Friends and Other Liars

by Kaela Coble

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  Copyright © 2018 by Kaela Coble

  Cover and internal design © 2018 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  Cover image © Ute Klaphake/Trevillion Images, Freedom_Studio/Shutterstock

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Coble, Kaela, author.

  Title: Friends and other liars : a novel / Kaela Coble.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014799 | (softcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Homecoming--Fiction. | Friendship--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.O255 F75 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014799

  CONTENTS

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  To my crew, for the family kind of friendship that endures through all the drama, that feels the same no matter the time or distance between meetings, and that loves even when it doesn’t like.

  PROLOGUE

  DANNY

  NOW

  Look at them. I’m dead and they’re still pissing me off.

  They’re disgusting. Sitting in their pew, huddled together like a pack of wolves. Each playing their part in mourning—the bereaved, the wilted, the guilty. They clutch at one another, leaning on each other physically and emotionally for support. Shaking heads, balled fists, crocodile tears. Asking why, how. Dabbing their swollen eyes with crumpled tissues. Declaring their loyalty and love for one another. For me.

  Really, they hate each other, and they hate themselves, and they hate me for making them face their own mortality. And they love me because it fuels their sick sense of pride in their little clan. The crew, they call themselves, even though they haven’t been whole for a decade. “Still supporting each other after all these years,” they declare, even though they wouldn’t know true support if it helped them climb out of a grave.

  There’s Ally, the great beauty of Chatwick, sitting tall and stoic, practically cradling a weeping, whimpering Steph in her arms. Ally’s expression as she comforts Steph says everything about her that you need to know. In this most horrifying moment, she is proud to be the crew’s leader, to be the default person in whom to find solace. But the tightness around her lips and the slight narrowing of her eyes shows a bit of the self-righteousness she feels. Steph is a girlfriend of the crew, not an original member. What right does she have to this display? Ally shoots glances at her perfect husband, Aaron. High school sweethearts; couldn’t you just puke? Talk about not being an original member… Aaron the dreamboat isn’t one either. He didn’t swoop in until our sophomore year of high school. And if you ask me, we would have been just fine without him.

  Emmett and Aaron sit together instead of with their respective significant others, no doubt upon Emmett’s insistence. He has always orchestrated the seating arrangements to split between genders. He’s the youngest of three brothers, and therefore the noise, the gossip, and the full range of feminine feelings have always made him uncomfortable. The heightened emotional state caused by my death is no doubt more unbearable for him than my death itself. That he is allowing Ally to tend to his sobbing girlfriend, offering no comfort of his own, comes as no surprise.

  He and Aaron mimic the same posture—leaned forward, their elbows resting on the thighs of their cheap woolen pants. They face the front of the church, careful not to make eye contact with each other, so they won’t have to utter one of the lame platitudes they’ve heard too many times over the past days. “He’s in a better place.” “He’s finally at peace.” And my personal favorite: “He’s with Roger now.”

  While they should be focusing on the tragedy that is (was) my life, instead my casket is a big, fat, polished-cedar reminder that one day this will be them. They ponder all the predictable questions that even people of the mildest intellect contemplate when faced with untimely death: Where do we go when we die? What will they say about me when I’m gone? What does it all mean? Tomorrow they will look into low-premium life insurance plans to take care of their burgeoning families, should something happen to them. It will make them feel like men in control of their lives. But they’re not. They’re boys, and they’re not in control of shit.

  Speaking of boys, Murphy isn’t here, the coward. He always picks the easiest option, and in this case (and many cases), that means hiding. I’m dead, lying here about to be carried off and buried, but all he cares about is winning the argument. Murphy showing up would mean I got the last word, or that he had forgiven me, and either of those would mean he’s weak. He doesn’t realize he’s the weakest one of the bunch anyway.

  That brings me to Ruby. She sits in the pew between the girls and the boys, the space between her and them so slight you would only notice if you were looking for it, like I am. She watches Ally comforting Steph, occasionally reaching out a hand to squeeze one of Ally’s. I know Ruby feels genuine grief, but mostly discomfort. She doesn’t know her place anymore, her role. I’m only now realizing that she never really knew it. She’s been an official outsider ever since she dared leave Chatwick at eighteen, but even before that, she and I were always the ones straddling the curvature of the crew’s closed circle. One foot in, one foot out. The dark ones.

  I know it’s terrible how much enjoyment I get from watching her squirm, but it’s just too entertaining. Besides, with the fate of my soul
no longer a question mark, I’m enjoying what I can. My death will be hardest on Ruby, for sure, but she’ll never admit it, and our crew won’t acknowledge it. She left. She abandoned us, so she can’t possibly feel it as deeply as they do. It’s amazing how grief turns so quickly from a group activity to a competitive sport.

  It seems all of Chatwick turned up in their patent-leather shoes and cheap polyester blends. “To show their support,” they’d say. For who? Me? Four days ago, they wouldn’t have pissed on me if I were on fire. Most of them are only here to satisfy their morbid curiosity, whispering behind hands and rolling eyes, gathering tidbits to relay later to their neighbors who were unable to make it. But some are here for my mother, Charlene, whose deli (formerly my stepfather’s) is where they happily spend their food stamps. Either way, I wish they wouldn’t have come. It makes them feel too damn good about themselves, and they don’t deserve it. And I don’t deserve the show either, even if it is fake.

  Mom stares blankly ahead of her as the priest eulogizes yet another man who has let her down. I look—well, looked—just like her. If you shaved off her two curtains of waist-length blond curls and straightened out her chest and hips, we would look like twins.

  Nancy, Ruby’s mother, sits next to Mom, holding her limp hand. Nancy is the one who made all these arrangements, and despite the overabundance of flowers, I still appreciate her efforts. She saved my mother from having to coordinate another funeral, and I think one is enough for a lifetime. Ruby’s never forgiven Nancy for the way she handled her own illness back in the day, but as dicey as things got in the St. James household, they didn’t hold a candle to my family. Besides, Nancy’s one of the only assholes in this town who has any compassion, and I’m grateful she’s decided to bestow it upon Mom when she needs it most.

  That’s all I ever needed. Compassion. If I’d ever gotten a shred of it from any of the people in this room, maybe I wouldn’t be in this fucking box.

  My “friends” all think they will finally be rid of me once they’ve fulfilled this obligation. They will go back to the “happy,” normal, vanilla lives they lead, and their guilt will subside eventually.

  Dumbasses. They have no idea Mom found the letters this morning.

  1

  RUBY

  NOW

  I’m the first to arrive at Charlene’s house, so I opt for street parking in case I need to make a hasty escape. I’ve never much cared for being caged in. Especially not in Chatwick.

  Staring at the house, the last place my friend Danny was alive, I remember when he moved in here the summer after his stepfather died. Charlene used the moderate payout from Roger’s life insurance policy to buy it, and with what was left over, she fixed up the apartment over the deli where the three of them had lived so she could rent it out. She and her son needed a fresh start, she explained to neighbors who raised their eyebrows at the sudden move, so soon after Roger’s death.

  Charlene’s first (and only) house project was to coat the outside with the hideous teal paint that remains today, enlisting the crew to do the bulk of the work. She paid us in subs that she brought over every day after the lunchtime rush. At the end of the day, she served us iced tea she mixed in a large glass pitcher as we melted onto the front porch steps and teased one another about who smelled the worst after a hard day’s labor. I can practically smell the iced tea, the paint fumes, and the sweat. It had been a happy time, mostly, but not as innocent as it should have been. At least for those of us who already knew that nothing was as it seemed.

  The paint is now chipped and faded, but it still glows with the spark of Charlene’s quiet defiance. She never said as much, but she had chosen it as a message: she no longer had to answer to anyone. She no longer had to rely on anyone else to keep her and her son alive. Her choices were hers and hers alone, and if she wanted a teal house, then by God, she would have one.

  I turn away from the house and look down the street. This is the “bad” part of Chatwick, below the railroad tracks. Danny didn’t mind it so much. He felt he belonged here, but he always hated how his street wasn’t lined with maple trees like the neighborhood where I grew up. He liked trees—climbing them, sitting under them, and reading or writing or (later) smoking under their shade—so I was happy to see a gorgeous old maple just a few steps from his plot in the cemetery. I hadn’t noticed it until a single red leaf fell right into his open grave, silently landing on his coffin like a flower would have, had we been allowed to lay the traditional roses on top of it. It surprised me to see the red leaf this early in September. It will be many weeks until the foliage in Vermont explodes into color so vibrant you can actually see how it taints the green landscape in photos taken from space, until Vermonters welcome but silently curse the leaf peepers who clog the roads and slow down traffic. So I tried to imagine that this lone early-turned leaf was some kind of message from Danny. He would have scoffed at that idea when he was alive.

  My hands are wrapped so tightly around the steering wheel that my palms begin to sweat. I consider driving away, straight out of Chatwick to Burlington, where the plane I am supposed to be blissfully seated on is currently being prepared for its flight back to JFK. In just over ninety minutes, I could be out of Vermont and back to my apartment in Manhattan with the blinds shut. But in my mind, I see Charlene’s pleading eyes, asking me to please come to the private service Danny requested. This was no public reception where my absence would hardly be noted; it was just the crew, so they sure as hell would notice if I wasn’t there. Although I doubt they would be all that surprised at my absence.

  Charlene’s words—“That’s what Danny wanted”—didn’t make sense at first. How could Charlene possibly know what Danny had wanted? Then it sank in.

  He must have left a note.

  Last week, the governor held a press conference, declaring the epidemic of opiate addiction in Vermont to be so severe that she felt justified in declaring it a state of emergency. She announced that she would be forming a task force—including state senators and representatives, officials from the Department of Corrections, and mental health clinicians—whose sole purpose is to stamp out the drugs coming into our state from New York and Boston and Montreal and address the sharp spike in demand for mental health and rehabilitative services.

  In the last few months alone, the hospital in Chatwick has reported fourteen heroin overdoses—four of which resulted in death, one of which was Danny. The tox screens showed they had all used a strain of heroin laced with fentanyl. So we all assumed his overdose was accidental. At least, we all wanted to assume that. Imagine your last shred of hope being that your friend had only accidentally died of a heroin overdose. And with one request from Charlene, that hope was taken away. “There’s letters for all of you,” she had said, once she could see the realization settling over us. “Please come.”

  Damn it. I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for Ally. I was the first person she called when she heard Danny was dead. My first instinct was not to take the call, but when someone you haven’t spoken to in ten years tracks you down at work at eleven o’clock in the morning, you answer the phone. If it had been anyone other than Ally, I would have had the receptionist take a message. Then I would have sent a nice card to Charlene (because Danny hated flowers), and I would have returned to pretending that nothing beyond the borders of Manhattan ever existed. It was Ally’s voice, the shock and the pain and the…Allyness of it. The way she hadn’t asked but demanded my return. “I’ve never asked you why, Ruby, and I still won’t. But you’ll come for the funeral. You have to.” What she meant, without saying it directly, was that I owe her. And I do. For leaving Chatwick and never looking back. For leaving her behind and never telling her why.

  If only I hadn’t picked up the phone, I would be at my desk in New York, feeling guilty but safe. Not plagued by the ceaseless nerves bubbling under my skin. Not overcome by an urge to smoke that I haven’t had in ten years. There are so
many things in Chatwick that aren’t good for me, and if I go in that house, I’ll be sucked back into them all. I’ll spin right back down the drain of this town.

  Just as I make up my mind to get the hell out of here before anyone else arrives, Charlene swings open the screen door and stands on the porch with one hand on her hip, the other over her eyes so she can see who’s lingering outside her house like a private detective. She recognizes me and waves. Shit. You can’t drive away from a grieving mother.

  The door of the Sentra squeaks as I swing it open. I took a cab from the airport this morning because Nancy was busy helping Charlene get ready for the funeral, but since I had an hour between my arrival and the funeral I went…home, I guess, is its rightful name. I no longer have a key to the house, but the code to the garage hasn’t changed (my sister Coral’s birthday, followed by my own). In addition to the spare house key that hangs behind my old ice skates, I found, to my surprise, my high school car, Blue, still a piece of junk with its four-gear standard transmission, power nothing, and heat that runs full blast all year long whether you want it to or not.

  My father purchased it secondhand for me the year he moved back in with us, a consolation prize for his absence. Despite my insistence that I wouldn’t need it after I left for college, Nancy has kept it here for me. The key was sitting in the ignition, and instead of going into the house full of memories I was not ready to face, I sat in the car and listened to a cassette tape—a cassette tape!—of songs I had recorded from the radio when I was twelve years old. Blue didn’t have a CD player like my friends’ cars did.

  I climb the rotting steps toward Charlene, who stands on her tiptoes to hug me. I am not tall: five foot seven in my tallest pair of heels, which I left at home—my real home, that is, in New York—but Charlene is a teeny size two, and the top of her head barely clears my shoulders. I feel like a beast descending on her.

  “Oh, Ruby,” she says, her hands on my face, her puffy eyes beseeching mine. “Thanks for comin’. It’s so good to see you.” She looks me all over and declares me as beautiful as ever. “Now come have some iced tea with your long-lost mother-in-law.” She includes this self-assigned title in the cards she sends every Christmas, despite the fact that I haven’t spoken to her son in ten years. She always hoped Danny and I would fall in love, as if I had the power to set his life on the right course. Now more than ever, perhaps unintentionally, it serves as a reminder that I could have saved her son.