The Secret to Lying

by Todd Mitchell

  The other RCs in our dorm stood by the exits, and from their stern, somber expressions, I knew this couldn’t be good.

  Once all the guys in our dorm were rounded up, Hassert led us to his room. The RCs lived in deluxe suites at the end of each wing. Hassert’s room had this tribal decoration theme going on, with African carvings and colorful weavings hung on the walls. The place reeked of chicken soup. Hassert pointed to a nasty-looking brown bubble in the ceiling that dripped cloudy water into one of three buckets he’d arranged below. The pizza burrito I’d eaten for lunch started to creep up my throat.

  Apparently, some “idiot joker” had propped a garbage can full of water and ramen noodles against Steve Lacone and Steve Dennon’s door the night before. When the Steves had opened their door that morning, thirty gallons of chicken-flavored water had flooded their room. In itself, that might not have been such a huge deal, except the Steves lived on the second floor, directly above Hassert’s apartment. Who knew?

  “It’s hard to believe,” Hassert said, “that someone who goes to a school for so-called gifted students could do such an utterly stupid thing.”

  He drummed his fingers against the wooden door and looked straight at me. I tried my best to appear as surprised as everyone else.

  “We’re not leaving this hall until we get to the bottom of this,” Hassert said. A hearty drop plunked into a bucket, splashing water on the orange-and-brown woven wall hanging. “Anyone care to explain who might have done such a stupid thing?”

  His eyes scanned the students gathered in the hallway. Dickie and Heinous stood nearby, but I knew better than to look at them. Dickie hadn’t even seemed that impressed by the prank. “That’s nasty,” was all he’d said that morning, when I’d told him about my late-night adventure.

  “We’ll wait here all day until someone speaks up,” Hassert said.

  I swallowed and stared at the buckets.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  A few students groaned and sat with their backs against the wall.

  “We’ll stay through dinner if we need to,” Hassert continued. “I don’t care. I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  I leaned against the wall and considered my situation. Dickie wouldn’t crack, and the only other person I’d told was Heinous. Maybe I was in the clear, but something else bothered me. The Steves? No. They might be our enemies, but they had their pride. They wouldn’t go to Hassert.

  I ran through the events of the night before. It had been a relatively simple matter to attach one of the custodian’s hoses to the laundry room sink and fill the garbage can that I’d propped against the Steves’ door. The tricky part was keeping everything quiet so I didn’t wake the Steves before the prank was ready. Once the can had filled, I dumped in twelve packets of ramen, and voilà! — the great chicken flood was set. No one saw me, except when I returned the hose to the custodian’s closet, I passed a person sitting in a patch of light by the stairwell.

  At the time, I hadn’t worried about it. He was just another computer nerd whose roommate must have gotten fed up with his late-night pencil scratching, so he’d been kicked out into the hall to finish his homework. He hadn’t said anything to me. Why would he care what I was doing? Guys like him lived in a separate world where the only things that mattered were virtual weapons specs and computer processor speeds.

  Of course he’d seen me. And given that I’d been carrying a dripping hose at quarter past one, he must have known I was up to something. I tried to piece together his face — pale, skinny, with a mop of greasy hair and a pointy nose. Muppet.

  I spotted Muppet sitting ten or so people down. He didn’t look at me.

  “I’m waiting,” Hassert said.

  Heinous raised his hand and my stomach knotted. Was he going to blow me in? Get rid of me so he could room with Dickie?

  “What?” Hassert grumbled.

  “Can we get our homework?” Heinous asked. “I have an English paper due tomorrow.”

  “No. No one’s going anywhere.”

  “What if I have to go to the bathroom?” Heinous asked, contorting his face as if he couldn’t hold it anymore.

  “The next person who talks better have something to say about this . . . this vandalism, or they’ll get a detention,” Hassert said. “We’ll stay here, gentlemen, for as long as it takes.”

  I looked at Muppet again. I’d never even called him by his real name. Ralph, maybe? Who could blame him if he told on me? There’d be one less jerk to make fun of him.

  The pizza burrito threatened to come back up again. If Muppet said anything, I’d be expelled for sure. Maybe that’s what I wanted, I thought. Maybe that’s why I kept doing stupid things. Chuck could be right — this was just one more attempt to run away.

  I watched the buckets fill.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  EVERYONE STAYED IN THE HALL, complaining about how hungry they were and how they had to go to the bathroom or do homework. Ten minutes before the cafeteria closed, the RCs finally broke down and let us go. Apparently, they didn’t have the authority to withhold food from us.

  I kept waiting for the ax to fall. In the days that followed, Hassert made all the threats he could, revoked all the dorm privileges he was able to, and cornered everyone he thought might know something, but no one blew me in. Almost a week passed and I was still there. Every day I didn’t get the call to start packing felt like borrowed time.

  I used to imagine that if I only had a few weeks left to live, I’d do all sorts of crazy things like swim with sharks and skydive naked over Chicago. Only now that my life at ASMA really might be over, I didn’t feel like doing anything crazy. Instead, I got serious about school. I behaved well in class and stayed up late doing homework. I even tried to get ahead on my physics group work, except I couldn’t get very far with it.

  The problem set Dr. Choi had given my group covered magnetism and electromagnetic fields. On a mathematical level, I knew the equations for calculating ohms, amps, volts, flux lines, and all that stuff. I could determine the strength of an electromagnet created by 12 volts run through a 2-ohm solenoid, and I could figure out exactly how much electricity would be induced by moving a 5-gauss magnet around a 1-centimeter iron pole at 3 rotations per second. But I couldn’t explain why any of this worked.

  According to Dr. Choi, magnetism was one of the fundamental forces of the universe. It determined everything from particle physics to the basic chemical bonds that held molecules together and resulted in life. It was essential. Yet not even Dr. Choi could tell me why opposite charges would attract and like charges repel. After all, when two different magnets were pulled together or pushed apart, what exactly went between them? What exerted the force? “That’s how it goes,” was all Dr. Choi said. “One of life’s mysteries.”

  My physics group agreed to meet on the balcony above the main commons of the boys’ dorm to finish the problem set. We’d never met as a group outside of class before, and the prospect of spending a couple hours studying with Ellie had me all mixed up. It was like the attraction and repulsion of magnets. On the one hand, I couldn’t stop thinking about the glimpse of Ellie I’d gotten outside of Chuck’s office. I even felt a little bad for her, because I figured that beneath the confident facade she might feel alone. But on the other hand, I couldn’t stand how stuck-up and superior she acted, and how she treated me like I was no one.

  I headed to the balcony ten minutes early. Ellie wasn’t going to catch me blank-faced and tongue-tied this time. I envisioned myself in the pose of a misunderstood genius, chewing on the end of my pencil with a lock of purple hair draped over my eye while I worked on a problem set — too deep in thought to bother looking up when she arrived.

  At least that was my plan, but when I got to the balcony, Muppet was already sprawled on the floor, papers scattered around him. He was hunched over his book, punching numbers into his graphing calculator. I glared. Hanging out with Muppet didn’t fit the sc
ene I’d had in mind. The air smelled a little funky, too, like wet tennis shoes. No. Bad James. After what Muppet had done for me, I shouldn’t make fun of him.

  “Hi, Ralph,” I said.

  He squinted at me. The thought that Ralph wasn’t his real name crossed my mind, but he didn’t correct me on it.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “The ceiling,” he replied. “Cumulus clouds. Stratosphere. Although up is a relative term.”

  “Uh . . . right,” I said.

  Ralph kept squinting at me.

  “So,” I continued, lowering my voice, “I wanted to ask you something about the other day. You know, when Hassert was grilling us.”

  “Because you flooded his room?” Ralph asked, dashing any hope I’d had that he hadn’t recognized me.

  I nodded. “Why didn’t you tell on me?”

  “I don’t tattle,” Ralph replied.

  “You’re not going to say anything to Hassert?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re in our group.”

  “What group?”

  “Physics group.” He gestured to the problem set he was working on. “You can’t go.”

  “What do you care?” I asked.

  “Because we’re friends.”

  It felt like a bowling ball had been tossed into my gut. My legs grew weak and I slid to the ground, sitting with my back against the balcony wall. Why Muppet, I mean Ralph, would think of us as friends was beyond me. “I’m not a very good friend.”

  “I know,” he said. “Regardless, I’d miss you.”

  “You would?”

  “Uh-huh. So don’t get kicked out. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He thrust his hand toward me. I stared at it, not sure what he wanted.

  Ralph took my hand and gave it a shake. Then he hunched over his calculator and went back to punching in numbers.

  Cheese and Ellie arrived a few minutes later. Ellie had on baggy pajama bottoms and a loose sweatshirt. Nonetheless, she managed to look like she was going to a photo shoot instead of a physics study session with guys whose biggest thrill was finding equations that made their graphing calculators draw breasts. She laughed at something Cheese said and nudged his shoulder.

  “What’s up?” My voice cracked.

  “Hey,” Cheese said.

  Ellie didn’t say anything. She was all business while we studied. She worked with Cheese on one half of the problem set while Ralph and I were supposed to do the other. I tried horsing around to lighten the mood — stealing a sheet of paper that she was using, folding it into an airplane, and launching it off the balcony, but she ignored me and wrote out her solutions on a new page.

  After the first hour, we decided to order pizza. Everyone chipped in, and Ellie actually spoke to me. She said, “No onions,” then went back to working with Cheese. I don’t know why she bothered telling me anything, because when the pizza arrived, she barely ate any of it. She just picked at the crust and sipped her Diet Coke.

  I didn’t eat much either. The stomach-go-flip feeling I got whenever Ellie was around wouldn’t go away.

  “Are any of you going to the Spring Fling?” she asked.

  The dance was still over a month away, but everyone considered it a big deal. The only time girls at ASMA dressed up in high heels and slinky dresses was for the fling. Guys were supposed to dress up, too, but they usually looked worse in tuxes than they normally did.

  “I’m going,” Ralph said. “I have a date.”

  Coke almost came out my nose. “Who?”

  “She’s not from this school,” Ralph said, scratching behind his ear. “She’s a girl from a different school, but I checked the rule book and that’s allowed.”

  “An import,” Cheese said. “You sly dog.”

  Ralph blushed. “Na-uh. She’s American.”

  Cheese and I chuckled.

  “What about you, Cheese?” Ellie asked.

  He licked some pizza sauce off his fingers and reached for another slice. “I don’t know.”

  “Beth Lindbergh,” I prodded. “She’s into you.”

  Cheese hunched his shoulders. “Maybe. But I like more zaftig girls.”

  “Zaftig?” I asked.

  “You never heard of zaftig?” Cheese replied. “That’s my favorite word, man. It means big boobs.”

  “No way.”

  “Look it up.”

  “You want to know my favorite word?” Ellie said. “It’s a science word.”

  “Ah, science,” I mocked. “The language of love.”

  “I’m serious.”

  My heart skipped at the thought that we were actually almost having a conversation. “So what’s the word?”

  “Syzygy.”

  Cheese and I glanced at each other. Ralph spilled a gob of sauce down his shirt.

  “It means,” she explained, “a kind of unity or conjunction. Like in psychology, Jung used syzygy to describe the total wholeness that happens when the masculine and feminine come together. And in astronomy, syzygy is when celestial bodies are arranged in a straight line, as in an eclipse.” She brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes and tucked it behind her ear. “So when you think about all the different meanings, syzygy is like connecting with someone in a celestial way. Pretty, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I squeaked, my voice breaking again.

  Cheese cracked a goofy smile. “What about a conjunction of zaftig bodies, like with me in the middle? Zaftig syzygy.”

  “You’re such a perv,” Ellie said, smacking his shoulder.

  It made my chest ache to see how comfortable she was with him.

  “How about you?” she asked Ralph. “What’s your favorite word?”

  Ralph swallowed a bite of pizza and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Pi.”

  “Like the pie you eat?” Ellie asked.

  “Or hair pie?” Cheese asked.

  “Or cow pie?” I asked.

  “No, no, no,” Ralph replied. “The number pi. Duh.”

  I had to hand it to Ralph — he was original. “That’s not even a word,” I teased.

  “I just said it, didn’t I?”

  “He’s got you there,” Cheese said. “Mmmm . . . pie.”

  “Okay, how do you spell it?”

  Ralph typed something into his calculator, then held it out for me to see. 3.14159.

  “Wow,” I said, trying to joke with him. “You could win the nerd spelling bee.”

  Ellie gave me an icy look. “I like pi,” she told Ralph. Then she went back to talking with Cheese about who he could take to the fling.

  I grew quiet after that. She’d asked everyone for their favorite word except me.

  By the time we finished the problem set, there was only half an hour left before curfew. Cheese and Ralph went to the computer room, and Ellie headed for her dorm.

  I followed her out. It was probably a dumb thing to do, but I couldn’t stand how she kept acting like I didn’t exist. “Don’t you want to know my favorite word?” I called.

  Ellie slowed. “Sure.”

  My skin prickled as I caught up to her. We were almost exactly the same height. “Ucalegon,” I said, stretching the word out.

  She smiled. “That’s pretty. It sounds like whales swimming. What’s it mean?”

  “A neighbor whose house is on fire.”

  “Figures. I should have known you’d pick something like that.” She slung her backpack over her shoulder and continued toward her dorm.

  I walked after her. It was a cold night, so there weren’t many people out. Ellie had a coat on, but I didn’t. Still, my face felt hot and flushed. “Hey!” I said. “Why do you hate me so much?”

  “I don’t hate you.” She kept walking, stepping around a puddle. Most of the snow and ice from winter had melted, leaving the ground muddy. “I just don’t like it when people show off.”

  “I don’t show off.”

  “Yes, you do. You’re always trying to impress p
eople.”

  I considered this for a moment. “Is that why you ditched me — the night I jumped in the pond?”

  “I didn’t think you’d actually do that,” Ellie admitted. “Sometimes guys do crazy things when I’m around, so I figured if I wasn’t around, you wouldn’t do anything.”

  “I’m pretty good at being crazy on my own.”

  She laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “You.” She headed to a bench and sat, crossing her legs. “You act so intimidating.”

  “Me?” I scoffed, sitting beside her. “You’re the intimidating one.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. Miss Perfect in every way.”

  I meant it as a compliment, but Ellie’s smile fell. She stared at the ground.

  “What did I do now?”

  “I hate that,” she said. “Perfect. Why does everyone expect me to be perfect?”

  “I’m not saying you have to be perfect. You just are.”

  “Trust me: I’m not.”

  I remembered how scared she’d looked when I’d seen her outside Chuck’s office. “I didn’t tell anyone,” I said. “You know — about you meeting with Chuck. Not that it’s a big deal. Lots of people see him.”

  “Do you?” she asked.

  “I only went because of a friend.”

  “Oh.”

  “I probably won’t go back,” I added.

  “That’s too bad. Chuck’s a good person. If it weren’t for him, I probably wouldn’t have anyone to talk to.”

  “Hold up. You’ve got more friends than anyone.”

  She gave me a perplexed look.

  “You’re always dating someone,” I said.

  Ellie smirked. “Guys never fall for me. They only fall for their idea of me.”

  “Well, what about your other friends?”

  “You mean the ones who keep adding comments to my site?”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know about it.”

  “I don’t.”

  Ellie sighed. “About a week after you jumped in the pond, someone put up a site about me. The address is ‘Pond Skank,’ but the pictures are all me. There’s even a nifty drawing of me, rising out of the pond like the Lady of the Lake, waiting to ‘skankify’ guys.”