I end up at Paloma High somehow, parked in the junior lot. Our school is a different building at night, an empty body with no light in its eyes. Staring out my windshield at the three-story mishmash of brick and modernism, I can only think about the tiny sound of those two people kissing. The remembered whisper, I love you.
Part of me wonders what it would feel like, a kiss. I’ve never felt compelled to try putting my mouth on somebody else’s mouth. I refuse to believe it feels like a symphony of violins, or a ferociously panning camera, or an eruption of emotion in the center of my chest, or anything else it’s supposed to be.
I look at my hands. I lift two fingers, close my eyes, and press my lips against them.
Nothing. It feels like nothing at all.
After a motionless second, I take my hand away. I exit the car and slam the door, embarrassed all of a sudden that I felt compelled to do that. Embarrassed that I even wondered. I clamber onto the hood of the car, lean back against the windshield, and stare upward, my hands deep in my pockets. The galaxy is spray-painted across the sky. Looking at it, I feel swallowed up. Infinitesimally small.
I know Earth is whirling on its axis at one thousand miles per hour. I know it is whipping around the sun at sixty-six thousand miles per hour. I know we’re all hurtling around the center of the Milky Way at four hundred and eighty-three thousand miles per hour. But lying here, I feel motionless. I take a breath, hold it for a count of ten, and let it go. It billows out over my head and trails off into the black sky.
You’ve done your part, a voice says in the back of my mind. You have no more information to give the school. Worrying about this is pointless.
But the girl’s voice lingers in my ears, low, husky, and sweet.
Since Monday, I’ve heard three days’ worth of theories.
Theories about who would be enough of a creep to screw a student.
Theories about who would be enough of a whore to screw a teacher.
The lunchroom has felt like a den of wolves,
table after table filled with sharp teeth.
Strangers in line behind me yap and bark—
they have new meat to tear into, today:
Claire’s candidate list, newly posted.
“The student government lists are so hilarious, I almost died—”
“Matt Jackson is on there, what on earth—”
“—and Olivia Scott, which, like . . . you know?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve heard Olivia is, like, super nice. But she’s suuuch a sluuut, it’s insaaane, oh my God.”
“Yeah, holy shit, did you hear about her and Dan Silverstein last weekend?”
“Who wants to bet it’s her who’s dating the teacher? Oh my God, wait. I’m a genius. What if those guys are, like, a smoke screen of sluttiness?”
(I round on them because this week has built up
and up,
and I can’t hold this towering weight anymore.)
“Don’t
you
dare!”
This student body is a body
poisoning itself deliberately and intravenously.
Acid and hatred and bile.
No wonder I feel sick.
It’s quiet.
Two glossed O-mouths, four lined eyes staring.
I have never seen these girls before.
I hope I will never see them again.
If they’ll condemn Olivia’s open legs,
they’ll condemn me if they ever find out—
and they can go ahead.
Isn’t the number of partners as unimportant as the height,
the weight, the eye color?
The age . . .?
But no, no, of course not,
because we’ve been trained to obey adults;
because rejecting somebody takes a steely, undeniable power when you’ve been brought up to accommodate, to appease, to please;
because age does matter—I know that.
I swear.
“I’m sorry, Juniper,” one of the girls says, “I didn’t mean—”
I dash away. Past our table. Olivia and Claire look at me with widened eyes,
as though I am made of stardust
and they cannot drink in enough of my
strange, unfamiliar light.
A shocked look in the hallway as I walk as fast as I can,
two, three, four scandalized glances for the girl showing emotion in the light of day.
I splay my fingers across my face,
as if no one can see me past them, I wish, I wish,
around-the-corner-through-the-door slammed-locked-shut—shaking—trembling—
safe.
Light echoes off the bathroom walls,
rings off the inside of the stalls.
Minutes. I spread calm like sunblock onto my skin.
There is a scream cupped somewhere in my ribs.
I shove my fingers under hot water. They turn red.
I look at my eyes in the mirror, but something there is not mine.
I have not settled back into my skin,
and I cannot coerce myself into believing it:
we are through, we are through, we are through.
YOU KNOW THAT FEELING WHERE YOU’RE EMBARRASSED on someone else’s behalf, and you want to dive under a blanket, thrash around, and yell, Why on earth would you do that?
I never thought I’d experience that sort of secondhand humiliation for Juniper, of all people. She’s so put-together all the time, it’s sometimes hard to believe she’s real.
Not that she’s perfect. Nobody’s perfect. I’m not perfect.
Still. It’s kind of reassuring when Juniper shows the world she’s not. Yelling at two random girls in the middle of a crowded lunchroom is far from perfect. I’ve never done anything that embarrassing.
Go ahead and judge me for this, but her screwing up like that makes me feel as if I’ve won some sort of unstated competition.
“The hell was that?” Olivia says, staring after Juniper.
“No clue. I’m going to see if she wants to talk.” I stand, crumpling my trash into my brown paper bag.
“She’s not going to talk, dude,” Olivia says. “Remember last winter’s recital?”
I grimace. It’d be hard to forget Juniper’s concert last December. In the middle of the final movement of a concerto, she fumbled a transition and stopped playing, to crushing silence from the audience and accompanist. She had to restart the movement, a grueling, seven-minute piece of technical wizardry. When the audience left, she locked herself in the bathroom, and nothing her parents, Olivia, or I said could coax her out.
After half an hour, she emerged, quiet and collected. She’s still never mentioned it.
“Well, I can try,” I say.
“Godspeed,” Olivia says.
I head out, frowning as I hoist my backpack higher on my shoulders. Twenty pounds of textbooks and notebooks and overflowing binders. As I leave the lunchroom, a voice in the back of my head says, It wouldn’t kill Olivia to try talking to her, at least. But Olivia never does that with me and Juni. She doesn’t push us like that. In my opinion, she hates getting that close.
When Olivia’s mom left Paloma, I did something for her every day. I texted, called, visited—I poured everything I had into her recovery. Back then, the summer before freshman year, I was too young to drive, so I cajoled my sister, Grace, into driving me wherever Olivia needed me to be. But when I went through my breakup in May, Olivia hid behind a bland, scared layer of sympathy, offering me platitudes like “It’ll be okay soon,” and “Tell me if I can do anything.”
Looking back, I don’t know if that was fair.
As I turn the corner, I catch a glimpse of Juni way down the hall, disappearing into the girls’ bathroom. I hurry after her.
When I reach the door, I push against it with my shoulder. She’s locked it. “Juniper?” I say. “It’s Claire. Want to talk?”
“It’s fine,” she say
s, muffled. “Please. I need some time.”
“Okay. Let me know.” I back away, stifling a sigh. Olivia was right. Of course.
Sometimes I feel as if Olivia and Juni operate on a different plane than me. They love pretending everything’s fine. They understand that about each other. Me, though—I hate keeping everything bottled up. I feel messy, compared with them. They’re neatly printed arias, and I’m a sloppy sonatina, splattered across loose staff paper. Juniper is elegant; Olivia is stoic. And God knows what I am.
All this squabbling and silence among the three of us has me on edge. Are we drifting away from one another? We’ve been a trio, inseparable, since sixth grade—the thought of losing them makes my heart squeeze.
I gnaw on my pinky nail. “Losing them”—that’s not quite right, is it? It’s not that the three of us are moving apart. I’m trying as hard as ever. It’s the two of them who are pulling away from me.
That’s how it feels, anyway. Juni and Olivia are a matched set as always, and I’m some spectator growing more distant by the day.
I glance back at the bathroom door. The fact that Olivia was right about this makes me angry. She knows Juniper better than I do, is what that says. I was wrong, it says.
I hate being wrong.
AS I’M DRIVING BACK TO SCHOOL FROM THE LIQUOR store, I keep thinking about this TV show I used to watch in New York, The Confessor. The title character, the host, is a dude called Antoine Abbotson, who’s short and smiley and wears a navy blue suit. Each show, he brings in three people who each have a secret. The idea is, the Confessor bids up the price to get them to confess that secret on live TV. But if he hits a certain dollar threshold—a concealed number somewhere under $50,000—the contestant walks away empty-handed. Sometimes, though, the people on that show make bank. One woman got paid $47,000 to explain to her husband that the front room in their house smelled awful because she’d pooped into their upright piano while sleepwalking, couldn’t reach down far enough to extract the resulting poop after the fact, and never had the heart to tell anyone.
It’s strange, watching that show, seeing how people price their secrets. My family hangs their eccentricities around their necks when they walk out the door every day. There’s Uncle Jeremy, who won a trophy for having the longest mustache in New York State. There’s my cousin Cabret, who dropped out of college to start her own private-investigation service. And you can’t forget Great-Grandma Louise, who at age ninety-one lives alone in a cabin in the Catskills and still checks her traps every morning for dead animals.
My family values honesty for a couple of reasons: first, the Ten Commandments say, “Thou shalt not bear false witness”; and second, my family is full of givers. Givers palm off their secrets with every handshake; they lay it all bare.
Me? I keep one secret from my parents. It’s boring, and everyone at school knows it: I sell drugs. Not hard drugs, just weed and booze, but I’m not about to tell my mom and dad. They think my money is leftover from sweeping aisles down at Brent Hardware, where I work over the summers.
It’d break their hearts if I ever told them, but as selfless as they are, what they give me never feels like enough. I always want more, and Paloma only makes it worse. This place seemed unreal when I got here freshman year: a dollhouse town, unimaginably small, and it’s shrunk since then. I’ve met everyone. I’ve been everywhere. There’s nothing left to collect now, except profits from deals. It gets depressing, sometimes.
As I turn into the junior lot, the cases of beer make a chorus of metallic clinks in the back of my truck. Then a scuffed-up Camry looms out of nowhere, its horn blaring. My foot jerks toward the brake pedal. Too late.
The Camry smacks into my front bumper, and I lurch forward. The sound isn’t so much a crash as a thump. “Car thump” doesn’t sound as dramatic as “car crash.” I feel sort of gypped.
In the sudden stillness, I take inventory of my body, scribbling a mental list across my mind’s eye:
• Icy skin.
• Pulse in strange places—earlobes, forearms?
• No pain.
I’m in one piece, at least, and I have something to cross off my “Never Have I Ever” list.
The wounded Camry pulls into a spot, and I park beside it, bolting out to check the damage. My truck door squeals as I swing it shut.
The Camry came out unscathed, except for a tiny dent under one headlight. My pickup, on the other hand, looks as if it got into a fight with a Transformer. The Camry must’ve hit the last thing keeping my front bumper attached. Now it dangles askew, a lopsided leer.
My jaw tightens, and I bury one hand in my hair. Look at me, worrying over a broken, mud-encrusted pickup. What would my middle-school friends think?
It takes a minute to shake the thought. First of all, if everything goes according to plan, I’ll have saved up enough for a new car, a nice one, before graduation. Second of all, I’m out of touch with everyone from the Pinnacle School, so their opinions don’t matter.
Still, I can’t get rid of the complex that place gave me.
My middle school was a private academy in Brooklyn’s richest neighborhood. I was a scholarship kid, the poorest person there by a margin so huge, it was humiliating. Everything about me stood out, from my haircut to my clothes to my commute. An hour’s trip separated our apartment in Coney Island from Pinnacle’s cushy spot in Brooklyn Heights, and I did homework on the Q, wedged into a corner of the train car beside my mother.
Pinnacle kids never seemed to think about money, but around them, it was all I saw. Every break, my Instagram and Facebook feeds flooded: photos of spring trips to the Maldives, skiing trips to Aspen, and summer homes in Europe. They wore their wealth effortlessly. The preppier crowd had polo players and Golden Fleece logos on their pastel clothes. The “alternative” kids wore baggy woolen tops and artfully shredded leggings, but it was the same old story of unspeakable amounts of money, just translated into a different language.
I don’t miss that place. I still feel embarrassed about my family because of it. I still worry how we look to people, even here in Paloma, where we’re now comfortably lower-middle class.
“Lucas, you okay?”
I look up from my bumper. The sight of a familiar face floods me with relief—I’ve dealt to Matt Jackson since I started freshman year.
I nod at Matt. “You good?”
“Yeah. You wanna call the cops?”
“Cops.” I glance at my truck bed. “Right.”
Matt eyes the tarp that covers the cases. “We don’t have to. My car’s fine, so if you’re okay driving around with your bumper half off, be my guest.”
“Thanks, dude. Appreciate it.”
Matt’s head bobs. The kid is low-key cool, but getting him to say much is tough. He’s also hot, in a my-type-of-way, but I’ve gotten good at ignoring when guys are hot, since everyone at this school is so aggressively heterosexual.
According to an article I read, three or four percent of people are gay, lesbian, or bi. Wherever they dredged up that statistic, it wasn’t Paloma High School. Twelve hundred kids, and I haven’t met a single other queer person. Definitely no Gay-Straight Alliance Club here.
Sometimes I feel like we should have a club for all minority populations, since this place has all the ethnic diversity of your average mayonnaise jar. The culture shock was real at first, moving here, where everyone’s the same shade of white and the same subgenre of Methodist.
Matt opens his back door and leans into his car, his shoulder blades pitching tents in the back of his hoodie. His voice is muffled as he rummages through the mess in his backseat. “Hey, are you selling today?”
“Yeah, hit me up after school.”
“Sweet.” He shoulders his backpack and shuts the door. “It’s a date.”
Something goes still in the center of my chest. I stay quiet as Matt pulls a beanie over his head. His eyes are light brown and guarded, and I can’t help but wonder.
A date?
An im
pulse hits me. Maybe it’s the adrenaline still zipping over my skin, or maybe it’s the smell of cold air conjuring the feeling of someone’s hand in mine. Winter of eighth grade was the first time I ever held a guy’s hand, and chilly afternoons remind me of it every so often: Caleb’s warm, uncertain grip.
“Hey, Matt,” I say. “You maybe want to get coffee sometime? Or dinner or something?”
His expression freezes. If it were a computer screen, it would read: 404 error. Unable to process request. “I . . . what?” he says.
Bad guess. Crap. Say something, Lucas.
“Nothing, never mind,” I blurt out. The least convincing three words ever spoken.
Matt, of course, because he is not a moron, doesn’t buy it for a second. He stares at me as if I’m a poisonous snake that’s tried to strike up friendly conversation. “Weren’t you straight, like, six months ago?”
A gust of wind scurries through the parking lot. I watch it toy with the heavy leather laces of my Sperry Top-Siders. I shouldn’t have said anything.
Nobody cared at Pinnacle, home to yuppie liberals galore. My friend Alicia used to kiss her girlfriend in the stairwell, and they were only thirteen, and nobody cared. Paloma High, though, is different. On the swim team, if you make a one-word complaint about a workout, you get told to “suck it up, fag.” After a hard test, people whine, “That was gay as shit.” And when my teammates compliment one another, they follow up with “no homo.” (They do this every time, as if people might’ve forgotten from the last time that they’re not a homo.) I’ve never seen anyone getting crucified for actually being queer, but that’s just one step up from, “Suck it up, fag.” So I’ve stayed quiet.
I should say “no homo,” pretend I was kidding, but I can’t get the words out. They taste bitter sitting on my tongue.
Matt still looks startled. “I thought you dated that Claire chick forever.”
“I did.”
“So?” he says.
I shrug. “So . . . what?”
“So how does that work if you’re gay?”
Seven Ways We Lie Page 5
