The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Will’s face had hardened into an expressionless mask.

  “I left your room,” I went on. “Do you remember? I left yours and came back to mine because I had a meeting with my tutor early the next morning.”

  Will folded his arms. “No, I don’t, really. It was ten years ago.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “So? I might’ve been asleep when you left.”

  “You were, I think.”

  He threw up his hands. “Then why did it matter?”

  “Because that’s not what you told them. The Gardaí. And because that was …” I swallowed. “Because that’s not what I told them either. I went in afterward and said the same thing. I thought that’s what had happened. I was confused, because they kept asking about our phones, about why I didn’t hear them ringing, but everything was so crazy then, so mixed up … I wasn’t thinking straight. But then later, when I was back in my room, I saw the calendar I’d up on the wall and I saw that I’d that meeting with my tutor, and I realized I hadn’t stayed the whole night. I’d left to go back to mine at some stage. Around one, one thirty, I thought. I’d got my nights mixed up.”

  “Wait a second, wait a second.” Will tapped a finger on the table. “Are you saying …? Did you think I went somewhere after you left, that I could’ve—”

  “I was 100 percent sure you hadn’t.” At the time. “I thought you’d just made an innocent mistake. Got mixed up like I had. But then they had that service at the chapel, and the chaplain gave that speech about us knowing more than we might realize, about how no matter how small the piece of information, no matter how irrelevant we thought it was might be, even if we were sure it had nothing to do with it … He said we should tell them.” Will was glaring at me. “I didn’t want to get you in trouble, and I didn’t want to get in trouble for telling them something that was wrong—”

  “What did you do, Ali?”

  I looked down into my lap. “I had Shaw’s business card. I called him and corrected what I’d said.”

  Will exhaled loudly.

  “I thought I was doing the right thing,” I went on. “It … it wasn’t even about you, Will. It was about me. I’d made a mistake. I was fixing it. I didn’t think for one second it would matter in the scheme of things—”

  “Let me get this straight,” Will cut in. “You overheard me tell the Gardaí I was with you all night the night Liz died, but you remembered waking up at some point to go back to your own room, leaving me alone, sleeping, and instead of coming to me and saying, “Hey, I think you might have got your nights mixed up,” you went back to the Gardaí and told them I’d lied about my whereabouts the night Liz died?”

  I shook my head. “That’s not what happened. Not at all. I thought I’d stayed there all night so I said that I had, but then I realized I hadn’t, so I went back and made a correction. That’s all.”

  “While you were doing that, did you happen to mention to them that I was definitely with you, all night, every other night one of those girls was murdered? Did you tell them that?”

  “I honestly didn’t remember if you—”

  “Well, I was,” he spat at me. “And if you did leave me that night, you left me fast asleep. What about the next morning? Where did we meet again?”

  I bit my lip. “In your room.”

  “In my room? Oh, really?” His tone was mocking. “And what was I doing in my room, when you got there?”

  “Sleeping,” I said quietly.

  “I was sleeping! So if I hadn’t woken up during the night, how would I have known that you’d even left? Wouldn’t I think you’d been there the whole time?”

  “Try to understand,” I said. “My best friend had just died.” Will rolled his eyes at this and I hated him for it. “I was only nineteen, for God’s sake.”

  “So was I, Ali,” Will spat. “So was I.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine.” He waved his hand, faux-dismissive. “I get it now. You never thought I was guilty; you just needed me to be. So you wouldn’t have to spend the rest of your life feeling bad that you’d taken away mine.”

  “Will, what did I do? You told them you did it. That’s what happened next. It’s not all my fault.”

  “I told you, they forced that out of me. I didn’t kill those girls. They made me say those things. And”—he started to shake his head, disbelieving—“now it turns out I mightn’t have been in that room at all if it wasn’t for the person I cared most about in the world, the girl I loved, the one who I thought loved me.”

  “I just told them I was w—”

  “You took away my alibi. You made me a suspect.”

  “It can’t have just been that, Will. There was ev—”

  “You fucking bitch.”

  I recoiled as if I’d been slapped.

  I’d never heard Will say anything like that, let alone to me. Each word had been dripping with white-hot anger.

  “You know what’s funny?” He laughed now, a soulless, mechanical sound. “All this time, I’m sitting here thinking that I hurt you, and it turns out that you fucking did this to me.” His face crumpled. “You did this to me. I loved you and you’re the one who did this to me …”

  They were there then, bodies, standing on either side of us, casting shadows onto the tabletop: Alek and the security guard.

  A hand on my arm, keeping me in my seat.

  A hand on Will’s arm, pulling him up out of his.

  Alek led Will out of the visitors’ room while I sat at the table, silent and dazed. A few minutes later Alek came back for me, and I wordlessly followed him back along the glass corridor, through locked doors and into reception where someone helped me open my locker and handed me my bag and phone.

  It took me a second to realize it was Malone.

  He asked me if I was okay. I lifted my head to look at him but I couldn’t think what to say.

  “The press have converged on your parents’ house,” he said. “You can’t go back there. Not right now, anyway. We’re going to bring you into the station for a couple of hours, to wait it out. Okay?”

  The station. More Gardaí, more people, more fluorescent lights. I couldn’t deal with it. I wanted to go somewhere where there were no other people. Somewhere I could close my eyes, curl up, and hide away.

  “Is there anywhere else?” I asked. “I just …” I started shaking my head. “I can’t …”

  Malone thought for a second. “Okay. There is. Come on.”

  alison, then

  It was a relief when classes finally began. I’d been craving routine and neither my wallet nor my liver could’ve taken another day’s worth of Freshers’ Week. I was also anxious to start my course, to see what it was like, to see what going to college was like. I’d been waiting long enough for it.

  Secondary school and I hadn’t got on. I’d hated pretty much everything about it. The fact that most of the day was taken up with instruction in subjects I detested; that everything was taught by the same small group of teachers so if you had been lazy or stupid in another subject in a previous year, the teacher would make that judgment of you whenever you met again; the itchy, scratchy uniforms; the long days; the hours and hours of homework that ruined what little of our lives were left over afterward. I felt uncomfortable every single day, like my own skin didn’t quite fit, and counted down the weeks—six years’ worth of them—until it was over. College was to be my reward.

  So I threw myself into it wholeheartedly, armed with a collection of smooth, unblemished notebooks and three tote bags from the campus bookshop, stretched to capacity. (The three things my parents were happy to cover the cost of without complaint: shelter, food, and books.) I came to class with the book read cover-to-cover, having highlighted sections and made notes in the margins as I went. I gave myself hand-cramps furiously scribbling down every l
ast thing the lecturer said, then going straight to the library afterward to type my notes up on my laptop while the lecture was still fresh in my mind. I had a filing system for these in a series of color-coded folders. The teaching staff were all passionate about whatever their specialist subject was and I couldn’t help but catch it from them.

  I was in a constant state of exhilaration and panic at the thought of all the books I was going to read, all the books I could read, and how little time there was, really, to read books.

  This lasted a week, maybe two.

  After that I downshifted into more of a trying-as-hard-as-I-can mode. I read what I knew I’d be questioned on in class, or at least enough of it to form answers that implied I’d read the whole thing. I stopped typing up lecture notes. Then I stopped, by and large, taking lecture notes. If I hadn’t finished a book by the time the class on it came and went, I wouldn’t bother going back to finish it, even though the word exam loomed on the horizon.

  Sometime in mid-November I started going to classes wholly unprepared, and soon figured out a way to hide this. I’d choose a seat out of the teaching assistant’s eyeline. I’d scribble notes furiously. I’d ask questions, rather than answer them. The lecturers were all teaching their specialist subjects; it didn’t take much to set them off talking about them. Some of the books I’d bought the first week of term stayed in the bag I’d carried them back to Halls in.

  I missed a class here and there, waited for some repercussion, but none ever came. There was no penalty for not going, it seemed.

  By the time December dawned, I was skipping lectures, going to only some classes and was lucky to find a tattered notebook and a single working pen in my bag when I got there. I’d nudge the person next to me just as the TA came in and say, “Which text was for this week?”

  Because I was distracted.

  By him.

  Will and I had become a couple slowly but steadily, although I was too scared to say anything to him that would invite confirmation or denial of this fact. We saw each other every other day, then every day, then we were living out of each other’s pockets.

  It wasn’t so much that my life opened up a space for him and he moved in, it was more like our lives dramatically and suddenly melded together. He was just always there now.

  I wondered what I’d done with my time, my feelings, my need to be touched, before him. Had I even had such a need?

  He was like a new friend, in the beginning. Now he’d become something else. Something more. If I wasn’t with Will, I always wanted to go see him. When he was there, I didn’t want to leave.

  I’d never felt that way about any other person. It was like the world had been dim and flat and now suddenly it was in Technicolor 3-D.

  Whenever Liz was with us, other people were too. I didn’t know if we’d engineered this, he and I, or if she had. But Will and I were always either alone together or in a group. A little one formed by me, him, Liz, Claire, Claire’s boyfriend Tom, and Lauren, who we didn’t see all the time but most weekends, or the bigger one we made whenever we went to the campus bar or out in town at night, collecting or joining other little groups comprised of our classmates or St. John’s Halls neighbors.

  I think that’s probably why I didn’t notice it for so long.

  * * * * *

  We’d all been looking forward to the Traffic Light Ball for ages. It was to be held on the Friday before the midterm break, the last day of classes for a whole week. The morning of it, most of us had some form of assignment or essay due, the first ones since we’d started at St. John’s. The Traffic Light Ball would not only be a chance to dress up and a fun night out that we had a whole week to recover from, but it would also be our reward for getting those damn assignments in.

  It was being held at the Burlington Hotel, not far from campus. We decided it’d be fun to walk there in our finery, holding our floor-length skirts and dresses off the pavement, navigating uneven paving slabs in our towering heels, shivering because we’d refused to taint our outfits with outerwear appropriate to the temperature. Liz and I both wore our Debs dresses, but swapped over. Her mother had had a business meeting in Dublin the week before and had brought them up for us, taking us out to lunch afterward so we could update her on how we were getting on.

  “Don’t say anything about Will,” I’d whispered to Liz at the very last moment, as we turned off Dawson Street and into the restaurant where her mother had made us a reservation. “I don’t want it getting back to Mam.”

  Liz made a face. “You haven’t told her?”

  “Why would I?”

  “I don’t think she’d mind.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to find out for sure. And I don’t want the FBI-style interrogation that’ll come with it if she gets wind of this.” I shivered at the thought. “It’s just easier this way. Trust me.”

  She’d winked at me. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  True to her word, she’d mentioned nothing about him at lunch.

  Will wore a tux to the ball, and I couldn’t stop looking at him. He’d worn it to his Grads ball, which I hadn’t asked too many questions about but which I’d inferred had been a week or two before he’d met me. I felt a tug of something at the idea that he’d been to a black-tie affair with some other girl on his arm, but I tried to swallow it down.

  He didn’t know me then. It didn’t matter now. Being jealous was horrifically pointless. We were together, at this, now, tonight.

  “You look beautiful,” he whispered in my ear as we entered the ballroom.

  I didn’t think I did normally, but that night—although I’d never have admitted it to anyone—I believed him.

  We picked up our stickers on the way in: red for in a relationship, green for single, orange for somewhere in between. Some of the guys took “wrong” colors for the laugh, and some of the girls refused to wear any at all. (Maybe they’d had their first Gender Studies module. Maybe the colors clashed with their gowns.) I took a red one and folded it somewhat discreetly around one of the straps of my dress.

  The venue was a huge ballroom with a stage dominating one end; the band played from there. The bar was just outside it. A few tables had been installed on either side, but the majority of the few hundred students took to the dance floor and stayed there. We set up shop at a table near the stage, so we could dump bags and the boys’ jackets and have somewhere to leave our drinks, which weren’t permitted on the floor. But this also meant quite the trek from our table to the bar and back again.

  Will had hopped up anytime my glass was nearing emptiness, so much so that I started to feel bad and offered to go get the next round. I checked with Liz and she convinced me that we should both get cocktails. I was waiting at the bar for more than fifteen minutes for them to be made.

  When I got back to the table, Liz was sitting on Will’s lap.

  She was sitting on his lap, angled to the side, with her arms wrapped around his neck. She was talking to a guy I didn’t know who was sitting next to Will, in the seat Liz had been occupying when I’d left. Will was looking toward this guy too. He had reddish hair and freckles, and a thin, angular face, and if you were going off first, fleeting impressions and you were being unkind, you might have labeled him with terms like dweeb or nerd before it was cool. He was smiling widely but I could tell by the look on Liz’s face that she wasn’t enjoying listening to him as much as he was clearly enjoying talking to her.

  And then, as I watched, she leaned her head to one side, turned and kissed Will slowly and deliberately on the side of his face, an inch from his mouth.

  It looked so intimate, my stomach dropped.

  It had been a job to carry two cocktails and Will’s bottle of beer back across the dance floor and I was lucky they didn’t slip from my hands now. But I also felt like I absolutely could not, would not, react in any way.

  What was going
on here?

  Liz and Will didn’t even hug. I had never seen her touch him. It wasn’t something I ever thought I’d have to see. But now she was sitting on his lap, something I had never done, something I wouldn’t do—such public displays of affection were embarrassing to me and, I would’ve thought, to him too—and doing it in front of everyone, in front of everyone we knew and this guy with the red hair that I didn’t know, and I’d just watched her kiss Will too?

  I reached the table then and Will looked up and saw me. He flashed a look that, although the length of a blink, communicated enough for my chest to open up again and permit me to breathe.

  He didn’t know what was going on either and he wasn’t happy about it. Whatever this was, Liz had done it.

  “Here you go,” I said loudly, putting Liz’s drink down in front of her with a touch too much force. The pink liquid inside it sloshed and slipped over the lip of the glass.

  She didn’t hop up in surprise or turn to me blushing with guilt. She just smiled and said, “Thanks.” Picked up the drink, took a sip.

  Like nothing was weird.

  Like she wasn’t sitting on my boyfriend’s lap and had just kissed him on the cheek.

  “You were gone ages,” she said. “Was there a big queue?”

  I noticed that Will’s hands were resting on the sides of his chair. He wasn’t touching Liz anywhere except for the places where she was touching him.

  “No,” I said, “there were two cocktails to make.” I met her eyes. “What did I miss?”

  “Oh, this is …?” She turned to the thin, red-haired boy. He was wearing a green sticker. I saw that since I’d gone to get the drinks, Liz had taken hers off.

  “Dan,” he supplied.

  “Dan,” Liz repeated.

  I smiled at him briefly. “Hi, Dan.”

  There was an awkward moment then when none of us said anything at all.

  “Excuse me,” Will said, shifting in his seat. “I’m going to need a bathroom break before I drink that beer.”