she says, “I asked you in here to help with the cleanup,” taking on a warning tone, and I say, “But tell me what—”

  She slams the wooden spoon onto the stove and says, “Mateo, do what I told you, and stop asking questions!” and in the reverberating wake of the cold, empty clang, I turn, trancelike, to clear off the table with clumsy hands, and there they are, the divorce papers, lying on top of the newspaper like any other printout. When I turn back to look at my mother, she’s half facing away, her body held slouched like a sagging tent, and I can’t do a thing but stare as she hunches over the counter. Her back gives one huge shudder. A tear drips down her baggy cheek. Her knuckles fly up to her mouth, and she bites on one hard, and then she starts shaking and trembling like water under thunder, and I think she might just dissolve.

  I’m silent.

  Sometimes you go a long time having fooled yourself into thinking that you’re as grown-up as you’ll ever be, or that you’re more mature than the rest of the world thinks you are, and you live in this state of constant self-assurance, and for a while nothing can upset you from this pedestal you’ve built for yourself, because you imagine yourself to be so capable. And then somebody does something that takes a golf club to your ego, and suddenly you’re nine years old again, pieced together from humiliation and gawky youthfulness and childlike ideas like, Somebody please tell me what to do, nobody taught me how to handle this, God, just look at all the things I still don’t understand, and you can’t muster up the presence of mind to do anything but stand there, stare, silent, sorry.

  Or maybe this doesn’t happen to everyone. Maybe it’s only me waiting to learn all this, waiting to find a place where I’ll understand everyone and everything and how it all works and why I’m fumbling through life’s pages with too-thick fingers, and maybe it’s only me who’s stuck in this emotional paralysis because I’m so busy trying to seem grown-up and feel grown-up I haven’t done any growing up, and maybe it’s only me standing in a small, dimly lit room, watching someone I love break down in front of me and not knowing what to do or where to turn or who I’m supposed to be.

  7:15 COMES AND GOES, AND DAD DOESN’T WALK through the door. I don’t ask where he is. Something’s wrong with my throat.

  Russ, swinging his legs at the dinner table, says, “Mommy. Where is Daddy?” and I say, “Come on, Rus
s, eat your dinner,” and Russ turns his big, round eyes on me—Dad’s eyes—and says, “Where is Daddy?” and I swallow and prod his little fork toward his hand, like, “Hush, just—here.” Mom’s jaw moves mechanically as she chews, her eyes trained on the saltshaker as if she’s trying to count every grain inside.

  I watch Russ eat, my head filling up with worries. Maybe it’s stupid to worry about my brother when a million kids get brought up between two houses and turn out fine, but it’s still weird to think about how different his upbringing is going to be than mine was, how maybe Mom or Dad will remarry and Russ will call somebody else his parent, or he’ll be my age and look back and never remember living in the same house with the three of us. And maybe it’ll fade from my memories when I’m older, too, and from Mom’s and Dad’s, if they can ever forget, and once we all forget what this place felt like, it’ll be like this family never happened at all. We’ll be a new, different set of people, only me and Russell binding us together.

  After dinner, I walk Russ up to his room. We hop up the steep steps in rhythm. “One, two, sound off,” I say, a little marching tune, and his hands spread out, bouncing by his cargo shorts.

  A tiny bathroom, an angular closet more than anything, sticks off to the side of Russ’s room. As we hunker down in it, brushing our teeth, I look down at the top of his head and get this rush of light-headedness, like vertigo, and I remember my dad standing beside me, brushing his teeth, back when I was a kid. He never missed a night, not for years.

  I look back up at the mirror as my eyes start to burn, and I blink a few times, spit, rinse, swish, spit.

  I usher Russ out and into his pajamas. “Read a story,” he says as I tuck him in. Mom just switched him from a crib to a twin bed a couple of months ago. I settle on the fading quilt beside him, scoop up Where the Wild Things Are from the dark space under the bed, and crack it open to where we left off last, a page with yellow eyes and a tiny scarlet boat and a set of loving, angry, wild things gnashing their terrible teeth. As I show him the illustrations, I say in my best growl, “We’ll eat you up—we love you so,” and Russ’s eyes are round and solemn, and he lifts his hand like the boy in the monster suit, stepping into his private boat, waving good-bye.

  I WAKE UP THE NEXT MORNING AFTER THE LONGEST sleep I’ve had in months, dreamless, no yelling down the hall. I shower under water so hot, my skin flushes, I drive to school under the speed limit, I take actual notes in US History, I walk through the halls steady and clear-eyed, and the whole time, my head feels so empty, it’s as if somebody went in through my ear with a hook and tugged my brain out in one long string.

  The lunch bell rings, reminding me how little appetite I have. I don’t even want to smoke. Now that I think about it, I haven’t wanted to smoke since, what, last Friday? That’s a long gap for me, but for some reason, I’m not missing it much.

  I walk to García’s classroom—empty until 1:00 for his lunch period—and dump my stuff in my seat. The back of the room, where García has a sign reading BOOK DEN, has a huge bookshelf that I always see the Poetry Society kids ogling. I draw a chair up to the front of the bookshelf and stare down the spines, all the names in alphabetical order, deep-sounding hardbacks like The Satanic Verses and Crime and Punishment mixed in with thin paperbacks in big, goofy fonts that hardly look longer than chapter books. I run my finger over the spines, remembering that half hour on Sunday when I was finishing Inferno, when I’d gotten so used to Dante’s poetry that it slid over my eyes as gently as silk over skin, and I only had to search for word definitions a handful of times. I’d forgotten how reading felt when I was young, mental images burning brightly in my mind, my imagination smoldering above the flint and tinder of the turning pages.

  I pull out a gray-jacketed book called The Black Glass Monarch and open it.

  On Vern’s eleventh birthday, the Monarch’s Chief Lieutenant came for her.

  The story pours over me like water, drips down onto my head until I’m immersed head-to-toe, transported between the covers. I’ve never read this fast, and it’s no Dante, but every time the main character outsmarts a soldier or discovers something about her past, my grip tightens, and this world sharpens until I’ve left my own world altogether.

  “Matt?” says a voice, jerking me out of the weird reading haze, and I look over my shoulder. Olivia stands in the doorway, her head tilted, her lips glossed cherry red.

  I stand. “Olivia. Hey.”

  She heads to her desk and drops her backpack in her seat. “What are you reading?”

  “It’s, uh, called The Black Glass Monarch,” I say, and she says, “Oh, I’ve heard of that. You like fantasy?” and I’m like, “Apparently.” She approaches the Book Den shelves, glancing from title to title. I take a paper clip from the shelf and mark my page, shutting the book.

  “Listen,” she says, “I didn’t want to say it over text, but thanks for Saturday night,” and I say, “Sure. Would’ve taken you two forever to clean that place alone,” and she says, “Oh, that, too, but I meant with Dan.”

  I meet her eyes, which are careful and shaded by her short brown lashes, and I say, “Sure. He was out of line,” and after a second, she says, “Everything okay? You sound sort of . . .”

  “Of what?”

  She shrugs. “Distant, I guess,” and I say, “Yeah, well.”

  “Something happen?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, yeah, but you don’t want to hear it,” and she says, “Sure I do.”

  I lean against the bookshelf. “I found out last night that my parents are getting divorced.”

  A dark gap parts her lips, her eyes crease with sympathy, and I stare down at my shoes. “I’m sorry,” she says, and I try to sort my thoughts, which have rushed back in an eager herd, all jockeying for place. “My parents—I want them to keep trying,” I mutter, embarrassed to say it, embarrassed even to want it. “They make each other miserable, so it’s stupid. But I feel . . . I don’t know. Betrayed? Not for me. I wouldn’t give a shit, but it’s Russ. I mean, they had a kid three years ago. I feel like that’s some sort of promise to him, and they broke it.”

  Olivia leans against the bookshelf’s other side, messing with the frayed edge of her T-shirt. She has long fingers, covered in rings. “You going to talk to them about it?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to do anything, you know? I’ve just been sitting in my room for, what, five years on and off, listening to them scream at each other about jack shit, and I feel like I’m stuck there now. I feel like it doesn’t make sense to break the pattern or to . . . yeah.”

  “No, I know,” Olivia says. “Breaking patterns. Not easy. But it’s never too late to try fixing them.” She half smiles, and her voice turns dry. “In any case, you know somebody who’s missing a parental figure, and she’s turned out semi-okay, I think.”

  I look down at the cover of the book—the sword and shield of the heroine—then back up at Olivia, watching me with her usual calm good humor. “She’s turned out sort of amazing, I think,” I say, a scared, stupid thrill running down my arms into my fingertips. And then the most incredible pink tinge lights up in Olivia’s cheeks, and she laughs, her fingers pulling harder at the edge of her shirt, and as she examines her dirty sneakers, I let myself look at the contours of her face, the wide, high expanse of her forehead and the uneven arches of her eyebrows that give her that careless expression and the slight cleft of her chin and the roundness of her cheeks. Every tiny thing that makes her herself. She’s twisting her rings around her fingers now, and she takes a step closer, and she’s hardly shorter than me, but with that step, I’m looking down into her eyes, and it’s like looking down into a deep well at the very center of her, and something in there is glowing and pulsing and so alive, it swallows me like boiling water. Her thick brown hair falls over her forehead, and I see a bumpy patch where she’s spread concealer over an acne breakout above her right eyebrow, and I see the clots in her eyelashes from her mascara, and I love
every detail, because it means I’m close enough to know these tiny secrets. I wonder what she’s seeing on my face, too, and I swallow nervously and glance down at her mouth, and God, the way her lips glimmer makes me want to lean in and kiss her until I taste what she’s tasting. I want to tuck her hair behind her ear and run my thumb down her jaw and cradle the side of her face in my hand—Jesus, I want to touch her.

  “I’m, um,” she says, “I’m sort of,” and I say, “Me too. Nervous?” and she says, “Yeah, that’s the, yeah.” And I laugh, and then we’re both laughing stupidly and looking anywhere but at each other, and then like a light switch flicking off, we’re both silent again, and our eyes are locked, and she says, “Look, I know that—”

  Then the door opens, and a voice goes in my head, Are you fucking kidding? and we move back from each other so fast that I barge into the chair I was sitting in. García, heading for his desk, says, “Hey, Matt. Is that Black Glass Monarch?” And I say, “Yeah,” trying not to sound too filled with rage, even though I want to take García and shove him bodily back out the door. Could the guy be any more inconvenient these days?

  He says, “That’s a fun one. You can borrow it if you want to,” and I say, “I . . . thanks.”

  As other kids bustle in, I look back at Olivia. Her blush has turned a brilliant red. She says, “Um, I’ll text you later,” and hurries back to her desk, her brown hair swishing from side to side. Every muscle in my body is still tense from her proximity.

  TO-DO:

  • Make sure everyone knows it’s not true. None of my friends were in their usual spots during break.

  • Eat lunch with Valentine. Valentine was not by the trailers today. He is not texting me back. Figure out why.

  • Place at swim meet.

  I CRASH OUT OF THE WATER WITH A GASP. THE WORLD roars back into sound around me, and cool air slaps my cheeks. My heart pounding, I check the clock.