“Lauren hasn’t told us much about her classes, actually,” Mom said, the question mark buried in her words.
“It was going to be a surprise,” I said.
Cindy’s perky face fell, her cheeks literally deflating. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
Mom touched her reassuringly on the shoulder. “You couldn’t have known. Lauren’s so modest. Why don’t you tell us, honey, so we can all be on the same page?”
Dad’s smile was nervous, his focus drifting around the room. This conversation wasn’t part of the scheduled event, not even a bullet point on his agenda.
“I’m putting together a photography portfolio for one of my classes,” I said.
“It’s so brilliant,” Cindy gushed. “She takes the best pictures—she really does. I can barely hold a camera steady...”
One of the pizzeria employees called a number, and Dad stepped forward to collect our order.
“Maybe you can show us some of those photos before we head back,” Mom suggested. “It was wonderful to meet you, Cindy.”
We gathered plates and napkins and little packets of Parmesan cheese and smiled our way stiffly out the door and down the street to Mom’s Mercedes. The street was clogged with cars, and it took Dad a while to find an opening.
I popped the lid of the pizza box and put a slice of pepperoni on my tongue, relishing its salt and heat.
“I don’t remember signing you up for a photography class,” Mom said.
I chewed the pepperoni slowly, deliberately.
Dad’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Well? Your mother asked you a question.”
I shrugged. “It’s for a class called Introduction to the Arts. We study visual art, music—”
“You’re taking that in addition to your other classes?”
“No, I dropped the biology class.” I’d also switched out of math, but this didn’t seem like the best moment to mention it.
In the front seat, Mom’s mouth was set in a tight line. “You need to be taking your general education requirements, Lauren. You’re not just here to try a little of this and a little of that. There’s an educational plan—”
“It’s one class,” I repeated. “And I’m thinking of studying fine arts, so it’ll be part of the requirements for my major.” This much was true, although I had been planning to wait as long as possible—at least another semester or two—before announcing it to my parents. Before their visit, I’d carefully packed away my Leica and slid my burgeoning portfolio underneath my bed.
Dad sighed, adjusting the visor so the setting sun didn’t blind him. “At least your friend seems excited about your work. She said you were very talented.”
Mom couldn’t let it go. “Everything’s always a lie with you. It’s always about sneaking around behind our backs.”
I leaned forward, my head between their bucket seats. “It’s my education, Mom. You can’t control the classes I take, like you did at Reardon.”
“If I hadn’t intervened there, you never would have graduated,” Mom snapped.
I rolled my eyes. I’d earned mostly B’s at Reardon, with the odd A and a few C’s, yet the arrival of my report card in the mail had always felt like doomsday, as if I’d brought shame upon the family for not being as brilliant as my siblings.
A car slowed in front of us, and Dad braked suddenly, the motion shooting us all forward against our seat belts. The pizza box slid from the back seat onto the floor, but thankfully the pizza in all its greasy gooeyness remained inside the box, folded over on itself. I lifted the lid to inspect the damage and said, “Still edible.”
Dad smiled, meeting my eyes quickly in the rearview mirror before returning to the road. I felt sorrier for him than I did for myself. He didn’t seem to understand all the intricacies of being a Mabrey, although all of our lives revolved around him. He was the one who would have to drive back to Simsbury with Mom, after all, listening to her complaints about my thoughtlessness.
In the parking lot outside Stanton Hall, I unclipped my seat belt and Dad did the same. Mom sat stony, staring ahead.
I gestured to the pizza. “Aren’t you coming inside?”
“Now that I think about it, we probably have to get on the road,” Mom said.
“Liz, we have food to eat. We might as well—”
“I don’t think I’m particularly hungry.”
Dad sighed, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
I scooped up the pizza box. No point in letting perfectly good food go to waste. “It’s a class,” I repeated. “A stupid fucking class. That’s all.”
Mom said, “You will not talk to us that way—” And I knew there was more, but I wasn’t going to stick around to hear it. I’d already slammed the door behind me and was walking fast across the parking lot, pizza box in hand. I waited for them to do something—for Mom to come after me or for Dad to pull even with me in the Mercedes, but none of that happened.
In my room, I moved some papers out of the way and set the box on my desk. Erin was still out with her parents, probably having the sort of happy family meal that regular people had, laughing and reminiscing and making plans for the next time they would see each other. But maybe there was no such thing as a normal family, a happy family meal. Maybe everyone was secretly, deep down miserable and they only put on brave faces for the rest of us.
More out of spite than hunger, I ate half the pizza and lay down on the bed, still dressed in my jeans and sweater in case Erin and her parents came back. I must have fallen asleep with the overhead fluorescent light still beaming down because the next thing I knew there were people running past my door, their footsteps echoing down the hallway.
“What’s going on?” I called to a girl who stood near the elevators, a hand over her mouth.
“Someone on the second floor took a bunch of pills,” she said. “It’s horrible.”
“Is she...” I faltered. “Is she going to be...”
“I don’t know!”
No one seemed to know anything, but after a few minutes the paramedics rushed past, a girl on the stretcher. She was struggling against her restraints, and there was an audible sigh of relief. At least she was alive.
“Her name’s Ariana Kramer,” another girl called. “She’s in my organic chem class.”
“Oh, my God, really? She’s so smart. She’s always in the library—”
I went back to my room, changed into my pajamas, turned off the light and crawled under the covers. Maybe my theory was right after all.
* * *
The week before Thanksgiving and a return visit to Holmes House, I came back to my room to find Erin sitting on her bed and Theresa, a girl from across the hall, sitting on mine. They both turned stony faces to me.
“Hey,” I said, placing my camera bag gingerly on my desk. “What’s going on?”
In her hands, Erin was holding a stack of prints, and she thrust them in my direction like they were evidence. I spotted an old Kodak paper box, where I stored most of my eight-by-eleven prints, open on the floor and instantly I knew what she’d found. I’d promised Dr. Mittel that I would get Erin’s permission to use her photos in my portfolio, but in all the weeks since, I hadn’t managed to ask her. No matter how I approached her, she would have been horrified—the same way she looked right now.
“Those are private,” I said, my voice thin, the objection weak.
“They’re pictures of me, you weirdo,” Erin spat. “So yes, they are private.”
“How could you even—” Theresa said, shaking her head in disgust. “And why would you...”
“Theresa,” I said. “Could I talk to Erin for a minute? I want to explain.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you, you nutcase. She found the photos, and she called me over. How long have you been stalking her?” Theresa’s voice rose dangerously, threatening to get th
e attention of other girls on our floor. Living in such close proximity to each other, we were always alert for a catfight, ready to take sides.
I snorted. “Stalking her? We live in the same room. I took some photos—okay. Erin—” her arms were folded across her chest, her eyes narrowed, lips trembling “—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that, especially not without your permission. But it just—I was trying to capture this beautiful moment. That’s all.”
Theresa threw up her hands. “What are you, obsessed with her or something? You’re a lesbian, aren’t you? I knew it. I said it from the first time I saw you, there’s something up with that girl!”
If the situation wasn’t so fragile, I would have burst out laughing. Theresa was just another Keale clone, blindly defending her friend’s honor. “I let you borrow my shoes last week!” I reminded her. “I came in here to find you looking through my closet, and I still let you borrow my shoes! Now you’re digging through the rest of my stuff—”
“Because we knew you were hiding something,” Theresa said.
I swore, turning back to Erin. She was looking down at an image of herself—her mouth slightly open, her face relaxed. “I’m sorry I took the pictures. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about them afterward. But my professor—he thinks they’re really beautiful—”
Erin gasped. “You showed these to people? Look at me! You can see—”
Theresa’s laugh cut her off. “What else is he going to say? Your dad is a fucking United States senator! Oh, yes, they’re brilliant, because you’re a Mabrey. Do you think that gives you permission to do whatever you want?”
I don’t think I’d ever hit anyone before, except MK sometimes when we were fighting, which he always started. But I was mad enough to do it this time. I could almost feel my fist connecting with Theresa’s nose, could almost see the resulting dribble of blood.
Erin was trembling with anger, shaking all the way down to her fingertips. The prints in her hands were crumpled beyond repair. “I know who you are, you know.”
I had a brief, horrible flashback to Marcus, the drugs, my court-ordered community service and fake bout of mono. Did Erin know somehow?
She made a fist around the photo, her sleeping face disappearing into a crumpled ball. “You think you’re so privileged, you think you can do whatever you want. You don’t give a shit about anyone else.”
“That is not true,” I insisted, although it was true enough that I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.
“You violated her!” Theresa yelled, eager to draw herself back into the fight. “You’re some weird sicko stalker and you just need to admit it!”
A cluster of girls had gathered openmouthed in the doorway. Maybe she was playing for the audience, or maybe she’d been planning to do this all along, but Erin looked down at the stack of prints in her hands, at all the lovely, sleeping reflections of herself, and began to rip through them. Theresa grabbed a stack of other prints from my photo box—prints that weren’t even of Erin—and began shredding them, too, the pieces falling down in the air around us like confetti. Then she went for the negatives, pulling them out of their plastic holder, the film fluttering to the ground.
“Stop it,” I yelled. “You bitch!”
By the time our resident advisor arrived, I had Theresa in a full headlock and Erin was on her hands and knees, ripping the pictures into ever smaller pieces. Katy banished us to the corners of the room like overaggressive boxers, as if we were each champing at the bit to get back in the ring. She looked around the room in horror—a lamp had been overturned, its shade punctured. Clothes and books and shoes, whatever we could get our hands on, littered the floor. One of my fancy flannel sheets had been ripped, and the potted plant Erin’s parents had brought her had tipped over on her desk, soil spilling on top of her homework.
“Holy fuck,” Katy said, her eyes wide. “And I thought this would be a quiet night.”
Later, Katy moved Erin’s belongings into the spare bunk in Theresa’s room, while I gathered the ruined scraps of my photography, my heart still pounding. Katy had heard the story by then, and she wasn’t showing me any pity.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked, imagining some kind of suspension or expulsion from Keale. What was the punishment for taking pictures of someone without their permission, even artsy and mostly innocent ones? I imagined myself getting booked on a misdemeanor at the tiny jail in Scofield, using my one phone call to contact Mom, who would either come to pick me up or refuse to help. Either way, I had earned another notch in my belt as the family fuckup.
Katy’s eyes slid coolly over me. “If it were up to me,” she said, and I knew the rest of the answer before she said it. Nothing would happen, effectively: it was the Mabrey get-out-of-jail-free card. Erin and Theresa and I would be officially or unofficially warned about fighting, but that would be the end of it. The dean would encourage Erin not to pursue her complaint any further on the unstated grounds that I was a Mabrey and that was important here.
“Wait,” I tried again. “Just tell me. Housing-wise, what happens to me? Do I just stay here?”
Katy’s arms were loaded with the last of Erin’s shoes, and she didn’t meet my eye. “What happens,” she said, “is that we’ll find you another roommate.”
And that was how I met Megan Mazeros.
Megan
The phone call from the housing department came over Christmas break, when I was staying at Gerry Tallant’s house in Woodstock and trying not to feel like a third wheel in the relationship between my mother and her boyfriend. I’d been jumping at the phone every time it rang, convinced that Joe was trying to track me down, to apologize for that night and all the nights that had come after, when I had missed him like a phantom limb. This was illogical, of course; I wasn’t sure Joe even knew my last name, let alone how he would have traced me to Gerry Tallant. If he’d wanted to talk to me, I was easier to find in Scofield.
Still, I felt myself deflate when I heard the voice of the woman from Housing and then had to ask her to repeat herself twice. “Lauren Mabrey?” I squeaked. “Are you sure?”
“I don’t understand,” my mom said when I hung up the phone. “You’re going to live with this girl? And her dad is a senator?”
* * *
Back at Keale, everything about Lauren fascinated me. It was as if her life was a movie, and I was eager to pay the admission just to escape into it for a few hours. There was the famous family, of course, smiling from a silver frame on her desk—her father and brother in dark jackets, Lauren and her mother and sister in red sweaters, all so perfectly coordinated and softly lit, they might have been the model family that came with the frame, a prepackaged version of what a family should look like. And they were practically celebrities—they were American royalty, the people who had it all figured out, who had achieved what the rest of us could only dream. Even Lauren thought of her family this way. Once I got to know her, she sometimes referred to her parents as The Senator and The Countess.
Everything Lauren owned was beautiful—her floral sheets and satin-edged blankets, the thick down pillows that I carefully laid my head against when she was out of the room, testing them out. Her bed was heaped with throw pillows and something called a bolster that seemed uncomfortable in any position. I wondered what she thought of my pink-and-black reversible bed-in-a-bag from Walmart, the stained pillow I’d had for years, not realizing it was something that could and should be replaced, and the mismatched bath towels I’d bought from the sale rack, trying to stretch Dad’s insurance money as far as it could go. After only a few months, the ends of my towels were frayed and the sheets were faded to a paler pink.
Lauren wore what I came to consider her uniform: cashmere sweaters that she casually balled up and tossed to the side when she was undressing for the night, slim dark jeans, tall boots with zippers snaking up the inside of her calves, the leather so soft it m
ade me realize that there was leather and then there was leather, and the kind I owned was nothing like the kind she did. Her wardrobe held several fancy dresses that never came out of their dry cleaning plastic, and rather than one functional winter coat, she had a half dozen, black and gray and winter white, long and short, fancy and casual. And always, always, there was her camera bag, slung over one shoulder, rattling with film canisters. It was the only thing she seemed to truly care about, and I often found her cross-legged on her bed, blowing dust from crevices and wiping the lenses gently with a soft cloth.
She was beyond messy, tossing things on the ground as if she expected someone else to come along and pick up after her—an actual maid, as opposed to how my mom used to say, “What am I, your maid?” when I left a pair of shoes by the front door. She hoarded the handouts she received in class at the bottom of her backpack, which had to be periodically upended in order for her to find anything. When I got to know her better, I sometimes pinched the silky fabric of yesterday’s underwear between a thumb and forefinger, flinging it from the floor in her direction, or piled her dirty socks on the foot of her bed or took a few bucks from her wallet and went downstairs to do her laundry myself. But in the beginning, I just watched the growing pile, mesmerized even by her dirt.
Lauren was beautiful—there was hardly any other word for someone tall and slender with glossy hair and straight teeth and clothes that fit like gloves—but she didn’t bother with makeup and her hair regimen was a casual, twisting bun that was always in a slow process of falling apart. She seemed amazed by my tubes of Cover Girl and Maybelline, the fourteen different eye shadows that left powdery dust over the inside of my makeup bag. These were staples of existence in Woodstock, but Lauren would ask, “Why do you need that?” as if she couldn’t spot the zit on my chin or the dark circles under my eyes, an inheritance from the Mazeros side of the family.
That first week, though, we hardly talked, other than polite exchanges about where we were from, what classes we were taking, when we liked to eat and sleep and shower. She stayed busy with her photography, and I was determined to read ahead for my British lit class. I’d heard about the fight with her roommate—all of Stanton Hall had heard about the fight with her roommate, if not all of Keale itself—but she never mentioned it, even when I deliberately asked, “Didn’t you have a roommate last semester?”
Here We Lie Page 8
