True Story

by Kate Reed Petty

  “Haley, stop it,” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  “You’re being quiet so that I’ll keep talking, aren’t you,” I said. “I know that trick. I’m not falling for it.”

  “Oh, I meant to tell you!” she said. “I found a couple of our old home movies. On VHS.”

  It was just like Haley to switch from one trick to another; the abrupt change of subject was just another way to keep me talking.

  “They were in the attic when I cleaned out Mom’s house,” she went on. “And they are wild!”

  I remembered the movies we’d made in middle school—back when we were brand-new friends. Ghostly white-paint handprints on the wall of Haley’s little brother’s tree house; watery oatmeal, dyed with green food coloring, for a vomit special effect; two girls collapsed in a rec room, laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe.

  “I totally forgot about those,” I said.

  “Me too! They’re amazing. I’ve watched them like eight times already. They’re such a weird mix of childishness and sophistication, like you can tell we were taking ourselves really seriously, but also we were, what, thirteen?”

  “Eighth grade,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “I found the scripts, too. I really want to do something with them. I’m thinking of using them in a film. Right? Like, A Portrait of the Documentarian as a Young Girl.”

  It was yet another tactic, trying to get me to brainstorm. Haley would never stop trying to suck me into her work. Ever since the Teen Scene column she had wanted to write about me when we were eighteen; or her senior thesis film, a documentary short about rape culture in high school.

  “Or maybe something about how horror movies shaped our feminism?” she was saying.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” I said. “I gotta go.”

  She was silent again.

  “I’ll call you soon,” I said.

  I was about to hang up when Haley said, “Alice. We were friends for twenty years. Are you really going to just . . .”

  I sighed. “Your math is a little off,” I said. “We lost those years in high school, and to Q.”

  “Well, I like to round up.”

  “I do have to go,” I said.

  “Hey. Alice.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I really miss you. I wish we talked more often. I know it’s hard with you being abroad, and I’m so busy, but—let’s try to keep in touch? Can we try to keep in better touch?”

  I stood for a minute in the suburban sunshine. She was right: I was punishing her. And why? I didn’t trust her anymore. I understood why she had written the op-ed, and I knew that she had not actually stolen my story—she had written only about her experience—and I knew also that my anger was grounded not in that betrayal but in years of exhaustion; I was tired of her constant encouragement to tell my story; being cold to her wasn’t going to change any of that. I wondered what I could say that would be both gentle and true. “I miss you, too,” I said, finally, and then I hung up before she could say anything else.

  I went back inside, turned my phone off, and started writing Fox’s introduction:

  I used to be afraid of everything. As the youngest (and skinniest) of three boys, I learned fear from a young age.

  At last, the writing was going well. I didn’t stop for two hours; when I finally stood up, and stretched, and opened my email, I had a note from Haley.

  I’m sorry I always say the wrong thing somehow, I hope you know I’m always here for you.

  Anyway—I thought you might want to see the actual scripts. From our old horror movies, I scanned them for you, and the PDF is attached.

  xo

  The attached file, labeled “Sister Wife Productions,” was a scanned document containing scripts for the movies, typed on my dad’s electric typewriter years ago. I glanced through the document, marveling that we had gotten the formatting right. I remembered that we’d asked the school librarian to order the script for Reservoir Dogs for us, telling her it was about the SPCA. I chuckled at the bravery of the girls we used to be (and Haley still was), then felt a stab of pain and quickly closed the document. I left it on my desktop to read later. I was on deadline, I told myself; it was a question of discipline, not my feelings about Haley.

  I muscled my way through the writing as the hours passed and the coffee shop crowd changed—the young mothers and middle-aged women ceding space to groups of teenagers looking for a place to flirt in the evening. I was still writing when the teenagers went home and were replaced by other people like me, working on our laptops; eventually the baristas turned the chairs upside down and swept us all out. I finished in the guest room at my parents’ house and sent the introduction to Fox five minutes before midnight, then went to bed in my clothes, too drained to even brush my teeth.

  I woke up the next morning to an email from Fox. I love it, you’re hired, he said. When can we start on the whole book?

  3. Final Draft

  A few weeks later, back in Spain, we did our last interview. By that point we’d talked for hours, and I’d written nearly forty thousand words in his voice. Any warmth I’d felt toward him after our first interview was totally gone; I was more than tired of him, and we still had another ten thousand words to go.

  We did most of our interviews in the evening, to accommodate the time difference with New York. That night I took my laptop out to the patio to look at the stars while we talked.

  10:00:00 . . . work is nutso these days, it’s really insane. I don’t know how I’m going to get through the next two weeks, honestly. But. Yeah. But that’s why I’m glad to have you! Writing this for me. It’s been great to work with you.

  . . .

  You’re blowing smoke. Which, I guess, is what I pay you for!

  . . .

  Isn’t it half of the reason to hire a ghostwriter, getting an ego massage?

  . . .

  10:00:30 Why?

  . . .

  For me it’s the opposite. I’m not a good writer, I don’t care. It’s flattering to have someone listen to you talk for—what, we’ve been working together three weeks now, we’ve done how many hours of interviews?

  . . .

  10:01:00 Like ten hours! Jesus. Anyway, yes, let’s wrap this up, I don’t want to take up a bunch of your time today. I feel like I’ve given you a lot of great stuff to work with.

  . . .

  10:01:30 Yeah? Did we say that?

  . . .

  Oh. No, I don’t know, I feel really confident. Seriously, don’t worry too much about it. I believe whatever you send me will be great, the book is going to be great.

  . . .

  10:02:00 You’re a really good writer. I almost can’t believe it, what you sent me yesterday was incredible. I can tell they’re my words, but you make them sound so—I don’t know, they sound actually good!

  . . .

  So I was thinking we could just cut the last two chapters. Cut them out.

  . . .

  10:02:30 Yeah. I’ll be honest, I thought this book was going to be faster.

  . . .

  I just feel like, let’s not stuff a bunch of extra stuff in just for the sake of it. Don’t worry about your fee—I’ll still pay for the whole word count.

  . . .

  10:03:00 Yeah. Short and sweet. Get right to the point. . . . My readers are busy, too. Plus that’s easier for you, then.

  . . .

  10:03:30 Yes!

  . . .

  Right. We can do that. Like, what do you need?

  . . .

  Right, right, so yeah, that’s easy, I can give you that right now: So the anthropology of fear is, modern life makes fear build up in our bodies, right?

  10:04:00 I think of it like smokers and black lung. Modern man so rarely experiences real dange
r—and I mean real like italicized real—so we have no idea how to handle our fear. Hundreds of years ago our ancestors had real things to be afraid of. Italicize that. Saber-tooth tigers and shit like that.

  . . .

  10:04:30 Okay, thousands of years ago. Ha, you’re probably right. I’ll get an intern to fact-check this.

  The point is our ancestors were afraid of real things, they knew what to do with the fear. Avoid the tiger, get away, and then you don’t have to be afraid anymore.

  Today, we live pretty safe lives. So when something sparks fear—like someone shoots up a movie theater in a suburb somewhere—we don’t know what to do with it! So we just hold on to it. And it changes our brain chemistry. We never experience the release of fear.

  10:05:00 Fear has to be released. Just like you have to sweat when you exercise, you have to let go of your fear after you’ve been afraid. By the end of this book, the reader is going to learn to physically release fear.

  . . .

  10:05:30 Physically releasing fear, so anyway, right, I’m not saying you have to put yourself in real danger, you don’t have to go get eaten by a saber-tooth tiger.

  Nothing? Okay, I thought that was funny. Anyway, I’m not saying that, I’m saying that you have to experience your fears. Then you can let them go.

  . . .

  10:06:00 Well, it’s simple. “Fear safety” is both the concept that there is safety in fear—that we cling onto fear as a kind of security blanket—and the mandate to avoid fear at all costs, to actually fear fear instead of to fear letting go of fear. Right? It’s a double meaning.

  Is that clear now?

  . . .

  10:06:30 No, it makes sense. What I mean is that you have to train yourself to fear safety, you have to rewire your brain chemistry to run screaming away from anything that feels too safe or comfortable, because then you’ll be motivated to always do the thing you’re scared of, then you’ll be able to really change and grow. So yeah.

  . . .

  I don’t think so. People will get it.

  . . .

  10:07:00 I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on it.

  . . .

  Cool, I’m glad you like it.

  . . .

  I’m gonna be happy no matter what you do. Please don’t kill yourself over this. I mean—I don’t mean that. That was a bad joke. I just mean, you know what I mean, right?

  . . .

  Thank you. Yes.

  . . .

  10:07:30 So what else do you need from me?

  . . .

  More stories? Like from my life?

  . . .

  I feel like I’ve been talking about myself for—well, for ten hours now! What a blowhard.

  . . .

  10:08:00 I’d have to think about that.

  . . .

  Yeah, the basement fungus story! I love that one.

  . . .

  A different one?

  . . .

  There was this thing in my hometown that’s pretty crazy. We had a serial killer.

  . . .

  Me, too! I’m so fascinated by serial killers. That’s a fucked-up thing to say, isn’t it? It’s gross to be interested in murder.

  . . .

  10:09:00 Yeah, I see your point. Like looking at what you’re afraid of can help make it less scary. Still, I don’t know if it’s right for the book. Maybe you can tell me, though. I think it just shows . . . I don’t know what it shows. But it affected me.

  . . .

  Maybe that’s it: it’s about how modern life builds up fear—because I grew up in a middle-class suburb, you know, your basic suburbia. Super safe! But a woman was murdered.

  10:09:30 A burglar broke into the house and knocked out her husband. And her body turned up in a dumpster behind a church, cut into fifteen pieces, which I remember specifically because I was like—where are those cuts? Even if you cut at every joint . . .

  . . .

  Anyway, the point is that it turned out her husband was the murderer. He’d done the exact same thing with his first wife, like ten years earlier. The cops there believed his story, the cops in my hometown would have believed it, too, except—

  . . .

  10:10:00 What did you say?

  . . .

  No. No, it was something else. I actually can’t even remember. But I know the story I’m telling you is different than what you’re saying.

  . . .

  No. Where?

  . . .

  10:10:30 That’s weird. No, I grew up in Florida. In Florida. What are the chances? Hey, shoot, can you hold on? I’ve got another call.

  . . .

  I hung up.

  I stared at Richard Fox’s avatar on my screen—a circle-shaped picture of his face that showed up whenever he called. It was too small to make out his features; I saw only dark eyes and a wide smile. There was a tight feeling in my chest getting tighter. I slammed my laptop closed as my body tightened up around a buried thing I didn’t want to know. I went inside and put on my running clothes.

  Running is the only thing that has ever worked for me. Thirty miles a week the only reliable cure for despair. Looping long courses through parks and city streets, I amaze myself—the indoor kid who always got a stitch in her side, who was always skipping gym class. I never knew you could learn to endure. Until Haley taught me to run. She came to see me the summer after senior year, found me puddled in depression and a sweatshirt, and took me to the track.

  That night I made it out of my apartment and down to the street and started to run. The city was crowded with people making their way to dinner, families still out playing soccer in the parks. I sprinted as fast as I could, but the tight feeling was still there, and Richard’s voice was still in my head.

  I know the story I’m telling you is different than what you’re saying. . . . I grew up in Florida.

  . . .

  I ran all the way to an overlook near the top of Montjuïc and stood looking out at the Mediterranean. I’d run too fast. My heart was going to explode. I did the leg stretches Haley taught me; I did the breathing exercise Haley taught me to slow my heart. I wondered if she’d been right all along. If you don’t control your story, your story will control you. I always thought she had no idea what she was talking about. The salutatorian and track star, the golden child who’d never really suffered. How did she know what would help me? But here I was, panting above the city, still running from a story I thought I’d escaped long ago.

  I couldn’t run anymore. I walked back down the mountain, through the shadows of the park. I passed passionate young couples wrapped up in each other on benches. I passed a gaunt man sleeping on cardboard. I came to the end of a long, curving sidewalk path and reached the street. I walked home, picking up a pack of cigarettes on the way. When I got to my apartment, I finally opened my computer to search for a picture of Richard Roth, a boy who drove me home from a party in high school one time.

  I found him in the archives of my hometown newspaper. He was “Teen of the Week.” I’d never seen his picture before; I’d always avoided yearbooks and local news articles like this one; I’d never wanted to see him. Now here he was, a wide smile in a school portrait with a marbled gray background. I opened a new window and searched for Richard Fox, the entrepreneur. I saw the same wide smile. I closed my laptop and went out onto my patio and smoked all of the cigarettes.

  * * *

  • • •

  ALL NIGHT, and all the next day, I dreamed about revenge.

  I would meet him in a city park. He would plunge a long knife into his own belly to show me that he was sorry. He would die with apologies still gurgling out of his throat, his body bowed down at my feet.

  We would meet at a museum, and I would be the one who plunged the knife in his bell
y. He would fall to his knees bleeding, asking why I couldn’t just let it go.

  Or we’d meet in the lobby of an old hotel. As we talked, a ghost would slip out of a painting on the wall. “You’re blowing this out of proportion,” Richard would say, as the ghost crept up behind him. “You’re being crazy,” he would say, as the ghost wrapped its fingers around his throat. He would die before the EMTs arrived. The heart attack would be so severe a vessel would burst in his throat.

  In some of my fantasies, he would apologize. In others he wouldn’t say anything, but in his eyes I would see the moment he realized I was going to kill him, the moment he realized he had brought it on himself. And when the cops came to pick me up, I would tell them what had happened, and they would understand, too.

  But that’s where my stories broke down. Telling the cops; telling anyone; because who would believe me? What Richard had done was too insane, too horrific, to imagine. If it were a movie you wouldn’t believe it. It would have to be a documentary.

  The idea arrived like that. Simple, and fully formed. I had the evidence—the interview tapes—I would make a documentary about Richard. Haley would help me.

  I bought a plane ticket that same afternoon, using money Richard had paid me. I was so frantic and skittish I accidentally checked the box saying that I would carry explosives and hazardous liquids and guns.

  Haley shouted when I told her the news. “You’re coming to New York? Really?”

  “I’m hoping we can see each other,” I said. “I need to talk to you about something.” Already I was feeling hopeful. Maybe the movie would start a new chapter in our friendship. A creative project that would bring us back together, like the horror movies we made in eighth grade.

  “Shut up,” she was saying. “See each other, no, come on. You have to stay with me! Alice!”

  Visions of Q loomed—hearing that I was in town, banging on Haley’s door. “You moved last year, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I can’t wait for you to see it. I can’t believe it,” Haley said. “I’m so excited. Stay with me forever!”

  She was laughing, joyful, and I smiled despite myself. I had forgotten how good Haley could make a person feel; her confidence was infectious. Plus, Q wouldn’t know her address. It would be okay.