This Lie Will Kill You

by Chelsea Pitcher

  Juniper started to laugh. It was the cold, brittle kind of laughter, like twigs snapping underfoot. Of course Ruby hadn’t submitted her for the scholarship. Of course Ruby wasn’t looking out for her from behind the scenes. Their friendship was over. It had been over for a long time.

  She sank down to her bed. When her phone lit up again, she was surprised to feel her heart leap. How could she still have hope after everything that had happened? Her heart was a bruised and bludgeoned thing. A Pandora’s box filled with grief and regret. But somewhere, hidden in the darkness, hope was glittering. It caused her breath to falter as she read Ruby’s text.

  I didn’t submit you, Ruby wrote, but I’m going to the party. Maybe we can solve the mystery together?

  Juniper didn’t trust herself with words, so she sent back a smile.

  2.

  DRAMA QUEEN

  Ruby Valentine was a lit firecracker ready to pop. Her skin crackled and her fingertips buzzed. Ever since she’d received the invitation from the Burning Embers Foundation, she’d been bouncing from foot to foot, brimming with excitement. What a fabulous opportunity! Strange, yes, but strange things were always happening in Fallen Oaks. People appeared out of nowhere and disappeared just as quickly. Pretty girls fell head over heels for monsters. Boys were transformed into fire, into pure, glittering light.

  A town of freaks wearing beautiful masks, Ruby thought, looking away from her reflection. She knew a thing or two about putting on a show. And now, before she could leave for the party of the century, she’d have to perform for her mother. Wrapping a robe around her red sequined party dress, she dusted some blush over her nose.

  A ruddy complexion would help sell the story.

  Out of her room she raced, like a princess fleeing a beast. Someone else would’ve tripped. But unlike Juniper Torres, who couldn’t balance on one foot for more than ten seconds, Ruby had been born with a ballerina’s grace, and when she was determined, her limbs filled with light. She floated. Slipping into the living room, she knelt at the back of the ratty old sofa and whispered in her mother’s ear. “Mom? I can’t sleep.”

  Her mother turned. So did Scarlet, Charlotte, and May. Four pretty red heads turning. Four sets of eyes trained on her. “What time is it?” Mrs. Valentine asked with a yawn. Her ginger hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and her floral nightgown had seen better days.

  “After nine,” Ruby said, glancing at her phone. The party started at ten. “You girls should get to bed.”

  Her sisters started to fuss, and Ruby’s mother sighed, already sinking under the weight of responsibility. Once upon a time, Mrs. Valentine had had a husband, and that husband had helped put these little girls to bed. He’d helped get them up in the morning too, and helped make their lunches. Now he was gone, and Ruby’s mother had four girls to raise on her own. Most nights Ruby shouldered the burden, but she couldn’t tonight. She had to imitate going to bed so she could sneak out of her window. But first, she needed access to the safe in the basement.

  Mrs. Valentine studied her daughter. They had the same pale blue eyes, the same freckles along the bridge of their noses. The same terrible taste in men. “Five more minutes, girls,” she said after a moment. “Charlotte, you’re sleeping in my room tonight, so you don’t bother your sister.”

  “She doesn’t bother me,” Ruby said. “My brain bothers me. When I can’t sleep, I—”

  “Are you having the dream again?”

  Ruby froze. She honestly hadn’t thought her mother would bring up the nightmare. When they’d first discussed it, Mrs. Valentine had gone completely white. Considering all the girls in the family had milky-pale skin, it was a sight to behold. Ruby had watched her mother transform into a ghost, and it scared her more than she would ever admit. Ruby wasn’t scared of life, and she wasn’t scared of death, but she was scared of ghosts.

  She had good reason to be scared.

  “I was just lying there, trying to fall asleep,” she began. “But I kept thinking about the dream, and trying not to think about it, and that only made it worse.” Ruby lowered her head. If she came on too strong, she’d have to go back to that psychiatrist. But if she didn’t come on strong enough, her mother wouldn’t let her into the safe.

  “I only need one pill,” she promised. “I can bring up the bottle, and you can count—”

  “Don’t bring it,” her mother said. “I have to trust you with it. That’s the point.”

  Ruby nodded. Now give me the code, she thought, sniffling softly. Reminding her mother that she was a young, innocent girl. Not a survivor, oh no. Just a child who needed her mom.

  Mrs. Valentine smiled, lifting a hand to Ruby’s cheek. “Three-eleven-nineteen,” she said, and Ruby exhaled, replying, “Thank you. Last one.” She rose to her feet. It took all the restraint in her body to keep her movements fluid and slow. She wanted to flee. To get the hell out of there before her mother changed her mind and ruined everything.

  Twenty seconds later, she stood before the basement door. It opened with a twist of the knob, unleashing a torrent of dust onto her head. The basement was off-limits to the younger girls, who could trip and crack their heads open on the stairs. They could get lost in the labyrinth of boxes or get nibbled by mice. It really wasn’t worth it for them to come down here. But Ruby liked being in the one place in the entire house where nobody would follow her, tug on her sleeve, or fill up the silence. Even cold, even dark, it was pleasant.

  It was her sanctuary.

  Then, with the simple pulling of a string, the light came on and the room became what it really was: a basement. A wasteland of discarded clothes and decapitated toys and small puddles of water that no one could trace to a source. On the far wall, there was a bookshelf her father had built, which had once held the family photo albums, but now the shelves stood empty.

  Ruby tore her eyes away from it, blinking back tears.

  She would not cry for real. Tears were for the stage, and for her mother, in times of desperation. Tonight, she desperately needed to get into the safe. As she neared the small, black rectangle, chills raced through her body.

  She knelt and turned the dial. Three. Eleven. Nineteen. The little safe clicked, and Ruby yanked open the door, pulling an object out of the darkness. It was heavier than she expected, and cold.

  After Ruby’s father had disappeared, Mrs. Valentine had invested in two items: a bottle of sleeping pills and a revolver she’d found in the back room of an antique shop. But while the pills were a prescription for Ruby (and thus, had spent their first few months on her bedside table), the revolver had taken up residence in the basement safe. Several refills later, Mrs. Valentine had locked the pills away as well, insisting on monitoring her daughter’s drug intake.

  Now, two years after their family had been fractured, Ruby had almost forgotten about the pills. She hadn’t forgotten about the revolver. She traced her finger along the curve of the weapon, keeping the barrel pointed away from her. She knew how dangerous it was. She’d taken a class on gun safety after her father disappeared and her mother got paranoid about men kidnapping her daughters. According to Mrs. Valentine, men could kidnap you at any moment. Walking to school in the sun. Sleeping in your bed at night. And while Ruby knew these things happened, she was much more frightened of her sisters stumbling onto the revolver and thinking it was a toy. She’d convinced her mother to purchase the safe that week, to keep the weapon locked away in a place they could reach if they needed to without risking the safety of her sisters. And so the gun had rested, hidden in the darkness and collecting dust, more a symbol than a weapon.

  Until now.

  The safety was on. Ruby made sure of it, before she slipped the gun beneath the folds of her robe. Closing the safe with a clang, she spun the dial. She knew her mother wouldn’t come down the stairs that night. She wouldn’t check the bottle of pills to make sure her daughter hadn’t taken too many. Over the past year, Ruby had earned back her trust. And now, with the revolver pressed agains
t her hip, Ruby would cash in on that trust.

  No one would suspect a thing.

  She climbed the stairs on soft feet, stopping behind the couch to kiss her mother’s cheek. Then she kissed each of her sisters, one by one, before hurrying down the hall. Once she’d closed the door to her bedroom, she slid the weapon into her red sequined purse.

  It was part of her costume. The purse had arrived in the mail yesterday, along with the dress, the gloves, and the shoes. Everything matched. Even her lipstick would match, once she had a minute to put it on. But first, she threw off her robe and tucked it under the comforter, making it look like a body was sleeping there. It was an amateur illusion, and it wouldn’t fool most parents, but Mrs. Valentine lived in a kind of blur. She’d lost herself, completely faded into nothing when Ruby’s father had disappeared, and while she’d been getting herself back day by day, she was a long way from solid.

  Ruby was banking on that. She was also banking on the fact that nobody would disturb her if they thought she was sleeping. Charlotte had learned her lesson two years earlier, when she’d gone racing across the room at the sound of Ruby’s screams. She’d tried to wake her sister, and Ruby had thrashed about so terribly, poor Charlotte had been hurled to the floor.

  Ruby felt guilty about it, even now. After their father had disappeared, the bruised arms and legs were supposed to go away. Those little girls were never supposed to worry about being tossed aside, so carelessly, like they weighed nothing at all. Ruby had asked for the sleeping pills that night, hoping they would make her limbs so heavy, she couldn’t hurt anyone again.

  It hadn’t really been about eliminating the nightmare.

  The nightmare was vivid. It always started the same, with Ruby sitting up in bed. She’d think she was coming awake, and then the humming would start. Soft and low, the pretty tremble of a baritone.

  “Daddy?” Ruby would whisper.

  First came the fingers, curling around the slightly open door. Then a face would appear, framed in shaggy ginger hair. Soft brown eyes. Smiling eyes.

  “Daddy?” Ruby would ask again.

  It was a foolish question. Of course it was him. Even with maggots falling from his eye sockets. Even with skin so pale, it was impossible to believe he was alive. And yet, he pushed the door open farther, stumbling on limbs that were starting to decay. Sometimes a bone snapped and he fell to his knees. But still, he would get to her.

  Walk, stumble, or crawl.

  “I didn’t do anything!” she’d tell him. It was what she’d always told him before, when those bright, twinkling eyes became hooded in shadow.

  “You’re a liar,” he would say. “You know what happens to liars.”

  Ruby did. She had known since she was a little girl and could still hide inside crawl spaces and under beds. She had known later on, when she’d taught her sisters the same tricks. And when she was fully grown and fully incapable of escaping him, he’d loom over her, and his hand would lash out. Grip her collar or her face. In the dream, his fingernails would dig into her cheeks, threatening to tear her apart. She’d look down and see dirt covering the floor. She’d look up and see trees surrounding her bed. And she’d realize this wasn’t her room anymore.

  It was her grave.

  The scream would tear out of her, a wild and anguished thing. But nobody would come to her aid. Nobody could hear her, until that one night, when Charlotte came racing across the room, shaking Ruby awake. Charlotte had saved her from him, and Charlotte had paid the price.

  Then Ruby got ahold of the sleeping pills, and the nightmare softened around the edges. Now, two years after the fact, it had almost faded away. But as Ruby stared at herself in the mirror, her skin drained of all color, she had the most terrible premonition of standing at her own funeral, trying to convince people she wasn’t dead.

  “He isn’t dead,” her mother had promised, the one time Ruby had divulged the contents of her dream. “He left us, Ruby. He didn’t die.”

  Ruby had nodded, keeping her thoughts to herself. Alive, her father could return to the family. Turn over a new leaf, or lose it completely. Ruby was ready to be done. Done with missing him, and with hating him.

  And maybe she could be. Maybe tonight was the beginning of the end. She would go to the party, solve the mystery, and leave everything behind. This town. Its dirty little secrets.

  All the memories of terror and elation.

  A clean slate, Ruby thought, tucking her phone into her purse. The screen was lighting up, informing her that her ride was here. She couldn’t exactly drive off in her own car. Her mother would notice that.

  And so, she rolled back her shoulders, telling herself it was only a short drive. She didn’t even have to speak to the driver. Ruby flicked off the light. Pulling on her shoes, gloves, and purse, she climbed out her first-story window and disappeared into the night.

  3.

  GOLDEN BOY

  Parker Addison could not believe his good luck. Ruby Valentine was climbing into his car. His Ruby, the girl he’d lost his virginity to. The girl who owned his heart. One year ago, she’d slipped out of his grasp.

  Tonight he was going to win her back.

  Parker shifted the rearview mirror, checking his reflection for the fiftieth time. His suit was a deep forest green that made his emerald eyes pop, and his blond hair was perfectly tousled. Touchable. Just the way Ruby liked it. But he didn’t try to kiss her, not yet. Didn’t put a hand on her knee. He would play this right, and she would fall back into his arms.

  Beside him, Ruby sighed.

  “What’s wrong, babe?” The word slipped out of his mouth. No other name would’ve felt quite right. Still, to remedy the mistake, he added, “You look hot, by the way.”

  Ruby snorted, looking out the window. “Just drive.”

  Parker’s skin flushed as he pulled onto the road. “Damn it, Ruby, why won’t you give me a chance?”

  “To do what? Go back in time? Become a different person?” She wouldn’t even look at him, and that was worse than the snarling. Worse than the laughter. If she’d look at him, she’d remember why she loved him, and all of this would be different. They could stop pretending they weren’t meant for each other.

  As Parker sped down the street, his eye caught on every restaurant they’d gone to, every movie theater they’d made out in. But Fallen Oaks was filled with generic chain restaurants stuffed between mini malls. He couldn’t exactly point to the Dairy Queen and conjure up some romantic memory.

  Still, a memory came to mind as they passed the parking lot of a run-down thrift shop, and Parker tapped the window, drawing Ruby’s attention. “Remember that Halloween, sophomore year? You were heading into the shop with Juniper Torres—”

  “I remember,” Ruby said softly. She wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t scowling, either. It was a start.

  “You were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.”

  “You’d seen me before.”

  “I know,” Parker said. “But every time was like the first.”

  Ruby looked down. He wanted to crawl into her mind and read her thoughts. He almost reached for her hand. Instead he peered out the window, thinking back to that night.

  It had been after sunset. Parker had been waiting for a while. He’d heard the girls talking at school, plotting to meet at the thrift shop after dinner, so he’d driven over to the strip mall around five thirty and waited in his car. When the girls finally arrived (almost an hour after he did) he was psyching himself up, listening to 102.5 The Rock at full blast, practicing what he was going to say.

  I love you was far too much.

  I want you would never go over well with a girl like Ruby.

  I need you would make him sound clingy, and Ruby would laugh.

  But he did need her. He wanted her desperately. And he’d loved her for longer than he could remember.

  Parker climbed out of the car. The girls were crossing the parking lot, chattering as they neared the thrift store. He knew, based on sn
ippets of their conversation at lunch, that they were going as zombie versions of Romeo and Juliet for Halloween. Beyond that, Parker didn’t really care. It was enough to know that every douchebag in town wouldn’t be catching flashes of Ruby’s behind. Her pale, curvaceous thighs. The breasts that kept bouncing, even when she stopped.

  Parker was halfway across the parking lot when he heard the voice. High and nasally, it hit him at his back, and his entire body tensed. “Yeah, she has great tits, but her family’s trash.”

  Parker turned, his hands balled into fists. There, hovering by some garbage cans, was a group of scrawny freshmen with vampire-pale skin. The one in the center was leering at Ruby.

  Parker didn’t even think. He just stalked over to the kid and picked him up by the collar. Tossed him into the row of trash cans like he weighed nothing. The rest of the assholes scattered, and Parker wiped his hands on his pants. When he walked over to Ruby, she was staring at him like he was the sun and she’d been living in darkness. She lifted his hand and placed it on her chest.

  “Do you feel that?” she asked, her heart beating into his skin. Racing, like she’d run a marathon. “It’s beating for you.”

  That was it. He was hers and she was his. Now, as the parking lot disappeared in the distance, Parker asked her if she remembered how she’d felt that day. The heat between them.

  “It was warm for October,” she said, and his guts clenched. But after a minute, she added, “It was like something out of a story. You came for me, and you fought for me. Nobody’d ever fought for me before.”

  Parker nodded, feeling like something had shifted between them. “It’s definitely not anything your shithead father would’ve done,” he said, reminding her that he wasn’t like the rest. Reminding her that he was better.

  “No, he would’ve been more likely to fight with me.” Ruby cringed. “The man loved to argue.”