But the good memories of her are soured by the ones that hinted she would leave. In hindsight, it seems so obvious. She took random trips without warning, overnight drives and weekend sojourns, unable to stand Kansas for longer than a few weeks at a go. She scooped up and dropped hobby after hobby, everything from tennis to painting. She never held down friends, either, always dropping out of touch for one convincing-sounding reason or another.
I force myself not to fling the photo away. I drop the frame back into place and crumple onto my bed, trying to deaden the anger. Thunder grinds to life outside, lazy and languorous and so deep, my house shudders.
My phone tempts me. I can’t call Juniper—I can’t add this to her plate. Claire? God knows what she would say.
My finger hovers over Matt’s contact for a second. He just found out about his parents’ divorce, for God’s sake. Can I load this on him, too?
Apparently I can. God, I’m selfish, I think as I hit call. It rings once, twice, three times before he picks up.
“Olivia?” he says. “I—hi.”
“Hey,” I say, my voice thick.
“What’s, um, what’s up?”
My throat ekes out a tiny noise, and I crush my hand to my lips. Don’t be so weak. You don’t get to cry. It’s bad enough that you’re making this call.
For a second, I can’t talk. I can’t even breathe. Weight presses on my chest, tangled up in my ribs like thick hair gnarled in a comb. My heart pounds, every beat a burst of pain.
“H-have you talked to your parents?” I manage. “About Russ?”
“No. I will after dinner, once he’s asleep.”
“Good. Good, great.” I look up at the ceiling, breathing in and out on eight-counts.
“What’s going on?” Matt says. “Hey, you can say.”
“It’s not—there’s not—”
“Yo,” he says. “Talk.”
More lightning. The lights flicker. Looks like night outside already, and it’s barely 5:45.
“Just . . .” I shake my head. In the absence of words, the rain splattering on my window is louder than a snare drum.
For a minute I stay quiet on the line, wondering how I can feel this outside myself.
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry, I just . . . Dan called me and . . .”
“Oh Jesus. What did he say?”
“That I’m a slut and deserve to be treated like one. And by ‘treated like a slut,’ he means ‘treated like I’m open for business at all times to everyone.’ ” I wipe my nose on the back of my hand. This is so self-indulgent.
“He’s a dick,” Matt says.
“I mean, I wouldn’t care if it were just him, but everyone thinks that. Richard Brown’s a huge man-whore, but girls never say, ‘He’ll probably sleep with me if I give him the time of day, and if he doesn’t, well, false advertising.’ Why doesn’t it work like that? Why is it just me?”
Matt pauses for a second before saying, “ ’Cause guys think about sex all the time, so it seems normal when they see girls in terms of . . . you know. Sex?”
“But some girls think about sex all the time, too. So why do boys get to be like, oh man, bro, dude, I’m gonna get mad pussy tonight, and people are like, ah yes, so normal, but if a girl goes out like, yeah, I’m trying to get some dick, everyone gets all puritan?”
Matt’s quiet.
“Also,” I say, in full steam now, “you don’t think about sex all the time, do you?”
“I mean, not all the time,” he says. “A lot, sure. But it’s not, like, a problem.”
“So why do people act like all dudes are sex-obsessed maniacs? That’s messed up, too.”
“I guess?” he says, sounding bemused.
“Sorry. I’m ranting. I just—thinking about hooking up with Dan now is so gross. My track record is so, like, besmirched by his presence.” I pull my covers over my head.
“I used to be friends with him in middle school,” Matt says. “He ditched me and Burke freshman year, which is fine. I mean, not like I’m Einstein, but Dan never had more than about point-eight brain cells, so, not a huge loss.”
I can’t even get any vindictive satisfaction from the insult. “He’s not even unique,” I mumble. “He’s the same.”
“As what?”
I curl up around my Star Wars pillow. “I don’t know. The other guys I’ve hooked up with.” I sigh, sending a brush of static into the phone. “Sometimes it’s, like, what’s the point anymore? Why am I trying to fill this space with boys? It’s—”
“What space?” he asks.
“I—what?”
“You said, trying to fill the space. What space?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of . . .” I bite my lip, but I can’t keep it back. “Sometimes it feels like I’m not enough. For anyone to stay. You know?”
“Oh. I . . . yeah.” He lowers his voice. “I don’t think you’re right, but I get it.”
“It’s stupid, anyway.” I force a hard laugh. “Like guys could compensate for me feeling unwanted and whatever.” The second the sentence comes out, I want to yank it back. Why am I rambling about my insecurities with the boy I have a crush on, of all people?
Matt stays quiet for what feels like several months, prolonging my humiliation.
Finally, he says, “You are wanted.”
A shiver darts down my arms. His voice is low, but what’s underneath comes out loud and clear: I want you.
I don’t say anything. Can’t say anything. In the commanding quiet, we lay every basic function bare for each other: the stir of our breath, the pump of blood in our veins, the air mixing in our eardrums. The softest nothing sound either of us could make. And something deep in me calms, cocooned in a wellspring of evening silence.
I open my mouth, intending to say something hopelessly witty. Instead, after a second of strangled hesitation, what comes out is, “Tell me something.”
“What?” he says.
“Tell me something. Anything. I don’t—it doesn’t need to be a—really, anything.”
“Okay,” he says, clearly bewildered. “Uh, in seventh grade I broke my wrist, and this guy Adam something was like, using your right hand too much? And everyone called me ‘Matt Jackoff’ for, like, two years. With hand motions included. So that sucked ass.”
I can’t help but laugh. “God, middle school kids are even worse than high school kids.”
“I don’t know. High school kids are pretty bad.”
“Some of them are all right.” I let my usual teasing tone seep back into my voice. “Like, you’re all right.”
Another pause.
“You tell me something,” he says, but the words sound so careful, I get the sense he doesn’t mean just anything.
“Something?”
“Can I ask about your mom? Like, what happened?”
I pull back the covers, staring at my ceiling, allowing the absence of my mother to ache. Thoughts of her sit on the surface, pulsing like reopened wounds.
“Okay, so my family went to New York when I was fourteen,” I say. “End of eighth grade.” I still remember the sight of Mom on Fifth Avenue—it’s an image cut sharp and hard, a facet deep in a gem. Her smile is stamped against the twilit gloom of the city, her blond hair whitened by the glow of a neon sign. Her hands are in the pockets of her jeans, her scarf nestling her chin in loose-woven linen. In my mind’s eye, she looks so much like Kat. Sometimes I think there’s nothing of Mom’s face left in my mind, that Kat’s snuck in and replaced my memories of her, that I’ve fooled myself into thinking I remember the sight of her.
“We were there for one weekend,” I say, “staying at this hotel in Brooklyn. We were supposed to be flying out Monday morning, one of those stupid early flights that—we had to get up at four or something. We had two separate rooms, one for me and Kat, and one for my parents, so I woke up at four, and I heard their voices through the wall, right? They’d been fighting for years at this point, and now they were just screaming
at each other in this hotel—probably woke up the whole floor. And Kat was sitting there with her arms around her knees looking terrified. So I got up, and I went out to knock on their door, but it, like, slammed open, and my mom sprinted out and ran down the hall. She was crying all the way down the stairs.”
I draw my knees up to my chest. “I go into their room, and Dad’s sitting there on the bed, staring at the tiny hotel TV, and there’s some stupid show playing, something about tearing down old houses, and it has this obnoxious, fake-smiling host, and Dad’s looking at the screen, obviously not watching it at all. God knows what he said to make her run like that. I still kind of wonder, but he’s never said, so I can’t help but think . . .” I swallow. “Anyway, so I ask him, like, ‘Should I go see if she’s okay?’ and he gives me this look filled with . . . like, wow, little tiny fourteen-year-old Olivia, you don’t understand what just happened. You don’t get it at all. But I sort of got it.”
My throat aches. I’ve spoken too long already. I rush on. “So I run down into the lobby, and I’m just in time to see the back of a taxi driving off. And me and Kat are like, okay, Dad, let’s call another cab, let’s go, but we can’t get him to move until after the plane’s supposed to take off. So we get a flight back in the evening, and by the time we get home, all her stuff’s out of the house. Never saw her again. Took a few weeks for Dad to get a number she’d pick up from, but they only talked once, and apparently she, um. Apparently she didn’t want to talk to Kat or me. Thought it’d be too painful.”
Matt doesn’t say anything.
I try to smile. I can’t quite manage it. “What’s your mom like?”
“I mean, not that bad. All I do is complain about her, but she’s not . . . I don’t know.”
“What’s her deal?”
He makes a noncommittal noise. “I guess all you need to know is that we visited Yale last summer for her twenty-fifth reunion, and at the end she basically said, ‘I’m humiliated that U of M is your reach school.’ ” He sounds uninterested. “She’s always thought I’m stupid. I’m smart enough to see that much. But you get used to being a disappointment when you bring home my grades every year, so at this point, not a big deal.”
The resignation in his voice depresses me. Claire’s got a 4.0 GPA, but she has the people-smarts of your average twelfth-century warlord. And Juniper’s dad has a PhD, but God bless him, he couldn’t find an ounce of common sense if it jumped screaming out of his cereal bowl. Maybe Matt’s the world’s best judge of character. Maybe he’s one of those people you can drop into a giant city and they’ll know their way around within thirty seconds. I’ve always thought everybody’s a genius at something; you just have to dig it up and polish the hell out of it.
To me, right now, he seems a little bit of a genius at making me feel normal again.
“Matt?” I say. “Thanks for this.”
“For what?” His voice lightens. “Whining about my family? I could do this shit all day.”
I laugh. “Okay. I expect a five-page whine by Friday.”
“No problem.”
“Single-spaced,” I add. “None of that making-the-periods-size-14-font shit, either. I can tell.”
“Hmm,” he says. “Someone’s going to be a hard-ass teacher.”
“Believe it.”
The silence turns thick. Its back sags under what we’re not saying.
“So,” I say.
“So.”
“Look, I don’t want to mess things up, because I think this is a good . . . you know?”
“Yeah,” Matt says, “it’s a good.”
I smile. “And I need a good right now, you know? With everything.”
“Me too.” After a long pause, he says, “I don’t want to mess this up, either. This—thing.”
“Yeah. I know. It’s just, um,” I say, my palms itching with sudden heat. I turn off my brain and blurt it out: “I really like you, I think, and I—yeah.”
“I like you, too,” Matt says cautiously, as if he’s expecting me to go, Fooled you! I take it all back!
“Ah,” I say, breathless. “Okay.”
“Yeah.”
I clear my throat. “Can I maybe see you tomorrow?”
“I—sure. After school? I can catch up with you in the new wing.”
“Perfect. So I . . . yeah. Bye?”
“Bye, Olivia.”
But neither of us hangs up, and for a while, neither of us says a word.
Finally, he says, “Raining pretty hard.”
My gaze goes to the window. The thin rivulets of water shatter the outside world into an Impressionist’s painting. A breeze flows through the thin opening, stirring the air. “I love the rain,” I say. “Smells like waking up.”
I delayed as long as I could.
The sun has drowned in evening rain.
I unlock the door, my fingers choking the knob.
What will they say?
They’ll want to make the call . . .
(it’s over uncovered my love discovered)
Will I grovel, my voice rough as gravel
will I plead, my eyes dripping need
will I put myself to shame?
Will they forgive him? forgive me?
will he forgive me for coming clean?
(please—forgive me)
(forgive me)
We perch uneasily in the living room.
An hour unfolds.
Every detail I didn’t detail; every problem they didn’t probe—I lay it all bare.
They tick silently like time bombs.
So there it is.
And they burst together.
Juniper Bridget Kipling—
Juniper!
Five months—
You’ve been lying right to our faces—?
I ice over. My words detach and drift, skiffs on a calm lake.
The lying didn’t take much. I’ve realized it would take me setting off fireworks in the house for you to even threaten me with consequences.
That is just untrue.
Do you realize how worrying—
Disbelief swims up. Yanks at my oars. Worry? You’ve just been watching as I turn into a train wreck. If you’ve been worried at all about how I’ve been acting, it’s been impossible to tell.
My mother’s fists are clenched.
Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze out the fear.
Squeeze us back to normal.
Dad’s on his feet. Has he hurt you? I swear, if he’s hurt you—if he’s forced you to . . . to do anything you didn’t—
Of course not. I’m on my feet, too. I told you, we didn’t sleep together, I told you, Dad.
His face is stained violet and red. A watercolor terror. I can’t believe this. I am calling the school right now.
No. You can’t—
Oh, yes I can. I can and I will.
He goes for the phone. I dive for it, smack his arm away—
He yells something—
Mom’s yelling, too—
(it’s everything I thought it would be)
and the doorbell freezes us all with a crystal note.
We shut down. The color slides from our cheeks like cheap dye.
Mom hurries down the hallway, answers with a dazed smile.
It curdles on her lips.
Horror drips cold down my back.
David?
These couches are as stiff as court benches,
a guilty verdict clutched in our fists.
So, says the voice that sounds more like a judge’s than my father’s. So, you’re him.
David García. Hi. I would say it’s good to meet you, but under the circumstances I’m guessing you feel differently.
You’re right. You think you can prey on my daughter and—
Dad. He didn’t prey on anybody.
I’m not finished. Young man, you have a responsibility. You’re a government employee, for God’s sake. You have a responsibility to the children of this country—
I’m not
a child, I point out, childishly.
My mother barrels over me. I agree one hundred percent. You should be ashamed to call yourself a teacher.
I know. Something’s quiet in David’s eyes. Which is why I turned myself in.
somebody has taken a hammer to my voice box
a broken sound collapses out of me.
teaching was his first love,
his greatest love.
(david? you—
you shouldn’t have—
should you have?)
i’m wordless.
my parents sit wordless, too.
So, with that in mind, he says, I don’t know where we go from here. I understand your anger, of course. And I’ll be shouldering the consequences. I’ll do everything I can to keep Juniper’s name out of this. I’m sure the police will be investigating, and they’ll want to interview her, but that’s not . . . since we never . . . it shouldn’t be a legal . . .
whispery sounds slip from my lips. yeah, um, i told them that part.
Right. Good.
david, why did you—you didn’t have to—
I did. his hand flexes. he could slip it into mine
but he knows better. I had to.
the fight has fallen out of the air.
my parents look to me. they all look to me.
i stay motionless, mind churning.
he’ll be fired. disgraced.
my mother’s voice is low. You will leave this house. And then, when you leave your job, and when you leave this city, you will leave our daughter alone.
that tone of command once made millions.
he sits tall under it. stoic.
but i—
i flatten a sob beneath a fist. my voice is an explosion, spraying shrapnel carelessly. no—Mom, don’t—please, please . . .
She’s right, June, david says.
i stare at him. splintering under the surface in betrayal. even my mother blinks her confusion.
I was wrong, he says. I should have been more . . . I should have made sure from the beginning that we—that this . . . that it wouldn’t have to be like this. That was always my responsibility, and I neglected it for five months.
with every word i fracture a little more, a new hair-fine line in a ceramic surface.
Seven Ways We Lie Page 23