by Chris Lynch
“Ah, women,” Juan says, sounding very much like a man who desires a vicious chest poking.
“Women, is right, ya pig,” she says.
“The last thing you need is to be mixed up in any way with dirty money,” I say to her. “And now you’re not. So that’s a good thing.”
I believe we have somehow made Juan’s day, because he starts for the door with a deeply satisfied smile on his face. It’s not enough, apparently, to win in whatever competition the likes of him are in. He has to create chaos in the lives of others to ice that cake properly.
“My money is not dirty,” he says as he reaches me. “I employ the finest of financial consultants to see to that.”
I get a shock right through me. It shoots up from my guts and certainly splashes all over my expression.
“That’s what I was waiting to see,” he says, pointing at my face before going on his way.
What was that? What did he say? Head games. I have had very little interaction with this man, but I have learned one thing quickly, and that is that his primary business is in head games.
“What was that he said?” I say to Junie after he’s gone. “Did you hear that?”
“Get. Out,” she says.
“Junie, listen. We have to talk—”
“We do not have to talk. If you don’t get out of this store right now, I’m gonna call the cops, or the other guys, and tell them you’re robbing the place. And that won’t go well for you.”
“Junie, please—”
“I mean it,” she shouts, eyes closed, phone poised.
I go.
“I am nobody’s bitch,” she yells at my sorry, sorry, stupid back.
Eleven
It is over now. Yes, I am a numbskull for taking it this far before being able to make that statement. I have tried my calls and my texts and my stakeouts of dog walking routes. I have traveled near, though not into, her store. I have tried calling Maxie, but I get nowhere there, either. Mom talks to Leona, but nobody talks about Junie, at least not to me. Instructions are obviously in place. And a person has to be a certifiable lunatic to cross Junie Blue.
Yes, hello.
I haven’t done much talking at all since Junie took my voice away.
I really thought I was doing something good there. And maybe that’s what she means about the gulf between us.
I ache with every breath. Like all my ribs are broken, and stabbing my vital organs in the bargain.
Sunday comes, and I realize I haven’t had a single conversation with my father for days. Way more than days. Way beyond days.
I think about the deal I made. I get more queasy every hour I get closer to starting work. I start Monday.
Sunday sacreds.
The beach is mobbed, and I don’t like it. It’s an absolutely made-to-order call-it-up-from-room-service sunny summer Sunday. Kids and seagulls are squealing, indistinguishable. Dogs are not supposed to be on the beach. They’re all here, all of them. My father and I are walking straight into the sun, along through the shallows, both of us in long pants—I don’t know why, with the cuffs rolled insufficiently up.
“You’re very quiet,” he says, raising his voice to be heard over the waves and the music and the wildlife.
“I noticed that myself,” I say. A Frisbee hits the water about a foot in front of me and splashes. I stare at it until a girl comes over to claim it.
“Sorry,” she says.
Girls in inappropriate turquoise bikinis who have every business wearing them do not need to apologize, so the gesture is appreciated.
“Not a problem,” I say, and she is gone.
“You know,” Dad says as we resume our very stiff-legged bankers-go-beaching walk, “not that you necessarily need my coaching, but that looked like a missed opportunity to stretch your social muscles a bit.”
“You think?” I say, looking back in the young lady’s general direction.
“I do. Just, something you might want to keep in mind, openness to new experiences and opportunities.”
“Ah,” I say, sounding a little like a bitter and pissy and ungrateful teenager, “but that’s what tomorrow’s all about. We don’t want to be overloading my circuits with too much all at once.”
We are walking a greater distance than usual. We are approaching the stretch where the ridiculously beach-blanket-friendly white sand of the public beach starts giving way to the rugged boulder-strewn private one. The population and commotion drop off precipitously here, which is a welcome thing.
“That would be ambivalence about the next, exciting stage of your life I’m hearing?”
At this point farther progress requires some rock climbing, which I have always loved but Dad never showed much interest in. The tide is coming in and is just starting to slosh around in the gullies between the boulders. This is prime crabbing territory. We did a lot of rock-pool adventuring when I was a kid. Probably the single most durable and treasured component to our early-years experience. It was the original Communion of our Sunday sacreds.
“Sorry, Dad. I’m sure it will be great.”
“I, myself, am certain of it,” he says.
He scrabbles kind of awkwardly, up a rock that’s about seven feet tall and five feet in circumference. He looks very much like a crab trying to climb a tree. That rock has got a twin, slightly shorter, six feet away, which I mount. We squat on our little mountains, me sitting like a chimp when gawking back at zoo patrons, him still crablike.
“I could release you from your obligation, if you feel this pessimistic, Son.”
“No, Dad, you can’t.”
The waves are slapping at our rocks, the tide seeming to accelerate. He reaches into his breast pocket, because of course we have breast pockets at the beach.
“You did not have to do this,” he says, holding out the check I wrote to Harry.
Is it possible to have a feeling, a reaction to something, and not have any idea what it is, even though it is going on inside your own body?
I do not know if I am surprised by this. I do not know if I am angry, or worried, or intrigued.
“I did what I had to do, Dad. I knew, at the time I did it, that I had to do exactly that. I knew it the way you know when you are hungry and have to eat.”
He nods, and I know this smile-nod. It’s his low-grade pride reaction when I say or do something that’s not exactly monumental but that signals there is perhaps an active bio-culture of sorts existing inside me. The check continues to flutter like a flag.
“You should put that away before it flies,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. “But just so you know, this does not have to happen.”
“It absolutely does.”
“Well, you have impressed the man, at any rate. He wants no more from you. This finishes it.”
I say nothing.
“You are an honorable man, Son.”
“You work for him,” I state flatly.
“He is a client.”
“What do you do for him?”
“Same as I do for all my clients. I look out for his interests.”
I look down at the slapping, splashing water reaching up for us.
“Do you do things you shouldn’t do?”
This is most definitely not what my father expected of his Sunday sacreds. I do not know what he did expect, but I can read that it was nothing like this.
“Oliver, you know what I do, very simply? I do what’s necessary. That, young man, is the same thing every single person who makes it in this world ultimately does. I do what needs to be done, to get by, to succeed, to provide for my family, and you have to admit I have done a pretty fair job of that over the years. Right?”
“No argument there.”
“And in my business—probably in most businesses, but certainly in mine—there are decisions that need to be made every single day, hard ones, that not everybody is going to agree with. I do my best, make the tough calls, and at the end of it all I am certain that I am doing more good in
this world than bad. And that, combined with success, is a pretty fair marker of a man’s ledger in this life.”
I am looking down now more than I am looking up. But I am listening.
“Are you listening?”
“I am.”
“Does this make any sense to you? Do you appreciate where I am coming from?”
“I’m pretty sure I do, Dad.”
“I hope so, O, I sure do. And I am confident, once you start making your way through this game, once you start connecting all the dots, once you appreciate all the things that a man’s just got to do in certain situations, which I know you are going to click on—”
“As your shadow.”
“As my shadow, exactly. Once all that starts falling in, once you see the world up close and for real, how the gears work and how guys like you and I work them . . . Well, I just know you are going to get it. You are going to get it, get it all, and get it like nobody’s business. I just know it.”
He is visibly excited. There is something primal about what I’m seeing, elemental with the tide coming up to meet him and his mad pleasure barely contained.
He truly believes that that is going to happen. That I am going to be that man.
And, to my horror, I believe him too.
“And it all starts tomorrow morning,” I shout, standing tall on my rock.
“Yes,” he says, still squatting, still as always a bit more timid than I am about such stuff.
“I’ll see you later, Dad,” I say.
He’s shouting something as I dive off the rock, in the direction of the open ocean.
Twelve
My suit, my bespoke gunmetal gray, summer-weight fine wool suit fits me better than my actual flesh does. I am a shark, I’m a blade, I am any number of beautiful streamlined lethal things, and I honestly feel like I can do what needs to be done, whatever needs to be done, in this suit. I look in the full-length mirror hanging on the inside of my closet door, and I’m stunned and intimidated by the transformation. I would buy anything from this guy in the mirror. I would do anything this guy told me to do, yes, including dropping to my knees and blowing him.
Power.
I could also quite happily shoot him.
I sit at the breakfast table with Mom and Dad for the first time this summer. Dad and I are, obviously, on the same schedule now, but Mom is here for reasons known only to herself. She usually likes to ease slowly into the day, a brief kitchen cameo before taking coffee and laptop back to bed. But here she is, staring at me with a mix of puzzlement and sadness that is making me heartsick, for her.
Dad just looks up at me occasionally over his Journal and juice, keeping words to a minimum, for fear, I believe, of sideswiping whatever momentum I have for getting to that first day at the office. It’s unspoken, but there is still enough of the same wiring in both of us that I believe we are both humming on this same wave—that somehow something irrevocable happens if we just get me across that threshold of day one of Shadow.
I would bet anything we’re right about that. I believe there are crossover points, and this is one.
Looking at Mom, I would bet she would make that same bet.
She looks like she’s at a wake. I feel like I am at a wake. Except, even at a wake people talk, a little.
The atmosphere is so spooky still that two of the three of us jump when my phone beeps a new message alert.
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me outside at seven thirty.
I check the time on the phone. Seven thirty-three.
“Excuse me,” I say, nearly tipping my chair over backward as I fly for the door. I burst outside.
“Holy mother,” I say.
“Holy mother right back atcha,” she says.
Junie Blue is sitting there, parked right in front of my house, in the 1963 cobalt-blue Corvette that has been sitting in marquee position in the front lot of the classic-car dealer for the last three months. I have lusted secretly for this car every single day but feared if I spoke up, someone would buy it for me.
“Junie . . . wow.”
“O . . . wow. I heard, through the grapevine—cough! LeonaMaxie—that you were walking the green mile in your monkey suit, but I didn’t believe it.”
I look down at my sharp-suited self.
“I only half-believe it myself.”
“Even half is probably too much.”
“I knew you wouldn’t leave without me,” I say. I knew nothing of the kind, so it must be the suit talking.
“Well, wrong again. I did leave without you, O. I got away, to the edge of town and beyond.”
“But you came back. This is good. This is good. You’ll give it another—”
“Wrong.”
“Then what are you back for?”
She unfurls the most kill-me-dead-run-me-over-then-back-over-me-again-for-good-measure victorious Creamsicle smile the world could possibly stand.
“For you. For you. I came for you. Know why?”
I’m just conversing politely now, because why should I care why? “Why?”
“Because you need me. This is me rescuing you. From the horrors of what you were about to do. Me, saving you. And y’know, it feels kinda nice.”
She guns and guns the great growly ’Vette engine.
“I can’t really linger, O, so if you’re coming . . .”
There is no rational debate to be had here—no emotional one, either for that matter. But I freeze up. This is huge and drastic and wild and way outside anything I even contemplated before, and without a doubt the exact opposite of what I was just about to do with myself this odd fine morning. I actually start lurching in the direction of the house.
“What are you doing?”
“Um, I don’t know. I’ll have to get . . . stuff.”
She reaches across and throws the door open. “All the stuff you’re ever gonna need is in here already.”
And that has the effect of paralyzing me even further. I am stuck, like a frozen dopesicle, on the step.
“For the love of God, go!” Mom’s wonderful, weird, warm voice groans at me from the front-room screen. “I will carry you to the car myself if I have to.”
And that snaps it.
I run, jump into that fine automobile, driven by that fine woman, and we peel away, me waving crazily back at my mother, who is curdling the whole neighborhood with a cowboy howl I never knew she had.
• • •
We could not have gotten to open road faster if we’d taken a helicopter. The car loves the highway, and purrs to tell us so.
“So,” I say, “where’d you get the money for this?”
“Walkin’ . . . the . . . dogs,” she drawls, the three words taking thirty minutes to come out.
I take my tie off and let it trail like our flag out the window.
“You know what is the one great thing that makes us right, Sweet Junie Blue Lies?”
“What is that one great thing, Lyin’ O’Brien?”
“At least we lie to each other honestly.”
She nods, considers, changes lanes without signaling.
“We would,” she says, “if we ever lied.”
I set the necktie free in the world that’s now behind us.
“Ah. True,” I say.
“True,” she says.
True.
CHRIS LYNCH is the Printz Honor–winning author of several highly acclaimed young adult novels, including Inexcusable, which was a National Book Award Finalist and the recipient of six starred reviews. He is also the author of the Printz Honor Book Freewill, Gold Dust, Gypsy Davey, Iceman, and Shadow Boxer, all ALA Best Books for Young Adults, as well as Pieces, Kill Switch, Angry Young Man, Hothouse, Extreme Elvin, Whitechurch, and All the Old Haunts. Chris teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He divides his time between Boston and Scotland.
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ALSO BY CHRIS LYNCH
Pieces
Kill Switch
Angry Young Man
Inexcusable
Shadow Boxer
Iceman
Gypsy Davey
Freewill
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2014 by Chris Lynch
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Jacket design and illustration by Krista Vossen
Interior design by Hilary Zarycky
The text for this book is set in Berling.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lynch, Chris, 1962–
Little blue lies / Chris Lynch. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Oliver, known as “O,” and his suddenly ex-girlfriend Junie are are known for telling little lies, but one of Junie’s lies about not winning the lottery could get her into trouble with a local mob boss.
ISBN 978-1-4424-4008-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4424-4010-4 (eBook)
[1. Honesty—Fiction. 2. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction.
3. Organized crime—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L979739Lit 2014
[Fic]—dc23
2012041877