The Last Time I Lied_A Novel

by Riley Sager

  I thought showing it to Emma would spark her interest, just in case the Magic 8 Ball lied and all signs actually point to getting my sorry ass booted from camp. That way she can continue what I started, if she’s so inclined. And I was right. It DID spark her interest. I saw it in her eyes as soon as she opened that box.

  But then the bad stuff had to take place. Yep, I showed her that I could swim. I thought she should know, for several reasons. One: If, God forbid, my body washes up on the beach one morning, she’ll be able to tell police that I’m an expert swimmer. Two: She needs to learn not to trust everything everyone tells her. Two Truths and a Lie isn’t just a game. For most people, it’s a lifestyle. Three: I’ll need to break her heart eventually. Might as well put a crack in it now.

  So now she’s pissed at me. Rightly so. She spent the rest of the day ignoring me. And it hurt like a motherfucker. There’s so much I want to tell her. That life is hard. That you need to punch it before it punches you.

  I know she’s hurt. I know she thinks she’s the only one whose parents ignore her. But she should try being left behind in New York while The Senator and Mrs. Senator go off to DC two months after her sister dies! Now that’s abandonment.

  As for the fake drowning, I had to do it. Hopefully Em will only pout a day. I’ll give her flowers tomorrow and she’ll love me again.

  July 3,

  Fun fact: In the 1800s, women could be sent to asylums for these reasons:

  Hysteria

  Immoral life

  Jealousy

  Masturbation

  Kicked in the head by a horse

  Egotism

  Nymphomania

  Bad company

  Novel reading (!)

  Other than the horse kicking, every single woman I’ve ever met could have been declared insane back then. Which is exactly how men wanted it. It’s how they managed to keep women down. Don’t like something they’ve said? Call them crazy and ship them off to the loony bin. Don’t fuck their husbands enough? Commit them. Want to fuck them too much? Commit them. It’s sick.

  And don’t you dare think things have changed much, diary. They haven’t. The Senator was ready to have me locked up after Kath died. Like it was wrong of me to mourn her. Like grief was a mental illness.

  Anyway, that’s the lesson I learned today. Every woman is crazy. The ones who can’t hide it well enough are shit out of luck.

  150.97768 WEST

  164

  Update: And now I’m fucked. I forgot I left you out, dear diary. Came back from the campfire to find Natalie and Allison reading you. Which doesn’t surprise me. They’ve been trying to get a peek at you all week. And now they have. I’m sure it was an eyeful. Thank God I didn’t write that Natalie’s gotten so thick in the thighs she looks like a lady wrestler or that Allison’s so pasty she might as well be an albino. That would be AWFUL if they read that about themselves, right?

  And while I’m tempted to leave you open to this page so they can do exactly that, I’ve decided it’s best to hide you. You’re no longer safe here, baby.

  The less they know, the better.

  Update #2: Welcome to your new home, little book. Hope you don’t rot here. Drawing a map so I don’t forget where you are.

  July 4,

  Can’t write much. Rowing here already took half the morning. Rowing back will take even longer. F has probably noticed I’m gone. She’s got spies everywhere. I’m certain she told Casey to double-check on me each night.

  But that might not matter for much longer.

  Because. I. Found. It.

  That clichéd missing piece that ties everything together. Everything makes sense now. I know the truth. All I need to do is expose it.

  But there’s a hitch. After reading you, dear diary, Natalie and Allison want in on it. And I’ve decided I’m going to tell them everything. Because I can’t do this without their help. I thought I could, but that’s no longer an option.

  Yes, I know I could just drop it, forget the whole thing, spend my summer, my year, the rest of my goddamned life pretending it never happened. A sane person would do that.

  But here’s the thing: some wrongs are so terrible that the people responsible must be held accountable. Call it justice. Call it revenge. Call it whatever. I don’t give a fuck.

  All I care about is this particular wrong. It can’t be ignored. It must be righted.

  And I’m the bitch that’s going to do it.

  I’m scared

  19

  That’s it. The rest of the pages—more than two-thirds of the diary—are blank. I flip through them anyway, just in case I’ve missed something. I haven’t. There’s nothing.

  I close the diary and exhale. Reading it has left me feeling the same way I did after each of Vivian’s hallucinatory visits. Confused and light-headed, spent and frightened.

  Vivian was looking for something, that much is clear. What it was—and what she eventually found—remain frustratingly out of reach. Honestly, the only thing I’m certain about is that the paper on which Vivian drew her map was torn from the journal. There’s a page missing between her entry about its new location and the one she made on the Fourth of July. I remove the map from my backpack and hold it against the ragged remnants of the missing page. It’s a match.

  I reread the entire diary, studying each page, parsing every word, trying to make sense of it. Little does, least of all why Vivian, a person who rarely failed to say exactly what she was thinking and feeling, needed to keep some things secret. So I give it yet another read, this time from back to front, starting with Vivian’s unsettling final entry.

  I’m scared.

  That one confounds me the most. Of all the myriad emotions Vivian displayed in the short time I knew her, fear wasn’t one of them.

  I flip to the previous page. That entry was made the morning of July 4, prompting two new questions: When did she write that final entry, and what was she afraid of?

  I clutch the book, frustrated, aching for answers that refuse to reveal themselves. “What did you learn, Viv?” I murmur, as if she could somehow answer me.

  Judging by the entry dates, I assume she buried the book sometime during the night of July 3. My guess is that she snuck out while the rest of us were asleep. Not unusual for her. She had also done it the night before.

  I remember because I was still mad that she had lied to me about her swimming skills. I was especially livid about the reason she lied—because Theo had been paying too much attention to me. She saw me in his arms, whispering encouraging words as he taught me how to swim. And she couldn’t stand it. So she faked drowning just to become the center of attention again.

  I ignored her the rest of that canoe trip back to camp. And the rest of the afternoon. And at dinner, where I took her advice and showed up so late I was last in line. I sat alone and picked at the dinnertime dregs—lukewarm meat loaf and mashed potatoes dried to a crust. At the campfire, I sat with girls my own age, who showed little interest in me. Afterward, I went to bed early, pretending to be asleep while the others played Two Truths and a Lie without me.

  Later that night, I woke to find Vivian tiptoeing into the cabin. She tried to be sneaky about it, but the creak of the third floorboard from the door gave her away.

  I sat up, bleary-eyed. Where did you go?

  I had to pee, Vivian said. Or is taking a piss something else you disapprove of?

  She said nothing else as she climbed up to her bunk. But in the morning, a handful of tiny flowers were sitting on my pillow, right beside my head. Forget-me-nots. Their petals were a delicate blue. In the center of each was a yellow starburst.

  I later stored them in my hickory trunk, pressed inside my copy of The Lovely Bones. Although she never admitted to putting them there, I knew they were from Vivian. She had indeed given me flowers. And just as she thought, I loved
her again.

  I flip back to the page where Vivian had made that prediction, reading it feverishly, wondering again if my feelings had been that transparent. It’s only after I reread the passage about her own parents that I get an answer—Vivian simply knew. Because she was just like me. Neglected and lonely. Basking in whatever scraps of attention she received. It’s how she was able to foresee that a hastily picked bunch of forget-me-nots would be enough to appease me. Because it would have been enough for her, too.

  More flipping. More pages. More questions.

  I turn to the page with Vivian’s musings about insanity. Of all the things she had written, this one shakes me to my core. Reading it feels as though she’s speaking directly to me, as if she foresaw my slide into madness a year before it would happen.

  But why did she seek out that information? And where?

  I vividly remember the day she made that entry. Riding to town in the camp’s mint-green Ford, squeezed tight between Vivian and Theo at the wheel. He drove one-handed, his legs spread wide so that his thigh kept bumping against mine. Each touch made my heart feel like a tiny bird trapped in a cage, fluttering against the gilded bars. I didn’t mind at all when Vivian said she was going shopping and slipped away from us, leaving me alone with Theo.

  I flip to the next page, where she had jotted down that strange set of numbers.

  150.97768 WEST

  164

  At first, I think they might be coordinates on a map. But when I grab my phone and check the compass app, I discover that 150 degrees points southeast. Which means it’s something else. Only Vivian knows for sure. But I’m certain she wrote down the numbers for a reason. Like everything else, I get the sense that she’s urging me forward, step by step, to find out what she learned all those years ago.

  I’m in the process of taking a picture of the numbers with my phone when the door to Dogwood opens and Miranda, Krystal, and Sasha burst inside. Their sudden presence sends me once again scrambling to close the book and shove it under my pillow. I’m not as quick this time around, allowing them to catch me in the act.

  “What are you doing?” Sasha asks, eyeing first the corner of the book poking from beneath my pillow and then my phone, which remains clutched in my hand.

  “Nothing.”

  “Right,” Miranda says. “You’re totally not acting like someone just caught looking at porn.”

  “It’s not porn.” I pause, trying to see if the girls believe me. It’s clear they don’t, so I tell them the truth, minus any context that would make them ask more questions. “I’m trying to decipher something. A code.”

  Miranda’s face lights up at the idea of solving a mystery. “What kind of code?”

  I glance at the picture on my phone, reading off the number. “What does 150.97768 WEST mean to you?”

  “Easy,” Miranda says. “It’s the Dewey Decimal System. Some book has that call number.”

  “You positive?”

  She gives me a disbelieving look. “Um, yeah. I’ve spent, like, half my life at the library.”

  The library. Maybe that’s where Vivian went when she claimed to be shopping. While there, she found a book important enough to note its call number in her diary. It’s clear she was looking for something. I even think she might have found it.

  I recall her entry about getting somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be. The Big L is the Lodge. F is Franny. Simple enough. But Vivian frustratingly failed to mention exactly what she found there and what she managed to steal.

  Still, she wrote enough to thoroughly unnerve me. Thinking about Franny’s reaction to her snooping sends a chill flapping through me. It doesn’t sound like Franny at all, which makes me wonder if Vivian was being paranoid. It certainly seems that way, especially Vivian’s line about wanting to tell me what she was doing in case something happened to her.

  I’m close to finding out her dirty little secret.

  It turns out something bad did happen, only there’s no proof it had anything to do with Franny or a deep, dark secret. Yet some events are too connected to be mere coincidence. This feels like one of them.

  I know the truth.

  The idea that I might be closer to learning what happened to the girls should excite me. Instead, a hard ball of pain forms in the pit of my stomach. Worry snowballing inside me. I assume Vivian experienced this exact feeling when she scribbled those last two words in her diary.

  I’m scared.

  So am I.

  Because it’s possible I’ve stumbled upon something sinister, even dangerous.

  That after years of wondering, I’m on the cusp of getting actual answers.

  Above all, I’m scared that if I keep digging, I might not like what I’ll find.

  20

  That night, my dreams are haunted by Vivian.

  It’s not like the hallucinations of my youth. Never do I think she’s really there, returned from the ether. There’s a cinematic quality to them—like I’m seeing one of the film noirs my father still watches on Sunday afternoons. Vivian in expressionistic black and white. First running through a forest as wild as one of my paintings. Then on a barren island, holding a pair of scissors. Finally in a canoe, rowing mightily into a rolling fog bank that whooshes over her, swirling and hungry, ultimately consuming her.

  I wake clutching my charm bracelet as reveille blasts through camp. To my utter surprise, I have slept through the night. My eyelids flutter, tentatively facing the light of morning. Even before they’re fully open, I can make out something at Dogwood’s sole window.

  A shape, dark as a shadow.

  A gasp catches in my throat, lodging there, momentarily blocking all breath as whoever’s at the window flees. I can’t tell who it is. All I see is a dark figure streaking away.

  Only when it’s gone do I swallow hard, suppressing the gasp, forcing it back down. I don’t want to wake the girls. Nor do I want to scare them. When I notice Sasha squinting down at me from her upper bunk, I can tell she didn’t see whoever was at the window. All she sees is me sitting up in bed, my face as white as my cotton pillowcase.

  “I had a nightmare,” I tell her.

  “I read that bad dreams can be caused by eating before bed.”

  “Good to know,” I say, although I’m pretty sure my dreams of Vivian were caused by her diary and not what little I ate last night.

  As for what I saw at the window, I’m certain it wasn’t a dream. Nor was it my imagination or a play of the light, like I tried to convince myself is what happened at the latrine. This time, there’s no talking myself out of it, no matter how much I’d like to.

  Someone was there.

  I still feel their presence. A ghostly hum right outside the window. My pulse races, humming in response. It tells me that I wasn’t mistaken about yesterday.

  Someone had watched me in that shower.

  Just like someone trapped those crows inside the cabin.

  And now someone was just watching me sleep.

  I shudder, horrified, my skin crawling. If the girls weren’t here, I’d let out a scream, just because it might make me feel better. Instead, I slide out of bed and head to the door.

  “Where are you going?” Sasha whispers.

  “Latrine.”

  Another lie. Tossed off to keep Sasha calm. Unlike me with my still-furious pulse and continuing shudder as I bolt outside to see if I can spot whoever was at the window. But already dozens of girls are spilling out of their cabins, roused by reveille and groggily starting the day. All of them stop when they see me. They also stare, some with their heads tilted in curiosity, others with outright surprise. A few more campers join the fray, doing the same thing. As does Casey when she passes by with two fingers pressed to her lips, already craving that first cigarette.

  That’s when it dawns on me. They’re not staring at me. Their gazes are fixed o
n the cabin behind me.

  I turn around slowly, not sure if I want to see what the others do. Their expressions—a little fearful, a little stunned—tell me it’s nothing good. But curiosity keeps me spinning until I’m facing the front of Dogwood.

  The door has been smeared with paint. Red. Still wet. Sliding down the wood in rivulets that resemble streaks of blood.

  The paint forms a word spelled out in all caps, the letters large and bold and as piercing as a knife to the ribs.

  LIAR

  * * *

  —

  Franny again stands before a mess hall filled with campers, although this time it’s to give a different kind of speech.

  “To say I’m disappointed is an understatement,” she says. “I’m devastated. Vandalism of any sort will not be tolerated at Camp Nightingale. Under normal circumstances, the culprit would be asked to leave immediately. But since you all have only been here a few days and may not yet understand the rules, whoever painted on the door of Dogwood will be allowed to stay if you come forward now. If you don’t and are later caught, you’ll be banned from this place for life. So, please, if any of you are responsible, speak up now, apologize, and we’ll put the entire incident behind us.”

  Silence follows, broken by a few coughs and the occasional squeak of a cafeteria chair. No girls stand to confess. Not that I was expecting it. Most teenage girls would rather die than admit they did something wrong.

  I should know.

  I survey the crowd from my spot by the door. Most of the girls have their heads bowed in collective shame. The few who don’t stare ahead with wide-eyed innocence, including Krystal and Sasha. Miranda is the only girl from Dogwood who seems pissed off by the incident. She sneaks glances at the girls around her, trying to find the guilty culprit.

  Standing along the wall are Lottie, Theo, Chet, and Mindy. Mindy catches me looking and gives me a scowl. I have officially ruined her goal of things running smoothly.