Last Girl Lied To

by L. E. Flynn

  “Hey,” she says. “I meant to ask you, did you end up applying to NYU? I know you were talking about it. I just wanted to ask because I applied.” She pushes her hair off her face and I notice that she has bangs now.

  “I thought you wanted to stay here,” I say. “You and Jenny always talked about staying in California.” Jenny’s name sounds foreign leaving my mouth, rusty and strange, despite how many times it runs through my head every day.

  Alison sucks in her lip. “A lot of things have changed this year.”

  Then the bell rings and she’s gone, rushing down the hall with a wave. And I don’t have time to find her again and ask about it because Jasper is at my locker after my next class, holding a rose. Except, this one has thorns.

  I guess he’s my boyfriend now. It doesn’t matter to him that the only thing we have in common is a girl who was barely even here to begin with.

  “When am I going to meet your mom?” he asks the second week back from break.

  “Later,” I say, fear unfurling in my stomach and rattling around, the sharpest pieces punching holes.

  He hasn’t mentioned Trixie or Toby Hunter since that day at the beach when we tried to find the Preacher, and I wonder again if he wants to put the past away, fold it up and store it neatly in a box, find a place for it, just like how everything is organized in his bedroom. Maybe he wants to cover up the stain with a rug and walk all over it with his new life and pretend it’s not there. He starts his sentences with we and our and I haven’t stopped him because, as pathetic as it sounds, Jasper is the one person I can count on.

  Sometimes I feel like if I want to find the Preacher—Toby Hunter—I’ll have to choose between him and Jasper, the boy who is actually here. Jasper thinks we’re done searching, and if I keep bringing this up, I might lose him and never find what we were looking for. So what’s the point?

  He stays over at the end of the month, when Mom goes out of town for another business trip. He says the words again, with his head on my pillow and his mouth against my ear. I love you. I still don’t say anything back.

  The next morning, Jasper presses me onto my back, his fingers in my hair. I let my eyes flutter shut and try to focus on this, the here and now, the kind of moment I never thought I’d have. Then another sound enters my head, and I try not to hear it until I realize what it is.

  The garage door opening.

  “Shit,” I say, sitting up so fast that my forehead knocks into Jasper’s. “Shit. You have to get out of here.”

  I yank on a pair of fleece pajama pants and a hoodie. I shove my feet into slippers and throw my hair into a ponytail, and when I whirl around, Jasper is still in the same position, looking like I just slapped him in the face.

  “Seriously. My mom’s home. You can’t be here when she comes up.”

  The door downstairs opens and slams shut. The sound of shoes clacking on the tile echoes through the house.

  “It’s okay,” Jasper says. I ball up his shirt and toss it at him, and he finally takes the hint and puts it on, the neckline of his T-shirt drooping down to show his collarbone. I put a self-conscious hand to my own collarbone, invisible under my skin, my breasts straining against the zipper of my hoodie.

  “It’s not okay,” I whisper. “My mom’s going to kill me.”

  I take a deep breath and decide that the best way to play this is to make it seem like Jasper and I were just doing homework. I stretch my duvet over my bed, tugging on each of the four points. I hand Jasper a math textbook. “Sit.” I gesture to my desk chair. “We’re studying.”

  Mom calls my name from downstairs, and I yell back at her that I’m in my room. By the time she opens my door, I’m lying across my bed, furiously typing on my laptop.

  “Oh,” she says when she sees Jasper at my desk. He immediately stands up and shakes her hand, which makes me cringe.

  “I’m Jasper,” he says. “I’m in Fiona’s French class. We’re conjugating verbs.”

  I’m not even taking French. I haven’t heard Jasper lie to someone else before, but he’s good at it. He makes it sound so much like the truth that I almost believe it.

  “Nice to meet you, Jasper,” Mom says, but I can tell she’s suspicious. “I’ll just leave the door open here, if you don’t mind.” She gives me a kiss on the cheek.

  I fight the urge to laugh. She leaves me here all summer, all weekend, all night, but wants my door to stay open while I study. I wonder if those were her mom’s rules for her, and if that’s what made it so easy for her to get pregnant with me.

  When I get back from driving Jasper home, I try to log in to Trixie’s email again, even though I feel guilty doing it behind Jasper’s back. I don’t know where to look for Toby, so I look for Trixie instead, because wherever they are, I’m sure they’re together. This time, I try different words. Her street name and birthday and Sarah Brown’s name and Jasper’s name, and I still get the same error message. Wrong password. Try again.

  I slump back against my chair. I need to let this go. I need to let her go, but then she wins. Maybe that’s why I need to find her so badly. To prove that I can beat her at her own game.

  69

  YOU HAD A plan to start community college while you waited for me to graduate, but you never seemed excited about it. I flipped through course catalogs and highlighted the most interesting classes while you nodded with all the emotion of a bobblehead.

  “When are we going to go shopping?” I said.

  “We just went shopping,” she said. “And might I remind you that you didn’t even want to go.”

  “I don’t mean clothes shopping.” I hated even having to bring that up again. Nothing about clothes shopping was fun for me. I was too scared to try anything on in case it didn’t fit and I’d be forced to confront the reality that I was bigger than I used to be, maybe even a lot bigger. “I mean book shopping. For school. We should go make sure you have the stuff on your list.”

  Trixie was going to take all kinds of courses, mostly ones I picked for her. Stuff like Introduction to Greek Mythology and Renaissance Literature and even a film class. I was jealous. I wished I were a year older so I could skip the rest of Robson and go there with her. But the first day wasn’t far off and she still didn’t have her books. I didn’t realize why she wasn’t jumping at the chance to go to the college bookstore and pick them out. Besides, books were fun to shop for. They always fit.

  “Next week,” she said. “Next week, I promise.”

  But we never went. Because when next week came, she was gone. And only then, at her house after the funeral, did her dad tell me that she decided not to go to college after all. That she wanted to work and save up money instead.

  “She worked so hard washing dishes at that place,” he said, and he sounded so proud of her that I couldn’t break his heart.

  She told me one lie and her dad the other.

  I wondered who got the first lie, or if it mattered. The summer days all blended together, fast food and loud music and sticky wine coolers and bad reality TV and sand stuck to my skin after the beach. Time bled through like a stain, making it impossible to distinguish one day from the next.

  Maybe she wanted it that way.

  70

  IN ASTRONOMY, WE’RE supposed to break into pairs to prepare for a discussion about the rings found around the Jovian planets. Alison starts to turn around, and before she can get out the words to ask me, I turn and put my hands on Beau’s desk. I’m not sure what to expect, if he’ll be soft like he was the other day or the bottle-smashing version.

  “Do you want to be my partner?” I say, because Jenny was right about one thing. I need to be the one to ask him. And I need to find some way to talk to Beau about Toby. If he knows one of his hiding places, maybe that’s where the Preacher is now.

  “Sure,” he mumbles without meeting my gaze. “If you still want me.”

  He says the last part so quietly I’m not even sure it happened. But if it did happen, that means there’s hope, the
re’s some part of him that needs someone to believe in him. And hope might be flimsy, but I’ve held on to less.

  Mr. Sweet says we can move into the hallway or the library to talk somewhere quieter, so Beau and I gather our books and leave the room. I make the mistake of turning around on my way out and see Alison staring at me, her eyebrow raised. My first thought is She knows. It happened at her house. The music was loud, and I never would have known if she was standing right there. She’s only biding her time until she can expose me to everyone. And what would Beau do then?

  We find an alcove in the hall and sit down with our backs to the wall. Beau yawns repeatedly and my heart sinks, because I wonder how I didn’t see it already. His red eyes, his sunken cheeks, the sour smell on his breath.

  “You’ve been drinking,” I whisper.

  “Just a bit. I held up a liquor store before school. The usual.” His lips form a slow smile, which disappears when he sees the look on my face. “It’s a joke, Fiona. You need to stop worrying about me.”

  I swallow back everything I want to say, about getting help and getting his life back. If my conversation with Aunt Leslie taught me anything, it’s that someone can’t be helped until they want to be. So instead of giving him a lecture, instead of tricking him into my car, I open my textbook.

  I couldn’t save Trixie, because she didn’t want to be saved from anything. Maybe I can’t save Beau, for the same reason.

  “It’s probably a bunch of bullshit,” he says, craning his neck back to stare at the ceiling. “The stars. There are probably little people looking down on us somewhere up there, laughing at what idiots we are. Judging all the mistakes we make. You know, maybe they even have a way to erase them. Don’t you wish you could just go back and redo all the shitty mistakes you’ve made?”

  “No,” I say, but I really mean yes. Because if I could, I might have seen all of the little clues Trixie did leave for me. The frayed ends she gave me to grab on to that I was too clumsy and nearsighted to catch.

  Then I realize what he means. Our mistake. That’s the one he would take back. And it doesn’t matter, it happened and nothing can take that away, but something still hardens inside me.

  “You know what I’d change first?” He takes the pen from my hand and draws a big blue X over the diagram in his textbook. “I would have paid less attention to my asshole brother. That’s how this whole thing started. If I wouldn’t have been so desperate to find out what he was hiding, I would have been minding my own goddamned business at that party. I wouldn’t have ever known about him and Trixie. Maybe he would have dumped Gabby and they could have been out in the open, whatever that would have looked like.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.” I’m not even sure I believe myself. “You’re his brother. You were worried about him.”

  He starts to laugh. “I wasn’t worried. I was just desperate to find something wrong with King Toby. I wanted to see if there was a human in there.”

  I don’t say anything. I take another pen and write the date on a piece of lined notebook paper and underline it five times, leaving indents on the page.

  “I blamed you too,” he says. “If you would have been at that party, I wouldn’t have been with Toby, because I would have been with you. That would’ve been our night. I had something for you.” He clears his throat. “I never told you about it. I buried it, actually. In my mom’s garden. Under her rosebush. And she wondered why it died.”

  He laughs, softly, but I don’t. You’ll be there tonight, right? But I wasn’t. I want to ask so badly what he buried, what he had to get rid of so fast he covered it in layers of dirt. But I force myself not to ask, because I don’t want the truth to come out that way. I want him to want to tell me. To need me to know.

  “My dad wants me to marry Jenny,” he says suddenly, pulling a page out of his textbook and shredding it between his fingers. “Can you believe that? He and my mom got married right out of high school. They want us to start popping out kids after college. Carry on the family line. I told him I don’t ever want a kid, and he flipped.”

  I rock back and forth and tuck the corners of my skirt under my knees. The idea of Beau marrying Jenny, being someone else’s forever, is enough to suck all the air out of me.

  “Don’t do it,” I hear myself say. “Live your own life.”

  He shakes his head. “You sound like a goddamn self-help book. Don’t turn into one of them. You’re the only one who isn’t.”

  Beau’s cheeks are turning red. I want to reach out and touch them, to take his face in my hands and press my lips against his and tell him everything will be okay. But I can’t say that because even I don’t believe it’s true.

  “I need to ask you a question,” I say instead, focusing my eyes on my textbook. “You know it wasn’t a coincidence, that both of them disappeared. Did Toby spend a lot of time on his computer? Or his phone? The night of Alison’s first party, was he on his phone a lot?”

  Beau slouches forward, slumping his head over his lap. “Who knows what the guy did behind closed doors. I wasn’t his babysitter. But you need to drop it. I know what you’re doing. You’re still looking. And all you’re doing is following your own shadow.” He leans toward me and puts his hand over my textbook. “Listen to me. Don’t go digging for a body that isn’t there. You’ll just get buried too.”

  “Did he ever mention anything about a preacher?”

  Beau shakes his head, but I can tell what I just said has sparked some kind of memory. “No. I have no clue what you’re talking about.” He says it gently. “Move on, Fiona. I’m telling you, move on.”

  Our faces are inches apart and I barely breathe. Down the hall, somebody coughs and it’s a reminder that there’s life outside of me and Beau, that he has a girlfriend and I have a boyfriend and we have nothing in common. We’re two people who used to be friends, who made a drunken mistake.

  “Promise me you’ll stop,” he says, but then the bell rings and I’m spared having to make that promise.

  71

  YOU WEREN’T AROUND to see it, but Beau stopped making sense after he smashed the bottle in Alison’s kitchen.

  “Orion,” he kept saying, pointing at the ceiling. “That’s what my mom wanted to call me, but my dad wouldn’t let her. Because he controls everything.”

  Nobody was listening. The party had carried on without him. People were starting to leave, filing out in clumps. I figured Trixie would come and find me soon and pull me away too.

  “You remember Orion,” he said, but this time he pointed at me. “You saw him too.”

  I nodded, but I still only saw Beau.

  72

  I DON’T TELL Jasper, but I start driving around by myself at night, cruising past all the places Trixie and I used to hang out. Anywhere Trixie might be. I even drive to the outskirts of town where there’s a trailer park, thinking she and Toby could be living there in a crappy aluminum piece of shit with a leaky roof, the last place anyone would think to look for them. I go back there two nights in a row, watching people come and go, my heart thudding. On the third night, I lean back in my seat, the leather cold, wondering why I even care this much.

  My mind wanders to the words I put on my NYU application. Describe an experience that has impacted who you are as a person. I wrote about losing my best friend. She understood me in a way nobody else ever had. She didn’t want to change me. We shared everything. She just wanted me to be happy. She always had my best interests at heart. Living without her has made me stronger, because her memory is everywhere.

  But each sentence has a double meaning, a hidden agenda, a secret of its own.

  She understood me in a way nobody else ever had. She understood the version of me that listened when she told me to drive away. But that was only one part of me, and she never knew the rest. Or never cared to.

  She didn’t want to change me. She already had.

  We shared everything. I shared secrets and she used them to stab me in the back. Maybe the only real th
ing we shared was that we both loved a Hunter brother.

  She just wanted me to be happy. As long as it was on her terms.

  She always had my best interests at heart. She didn’t want me and Beau to be together, so she did everything she could to keep me from loving him. Including betraying me in the worst possible way, doing with him what I always wanted to do, just because she could.

  Living without her has made me stronger, because her memory is everywhere. This is the part that makes me mad, because it’s the part I want to be true. I want to be able to say I’m stronger now, but every day I just feel weaker, like my energy is being sapped with each passing hour.

  I jerk upright when I see a guy in a baseball cap holding hands with a girl whose twiggy legs poke out of faded denim shorts. They’re walking down the side of the road, kicking up dirt, heading right toward my car. This is it, I think, sweat forming under my armpits, sending chills through the rest of me. I got them.

  But as they get closer to the car, I realize it’s not them, not even close. The girl is older, probably in her thirties, with sun-damaged skin and a rattling cough like a lifelong smoker’s. The guy is missing teeth and is all wrong for Toby Hunter, too short and too scrawny. His beady eyes pass over me just long enough for me to realize this whole idea is stupid and dangerous and pointless. They might have stuck around Morrison Beach at one point, but they aren’t here anymore.

  I slump against the steering wheel in frustration. There’s something I’m missing here, a giant piece of the puzzle that’s right in front of my face, a piece that will lock the other pieces together. All of the clues are floating around in my head rootless, and the harder I try to grab on to one, the farther away the other ones get.