The Secret to Lying

by Todd Mitchell

  johnnyrotten: How about this: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination — what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth — whether it existed before or not.”

  ghost44: That’s a long bumper sticker.

  johnnyrotten: It’s Keats. I’m reading him for English — thought I’d try to impress you.

  ghost44: Well, not to offend any dead white males out there, but I have to disagree with Keats. As far as I can tell, beauty and truth don’t have anything to do with each other. They seem more the opposite to me.

  johnnyrotten: How so?

  ghost44: Beauty is deceptive. It’s an illusion. It distracts us from the truth. The poet Valéry defined beauty as the thing that leads to desperation.

  johnnyrotten: Are you a teacher?

  ghost44: God, no, you sicko. I just read a lot.

  johnnyrotten: Why won’t you tell me who you are?

  ghost44: That would take all the fun away.

  johnnyrotten: At least give me a hint.

  ghost44: I already have.

  johnnyrotten:?

  ghost44: Anyhow, I wanted to wish you good luck at your disciplinary hearing. I hope you don’t get kicked out tomorrow.

  johnnyrotten: Would you miss me if I was?

  ghost44: Of course. I need someone to haunt.

  ON MONDAY, DICKIE, HEINOUS, and I were pulled from our normal classes, which was the one perk of having a disciplinary hearing. All the students in my chemistry lab grew quiet when Ms. Pritchett, the secretary, called me to the office over the PA system. I smirked and stuffed my hands into my pockets as I left to hide the fact that I was trembling.

  On the way to the office, Dickie, Heinous, and I joked with each other. Dickie, who planned on being a lawyer, felt certain we couldn’t get suspended. He’d read through the entire student handbook. Although fighting was listed as a suspendable offense, there was nothing prohibiting play fighting. “We were merely exercising our freedom of expression,” he said. “Call it performance art.”

  “Right-o,” I quipped, doing my best to sound nonchalant — like getting in trouble was old hat for me. “We’re actors!”

  “It’s not our fault if they don’t have a sense of humor,” Heinous said.

  “If they can’t appreciate art,” Dickie said.

  “Blast!” I added. “We should have sold tickets.”

  Ms. Pritchett led us into a conference room and gave us each a yellow legal pad and a pen. She seated us apart from each other and told us to write down our versions of what had happened.

  Heinous finished his in no time and began adding diagrams of the performance, which he flashed to us across the room. He labeled one of the drawings “The Single Bullet Theory.” It was a detailed illustration of the possible trajectory of one imaginary bullet that somehow hit a stick figure version of me six times. I was so nervous, even the stupidest things made me laugh. Ms. Pritchett stuck her head into the room and scolded me for talking.

  Dickie approached his written account more seriously. He kept chewing his pen and flipping through the student handbook he’d brought with him, as if composing a legal brief. It took him at least twenty minutes before he finished.

  When we were done, Ms. Pritchett collected our legal pads and led us into Principal Durn’s office. Doughy-faced Hassert sat off to the side with his hands folded on his lap like a maniacal supervillain. All he needed was a fluffy white cat to stroke and the image would have been complete. Clearly, he’d already told Principal Durn his version of events.

  Ms. Pritchett gave Principal Durn the legal pads and seated us in three chairs arranged before his desk. Principal Durn, a small black man with a deep voice and dark circles under his eyes, flipped through our statements. His bald head, ringed by a nimbus of peppery hair, made him resemble a monk. I liked him — he didn’t pretend to be a big shot like other principals I’d known, and he always spoke politely, treating students as adults.

  “Richard Lang,” he said to Dickie, “it says here that you, quote, ‘fail to see how performance art without malicious intent could be construed as fighting with the intent of injury.’”

  “Yes, sir,” Dickie replied.

  Principal Durn nodded and continued to read. “‘The performance was merely a commentary on the inherent violence of eating at a cafeteria which condones the consumption of animals, while concealing the inhumane reality of their treatment.’”

  Dickie nodded. “I’m particularly concerned about the chicken-fried steak.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Heinous’s shoulders shake as he tried to keep from laughing. I clenched my jaw to appear like I was stifling laughter, too, but the truth was I couldn’t stop thinking about what would happen if I got kicked out of ASMA. I’d die if I had to go back to my old school.

  Principal Durn moved on to the next legal pad. “James Turner,” he said, looking at me.

  “Yes, sir?” My face froze in a fake grin.

  “According to your account, Mr. Lang charged at you with a fork in his fist. You pretended to slap Mr. Lang with a tray. Then you proceeded to scuffle with him until your, quote, ‘limb was removed’?”

  “That’s right,” I said, barely able to force out enough breath to speak.

  Principal Durn continued, “If I understand things correctly, you stabbed Mr. Lang in the back with a stage knife and pretended to be shot to death while activating numerous blood packets on your chest? As you wrote, ‘tomato spurts regaled the crowd’.”

  “It was ketchup,” I explained.

  “Mr. Turner?”

  “Nothing.”

  Principal Durn turned to Heinous. “Henry Chavez, you state, ‘I went Bang! Bang! and J.T. went down. I capped him. Victory was mine. The forces of evil were avenged’.”

  “You see,” Heinous said in his I’m-just-trying-to-be-helpful voice, “‘capped’ is a pun.”

  “I see.” Principal Durn continued to read off the pad. “‘The bloodfest was meant to reveal the hypocrisy of a patriarchal culture which applauds the presentation of violence in the media, but not the exposure of breasts.’”

  “That’s it exactly,” Heinous said. “I think I’d be a better person had I been raised seeing less violence on TV and more breasts.”

  “You boys think you’re so smart,” interrupted Hassert, a scowl creasing his face. “Everything’s a joke you can just talk your way out of. Never mind the mess you created. Never mind the destruction of state property or the disruption of school. Never mind the three security guards who were called in. Do you realize, Henry, that if we’d had an armed security guard on duty, you could have been shot? You didn’t think about that, did you? How funny would that be?”

  “It was a cap gun,” Heinous replied, pointing to the confiscated weapon on Principal Durn’s desk. “Kids use cap guns.”

  “Look-alike weapons are illegal,” Hassert said.

  “How many guns have you seen with orange plastic tips?”

  “You ought to be expelled.”

  “With all due respect,” Dickie said, “there’s nothing in the handbook prohibiting cap guns.”

  “Not only a look-alike gun,” Hassert continued. “You used a knife as well.”

  “It was a stage knife,” I said, leaving off the part that I’d swiped it from the school’s theater supplies.

  “Well, James, that looks like a real knife to me. Don’t you think it looks real, James?”

  I hated the way Hassert said my name.

  “Six-year-olds can buy cap guns,” Heinous said. “When I was a kid, I had a cap gun.”

  Hassert’s jowls shook. “Not here! Not in school!”

  “Are look-alike hands illegal, too?” Dickie asked. “What about look-alike blood? Or look-alike teeth? Are you going to outlaw ketchup and fillings?”

  Hassert shook his plump finger at us. “Ever since you three arrived, you’ve abused opportunities.” His glare settled on me.

  I was still grin
ning, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do.

  “Quit smirking, smart-ass!” snapped Hassert.

  “That’ll do,” Principal Durn said. “Mr. Hassert, I’d like a word with these gentlemen. Alone.”

  “I’m keeping my eye on you,” Hassert mumbled as he left. “All of you,” he added, but his gaze stayed on me.

  After Hassert left, Principal Durn took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t say anything. For a long time, the only sound in his office was the ticking clock.

  “Are we getting suspended?” Dickie asked.

  “No.”

  “Can I have my cap gun back?” Heinous asked.

  “No.”

  Principal Durn took a deep breath, scratched his cheek, and tugged his ear. He looked exhausted. Finally, he got up and pulled a yearbook off the shelf. The picture on the cover was of a different school.

  “Did you know that before I came here, I was the principal at East Jefferson High?”

  We shook our heads.

  “Seven years. It was quite a change for me coming here,” he said, sitting down and flipping through the yearbook. “There were good students at East Jefferson. They may not have been able to score as high on tests as students here can, but they were smart. And they didn’t have one-tenth the opportunities you three do.”

  Here it comes, I thought, the speech about how privileged we were to get this great education from the state.

  “Look.” Principal Durn pointed to a picture in the yearbook of a kid with a broad forehead and a huge smile. “John Sandia,” he said. “Triple varsity. Football, basketball, and baseball. He kept a scrapbook of every game he played in. The thing is, he didn’t write about his own accomplishments in that scrapbook. He wrote about what the players on the other teams had done. What great athletes the others were.”

  Principal Durn tapped on the page next to John’s picture, then he flipped back a few pages and indicated a picture of a girl with curly dark hair, glasses, and a few blemishes on her cheeks. “That’s Lynn Frillo,” he said. “The most gifted poet I’ve ever met. She wrote lines that gave me chills. And then there’s Robert Stone.” He pointed to a student on the opposite page with a strong jaw and muscular neck. “Robert had two younger sisters he walked to school every day. He made them lunch every day. He picked them up after school every day. And he helped them with their homework every day.”

  Principal Durn let us study the pictures of these other students we’d never met. “Do you know what they had in common?” he asked.

  “They worked hard?” Heinous offered.

  “Yes. They did,” Principal Durn said. He turned the book toward himself and looked at the pictures again. “They worked hard, and each of them was shot and killed while I was principal at East Jefferson High.”

  I looked at the pictures again — those small, upside-down faces who’d lived and died for real.

  “Now do you see why I fail to find your prank funny?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Dickie replied.

  Heinous nodded.

  I stayed silent, staring at the pictures.

  School had ended by the time Principal Durn dismissed us. We filed out and strolled the empty hallway. Once we left the main building, Heinous made a joke about how we should start a “less violence, more breasts” campaign, and Dickie offered to make the pamphlets.

  I forced myself to joke with them, but my laughter sounded empty. I was a cardboard cutout of a person — a flat look-alike trying to pass myself off as real. I worried that Dickie and Heinous might hear the hollowness in my voice and know that I was all lies, paper thin.

  We made our way to our dorm. Dickie turned on the commons TV and they crashed on the couch. I tried to hang out, only the phony feeling wouldn’t go away. After a few minutes, I claimed that I needed to do homework and locked myself in my bathroom.

  My hand brushed my purple and orange-streaked hair as I stared in the mirror. It felt like someone else’s hand — as if I were stuck outside my body, floating two feet back. Disconnected. “This is me,” I whispered, but my voice wasn’t convincing.

  I opened the medicine cabinet and took out the Swiss Army knife that my dad had given me. The blade flashed silver and sharp. I imagined fighting with it, like I’d claimed I’d done. Then I pressed the blade against the inside of my forearm until the cool edge dented my skin. If I was going to be someone, I had to commit myself. I had to earn it.

  I jerked the blade across the pale skin of my forearm. Red welled into the gap, and with it came the pain — a hot, purifying burn that filled my body. I cut myself a few more times, thinking of the scars I’d have. Each would be proof for my stories. Evidence that I was someone who’d fought and struggled and had survived something real.

  After rinsing the cuts, I wrapped them in my ketchup-stained T-shirt from the ultimate freak. Blood soaked into the fibers. The ketchup stains were a shallow orange-red, but real blood looked darker. When it dried, it was almost brown.

  “BACK AGAIN,” NICK SAID.

  They were sitting in the same corner booth of the diner. Nick was stacking plastic half-and-half containers into a pyramid. Kiana took the top one off and poured it into her coffee.

  “That’s mine,” I said, nodding to the sword that lay across the table.

  Nick grinned. “You sure about that?”

  “Go easy on him, Nick,” Kiana said. She swirled another cream into her coffee.

  I held out my arm to show them the cuts. “It’s mine,” I repeated.

  Nick stood and raised the sword. He slashed, only this time I didn’t flinch. I didn’t try to avoid the pain anymore. It was the price that had to be paid.

  My hand rose to meet the blade, and the metal bit into my palm. A thrill coursed through me. Master the pain, master yourself.

  I twisted the sword free of Nick’s grasp. Then I flipped it around, pointing the blade at him. My bloody fingers settled into the worn leather grooves of the hilt.

  “Well done!” Kiana said.

  Nick shrugged. “It’s a start.”

  The jaws of darkness do devour it up;

  So quick bright things come to confusion.

  —A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, ACT 1, SCENE 1

  GUSTS OF COOL AIR SHOT like adrenaline through my veins, laced with the leaf-burning, pumpkin-smashing, apple-fermenting scent of fall. Fall’s my favorite season. I always feel more alive then, as if, on some primal level, my body knows it’s my last chance to run wild before winter. I think everyone feels that a little. We’re like stags bucking horns. I guess that’s why football season’s in the fall — the ancient autumnal need to bash heads. Except ASMA didn’t field a football team. Soccer was our only fall sport.

  I wasn’t much into watching soccer, but sometimes I went to games to be outside and get rowdy with the crowd. ASMA usually lost in every sport except chess. Nonetheless, it was fun to taunt the opposing teams. Nothing like a stand full of geeks shouting, “That’s all right. That’s okay. You’re gonna work for us someday,” to piss off visiting jocks.

  Our cheerleaders were especially talented. Since the administration had banned all “inappropriate” cheers, they took to making up cheers that no one except geeks would understand. Things like “FORGET DEFENSE. DE-FENESTRATE!” Or “KICK THEIR G-L-U-T-E-U-S M-A-X-I-M-U-S.” Then the cheerleaders would shout, “GLUTEUS!” And the crowd would shout, “MAXIMUS!”

  Keep in mind, this is a school where the administration had chosen quarks as our mascot. Chants of “TAKE THEM TO THE ABATTOIR!” were as close as we could get to being rowdy without getting in trouble. We might not have been good at sports, but the fact that the opposing team needed a dictionary to figure out what we called them gave a certain satisfaction.

  The day my old high school came to play our soccer team, I almost didn’t go. I worried that someone from my hometown might recognize me, and I didn’t want anyone from ASMA to find out about who I used to be. Besides, I liked that I’d vanished from my old scho
ol without an explanation. I pictured kids who’d once sat next to me in Algebra spending their days wondering where I’d gone. Maybe Kinsey Jackson regretted not giving me an H. Maybe she worried that I’d died or that she’d missed her chance with me and now I’d moved to someplace better.

  Through the open window of my dorm room, I heard the crowd chanting, “T-R-O-G-L-O-D-Y-T-E-S! THAT’S RIGHT. GO HOME, YOU TROGLODYTES!” and I felt a little proud. Since it was a Friday, everyone was at the game. Being the only guy left in my dorm started to depress me. I finally put on my coat, messed up my hair, and headed for the field.

  The first half was nearly over by the time I reached the stands. Dickie and Heinous were in their usual seats, heckling the athletes. Sunny sat with Dickie, and Katy and Sage were on her other side. I spotted Ellie in the stands as well, sitting with the beautiful people, but I did my best to ignore her as I walked up the bleachers.

  I sat next to Heinous. He kept standing and pulling up his shirt to expose his nipple every time the goalie looked over. “Yeah, baby,” he said. “Watch it. You’re under my nipple power. Oh, yeah. Can’t stop looking over, can you?”

  At halftime, people wandered around to get sodas and flirt. Dickie and Sunny were having a tickle war. Heinous bragged about how he should get a varsity letter, since his nipple had scored our only goal. I watched the players from my old high school eat orange slices while being lectured by their coach. I knew the names of almost everyone on their team.

  At the start of the second half, Jessica Keen and Rachel Chang sat in front of us, so close that Jessica’s back almost touched my knees. She looked wickedly cute in a black skirt, fishnet stockings, boots, and an old army coat. Dickie leaned over and gave me a sly grin. “She’s into you,” he whispered.

  “Yeah, right,” I whispered back. “She’s a junior.”

  I tried to pretend that I wasn’t interested, but my eyes kept drifting over to her. I imagined what it would feel like to brush my fingers along the slope of her neck down to the hem of her loose-collared shirt. Then I remembered the tattoo I’d glimpsed between her breasts, and I wondered what it said and what she thought of me and if she might be ghost44.