Here We Lie

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  Behind me, Lauren called out, “Someone’s coming,” and I scooted as far as possible to the right. Headlights washed over us, and I glanced over my shoulder. Instead of moving into the oncoming lane to give us a wide berth, the way cars usually did, this one pulled up close and hung even.

  “Shit,” Lauren said, and even before I dared a glance, I knew who it would be. There were three guys in the cab of the truck, and the one who leaned out the passenger window was the one with the moustache, his mouth pressed now into a flat line.

  “Hey, ladies,” he called, his voice cutting through the night. “Remember us?”

  “Go faster,” I told Lauren, sweat blooming beneath my shirt.

  “Looks like you’re in a hurry,” he called. “Want a ride?”

  “Fuck off,” I snapped. “Leave us alone.”

  The truck stayed even with us, dangerously close, the warmth of the engine a palpable thing. Lauren let out a sound behind me, a half whimper, and I imagined that headline: Senator’s Daughter and Friend Attacked on Rural Connecticut Road. The guy in the middle leaned toward the window, the brim of his hat shading most of his face, only the humorless line of his mouth visible. “Why so nasty?” he called. “We’re just being polite.”

  The truck edged closer, pushing us toward loose gravel and a sloping decline into the ditch that lined the side of the road, a repository of graying snow and slush. We were about a mile from Keale, the lights of campus not yet visible, the town several miles behind us. There would be no witnesses, I thought, my heart thudding, fury building.

  “Megs,” Lauren breathed. “What are we going to—”

  I held one hand aloft, flipping a mighty bird in the direction of the truck. “Get out of here, assholes! Go screw your pet cows or something!”

  Behind me, Lauren whined, “Megan, don’t. Let’s just keep going.”

  As if moved by her plea, the truck pulled ahead, belching a cloud of exhaust as it accelerated.

  “We’re fine,” I called over my shoulder, trying to sound like I believed it. “They’re a bunch of idiots. Let’s go.”

  Up ahead, near the slight sloping crest before the Keale campus came into view, the pickup braked suddenly and executed a wild U-turn, kicking up gravel on the side of the road.

  Shit. Sweat crawled down my neck, tangling my hair. They were coming back for us.

  I yelled, “We have to keep going! We can’t stop now.”

  It was like a scene from a movie, surreal but fascinating, the sort of thing you watched through spread fingers. Engine roaring, the truck started for us, headlights bleaching out the rest of the world. Lauren pulled even with me, and we stood, feet on the ground, frozen. They’re going to force us off the road, I thought, and I could see it, could feel it—the two of us sliding into the ditch, legs tangled in our bikes. The next frame belonged to a horror movie, our mouths gagged with our own shirts, our wrists held down.

  Lauren clutched my sleeve with one hand, her mouth a gaping hollow. I wanted to tell her that they were only trying to scare us, but I couldn’t keep up the facade any longer. They were three shadowy figures in the front seat of a pickup truck on a quiet road at the tail end of spring, and they were going to do more than scare us.

  This is what you get, I told myself. This is the punishment you’ve been waiting for. It was always coming, all along. I’d known it since that moment I’d held the pillow over Dad’s face, feeling the tug-of-war between life and death.

  “Lauren,” I said, wanting to apologize because it was my fault, it was always all my fault.

  Headlights approached from behind us then, and a car slowed, navigating the narrow space between the truck and our bikes. Someone in the back seat waved—a girl I recognized from our dorm, and I raised my hand in return, the gesture halfway between a wave and a cry for help. On the other side of the road, the pickup roared past, its taillights disappearing until the truck was only a speck in the distance, benign as a child’s toy.

  “Holy crap,” Lauren breathed, but I couldn’t even form words. When we started again, my legs wobbled on the pedals. I nearly sobbed with relief when we crested the hill and the campus came into view a minute later, the dorms lit like candles on a tiered birthday cake. We biked, wordless, to the green space in the center of campus, in front of the building that housed the switchboard.

  I retied my ponytail with shaking hands. “Well, that was interesting.”

  Lauren’s cheeks were flushed, her chest heaving. “I thought I was going to wet myself. Seriously—I almost lost control of all bodily functions. But you! You were so cool. I was almost afraid for those guys.”

  “Ha,” I said weakly. “I was a mess all the way through.”

  Lauren shook her head. “No, you were great. You went all Kansas on them.”

  “Is that what it’s called?” I swung one leg over the bike, dismounting. “I’d better go. Try to stay out of trouble, okay?”

  She pushed off, heading for the dorms. When she reached the edge of the path that veered toward Stanton, she stopped and looked back at me. It took a moment for me to understand what she was saying since her words were bouncing off the buildings, the sound echoing back to me. “You’re a freaking hero! You’re my hero!”

  All that night, the words echoed inside me, too.

  A hero.

  Me, a freaking hero.

  OCTOBER 10, 2016

  Lauren

  We were running late; we were always, always running late, no matter how early we started. My alarm had gone off at 5:45, when the day was still dark, and everyone else was asleep. Schnauzer, our unfortunately named golden retriever, was already doing frantic circles by the back door when I made it downstairs in my yoga pants and tennis shoes. I pulled on one of Brady’s old college sweatshirts, leashed Schnauzer, and we were out the door, stopping first at the birch tree in the front yard for a long, relieved pee, and then heading out for a quick sprint around the block that left both of us panting. It would be the only meaningful exercise either of us got all day, and it was over in ten minutes.

  Back at home, it took longer than normal to wake up Emma, and Stella had a minor meltdown about her hair, which still looked puffy despite her attempts to straighten it. “All the girls in the eighth grade have straight hair,” she whined as I ran a comb through the frizziest parts and attacked them with the flatiron she’d begged for last Christmas.

  In the middle of this, Brady had kissed me goodbye, mouthing I’m sorry in my direction. He did more than his share at night, but in the parental division of labor, mornings were mine.

  Now Stella seethed next to me in the front seat of the Pathfinder, her jaw set against whatever obstacles the day would bring. I thought about telling her how I had hated school when I was her age, too, but that was a world away, fancy prep school versus perfectly good public school, old school snobbery versus SnapChat and Instagram. In the back seat, Emma was wondering aloud about moths, and why they wanted to fly so close to the light, and why when you saw a moth up close, it looked like it was a hundred years old. Our childhoods, truthfully, were nothing alike.

  I dropped Stella off at the edge of the middle school property and watched her go as I waited through the chain of minivans and SUVs. She was a thin silhouette in skinny jeans and a tunic that hung halfway to her knees, and she was in an incomprehensible hurry to grow up, to get her period and fill out her bra, to enter the complicated world of adults.

  Someone behind me honked, and I raised my hand reflexively in apology.

  Emma’s school was less than a mile away, but it was a clogged mile, full of parents like me making the morning run, their back seats crammed with car seats and soccer cleats. It was already 8:05, and the warning bell would ring in five minutes. I put on my blinker at the last moment, spotting a place on the side of the road.

  “What are we doing?”

  I put the Pathf
inder into Park and killed the engine, tucking the keys into the pocket of my jacket. “I’ll go ahead and walk you from here, okay? It’ll be faster.”

  Emma held my hand as we made our way down the sidewalk and around the bus lane to the second-grade wing. She took her lunch pail from my hand, angling her head upward to meet my lips for a goodbye kiss. When she ran off, the lights on the bottoms of her shoes blinked against the pavement.

  The sound of the first bell sent a throng of second graders rushing past. Someone jostled my elbow—it was Emma’s teacher, Ms. Marris, young and golden haired. “Oh, I’m sorry. You’re Emma’s mom, right? How are you?”

  “Oh, fine. Just dropping her off.” I was acutely aware of my yoga pants, the same ones I’d been wearing yesterday when I picked Emma up from school. That was the problem with working from home; certain standards were necessarily relaxed.

  “She’s such a sweet girl,” Ms. Marris said. I tried to remember her first name from the parent-teacher conference where she’d shown me a stack of Emma’s drawings of salmon at various stages of their life cycles. Rachel, maybe? Rachelle?

  I smiled. “She gets that from her father.”

  She hesitated, and I began to sense that something was strange about this conversation, about the way Emma’s teacher was just standing there, not moving along to her twenty-five students who were lined up according to a mysterious, prearranged pattern. Her eyes held mine for just a beat longer than friendliness required. Was there something she wanted to say to me? Something about Emma, her grades or her behavior? That didn’t seem likely. But instead she touched me quickly on the arm. “You take care.”

  “Thank you—I will,” I answered, puzzled. “You take care, too.”

  The tardy bell rang, and I stood on the sidewalk as the chaos of a few minutes earlier became a sort of order and lines of students traipsed past on their way to class.

  My pocket vibrated, and I pulled out my cell phone. Probably Stella, telling me she’d forgotten something at home—her PE shorts, maybe, or ten dollars for one fund-raiser or another. But this message was from my mother, who contacted me so rarely that it was always a shock to see her name on the screen. It was in all caps, either because the message was important or because to my mother texting was still an elusive technological function.

  DON’T TURN ON THE TELEVISION. CALL ME FIRST.

  SUMMER

  2000

  Lauren

  As my mother would have said, Megan Mazeros wasn’t someone we knew. She wasn’t from an important family, she wasn’t one of Dad’s constituents and there were no obvious extrinsic benefits to our friendship.

  I hadn’t told Mom anything about my fight with Erin, so she was surprised the first time Megan answered the phone in our dorm room at Keale, and she was still grilling me about her when I came home for two weeks before starting my summer job. After the relative freedom of Keale, Holmes House felt like a form of house arrest, as if I were wearing an ankle bracelet that would alert my mother whenever I left the grounds. When I took my camera out in the mornings, with the light glinting through gaps in the trees, she inevitably followed me, picking her way carefully behind me in a pair of gardening shoes that had never once been worn for gardening.

  “Mazeros,” she said for the millionth time, turning over the name in her mouth, placing the accent on a new syllable, as if there was something untrustworthy about the letters themselves. “Where is she from, exactly? Poland? Hungary?”

  “Mom, I told you. She’s from Kansas.” The ghost of Marcus Rodriguez hovered between us for a moment, and I knew that she was seeing Megan the same way, another person with a foreign-sounding name, another person who couldn’t be trusted. That was her default position, despite any evidence to the contrary.

  Mom hesitated, as if she were running through a mental Rolodex of people she knew from Kansas and coming up empty. “And where did she go to school?”

  “In Kansas, Mom. A public school.” I enunciated the words for her carefully, in case she’d never heard them.

  “I’m only asking! We don’t know anything about her. It’s just surprising, when you and Erin seemed like such a perfect match. I don’t understand why you girls didn’t want to stay together.”

  I turned to her, holding the camera at eye level. She put up a hand, ducking my shot. When I developed it later, her delicate ringed fingers would seem large as a catcher’s mitt.

  Out behind Holmes House, the lake reflected ripples of sunlight. It was so quiet out here, a change from the constant female chatter at Keale. But then, it had always been quiet out here, since the lake was within our property line, and the property was hemmed in by one of those rambling Connecticut forests, the trees muzzling the rest of the world. Mom followed me down the steps and onto the path that led across the lawn. “Well, I suppose I’ll meet her this fall, then. Maybe for Parents’ Weekend.”

  I wasn’t eager to repeat that particular experience. Megan had the right idea, keeping her mother securely stowed away in Kansas.

  “It’ll be nice,” Mom continued, forcing the smile into her voice. “We’ll have dinner, maybe take the two of you to a movie or something, whatever you’d like to do.”

  I laughed, imagining The Senator and The Countess and Megan and me, all lined up in Scofield’s falling-apart theater. “Actually,” I said, the idea coming to me suddenly, brilliantly, “maybe I could invite her here sometime, for Thanksgiving or Christmas break.” Now that the words were out, I was sure it was the best idea I’d ever had. Megan never seemed to be in any hurry to return to Kansas, and I was already dreading the thought of an uninterrupted month of the Mabreys.

  Behind me, Mom stopped short. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

  A duck flapped into the water, ducking its head beneath the surface. I shot its tailfeathers and webbed feet, then the quick, bewildered expression as its head reappeared. “Why not? It was never a problem when I brought my Reardon friends here.”

  “But we knew...” Her voice trailed off, and I finished the sentence for myself. We knew their families. We knew where they were from. We knew what their fathers did.

  We knew who they were.

  I bent down, rolling the hems of my jeans into thick cuffs. “Don’t worry. I’ll have her brush up her résumé and letters of reference. Maybe Dad can get someone from the FBI to run a background check. It’ll all work out.” I kicked off my flip-flops and left her on the grassy bank, glaring at me, while I wandered a few steps into the water, bending low to shoot the pale skin of my feet and the meandering ripples that widened outward.

  Since arriving at Holmes House, I’d emailed Megan every day from the computer in Mom’s office. Sometimes it was just a quick How are you? I’m dying here. She always replied immediately. Hey! I’m good. Bored as hell. Or maybe I just got a papercut from an envelope, so I’ve had my excitement for the day. I could almost imagine her at the county tax office, sandwiched in a cubicle, surrounded by filing cabinets and washed out beneath fluorescent lights. She’d only laughed when I invited her to apply to Camp Watachwa with me.

  “I’ve never been to summer camp,” she’d pointed out, thumbing through the application materials. “I don’t even have a frame of reference for being a counselor. And this other stuff—watersports specialist, equestrian coach? Please.”

  “You could apply, though. I mean, you have good grades. They’d find something for you.”

  She’d continued reading from the packet in her faux-snooty voice. “Our staff hails from more than sixteen countries. Is that new, or did you have staff from sixteen countries when you went there?”

  I frowned, trying to remember. There had been a counselor once from Sweden, Lars. But he’d attended a prep school in Manhattan and despite an accent that made every girl older than eleven drool, he hadn’t seemed particularly exotic. “I think there were people from other countries who worked
in the kitchen.”

  Megan raised an eyebrow. “Are you aware of how that sounds?”

  “I mean, no. That’s not what I meant.” But when I thought about it, it was true. When I’d passed behind the kitchen after mealtimes, I’d heard them laughing and teasing and singing, breaking into phrases of their native language, almost as if they inhabited an entirely different world from the rest of us.

  Megan tossed the packet back to me. “Seriously? This place would never hire me. And I’m trying not to work in a kitchen for a change.”

  I hadn’t been sure that Camp Watachwa would hire me, although I’d spent six summers there as a camper, mostly managing to stay out of trouble and once being a captain on Color Days. I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted to do, either, but I hadn’t left myself with too many options. Megan had helped me craft a personal essay about the impact of Camp Watachwa on my life, how the counselors had inspired me, what I’d learned about bonding and friendship—none of which was exactly true, but by the third draft, it felt true. Dr. Mittel wrote a letter of recommendation for me, and Megan proofread the whole thing with her ferocious red pen before I sent it off.

  It had been Megan’s idea to tell Camp Watachwa about my passion for photography—by that time, I joked, I knew my way around a darkroom blindfolded. There hadn’t been a photography option at Camp Watachwa when I attended it, but I wrote that I would be willing to set up a darkroom, run mini craft camps for the kids and coordinate an art show at the end of the summer.

  Some combination of personal essay or letter of recommendation or grand promises had done the trick, and I would be spending the summer in the humid paradise of Camp Watachwa, but I did feel bad about Megan, stuck in the Woodstock County Tax Office, licking envelopes and getting paper cuts on her tongue.

  * * *

  Being back at camp as an adult was a surreal experience. Not much had changed in the basic structure of the place, but now that I was on the other side, it all looked too contrived—the cheery cabin signs, the stacks of red canoes, the “rules” spelled out in giant letters across the dining hall. 1. Have Fun. 2. Respect Others. 3. Respect Yourself. 4. Don’t Forget to Have Fun! It seemed like a scam, a sort of forced march toward merriment, and I was amazed that I’d bought into it for so long, from eight to fourteen years old.