The Best Lies

by Sarah Lyu

  “Why do you stay?”

  “A lot of reasons.”

  “What’s the main one? And don’t say it’s me and Christian.” I wasn’t giving him any outs.

  Finally he looked at me, attempting a smile that ended up in a grimace. “What can I say, I’m a romantic,” he joked weakly.

  I stared at him blankly.

  “It’s terrifying,” he said. The truth at last.

  “Leaving her?”

  “Being alone.”

  This moment between us was so strange and awful. I’d loved my dad, I’d resented him. I’d been surprised by him and disappointed by him, but I’d never felt what I felt then—pity.

  It was depressing, growing up thinking your parents had all the answers, thinking age was the same as wisdom, all to realize one day that no one had the answers. That your parents were not gods or monsters but human, fallible. That in a way, they’re children just like you. That all of us are just children, lost and scared, trying to find our way.

  I thought of what Jack said, about how survival was a talent. We were all just trying to survive.

  MONDAY // JUNE 26 // DAY 290

  41.

  Diane and Dale Novak, Jack’s aunt and uncle and Evan’s parents, were both educators—Mr. Novak taught second grade and Mrs. Novak was the vice principal of the middle school. On the second week of summer vacation, they invited me over for dinner. Their house smelled like cinnamon snickerdoodles and was filled with knickknacks from their travels.

  “All from the pre-Evan days,” Mr. Novak said with a laugh.

  “Not all. Some of these are from when Evan was old enough to travel,” Mrs. Novak said. “The best part of being teachers is having two months to travel every year.”

  It was my first time over for dinner and I mostly stayed quiet, sitting with Jack and Lola on one end of the table, Evan on my other side. After spring break, Evan, a junior like Jae, joined our lunch table, becoming a fixture soon after. After the fish caper, as the night came to be called, he seemed taken with Elise. It bothered me, not because I felt threatened but because he reminded me of myself when I thought Elise had all the answers, when I was sure Elise was my soulmate, more sure than I’d been sure of anything my whole life. He looked at her like she was his savior, and I wondered if I had done the same.

  I wondered if I was still the same Remy who desperately needed her. And if I wasn’t, what did that mean for us? I couldn’t bear the thought of not having her in my life, of losing Elise x Remy, but as I glanced at Jack, I knew we’d never be able to go back to the way things were—when Elise was the world and I was an ever-present satellite.

  “So, Remy,” Jack’s aunt said. “Did you know Jack from school? The swim team maybe?”

  “Um, no actually,” I said. “I don’t swim and we’ve never had any classes together.” Riverside was also huge, with a student body of almost 2,500 kids.

  “We met at a friend’s house in March,” Jack said. “We kind of started talking because neither of us wanted to be there.” His aunt and uncle laughed at that.

  “In any case,” his aunt continued. “It’s been good to see Jack so happy lately.”

  He and I shared a soft smile. I’d been happier lately too.

  “Hey, Remy,” his uncle said. “Did you know that Jack was an Olympic hopeful?”

  “Really?”

  “Oh my God, Uncle Dale, stop,” he said.

  “We have pictures of him and Evan going back to their days in floaties.”

  “Mom, ugh,” Evan said. “Stop.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing these pictures,” I said with a sly smile.

  “Do not encourage them, Remy,” Evan said. “Do not.”

  “Ignore them, Remy. We’ll show you all the embarrassing photos,” his uncle said.

  “Why are you like this?” Jack groaned, but he was smiling.

  “We’re bored! It’s summer for us too,” his aunt said, laughing.

  We spent the rest of the meal talking about school, and their plans for the rest of summer. The dinner itself wasn’t that remarkable, but that feeling stayed with me—that warmth and camaraderie from being around family who cared about you.

  Even in public, my parents’ forced closeness was unconvincing, at least to me. Melody’s parents were nice, but they mostly kept to themselves and often spoke to Mel in Korean.

  I didn’t want to think about Elise and her father. She’d been texting me throughout the night but I hadn’t had a chance to get back to her.

  I couldn’t avoid her forever, though. After dinner, Evan pulled me aside when Jack was helping clear the table. “Hey, Remy, Elise is really worried. Are you avoiding her?”

  “No,” I said, surprised she’d talked to Evan about me. “What’d she say?”

  “Not much, just that she hasn’t seen you in over a week.”

  “Oh. I guess I’ve been busy,” I said. “I’ll talk to her, sorry.”

  I called her when I got home and she picked up on the first ring.

  “Remy?” Her voice sounded so heartbreakingly hopeful.

  “Hey,” I said, wracked with guilt. It wasn’t like I was actively ignoring her. I always texted her back, just not right away. We saw each other a week ago, on the last day of school, but I hadn’t seen her since, and it was the longest stretch we’d gone without seeing each other since we met. I used to spend all my time with her—I used to want to spend all my time with her, but I hadn’t wanted to hear her complain about how I was ditching her for Jack anymore.

  “Are you home?” she asked. “I’ll pick you up. Let’s go for a drive.”

  42.

  We drove around in silence for a while, cigarettes in hand, with the top down. It unnerved me, how quiet she was.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. I used to pick up all her calls right away and respond to her texts as soon as I saw them. And now I let her calls go to voicemail and forgot to text her back half the time. I used to spend every free minute with her, and even though it was summer now, I hadn’t seen her since the end of school.

  I knew she thought it was all Jack’s fault, but it was more than just him. It was hard to admit, but part of me started pulling away from her the night she told me about her father, showed me that bruise on her shoulder. It was hard to accept that I was simply afraid—afraid of what I didn’t understand, afraid of Elise, afraid for Elise. Afraid of her father. Afraid of the Deadly Vipers and what they were up to, afraid of her endless well of anger.

  The day after the Vipers took Mr. Voss down, she told me the reason they went after him was because he’d known Dawkins was a creep but did nothing about it, or worse, tried to cover it up.

  “How do you know?” I’d asked.

  “Come on.” She leveled a look at me. “He had to have known.” Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t.

  “But—” I began to protest.

  “God, you sound just like Madi. Okay, we broke into his office, forced the locks on his filing cabinets to find the personnel folders. We had proof. It was in Dawkins’s file. He’d been let off with warnings in the past. Voss knew and just let him off the hook.”

  “What’d you guys do?” I said, unease growing.

  “Nothing much, actually,” she said with an innocent smile. “We just sent a letter to the local news channel with a copy of the evidence we found. It took only two days for them to run a story. After that, he agreed to retire quietly.”

  “He did? Was there an announcement?” I couldn’t believe I’d missed it, but then again, I was doing my best to avoid the Vipers and their operations.

  “No, not to the whole school. The board probably didn’t want to draw more attention to it.”

  I stared at her in awe, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. The power Elise possessed seemed limitless.

  “Anyway,” she said now. “I heard from Evan that you were at dinner.” She sounded casual, but I could tell she cared, just not if she was angry.
/>   “Yeah.”

  “That must’ve been boring.” Stopping for a red light, she took a long drag from her cigarette.

  “What?”

  “Eating bland food and pretending to be someone else to impress Jack’s aunt and uncle.” She glanced at me for confirmation before the light turned green. “Bet you couldn’t wait to get away.”

  “No, it was nice, actually,” I said, shaking my head. “It was really . . .” I searched for the right word. “Normal.”

  She made a face. “Normal? Ugh.”

  “I don’t know, I want that,” I said. “A family like that.” Even though Jack had shitty parents, he still had his aunt and uncle, family who loved him.

  Elise pulled over into a gas station. “You have a family already—me. We’ll always be family, you and me.” I smiled faintly at the familiar words, often spoken by Elise like it was a promise. An unbreakable vow.

  Elise wanted a remarkable life. She wanted to be remembered. Or maybe she was afraid of being forgotten. What she said about Melody, about how choosing to live a quiet life was the same as not existing. I had loved that. Take me with you, I’d cried.

  But lately I wasn’t so sure. Maybe it wasn’t terrible, having a quiet life. Having a family you love that loves you back. Being happy. Maybe that would be enough.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of feeling angry?” I asked her, genuinely curious.

  “No,” she said firmly.

  “Why not?” Just thinking about it was exhausting—maintaining the white-hot fury she carried with her.

  “Because,” she said, lighting another cigarette and passing it to me, “the moment you let that anger go, you lose the drive to fight. You accept the shitty things that people do to you.” Anger was the source of her power. It was the source of all her strength.

  And suddenly she didn’t seem all that strong anymore.

  “Well, I’m exhausted,” I said. “And I’m too tired to fight.”

  She looked at me, disappointment written all over her face. “That’s Jack talking, not you.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not.”

  “It’s like he’s brainwashing you,” she said.

  “Come on,” I said with a laugh, even though I was starting to get annoyed. “No one’s brainwashing me.”

  “You’re different now,” she lamented. “And it’s all because of him.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “It’s true,” she said. “You never answer my calls. It takes you days to text me back. And last week we had a thing and you were just completely MIA.”

  “What thing?”

  “A Deadly Vipers thing,” she said.

  I took a final drag of my cigarette before tossing it onto the concrete.

  “Don’t lie, you were with Jack, weren’t you? I can’t believe you—”

  “I wasn’t with Jack,” I said, annoyed. “I was stuck at home because my parents were tearing into each other again and I couldn’t get away.”

  That stopped her. “Oh.”

  “And for the record, I only met Jack because you ditched me, remember?”

  “Is that what this is all about? You’re just mad about that?” she said, looking strangely relieved. “Oh my God. That really is it, isn’t it?”

  “No—”

  “You want me to fight for you, is that it? I can do that,” she said.

  “That’s not it,” I said, growing agitated. “Stop. Just stop. It’s not a competition! I love both of you, okay?”

  “You love him now?” she asked in shock. I was surprised too. I hadn’t known how I felt until that moment.

  “I do.”

  She scoffed.

  I sighed. “You want it to be just the two of us forever.”

  “And what is wrong with that?” she said. “Love makes you do crazy things. I don’t mean love like ours. I mean infatuation. What we have is true love, the way we feel about each other is real. The way I felt about Christian wasn’t. I was infatuated with him and it made me crazy. It’s the same with Jack. You’ll see. You’re just infatuated with him. One day you’ll do something in the name of love and you’ll regret it.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t believe the things she was saying. I wasn’t infatuated. I knew how I felt.

  “What we have is real,” she repeated. “No one else has what we have. No one will ever love you like I do.”

  “No one will ever love me like you? Are you kidding me?” Maybe I believed that too at one point. I thought Elise had swept into my life and saved me. I thought she was my one and only salvation. I thought we were each other’s salvation, but Elise wanted more. It was how I’d ended up meeting Jack in the first place. And now she was upset because I didn’t need her like I used to. “Do you even hear yourself?”

  She looked like I’d punched her in the stomach.

  “I want to go home,” I said, turning away from her. For a while there was just silence, the two of us sitting in the Pink Caddy in the middle of an empty gas station. Finally she started the car again and drove me home.

  As we slowed to the front of my house, Elise grabbed my wrist and held on tight. “What, you’re just done with me?” she said.

  “No.” I sighed. “I’m just tired, okay?”

  She eventually let me go. I got out of the car and was halfway to my front door when she called my name.

  “What?” I said, turning back.

  “You use people, Remy,” she said. “You’re a user. Cameron, Melody, and now me. We’re just—just things to you. You feed off our attention and then you leave us behind when you’re done.”

  And before I had a chance to respond, she was gone.

  43.

  I don’t tell Detective Ward about our fight, or what was said, just that we had one. A bad one. “I didn’t speak to her after that. I ignored all her texts, emails. I let her calls go to voicemail and deleted them without listening to any of her messages.”

  Elise sent me a million texts saying sorry, and a slew of emails when I didn’t respond to any of her messages or missed calls. I deleted her voicemails without listening to them.

  But that only lasted two weeks. Then came a string of terrifying texts.

  Elise: My dad hasn’t been going to The Realtor’s for a whole week

  Elise: I’ve been avoiding him, but I’m basically under house arrest

  Elise: I’m scared, Rem

  Elise: Please I’m sorry about what I said okay?

  Elise: I need you

  The scariest thing about her messages was the fact she mentioned her father at all after pretending nothing was wrong for months. I drove over to the Pink Mansion as soon as I saw them, texted her, and waited for her to slip out undetected.

  “Remy!” Her whole face lit up when she saw me. I held her tight.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  She was. She’d just been scared, that was all.

  “This happened at least four or five times,” I tell Detective Ward. “She’d call, or text, and every time she’d say it was an emergency, that she was afraid of her father. Something. And I’d always come.” I clear my throat, try to hold back my tears. “I know I should’ve told someone about it. I know I messed up.”

  Detective Ward jots down notes, and I am desperate to see what she’s written, what she thinks—if she knows it’s all my fault for ignoring Elise’s calls that night.

  “She did it several times,” I repeat. “And I always came.” You have to believe me, I am saying. I did everything I could, even if I hadn’t.

  “No one is blaming you for anything,” Detective Ward says. “You know that, right? You’re not on trial here.”

  Still, I wonder what the folder with Elise’s name holds. What Ward thinks of me, what Vera must think of me, if they think I’m a monster like I do.

  SATURDAY // AUGUST 5 // DAY 330

  44.

  Nothing stood out about that weekend. No dark omen or warning, no thunderstorms or black cat
s. Long stretches of good days were punctuated every so often with a bad one, forming a rhythm, a cadence. It was almost predictable—almost.

  Things didn’t escalate. Or maybe they did, and we were just lobsters in a pot, the temperature rising so slowly we didn’t realize it was lethal until it was too late.

  It went like this: I’d meet up with Jack. An hour later, I’d get the first text. Then the calls would come, one after the other. Finally I’d leave Jack at the lake or at his place and drive to the Pink Mansion.

  Sometimes Elise sported a new bruise. More often she didn’t. We’d sit in my car, parked on the road where her father couldn’t see us. We’d talk, sometimes cry. I’d distract her, and that’s what she needed most then.

  Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

  That night was no different.

  “Elise cries wolf,” Jack said flatly, soon after I arrived at his house. He had the whole place to himself, Evan and his parents at dinner with his grandparents on his dad’s side.

  “No, she doesn’t,” I said, petting Lola by my side as Jack stood by the stove, making us pasta. “She just really needs me right now.”

  Love is to need and be needed. Love is truest, strongest when you need each other, when you can’t live without each other.

  “Come on, Remy,” he said, like he expected better from me. “You know it’s true, and you know you don’t want to go.”

  “It’s complicated,” I said, and then really heard myself. It was what my dad had said once upon a time when we were sharing an ice cream and rebelling against Mom. I hadn’t understood what he meant. It all seemed so simple to me back then, so black and white. But now I understood how he felt, how he probably still feels now. How an intense shared history could make it hard to give something up. Knowing this made them more human to me.

  Jack shook his head. “She wants to know you’ll always come when she calls.” He hadn’t seen her bruises. And I’d promised Elise I wouldn’t tell anyone. “She wants to know you’ll always pick her over me. More than that, she wants me to know you’ll always leave if she asks.”