The Truth Beneath the Lies

by Amanda Searcy

  Mom hugs me again. “I think you’re very brave,” she says.

  It’s late when the knock on the door comes. We aren’t asleep. I wonder if I will ever sleep again.

  Hipster stands in the hallway and holds a cell phone out to me. I place it to my ear.

  “You were great, Kayla Asher,” Cavallo bellows. “Drake, or whatever his name is, gave us a fake ID. They’re running his prints now. Once we know who he really is, I’ll question him. Until then, I’ve got him in a room. I’m gonna let him sweat awhile.”

  “What about the other guy?” I ask.

  “Other guy?”

  “Jordan,” I whisper.

  “Oh, that guy. Wrong place, wrong time. He seemed to genuinely have no idea what was going on. We asked him some questions and cut him loose.”

  The aching deep between my rib cage and belly button eases up.

  “You did a stellar job, Kayla. Good night.” He hangs up.

  I don’t feel so stellar. Back when school started, I had a job and a best friend. I was on the dance team. I met a boy and had an honest-to-God, real boyfriend. And now? I have nothing. No job. My relationship with Paige is strained. I got Jordan’s friend arrested for assault and murder.

  Stellar, Kayla. Absolutely stellar.

  I sit on the floor of my closet and break open the box that contains the phone from Carol Alexander. I don’t want to use it, but what choice do I have now? I have to try to fix things with Jordan.

  I go through the steps to activate it and then punch in the number from the scrap of notebook paper that I have stared at a hundred times since Jordan gave it to me. I type a text.

  I’m sorry.

  The phone, the fish, my ripped shirt.

  Adrian knows.

  I can’t calm down. I still was holding on to a little bit of hope that Adrian hadn’t figure it all out. That he thought I was just some strange girl who lied about being from North Dakota. But not anymore. Adrian knows everything.

  Mom whisked me out of C&J’s and brought me home. She declared everything to be okay.

  That didn’t make me feel any better. I pace back and forth, wring my hands, cry, hiccup, gasp for air.

  Mom forces a pill down my throat to make me sleep. It doesn’t work. I wake up at two a.m., sweating, sick to my stomach.

  Adrian knows.

  I check the black monster for the millionth time. It hasn’t rung again since the restaurant. I hang over the side of the bed and nestle it back into the duffel bag. I won’t need it anymore.

  I can’t clear my head. Horrible things keep dancing in front of my eyes. I don’t know what’s real. I don’t want to die. But I don’t want to keep living like this, either.

  There’s one thing that I know will help. Make it stop. Give me some peace, even if it’s fleeting. I’ve hit rock bottom. It’s all I have left.

  Lime-green strappy sandals that match one of my overly cute school outfits are the first shoes I find. I slide them on. I pull on a jacket. My toxic-pink phone is in the outer pocket and knocks against my hip. I don’t take it out. If I do this wrong and die, the phone will make it easier to identify my body.

  Mom took a sleeping pill too. Hers worked. She doesn’t hear me creep down the hall to the kitchen. In the bottom cabinet, behind assorted pots and pans, is another duffel bag. Inside, tucked into the lining, is a stack of hundred-dollar bills. I peel off three of them. Mom’s probably forgotten all about the bag. Not that it will matter tomorrow. She’ll have bigger things to think about than missing money. Mom. She’s almost enough to stop me. To send me back to my bedroom. Almost. I turn and go out the front door.

  The desert night is bitterly cold. A thousand stars explode over my head. My toes are numb. I pass the strip mall and the school. One foot in front of the other until I come to the land of chain-link fences. A dog barks. “Shut up!” rumbles out of a leaning, paint-peeling mobile home.

  At the end of the dirt road, Tomás and Happy sleep in their blacked-out house. I’m not going there. I stop at the first house on the right. The house I saw Tomás dealing to.

  The porch light is on. They’re up. Of course they are. Bad things come out in the dark. I walk around to the back door. Music’s playing. Not thumping party music, something old and mellow.

  I knock. The sound of stumbling inside. The door opens a crack, and a patch of red hair demands, “What?”

  I hold up the money.

  The door opens wider. His pupils are huge. There’s another person in the house. A woman with dishwater-blond hair falling in greasy clumps around her face. She’s stretched out on the floor, leaning against the couch. She moans in ecstasy.

  I tip my head at her. Red understands. He lets me in.

  Pipes, half-smoked cigarettes, and a vodka bottle litter the coffee table. I move toward it.

  Red makes a grab for the money. I pull it away. “After,” I say. He agrees, because he knows that once I’ve done it, he can rob me blind. Do whatever he wants. He positions himself behind me. His hands rest on my shoulders.

  I sit on the floor. I’ve seen this done before, of course. It always looked so easy. My hands shake. I feel a mix of emotions I don’t have a name for. Relief that I might get to forget what I did. Terror of what I’m about to do. A new guilt for something I haven’t even done yet.

  There’s a syringe in front of me on the table.

  I reach for it but pull back. I need a moment to collect myself. Before I do this thing that can’t be undone.

  I look around the room. Over Red’s shoulder, three pictures in dusty frames stand on an empty bookcase. The first picture is a formal family portrait. A mom, a dad, and two cute little blond girls, all in their Sunday best.

  The second is of the blond girls as teenagers. They’re standing on the side of a river, fishing poles in hands, arms thrown around each other.

  The third is a picture of one of them all grown up. She has a little girl of her own. They smile, but the tension is already there. The foreshadowing of something bad about to happen.

  That woman is next to me on the floor. A dark, ghostly shadow of her former self. I don’t see anything belonging to a kid in the house.

  “What happened to the kid?” I whisper. Red places his fingers against the side of my neck. I push him off. My eyes spin around the room. “Where’s the kid?” I twist around and grab his face, forcing him to look me in the eye. “Where’s the kid?”

  “What kid?” His cheeks burn with irritation. His lips sneer.

  I let go and try to stand. He pushes me down to the floor. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  I glance back up at the photos. “I’m not going to do this.” I get one foot under me.

  “Money,” Red demands.

  “No,” I say. “You can keep your drugs.” I push the wad of bills farther into my jacket pocket.

  I never make it up to my feet. Red uses his body to pin me to the floor. He gropes my jacket. I slap him hard across the cheek. He automatically raises a hand to assess the damage. It’s enough for me to shimmy out from under him.

  I get halfway to the door before his fingers grip my upper arm. I kick at him, landing a blow to his knee that sends my shoe flying.

  “You fucking bitch.” Red’s fist swings. It hits me on the side of the head. My teeth rattle. I see stars. I can’t stop myself from falling onto the couch. Red crashes down after me, grabbing for the money in my pocket. I can’t breathe.

  I want to give up.

  No, a little voice says inside me. No. I’ve given up too much already. This is Mom’s money. My stomach churns with a million regrets. I’m not giving it to him so he can use it to slowly kill himself. Mom wouldn’t forgive me for that. I wouldn’t forgive me.

  I muster up all the will in my thin body and lift my knee hard. It makes contact with Red’s groin. He groans and rolls onto the floor. The woman’s head slams into the side of the coffee table, but she’s too far gone to notice.

  I run. Splinters from the decaying
wood stairs stab my bare foot outside the mobile home. My entire head aches. The night blurs in front of me.

  “You fucking bitch!” Red roars. A chorus of dogs bark and snarl. He’s coming after me.

  My foot is ripped to shreds. I run behind the house next door. A light comes on. I want to knock, beg them to let me in, but they might deliver me right back to Red. If he catches me, I don’t know what he’ll do.

  I keep going. Happy and Tomás are at the end of the road. If I can make it to their house…I stop. This is my mess. I did this. Happy and Tomás are innocent. Innocent people get hurt.

  I make a quick jag to the left. A Rottweiler slams into the fence. I back into the shadows of the house. The dog keeps barking as Red approaches. The porch light flips on. A man comes out. A menagerie of crude tattoos covers his arms. He lights a cigarette.

  Red freezes in the pool of light. The man whistles to the dog. It stops barking and runs to his feet. “Everything okay?” he asks.

  Red nods. The man on the porch doesn’t move. He takes a slow drag off his cigarette. The dog dances around, thrilled with the late-night company.

  I stay frozen in the shadows while a quiet standoff takes place. Red in the road, swinging his arms. The man blowing a long stream of smoke up into the dark sky.

  Finally, Red breaks and stomps off. The man stubs out his cigarette and pats the dog on the head. He glances into the darkness where I hide. He nods. The porch light goes out. The dog settles down onto its belly in the yard as I creep into the desert and pull out Toxic Pink.

  —

  Teddy doesn’t say anything. He looks me up and down, assessing the damage. Checking to see what I’ve done to myself. He nods, satisfied that at least I’m not high.

  My adrenaline has worn off. Tears stream down my face. “Please don’t tell her,” I whisper. “Mom is doing so well. It would kill her.”

  He stops the truck at the end of my road and turns off the ignition. “I’m not going to tell.” His eyes stare straight ahead into the night.

  I dab the water off my cheeks. “You’re not?”

  He shakes his head. “Betsy, shit happens to people. Shit that’s their fault, and shit that isn’t. That’s life. You only get a say in what you’re going to do about it.”

  I pull my one shoe and my bloody foot up to the seat and wrap my arms around my knees. “Why are you here?” I ask.

  He laughs. It’s sad and full of despair. “You mean why do I live by myself at the ends of the earth?” He sighs. “There was a woman. She was scared. She called me three, four times a day. Nothing was ever really wrong. One night she called, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I ignored her. I watched a football game with my feet up.” He rubs his face. “When they found her body, she was still clutching the phone. My number was the last one dialed. After that, the only peace I could find was at the bottom of a bottle. I lost my job—I lost everything. Then I got offered a deal. I got sober. And here we are.”

  “Do you regret it? Making a deal?”

  “I used to. Until you and your mom came along.” His face shows such an earnest intensity I have to turn away.

  “Betsy, nothing can change the past. I know you’re hurting, but if you look around, you’ll see that unexpected good things can still happen. There’s got to be at least one good thing you have now that you wouldn’t have if you’d never come to San Justo.”

  He pauses, like he’s waiting for me to answer. I can’t. I can’t see anything beyond the darkness right now.

  To appease him, I nod. As I open the door, he rests his hand on my arm. Even though it’s gentle and kind, I flinch. “It wasn’t your fault, Betsy. You’re a kid. They used you.”

  “Adrian knows,” I say, and reclaim my arm.

  “Put some ice on your face,” he calls after me.

  —

  I break the seal on a bottle of foundation Mom bought me when we first got here. I smear it over the dark splotch of bruise appearing on my left cheek and stretching up toward my eye.

  When I’m done, I look ghostly. I flop my hair over my face.

  Mom makes pancakes with blueberries. She draws a smiley face in syrup on mine. She sits down across from me.

  “I talked to Teddy.” My fork freezes in midair and a drop of syrup splashes to my plate. “He says that everything’s fine. There’s nothing to worry about.” Mom smiles tightly, like she doesn’t quite believe it, and picks up a bouquet of yellow and white roses tied with a red silk ribbon. “What do you think of this? Would pink be better?”

  I eat my pancakes. Agree that pink would be better. Smile like the girl Mom wants me to be. Not like a girl who still has three hundred dollars in her jacket pocket. Not like one who almost did what I almost did.

  When she gathers up her flowers and leaves for work, I limp to my bedroom and drop down to my knees. I liberate the black monster from its dark prison.

  It flashes with a text message. A complaint about the weather. He’s taunting me. Waiting for my reaction. I respond politely and pretend that I’m the same as before Adrian knew everything.

  I press send.

  The monster stays dark and asleep.

  It lets me live another day.

  I ride the bus from school to No Limit Foods. The bus driver smiles at me, as if going back to our old routine makes all the universe right again. He’s wrong. Jordan never answered my texts. His phone went to voice mail whenever I called. I told him I would be at No Limit. I have nowhere else to go.

  I get off at my stop and scan the parking lot for Jordan’s blue Jeep. It isn’t there.

  When I walk past the McDonald’s, the manager dashes out. “Hey,” he calls. I stop and turn to face him. He flaps a piece of paper in my face. “We have an opening. You just need to fill out the application.”

  “Thanks,” I say, take the paper, and almost throw up in the parking lot. I fold the application and stick it into my back pocket. I don’t have a choice. I will have to fill it out. I’ll find a way to trick myself into believing the fry cook quit and that I’m not taking Shonda’s job.

  Even though I know Jordan isn’t there, I slink through the doors of No Limit.

  It still smells like old produce mixed with stale bakery goods. If someone told me months ago that smell would make me want to burst into tears, I’d have thought they were high.

  Albert’s nosing around the front, watching my replacement. She’s flustered. Her line’s impatient. She runs her finger over the laminated card, searching for the code for bananas. Bananas. Everyone buys them. It’s the easiest one to remember.

  Elton flips through a magazine by an empty register. He looks up, and surprise passes over his face. “Hi, Elton,” I say to break the awkward tension filling the space between us. He doesn’t respond. His mouth hangs open slightly. His eyes lock onto me. I turn around and feel him stare straight through my back.

  I slip down the cereal aisle before Albert sees me. There’s only one place I can think of to go. I dodge a woman with three whining children and a cart piled up to the top with frozen dinners, canned goods, and brightly colored junk food. I pass the dairy and the meat cases and enter the red glow that surrounds Albert’s stupid castle of cherry cream soda. The one that hid small children all last summer.

  It’s exactly the same. Not a single six-pack is out of place. I lean against it. If I were two feet shorter, I would curl up inside its little door and never come out again.

  Jordan doesn’t magically turn the corner or appear eating M&M’s. It was wishful thinking, but still I wait. Albert is on to me. When he walks by for the tenth time, I, for the tenth time, pretend to examine the calories on a can of cherry cream. By the time it gets dark outside, I’ve almost convinced myself I want to drink one.

  “Do you have a ride home?” Albert’s voice is soft, almost caring. His manager’s vest is slung over his arm.

  “Sure,” I say. My voice is flat. I don’t even make an attempt to cover the lie.

  “I’ll drive you home.” The manag
er is back in his tone.

  “I can walk.”

  “No. That creep is still out there.”

  I narrow my eyes. “I thought they caught him. Arrested him in front of McDonald’s.”

  Albert shrugs. “A cop buddy of mine said they let him go. He wasn’t the guy.”

  “Oh.” I turn back to the soda. My heart beats with equal parts excitement and terror. It wasn’t Drake. That’s good. Maybe Jordan will eventually forgive me. But if the guy’s still out there, so is Girl Number Four.

  “Let’s go,” Albert says. It’s an order. Even though he isn’t my manager anymore, I follow him out to his car.

  It’s a standard vanilla, off-brand car with a spotless cream-colored interior. It’s so Albert.

  “Bluebird Estates?” he asks, and double-checks all the mirrors and hits the automatic locks before putting the car in reverse.

  Bluebird Lane is to the right. We go left. “Um, Albert?” I point behind us.

  “I didn’t want to fire you,” he says. We make a right onto a street crowded with car dealerships. It glows like daytime. “But there are rules. I have to follow the rules.”

  “Albert?” I try again. “This isn’t the way.”

  “The new girl can’t keep up. She’ll never be as good as you.” He makes another right turn. “I miss you.”

  “Albert, please stop the car.” I don’t let my voice betray how freaked out I am. Albert is Albert. He’s a pain in the ass, but he isn’t violent. Is that what all those other girls thought? A nice, straight-laced, rule-following grocery store manager offered them a ride and they never came back?

  “Albert, please.” I unlatch my seat belt and paw the door, searching for the lock. We make another right turn. The car comes to a stop. I pop the door open without taking my eyes off him. I’m not going down without a fight.

  He stares. “If you walk the way we went, you’ll stay on well-lit streets with lots of traffic. It’s farther, but it’s safer.”