Seven Ways We Lie

by Riley Redgate

  I forge down the hall, against the tide of people surging toward the stairwell, and as I cross the arch where the old wing intersects the new wing, the halls empty little by little, leaving a few people standing at lockers, a few others heading into classrooms for after-school meetings, and one tall girl standing at the plate-glass windows looking out over the green. The light makes her eyes glint like rhinestones. The long rays of afternoon sun wash her profile in sharp relief, casting shadows from her arched eyebrows down over her eyes, and as she looks at me, she smiles, and the sight of it does something awful to the inside of my stomach.

  I stop in front of her. She doesn’t look anywhere near as nervous as I feel, with that easy smile playing across her lips. Unable to hold her eyes, I glance out the wide window. Paloma High is one of the tallest buildings for miles, and from here, I can see halfway across town. It seems minuscule, roads twining like veins through green little enclosures, each tiny house somebody’s unknown world, and if I squint, I swear I could see my own.

  “Hey,” Olivia says, and I’m like, “Hi,” wishing we’d picked somewhere we could be alone instead of the middle of the hall. Bit by bit, her attention erases the world around me altogether.

  “Is Juniper doing okay?” I ask, once I remember that Olivia’s smile isn’t the only thing that exists.

  “Yeah. She had to deal with the police, but she’s got her head on her shoulders.”

  “And you’re all right?”

  “I . . . yeah.” She twists a lock of hair around her finger. “I talked to my sister and my dad last night. Talked-talked,” and I say, “Yeah?” and she says, “We’re trying to work things out. I think it’s going to happen this time.”

  “Your sister’s in the play, right?” I say, remembering the lunchtime announcements. Kat’s voice drawled out of the intercom, inviting us to The Hidden Things, by some Russian guy.

  “She’s the lead,” Olivia says proudly. “And she found them a new faculty advisor last-minute.” Her smile fades. “How about—how’d your parent talk go?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I told them I was freaked out about Russ. And they were all, yeah, us, too, which . . . I never thought about that, dumb as that sounds, thought about them being worried. They seem so angry all the time, it sort of drowns out the rest.” I shrug. “I asked if they’d thought about trying again, but it’s not happening. I got to the game too late.”

  My voice drops. “It’s just . . . I thought if I tried, for once, I could fix something, you know?” I glance out the window at the horizon, at the fast-moving clouds that glide like swans across the flat countryside. “I don’t know. Change is the worst. With everything happening around you, and you can’t slow it down or correct it and you can’t even get a hold of it, like, why it’s happening, and it all feels like . . . you know, what the hell can you do?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “But just because you can’t fix everything, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give a shit, and it sure doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.”

  “I know,” I say, counting the inches between us. The world is disappearing again, patch by patch, leaving only her.

  “Hey, I want to show you something,” she says. “Come on.” She leads me down the hall. We turn a corner into a side hall, and she opens a door. I peer inside. It’s a storage closet filled with old textbooks and stacks of yellowing paper, and I’m like, “What—” and then her hand grabs mine, warm and tight, and she tugs me inside and shuts the door. Darkness drops, and her other hand lands on my chest. She presses me back into the door, her head tilted up, and her lips are half an inch from mine in the dark. I feel her breath. I can hardly see her anymore. Some part of her body brushes my hip, and my body’s electrified. Her hand trails over mine—fingers to palm, palm to wrist, up my forearm with torturous slowness—and fastens around my biceps.

  “Hey,” she whispers, and the tiny exhalation darts over my lips. “So . . . yeah? Are we . . .”

  I lean forward, and the gap between us vanishes.

  Her lips are ChapSticked and taste like lemon. She kisses me hungrily, her teeth pulling at my lip and her tongue flicking against mine, and I rest my hands on her waist, containing her, feeling her movement as we twist our way out of our backpacks between kisses. As they fall to the floor, I fit my hand into the small of her back and draw her close, my other hand curling around the nape of her neck, slipping up, tangling in her long hair. She’s so tight against me, I feel her every curve. Her chest presses against me as she breathes. My body pulses with heat.

  Olivia knows what she’s doing to me; it’s more obvious every second. As I lift the hem of her T-shirt, thumbing the smooth skin of her hip, her lips move down to my jaw. I tilt my chin, letting her drop kisses on my Adam’s apple, letting her nip at every nerve ending I didn’t know I had. Her teeth tease the juncture between my jaw and my neck, and I let out a low, frustrated sound that struggles through the silence, and when she kisses me again, I feel her smiling.

  I push gently, backing her up against the shelves, and my hand’s under her shirt now, sliding up from her hip to the rough lace of her bra, her breast full and heavy in my hand. My mind is a blank roar, filled with sensation. She kisses me harder, her hands wound into the back of my shirt as if she’s going to tear through it, and something boils urgently in my stomach, forming clouds of steam in my head, and my heart pounds as if it’s trying to kick its way through the front of my chest. The lemony taste of her is mixed with some intoxicating, bittersweet scent coming from the volumes of brown hair that fall over her shoulders. She’s holding on to me so tight, painfully tight, the way someone nervous might hold on to the edge of their seat, and as my eyes adjust to the darkness, I start catching glimpses of her in shadows and grays, her strongly bridged nose and her wet-kissed lips, and when I close my eyes again and kiss her hard, she makes this high, tiny sound into my mouth that gets me so turned on, I can barely move.

  “Fuck,” I say, and I pull back. She says, “Thoughts?” and I say, “Thinking is sort of an issue right now,” and she says, “Take your time,” all casual, as if she didn’t just provide me with the most life-fulfillingly hot experience I’ve ever had, and I feel all blushing and virginal, and words fall out of my mouth in an incompetent blob: “Hey, so can we, like, be dating?”

  She grins. “Sure, we can, like, be dating,” she says, “although that’s the most passive possible way to phrase that question,” and I say, “Okay. I want to be your boyfriend. I want you to be my girlfriend. I want you,” and she says, “Hmm. Do you really?” and through her coy, teasing tone I hear something real, some tiny kernel of fear that I want something other than just to be with her, as if that were even a glimmer in the eye of possibility.

  “I promise,” I say. I want to say I would promise her the world, if I could make good on it. I want to tell her that nothing and no one before her could make me keep a promise, and now I never want to break one. For once, she’s quiet. I kiss her forehead, and her breath on my collarbones makes me shiver. “Promise,” I say. I kiss her nose, her cheeks, her lips. “Promise. Promise. Promise.”

  FOCUS.

  There’s silence backstage. Silence from the other actors, and silence in my head.

  Everything is still except for Emily, who stands onstage, her voice brighter and more dynamic than it’s ever been. She’s a spot of color tracing her way through the monologue with gesture and heart, bravely carving out every second of intention.

  “—and I’m tired of waiting,” she finishes, triumphant. I let the silence ring for a second, her voice reverberating over the opening-night audience. Good crowd tonight. They don’t laugh more than they need to. Always good, when ninety-nine percent of your show is as depressing as all hell.

  I walk onstage. “You’re tired of waiting?” I say. Emily steps back, her face filling with shame. “You’re tired of waiting,” I repeat. “You, Natalya, who left me in this town?”

  The lines feel different tonight. I’m not
using them like weapons anymore, not using them like hammers of guilt to slam into Emily’s character. Tonight, something trembles in my voice and in my hands, and I feel like I’m pleading. “Look at me. Look at what I am now.”

  “I am looking at you,” she says.

  “Look harder.”

  “I see a loving mother, a caring sister. I see—”

  “You see nothing,” I insist. “I am nothing anymore except wasted potential. Nothing!”

  I wait. Waiting, I realize, for her character to contradict me. But she doesn’t.

  I step forward, and my hands come up of their own volition, cupped as if holding water. “You were supposed to be my teacher. You said I was brilliant—a prodigy, you said. You were supposed to take me away, teach me everything, but instead you ran the first chance you had!”

  My voice peaks, cracking. My heart beats hard. I haven’t left myself backstage this time. Kat Scott is all here, every ugly fissure and scar laid bare by the stage lights. Every chunk of desperation and anger from the last two and a half years is here, bleeding out in front of the crowd. Every way I’ve ever felt abandoned is crashing out from me.

  I let the silence hang for a long moment. I tuck my hair back into place, and my voice falls, quavering. “And you come back and say you’re tired of waiting. You hypocrite.”

  “I’m sorry, Faina,” she says, and as it comes out, I realize Mr. García was right. I didn’t want her to say she’s sorry. I wanted her embrace, her comfort. I wanted her to promise I could still have everything I ever wanted from her.

  But instead she gave me a feeble apology. As if that could ever patch over what she did.

  I shake my head and back offstage, still unsatisfied.

  · · · · · · ·

  I LURK OFF LEFT FOR THE REST OF THE SECOND ACT. Ani remembers every move she’s supposed to make. Elizabeth hits the center of every pool of light. I don’t know what we did to please the theater gods, but the show goes off like chain lightning, each line crackling one to the next, each scene tenser and more electric than the one before.

  Finally, the last scene starts. I enter the old schoolhouse at sunset. The mass of gray threads that makes up our backdrop is stained with light, dappled bloody orange. As I enter, the specials up front brighten, pouring down onto me like red paint.

  “Faina,” Emily says. She stands at the chalkboard, writing the beginnings of an equation.

  “Natalya,” I greet her.

  “I thought I might see you here. I thought you might be back.”

  “I always come back to this place.”

  She smiles. “Did you know I would be here?”

  “I supposed.” A beat passes before I add, “But I must go home soon for dinner. My daughter is awful at cooking. She’ll have to marry someone who cooks, or she’ll starve.”

  “How old is she?” Emily asks.

  “Nearly fifteen.”

  “Is she still in school?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Good child, but she doesn’t have my mind or my husband’s determination. She does write well. That, she can do. The younger one, now—the younger one has a mind for math. I can tell, young as she is.”

  Bits of chalk crumble off as Emily scrawls up square roots and summation signs.

  I let the words tremble at the front of my lips for a moment before they burst forward. “I thought of you as a mother, you know,” I say. The momentum of it carries me toward her step by step, but she doesn’t face me. “I was young. I thought the world of you. I thought you cared.”

  “I did, Faina,” Emily says, sounding dazed. Engrossed in what she’s writing. “I did care for you, and yes, there were times I thought of you as my own child. But . . .” At last, she finishes the huge equation. She stands back, admiring it, and turns to me. “What do you think?”

  I swallow hard, scanning the chalkboard. My index finger brushes the last term. I pick up the chalk and trace the tiny piece of the line I erased. “It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful work.”

  “So you see why I had to go?” she says. “Why I had to resume my research?”

  “No, I don’t. But it is still beautiful work.” I let the chalk drop to the stage. With a crisp little snap, it breaks in two. I look down at it for a moment. The space shared between Emily and me hangs heavy, and my heart beats hard. Her age makeup is dark in the spotlight, whitish bags drawn under her eyes and creases pressed in at the sides of her nose.

  The apology spreads across her face. Emily approaches me, and anticipation prickles at my palms. Finally, she’ll try to take me back and keep every promise she ever made.

  “Do you want me to show you the rest?” she says. “I could try to find a way. I could go back and ask the other professors if you could join us at the university. I could—”

  “Mama?” says a voice. I turn, and my daughter enters. “I did it,” she says. “I made dinner. And—and we are all waiting for you at home.”

  I study Ani, struck by the hopefulness in her voice. The plea for acceptance and love. For one second, I swear to God her blue eyes look like my sister’s.

  All at once, I understand what García meant when he asked me to rethink the end of the show. This play doesn’t close with my character’s defeat. I might have hoped for something years ago, but in the meantime, I found something else beautiful. Something that I haven’t valued until the closing scene.

  What I saw this whole time as an obligation to my family isn’t an obligation—it’s a privilege. And at the end, I’m finally happy to have it. Lucky, even.

  I’m lucky.

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” I say to Ani, choking on the words. I turn back to Emily. “No,” I say. “I can’t go with you.”

  “But—”

  “I won’t go,” I say, and it’s not resignation this time. It’s self-acceptance. Here, I choose to love what I have. Here, I choose to love what I am now.

  Walking away from Emily, I half smile. My cheeks are wet and cold with salt and water.

  As I exit, the curtain collapses toward the stage, billowing down as if in exhaustion. The dark smack of applause thunders out in the audience like heavy, cleansing rain.

  I imagine

  him next week, driving I-70 East,

  steady hands, steady wheel,

  steady pace,

  steadily disappearing.

  I imagine

  myself next year, walking a stage,

  steady feet, steady breath,

  steady pace,

  steadily myself.

  And what will I remember about his eyes

  besides that they had him inside,

  and they made me feel some sort of way—

  sick with hope?

  I imagine

  Hemingway and Beukes, Christie and Martin,

  Márquez and Morrison, Rowling and the Bard

  boxed and taped and stacked beside a spare wheel.

  His emptied house would barely fill a car—

  he was built to carry his home on his back.

  I imagine

  futures with him and futures without.

  But on Thursday night, I don’t dream of him.

  I dream of a city made from violin strings and Saran wrap,

  bubbling in the heat of a summer sun.

  I dream of voices I haven’t heard yet

  and haven’t missed yet;

  of places I haven’t known,

  pieces I haven’t played,

  and people I haven’t loved.

  I wake up to music, an alarm-clock croon,

  and I stare at my ceiling,

  serene.

  I think I’m beginning to understand

  how hearts fit together.

  Not like diseased carnations that lean against their crutches.

  Not like vines that twine tight, throttling their hosts.

  But like two trees:

  two systems of deep, untangled roots,

  two patterns of flowering branches,

  whose leaves drink
their own sunlight

  and breathe their own air.

  Two trees with something slung between them,

  a hammock or a tapestry or a swing,

  some third, beautiful thing

  that neither would die without.

  Hearts fit together like hands.

  Not by necessity.

  By choice.

  “HO-LIVIA,” SAYS A GUY’S VOICE FROM BEHIND ME.

  My mouth full of green beans, I glance over my shoulder, determined to chew very angrily at whoever was responsible for the ‘ho-livia’ comment. But alas, the fast-moving stream of kids passing through this channel in the cafeteria has masked his identity. Resolving to chew angrily at him some other time, I turn back around.

  “Yo,” Matt calls after the dude.

  “Not worth it,” I say. Matt sighs, slouching back down, doodling faces on his History notes. On his other side, Burke Fischer has his septum-pierced nose buried in Kierkegaard.

  “What’d they say?” Juni asks me over the cafeteria table. “I didn’t catch whatever profoundly unnecessary insult it was.”

  “Ho-livia,” I explain over the chatter echoing off the cafeteria ceiling. “It’s funny, because ho means whore and also rhymes with the first syllable of my name. Ha-ha. Excellent joke.”

  “Don’t let it get to you,” Juni says. “You look tired, lady.”

  I make a grumbling noise. “ ‘Tired’ is the understatement of the year.” I point at Kat, who sits beside Juni. “You didn’t tell me your show was, like, ninety-seven percent crushing misery.”

  She shrugs, slurping from her juice box. “It’s Russian.”

  Someone taps my shoulder. I turn again, wondering if ho-boy has returned, but no.

  “Claire. I—hey,” I say, setting down my fork on my lunch tray. Juniper told me about their conversation yesterday, but Claire never found us during lunch. I hope to God she was apologizing to Lucas.

  “Mind if I sit?” she asks, every word a tentative little push.

  “Sure.”

  She perches on the blue plastic disk to my right. A wisp of hair slips out above her ear. “I get it. I think.”