Where the Truth Lies

by Jessica Warman

  I smile at her. “What do you think? He’ll love it, right?”

  Stephanie frowns. “No. I don’t think so, Emily.” When she looks at me, she’s practically glaring.

  I’m confused. “Why not? He just lost his watch last week. I was with him when he lost it. He needs—”

  “I know he just lost his watch. That’s why I bought him this.” And she pulls her gift for him out of its bag.

  It’s the same watch. I’m not kidding: the same exact watch from the same store.

  “It wasn’t just me,” she says. “My mom and I picked it out together. She’s over at Winchester right now, and the three of us are going out to dinner tonight.” She gives me a matter-of-fact look. “I guess you’ll be taking that back, won’t you?”

  “Steph, no.” I shake my head. “It’s engraved.” And I show her.

  She snorts. “Well, that was stupid of you. I mean, that’s even more of a reason why I should give him this one instead. What’s he going to do after you two break up, Emily? He’s not going to want a watch with your initials on it.”

  I can feel my cheeks growing warm. “Who said anything about us breaking up? And you know, he invited me to dinner tonight.”

  She looks like she wants to smack me. “I said no holidays!”

  “It’s your birthday, not freaking Christmas! Besides, you’re going to be there, too!”

  “You’re taking that watch back.”

  I shake my head. “No. I’m not.”

  “You’re not coming to dinner with us.”

  “Yes, I am. I was invited.”

  “Well, as the birthday girl, I’m officially uninviting you.”

  “I don’t think the birthday boy will be too happy about that.”

  Stephanie stands up. “You know what? Fine, Emily. How about this? I go to dinner with my mother and brother for our family birthday dinner. My mom and I give Ethan the watch that we bought him. Then, later on tonight, you can give him the watch you bought. And we’ll see which one he wants to keep.”

  We are glaring at each other; it’s the first real fight we’ve had since I started dating Ethan. Considering how ridiculous she’s been, I’m surprised there haven’t been more problems before now.

  But I know Ethan, and I know he’ll love the watch. My watch. So I say, “Fine. That sounds like an excellent plan.”

  “Fine.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.” She stands up, clutching the watch she bought tightly to her chest. “I’m going over to Winchester now. I’ll see you later.”

  Every time it’s somebody’s birthday, the school makes a cake for the birthday boy or girl to pick up after dinner and take back to the dorm. Since Stephanie and Ethan aren’t here, my roommates and I pick up their cakes for them. I drop Ethan’s off at his dorm, and then Grace and Franny and I walk back to the quad with Stephanie’s.

  There’s a faculty meeting up at the school tonight, so the dorms are pretty much deserted. It makes it tough to do homework knowing that nobody’s going to pop a head into your doorway (which has to be open during study hall) to make sure you’re getting things done. As a result, after something like forty-five minutes of work, Grace and Franny and I make a collective decision to stop working and give each other manicures.

  I’m leaning against the edge of Stephanie’s bed, filing Franny’s brittle nails while she pages through an issue of Cosmo with her free hand. “I’m pissed at Steph,” I say.

  “Really?” Franny asks, looking up from the magazine. “Why?”

  I tell them briefly what happened with the watches. When I’m finished, Grace says, “Let me see the watch.”

  I go into my room and get the box.

  When I open it up to show them, I almost can’t believe what I’m looking at. I blink and blink, making sure my contacts are in place. The face of the watch is smashed. Glass broken, time-telling ability defunct.

  “It’s broken, Emily,” Grace tells me, suddenly standing at my side. She’s obviously excited, shaking a bottle of purple nail polish, grinning like a maniac.

  “Is it? I thought it was supposed to look this way.” I glare at her. “You know who did this?”

  Franny gasps. “You think Steph would have?”

  “It’s been in my desk drawer since we left for dinner. She left to go over to Winchester … but she could have come back once she saw me leave.” I’m so furious, I can barely think straight. “She’s the only person who knew I bought him this watch. Besides, who else would want to break it?”

  “I know, but Emily. That’s so … insane.”

  I am fuming. The watch was expensive, but that’s not the point; my best friend broke my boyfriend’s watch. It’s just a watch, and she couldn’t stand the idea of me giving it to him.

  “I don’t think Steph would have done that,” Franny says.

  I want to slap her for being so naive. “We’re talking about Stephanie. She’s obsessed.”

  “You should beat her up!” Grace shrieks.

  “I’m not going to beat her up,” I say. I realize that my voice is shaking.

  My roommates both look at me with expectation. “You have to do something,” Franny says.

  My eyes fall on Stephanie’s cake. It’s a double-layer devil’s food with “Happy Birthday Stephanie!” written in careful cursive icing, surrounded by red and white flowers.

  “I know,” I murmur. “I have an idea.”

  They both look at me, following my gaze.

  “You could poison it,” Grace offers.

  “Grace,” Franny says, “where would she get poison?”

  “I don’t know. The chem lab?”

  They start talking like I’m not even there.

  “What kind of poison? She’s not going to kill her.”

  “I don’t know, Franny. It was just an idea.”

  “You know how bad Emily is in chem.” Franny shakes her head, as if the idea were ever actually a possibility. “Poison is definitely not the way to go. Emily could get arrested.”

  “Would you two be quiet?” I snap. “This is what I’m doing. And you two are going to help me.”

  I glance from the broken watch to the cake, back to the watch. Then I take a few steps across the room and, with my bare hand, grab a fistful of cake and shove it into my mouth.

  Franny and Grace stand there, gaping at me, both of them on the verge of …something. Either laughter or outrage.

  “Look at that watch,” I say, my mouth full. “It looks like she took a freaking hammer to it. We are going to eat this entire cake. Right now.”

  Franny picks up the watch to take a better look. When she does, shards of glass from the face fall out onto the ground.

  She bites her lip. “I shouldn’t. It’s so much sugar.”

  “Oh, right,” Grace says, “you really shouldn’t. You wouldn’t want to be a size zero, fatty.”

  I take another handful of cake and rush across the room to Franny, shoving it into her mouth. “You like that? It’s good, right?”

  “Stop!” Grace shrieks, doubled over laughing. “Wait, wait, I want some. Wait for me.”

  We don’t have any silverware, just our hands. The three of us sit in Stephanie and Grace’s room together, in a semicircle around the cake, and shovel it in, bite by bite, until the last crumb is gone.

  Three girls, one cake, two crimes. Again and again, it occurs to me how wonderfully, absurdly ordinary all of this is compared to the secret truths I’m living with.

  “I can’t believe we ate the whole thing,” Grace says. Her tone is somber as she stares at the cardboard platter and box.

  “Stephanie’s going to wonder,” Franny murmurs. “She’s going to expect her cake, and when it’s not here, she’s going to want to know what happened to it.”

  “We’ll tell her it never came,” I say. I still don’t know how I’m going to confront her about the watch. What will Ethan think? He’ll definitely be angry with her, but will it make him realize how much she’s intrud
ing in our relationship? I wonder what he would do if he knew she’d forbidden us to have sex. The fact that she smashed the watch almost makes me want to do it with him, just to show her.

  Franny shakes her head. “People saw us coming back from dinner with it. She’s going to know it was here.”

  “Okay,” I say, thinking. “We have to destroy the evidence.” And I take the box, crumple it up into the tiniest ball possible, and stuff it in my coat pocket. “I’ll be right back.”

  I go out to the Dumpster behind our dorm. I stand on my tiptoes and toss in the handful of crushed cardboard. When I get back to my room, the three of us go to the bathroom together and brush our teeth. Then we wait.

  Stephanie comes back around eight thirty.

  “You guys are supposed to be working,” she says, giving me a fresh scowl. “We have midterms coming up. Em, you’re going to fail everything.”

  I stand up. “Oh, like that’s your concern right now.” I do want to beat her up. I want to hit her, to pull her hair, to punch her in her smug birthday-girl face. “Come on,” I say, stepping close to her. “We are officially in a fight.”

  She smiles innocently. “Why?”

  “You know why! Don’t play stupid.” And I show her the watch.

  She covers her mouth with a hand; I can tell she’s trying not to laugh. “Oh my God. Emily, I swear to you, I did not do that.”

  “Right.” And I take my index finger and poke her right in the center of the chest. “Don’t bother, okay? It was obviously you. Just wait until I tell your brother.”

  She narrows her eyes at me. “You aren’t going to do that.”

  “I’m not? I’m putting my shoes on right now. I’m going over to Winchester to tell him. How are you gonna stop me?”

  Stephanie doesn’t move. She doesn’t seem alarmed or upset in the slightest. Her tone remains calm and collected. “Franny? Grace? Can Em and I be alone for a minute?”

  The two of them rush from the room.

  Stephanie takes a moment to stare at me. Then she goes to our bedroom door, opens it to find Grace and Franny pressed against it, listening, and says, “I mean it. This is serious. Emily and I need to talk alone.”

  They scurry downstairs. When she’s sure it’s just the two of us, she says, “Sit down, Emily.”

  “We ate your cake,” I say. “We ate the whole freaking thing with our bare hands. It was delicious.”

  She crosses her arms and says, as cool as can be, “I don’t give a damn about my cake.”

  Not the reaction I was anticipating.

  The tension in the room is almost enough to make me dizzy. Still eerily calm, Stephanie takes a seat on my bottom bunk.

  “It was me. I smashed the watch,” she says. “But not because I didn’t want you to give it to my brother.”

  “Really?” I ask. “Then why?”

  “Because,” she says, deadly serious, “you don’t deserve to give it to him. You don’t deserve to have anything to do with him.”

  “And what makes you say that?”

  “I was looking for the watch. I was going to hide it somewhere so you couldn’t find it. And then I looked under your mattress and I found an envelope.”

  My whole body goes cold. I keep Renee’s letters in a huge manila envelope under my mattress. I never dreamed that anyone would go rifling through my stuff, let alone looking under my bed.

  “And what did you do with the envelope?”

  She shrugs. “I opened it. I read some of the letters.” Stephanie licks her lips. She stares at me for a long time before speaking. Even though I already know what she’s going to say, I could almost pass out when she says the words out loud. “Del Sugar got you pregnant last year.”

  To hear her say it feels devastating in a way I almost can’t explain. It makes it more real than anything has before, because now it’s out there, broken into the world I’m trying to function normally in—and who knows what Stephanie is going to do with the information?

  “Steph,” I say, trying to stay calm, even though I’ve started to shake, “I wanted to tell you. You don’t understand.”

  “I understand perfectly. You’re a liar, and I shouldn’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth. What happened to the baby, Emily? Did you get an abortion? Tell. Me. The. Truth.”

  I can’t look at her. “I gave her up for adoption.”

  “You hid a pregnancy?”

  “Yes.” I stare at the floor.

  “You told Renee and not me,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “Do your parents even know?”

  I shake my head.

  “Nobody else knows?”

  “Del knew.”

  “Emily,” she says, “I’m telling Ethan.”

  “Oh, Steph, please don’t do that! I’m begging you. I’ll do anything you want me to.”

  She nods. “Okay. Then break up with him.”

  I don’t say anything. Ethan is a huge part of my life. He’s a huge part of what makes my life almost normal. If I break up with him for no discernible reason, I’ll be losing my boyfriend and best friend in one punch.

  “I can’t do that,” I say. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “What does it even matter? It’s not like we can be friends anymore, not after you lied to me all year.”

  “But how could I tell you? How could I tell anyone?”

  She shakes her head. “You told Renee. You could have told me. I would have understood.”

  “You would have? Like you’re understanding me right now?”

  “This is different.”

  “No, it isn’t. Look, Stephanie, just give me a day. Just think about it for a while. Think about how you would feel. Please? Take some time before you ruin everything. You don’t know the whole story.”

  She bites her lip. “One day.”

  I let out my breath; I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding it. “And then we’ll talk.”

  “Then we’ll talk. But I don’t think I’m going to change my mind.”

  “Tomorrow,” I say, knowing it will be here way too soon.

  She stands up. “Tomorrow.”

  I stare at her as she leaves the room. “Where are you going?”

  “To tell on you for eating my effing cake.”

  chapter twenty-one

  I can’t sleep. Even two of Dr. Miller’s pills don’t do anything to help me calm down. After she came back from telling on us—apparently she walked all the way up to school and caught my dad coming out of the faculty meeting—Stephanie marched into our room to inform us that we were all supposed to be in the headmaster’s office before breakfast the following day.

  I couldn’t care less about the cake. It will mean a couple of work details at the worst; Stephanie knows that. And now she knows about the baby, too. I can’t imagine what people will do if they find out. I’m sure that girls have gotten pregnant at Stonybrook before, but there haven’t been any that I’ve known about—and certainly none of them have been the headmaster’s daughter.

  Above me, Franny snores softly, her concave belly full of cake, probably the fullest it’s been in months. It’s a little past one in the morning. It’s been a tense evening in our room, for sure, but before she fell asleep, Franny said to me, “Don’t worry so much, Emily. Everything will be okay in the morning. We’ll get in trouble and then it will be over.”

  But for me, it feels like it will never be over. My baby would be seven months old now. What do seven-month-old babies do? A quick Google search told me more than I wanted to know. They sit up, roll over, and babble. They sleep through the night if you’re lucky. They start to get teeth. Some of them even start crawling. They begin to develop a preference for certain people, in particular their mothers.

  I sit up in bed and kick the sheets off my legs. I’m wearing thick flannel pajamas that my parents bought me for Christmas. Outside, it’s so cold that there’s frost forming on the insides of the windows in our room. Digger rarely stays out this
late when it’s this deep into winter.

  I get up, still not knowing for sure what I’m going to do. All I know are facts. Fact one: my life is a mess. Fact two: I don’t want to lose Ethan. Fact three: if anyone will understand, maybe it’s him.

  So I pull my boots and coat on over my pj’s, and I sneak quietly into Steph and Grace’s room. I retrieve the rope ladder from under Stephanie’s bed and am gone before she has a chance to wake up. Then I trek all the way over to Winchester, and knock at Ethan’s window with burning cold knuckles until he wakes up and lets me in.

  It’s funny how you remember things. As I’m crawling through his window, I remember the night I came over here with Stephanie, the very first time I met Del Sugar. I remember the feeling of electric excitement when Ethan hugged me that night in the hallway. He’s told me since he liked me even then, and in hindsight, it was obvious. If I had realized, or even if Del hadn’t been up watching TV that night, everything might be different.

  When I put my arms around him now, he slides his hands inside my coat and kisses me on the neck.

  “Happy birthday,” I murmur, knowing I’m going to start crying any second now.

  “It’s past midnight,” he says. “Not my birthday anymore.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why didn’t you come to dinner? Steph said you weren’t feeling well.”

  I pull back and look at him. He was obviously asleep; his hair is disheveled, and he’s squinting in such a way that I know he’s not wearing his contact lenses.

  He gazes down at my pj’s as I shrug off my coat and let it fall onto his floor. “If this is a striptease, you might want to reconsider your outfit.”

  All he’s wearing is a pair of red boxer shorts. “Aren’t you cold?” I ask.

  “I have a good blanket,” he says. “Come on, lie down with me.”

  We crawl into his bed together. We lie there on our sides for a few minutes, quietly, before I start to cry.

  “Emily,” he says, “something’s wrong. I can tell.”

  Still on my side, I notice that Ethan is wearing his new watch—the one he got from his sister and mother.

  “I like your watch,” I say, ignoring his worry.

  “Do you? Steph and Mom bought it for me. It’s nice.”