Even When You Lie to Me

by Jessica Alcott

“I did.” She grabbed the magazine back. “I’m burning this.”

  —

  The next day, I found Asha on my way to Drummond’s class. The thought of stalking Drummond alone with Lila made me anxious (what if she approached him and started flirting while he stood there half naked and dripping wet? what if she decided to get in the pool herself?). Maybe she and Lila would even be friends by the end of it. There was no better bonding experience than a semilegal stakeout.

  “Hey, Ash,” I said, sidling up next to her. “How’s it going?”

  She glanced at me suspiciously. “Fine, I guess. Do I want to know how you are?”

  “I’m good, thanks for asking,” I said. “Listen, I know this is kind of…uh, do you want to hang out this weekend?”

  Her forehead creased. “Um, I’m not sure. What were you thinking of doing?”

  “Ah,” I said. “That’s the thing. I don’t think you’ll be interested, but I want you to come.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly.

  “We’re—Lila and I—we’re going to go to the community center.”

  “For…Why?”

  “Because we heard that…” It seemed so stupid suddenly that I stopped. “Never mind, it’s really dumb. I’m sure you have better things to do.”

  “You’d be surprised,” she said. “Come on, what is it?”

  “Well, you said you don’t even like Drummond, so…”

  “This has to do with Drummond?” she said. “Him being at the…Oh, disgusting.” But she laughed as she said it.

  “I know, it’s idiotic,” I said. “He swims, apparently. It was Lila’s idea. I guess I thought if you were there, I’d feel better about the whole thing.”

  “You know I don’t really like him. And I definitely do not like him like that.”

  “I know. You can mock us the whole time if you want. Bring your camera.”

  She was silent for a minute as we jogged up a stairway.

  “And Lila wants me to come?” she asked.

  “Yes! She wants to actually get to know you.”

  Asha looked down at the book she was carrying. “I’ll think about it.”

  —

  “I invited Asha,” I whispered before class started.

  “What?” Lila said. “Why? Why would you do that to me, Charlie?”

  “I want you to get to know her. You’ll like her.”

  “You know I think she’s weird.”

  “This is coming from someone who’s about to stalk her half-naked teacher at a public pool.”

  “Can the peanut gallery settle down so we can get started?” Drummond raised his eyebrows at us.

  Lila smirked, and I hit her. That made her start laughing helplessly.

  Drummond walked up to us, smiling as if he were in on the joke. “You guys found Othello that hilarious, huh?”

  “ ‘The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves,’ ” I said.

  “That one’s from Julius Caesar, Cassius,” Drummond said, “but nice try.” He rapped his knuckles on the table in front of us and turned back to the class. “All right, guys, let’s get started. What did you make of Desdemona?”

  “She was kind of pathetic,” Frank said. “She whimpered a lot.”

  “She whimpered,” Drummond said. “So do you think she deserved what came to her?”

  “Of course not,” Lila said. “She didn’t deserve to be smothered.”

  “Ah,” Drummond said. “Would she have deserved it if she had cheated on Othello?” He turned to Sean, who was slumped back in his chair, looking out the window. “Sean? What do you think?”

  “Hell yeah,” Sean said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “She would’ve been a slut.”

  A few people protested, and Drummond held his hand up. “A slut,” he repeated. He pronounced it in such a way that it sounded obscene: something about the slide of the s and the clip of the t. “Does a woman who has sex outside of marriage deserve to be killed?”

  You could see Sean was pleased he’d had an effect on us. “She wouldn’t just have been having sex,” he said. “She would’ve been cheating on him. Good for him if he took it into his own hands.”

  “And would it have been okay if Othello had cheated on her and she’d killed him?”

  Sean looked at him sharply. “That’s not the…” He looked back out the window, his fingers curling.

  Drummond let Sean trail off into silence. I could tell from the faint lines on his forehead that he was annoyed. “So, guys,” he said, “even if Desdemona cheated on Othello, would it have been okay?”

  “No,” I said. “It wouldn’t.”

  He turned to me. “Why not?”

  “Uh, because it’s not okay to kill someone even if she cheats on you?”

  His eyes lit up, like they always did when we hit on something he wanted to pursue. “An excellent point. And yet our empathy for Othello rests on us believing he would be justified if she had cheated.”

  “Yeah, but he is hot-blooded,” Lila said. “Iago uses that against him.”

  “He’s also an outsider,” I said. “Actually, so is Desdemona. He’s a Moor and she’s a woman.”

  “And how does that affect them?”

  “Desdemona sort of helps him fit in.”

  “So you’re saying Desdemona has a kind of limited agency.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “She’s his voice in legitimate society. But then he smothers her voice. He actually takes her voice away.”

  “She’s in a double bind,” Asha said. “They both are.”

  Drummond raised his eyebrows. “What was that, Asha?”

  “He thinks the only thing that makes him worthwhile is the fact that he’s defending white society, but it’s white society that brings him down. And Desdemona choosing Othello is the thing that dooms her—the fact that she’s strong enough to have her own will is the thing that makes him so paranoid and ultimately kills her.”

  “Excellent,” Drummond said. “And a double bind is…?”

  Asha sat up a little. “It’s like…it’s like a catch-22. Like how women are told not to care about male attention but also that they’re not worthwhile if they don’t get it. Or how they’re expected to wear makeup, but they have to look like they aren’t. Or how they’re allowed to have power as long as it’s sexual, but then if they use it, they get called sluts.” She glanced at Sean. “And if they don’t have sexual power, then they’re worthless. It creates a situation where the person in the double bind can’t win.”

  Drummond frowned. “Why would society do that?”

  Asha gave him a small smile. He smiled back. “To keep us policing each other and trying to live up to an impossible standard instead of turning our anger on the society that’s telling us to act that way.”

  Drummond turned to the class. “Welcome to feminist criticism, everyone.” He pointed at Sean. “You too, Sean, if I have to drag you there.”

  Sean looked at Drummond. “You’re a feminist?”

  “Yes, I am,” he said.

  Sean paused for a moment, and then his fingers uncurled. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t do her,” he said.

  Drummond allowed our class the laugh. “A terrifying glimpse into the mind of the teenage male.”

  “You were one too,” Lila said.

  “Never,” he said. “I came out of the womb covered in prematurely gray stubble.”

  I looked at Asha. I knew he had her. She pretended for a minute that she didn’t see me watching her, and then finally she glanced at me and said, “Fine, I’ll go.”

  “It’s been two hours,” I said. “I don’t think he’s coming.”

  Lila looked into the rearview mirror. “What do you think we should do?”

  “I was ready to go an hour and forty-five minutes ago,” Asha said.

  Lila sucked in her cheeks. “What about you, sunshine?”

  “I’m having a great time,” I said. “I can’t feel my hands.”

  “You�
�re not helping,” Lila said as she started the car.

  “I’m freezing,” I said. “Maybe because you’re too cheap to turn on the heat.”

  Lila looked at Asha again. “I promised to be nice today, so you’re going to have to take this one.”

  “I’m wearing a scarf,” Asha said.

  “Let’s get some lunch,” I said. “I need hot chocolate.”

  “Horsemeat?” Lila said.

  I nodded. The Horseshoe was our favorite diner. The menus were fraying at the edges and we were always brushing crumbs off the vinyl seats and wiping the crust from the lid of the ketchup bottles, but we could usually get a table in the corner and the waitresses always let us linger there for hours.

  Asha studied the menu for a long time. “This is extensive,” she said. “Ten pages? What’s good?”

  “The chicken parm is…well, I’m not going to say it’s definitely chicken, but it probably lived on a farm at one point,” I said.

  She laughed. “Maybe I’ll stick with the burger.”

  Lila glanced at her. “Really?”

  Asha looked up. “Is that surprising?” she said mildly.

  “Of course not!” Lila said, but her voice went up too high. “I just thought since you’re…you might not eat…”

  Asha flipped her menu over. “Actually, maybe I’ll have the veal.”

  I could sense Lila trying to catch my eye but I didn’t look at her. Let her be unsure of herself for once.

  “So what are you up to later?” I asked Asha after we’d ordered.

  “Movie night with the family,” she said.

  I was sure Lila would think this was stupid, and I braced myself for what she would do, but she said, “Do you know that Charlie has seen a total of two movies her whole life?”

  “It’s more than two,” I said.

  “But she is on a first-name basis with the entire staff of the town library.”

  “At least my favorite movie isn’t UHF.”

  Asha raised her eyebrows. “What’s UHF?”

  “It stars Lila’s favorite musician, Weird Al,” I said. “A forgotten classic, really.”

  “Don’t even,” Lila said, but she was laughing.

  I relaxed a little as we ate. Asha grimaced at her burger, but she finished it. After we’d pushed our plates away, Lila said, “Sorry that was a bust. The girl on my team said he’s there every Saturday without fail. Maybe she was just punking me.”

  “I bet he knew,” I said. “He knew, and we’re going to see it in his eyes on Monday.”

  “Silently accusing us of perving over him?” Lila said. “He’d be flattered.”

  “Of course he would,” Asha said. “He’d love it.”

  “You don’t like him?” Lila said. She arched her eyebrow at me.

  Asha folded her arms on the table. “He’s fine,” she said. “But I think he likes the fact that everyone loves him a little too much.”

  Lila waved away her words as if they were an unpleasant smoke. “I’d be flattered too if half my students had a crush on me.”

  “He encourages it,” Asha said. “Can you imagine the ego boost he’d get if he knew we tried to spy on him?”

  “That’s assuming he looks good enough to get an ego boost,” I said.

  Asha laughed and wrinkled her nose. “I can’t say I was all that curious.”

  Lila looked at me. Then she sat back and slung an arm across the empty booth next to her. “So you’re on the yearbook staff?”

  “Kind of,” Asha said. “I take pictures for them.”

  “So you’re not quite on staff.”

  “You’ve met them, right? I’m as much on staff as I want to be.”

  Lila smiled tightly. “Not a fan of the people here, then?”

  Asha shrugged. “Didn’t say that. People are kind of the same everywhere.”

  “So people are equally unlikable wherever you go?”

  Asha looked like she was amused by Lila’s rudeness. “Yeah, if you want to put it that way.”

  “You’re not exactly helping your case, Lila,” I said.

  Lila ignored me. “So why didn’t you bring your camera today?”

  “Ugh,” Asha said. “I don’t want this immortalized.”

  Lila’s forehead began to crease, and to cut her off I said, “That’s true. We’re going to cringe when we think about this in ten years. We’re not going to want photographic proof.”

  “Oh please, Charlie,” Lila said. “You came along. Don’t act like you’re better than this.”

  I frowned. “Don’t act like it wasn’t your idea in the first place.”

  “Yeah, okay. You may have pretended to protest but you were desperate to see him.”

  “I was not!” I said. “You didn’t even—”

  Asha moved to stand up. “I think I might leave you guys to it. I’ve got to get home—my mom was expecting me an hour ago.”

  “It’s the middle of the afternoon,” Lila said. “Your curfew couldn’t be that early.”

  “I need to get back,” Asha said in a voice that didn’t allow argument. “But thanks for the adventure, and for lunch.”

  “You didn’t drive here,” I said.

  “It’s not far. I’ll see you Monday.” She left some money on the table and walked away.

  “Thanks,” I said when she was out of earshot. I stabbed at a fry.

  “What?” Lila said, her eyes wide and guileless. “What could I have possibly done wrong?”

  “You’ve been rude to her since we picked her up this morning,” I said. “And to me.” I couldn’t look at her, so I watched the fry collecting ketchup as I swirled it around the plate. “And she lives about five miles from here, so you must have really pissed her off.”

  “She was rude to us, Charlie,” Lila said. “Why did she even come if she was just going to dump on what we were doing?”

  “Because I asked her to?”

  “No one told you to do that. I wanted to do this with just you. I thought it would be fun and instead she just disapproved of us the whole time. And then you joined in on it.”

  “You weren’t exactly welcoming to her.”

  “She’s not exactly friendly.”

  “She takes a while to warm up to people,” I said. “They only moved here a few months ago.”

  “She’s a snob.”

  “She’s not.”

  “She is.”

  “I was like that with you at first.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “You probably didn’t notice because you were being so loud and obnoxious.”

  Lila picked up one of my fries and threw it at me. “At least she seemed interested in Weird Al.”

  I snorted a laugh. “So he has two fans now.”

  She crossed her arms in front of her chest, but the corner of her mouth turned up.

  “She was trying to be friendly to you, you know,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “I was being friendly with her too.”

  “Is asking her whether she likes people a friendly thing to say?”

  “Oh come on,” Lila said. “She can grow up and take it.”

  I sighed. “So much for that.”

  Lila stood. “Fine,” she said. “I will try. Now get up. I need to give my library card a spin.”

  I caught up with Asha on my way to lunch on Monday. “I’m sorry about Saturday,” I said once I was next to her.

  Asha looked at me. “I’ll live,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Don’t worry about making you walk five miles home?”

  “Ah, I called my mom and she picked me up.”

  “Bet that was a fun conversation in the car,” I said.

  “You mean when I told her I was trying to see my English teacher shirtless? Luckily she didn’t ask. I think she was glad I was out with other people.”

  We stopped inside the cafeteria. “I just—I’m just really sorry about Lila,” I said. “She’s not usually like that. Well, she is,
but…” I stopped when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned; it was Drummond. Fear shut me up.

  “Uh, bye,” Asha said. She moved off before I could say anything.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” he said.

  Oh great. “Um, yeah, I guess.”

  He motioned me back into the hallway. He hadn’t acted different in class, but he hadn’t been especially friendly either. Now I was sure he knew. I imagined the various ways he could humiliate me and was only about halfway through when we got to his empty classroom.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” he said as he closed the door.

  I sat on the edge of a table and let my legs swing. At least I’d be higher up than he was.

  “So your mom contacted me,” he said. He sat down in front of me.

  “About—wait, what about?”

  “She said she wanted to know if the three of us could meet up to talk about internships.”

  My breath gushed out. “Oh my God. I forgot about that.” Annoyance shot through me along with the relief: she’d called him already? Summer was so far away. I hated thinking about it.

  He laughed. “Sorry, did I scare you?”

  “Uh, a little bit.”

  “Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. I just wanted to make sure it was okay with you before I called her.”

  I was still reeling from the scare. “If what was okay with me?”

  He looked at me quizzically. “You all right?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was ready for you to yell at me.”

  “Never,” he said. “If I were trying to let you know that you’d disappointed me, I’d ignore you for a couple of weeks and hope you’d get the hint.”

  “That works?”

  “No, not at all,” he said. “People just assume you’re busy.” He crossed his arms loosely. I tried not to stare at his chest, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like now if I’d seen him shirtless. I was suddenly glad I still had to imagine it. I didn’t want to know if he didn’t look good.

  “If you don’t want me to meet your mom,” he said, “I certainly understand. I know it’ll only be a letdown for her, meeting me in the flesh after months of your incessant praise.”

  I fought back a blush. “She wouldn’t be swayed by anything I said. I’m sorry she’s bothering you about this already.”

  “She’s just trying to help,” he said. “I probably should have asked you this before, but have you thought about what you want to major in?”