Friends and Other Liars

by Kaela Coble

  He laughs. “I don’t know, I guess I never thought past that part.”

  “I mean, it seems kinda dull, doesn’t it? We just float up there, strap on an unflattering toga, and stroke a harp all day? I mean, that’s why we work hard to be good people? That’s our big reward?”

  He’s amused now. This feels just like one of the conversations we used to have at night after our parents had gone to bed (or Nancy had gone out), whispering into the phone so we wouldn’t get hollered at to hang up and go to bed. “There’s probably more to it than that,” he says.

  “Like what?” I ask, collapsing my arm and lying back down, my hands pressed together under one cheek. I look expectantly at him like a kid waiting for their parent to tell them a bedtime story. He laughs at this.

  “Maybe it’s like this movie I saw once. You get to pick if you stay in heaven or if you go back for another life. And if you choose heaven, you kind of create whatever you want it to be like.”

  “What do you think Danny would choose?”

  “Well, given that he just offed himself, I don’t think he’d be too psyched about the idea of living life all over again, or taking his chances on a new one. He’s probably up in heaven dealing dope to all the angels,” he says. The mental image makes us both laugh, but after a minute it hits me what we’re really talking about, and I start to cry.

  “Hey,” Murphy says, pulling me into him and speaking softly into my hair. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made a joke.”

  I shake my head. “No, it’s not that. It’s just…everything. Danny and Emmett and…this.”

  “Was I that bad?” he asks, mock offended and clearly trying to lighten the mood.

  “No,” I say, pulling myself together and giving him a little kiss on the forehead. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Was it better than…you know, before?”

  I roll my eyes. “Murphy. The last time we had sex you were a newbie. If you hadn’t improved your skills since then, it would be a problem.”

  He searches my face and must realize this is the highest praise he’s going to get from me.

  “What would you choose?” I ask him. I’d quite literally prefer death to talking about us back then.

  “Heaven for sure,” he says as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

  “And what would your heaven look like?”

  He thinks for a second, stroking his chin to emphasize his deep contemplation. “It would be like one endless night at Margie’s. Cold beer. Good friends. Beautiful, easy women.”

  I groan. I can’t help myself. This is what Murphy has become? A ’necker? Has he always been one, and I just never noticed because I was surrounded by them?

  “Oh and what would your heaven be, Miss Priss?” he asks, pushing pretend glasses up his nose with his index finger. “Sitting on the sofa with a glass of wine and a good book?” He says it in a mock British accent, and I wonder if he’s taking a dig at Jamie. I should never have talked about him. The two of them are supposed to be completely separate worlds for me. It’s like I’m not even the same person when I’m thinking about one or the other.

  “Actually, that sounds kinda nice,” I say. “But I would pick reincarnation.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Of course you would, Tuesday.”

  I’m taken aback. “Why ‘of course’?”

  “Because you’re always in search of something better. Always have been, always will be.” He looks into my eyes now, and I turn to lie on my back.

  “That’s not true,” I say defensively to the ceiling. But at the same time, I wonder if it is.

  We’re quiet for a minute. “You know,” he says in what I recognize as his I’m-about-to-poke-a-bear-(you)-with-a-stick tone, “I really think we should just tell people. I mean, I’m guessing your secret is about us. It happened so long ago, and I think people will understand. What’s the big deal?”

  The words feel like shots to the kneecaps, even considering he thinks we’re talking about two totally different things. The time in our lives he’s referring to has defined me in ways I still haven’t been able to process, and yet for him it’s something in the past, something he washed his hands of long ago. I nod slowly, feeling the color drain from my face, my tongue heavy and stuck as if it’s glued to the roof of my mouth. I want to cry, but I can’t give Murphy the satisfaction. Mr. What’s the Big Deal?

  “Right,” I say finally, throwing off the covers and jumping out of bed.

  “Hey. Where you goin’?”

  “Sorry, I gotta go. More work to do.”

  “It’s Friday night.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what they say about New York.” I force cheeriness into my voice as I make a beeline for the door. “It never sleeps!”

  “Ruby, wait,” I hear him say as I let his screen door slam shut behind me and run out into the rain.

  11

  RUBY

  BACK THEN—SENIOR YEAR

  I don’t say anything for what probably seems like a long time. But I can’t help it. I mean, he loves me? Murphy?

  “You mean as a friend, right?” I ask, glancing in his direction and then returning to stare straight ahead. I’m giving him an out because it’s prom, because we’ve been drinking and smoking, and because this has suddenly gotten way too serious. It’s entirely possible that my freak-out radar is just oversensitive. We’ve always said how great it is to have a best friend of the opposite sex. You get the companionship without the commitment, the perspective without the pressure. What’s not to love? I must be misunderstanding. He must have just forgotten to add the “man” and punch me in the arm.

  “No,” he says. “I’ve been in love with you. For a while.”

  So much for that theory. “How long?”

  “Two years.”

  I take a puff of my cigarette to trap the gasp in my throat, then offer it to him. I’m not surprised when he actually reaches for it and takes a deep inhale. His confession is changing everything; it might as well change his stance on smoking. “Two years,” I repeat when he passes it back. I try to calculate backward. Two years ago would be sophomore year. We had dated dozens of people between the two of us since then. One of them being Hardy Crane. “All this time? Why the hell didn’t you say anything?”

  “You know why, Ruby. The timing was never right. Either you liked someone, or I liked someone, or neither of us liked anyone and we would kiss and then you would tell me what a mistake it was because it would ruin our friendship.”

  “I thought we were in agreement about that. I mean, you’re my best friend.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s not something I’ve ever wanted to risk. Boyfriends and girlfriends break up all the time.”

  “I know.”

  I stamp out my cigarette on the side of the staircase and let it drop to the ground. I think briefly how much time we’re going to spend combing the lawn for butts in just a few hours. We really should have put a can out.

  “I can’t believe you’ve been hiding this for so long,” I whisper, letting my head—too heavy now—drop into my hands. Maybe I did see this, feel this coming. I guess if I’m completely honest, there have been times when I sensed Murphy might want more, and there were also times I thought my feelings might tiptoe over the friendship line, but we never talked about it, so it always passed like a storm cloud over an otherwise sunny day. To hear it out loud like this? It’s too real. I start to sniffle. Then, floating above us for a moment and seeing that my best friend is—for the first time—telling a girl he loves her, and wanting better for him than a tearful reaction, I make myself shiver to pretend the sniffling is from cold rather than emotion.

  He puts his arm around me and I lean into him, even though my instinct is telling me to run away. I thought setting him up with Taylor would set us back on the right track. The friendship track, whe
re we get to have fun and be ourselves and never fight. Not about anything real, anyway.

  “I’m sorry, Murph. I don’t know what to say,” because I don’t. I can’t say for sure I feel the same way, but I can’t say for sure I don’t.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” he says, and I can tell he’s trying really hard to sound fine with it all. But how can he be? The only desired outcome of telling someone you love them is for them to say they love you too, and immediately. Any variation from that is crushing. We wordlessly get up, creep inside and up the stairs, and climb into the twin bed of one of Nicki’s brothers’ rooms. At first, our backs face each other, but despite my good intentions, I start to cry, and Murphy rolls over to hold me. He strokes my hair, peppering my hairline with tiny kisses, and whispers that it’s all right until I fall asleep.

  • • •

  When we wake up the next morning, Murphy is still holding me, and I find I don’t feel as sad as I did the night before. A little anxious, maybe, but not sad. And maybe even a little…happy?

  We tiptoe downstairs in an attempt to sneak out before anyone wakes, but Danny grunts and stretches on the couch. “Too early,” he mumbles, his voice scratchy with last night’s smoke.

  “Morning, sunshine!” I say, purposely bright in order to annoy him. Murphy and I both sit on him on the couch and bounce up and down.

  “Fuck off! Fuck off!” he says, until finally he threatens to throw up on us and we leap off him.

  “Suckers,” he says, grinning. He smiles at us for a long time, looking back and forth between the two of us. It must make Murphy uncomfortable, because he begs off to use the bathroom and leaves me and Danny alone in the living room.

  “What?” I finally ask.

  “Something happen between the two of you last night?”

  “No,” I say reflexively. It’s sort of true. Murphy and I didn’t so much as kiss last night. If we had, Danny would be able to tell. He always knew when I’d hooked up with Hardy, before I even opened my mouth. Good thing he stayed asleep when Murphy and I snuck out of his house the day after we actually had sex.

  “Hmm,” he says. “You look…happy.” His voice is filled with suspicion.

  “Oh yeah?” I shrug. “Just in a good mood, I guess. It’s a beautiful day outside,” I say, bending to peer out the window, up at the sky. It is gorgeous—the sun is shining, not a cloud in sight. True to Vermont’s fickle nature, overnight it decided to transition from Mud to Summer.

  Danny nods slowly, but I can tell he knows something. Finally, he shrugs, reaching for his cigarettes and shuffling one out of the pack to stick behind his ear. “Enjoy it,” he says, standing to leave. “Your ‘good mood.’ You and I aren’t the type to be happy for very long.”

  • • •

  After I help the girls clean up all the beer cans and cigarettes (while the boys play with Nicki’s little brothers’ friggin’ Nerf guns), Murphy and I go to his house right around the corner. I know I should go home, and I get a wave of guilt thinking about Taylor, who is sitting at home waiting for Murphy to call. But Murphy is the one who invited me over—hell, he’s the one who started all this—and I’m not ready to go home to sift through this mess alone. Suddenly alone doesn’t have the appeal it used to have. I feel like there’s some kind of spell over us, and as soon as we part ways, it will be broken.

  I change into Murphy’s T-shirt and nylon athletic shorts, which are now designated as mine after so many post–field party visits when I demanded comfy clothes that didn’t reek of bonfire. We grab a blanket and lie in the sun on his back lawn. I spend the time practically, trying to convince Murphy he doesn’t really love me. If he cracks, I’ll know he doesn’t, and then it will all go back to normal before this all gets out of hand.

  “You hate the way I say ‘orange,’” I remind him.

  “Well, Jesus, it’s ‘oar-inge,’ not ‘arnge,’” he says.

  “And you hate that I smoke.”

  “You’ll quit. Someday. Right?”

  “I’ve whored around for two years.”

  “Tuesday, you’ve slept with two guys, and one of them was me.”

  “Yeah, and neither of them were my boyfriend. What do you call that?”

  “You’re independent. Unconventional. And awesome.”

  “I don’t even know how to have boyfriends, Murph. I don’t even know if I want one.”

  “Okay.”

  “And we’ve been best friends since eighth grade. Who would you talk to when I piss you off?”

  “Good point,” he says, smiling. “Probably the same person I talk to about it now. You. I’d say that gives us one up on most of the couples we know.”

  I don’t bring up the biggest question on my mind: What about the crew? These friendships, however flawed, are the only thing I’ve been able to count on through the whole mess with my parents. I don’t want to risk losing them. Even when I didn’t know what Nancy’s mood would be like from one day to the next, when I didn’t know if my parents were together or divorced or something in between, I’ve always known I can go to Ally and feel mothered, or at the very least to dance around in my underwear; I can go to Danny and feel like I’m taking care of someone who really needs it; I can go to Emmett and fight if I need to blow off steam. And I can go to Murphy and laugh and know everything will be okay.

  But if they all know about Murphy and me, it will be weird and awkward. Suddenly we’ll be a couple, and every bonehead comment Murphy makes will be a reflection of me. We’ll be responsible for each other’s actions in a way we haven’t ever had to be. We’ve always just been able to enjoy each other, and now we’ll have to defend each other. Our disagreements will affect the crew. They will be owned by them. Every touch and look and sentence uttered will be up for analysis. And I don’t want to be a contestant in the relationship contest that Ally and Nicki seem to be in. They alternate between competing over who has the best boyfriend and who has the worst, depending on the drama of the day.

  I bring up the question that should be the biggest on my mind—if I were a better person, anyway. “What about Taylor?”

  His face clouds over, and he takes a moment to respond. “She’ll survive.” He doesn’t explicitly promise to break up with her, and I don’t ask him to.

  After several hours of alternately dozing and indulging my neuroses, Murphy sits up straight, suddenly hard-faced. “Look, Ruby. I said what I said last night, and I meant it. If you don’t feel the same way, that’s fine. I’m not going to die. But I thought you should know the truth. Now let’s just drop it. And maybe you should go home and shower, because you kinda stink.” I give him a playful sock on the arm, and he pulls me close and gives me a quick peck on the lips. Uh-oh. I push him off and glance around frantically. What if Cecile sees?

  “Okay, I’m going home.” I stand up abruptly. “Listen, I don’t think we should tell anyone—”

  “Anyone about this, especially the crew, because it’s none of their business and we don’t want it to become ‘a thing,’” he recites. It was the same thing I said to him the night I took his virginity.

  • • •

  The next few weeks are a blur of confusion, excitement, and despair. Murphy and I continue to hang out, but just as I worried, everything is different. It’s good and bad. The bad comes when we see each other in the halls or greet each other in front of our friends. We’re both trying to make it seem normal, but suddenly we can’t remember how we used to act around each other. The more casual we try to be, the more awkward it is. One time, we even shake hands before heading into homeroom. I’m really glad nobody saw that.

  The good, and I mean really good part happens when we manage to be alone. At first, tension crackles like there’s an electric fence between us. It’s the same spark and playful sense of humor that’s always been there, but now I’m hyperaware of it, and it’s obvious to me that what
we have—what we’ve always had—is more than friendship. Everything is amplified.

  I drive Murphy to get his hair cut at Le Beaux Cheveux (whose name implies a higher level of sophistication than Chatwick is capable of). Since I got my car, I’ve taken any excuse to leave my house, even if it’s chauffeuring my friends to appointments like a soccer mom. It’s a chance to sit in my car and smoke and read and not worry about a tense conversation coming around the corner at home. But lately, it’s more about getting to spend any amount of alone time with Murphy that doesn’t appear suspect. This time, I don’t sit in my car; I go in with him and sit in the waiting area. I pretend to flip through a magazine, but every few seconds we exchange flirty eyes in the mirror. The stylist makes a comment about what a cute couple we are, and we immediately stiffen. I go back to my magazine, and Murphy tells the stylist, “We’re just friends.” I’m not looking at him, but I can tell he’s smirking when he says it.

  Afterward, we walk down the gravel driveway and I risk contact by running my hand through his still impossibly thick hair. I tell him the cut looks great, and he looks at me with that gleam in his eye that I now realize is there for a reason. He bends down quickly and scoops me up in his arms, just like he did on prom night. I let him carry me a few feet, but squiggle out of his arms as we approach my car, which is parked on Main Street.

  Not ten seconds later, we hear a honk. A maroon SUV drives by, Taylor waving from the passenger seat of her mother’s car. Murphy and I wave back enthusiastically, then avoid looking at each other on the ride home.

  That’s the other bad part. He still hasn’t broken up with Taylor. I don’t want to ask him to do it while I’m still unsure about taking her place. It occurs to me that he hasn’t made up his mind either. He told me he loved me, not that he wanted to be with me, and that’s not always the same thing.

  A few days later, I drive over to his house to give him a ride to baseball practice. I haven’t done it recently because he got his truck right before the season started, and since Dad came back, Nancy makes a big show of having dinner on the table every night. But his truck is at Borbeau’s getting an oil change. It’s another cover we don’t discuss. Murphy knows how to change his own oil, and even if he didn’t, an oil change doesn’t require an overnight stay in the garage. I pretend it’s out of habit that I’m here early, ready for my cooking lesson with Cecile, but when I find out she’s showing an apartment, I’m not exactly crushed.