“I know that, Emily.” Tug. “We’re not using the kitchenette. We’re using your parents’ house.”
My mouth falls open. “How are we going to do that?”
Franny is pleased with herself. “I talked to your mom about it at breakfast.” She shifts her gaze to Stephanie. “And Latin is a dead language, you know. It’s completely useless.”
Steph flicks a vocab card at her. “Not if I’m going to be a doctor, it isn’t.”
“Ha!” Grace blurts. “There’s no way you’ll get into medical school. You’re going to be an aerobics instructor.”
Franny covers her mouth as she giggles.
“You’re awful. I can’t stand any of you,” Stephanie announces. She frowns. “I could be a doctor if I wanted to.”
“Sure you could,” Grace says. “And Emily could be an astronaut.”
I don’t even pretend to be offended.
Grace and Stephanie keep arguing all the way to my parents’ house. My mom is waiting for us.
“This is so sweet of you, girls,” she says. My mom isn’t wearing any makeup yet, but she still looks pretty.
She gave Franny a list at breakfast with everything we’d need to make chicken noodle soup. Before we begin, my mom makes us strawberry milk shakes. The four of us sit at the kitchen table, drinking through bendy straws, while my mom helps us get started.
First, she puts the chicken in a pot of water on the stove. Then she starts chopping vegetables in the food processor. We’re still watching.
“What are you girls doing this weekend?” she asks.
The four of us exchange a silent look. There’s a party at Amanda Stream’s beach house tonight, but we can’t tell my mom about that.
Before the pause becomes too long, Franny says, “Probably going to the mall.”
At exactly the same moment, Steph says, “We’re going to stay in and study.” They look at each other. Steph kicks Franny under the table.
My mom pretends to ignore them. To me, she says, “What about you, Emily? Any plans for this weekend?”
She says it innocently enough, but I can tell she’s feeling me out, trying to see if I’m hiding something from her, which I definitely am. There’s no doubt I’m going to spend a lot of my free time this weekend with Del.
I haven’t seen him since yesterday. He wasn’t at breakfast, and he wasn’t at his dorm afterward; he’s pulled another one of his disappearing acts. Every time I ask him where he goes, he either ignores me or changes the subject.
We hang out in my parents’ kitchen until the early afternoon. Once the soup is finished, I realize that my mom has done all of the work herself. She has been so kind, so genuine and helpful and wonderful. Even though I’m sharing her with my friends, I feel so grateful that she belongs to me.
My roommates seem oblivious to the fact that we are in no way responsible for the finished product; it’s like they think they can take credit because they were in the same room as the soup.
“Should we take it over to him now?” Stephanie asks.
“I should go running before the—I mean, before we go shopping,” Grace tells everyone. She fidgets as she leans against the counter. Grace gets anxious if she doesn’t run every single day.
“I can take the soup to Paul,” Franny says.
We all look at her.
“Did you just call him Paul?” I ask.
Tugtug. Even my mom is staring at Franny, waiting for an answer.
“Um. Yes,” Franny tells us. “He told everyone in our study hall to call him Paul.”
Stephanie shakes her head. She makes a face. “That’s weird, Franny. He’s a teacher.”
“It’s not that weird. He’s only twenty-two.”
“Yeah. He’s twenty-two and we’re sixteen.” Grace is already stretching her hamstrings.
“Don’t call me weird, Stephanie.”
“Then don’t act weird.”
“Ladies. Calm down.” My mom is smiling. She winks at me. “Why don’t you all take it to him? I’m sure he’ll be flattered.”
But once we leave my parents’ house, Grace starts trotting away. “See you later,” she calls, waving at us over her shoulder. She’ll be gone most of the afternoon.
Franny, who is holding a big Tupperware container with the soup, looks at me and Stephanie. “Really, I’m fine,” she tells us. “You two go ahead. I’ll be back soon.” I can tell she’s dying to pull her hair out, except she doesn’t have a free hand to reach with.
When we get back to the dorm, Steph and I sit on my bedroom floor to try and do homework together, but we keep getting distracted.
“You’re going to the party tonight, right?” she asks.
“Yes.” I squint at my open precalc book, unable to comprehend much of anything that I’m looking at. I should have taken geometry instead.
Amanda Stream’s parents have a beach house about five miles away at Groton Long Point. The place is massive; it even has its own three-par golf course. Her parents spend about two weeks a year there; her mother is this prominent playwright who apparently—at least according to Renee, who heard it from Bruce—has major Emotional Issues, and her father is a psychiatrist who caters to the whole swanky New York set. (That’s Renee’s word, not mine—leave it to her to say “swanky” without it seeming the least bit cheesy.)
Anyway, apparently Amanda’s mother is so anxiety-ridden and almost constantly tortured by her Art that they barely ever leave the city, which actually turns out to be a great thing for all of us here at Stonybrook, because everyone knows the security code to the beach house (4-4-1-1) and Amanda doesn’t mind—at least not too much—if you come and go as you please, and she has parties there herself most weekends, and in general it’s one of those sad situations that ends up working out great for the kids in the short term, but which will undoubtedly leave poor Amanda damaged for life long-term. I can picture her on a shrink’s sofa someday, complaining about her absent parents and how retrospectively miserable her adolescence was.
But my point is, everybody goes to these parties. Even Renee. Even Ethan, who is usually such a complete Boy Scout. And even Del, who almost never socializes with anybody except me.
“Of course I’m going,” I say to Steph. “So what?”
Stephanie’s anger toward me has cooled over the past couple of weeks. She has other things to worry about: her parents are in the middle of a custody fight for her and Ethan, and her father doesn’t want to pay alimony. Her mom already has a new boyfriend. Steph has lost at least ten pounds since the beginning of the year. I don’t blame her for being so edgy; her family is in pieces.
“So, you should talk to Del, Emily. Someplace where there are plenty of people around.” She pauses. “Not in his room. Not in the woods.”
I stare at her. “How do you know about that?”
“Oh, come on.” She tosses her stack of vocab cards aside. I close my precalc book.
“Everybody knows what you’ve been doing, Emily. And everybody thinks it’s a bad idea. Your father doesn’t want you to see Del. Why not? He has to know something you don’t.”
For an instant, as Stephanie’s talking, I catch a glimpse of just how much she looks like Ethan when it comes to her subtle facial features: the curve of her small, perfect nose; the prominence of her cheekbones; the way her earlobes are small and attached, which she once informed me was a sign of superior breeding. “Even Renee doesn’t like him,” she says, “and you know it’s a bad idea if Renee doesn’t approve.”
I shake my head. “How do you know everyone thinks it’s a bad idea?”
“Because we’ve been talking about it. I know Del is all hot and mysterious and brilliant. But there’s something so off about him. Something isn’t right. What kind of person is involved in beating someone up with a baseball bat?” I’m not sure how, exactly, but by now everyone has heard one version or another of what happened at Del’s last school. I certainly haven’t been the one telling them. “Think about it, Emily,” sh
e continues. “How well do you actually know him?”
“I know him better than anybody,” I insist. “He tells me everything.”
“Really?” she says coolly. “Where is he right now? Where does he go when he disappears?”
I don’t know what to tell her. I don’t say anything.
“That’s what I thought.” She stands up, crosses the room, and sits down at Franny’s desk. She begins to brush her long blond hair, examining it for split ends.
“Listen,” I say, “I don’t know where he goes, but I’m sure he’s not doing anything wrong. Maybe he wants to be alone.”
“He can’t be alone in his room?”
I ignore her. “My dad doesn’t even know for sure that Del was involved with what happened at his old school. Nobody knows for sure what happened.”
“Del knows,” she says.
“It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter now.”
She scowls at me. “Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not being stupid. I trust him.”
“Well, if there’s one thing I can tell you,” she says bitterly, “it’s that you don’t know him the way you think you know him. He’s barely been here for three months. I thought I knew my father, and look what he did. You shouldn’t trust him, Emily. You’re being naive.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “I shouldn’t trust your father? Who are we talking about?”
“Shut up. You know I mean Del.” She tosses the brush onto Franny’s bed and stands up. “Just do me a favor. Do all of us a favor. Please?”
The space between us is awkward. I want her to leave. “What do you want?”
“Ask him about his old school. Find out more about him before you get into trouble.”
“Stephanie, he isn’t going to get me in any trouble.”
“Promise me you’ll talk to him.”
I nod. “Okay. I will.” I want to believe that Stephanie is actually concerned about me. In the back of my mind, though, I remember how all the girls reacted when Del first got here. Until he started paying attention to me and me alone, everyone wanted his attention. The more likely scenario, I think, is that Stephanie is jealous.
That night at Amanda’s house, it takes me forever to find Del. He’s alone in one of the bedrooms, lying on his back in bed, gazing at the ceiling.
We’re in Amanda’s older brother’s room. Her brother, Ty, is in college now—at Bard? Brown? Someplace like that. Anyway, the room is at the corner of the house. It has a balcony with a killer view of the ocean, a vaulted ceiling with four big skylights above the bed, and two telescopes positioned to check out both the sky and whatever’s going on down the shore. The room is far away from the rest of the house, far away from the party downstairs.
“Come here, Em,” Del says, still staring at the ceiling. How does he even know it’s me?
Talk to him … someplace where there are plenty of people around.
I sit beside him on the bed. “What are you doing up here?”
He reaches out to hold my hand. “Looking at the sky. Thinking.”
“About what?” From down the hall, I hear the lilting of voices carrying toward us. I don’t feel the least bit unsafe with him. Even if we were alone in the house, I realize, I would feel completely at ease.
“About how I got here,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’m in this beautiful house with all of these beautiful people … I have everything I could want. I have you. I have parents who love me.”
But they sent him away. He said so himself.
His gaze is penetrating and intense. His blue eyes are big and watery. I start to feel a little uneasy. Where was he this morning? As far as I know, he didn’t come back until late in the afternoon.
“Del,” I say, frowning, “everyone’s parents love them.”
“No, they don’t.” He shakes his head. “You’re so naive, Emily.”
I am getting so tired of people calling me naive. “You think there are people who have kids just because?”
“Kids aren’t always intentional. And even if they are, people change their minds. Or else they find out they aren’t up to it, after it’s too late. People do awful things all the time. You don’t have any idea.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
“Your parents are practically perfect, aren’t they? Is that what you think, Emily?”
I nod, remembering the way my mom looked as she made soup this morning. She was so happy. “They’re pretty great.”
“Right,” he says. There’s a hint of sarcasm in his tone. “You are one lucky girl.”
“ …”
“ …”
“Del … can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Where did you go this morning?”
He stares up at the ceiling. He sniffles. “Nowhere. Sometimes I go for long walks.”
The answer doesn’t ring true. “You go for walks,” I repeat.
“Yes.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
He nods.
“What happened at your old school? Why did you leave? And I don’t mean that your parents pulled you out. I mean specifically—why did they pull you out?”
He’s still holding my hand. I can feel his grip tighten a twinge. “Who told you about that?”
“My dad. He thinks you might be dangerous.”
Del grins. “Oh, he does? Dangerous how?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t trust you. He told me that you were involved in an … an incident. With a baseball bat.”
“That’s such bullshit. That isn’t what happened.”
“Then tell me what happened.”
Del reaches toward the floor, where there’s a half-empty beer bottle that I hadn’t noticed before. He picks it up and takes a long swig. “Okay, Emily,” he says, “you want to know what happened at my old school?”
His face and neck are sweaty. His breathing is heavy. If I didn’t know him better, I might be afraid of him.
“Yes,” I say. “I want to know what happened.”
He takes another swig from his drink. “This girl—my roommate’s sister—she got raped.”
I cringe at the word “raped.” “Okay.”
“My roommate decided to do something about it.” Del pauses. “And I didn’t stop him. I guess it makes me involved in a way.”
“But you didn’t get expelled.”
He spreads his arms wide. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“What happened to the boy? The one who …”
“The rapist?” He smirks. “He spent some time in the hospital. Then his daddy took care of things, and instead of getting arrested like he should have, it turned into a he-said-she-said, and my roommate was the one who got in all the trouble. So now this little girl—this fourteen-year-old—is at school with her rapist, and she doesn’t even have her big brother anymore. Real fair, right?”
I’m quiet for a while. Finally I say, “There are other ways to deal with things.”
“Not always. No, Emily.” He’s getting more and more excited. “Some people have things coming to them, you know? Some people are rotten inside. This guy was one of those people.”
It should bother me—shouldn’t it? It should make me afraid. But instead I feel the opposite way. Del didn’t actually do anything … he just stood by and let it happen.
There is so much about him that I don’t know. But I know he was abused. I know his sister was abused. Coming from a background like that, how else would he know to react?
He slides a hand behind my neck and pulls me toward him until our foreheads are touching. “Hey,” he whispers. “Don’t be scared, Emily. I would never hurt you.”
“I know,” I say. And I do know; I believe him like I believe my own name.
He kisses me on the lips. The smell on him almost makes me want to gag: it’s kerosene, sweat, beer, and cigarettes. “What do you want to do?” he asks.
&nb
sp; “I want to go find my friends,” I tell him. “And I want you to come with me.” I pull back a little bit. “People want to get to know you. You need to give them a chance to see that you’re …”
He grins. “Normal? I’m not.”
I close my eyes. For a moment the room is totally silent except for the sound of our breathing. “I know that, Del.”
“You want me to pretend?” he asks. “For you?”
I nod. “For me.”
He kisses me again. “Okay. Anything for you.”
Downstairs, almost everyone is gathered in the great room, where there’s a huge fire burning in the fireplace and beer bottles scattered on all the tabletops and empty surfaces. Even the lid to the baby grand is covered with them.
People pretend not to notice, but everyone looks at us when they think we’re not paying attention. Del leads me by the hand to the sofa, where Steph, Grace, and Franny are sitting with Renee and Ethan. All of them are drunk and talking about Madeline Moon-Park.
Madeline is probably the only subject that could engage my roommates and Ethan in such an animated conversation with Renee. Madeline has become something like an urban legend since her failure to return this year. There are no seventh graders at this party, but they all know her as the coolest, most aloof person in Stonybrook’s history, which is a little bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
She was one of those kids that show up in a shuttle from the airport on the first day of seventh grade. Like I’ve said before, her parents didn’t visit. Nobody has ever even seen them. Madeline almost never went home for the holidays. She was an only child. She was fiercely smart, fluent in Korean, and never talked about where she came from. And then she was gone. We can’t find anything on Google. My father won’t tell me what happened to her. It’s like she’s vanished.
Del and I sit down with everyone else. He’s still holding my hand. More looks are exchanged among my friends. Their gazes move past me to stare at him, his T-shirt revealing the infamous tattoo. He and I pretend not to notice.
“Anyway,” Renee continues—she’s the only one who’s not staring at us, and she seems oblivious to the fact that everyone else is—“I’ve exhausted all of my resources. The Internet, Emily’s dad, the Diggers—nobody will tell me where she is or what happened to her. All my e-mails come back as undeliverable. Her cell phone is disconnected.” Renee presses a finger to her lips in thought. “We were best friends,” she says. “I don’t know why she would leave without telling me anything.”
Where the Truth Lies Page 9
