Last Girl Lied To

by L. E. Flynn

  “Cool,” Trixie said, running her fingers over one of the patches. “Maybe you could make me a pair.”

  My cheeks burned with something that felt an awful lot like pride. I wanted to be alone with that emotion, wrapped up in that feeling, before it went away.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Trixie said.

  “No,” I said too quickly. I thought about Beau, about the day we met, the spark I felt so vividly that it was like I stuck my finger in an electric socket. Our texts and bike rides and one almost-kiss at the end of sophomore year. I thought about Jenny in the hallway, the way she wouldn’t quite look at me. He asked me out. It’s not like I could say no.

  “Good,” she said. “They’re overrated. Once they go and fall in love with you, everything gets ruined.”

  I didn’t know who she was talking about, and she wasn’t even looking at me anymore. She was staring at the photo collage on my wall with a quirky little half smile. I had made it the summer before, printed pictures of me and Jenny and Alison and cut letters out of magazines to spell best friends and love and laugh. Suddenly, I was embarrassed by all of it. The collage, my lavender walls, my canopy bed. I had a stuffed rabbit on my pillow and collector Barbies in unopened boxes on my bookshelf. The whole room was so babyish and felt too small with Trixie in it.

  “So I take it you don’t have a boyfriend either?” I was desperate to say something to make her stop looking around, but it felt like the wrong thing to say.

  She rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and sighed, this huge shuddering sound. “I had this thing with my lab partner. But it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  I grabbed a chip out of the bag and popped it in my mouth. The salt stung my tongue and the crunching sound drowned out all the noise in my head. Then I ate another chip, and another. I knew I shouldn’t have been eating them, and that made them taste even better somehow.

  “This guy I hooked up with, he keeps texting me,” she said finally, standing up and leaning against my windowsill. “That’s why I needed to get away for a bit. I needed some space. You know?”

  I nodded, even though I didn’t know. I hadn’t ever hooked up with anyone.

  “Your lab partner?” I said.

  She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. I knew Mom would smell it and I’d get in trouble later, but I didn’t care.

  “We should have lunch together more often,” she said. “I know a great place we can go next time. You’ll love it.”

  She barely knew me, but it seemed like she knew me better than anyone. Well enough to know what I would love before I did.

  10

  TWO ANNOUNCEMENTS ARE made when I’m in homeroom. One is about cheerleading tryouts. The other is about Patricia Heller’s memorial service, to be held on Friday. Trixie hated her real name: Patricia. Nobody called her that, not even her dad.

  Both of my old lives, back-to-back over a crackling intercom. It’s almost comical, the universe conspiring to make this day a wreck. I ask Mr. Hanson for a hall pass, which I use to go to the bathroom and lock myself in a stall and curl up in a ball in front of the toilet.

  If it were me—if I were the one who was gone—she would have found the evidence. She would be following my trail, chasing the bread crumbs even as I swept them away, because she would’ve known where I was hiding. Maybe she left me a trail, and I never knew her well enough to follow it.

  I wonder what she would think if she knew I was covering up someone’s tracks from the night she disappeared. I wonder what she would think if she knew they weren’t hers.

  My eyes sting and my hairline is damp with sweat. I lean against the wall, resting my forehead on the toilet paper dispenser. I consider what Mom said this morning when she hugged me before I walked out the door: It’s never too late to start fresh, sweetie.

  I remember how Mom’s voice sounded when she got back from Tokyo, when she was on the phone with Aunt Leslie and I overheard her. Maybe she meant for me to.

  “She’s always hanging around with Trixie,” she said as I listened at her bedroom door. “She’s a bad influence. All they do is drive around and eat junk food. And I think she’s been drinking too.”

  I had held my breath and imagined what Aunt Leslie must have been saying on the other end. Hopefully something in my defense, but I knew the mention of drinking would shake her up because of her own history with it. Then Mom exhaled deeply. I could almost see her face, the lines deepening on her forehead. “I’m worried about her. She needs to find other friends. She can’t just be spending all her time with this one girl.”

  I had turned around and silently snuck away, my heart pounding. I was sick with worry, sick and angry. She couldn’t separate me from my best friend. She couldn’t take away the one person who understood me. She wouldn’t.

  The bathroom door swings open. I wrap my arms around my knees and stay quiet.

  “It’s emotional eating,” a girl’s voice says. “It happened to my aunt when she and my uncle split up. She used to be skinny. Now she can barely walk down her driveway.”

  I cover my mouth with my hand. I’d know that voice anywhere. High-pitched and airy, like wind chimes. Alison James, captain of the cheerleading squad, my former friend. If anyone is an emotional eater, it’s her. She’s the girl who once cried over the perfect chocolate cake Jenny and I made for her fifteenth birthday.

  She’s also the girl who threw the last party Trixie ever attended.

  “No, it started before her body changed,” another voice says. Jenny. “She started acting different last year. It was like she was brainwashed or something.”

  “Maybe they were lesbians,” Alison says in a hushed voice. “They spent basically every minute together.”

  I dig my fingernails into my palm so hard that they leave little red crescent moons.

  “I don’t think so,” Jenny says. “Trixie was fucking that weird guy in my geography class. Jasper. Remember, the one I told you about? They sat in the back row and, I swear, he had his hand up her skirt during class.”

  Liar, I want to shout. Trixie never wore skirts.

  “That’s messed up,” Alison says, and I can tell by the lilt in her voice that she’s tilting her head up, probably applying makeup like she used to before practice, even though she’d just sweat it right off.

  “Whatever,” Jenny says. “Plus, I saw them in the smoke pit once practically doing it. Just gross.”

  “I wish we could help her,” Alison says, smacking her lips together.

  “Yeah, except she’s dead now,” Jenny says, and the word is a dull thud in the air.

  “Not Trixie,” Alison says. “Fiona.”

  “Look, not to sound mean, but she’s not our problem either. This is senior year. I’m not getting dragged into someone else’s drama. I have enough drama of my own.”

  A snapping sound, probably Alison closing her powder compact. “Beau?” she says gently, and the word sounds so tender that I almost want to barge out of the stall and hug her. Alison isn’t a mean girl. Alison cares about people. Maybe she even cares about me.

  “He’s still drinking a lot,” Jenny says. “And after your party, I don’t even know how to bring it up without him going off on me. He said he was sorry, but I never know which version of him I’m going to get, and it’s scary.”

  Maybe Alison doesn’t, but I hear the excitement in her voice, buried under whatever else she’s trying to layer on top of it. Jenny hasn’t changed a single bit. She just loves the idea of tragedy: the romance of a boy wrestling with a ghost, the drama Beau brings to her stale little life. And I hate her for so many reasons, but that’s the biggest one of all.

  Alison drops her voice to a whisper. “Is he still involved in, you know, that shady stuff?”

  “No,” Jenny says, and I bet she’s shaking her head adamantly, her bangs flying across her forehead. “No, he gave all that up.”

  A shoe taps on the floor. “I just don’t really get what you see in him. He’s not a good boyfriend. H
e doesn’t do anything nice for you and doesn’t make an effort around us. And he was psycho at my party. Like, someone-should-have-called-the-cops psycho. That would have been the last straw for me.”

  “You don’t know him like I do,” Jenny says, and her words are knives, carving me up. “You don’t know what he says to me when we’re alone. He loves me. He needs me.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem,” Alison says, shuffling toward the door. “He needs you too much. And you’re starting to need him just as badly.”

  When they’re gone and the door swings shut behind them, I want to scream. They think they know everything, that they have it all figured out. The whole story, the lie. Just like last year, with Toby Hunter. The rumors, collecting like dust in corners. The air foggy with bullshit, so thick that people were choking on it.

  I get up and wash my hands and take my time walking back to class. I pretend to pay attention to Mr. Hanson, but when he asks us to write down our thoughts on some Shakespeare scene he just read out loud, I put something else on my page. Something I need to write down to actually believe. Because Jenny is wrong and Alison is wrong and my mom is wrong and everyone else is wrong. Trixie didn’t walk into the water and drown. She wouldn’t do that. She might not be here, but she isn’t dead, and I’m the only one who can prove it.

  The words, scrawled deep and heavy in my notebook, are their own truth:

  REASONS WHY TRIXIE DISAPPEARED

  11

  THERE’S PROBABLY A reason why people were so eager to believe that man’s story about how you walked into the water. There’s probably a reason they gave up so easily. Actually, several reasons. But the first one came from before I ever even met you.

  His name was Toby Hunter. Everyone at Robson High knows that name, and now everyone in Morrison Beach, California, does too. He became the poster child for suicide, the example of how you don’t always see the warning signs. I’ll never know the whole story of Toby Hunter and why he did it, because I didn’t know the real Toby Hunter. I only knew the version everyone else knew. The football star, the captain of the swim team, the guy dating the most beautiful girl in school. The guy who was supposed to go on to become president or something. Clean-cut, nice, smart. Everything a girl wants in a boyfriend. Except, I didn’t want Toby. I wanted the other Hunter brother.

  Toby Hunter was going places. Until he went to the last place anyone expected: he left a party drunk and jumped off the Morrison Beach Pier.

  I wasn’t at that party. I was supposed to go, but I had stayed home with food poisoning, puking like clockwork every five minutes. Later, Jenny told me in hushed tones about the fight Toby had with his brother, Beau, right before he stormed off. He was wild, she said. Probably drunk or high or both. Nobody tried to stop him, because everybody figured he just needed to cool off. Nobody thought he would do what he did.

  Three people saw Toby jump off the pier. One went in after him and nearly drowned. The waves were too big, the current too powerful. It was immediately ruled a suicide, a tragedy, a terrible waste, even though Toby’s body still hasn’t been found.

  The rumors started immediately too. Maybe he just fell, lost his balance. Those were the people in denial.

  Then there were the other people. The ones who said he wasn’t dead at all. The ones who said he was too good a swimmer to drown started circulating theories about why he would stage his own death. Like, he wasn’t dead but was working on an oil rig in Canada. Or that he moved into the Ozark Mountains and grew a beard and farmed goats. And while the truth sank, the rumors sputtered to the surface. Completely out of control. All of a sudden, everyone seemed to know someone who knew someone who had spotted Toby somewhere in the world. Nobody wanted to let Toby Hunter rest in peace.

  It’s different with Trixie. She mostly kept to herself, didn’t have a thousand friends. People flung words at her, tried to stick labels on her like tape. Loner. Weirdo. Trouble. She’d snuck out of Alison’s house like a shadow after everyone else had left, except the ones too drunk to know where they were. She didn’t say goodbye to me. It’s easy for everyone to believe she walked into the ocean and drowned. The signs were all there, they’d said. A classic case of somebody who wanted out.

  The signs were all there. But not the signs everyone thinks, the ones tossed out like a last-minute life preserver from somebody who planned to die.

  Trixie had all the signs of somebody who wanted people to think that.

  12

  THE LIST IS in my pocket as I drive to Dr. Rosenthal’s office. I’m speeding, in a rush. I was late to leave school because Mrs. Moss, Robson’s guidance counselor, insisted on cornering me after class and telling me her office was always open if I needed to talk. Like I’d really tell Moss anything. Her eyes would go wide and her jaw would drop if I told her what I did at the party, and who I did it with.

  The list is in my pocket but I can hear the words in my head. My blocky handwriting in bullet points like I’m studying for a test. Except, if this is a test, it’s the first one I’m failing.

  REASONS WHY TRIXIE DISAPPEARED

  I’m wondering if the list is total bullshit, if she really did do what that man said he saw, when I slam on my brakes to narrowly avoid hitting someone walking through a red light. My chest tightens and my pulse races and I raise my hand to pound the horn, but then I see who I almost hit. Or rather, who almost hit me. The same person who stared at me across the hall today.

  Jasper Hart, the only name currently on my list.

  He doesn’t even look to see who almost hit him, just raises an arm in the air and waves it, like he’s conducting a symphony in traffic. Then I see that he has earbuds in and think that maybe he is.

  Somebody behind me honks and I slowly inch forward. Jasper is on the sidewalk now, and when I see him cut the corner down a side street, I make a hasty decision in the form of a sharp right-hand turn. I recognize this street because Alison’s house is on it.

  I look at the clock on the car radio and know I’ll never make it to Dr. Rosenthal’s, but suddenly, I couldn’t care less. He’s just going to tell me to start eating better and maybe give me a lecture, some canned bullshit I already know. None of it matters.

  I stay a good distance behind Jasper and watch his lanky figure. He’s wearing a long black jacket, despite the heat, and it swings from side to side like a pendulum. He takes giant strides and periodically snaps his fingers, and I chug alongside the curb, hoping I’ll figure out a plan as I go.

  When he stops suddenly, I do too. I hunch against the back of my seat and slide down as he stops in front of a driveway.

  But he doesn’t walk up the driveway. He turns around and walks right toward me instead. I stare at my key in the ignition. I should just drive away and avoid him for the rest of the year. For the rest of my life. But I’m paralyzed, either out of fear or curiosity or a thick mixture of both. And it’s too late, because he’s beside my window, rapping his knuckles against it, motioning for me to roll it down. His face is completely expressionless.

  I roll the window down and he rests his forearms there until our faces are inches apart. “Following me?” he says. I can’t tell if he’s pissed off or amused or both. “I never would have presumed I was interesting enough for a girl to follow.”

  I suddenly wish the plate of glass were still between our faces. He’s too close without it. Close enough for me to see his dark eyes and the fringe of thick black eyelashes casting a shadow on his cheeks. Close enough for me to see the smattering of acne scars, stark against the whiteness of his skin. His mouth is wide and his lips have a reddish tinge, like he has been drinking fruit punch. Trixie told me he was a good kisser, but to me he looks more like a vampire, ready to suck the life out of everything.

  “I didn’t see you at the funeral,” I say when I finally find my voice.

  Jasper bites his lip and stares at the ground. I notice the top of his head for the first time, which I never saw before because he’s so tall. Blond hair is growing in at th
e roots, a stark contrast to the black hair hanging down to his shoulders. Blond roots and dark hair, the total opposite of Trixie.

  “I don’t do well with grief. I’m better at expressing it by myself.”

  I nod like I understand, but I don’t. It’s a strange thing to say. Nobody deals well with grief. Nobody knows what to say at funerals. Jasper makes grief sound like an art form.

  He looks directly at me, which is unnerving, like he knows all my secrets. “So, I’m intrigued. Why are you following me?” he says slowly, enunciating each word.

  I squirm in my seat, wishing I had just gone to see Dr. Rosenthal like I was supposed to. Being prodded and judged couldn’t possibly be any worse than this.

  “Because I don’t think she’s dead,” I say, my voice coming out in a high-pitched squeak.

  He says nothing and I’m sure he’s going to say that I’m delusional, that I’m just sad and lonely and making stuff up. Then he glances around, like he’s checking to see if we’re being watched, and walks around to the passenger side of my car and hops in. Just like Trixie did that day. Uninvited. He leans over the console and his hair flops in his eyes.

  “Well,” he says, his voice almost a whisper, his hands pressed together like he’s praying. “If she’s not dead, where in the world is she?”

  13

  YOU WEREN’T A part of my life in sophomore year. I had probably walked past you countless times, but I never saw you once.

  The first day of sophomore year, before I knew Trixie existed, I wasn’t searching for a girl who was presumed dead. I was searching for Jenny and Alison, who were supposed to meet me outside the school’s front doors. We weren’t eating in the cafeteria that day. We wanted to celebrate the first year of not being freshmen—of being higher up on the high school food chain—by having lunch away from school. None of us could drive, so we planned to walk to some little place near the beach that Jenny claimed had good taco salad.