We Were Liars

by E. Lockhart

  Mummy sighs. “We grew up, Dad,” she says. “We grew up.”

  31

  Giveaways: childhood art, botanic prints.

  I get my laundry basket from Windemere and head to Cuddledown. Mirren meets me on the porch, skipping around. “It’s so amazing to be on the island!” she says. “I can’t believe I’m here again!”

  “You were here last summer.”

  “It wasn’t the same. No summer idyll like we used to have. They were doing construction on New Clairmont. Everyone was acting miserable and I kept looking for you but you never came.”

  “I told you I was going to Europe.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “I wrote you a lot,” I say. It comes out reproachful.

  “I hate email!” says Mirren. “I read them all, but you can’t be mad at me for not answering. It feels like homework, typing and staring at the stupid phone or the computer.”

  “Did you get the doll I sent you?”

  Mirren puts her arms around me. “I missed you so much. You can’t even believe how much.”

  “I sent you that Barbie. The one with the long hair we used to fight over.”

  “Princess Butterscotch?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was crazy about Princess Butterscotch.” “You hit me with her once.”

  “You deserved it!” Mirren jumps around happily. “Is she at Windemere?”

  “What? No. I sent her in the mail,” I say. “Over the winter.”

  Mirren looks at me, her brows furrowed. “I never got her, Cadence.”

  “Someone signed for the package. What did your mom do, shove it in a closet without opening it?”

  I’m joking, but Mirren nods. “Maybe. She’s compulsive. Like, she scrubs her hands over and over. Makes Taft and the twins do it, too. Cleans like there’s a special place in heaven for people with spotless kitchen floors. Also she drinks too much.”

  “Mummy does, too.”

  Mirren nods. “I can’t stand to watch.”

  “Did I miss anything at supper last night?”

  “I didn’t go.” Mirren heads onto the wooden walkway that leads from Cuddledown to the tiny beach. I follow. “I told you I wasn’t going this summer. Why didn’t you come over here?”

  “I got sick.”

  “We all know about your migraines,” says Mirren. “The aunts have been talking.”

  I flinch. “Don’t feel sorry for me, okay? Not ever. It makes my skin crawl.”

  “Didn’t you take your pills last night?”

  “They knocked me out.”

  We have reached the tiny beach. Both of us go barefoot across the damp sand. Mirren touches the shell of a long-dead crab.

  I want to tell her that my memory is hacked, that I have a traumatic brain injury. I want to ask her everything that happened summer fifteen, make her tell me the stories Mummy doesn’t want to talk about or doesn’t know. But there is Mirren, so bright. I don’t want her to feel more pity for me than she already does.

  Also, I am still mad about the emails she didn’t answer—and the loss of the stupid Barbie, though I’m sure it’s not her fault.

  “Are Johnny and Gat at Red Gate or did they sleep at Cuddledown?” I ask.

  “Cuddledown. God, they’re slobs. It’s like living with goblins.”

  “Make them move back to Red Gate, then.”

  “No way,” laughs Mirren. “And you—no more Windemere, okay? You’ll move in with us?”

  I shake my head. “Mummy says no. I asked her this morning.”

  “Come on, she has to let you!”

  “She’s all over me since I got sick.”

  “But that’s nearly two years.”

  “Yeah. She watches me sleep. Plus she lectured me about bonding with Granddad and the littles. I have to connect with the family. Put on a smile.”

  “That’s such bullshit.” Mirren shows me a handful of tiny purple rocks she’s collected. “Here.”

  “No, thanks.” I don’t want anything I don’t need.

  “Please take them,” says Mirren. “I remember how you used to always search for purple rocks when we were little.” She holds her hand out to me, palm up. “I want to make up for Princess Butterscotch.” There are tears in her eyes. “And the emails,” she adds. “I want to give you something, Cady.”

  “Okay, then,” I say. I cup my hands and let Mirren pour the rocks into my palms. I store them in the front pocket of my hoodie.

  “I love you!” she shouts. Then she turns and calls out to the sea. “I love my cousin Cadence Sinclair Eastman!”

  “Overdoing it much?” It is Johnny, padding down the steps with bare feet, dressed in old flannel pajamas with a ticking stripe. He’s wearing wraparound sunglasses and white sun block down his nose like a lifeguard.

  Mirren’s face falls, but only momentarily. “I am expressing my feelings, Johnny. That is what being a living, breathing human being is all about. Hello?”

  “Okay, living, breathing human being,” he says, biffing her lightly on the shoulder. “But there’s no need to do it so loudly at the crack of dawn. We have the whole summer in front of us.”

  She sticks out her bottom lip. “Cady’s only here four weeks.”

  “I can’t get ugly with you this early,” says Johnny. “I haven’t had my pretentious tea yet.” He bends and looks in the laundry basket at my feet. “What’s in here?”

  “Botanic prints. And some of my old art.”

  “How come?” Johnny sits on a rock and I settle next to him.

  “I am giving away my things,” I say. “Since September. Remember I sent you the stripy scarf?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  I tell about giving the things to people who can use them, finding the right homes for them. I talk about charity and questioning Mummy’s materialism.

  I want Johnny and Mirren to understand me. I am not someone to pity, with an unstable mind and weird pain syndromes. I am taking charge of my life. I live according to my principles. I take action and make sacrifices.

  “You don’t, I dunno, want to own stuff?” Johnny asks me.

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, I want stuff all the time,” says Johnny, throwing his arms wide. “A car. Video games. Expensive wool coats. I like watches, they’re so old-school. I want real art for my walls, paintings by famous people I could never own in a million years. Fancy cakes I see in bakery windows. Sweaters, scarves. Wooly items with stripes, generally.”

  “Or you could want beautiful drawings you made when you were a kid,” says Mirren, kneeling by the laundry basket. “Sentimental stuff.” She picks up the crayon drawing of Gran with the goldens. “Look, this one is Fatima and this one is Prince Philip.”

  “You can tell?”

  “Of course. Fatima had that chubby nose and wide face.”

  “God, Mirren. You’re such a mushball,” Johnny says.

  32

  Gat calls my name as I am heading up the walkway to New Clairmont. I turn and he’s running at me, wearing blue pajama pants and no shirt.

  Gat. My Gat.

  Is he going to be my Gat?

  He stops in front of me, breathing hard. His hair sticks up, bedhead. The muscles of his abdomen ripple and he seems much more naked than he would in a swimsuit.

  “Johnny said you were down at the tiny beach,” he pants. “I looked for you there first.”

  “Did you just wake up?”

  He rubs the back of his neck. Looks down at what he’s wearing. “Kind of. I wanted to catch you.”

  “How come?”

  “Let’s go to the perimeter.”

  We head there and walk the way we did as children, Gat in front and me behind. We crest a low hill, then curve back behind the staff building to where the Vineyard harbor comes into view near
the boathouse.

  Gat turns so suddenly I nearly run into him, and before I can step back his arms are around me. He pulls me to his chest and buries his face in my neck. I wrap my bare arms around his torso, the insides of my wrists against his spine. He is warm.

  “I didn’t get to hug you yesterday,” Gat whispers. “Everyone hugged you but me.”

  Touching him is familiar and unfamiliar.

  We have been here before.

  Also we have never been here before.

  For a moment,

  or for minutes,

  for hours, possibly,

  I am simply happy, here with Gat’s body beneath my hands. The sound of the waves and his breath in my ear. Glad that he wants to be near me.

  “Do you remember when we came down here together?” he asks into my neck. “The time we went out on that flat rock?”

  I step away. Because I don’t remember.

  I hate my fucking hacked-up mind, how sick I am all the time, how damaged I’ve become. I hate that I’ve lost my looks and failed school and quit sports and am cruel to my mother. I hate how still want him after two years.

  Maybe Gat wants to be with me. Maybe. But more likely he’s just looking for me to tell him he did nothing wrong when he left me two summers ago. He’d like me to tell him I’m not mad. That he’s a great guy.

  But how can I forgive him when I don’t even know exactly what he’s done to me?

  “No,” I answer. “It must have slipped my mind.”

  “We were— You and I, we— It was an important moment.”

  “Whatever,” I say. “I don’t remember it. And obviously nothing that happened between us was particularly important in the long run, was it?”

  He looks at his hands. “Okay. Sorry. That was extremely suboptimal of me just now. Are you angry?”

  “Of course I’m angry,” I say. “Two years of disappearance. Never calling and not writing back and making everything worse by not dealing. Now you’re all, Ooh, I thought I’d never see you again, and holding my hand and Everyone hugs you but me and half-naked perimeter walking. It’s severely suboptimal, Gat. If that’s the word you want to use.”

  His face falls. “Damn. It sounds bad when you put it that way.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s how I see it.”

  He rubs his hand on his hair. “I’m handling everything badly,” he says. “What would you say if I asked you to start over?”

  “God, Gat.”

  “What?”

  “Just ask. Don’t ask what I’d say if you did ask.”

  “Okay, I’m asking. Can we start over? Please, Cady?” He clasps his hands. “Let’s start over after lunch. It’ll be awesome. I’ll make amusing remarks and you’ll laugh. We’ll go troll hunting. We’ll be happy to see each other. You’ll think I’m great, I promise.”

  “That’s a big promise.”

  “Okay, maybe not great, but at least I won’t be suboptimal.”

  “Why say suboptimal? Why not say what you really are? Thoughtless and confusing and manipulative?”

  “God.” Gat jumps up and down in agitation. “Cadence! I really need to just start over. This is going from suboptimal down to total crap.” He jumps and kicks his legs out like an angry little boy.

  The jumping makes me smile. “Okay,” I tell him. “Start over. After lunch.”

  “All right,” he says, and stops jumping. “After lunch.”

  We stare at each other for a moment.

  “I’m going to run away now,” says Gat. “Don’t take it personally.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s better for the starting over if I run. Because walking will just be awkward.”

  “I said okay.”

  “Okay, then.”

  And he runs.

  33

  I go to lunch at New Clairmont an hour later. I know Mummy will not tolerate my absence after I missed supper last night. Granddad gives me a tour of the house while the cook sets out food and the aunts corral the littles.

  It’s a sharp place. Shining wood floors, huge windows, everything low to the ground. The halls of Clairmont used to be decorated floor to ceiling with black-and-white family photographs, paintings of dogs, bookshelves, and Granddad’s collection of New Yorker cartoons. New Clairmont’s halls are glass on one side and blank on the other.

  Granddad opens the doors to the four guest bedrooms upstairs. All are furnished only with beds and low, wide dressers. The windows have white shades that let some light shine in. There are no patterns on the bedspreads; they are simple, tasteful shades of blue or brown.

  The littles’ rooms have some life. Taft has a Bakugan arena on the floor, a soccer ball, books about wizards and orphans. Liberty and Bonnie brought magazines and an MP3 player. They have stacks of Bonnie’s books on ghost hunters, psychics, and dangerous angels. Their dresser is cluttered with makeup and perfume bottles. Tennis racquets in the corner.

  Granddad’s bedroom is larger than the others and has the best view. He takes me in and shows me the bathroom, which has handles in the shower. Old person handles, so he won’t fall down.

  “Where are your New Yorker cartoons?” I ask.

  “The decorator made decisions.”

  “What about the pillows?”

  “The what?”

  “You had all those pillows. With embroidered dogs.”

  He shakes his head. “Did you keep the fish?”

  “What, the swordfish and all that?” We walk down the staircase to the ground floor. Granddad moves slowly and I am behind him. “I started over with this house,” he says simply. “That old life is gone.”

  He opens the door to his study. It’s as severe as the rest of the house. A laptop sits in the center of a large desk. A large window looks out over the Japanese garden. A chair. A wall of shelves, completely empty.

  It feels clean and open, but it isn’t spartan, because everything is opulent.

  Granddad is more like Mummy than like me. He’s erased his old life by spending money on a replacement one.

  “Where’s the young man?” asks Granddad suddenly. His face takes on a vacant look.

  “Johnny?”

  He shakes his head. “No, no.”

  “Gat?”

  “Yes, the young man.” He clutches the desk for a moment, as if feeling faint.

  “Granddad, are you okay?”

  “Oh, fine.”

  “Gat is at Cuddledown with Mirren and Johnny,” I tell him.

  “There was a book I promised him.”

  “Most of your books aren’t here.”

  “Stop telling me what’s not here!” Granddad yells, suddenly forceful.

  “You okay?” It is Aunt Carrie, standing in the door of the study.

  “I’m all right,” he says.

  Carrie gives me a look and takes Granddad’s arm. “Come on. Lunch is ready.”

  “Did you get back to sleep?” I ask my aunt as we head toward the kitchen. “Last night, was Johnny up?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.

  34

  Granddad’s cook does the shopping and preps the meals, but the aunties plan all the menus. Today we have cold roast chicken, tomato-basil salad, Camembert, baguettes, and strawberry lemonade in the dining room. Liberty shows me pictures of cute boys in a magazine. Then she shows me pictures of clothes in another magazine. Bonnie reads a book called Collective Apparitions: Fact and Fiction. Taft and Will want me to take them tubing—drive the small motorboat while they float behind it in an inner tube.

  Mummy says I’m not allowed to drive the boat on meds.

  Aunt Carrie says that doesn’t matter, because no way is Will going tubing.

  Aunt Bess says she agrees, so Taft better not even think about asking her.

 
Liberty and Bonnie ask if they can go tubing. “You always let Mirren go,” says Liberty. “You know it’s true.”

  Will spills his lemonade and soaks a baguette.

  Granddad’s lap gets wet.

  Taft gets hold of the wet baguette and hits Will with it.

  Mummy wipes the mess while Bess runs upstairs to bring Granddad clean trousers.

  Carrie scolds the boys.

  When the meal is over, Taft and Will duck into the living room to avoid helping with the cleanup. They jump like lunatics on Granddad’s new leather couch. I follow.

  Will is runty and pink, like Johnny. Hair almost white. Taft is taller and very thin, golden and freckled, with long dark lashes and a mouth full of braces. “So, you two,” I say. “How was last summer?”

  “Do you know how to get an ash dragon in DragonVale?” asks Will.

  “I know how to get a scorch dragon,” says Taft.

  “You can use the scorch dragon to get the ash dragon,” says Will.

  Ugh. Ten-year-olds. “Come on. Last summer,” I say. “Tell me. Did you play tennis?”

  “Sure,” says Will.

  “Did you go swimming?”

  “Yeah,” says Taft.

  “Did you go boating with Gat and Johnny?”

  They both stop jumping. “No.”

  “Did Gat say anything about me?”

  “I’m not supposed to talk about you ending up in the water and everything,” says Will. “I promised Aunt Penny I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “It’ll make your headaches worse and we have to leave the subject alone.”

  Taft nods. “She said if we make your headaches worse she’ll string us up by our toenails and take away the iPads. We’re supposed to act cheerful and not be idiots.”

  “This isn’t about my accident,” I say. “This is about the summer when I went to Europe.”

  “Cady?” Taft touches my shoulder. “Bonnie saw pills in your bedroom.”

  Will backs away and sits on the far arm of the sofa.

  “Bonnie went through my stuff?”