The Liar's Guide to the Night Sky

by Brianna R. Shrum

  But I put my phone away.

  Mom says, “How was school?”

  I normally just let it slide at Fine because I don’t want to go into shit with them. I don’t want to go into it at all, and I honestly don’t know if it’s because now I’m super depressed or if it’s because I always felt like this.

  This is how it is now, since the mountain.

  Everything feels wrong, and I am eight thousand percent uncertain.

  I fucking—I fucking hate uncertainty.

  God, I’ve never been uncertain in my life.

  And now here I am, unable to remember what my policy on school details has always been, and when my mom says, “Did you want broccoli or carrots or both?” I reply, “I don’t know.”

  I don’t know!

  I don’t know anything anymore!

  I blink hard, enough that my eyes start to sting. I mean to say, Fine. Like always. But what I say is, “I’m a goddamn spectacle, Mom.”

  My mom says, “Language.”

  My dad sets his knife down with purpose and says, “Hallie Jacob.”

  I blink.

  I pick up the fork.

  I eat my broccoli and carrots I could not choose between, and I am absolutely suffocated by the fact that I seem to have changed utterly while my parents simply have not.

  Nothing else has.

  Nothing but me.

  The only one who notices, or notices and cares enough to bring it up, is Zayde.

  He and I have never been close; we never really had the opportunity to be. But I love him and he loves me and he’s known me all my life.

  It’s my night to hang out with him, and we’ve been playing pinochle in the quiet. He doesn’t have much to say nowadays; I think it just takes a lot of energy.

  But he lays down a jack, wrinkled hands trembling, and says, “Buttercup. You’ve looked better.”

  I wrinkle my nose. My pajamas are mismatched, and I guess I could have taken more time on my hair but—

  “Sad,” he continues. “You look sad.”

  “Oh,” is all I can manage.

  He doesn’t push me. He just takes a card from the pile and pushes his glasses up on his nose. And he waits.

  I finally say, “I don’t know why I’m being like this. I should be happy. I survived.”

  “Not enough,” he says, glancing up at me and resting his elbows on the table, “just to survive.”

  I blink back at my grandfather, and for a second, I feel sorry for taking up the most precious of all his time—the time that comes near the very end—with neediness. With sadness. With my own drama.

  But then he gives me the smallest smile and goes back to his hand, and I think he’ll make a run.

  And I don’t feel sorry at all.

  Jolie and Jaxon invite me over for Shabbat dinner.

  I say to my parents, “I’m heading over to Uncle Reuben’s.”

  My mom waves me off and my dad says, “Let me drive you.”

  I don’t know why that’s so irritating, but lately, everything is irritating? Which is stupid because I survived! I survived a week on a mountain in the cold with a boy I didn’t even know! I should have a new lease on life! I should be clicking my heels together and diving into paintings to play with all the animated woodland creatures and sing songs about joy.

  It’s fine.

  I’m just completely empty, is all.

  Because no one gets it.

  No one but Jonah Ramirez, and he hasn’t texted me and I haven’t texted him, and I think neither of us knows what the hell to even say.

  The car ride is weirdly quiet.

  It’s not enough, I hear. Just to survive.

  I shut my eyes.

  We get to my cousins’ house, and Dad comes to the door with me and says hello to his brother; they were so cool for a while—everyone was. Like this almost-tragedy really brought the family together.

  It seemed, through family dinner after family dinner, that maybe the change was going to be permanent.

  I don’t know, maybe it will be.

  I slip in the front door and Jaxon whacks me on the back of the head affectionately. Jolie beams at me and says, “Lila Rahal asked me to Winterfest. Like as her date. Oh my god, LILA RAHAL. Do you even understand how beautiful she is? I think she’s going to wear a suit. Kill me now so my heart doesn’t literally stop when the most gorgeous freaking girl in the school shows up at my DOOR in a SUIT; you and I are going dress shopping. Oh shit, I need to figure out what color hijab she’s going to wear so I can like, coordinate.”

  “Lila Rahal, Jesus—well done.”

  Jolie is not lying; Lila can absolutely get it.

  “I thought—weren’t you into Yvette?”

  “No,” she says. “Hallie, pay attention. That was weeks ago; Yvette’s with Angel.”

  “Oh,” I say. Pay attention. Pay. Attention.

  My cousin wrinkles her nose, smiles, practically starts doing pirouettes.

  See now, this. This is what I should be doing. I should be experiencing this kind of glee at every flower and shooting star I see.

  I smile at Jolie.

  I hope it looks real.

  Here’s the shitty thing: I’m happy for her. It’s not like I’ve been through this life-changing thing and now her date with the prettiest girl in school is just so trivial that I don’t care about it.

  It’s that I don’t care about . . . anything.

  Because I don’t know how to care here.

  I don’t know how to care when the world has stayed the same and I’m just totally different and probably traumatized, and what I really do not know is how to navigate all of this without a plan.

  Anyway, I smile wide and bright.

  Jolie accepts it.

  I wait to hear the front door close and for Uncle Reuben to come back in and for Aunt Adah to light the Shabbat candles.

  But what I hear, what we all hear, is Reuben hissing, “You have got to be kidding me,” and my dad saying, “Jesus, Reuben, why does everything I say have to be insulting to you?”

  “I could ask you the same question.”

  “Are we seriously doing this again?”

  “You’re the one coming into my house shitting all over it, man.”

  I don’t know why hearing things like Man coming from adults is strange, but there’s something to be said for the weirdness of parents reverting to their teenagehood when they’re yelling at each other.

  The whisper-yelling lowers and then it’s quiet because my cousins and me are shamelessly eavesdropping.

  “Thought they were done with this shit,” said Jolie.

  “Please,” says Jaxon, “they’re never done with this shit.”

  I’m quiet for a minute. Then I say, “No one’s done with this shit because nothing’s changed. Nothing changes.”

  Neither of them knows what to say about this.

  So it’s quiet and now it’s awkward with them. They know I’m talking about the time on the mountain and we’ve all been pretending it’s the same for everyone. That it bonds all of us. I want it to! In some way, it does. None of us will ever untangle what we did for each other on that mountain.

  But it’s not the same.

  They were stuck for two days.

  I thought I was going to die.

  And I spilled my most intimate secrets to a boy I didn’t know and we haven’t spoken since and it feels like an absolute chasm, jumping from me to anyone else here.

  Dad and Reuben are still fighting, and the silence between me and my cousins is suddenly palpable, and all of this is so trivial and shitty and stupid.

  Dad says, “HAL,” and I say, “Fine,” before I even know what he’s going to say.

  He’s done this before—no surprise he’d do it again.

  When I’m eighteen, I’ll do what I want.

  But at seventeen, I still have to listen when Dad yanks me out of my cousins’ house because he and his brother can’t seem to stop hating each other.


  I fling my overnight bag across my shoulder and stomp out of the house, and I don’t even say goodbye to my cousins because I’m a bitch.

  Well, that and who am I kidding? I left without a fight because every single place I go, I feel alone.

  And with them, with my favorites, I feel even lonelier.

  Because they are my people.

  And they were up there on that mountain.

  And they don’t get it.

  I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and sit in the front seat while Dad mumbles some sort of half-hearted apology that’s really just apologizing for Reuben’s terrible behavior, when let’s be real—it’s not really about Reuben. It was always about my dad and everyone’s too afraid of him to say anything about it.

  I keep my mouth shut while he guns for approval and continue to dig my hands hard enough into my eyeballs that I see those weird tie dye spots that don’t go away for five minutes even after your open your eyes, and finally, when we near the house and Dad is still talking, saying more to me than he has in the entire two weeks I’ve been home, I just . . . snap.

  I snap.

  I say, “Dad. I’m sorry. Why don’t you just fuck off?”

  He jerks the car into park in the driveway. “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve been the worst to Reuben our entire lives because he smoked too much weed growing up and you think he freeloads or whatever and you’re so much better and we’re so much better because we have money and he’s so irresponsible and wild and has to ask his parents for money sometimes—”

  His nostrils are flaring and I think he’s angry, but more than that, he’s hurt. He looks desperate when he says, “You have no goddamn clue what you’re talking about; you weren’t there twenty years ago or five years ago when—”

  “I don’t care,” I say. “CHRIST. Does anyone get it? That I just don’t—” I choke on a sob. “I don’t CARE.”

  I jump out of the car and slam the door behind me and my dad says, “Young lady, you can’t speak to me that way.”

  He’s trying for authority, but he feels betrayed that I would take his brother’s side over his. I can hear it.

  It just feels so wrong and stupid and wasteful, I guess.

  I stomp off to my dad yelling and chasing after me and I don’t care. I’ll care tomorrow probably when I’m grounded within an inch of my life, but right now, I’m in the kind of mood that gets a girl to tell her dad to fuck off and slam the door when she gets upstairs and just keep the door locked while he pounds on it.

  I wait until he goes away.

  I pull out my phone and scroll through Jonah’s Instagram again and again like that will get me some kind of connection to him, and then I close the app with fervor.

  I feel so goddamn empty.

  And alone.

  And grateful to be alive.

  Alone.

  I blow out a breath.

  I scroll to Jonah’s number in my phone, a number I was never supposed to have but got once when I was fourteen and never deleted in case it stayed his number.

  And well, just on the off chance, I write Hey.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  JONAH WRITES BACK AT 2:00 a.m.

  He says: Hey stranger

  I say: wyd

  I understand that that’s code for Do you want to fuck? But I don’t care. Maybe I do. Maybe I do want to fuck, maybe I want to talk, maybe I want to go back up to that cave where I felt close to anyone and anything and had plans for the next five minutes, because the next five minutes were all that mattered.

  Where life wasn’t so wide open and impossible to organize.

  He says: Nothing. Wanna smoke?

  I don’t know if I want to smoke.

  Like I said, maybe.

  I say: Where can I meet you

  He shoots off an address that’s about halfway between his side of town and mine—both considerate and sensible; maybe this is where he and Jaxon go to hang and be degenerate.

  I don’t worry too much about being quiet when I leave the house. Mom and Dad go to bed at like 11:00, and I’m sure they’re deep into REM cycles by now.

  I don’t slam the door or anything.

  But at this point, even if they heard me leave, what’s the worst that happens?

  I shrug to myself and hop in my dad’s car.

  I drive off.

  It’s so quiet at night on the roads. There’s no snow around, which is nice, no ice to worry about, which hardly ever happens around here in January, but small blessings. It is empty, just this wide, black stretch of road ahead of me, the occasional flash of headlights through the windshield.

  I get to the address Jonah gave me, and it’s not a building; it’s a trail.

  It’s thirteen freaking degrees outside but somehow that seems right.

  It seems right that if we are meeting, it’s out here in the cold.

  In the skeleton shadows of the trees.

  I slip out of the car and lean against the hood, hugging my huge coat around me.

  It’s not the one I brought to the mountain; that one is buried in the back of my closet because I couldn’t decide if I wanted to keep it forever or burn the thing.

  It’s big and warm, though, and marigold yellow.

  I’m surveying the dark trees ahead of us while my nose goes red and cold, lost in a thousand quiet things, when the quiet rumble of a truck engine makes me jump.

  Jonah pulls up beside me, Rage Against the Machine blasting through the doors.

  He turns off the ignition and opens the door and the music quiets and it’s back to the sounds of the woods— which is to say, almost nothing.

  The woods in Colorado are quiet, always. Almost eerily so.

  But there are a couple crickets. An owl somewhere. Breeze rustling the twiggy fingers of the leaflorn aspens.

  It’s quiet, still, when Jonah gets out.

  He takes a couple steps over to me, hands shoved deep into his jeans.

  “Aren’t you cold?” I say, nodding to his hoodie.

  He shrugs. Then he tips his head toward the trail and I follow him to the entrance.

  “It’s closed,” I say, but even as I vocalize it, I know it’s not a real protest.

  “So?” he says.

  He hops the thigh-high closed gate, totally ignoring the sign that lets hikers know that it’s closed after sundown, and I hop it after him.

  After . . . everything, I guess he’s right. Trespassing on a little walking trail in the middle of the night is nothing.

  He walks ahead of me, and I’m struggling just a little to keep up with his huge, long legs. My muscles are burning a couple minutes in, because this is apparently the most physical activity I’ve engaged in since the mountain.

  Which honestly feels like it should be bolded and capitalized or something at this point.

  Like . . . The Flood. The Shot Heard ’Round the World. The War to End All Wars.

  THE MOUNTAIN™

  Hallie Jacob (PTSD Pictures, Coming to a Theater Near You)

  Anyway, my muscles hurt, and my lungs feel a little overworked, a little dry, like they did here before everything happened.

  I’m glad I’m far enough behind Jonah that he probably doesn’t notice.

  Well, kind of. Except that ostensibly, the reason we showed up here wasn’t exactly to hike; it was to . . . to what?

  I don’t know.

  Wow, I guess I really have no idea.

  Maybe he doesn’t know either or maybe he does, but if he does, he ought to share it with the class, because god, I’m drowning.

  I half-jog to catch up with him, and then we’re walking in step, even though I’m burning my muscles harder to do it. I refuse to fall behind again.

  “Why did you come out tonight?” I finally say.

  Jonah stops and whirls on me. “Why did you ask me to?”

  I fall back just a half step, just a shift of my weight onto my back foot, and I blink.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

&
nbsp; He stares at me, eyes dark and intense and glinting deep, black-brown in the moonlight.

  His jaw is clenched like he’s mad, almost.

  Or like . . . something hurts.

  I can’t even tell the difference anymore; maybe there isn’t one.

  He doesn’t look away, doesn’t shift backward, just looms there inches away from me, hands still in his pockets.

  Waiting.

  Breathing.

  Each time either of us exhales, it clouds out on the clear dark.

  I feel like there’s something I’m supposed to say or do but I don’t—I don’t know what.

  Welcome to my freaking life.

  My pulse is jumping, faster and faster the longer he looks at me, cool in my cheeks warming as I wonder.

  Then he just makes this sound between his teeth, and his hand is cupping the back of my head and yanking me toward him.

  We knock teeth and my nose bumps hard into his and I don’t care; I don’t give a fuck.

  Jonah’s hands are on me, and his tongue is playing in my mouth like desperation.

  For a couple of seconds, I can just lose myself.

  I can kiss him and touch him and be touched over this jacket, under, until I forget that I’m so fucking alone.

  We both can.

  It’s freezing and dark because this is how it is with us; this is how we connected, so it’s fitting that this is where we wind up, kissing each other like we are both hungry.

  His teeth catch my bottom lip, and I think one of them is a little chipped because when I run my tongue over my lip, it’s raw and tastes like blood, but I don’t care, I don’t care.

  I care that, for this second, all there is is me and Jonah and a hundred trees that have no opinion, a solid dark that surrounds us, that lets us both just exist in a way that is shockingly alive. Shockingly . . . connected. Like, Jesus, I forgot what it felt like not to be numb, not to be isolated.

  Right here, right now, I’m not.

  He pulls away from me after who knows how long, fingers curled around the back of my neck, pressing my forehead into his.

  I feel the warmth of his breath on my mouth, on my nose.

  I keep my eyes shut against all of it. I don’t want to talk or think or see; I just . . . want to feel.

  He is the one who speaks first: “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, Jacob.”