She only shrugged. “Didn’t work out.”
I watched her, waiting for more.
Lauren gave me a quick, curious look. “And your roommate was the one who—”
“Yeah,” I said, relieved that we were finally going to address it. “She took a bottle of pills.”
But Lauren only nodded, unimpressed. “It was just Advil, wasn’t it? She must not have been serious.”
“Right,” I agreed, although this was not the kind of thing that would ever occur to me. I realized this about Lauren: we might have been about the same age, but she’d lived about a million times more life than I had, and most of it she was able to dismiss with a shrug.
At the end of January, a snowstorm caused the electricity in our dorm to go out, and we huddled in the common room with dozens of other girls in their flannel pajamas, wrapped in blankets, eating peanut butter and crackers like the world had ended and we’d decided to dip into our stock of nonperishables to survive. Someone had contraband whiskey, and we passed the bottle, taking throat-burning shots, giggling like twelve-year-olds at a sleepover. Eventually, the lights came on and everyone drifted back to their rooms. Lauren and I weren’t tired anymore, and after a few minutes of trying to sleep, she said, “That reminds me” and rummaged through a dresser drawer, coming up with a bottle of peppermint schnapps.
“For emergencies,” she explained, winking.
It was hard to imagine someone like Lauren ever having an emergency at all.
We ended up getting sloppy drunk and laughing so hard that occasionally one of the girls next door banged a shoe against the wall to get us to be quiet. Most of the comedy came from our differences—the blue blood/prep school/summer camp/senator’s kid and me, who’d spent eighteen months asking, “Would you like to hear today’s special?” We sat on our own beds, backs pressed against the bumpy plaster, and passed the bottle back and forth. Peppermint schnapps was truly disgusting, even compared to some of the concoctions I’d tried at parties in Woodstock.
“So,” I asked Lauren, the alcohol making me brave, “is everyone at prep school as snooty as I imagine them to be?”
She pretended to consider this very seriously, before saying, “Yes.”
I laughed. My head felt light, like it had been pumped full of helium. “What was it like? I mean, I only have my overcrowded public school classrooms as a reference point.”
“Let’s see.” She took a sip, nearly missing her mouth, and a clear trickle of alcohol, like drool, ran down her chin. She swabbed at it with the heel of her hand. “Navy-and-white uniforms. Pushy parents, including my own. Kids with fancy cars. It was all about routine, really, so we looked forward to anything that broke the routine. Parties. Gossip. The sex so-and-so was rumored to be having. Days away.”
“What are days away? Like field trips or something?”
Lauren wiped her mouth more vigorously, this time on her sleeve. “They were these planned trips where the school chartered a bus and took us to museums or monuments or plays, and then afterward dropped us off to go shopping for a few hours.”
“We had those, too,” I commented. “Only they were called field trips, and we had to pack our own lunches to eat on the school bus, and at the end we spent a few bucks on overpriced magnets and key chains and crap because clearly the one thing missing from our lives was a souvenir of every place where a president had spent the night.”
Lauren nodded sagely, the effect somewhat lessened by a soft belch, followed by a louder one. On my bed, I contorted with laughter.
“Confession,” she said. “All I know about Kansas is from The Wizard of Oz. You know—fields and barns and tornados.”
On the other side of the room I froze in position, hands wrapped around my shoulders like a self-imposed straitjacket. I had to wait a full minute for Lauren to notice.
“What?” she asked. “Is that offensive?”
I said, “Actually, I’ve never watched that movie.”
She opened her mouth and another burp fell out. “You’re kidding me! Isn’t it like, an official state movie or something?”
“Confession,” I said, tucking my chin into the shelf I’d made with my arms. “My grandparents were killed by a tornado. It caught them while they were driving, swept their car up into the funnel and spit it out in about a million pieces a few miles away. So I guess we never found the movie too cute.”
“Oh, my God.” Lauren lurched forward, stumbling from her bed to mine. Suddenly she was holding me, her peppermint breath rank against my cheek. “I’m so, so sorry,” she said, petting me awkwardly until she realized I was shaking from silent laughter.
“Seriously?” She pulled back, studying me in the glow of my bedside lamp. “Were they killed by a tornado?”
I shook my head. “Cancer and a heart attack.”
We stared at each other for a long moment, and then Lauren let out a shriek that was somewhere between outrage and admiration. “I can’t believe you said that! You had me feeling so horrible.”
I wiped my eyes with the corner of my blanket. “You should have seen your face. I almost told you the house came down on them, and all we found were their legs.”
She reached past me and smacked me with my own lumpy pillow. I stumbled to my feet and armed myself with her fancy bolster, finally figuring out an appropriate use for the thing.
This time the pounding came from both sides, two sets of girls telling us to shut the hell up, it was nearly 3:00 a.m., and they had classes in the morning.
“We’d better stop,” Lauren said, capping the schnapps and returning the bottle to her drawer, only an inch of liquid still sloshing about. She flicked out the light and stumbled back to her bed, tripping over one of her textbooks, still splayed open on the floor. “I might have blown any free passes I have with the housing department.”
We retreated to our separate beds and snuggled down, quiet under the covers. In the dark, I couldn’t stop grinning. Partly, this was from the alcohol, the general warmth that I felt all the way down to my toes. But the rest of my happiness was from Lauren. This was the female camaraderie that had been promised by the Keale brochures but which had been, up until now, elusive. Wasn’t this better than how I’d spent my nights since October, pining away after Joe Natolo and wondering what might have been? For the first time, that hurt seemed distant, like a bullet that had grazed me but moved on, leaving me mostly intact.
Lauren’s breathing had evened out, but just when I thought she was asleep, her voice came from the other side of the room, blanket-muffled.
“Tornado,” she whispered, and we started all over again.
* * *
It was surprising what came out of my mouth when I was talking to Lauren. Not lies, exactly, but more like shreds of truth held together by exaggerations. There was no one to contradict me when I told Lauren that I’d grown up in a trailer park, that my family’s prized possession was a giant satellite dish, that I had a pit bull named Killer who snarled at the world from behind the chain-link fence. I was at Keale as part of a scholarship program, I told her, one designed to keep me from a lifetime of unplanned pregnancies and meth addiction. The words somehow felt true, coming out of my mouth; I could have been describing someone’s life, after all—there had been enough general poverty and discontent in Woodstock to go around.
“Wow,” she breathed. “That’s so—wow.”
My lies, at first, seemed harmless. I let her believe my relatives were toothless and inbred, that I’d grown up in the “hood” rather than our modest Craftsman on a tree-lined street. I hinted at drug-fueled nights—things which probably existed in Woodstock but were beyond the realm of my experience. I told myself that it was simply the opposite of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses; I was showing her my life through unwashed, finger-smudged lenses. And the lies came more easily than the truth, which lingered like a tough bruise, go
ing green and yellow and staying tender to the touch. It was easier to imply that my dad wasn’t around—a partial truth, easier than telling about his months of dying and what I’d done to help him along at the end. It was easier to be flippant about my mom and her disgusting boyfriend, when the alternative was to admit that he was a decent guy, different from my dad, but not disgusting. After all, he’d offered to let me stay with them in his new beige house in his new beige subdivision for as long as I wanted. But I told Lauren that Gerry had at least a dozen pastel-colored polo shirts, like the colors in a baby nursery. (“Gross,” she said.) And that when he went out in public, he kept a hand cupped low on my mom’s ass. (“Nasty,” she said.) And that sometimes I saw him looking at me in the same way, and it was all I could do to hide my body behind my oversize sweatshirts. (Lauren’s eyes had gone wide. “Whoa,” she said.)
And then there were the nights when we split a bag of microwave popcorn and talked about guys and sex. In reality, all I could contribute was from my time with Kurt Haschke, but it was easy enough to elaborate here and there, to invent names and places, things the fictional me might have done—behind the bleachers after the football game, in the Fun House at the carnival, on the couch when my mom was down in the basement, doing laundry. I liked this Megan, the one who saw sex as casual and meaningless, rather than what it had been for me: an act of desperation, a way to remind myself that I was capable of feeling something.
“You didn’t,” Lauren would gasp with each story, her eyes wide with admiration.
And I would shrug, having grown comfortable with the lie. “Why not?”
“I’m so pedestrian,” she lamented, flopping onto her back.
Lauren’s experiences, I imagined, had involved fancy sheets, slinky lingerie, chocolate and strawberries and a housekeeping staff to take care of the mess. She mentioned someone named Marcus, and I pictured him tall and dark and handsome, arriving on her doorstep with a bouquet of flowers, plying her with the name of a wine I couldn’t pronounce, feeding her expensive delicacies. Basically, I imagined for her all the things that I could never dream of for myself.
I rationalized my lies like this: Lauren and I knew each other only in the context of Keale, and it seemed unlikely that our lives would intersect in other ways. We weren’t going to bump into each other at Shady’s Hardware on Main Street in Woodstock. Our vacations weren’t likely to overlap, with the two of us staying in the same all-inclusive island resort with our families. And weirdly, the story of my fake miserable childhood gave me a bit of status with Lauren, a sort of fabricated self-confidence that started to feel genuine. It allowed me to be the foul-mouthed heroine of my own life, the fearless friend, a more adventurous version of myself.
* * *
Once the snow began to melt, Lauren bought a bike, too—hers an expensive, sturdy one from a shop in town—and we spent our Saturday afternoons cruising the country roads around Keale, scouting locations for her photo shoots, then heading into town for dinner. We liked the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet at Slice of Heaven, where I always hoped to run into Joe, but never did.
Lauren inevitably produced her wallet at the register, pushing away the handful of crumpled bills left over from my work-study paycheck.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and I knew that it didn’t—I’d seen the receipts from her bank account, the generous monthly deposits and the casual, here-and-there withdrawals.
“You think you can buy me off so easily?” I asked, and she laughed.
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
Our favorite booth, tucked in the corner, had vinyl seats sticky to the touch and a Formica tabletop that we slowly, determinedly, picked at with our fingernails as we talked, often for hours. On the Saturday that cemented things, that made our friendship an official thing, not an accident of the housing department but more like a contract signed in blood—we’d arrived at Slice of Heaven later than normal. It had been Lauren’s idea to bike along an offshoot of the Housatonic, and she’d shot three rolls, including one of me, shivering in my gray Keale T-shirt. By the time our pizza arrived, it was fully dark, and we had to hurry if I was going to get back in time for my evening shift at the switchboard.
Lauren was complaining about the upcoming summer—if she couldn’t find something to do, she would end up interning for her dad in DC. I’d heard threads of this argument a dozen times, but I still couldn’t understand what made interning for her father such a bad option. I was trying to decide whether I should beg for my job back at the Woodstock Diner or accept Gerry Tallant’s offer of a temp job in the tax office. I would have jumped at the chance to intern for a senator.
While Lauren talked in circles, I picked the pepperonis off the uneaten slices and popped them in my mouth, one by one. Licking the grease from my fingers, I caught the glance of a guy across the restaurant, wedged into a booth with two companions, their bulk spilling over the end of the bench seat. One of them smiled at me, raising a glass. The others turned toward us, following his gaze.
“Hey,” I said, interrupting Lauren’s monologue. “Don’t look now, but those guys are checking us out. I said don’t look now,” I repeated as she swiveled her head.
Chastened, Lauren allowed an appropriate amount of time to pass before sweeping the restaurant with a casual glance. She wrinkled her nose. “They look like townies. Are you interested?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Loserville, population three.”
“What should we do? Keep being our charming selves?”
“Want me to burp the alphabet?” I offered.
She laughed and glanced over at them again. “Shit. I made eye contact. One of them is coming over here.”
“Is it too late to hide under the table?”
We were both laughing now, too loudly, and in a moment the guy was standing there, a shadow falling over the remaining scraps of our pizza. He was our age or a bit older, light brown hair peeking out like a fringe around the edges of his baseball cap. His moustache was untrained, leaving wispy hairs to spill onto his upper lip. Lauren looked down at her plate.
“Are you two from around here?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Really? That’s the best you’ve got?”
When he smiled, his lip disappeared beneath the fledgling moustache. “All right. I could ask if you’d let me buy you a drink.”
“We have drinks,” I pointed out, gesturing to our sodas in their red tempered plastic cups.
“Not that kind of drink. There’s a bar a couple blocks down, if you want to see where the locals hang out.” His gaze moved from me to Lauren, whose eyes were fixed on me. It was clear she was going to be useless in this situation. I was sure she’d been hit on by dozens of guys, but they’d probably had hyphenated last names and cars that cost more than their private school tuition. The last thing we needed was to end up doing shots at a dive bar with these guys just because she was too polite to say no.
I reached across the table for Lauren’s hand, lacing her fingers through mine. Her eyes widened, but then I felt the warm return pressure of her grip, the creaminess of her skin from the lemon-scented lotion she applied every morning. I smiled at her, then up at the poor guy, whose cheeks flamed with embarrassment.
“So,” I said. “Do you often hit on lesbians?”
Lauren cleared her throat. “Seriously. Do you mind? We’re trying to have a private moment here.”
“My apologies,” the guy said, giving us a mock bow. To his friends he called, “They’re a bunch of dykes!” A few heads turned—the openmouthed shock of high school girls, the raised eyebrows of a man old enough to be my father.
I was angry about the slur, even if it didn’t apply to us. “Hey, you know what? Why don’t you back the fuck away and save yourself years of reconstructive dental work?” More heads turned; there was open staring now, and one of the pizza employees who had been wiping down the buffet took an uncertain
step toward us, a bar towel in her hand.
He glared at me, muttering “Bitch” as he turned around. His friends were on their feet now, balling up their greasy napkins, teasing him.
I settled back, shaking, embarrassed to be the center of attention, but when I looked at Lauren, she was beaming. Before I could register what was happening, she had leaned across the table to give me a generous kiss, one that landed half on my mouth. I heard the guys hoot with laughter, and when I looked up again they were gone, their table littered with napkins and plates.
“I can’t believe you did that,” I said. “Seriously—well played.”
Lauren grinned. “I can see the headlines now. Senator’s Daughter Involved in Torrid Lesbian Affair.”
“Ooh,” I said, taking the last slug of my soda. “Torrid. I’ve always wanted to make the papers, you know.”
Lauren shook her head, almost sadly. “Unfortunately, it would never go that far. My mom would get to everyone first. She’d threaten the pizza employees with their jobs if they talked. She’d dig up the dirt on those fine, upstanding gentlemen. And she’d pay you off, of course. Within a week, you’d be back in Kansas, living like a queen.”
I laughed at her seriousness, as if any of this were an actual possibility. “Your mom would pay me off? Really? What’s the going rate for despoiling a senator’s daughter?”
There was something strange about the look Lauren gave me, a smile that curved slowly upward, so slowly it didn’t seem like a smile at all. “You’d be an idiot if you took anything less than two million.”
I blinked.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
* * *
Our ride back to campus was eerie and quiet, the road clear and the sky dark, stars hidden behind a sudden low cover of clouds. I took the lead, pumping hard to set a pace that would allow me to make it back to campus before my shift.
Here We Lie Page 9
