Seduced by Lies

by Stacey Quinn

  For the first time in a long time he felt like a human being again - that girl had actually made him feel, had even made him blush! And he luxuriated at the idea of more encounters like this one. Ecstatic at his tiny accomplishment, Sam whooped and danced around the back of the library, congratulating himself and cheering loudly until he was forcibly asked to vacate the library.

  CHAPTER 3 - I JUST CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD

  Sienna arrived home to a hastily scribbled note from her mother on the dining room table -

  S -

  Louise called - gotta work late tonight. Pizza’s in the freezer.

  Try not to cause any trouble.

  M x

  Sienna silently thanked the Gods (“If you actually exist.” She added as a snide afterthought), and immediately made a beeline towards the fridge and her mother’s ‘secret’ bottle of vodka that she kept hidden at the back of the vegetable drawer. Plunking down on one of the uncomfortable, flat, solid oak chairs with a bone-weary sigh, she poured herself a generous measure into a large tumbler glass. She held the glass up close to her face, observing the crystal clear liquid as it swirled around the bottom, as if it were a fine wine she was about to sample and dissect. She toyed with the idea of downing the half-full tumbler in one go - no point in pussy footing around - before glancing at the clock and realizing it was only 4:30 pm. Her sensibilities got the better of her, and so she rose from her seat with another exasperated sigh and reached for the Coca-Cola in the cupboard. The liquid hit the back of her throat, sending a pleasant, warm, burning sensation down her larynx and into her chest, and causing the back of her eyeballs to prickle with the threat of tears. A slight smile curled around Sienna’s lips as she poured herself another, and another, each slightly stronger than the one before, until at last she felt prepared to once again attempt to analyze the day's events.

  Sam. That’s what he’d said his name was. But why did she remember that inconsequential little bit of information? Why had she listened to a single word that Jock had said? It was clear from his ridiculous choice of attire and his cheesy, ‘I’m so cool’ smirk, that he was just like the rest of them, and couldn’t possibly contribute anything worthwhile towards Sienna’s life. So why had she let him stop her? Why had she turned around, time and time again, and continued to listen to his drivel? And moreover, what could a Jock boy possibly want with her? They had nothing at all in common - in fact he was simply a copy of those other lower beings that had whispered and laughed at her in the corridors that day. So why on earth would he take the time to seek her out and make an attempt at conversation? And why had he seemed so crushed when she’d rejected his attempt?

  The first thing that sprang to mind was that it was a ruse - some kind of bet between Sam and his Jock pals that involved her. Maybe something like - ‘Let’s see who can bed the weirdo first - winner gets a pint.’, or some other childish, demeaning prank. Sienna’s blood boiled at the very thought, and her fingers clenched tightly around her empty tumbler, until her knuckles turned white and the glass began shaking in her hands. A string of swear words and violent insults raced around Sienna’s mind, and she had to bite her lip to stop from screaming them at the kitchen walls. But another, much quieter thought lurked at back of her mind, a thought that took another vodka and coke for Sienna to confront.

  She slammed the empty tumbler a little too hard onto the soft surface of the pine table, causing it to dent slightly, and took a deep, steadying breath, closing her eyes and enjoying the slight spinning sensation in her head. The alcohol had helped loosen her thoughts, and Sienna could no longer deny the tiny seed of a notion that she had been flatly ignoring since the incident in the library - There had been something about that Jock boy. There had been that look in the deep pits of his eyes, and odd edge to the way he held himself. That flash of recognition in his eyes each time he looked at her, that deep yearning that seemed to seep from his very pores each time she looked at him. Not a sexual yearning or desire, but more of a need for...companionship. He seemed to be under the impression that they understood each other somehow, that they were on the same level. Maybe he too had a secret, a dark anguish that nobody would understand. Perhaps his life had thrown him in the deep end, just like Sienna’s, forcing him to mature before his time and now he too had to fight and struggle through each day.

  “Impossible.” Sienna spat, arguing with her own mind. “He’s clearly still an idiotic adolescent! Why would a mature, experienced adult willingly wear such ridiculous clothes and act in such a ridiculous manner?! He was a gibbering fool for Christ’s sake!”

  The voice in her head had its retort ready and waiting -

  “He did pick Stephen King. Out of all the other possible books in that bookshelf, he picked Stephen King.”

  Sienna huffed and crossed her arms. “Lucky guess.” She mumbled unconvincingly.

  “But what about the way he held himself?” Her mind continued to nudge her. “That definitely wasn’t the confident stance of a cocky Jock.”

  Sienna couldn’t deny this, and was forced to admit she was stumped. There had definitely been a certain awkwardness to Sam that wasn’t usually associated with his Jock types. He’d seemed somewhat...embarrassed of himself, as if he knew what a twat he looked like in his ridiculous baggy shorts and cap, and was apologizing for it through his body language.

  Sienna could feel the other half of herself riling up once more, ready to argue back again. With some effort, she forced herself to stop, foreseeing the vicious circle the night was heading towards and realizing that no good would come of it.

  She rubbed hard at her tiring eyes with the heels of her hands, not giving a second thought to large, black smudges of eyeliner that were now smeared across her face. Through her blurred vision she could gauge that there was about two thirds of a tumblers worth of precious liquid left in the bottom of the vodka bottle, which she proceeded to turn upside down above her glass and pour messily into it. She was at that pleasant level of drunk where she could no longer taste the burn of the alcohol, and so the remainder of it slipped down her throat as smoothly as water, followed by a lip-smacking sigh of appreciation.

  Sienna rose shakily from her chair, one hand leaning heavily on the table for assistance, and flipped her mother's note over, scrawling messily across the back -

  Dearest Mother -

  Thanks ever so much for your loving and heartfelt note - never has there been a daughter as lucky or as loved as I!

  As for the pizza, I kindly saved it for you, choosing instead to fill my belly with that bottle of voddy you think I don’t know about. Rest safe in the knowledge that I enjoyed every last drop!

  Best Regards

  Your daughter

  S

  And with that she sauntered, somewhat lopsidedly, out of the kitchen and up the stairs, slamming her bedroom door behind her out of habit. The dark, isolated familiarity of her room was like the embrace of a dearly missed friend, one which Sienna fell eagerly into. Surrounded by her belongings and the items that made up her little world - the seemingly insignificant possessions that held all of her dearest memories and moments, that essentially made-up the very person she was, she felt instantly more comfortable and at ease. In her private little bubble, Sienna could mostly forget and ignore the troubling events of the day, as if they were no more than the fading feelings and images of a half-remembered dream.

  She gently and lovingly unsheathed her laptop from her backpack and placed it gently on her bed, waiting for it load up. While the machine came to life, buzzing a whirring softly, Sienna reached under her bed, hands scrabbling along the carpet until they came across the item she desired - an innocent looking, if slightly tatty, shoe box. Her face split into a rare smile as she placed the shoe box in her lap and flipped open the lid, revealing a mass of loose king size rizlas and empty baggies. She rummaged through the disorganized contents until she came upon the one full baggie left in the box, and proceeded to roll a well-filled joint. Somehow her drunk finger
s managed to roll much more masterfully than her sober ones had done that morning, and within a few minutes her lungs and mouth were filled with the sweet taste of THC. She took a few more deep drags, letting the smoke and cannabinoids take effect before turning back to her laptop.

  She clicked straight onto her favorite page - ‘The British Poetry Centre’ and their Facebook page - pretty much the only thing she used her laptop for these days. Not a day went by when Sienna didn’t check the pages updates or add some of her own, considering the dismal lack of mature company that was on offer to her these days, she substituted friends the faceless words and posts of the other intellectuals on the site, gleaning comfort from the insights they shared through their computer screens. This was her last, tenuous connection to the life she had loved and so cruelly lost, to the girl she had once been.

  Usually she would spend hours trawling through the pages, carefully reading and dissecting each new piece of poetry or literature. She liked to play out conversations in her head, imagining what he would say about the words on her screen, the beautiful opinions and insightful knowledge that only he possessed and that only she could understand and appreciate. But tonight her mind was too fuzzy and raw, a million thoughts buzzing around her mind like an angry hive of bees. And so she simply re-posted a short section from one of her favorite poems -

  “Lovely joy left blank, perhaps you are

  the center of all my labors and my loves.

  If I've wept for you so much, it's because

  I preferred you among so many outlined joys.”

  She read over the text once and, satisfied with her input, closed the tab, only to be unexpectedly confronted with a tab she had forgotten she’d left open - an image she’d been looking at just before College that morning. Her breath caught in her throat as she gazed at an image of herself - long brown hair framing a happy face, eyes sparkling, her smooth, smiling cheek pressed against his rough, stubble face, so close together that her previously wild mane mingled with his distinguished, graying locks. A wave of mixed emotion crashed over her, intensified by the alcohol, bringing the stabbing sting of tears along with it. Her breath came in shuddering gasps as she swiped at the offending droplets that fell from her eye-lids, not wanting to tear her gaze from the image despite the pain it brought - the pain just meant that it had all been real. She traced her finger along the pixels of his face, stroking his strong jaw and smoothing out the lines of his crow's feet, just like she had so loved to do in real life. She drank in the sight of them together - how well they had meshed, despite the age gap and the so-called ‘taboo’ of their relationship (though how love could be taboo Sienna would never know). As her eyes roamed over the picture, they fell onto his eyes staring out from the screen, and Sienna felt a sharp and overwhelming jolt of recognition.

  “Sam!” She gasped, caught off guard. Though that pathetic Jock could never compare to the divine, virtually Godlike man on her screen and from her memories, there was a fathomless, penetrating depth in his eyes, visible even through the pixels, that Sienna (no matter how hard she tried to deny it) had seen briefly in Sam’s.

  Sienna screamed in rage and confusion and sorrow, howling her pain to the bedroom ceiling and slamming shut the lid of her laptop. Not only had that Jock confused and annoyed her, he was now even marring the few good memories she had left.

  She fell back onto her bed, emotionally and physically exhausted, slapping herself in between bouts of tears to try and regain some sense. After about half an hour the slapping seemed to be working - the tears stopped and her breathing became steady once more. She convinced herself that the similarities and signs she’d thought she’d seen were nothing more than the product of a long, hard day and a little too much to drink, and that Sam was nothing more than an idiotic Jock (if a slightly unusual one at that). It was the simplest and most logical conclusion she could come to, and she forced her argumentative mind to admit that it was a satisfactory one.

  Satisfied that she’d solved the mystery, and confident that she would not let Sam fool or confuse her again, Sienna rolled over and picked up her half-smoked doobie. Her eyes were already beginning to droop and close of their own accord, but she had to finish her smoke - it would do no good to leave any evidence lying around for her mother's prying eyes.

  Sam chose to drive the slightly longer, scenic route home that day, dodging the rush hour traffic that clogged the main road and enjoying the extra ten minutes of blissful solitude. His afternoon lecture had been a breeze - he’d barely even needed to act as he’d laughed and joked with his classmates, his head filled with thoughts of that enigmatic blonde girl. Not that he was getting ahead of himself - he knew she was hurt and damaged, he could recognize and understand that better than anyone, and he knew it would take a long time for her to begin to trust or reveal herself to anybody. But he was more than prepared to invest that time and patience, to gain her trust and understanding and to make her see that, despite outside appearances and put-on attitudes, they weren’t so dissimilar after all. No matter what it took, Sam would follow this light at the end of the tunnel, right to its source, because whatever lay ahead for him and this nameless girl, he felt certain it would be better than anything he had right now.

  He sped up as he pulled out of the College grounds, winding down the window and letting the summer breeze ruffle his hair playfully, as he picked up where he’d left off on his Dire Straits playlist.

  Track number 2, Romeo and Juliet, began playing just as Sam crested the top of the windy mountain road, the soft, opening chords introducing the humbling view of the sweeping valley and small villages below. The sinking summer sun illuminated the scene, and Sam felt as if the world had never been more beautiful. Grasping on to this long forgotten feeling of happiness and optimism, and committing fully and wholeheartedly to it, he began singing along through his genuine, unstoppable smile.

  “A love struck Romeo sings the streets a serenade,

  Laying everybody low with a love song that he made.

  Finds a streetlight steps out of the shade

  Says something like - ‘You and me babe, how about it’?”

  Sam pictured himself as Romeo - the hero, finally finding his heroin and being released from the dark, smothering embrace of his pain and his woes, so that he may show her the light and rescue her from her balcony of lonely solitude.

  His uplifted mood did not falter the entire way home, and as the music continued to play, Sam continued to bellow the lyrics to the winding mountain roads, feeling that he could now appreciate their meaning on a whole new level.

  It wasn’t until he was slipping his key into the front door that Sam’s mood dipped. He’d been floating on sunbeams since lunch time, but on the other side of that door lay the true reality and horror that he had so blissfully, if briefly, been able to push to the back of his mind. He could never be sure what he would find on the other side of this thin panel of wood - a weeping mess, pools of vomit, incoherent yells and smashing plates, or even a suicidal depressive. No matter what it was, Sam would always deal with it or else nobody would. His father had put up with it for years, though admittedly she had been considerably better when he’d been around, but when push came to shove his father had shown his true colors - the brilliant, acclaimed, visionary English Master and tutor had also proven to be weak and selfish, and in his absence, Sam had been forced to take over his role.

  Sam held his breath and listened intently, one ear pressed against the wood in the hope of some small hint as to what was awaiting him. Silence. He considered stooping down and peeking through the letter box, before realizing that no matter how prepared he could make himself, stepping inside this tomb of a house would always be just as emotionally draining and challenging as it always had been. His stomach sunk sickeningly, as it always did, but at least he had his ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ to keep him going through whatever he had to deal with this night, and all other nights to come.

  Sam's body involuntarily tensed as he s
wung open the door and stepped over the threshold, but (as his eavesdropping had told him) the house was completely still and silent. His immediate thought was that he should run up the stairs to the bathroom, where he had last seen his mother, and make sure she hadn’t passed out in the toilet bowl and accidentally drowned herself in the toilet water. His foot was on the first step when he heard a snuffling, grunting, half-snore from the living room sofa. He walked softly over to the piece of furniture and peered down over the back - his mother lay awkwardly on its pillows, her limbs jutting out at odd and uncomfortable looking angles, but sleeping soundly (and for quite some time from the look of the dried, crusted trail of saliva that spread from her mouth and across her cheek). Her mobile phone lay on the floor nearby, where she’d dropped it as she’d passed out, open on the text that Sam had sent her that morning, an incomprehensible, half-formed and unsent reply showing on the screen. Sam smiled to himself, admiring his mother’s drunken efforts and feeling oddly touched by them. He strolled around to the front of the sofa and gently lay a tartan blanket over his mothers fragile, snoring form. Bending down to her level, he gazed at her peaceful, sleeping face, and couldn’t help thinking that, in sleep, she looked just the same as she always had - like the loving, joyful mother he remembered from childhood, if a little thinner and bonier. Sometimes he could look at her sleeping features, and if he concentrated and pretended hard enough, he could almost pretend that nothing had ever changed - that it had all just been some terrible dream. But he had no time for pointless daydreaming or wishing tonight - he had important research to do. He placed a gentle kiss on her forehead before standing up, causing her to scrunch up her face and snuffle a little more in her sleep, and smiled warmly down at her before quietly making his way to his room. Today seemed to have gone fairly well in all aspects.

  Six and a half hours later, as the fluorescent lights of his digital clock announced to Sam that it was 11 pm, he was just about ready to tear his hair out in frustration. When he’d thought of the blonde girl as an ‘enigma’, he couldn’t have comprehended the true extent of that statement. He’d entered his room with a plan of tracking her down online, via Facebook. This task was made trickier by the fact that he had absolutely no clue what her name was. He’d started off by trawling through the ‘friend lists’ of all the people he knew from College, in the hope that maybe at least one of them had added her as a friend. He’d scrolled and clicked and scrolled and clicked, encountering disappointment after disappointment, until his mouse hand was raw and aching. His eyes burned from the thousands of computerized images he’d gone through, analyzing each one carefully for any sign of the blonde girl, but with no luck. So he moved on to the College’s facebook page, looking for her face in the tiny, thumbnail pictures next to each and every post and comment, and keeping an eye out for any students whose friends lists he hadn’t yet trawled through. After all - everyone these days had a Facebook, so she was bound to be on here somewhere! But four solid hours in and Sam hadn’t managed to find so much as a whisper on the mysterious new girl. He would have begun to believe that she didn’t actually exist, that perhaps it had all just been a figment of his imagination, if it hadn’t been for the incredibly real, tangible and lingering feelings she had inspired in him.