The Safest Lies

by Megan Miranda

  The medic insisted on bringing me inside with a wheelchair—protocol, she claimed—but I stood up as soon as we were safely inside the lobby, despite the look she gave me. I glanced around the room at the sea of strangers—all watching me back.

  I heard periodic beeping, a loudspeaker crackle, a baby crying. Everything was unfamiliar—the angular walls, the sounds, the sharp scent of cleanser—and I stayed close to the medic as she led me through the lobby. I checked over my shoulder, saw the double doors we’d entered. But there were no windows, no other exits except more doors leading to more halls. I could see the fluorescent glow through the glass panels. A labyrinth of rooms I’d never find my way out of alone.

  I also didn’t see Ryan anywhere—maybe he was already getting looked at. Maybe he was on a different floor. Maybe he’d never find me in the sea of strangers. The medic led me past a bunch of people who looked like they should definitely be wearing masks, past the police hovering near the hallway entrances, to a narrow bed surrounded by blue curtains. I hadn’t stopped shaking since being pulled from the car.

  “Probably just the leftover adrenaline,” she said, watching me stare at my own hands. I curled my fingers in.

  “Yeah,” I said. Not the fact that my hands had barely kept me from falling, or the fear that was oozing out of every pore, turning me anxious and paralyzed.

  It’s just the unknown, that’s what Jan would say. It’s how I got through the first month of high school last year, after it was strongly suggested that I attend our local school instead of having my mother homeschool me any longer. Strong suggestions were things my mother took pretty seriously. And me leaving the house on a regular basis was a big condition of her custody agreement with Jan and the Department of Family Services. Jan was the one who got me a summer job, for that very reason.

  The medic patted my shoulder awkwardly before leaving the area as a woman in scrubs pulled the curtain aside.

  I’m not stuck in the car anymore; I’m not hanging from a cliff; I’m not in danger. And slowly, the shaking subsided.

  —

  The doctor kept shining a light in my eyes, asking me to follow her finger, even as the police officer questioned me. I didn’t have a bump on my head, I didn’t recall hitting my head, but the fact remained that I had been unresponsive until Ryan Baker crawled into my car. I wondered, briefly, how long that had been.

  “Were you on the phone?” the police officer asked.

  “My phone was in my bag.” Both of which were now over a cliff.

  The doctor’s fingers traced patterns on my skull, which was not at all unpleasant—a direct contrast to the officer’s line of questioning.

  “Had you been drinking?” he asked.

  “Other than caffeine? No.”

  “So, you were tired then? Did you fall asleep at the wheel?”

  Of course I was tired. I’d been at school for eight hours, and then spent two more hours tutoring Leo Johnson in chemistry. But these were the types of questions people asked my mom, who had learned to err on the side of caution, on the side of lying. Always too much to lose.

  “Not really,” I said. “A soda was just the cheapest thing in the school vending machine. There was a car heading my way, on my side of the street. That’s why I drove off the road.”

  “What did this car look like?”

  It had been dark. I closed my eyes, tried to remember. One glance away. The heat kicking on. The glare of headlights, and I cut the wheel…“All I saw were the lights.”

  The doctor was moving my head gently back and forth.

  “There’s no sign of another car,” the police officer said.

  I closed my eyes, tried to see it again—maybe the glare had been from my own high beams reflecting off the median. What had I really seen? It had only lasted a fraction of a second. Now that I revisited it, I started to doubt my own memory.

  “Did you check the bottom of the cliff?” I asked.

  He looked at me like I’d made a distasteful joke, but I was serious. He nodded to the doctor. “That’ll be all, Kelsey. Do me a favor and fill in your birthdate, phone number, and address, in case we have any more questions.”

  “Sure.” I took the clipboard from his hand.

  The officer pulled the curtain back as he left, and Ryan stood just outside, leaning against the desk at reception. I smiled involuntarily, and he half waved back. He was something familiar, and suddenly safe, and it reminded me of all those times at the Lodge, before things turned awkward, when he’d sit on top of the counter, smiling at me while I talked.

  There was now a bandage wrapped around his upper arm, disappearing inside the sleeve of his shirt, and I wondered whether he’d gotten that from climbing in my car or if it was from the fall. The doctors chatted him up, patted his shoulder—he was still in uniform, and looked completely at home.

  “Looks like someone’s here to check up on you,” the doctor said.

  “He’s my ride home,” I said. And when she raised an eyebrow, I added, “He’s in my math class.”

  She ran her hands over my arms, my sides, my back. I winced when she pressed my left arm, felt my body tense when her fingers skimmed my elbows. “You can expect some bruising,” she said.

  She scanned my body quickly, turning over my hands, gently uncurling my fingers. “Ouch,” she said. Her eyes flicked up to my face and back down again. “Any idea how this happened?”

  The deep line ran across all four fingers of both hands, the skin scraped raw. I resisted the urge to ball them back up. A secret—how close we truly came.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know.” A small lie. A learned habit.

  She pressed her lips together as she treated and bandaged each one. “Are your parents coming?” she asked. “There’s still a bunch of paperwork to take care of before we can release you. And we need your insurance information.”

  “No, but…” The thought trailed off as two teenagers approached the desk Ryan was leaning against. I heard the guy say my name as the girl’s gaze flitted around the room, eventually settling on me. She tapped her brother’s arm, and I shrank into myself.

  Cole and Emma. Jan’s children. Both exes of mine, in one way or another.

  Jan’s son, Cole, was also first-boyfriend Cole, even though it was back when he was fifteen and I was fourteen, and he probably only did it because he wasn’t supposed to. Or maybe just because I was always there.

  Jan used to take me to “socialize” with her children—it was healthy, she told my mom. It was a step. A safe step. She brought me around to birthday parties, or out on excursions, for years. Until I turned fourteen and I wasn’t just a girl his mom made them hang out with anymore. There were probably rules against this, with Jan.

  He’d told me he liked my freckles and I told him I’d had them forever, hadn’t he noticed? He’d shrugged. He’d kissed me. A month later, Jan found out and told Cole to put an end to it, and when I confronted him about it, he shrugged again, and that was the end of that. At first, I’d thought he was a coward, not standing up to his mom. Then I realized he probably didn’t care. He shrugged. The end.

  I have since come to loathe all boys who shrug.

  Rumor had it that he broke up with his last girlfriend through a text, and that he forgot to break up with the one before that at all before moving on. So, honestly, I guess it could’ve been worse.

  An unfortunate by-product of the Cole breakup was that Emma eventually became ex-best-friend Emma, as well. Sadly, never to be replaced. My neighbor Annika was probably the closest thing I had to one now—when she wasn’t away at boarding school.

  Cole, at least, had let me know in no uncertain terms that whatever we had was over. The shrug. With Emma, it was more of a drifting. There was no big falling-out; she just stopped answering her phone. Our friendship just kind of fizzled, like a sparkler burning down to your fingers. By the time you realize you were being burned, it was too late—the damage done, the spark already extinguished.

 
She’d gone on to become someone else—new friends, different crowd—while I remained left behind, painfully the same. A work in progress, Jan called me. Always in progress.

  I assumed Jan had had a Talk with her children about privacy and such, because as far as I knew, neither had told anyone about my mother. And last year, when I found myself wandering the school halls for the first time, their faces were the only ones I recognized—their eyes momentarily meeting my own, then sliding quickly away. Three years later, and it was as if we’d never known each other at all.

  Still, both of them were metaphorical bombs, as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t make eye contact without seeing myself reflected in their eyes—in their mother’s dinnertime conversation, in her papers. I did not like what I saw.

  Cole was the one to speak first. “Mom’s taking a night course. And our dad’s away at work. So here we are.”

  “Thanks,” I said. First word spoken in over three years. Not too hard. Like ripping off a Band-Aid.

  But then he shrugged. No big deal. Whatever. We’re done. Take your pick.

  Cole had my medical consent forms, the ones that Jan had used before to get me treated. The ones she needed to get me released. Because I was seventeen, and therefore not capable of making decisions for myself.

  Emma was sixteen, had grown into her wide-set eyes, had also developed curves and a mean streak, if rumors were to be believed. Cole had only gotten taller, had filled out from football and lacrosse, and had his pick of girls, which he rotated through at an alarming pace.

  “What’s Ryan Baker doing here?” Emma asked, like we were still friends—as if she hadn’t systematically ignored me until I stopped trying. And then, when Ryan turned at his name, she leaned into her hip and cocked her head—a study in flirtation—and said, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Just a few stitches,” he said.

  “How much longer?” Cole asked the doctor, not making eye contact with me.

  “Thank you for bringing the papers. But I have a ride,” I said.

  “My mom said—”

  “Ryan’s driving me.” I liked this version of me a lot better. The girl who got rides home from people she vaguely knew, who did not need to rely on the generosity of ex-friends. Resourceful. Resilient.

  “Okay, fine.” Cole let the papers drop into my lap, his hands held up like he was relieving himself of some great responsibility. “I do have better things to do, you know.”

  I wondered what Cole had been doing before his mom sent him here, because his aggravation at me seemed a little stronger than a one-month relationship more than three years earlier should warrant—especially one that ended with a shrug.

  “Blame your mother,” I said, because that hurt.

  “Or yours,” he said, which hurt even more, because he was right.

  The ticking bomb. They knew the truth. I know, I know, I know who you are.

  Who am I? Usually, I’m nothing. A student in your math class. Kelsey Thomas? A shrug. A girl in a sea of faces, passing unremarkably in the hall. Most of the time, I’m fine. Steady hands, steady course, X-ing out the boxes of the calendar—a string of days that blur together in typical fashion.

  Other times, out of nowhere, I become afraid, like her. So afraid that I cannot move. Sometimes, for no reason that I can understand, I do nothing but lie in bed, like my mother does, needing the four walls and the silence. I sometimes become so paralyzed that I pretend to be physically ill, just so I can remain, unmoving, in the safety of my room. To know, at any moment, at every moment, that I am okay. I am safe.

  But that’s nothing compared to my mother.

  I’m the daughter of a woman completely ruled by fear. We live on a very fine line.

  And they know.

  —

  After the papers were processed and the doctor released me to go home, leaving me with a pamphlet on how to watch out for signs of an internal head injury, I unwound the bandages from my hands and quickly looked myself over in the mirror. Nothing visible for my mother to worry over unnecessarily. I slid off the bed and joined Ryan at the front desk, where he was working his way through a bowl of lollipops. People kept smiling at him as they passed, like they couldn’t help themselves.

  “Those your friends?” he asked, his tongue unnaturally red from the candy.

  “No,” I said. “Their mom had paperwork the hospital needed. Long story.”

  “Is she your guardian or something?”

  “Not exactly,” I said, following him out into the parking lot. Jan wasn’t something I wanted to elaborate on, or explain.

  “But your mom’s sick, right?” My shoulders stiffened on impulse, and he visibly cringed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to just say that.”

  I guess there was some sort of talk, if Ryan had heard that. “Yes, she is.” It was the truth, but not in the way he meant it. Not cancer or something terminal. But it was an illness. Simpler to let them assume it was something physical in nature. Something they could understand.

  Seeing Jan was part of my mother’s deal to keep me. Jan was assigned by the state. I’ve come to rely on her, but I also don’t totally trust her, because she reports to someone else, who decides my fate. My mother relies on her even more, and trusts her even less.

  Especially since that article she wrote, that was decidedly about me.

  My fear.

  There was this study, before, that she referred to in the paper, on epigenetics and fear. How scientists repeatedly scared mice with specific odors—fear conditioning, it’s called—and then watched as their future offspring seemed to be scared of those same scents. They did it with cherry blossoms—I could not imagine being scared of cherry blossoms, but to each their own, I guess. Anyway, this was the basis of her article. Evolution in progress. A sign that gene expression can be altered. That fear can be passed down, conditioned, woven into the very core of us, down to the expression of our DNA.

  Her article became the subject of a peer review discussion. Were my fears the product of my childhood? Was I fed them as an infant, held to my mother’s chest? Did the tension leech from her body into mine? Did I absorb some physical cues from her? Did she weave them into bedtime stories, whispered to me in the dark? Or—and this is Jan—was there something tying mine to hers, that goes deeper, all the way to my DNA?

  On the one hand, I wasn’t a mouse.

  But I remembered, just as Jan must have, when she took me and Emma to that nail salon while the back rooms were being worked on, and all the hairs on my arms stood on end from the scent of the cleaning fluid, and I threw up my burrito all over the cheap linoleum floor.

  The scent of caustic cleaners, Jan wrote in that paper. Though this was a violation of our privacy, we had too much to lose.

  Careful, always careful. The word like an echo, always there, always a warning. There were too many ways she could lose me.

  Ryan drove a Jeep with a soft top, and doors he could remove in the nice weather, which I’d seen him do when he pulled up to the Lodge in the summer. I could tally the ways my mother would deem this car unsafe. Then again, mine was over a cliff, and his was not.

  “Where do you live?” he asked as he opened my door.

  “Do you know Sterling Cross? It’s this neighborhood at the end of—”

  “Yeah,” he said as he shut the door. “I know it.”

  His phone chimed in the space between us as we exited the parking lot, but he ignored it.

  “So,” I said, “firefighter, huh? Aren’t you a little young?”

  “I turned eighteen last month, but I’ve wanted to do it my whole life. My dad just retired. My grandfather was a firefighter before him, too. The department is practically my family. We were all just waiting to make it official.” He smiled to himself. “It’s in my blood.”

  His phone chimed again.

  “Are you going to check it?” I asked. If it was my mother, and I ignored it more than once, she’d start to panic.

  His hands tightened on the wheel,
and his eyes slid over to me for a fraction of a second. “Not while I’m driving. I’ve seen enough accidents, thanks,” he said.

  And then I was back there, hanging, my fingers scrambling for purchase….“I wasn’t texting, in case you were wondering,” I said. I picked up his phone, felt him cut his eyes to me again. “A Holly wants to know if you’re going to the party at Julian’s tonight.”

  He shifted in his seat. “Uh.”

  “She says she really hopes you’ll be there. The really is in all caps, by the way. So I think she means it.”

  “Kelsey?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Just a few scratches. More than I can say for you.” I caught myself staring at his bandage.

  “No, I mean are you okay?” he asked.

  “Oh.” I put his phone back. “I don’t know.” We drove through the mountain pass, and I concentrated on the floorboard instead of the double yellow line, and the narrow shoulder of the road, and the dark night stretching out below us. “Ask me tomorrow.”

  “Put your number in my phone, and I’ll ask you tomorrow.”

  “My phone is gone,” I said.

  His thumbs were drumming on the steering wheel, all nervous energy, and it was starting to catch.

  He’s asking for your number, Kelsey. Don’t be a moron.

  “For when you get a new one, then,” he said.

  Meaning: I lived in Sterling Cross, I could afford a new phone. And I would get a new one soon, because it was doubtful I’d be let out of the house without one.

  “Okay.” I added my number to his phone, like he asked.

  “Where to?” He pulled into the entrance of Sterling Cross, which was one windy road you had to travel a few miles down until it forked off in several directions, each road leading to a single lot with a stand-alone house. There were only ten houses in the neighborhood, and most were some type of mansion trying to disguise itself as a humble log cabin—mountain chic, Annika called it, when I’d pointed this out to her.