Friends and Liars

by Kaela Coble

  Back then

  It is way too early for my buzzer to be going off. I groan awake, resentful that my roommate, Lisa, has undoubtedly left her keys and ID behind in some fellow pretentious drama major’s dorm room—again. Security at NYU is strict; even if they know your face, they don’t let you up without your ID. Then I remember Lisa requested a room transfer and moved out yesterday. She swears it’s to be closer to the theater where all her classes are, but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s because I’ve been crying for two weeks. I guess it’s hard to soak in New York when you’re already drowning in your roommate’s used tissues. I don’t really care. In fact, it’s nice to be able to experience my sorrow without the pressure of trying to appear normal. Besides, I have enough drama to carry me through freshman year without a roommate who majors in it.

  I drag myself up, glancing at my alarm clock on the way to the door. It’s 5:30 in the morning. I press the brass button, “You’ve got the wrong room.” There’s no other explanation for it. Who would be visiting me? I haven’t made a single friend here, due in no small part to my complete lack of effort. I’m about to flop myself back into bed when a voice crackles through the speaker. “Ruby St. James? There’s a young man here to see you. Are you expecting him?”

  A young man? I haven’t had a single interaction with a male since I’ve been here. I’ve barely left my dorm except to go to classes, and there I just sit silently in a cavernous lecture hall among hundreds of other students. But what if . . .? My heart stops. If it’s not someone I’ve met here, there is only one young man who might be looking for me.

  I press the button again. “Let him up.”

  Oh my God. The words echo in my head: Are you expecting him? No, not expecting. Fantasizing, yes, in my darkest and weakest moments, but not expecting. This is too much like a movie to be happening to me. Girl is homesick and alone, thinking the man she loves doesn’t care about her. But now that she’s really left, and the reality of her being out of his life is too much to bear, he drives all night—and he must have driven; there are no red-eyes from Drummond airport—to rescue her from her heartache.

  My heart is pounding so hard I have to sit down on the bed, but I pop back up almost immediately when I realize I cried myself to sleep last night and haven’t showered since the day before yesterday. I hastily spritz perfume, tie my hair back in a ponytail, and pinch my cheeks like I really am a girl in a movie, before there’s a knock on the door. I force myself to wait a few seconds before I open it.

  My face falls.

  “Try not to look so happy to see me, Tuesday,” Danny says.

  I try to rearrange my face from obvious disappointment to pleasant surprise, but as with so many things, I fail.

  “You look like shit,” I blurt. It’s true. His eye is swollen, his nose looks broken, and there are flecks of dried blood in his goatee. I thought I was done with battered Danny showing up at my door in the middle of the night.

  “Thanks,” he says. “You too.”

  I laugh. It’s the first time in weeks that I’ve laughed. And then I realize this is Danny in front of me. Danny who knows me, who’s known me for as long as we both remember. I don’t ask him what happened to his face. Perhaps I should, but I’ve learned my lesson about asking questions I don’t want to know the answer to.

  “I’m really, really glad you’re here,” I whisper. My eyes water despite my best efforts. It’s like they’re defective or something; they’re a goddamn faucet I can’t turn off.

  “Hey now,” he says. He drops the backpack he’d slung over one shoulder and pulls me into a hug. “No tears. My face will heal, I promise.”

  I laugh again, and a fresh wave of tears comes after it. He squeezes me tightly, and I inhale his unique mixture of menthol cigarettes and Old Spice deodorant and home. He pulls back and puts his hands on either side of my face, wiping my tears away with calloused thumbs. “I was hoping to find you here with some trust-funded film major, smoking flavored tobacco from a hookah and wearing a beret.”

  I knit my eyebrows together. “Why would you hope that?”

  We both laugh. “Okay, maybe not exactly that. I just mean I was hoping to find you happy. I wanted to see Ruby St. James in her grand new life. The one you always dreamed about.”

  I pull away from him, under the guise of clearing a space on Lisa’s old bed for him to sit. It’s piled high with clothes I haven’t had the energy to deposit into the hamper, let alone wash. “Yeah, well, I guess it takes more than two weeks to build a new life,” I say.

  “Especially when you’re in love with someone from your old one.” He says it softly, gently, but it’s not a question.

  I almost laugh. He, like Ally, thinks I am in this state because of Hardy Crane. That I am broken by such a sack of scum. It would be easier if I let him believe it, like I let Ally believe it. But it’s Danny, and he’s trusted me with much worse than this, so I say, “That night, at the party, it wasn’t what it looked like. Nothing happened with Hardy and me.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Hardy.”

  “Then who—”

  “Same asshole who gave me this,” he says, pointing to his black eye. “Murphy.”

  My mouth falls open, my tongue lying heavy like lead. I’m not sure which revelation is more shocking to me: that Murphy and Danny came to blows, or that Danny knew something about me and Murphy. I decide to start with the less selfish line of questioning. “Murphy did that to you?”

  He nods, then waves me off, apparently deciding the same thing. “But I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s talk about what he did to you.”

  I wait a beat. Maybe if I don’t speak he will elaborate on his thing. No such luck. “What did he tell you?” I finally ask.

  He shakes his head. “Not a thing, I swear.”

  The gratitude I feel towards Murphy for respecting my privacy is quickly replaced by disappointment that he didn’t find it worth talking about to his best friend.

  “It was the fourth of July,” Danny continues, and my heart thuds into my stomach, remembering what had happened that day. “You went MIA again after Luke’s party, and yeah, I figured you were hanging out with Hardy again. But we always watched the fireworks from your roof, so I thought I would take a chance and stop by. Murphy’s truck was parked outside. I had asked him earlier if he was going to your house, like always, but he said he was going to Drummond with his brother. The fact that he lied about it, combined with how weird you guys have been with each other . . .” he holds up two fingers on his left hand and two fingers on his right and then connects them. He put two and two together.

  “So if you knew about it since July . . . I mean, that’s not what caused that, right?” I point at his eye, wondering if Lisa might have left her icepack behind in my mini-fridge. Although it’s probably too late for ice at this point.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Dan.”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it!” He turns away from me and picks up a book of short stories lying next to my bed. As he flips through, he says casually, “So you’re in love with him?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “But you are.” I don’t confirm or deny, but he takes my silence as his answer and whistles. He whistles. “You’re in love with Murphy Leblanc, and I never want to see him again. This calls for a smoke.”

  I start to panic. How to handle this?

  “Come on,” he says, elbowing me. “I finished my pack in the car. Can I bum one?”

  “Non-smoking dorm,” I say. “Sorry.”

  “Duh, Tuesday. I meant we should go outside.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “You don’t have any? Seriously? You always have some. Well, whatever. This is New York, I’m sure we can find a place that’s open.”

  “I quit.”

  He looks at me for a long moment. Eerily long. “You quit smoking after moving to a new place, where nothing’s familiar and your heart is, clearly, broken?” He waves his
hand at the moat of wadded-up tissues surrounding my bed.

  “Seemed as good a time as any,” I say, avoiding his eyes.

  He jumps off the bed. “Holy shit, Tuesday. You’re pregnant!”

  Danny goes with me to Planned Parenthood for the initial appointment. They assume he’s the father, and this doesn’t seem to bother him. They ask a lot of questions about my mental health and ask me like 400 times if I’m sure about my decision. They pull me into a room separate from Danny, to confirm this is my choice and I’m not being coerced into it. I wonder if this is standard protocol, or if the state of Danny’s face has something to do with it. Although, if they were taking that into account, they would probably assume that I am the one in charge. I try to schedule my appointment—the big appointment, the one for “the procedure,” or “the termination,” as they kindly call it—for tomorrow. But I am ten weeks pregnant, and since I have two weeks before I have to make a decision, Danny thinks I should give it a few days. “You can’t undo it, Tuesday. I’ll support whatever you want to do, I just want you to be sure.”

  I tell him I already am, that after two weeks of crying about it on my own and a few days talking it over with him, I’m finally sure this is the right decision. But I take his advice and schedule “the procedure” for early next week. The truth is, I’m not sure. I change my mind every other day. But when I strip away the hormones, and the voices, and the feelings I still have for Murphy, and the logistical questions about how this should be handled, all I have left is a screaming, pulsing fear. I am one large, exposed nerve. Everything hurts. Every single moment.

  Meanwhile, Danny is a good distraction. I order take-out, or sneak food from the dining hall to feed him. The dorm is so big, even his massacred face doesn’t stand out as a non-student’s when he uses the men’s bathrooms. He sleeps in Lisa’s old bed. While I’m at class, he spends his time wandering around the city or critiquing my writing assignments while he hangs out the window smoking cigarettes. I tell him he can’t smoke (cigarettes or otherwise) in my dorm, but every time I come back from class the windows are open and it smells like air freshener. He can’t enter the building without an ID, which means he can’t really pop out for a smoke unless it’s timed with my return from class, so I let it slide. A smoking Danny is preferable to a nonsmoking Danny, and what difference does second-hand smoke make, really, at this point?

  It’s surreal to have someone here from the life I’ve been mourning. We don’t talk about Chatwick, or any of its residents, but having him here is a connection to the place I am disgusted with myself for missing. All I ever wanted was to get out of Chatwick, and here I am, in the most exciting city in the world, but still every bit as stuck there as I always was. Danny is too, I think. He seems to be heartbroken but refuses to talk about it, and I still don’t know what caused the bruises that have started to transition from blue and purple to yellow and brown.

  I’m not sure what his plan is. I’ve dragged him to some of my classes, and because he’s read my assignments, he raises his hand and gets in debates with my professors and the other students. I don’t know why Danny isn’t in college himself; he’s so smart. I tell him I think he should enroll, to which he scoffs or rolls his eyes. I’m not sure if I’m thinking in his best interest or mine. It’s not like working at Borbeau’s and selling weed is some great five-year plan, and as he pushes me out the door to explore New York with him, I notice a boundless energy I’ve never attributed to him before. It’s his first time in New York, but he’s better at it than I am. While the areas I’ve come to know through my father are shiny and safe, Danny leads me to Chinatown, where we’re not sure exactly what we’re ordering (and my insatiable appetite keeps me from asking too many questions); to the second act of an off-Broadway show, by sneaking in with the smokers; to Coney Island, where I load up on chili dogs since I can’t ride the rides. Despite the cloud of anxiety that radiates from every pore, I’m falling in love with this city. It’s everything Chatwick isn’t—loud, anonymous, and full of diverse strangers and new experiences. And if Danny is falling in love with it too, is it so crazy for him to stay? Maybe it’s his chance to get out of Chatwick. And maybe it’s mine to have someone to cling to, when all this is over. Would it be so bad? Isn’t it my turn to lean on someone?

  Tonight, our plan is to see a movie, at my request. I am, after all, for however short a time, pregnant, and my feet ache from all the walking we’ve been doing. But on my way home from class, someone hands me a flyer for a new underground jazz club, and I smile because I know this is just the type of thing Danny will want to try, and I will get to be the one to suggest it. He’s been introducing the crew to new things since our ages were in single digits. Granted, most of them have been drugs, but not all of them. When we were little, he always found the secret hideouts in the trails behind Emmett’s house, and he was always the one to get us to cliff-jump at the granite quarry—offering gentle encouragement to Ally and Tara and me, bullying to Emmett and Murphy. Even since he’s been here, in “my” new city, he’s the one pushing me toward adventure rather than allowing me to drown in my crisis. Perhaps there could be something more between us, if I could just get him to stay.

  Despite my aching feet, I practically skip back to the dorm, giddy at the thought of finally being the one to introduce him to something new. This has been happening since Danny’s been here, these waves of normalcy, even happiness. Small, merciful moments when I know everything will be okay. Maybe not now, but eventually.

  But the thing about hormones, and the thing about Danny, is that in an instant, everything can change.

  When I get to my dorm room, Danny isn’t alone. A guy I’ve seen in the dining hall is sitting on my bed, holding a small bag of white powder and watching Danny thumb through a stack of money. The only sound in the room is the thwap, thwap, thwap of each bill as he shuffles it from the uncounted to the counted stack. Danny’s buying drugs—bad drugs, not just a little harmless herb. But no; the visitor hastily clenches his fist around the bag and hightails it out the door, and Danny folds the money and tucks it into his cargo pocket. It’s worse, somehow. He wasn’t buying bad drugs. He was selling them.

  I slam my bag down on my desk; the flyer for the club flutters to the linoleum floor.

  “How was class?” he asks, as if nothing happened.

  “What the hell was that, Danny?” I know the answer, but I just don’t see how it can be true.

  “I’m sorry. You usually don’t get back from class before five.”

  “The professor let us out early. That doesn’t answer my question!”

  He picks up the flyer from the floor. “Hey, did you want to go to this? Looks cool.”

  “You’re selling drugs out of my dorm room?”

  “Ruby, don’t play dumb. I’ve been selling drugs since tenth grade, and you know it.”

  “Yeah, weed, Danny. Not . . . not . . . I don’t even know what that was, but I know white powder is not weed!”

  “It’s just a little blow. It’s not a big deal!”

  “Just a little blow!” My voice is approaching the screech Nancy makes when she finds her spices out of alphabetical order. “Do you know how much trouble I could get in? I could get kicked out of housing just for having you here for so long. If they found out you were selling drugs? Jesus, I could get kicked out of school!”

  He’s quiet, but his face reddens.

  “And are you actually doing this shit now? How long has that being going on?”

  He speaks evenly, pointedly. “Well, I see you have your priorities straight. Your first concern is for how much trouble you could get in. Your second is for me.”

  I’m so mad I can’t even see his face anymore. Ten minutes ago this boy was my life raft.

  “But that’s always been the problem, hasn’t it?” he continues, mistaking my silence for guilt and taking the opportunity to get in one more jab. “I always come second. With you, with my mom, with everyone!”

  “Oh, spare
me the song from the world’s tiniest violin, Danny. You have never taken responsibility for anything in your life, and look what good it’s done you! You’re not in school. You have no job beyond this.” I wave my arm at the door that his “client” just exited. Suddenly it comes to me the real reason why no one’s reported seeing a beat-up stranger lurking in the halls.

  His face goes blank, and I know my Danny has left the building. “Are you actually throwing Roger back in my face right now?”

  “I wasn’t talking about—”

  “I killed Roger. Just go ahead and say it. I’m a murderer. Well, congratulations, now you’re part of the club!”

  “Excuse me?” I narrow my eyes at him, giving him a tread-lightly warning. But he’s too far gone.

  “How are we any different, Tuesday? By next week, both of us will have taken a life that that caused us pain. We both made the choice to do the wrong thing, to make our own lives better.”

  Tears sting my eyes. I never realized he was capable of wounding me this deeply. All this time, supporting me—is this what he really thinks of the choice I’m making? “I don’t give a shit what you’ve been through in your life, Danny, you have no right to say that to me. You have no idea what this is like for me. It’s always been about what’s happened to you. Nothing is ever worse, no one’s pain ever compares. You’re going to waste your life feeling sorry for yourself and justifying your habits by blaming everyone else for your life. Grow up!”

  He takes a step toward me, his fist raised, but before he gets too close he spins around and puts his fist through the drywall. My hands fly to my mouth, but I don’t scream or make a sound. The moment of impact echoes between us loudly enough. Danny’s breathing is heavy and panicked. So is mine. Blood drips from his hand. My reflex is to go to him, patch him up and hug him, and tell him it’s all going to be okay. I want to take back the last ten minutes. I want to come in just a moment after the deal had been made, so I don’t have to know about this. I don’t want to lose another person. My last person. But I can’t do the codependent thing again.