I’d eaten a cheeseburger and a bowl of ice cream at the orientation barbecue earlier that day. CJ had nibbled on some potato salad. I’d never had to think about what I ate, but maybe I needed to start.
“Anyway,” Pippa said. “We’re supposed to find people to bring to this party. Some guy invited us and said to bring more freshman girls. ‘Fresh meat’ is actually what he said, which is kinda gross, but hey, it’s a party. Wanna go? It’s at a house on Hutchins Street.”
“Sure,” Jackie said.
“Now? Should we change?” I was still wearing jean shorts and a white tank top, grubby from moving in all day. Pippa and Bree were in sundresses, and Pippa was wearing eyeliner and something glossy on her lips.
“If you want.” Bree shrugged.
“Nah, let’s just go,” Jackie said. She untwisted and retwisted her blond hair into a messy bun and stood. In a navy T-shirt and track shorts, she looked like a gorgeous tomboy—the kind guys are obsessed with. I wanted to at least put on some mascara and change my shirt, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to come off like some superficial girly girl who can’t go to a party without makeup on.
“Let’s take a shot before, though?” Pippa said, gesturing to the Absolut. “If it’s okay with whoever’s vodka that is.”
“Mine,” I said. “Go for it.”
The four of us passed the bottle around. When it was Bree’s turn, she hesitated before taking a swig, then her expression morphed into one of disgust.
“Yuck.” She passed the bottle to Jackie.
“It gets easier,” Pippa said.
“Easier?” Jackie asked.
“I didn’t drink that much in high school.” Bree blinked her hazel eyes.
“Well, there’s plenty of time to catch up now.” Jackie smiled.
“What did you do in high school, if you didn’t drink and you didn’t have sex? You went to boarding school. Isn’t that what people do there?”
“Pippa, you’re annoying.” Bree glanced away before looking at Jackie and me. “I went to Choate and spent most of the time studying my ass off so I could get a good financial aid package for college. I’m not trying to make you feel bad for me; I’m just telling you,” she said quickly, as if she had rehearsed it. Then she looked down and smiled ruefully. “But yeah, I’ve got to lose the v-card.”
“Well, don’t give it up to just anyone,” Jackie said.
I nodded in agreement, though I felt bad for Bree for getting put on the spot. I would’ve hated going to college a virgin.
“We’ll get her laid, ladies.” Pippa grinned. “And with someone worthwhile. You’re gorgeous, Bree. You can afford high standards.”
I wouldn’t have called Bree gorgeous—she was more cute, with her freckles and button nose—but I understood that Pippa was trying to redeem herself for making Bree feel self-conscious. Bree’s prettiness was mostly accentuated by her thin figure. Skinny people just look better, I realized then.
Jackie took her swig of Absolut, and my stomach churned in anticipation. We were going to a party, and there wouldn’t be a curfew. I would probably never have a curfew again. I felt the corners of my mouth poke into a smile. I fingered the backs of my new earrings, twisting them around and around as I waited for my turn to take a pull of the lukewarm Absolut. Jackie handed me the vodka and I winced as I swallowed it down—not a new feeling. I’d done my fair share of vodka pulls in high school, first for fun and then just to dull everything away. But things were going to be different now, I knew.
I felt a pleasant rush to my head as I stood. I was still touching my new earrings as I caught a glimpse of them in the mirror hanging on the back of the door. L. A. They looked expensive—definitely real gold. I actually liked them a lot (I’m a sucker for a tasteful monogram), but they screamed gift from CJ. They would never be anything else. I pulled them off discreetly, quietly dropping them into the trash bin as we left the room.
2
STEPHEN
SEPTEMBER 2010
The first time I saw Lucy Albright was at a party at Wrigley’s house on Hutchins Street. Wrigley and his roommates threw down a lot our junior fall, and the best-looking freshman girls always showed up wasted, wearing tight jeans and revealing tops. But Lucy was different from the rest of them. She’s beautiful, but it’s more complex than that. Lucy is beautiful in the way that makes it hard to stop staring, in the way that the attractiveness becomes something you have to figure out. The best part is, she has no idea.
She stood in the living room by the fireplace, holding a plastic red cup and wearing shorts, I forget what color, but I remember that they were shorts because I took note of how long and slim her legs were. Not too skinny, but perfect. Tan, creamy skin, like a coffee milk shake. Her arms were the same, lengthy and thin like string beans. Every move she made seemed graceful and honed; she was feminine and delicate in a way that made me want to hold her hand. I couldn’t stop watching her.
Her face was incredible, too. Perhaps not perfect—no, not perfect—but holy hell pretty. Dark blue eyes, a straight nose between defined cheekbones. Her long, chestnut-colored hair spilled down over her neck and down through the middle of her exposed shoulder blades.
I watched her for a long time. Sometimes I catch myself staring at people for too long without realizing it. I’m only curious. Why do they laugh? How do they speak? What do they do? What do they feel? I want to know.
Lucy’s smile spread across her whole face. It was pretty, like the rest of her. You have to be careful of girls that are too pretty, though. They hold a power that they never had to earn.
I finished my seventh beer. I’d already had two whiskey shots, but I still felt a creeping sense of anxiety right at the base of my brain, so I did another with Wrigley in his room. Charlie took out the little white bag and shook a small pile of blow onto the mirror lying on Wrigley’s table. He used his driver’s license to cut us each a generous line. Long and thin. Like Lucy’s arms, I thought, as I inhaled and felt the whoosh hit my brain. Like a blast of cold, sweet air that made life come into focus.
I didn’t talk to her that night. Not because I was nervous—I don’t get nervous talking to girls—but because I got shitfaced and ended up in Diana’s room again, fucking her, and then sitting up in bed until three in the morning listening to her whine about what a horrible person I’d become.
I did catch Lucy’s eye, though, across the room, and I held her gaze for a couple of seconds. She looked at me with an expression mixed with interest and fear, like I was going to do something terrible to her. But when I smiled, her expression softened. That was when I knew. It’s usually fairly easy to tell, but with Lucy I knew for sure. There was something about her, a fragile sense of blind conviction. I knew that she would trust me.
3
LUCY
OCTOBER 2010
Pippa started seeing Mike Wrigley the second week of freshman year. Everyone called him Wrigley, not Mike. Wrigley and his friends were in charge of planning the annual trip to Lake Mead the first weekend in October. They were part of the underground fraternity Chops, short for Lambda Chi Alpha, Pippa explained. Baird had shut Chops down a few years ago after a drug bust, but Wrigley had since spearheaded its underground revival. Freshmen weren’t supposed to go on the Mead trip, but with her new semi-girlfriend status, Pippa got the four of us invited.
We hit the road at dawn on Friday in Pippa’s Touareg, tailing Wrigley in the weak gray light, the sun a thin orange line on the horizon. Pippa offered to drive while the three of us slept, but I can never really sleep in cars, so I talked to her while she chased Adderall with her latte and balanced the wheel in cruise control—it was a straight shot on I-15 across the border into Nevada.
I’d been perplexed by the collective enthusiasm surrounding the five-hour drive to a random desert lake, the Pacific Ocean being a mere fifty miles from Baird. But pulling into the marina midmorning, the sun a giant tangerine orb casting rays onto the velvety blue water, I understood. Mea
d was more than just a lake. Massive red cliffs rose around the shorelines like something from another planet, the surface of the water iridescent under the cloudless dome of pure blue sky. It was a landscape starkly different from anything I’d ever laid eyes on. New frontiers. The possibilities filled me. I watched as the rest of the cars pulled in and bleary-eyed kids climbed out, yawning and stretching in the sun. There must’ve been sixty of us, maybe seventy. Some were cracking open beers already. Wrigley appeared from the marina office with two keys and tossed one to a guy with longish dark hair. Someone else in Chops, most likely. They were wearing matching captain’s hats.
“Anchors aweigh,” Wrigley said, and everyone followed him and the dark-haired guy onto two houseboats at the end of the marina.
Lake Mead was the most spectacular place I’d ever been, I decided after day one of cruising through the endless lake, through canyons that seemed to stretch on forever. It was October but still summer weather on the lake, even hotter than my first month in Southern California, and I could feel the sun baking me a shade darker. There were fresh thirty-racks in every corner and plastic pouches of pink Franzia dangling above our heads. Wrigley turned up the music as loud as it would go and it didn’t matter—there was no one else around for miles.
At night the two boats docked on a wide-enough beach. When Jackie, Bree, and I couldn’t keep our eyes open for another drink, the three of us crawled into whatever vacant space we could find and crashed into sleep. Pippa slept with Wrigley in his tent on the beach. The queen of Mead, I heard one girl deem her, because Wrigley was the king.
I felt farther away from home than I ever had, and happier than I had since before the really bad year, before the Unforgivable Thing. Baird kids seemed to have a kind of fun that was new to me, the fun that came with open-mindedness and experimenting and genuine self-confidence, an entirely different kind of fun than the Cold Spring Harbor, Southside-induced fun we had in cocktail dresses on the golf course, where fun had become another word for competition—a night out was a contest to see who wore the cutest outfit and who flirted successfully with the most attractive guy. I’d gotten so sick of all that at the same time that Lydia and Helen and my other Long Island friends had absorbed it into their identities. They would build their lives around it—preppy Long Island kids turned preppy Long Island moms. I wanted to run away from it; I was afraid of what might happen if I didn’t. I craved something more when I put my head down on the pillow at night, and the longing stretched all the way to my toes.
I had tried to explain all this to Lydia without sounding condescending, but I never succeeded. I knew I sounded spoiled, patronizing, criticizing a life I should’ve felt lucky to have. It wasn’t that I wasn’t grateful—I was, I tried to be—but by the beginning of senior year I knew that if I didn’t get out of there, I would shrink. It was a point of contention between Lydia and me right up until the day I left for Baird and she for Amherst. She wanted me to want the things she wanted, but I just didn’t.
Except for a few of the older girls who stared at us like they wanted to throw us overboard, the kids at Baird were sincerely nice. Funny and interested and offbeat and smart—a collection of personalities that inspired me, that made me feel a new part of myself. I watched them take drugs like it was nothing, and not because they were trying to impress anyone. If you didn’t do drugs, no one cared, either. There were loose social circles but no cliques; it felt like you could really do whatever you wanted and no one was going to judge you. Baird kids wore neon one-pieces and gold shorts and said things like hella and let’s kick it. Lydia and Helen would’ve thought they were weird.
The third and final day on Lake Mead, I leaned against the railing on the upper deck of one of the houseboats. I was physically exhausted but still mentally jacked up, fueled by beer and adrenaline. Pippa leaned over Wrigley, her hands pressed to his sun-kissed shoulders, as he used a credit card to separate a mound of white powder on a hand mirror. Pippa had been doing coke with Wrigley all weekend. I watched her suck the skinny white line up her nostril with a rolled twenty-dollar bill.
Pippa passed the mirror to Jackie, and I felt a stab of betrayal when Jackie sucked up one of the lines. Until this weekend, I hadn’t known Jackie did coke. She said she doesn’t “do” it (i.e., doesn’t buy it), but that if it’s there, she might dabble. I was relieved when Bree declined and passed the mirror to me, because it meant I could do the same. Part of me wanted to try it, but there are those stories about people passing out and never waking up the first time they do coke, and I just knew I’d be one of them.
I passed the mirror to the guy next to me and stood. My fingers gripped the thin railing of the boat, and it was then that I turned around and saw his eyes. I’ll never forget his eyes. I think I’ll lie in bed years from now, when I have children and my children have children, and I’ll see those two bottle-green orbs, watching me, on the precipice of changing everything. The eyes were small but luminous—they could’ve been woven with strands of silk they were so bright. They pierced me from the deck of the other houseboat, a good twenty feet away. It was crowded—people stood all around, wet elbows bumping into sides and heads turning, shielding the eyes from my view every couple of seconds, like clouds passing over the sun. But the eyes never looked away.
“Luce, we’re funneling!” Jackie yelled. The coke was finished; there was a new activity. “You first.”
Everyone was shouting my name, and Jackie grabbed my hand, pulling me down. I anticipated pain as my knees scraped the rough fiberglass surface of the deck, but in my drunken blunder I was having too much fun to notice if it hurt.
Jackie handed me the plastic tube and lukewarm beer rushed down my throat so quickly I nearly gagged, but I managed to swallow it in full, fast gulps until the can above my head rattled empty. Jackie helped me up, my head so dizzy that I lost footing in the sunny haze, falling backward, when a thick arm caught me from behind. Thick but soft, like the punching bag my dad keeps in our basement.
“Watch it.” The voice was hard and quick.
I looked up, my heart hammering in my chest. The bright green eyes stared down at me sharply. I felt as if they could see into me, as if they had jumped inside my body and were wandering around the inside of my soul, taking notes.
“Have we met?” He released me.
I recognized him. I’d seen him at a party once, and he was the guy Wrigley had tossed the other set of keys to on the first morning of Mead. Chops captain number two. He was taller up close, with curly dark hair all over his chest. Parker didn’t have any hair on his chest.
“I don’t think so,” I answered. “I just saw you—on the other boat? How did you get over here so quickly like that?”
“Magic.” He winked. His dark hair was shiny and coarse. It fell in tousled waves around his face. Olive-toned skin.
I couldn’t decide if he was handsome. He looked like a younger Christian Bale, maybe, but thicker. A weaker chin. Not as overtly good-looking. But there was Something About Him. A pinch in my stomach.
“You must be one of the aesthetically pleasing freshman ladies Wrigley brought along, bless his heart. I’m Stephen DeMarco.” He held out a hand, his eyes locked to mine.
“I’m Lucy Albright.”
His hand felt thick and cold from the beer he’d been holding.
“Lucy. Like the song?”
“The song?”
“ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’ ” He smiled, using his hands to make a panorama in the sky.
“My dad used to sing me that song.”
“ ‘Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies . . .’ And we’re on a boat on a river. It’s too perfect.” He laughed. I noticed a little pudge spilling over the waistline of his red bathing suit.
“Except we’re not on a river. It’s a lake.”
Stephen tilted his beer bottle in my direction. “That it is. You’re smart. I see why Baird had the good sense to accept you.”
> I couldn’t think of anything to say. I grabbed another beer from an open case at our feet. I felt like I was surviving on beer at that point. I’d barely had anything to eat in three days. I’d been eating less in general, actually, ever since the freshman-fifteen conversation. My stomach grumbled.
“So what do you think of Lake Mead, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds?” Stephen asked. The sunlight was splintering, but he kept his sunglasses on top of his head, his eye contact unyielding. I knew if I looked away it would seem rude.
“It’s amazing,” I said.
“You never forget your first trip to Mead.”
“I don’t doubt it. Nice hat, by the way.”
“Thanks. Wrigley is the true captain, but I convinced him that the cocaptain deserves a hat, too.”
“Of course. Your efforts are appreciated. Thank you for keeping us afloat.”
“Not a problem. Only following my orders, Lucy.” When he said my name, there was a jolt in the nerves wrapping my spine. “It was nice to meet you.”
“You, too.” I was locked in my head, momentarily stunned by a foreign feeling. I was relieved when he wiggled three thick fingers before turning away.
Then he looked over his shoulder, piercing my gaze again. “By the way. You look so good in that bikini, it hurts.”
4
STEPHEN
OCTOBER 2010
I knew it when Lucy became interested in me. I could sense it at Lake Mead; when we talked, I could taste it in the space around her, like salt in the air.
The only problem was that Lucy’s interest was, for her, a subconscious yearning. A feeling she would not yet face, one that clashed with her naïveté and limited sexual scope. She wasn’t a virgin—there was no way—but her demeanor seemed raw, youthful. I need to know more. I needed to know what it was like to fuck her.
I knew how to catch the interest of girls like Lucy. It would take time and effort, like most good things in life, but I wasn’t in a rush. I had plenty to keep me occupied, including the dilemma of Diana Bunn.
Tell Me Lies Page 3