The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett

by Chelsea Sedoti

  “But is it just because I hate Lizzie?” I asked.

  Emily Flynn, my best friend for the past million years, took a bite of her sandwich and got a serious look on her face—possibly because she was taking my situation super seriously, but probably because Emily looked serious most of the time.

  It was lunch period, and we were sitting on the stairs that lead to the back entrance of the gym, which is where we always eat. Lunch is when social interaction happens. Since the back staircase isn’t really the place to be seen, no one goes there much. Exactly why Emily and I like it.

  Emily still hadn’t commented, but I plowed on anyway. “I mean, at first, I thought I was just in a bad mood because it’s Monday and I’m tired and I’m the only person in the school who didn’t go to the dance—”

  “I didn’t go to the dance,” Emily interrupted.

  “But it’s not just that, is it?” I went on. “And it’s not just that I hate Lizzie. So why am I so bothered by this whole thing?”

  “Because you’re jealous.”

  For a second, I was too stunned to speak. “Because I’m what?”

  “Jealous. You’ve always been jealous of Lizzie,” Emily said, as if it was the simplest, most reasonable explanation in the world.

  Obviously, aliens must have abducted Emily and thought she was such a good specimen that they couldn’t bear to part with her, so they took her to their planet and put a pod person in her place.

  I was wondering how I might contact the mother ship about returning my friend to her earthly body when a new thought occurred to me. “I think what’s bothering me is that everyone is making such a big deal over nothing.”

  Emily tilted her head and looked at me strangely. “I don’t think a girl mysteriously disappearing is nothing.”

  “It’s nothing, because it’s Lizzie Lovett.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I opened a bag of potato chips, only briefly considering how disappointed my mom would be if she caught me consuming empty calories. She’d probably rather find me with drugs. “It’s like this, Em. Nothing bad will ever happen to a girl like Lizzie. The world doesn’t work that way. The biggest problem she’ll ever have is, I don’t know, whether to match her shoes to her eyeshadow.”

  “First of all, who matches their makeup to their outfit anymore?” Emily asked, wrinkling her nose and brushing nonexistent crumbs off her blouse. “And second, you’re saying what exactly? Some people live charmed lives, and nothing tragic can happen to them?”

  “I guess so.”

  “That’s really stupid.”

  I put another chip in my mouth and crunched loudly, knowing how much it bugged her. “It’s true though. Some people are just lucky.”

  “Let me guess. You think you’re one of the unlucky ones?” A smile pulled at the corner of Emily’s mouth, which I instantly resented.

  “No. That’s not what I’m saying. This isn’t about me.”

  Emily raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s not,” I insisted.

  Emily shrugged. “If you say so.”

  We ate in silence for a moment. Rather, I ate while Emily pulled strands of her hair in front of her eyes and examined the ends. As if she’d ever had a split end in her entire life.

  Eventually, I had to ask. “What do you think happened to her?”

  “I thought you didn’t care where Lizzie was.”

  I didn’t. Mostly. I smiled sheepishly at Emily. “Well, pretend for a minute I do.”

  “Maybe she got in a fight with her boyfriend and left. That’s what most people think.”

  “Poor guy,” I said.

  “Can we stop talking about Lizzie for a minute?”

  I put down my bag of chips. I could tell when Emily had something important to say. “Yeah, of course.”

  “I got a letter about that music composition program. I’m a finalist.”

  I’m not one of those girls who squeals and hugs her friends all the time, but in certain cases, I make exceptions. Emily laughed and hugged me back.

  “This is so exciting! Why didn’t you tell me right away?”

  “It’s not for sure yet. I’m only a finalist.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re going to get accepted. I know it.”

  “We’ll see. This is really big. It could help me get a jump start on the rest of my life.”

  I was glad one of us was thinking about the future.

  “This is awesome, Em. I’m really proud of you.”

  Emily smiled, and I could tell she was proud of herself too, even if she’d never in a million years admit it.

  “Do you want to come over after school?” I asked. “We can celebrate.”

  “There’s nothing to celebrate yet.”

  “Then we can watch the news reports about Lizzie and make up elaborate theories.”

  If Lizzie was even still missing by then.

  “I can’t. Piano lesson.”

  “Oh, right.” I was disappointed, even if the news probably wouldn’t have new information, and Emily wasn’t good at making up theories anyway.

  “You should come to the library with me after school tomorrow though. We have that report due on Friday.”

  The report on the Mills. I’d forgotten. “Yeah, I guess I should.”

  Then the bell rang, and lunch was over, and Emily and I gathered up our things. I wanted to say more, maybe something about how I was super happy about her music program but a little sad that we might not have one last summer together. And how maybe I was a little jealous of Lizzie Lovett and that I appreciated Emily not judging me because of it. And probably something about how she was a really good friend. Instead, I told Emily I’d see her in fifth period and went to my English composition class.

  • • •

  The first day Lizzie was missing, everyone talked about the disappearance without actually knowing the facts. By the time the final bell rang, I’d heard more about Lizzie Lovett than I had since we were in school together. Which I guess worked out, because no one talked to me about the dance.

  I walked home from school, because I hadn’t been able to find my car keys that morning. Also because my Volkswagen Rabbit was making huffing noises again. Someday, it’ll explode while I’m driving, and my mom will tell people, “I told Hawthorn not to get that old car. I told her we’d buy her something nicer like we did for her brother, but she just never listens,” and then the last thing people will ever think about me is that I’m stubborn and made stupid mistakes.

  I could have taken the school bus home, but I consider that a last resort. Being in a cramped space with lots of people who all have something to talk about with each other while you’re sitting there alone is totally awkward. Also, there are no seat belts on the bus, which has never made sense to me.

  Luckily, I don’t live far from Griffin Mills High School. In a place as small as the Mills, nothing is very far from anything else. Really, the town is just a bigger version of high school, which is just a bigger version of the bus. Lots of people packed together for their entire lives, all having things to do and people to talk to, and if you’re not a part of it, you feel totally broken.

  My family should have lived in Pittsburgh. My dad drives forty-five minutes to get there five days a week. Wouldn’t it be better to live closer to the place he worked? My parents were pretty opposed to the idea though. My mom had all this stuff to say about a “better quality of life” and whatnot. A better quality of life for her, I guess. Not for me. If I’d grown up in a big city, everything could have been different.

  Cities let you blend in. There are so many people that it doesn’t matter if you’re weird or if no one likes you, because there’s probably someone even worse off. And if you’re really lucky, you might even meet people who are weird in the exact same way you are and feel like you’ve fi
nally found a place where you fit in.

  There was no chance of that happening in Griffin Mills. I was convinced there was a secret factory somewhere in town, spitting out people from a mold. And I came out defective.

  But I only had one more year, and then I could go far away from the Mills. Not that I’d actually made any plans yet.

  The walk home mostly takes me through residential areas. The houses close to school are ancient—crumbling Victorians with wraparound porches and turrets that look out on the Ohio River. It used to be where the rich people lived, but that was a long time ago. The farther you go west, the newer the Mills gets. Then all of a sudden, the neighborhoods end, and there’s only dense woods and occasional farms.

  My house is near the edge of town. It’s a typical 1950s house, two stories with white siding and dark-blue trim. The street it’s on, the street I’ve lived on for my entire life, dead-ends in a patch of woods. There are no fences in my neighborhood, just trees separating one house from another. It makes the area seem more isolated than it is but not as isolated as one of those old farmhouses. Which is a good thing. I know what sort of stuff can happen at a lonely farmhouse in the middle of the night. I read In Cold Blood for freshman English.

  At home, I found my mom and Rush sitting in front of the TV, watching a local news station.

  “Anything new?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” my mom said. “The search party is still out.”

  I tossed my backpack on the floor and sat in an armchair, my legs dangling over the side. “She couldn’t have gotten that far. I mean, it’s not like we’re dealing with someone exceptionally bright.”

  “Hawthorn,” my mom said with her warning tone.

  “Lizzie’s mom is about to talk,” Rush said. He grabbed the remote and turned the volume up enough to drown me out.

  I hadn’t planned on watching the news with my family. I didn’t really want to spend my afternoon watching Lizzie Lovett’s mom cry on TV and ask for help finding her daughter, or wait for updates radioed in from the search party. But it’s not like I had much else going on. And besides, I was mildly curious.

  Chapter 3

  Freshman Year

  I couldn’t sleep that night, which is something that happens more often than I’d like. How it usually goes is I’m tired and lay down, but suddenly, my mind is racing, so I go over everything that happened during the day and all the ways it could have happened better than it actually did.

  On the first night Lizzie Lovett was missing, I gave up on sleep pretty fast. I got out of bed and climbed onto the bench in front of my window. There aren’t any streetlights in my neighborhood, but the moon was full, so I could see clearly. Not that anything was happening outside. Was everyone in all the other houses asleep, or did some of them have insomnia too? I bet Lizzie was sleeping like a baby, wherever she was.

  It was annoying, the way my thoughts kept returning to Lizzie. She had enough people obsessing over her. I didn’t need to add to the Lizzie worship. But the more I tried to push her out of my mind, the more impossible it became. Stuff I hadn’t thought about for years kept popping into my head.

  Like the first time I saw her.

  It was a pretty weird thing to remember, but I did. I was in sixth grade, and my parents forced me to go to one of Rush’s freshman football games. I thought it unfair, because he never had to attend any of my activities. But when I brought that up, Rush was like, “What am I supposed to do, sit there and watch you read?”

  At the game, Lizzie was cheerleading, and she wasn’t very good. Her jumps and tumbles were sloppy. Once, she forgot the entire second half of a cheer. But even though she sucked, everyone was watching her. You had to watch her. She was so pretty and loud and happy that it didn’t matter how much she screwed up. There wasn’t one other girl in the stadium who had as much charisma as Lizzie Lovett.

  The other cheerleaders were looking at each other instead of at the crowd, trying to stay in sync. Every time there was a break, a bunch of them pulled out compacts and checked their hair and makeup. They were so obviously worrying what people thought of them. What made Lizzie different was that she didn’t care. She was grinning and having fun. She was happy.

  Instead of paying attention to the game that night, my eyes were on Lizzie Lovett as she smiled and laughed and joked with her friends. And I wanted what she had. I wanted her charisma. I wanted to be that comfortable in my own skin. I wanted to have a high school experience that was as much fun as hers seemed to be.

  Clearly, we don’t always get what we wish for.

  Lizzie and I didn’t talk until a few years later, when I was a freshman. It was so early in the year that I still hadn’t memorized my locker combination—though I seemed to be the only one in school having that particular struggle.

  I also seemed to be the only person who had no friends.

  Everyone else was excited about being in high school and embarking on a new journey and all that, but I was pretty depressed. Not only because no one would talk to me, but because I was starting to realize being in high school didn’t actually make you any smarter or cooler than you were in eighth grade. You were the same person, just in a new environment where you didn’t know the rules.

  On the very worst day of my freshman year, I hid in the gym’s locker room during lunch period. I hadn’t expected anyone to be there. I certainly didn’t think Lizzie Lovett would be sitting on one of the benches, talking on her cell phone. But there she was.

  I instantly felt awkward, like I was interrupting a private moment. Which meant the polite thing would be to turn around and leave. Except I was already halfway down the bank of lockers when I noticed her, and running away would probably have made me seem even more awkward.

  So instead, I stood paralyzed in the middle of the room—which was probably the most awkward option of all.

  Lizzie glanced up at me. Our eyes met. I wanted to disappear.

  Instead, I forced myself to sit down on a bench and rifled through my backpack like I was looking for something.

  Even if I hadn’t gone to Rush’s football games, I would have known Lizzie. Every single person at Griffin Mills High School knew who she was. And now I was the weird freshman who invaded her space and eavesdropped on her conversations.

  “Well, I was planning on it,” Lizzie said into the phone. She sounded angry. I wondered who she was talking to. One of her many admirers, I guessed. They were probably fighting over something super incredibly important.

  “God, Mom, I know.”

  Or maybe not. It was weird to think of Lizzie Lovett doing something as ordinary as calling her mom during lunch.

  “OK, fine. Yeah. OK. Love you too. Bye.”

  Lizzie sighed deeply and tossed her phone into her purse. Of course she would carry a purse instead of a backpack.

  I was still pretending to dig through my own bag. It suddenly seemed oversized and childish. At least it wasn’t the Alice in Wonderland backpack I’d had the previous year, the one I thought was so cool until my brother made fun of it.

  “Aren’t you Rush Creely’s little sister?” Lizzie asked.

  It took me a moment to realize she was talking to me. Which was pretty absurd, because Rush only has one sister.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Lizzie nodded. I waited for her to say more. She didn’t. She didn’t get up to leave the locker room either.

  I wondered if I should start looking through my backpack again. Or say something about Rush. Or slink away while hoping she didn’t notice.

  “Sorry if I interrupted your call,” I finally said.

  “You didn’t. It wasn’t, like, private or anything.”

  “Oh. Cool.”

  Silence again. Why wasn’t she leaving? Was she waiting for me to leave?

  “What are you doing in here?” Lizzie asked.

  I figured I shoul
d make up some awesome and elaborate story that explained why I was in the locker room, rifling clumsily through my backpack. The reason would be really great, and the story would make me sound cool, and then Lizzie would respect me.

  “I’m sort of hiding,” I said instead.

  “From what?”

  “My friends.”

  Lizzie shrugged as if it wasn’t a big deal at all. She seemed vaguely bored. I wished she would stop looking at me, because her gaze made me feel like I was taking up all the space in the room, sucking up all the air.

  I looked down at my backpack. I looked at the locker room door. I looked at Lizzie, who was still looking at me.

  “I guess I kind of screwed up,” I said, because I had to say something. “My friend Amy had this thing happen…this thing with a teacher.”

  “Oh my God,” Lizzie said, her face lighting up. “You’re friends with the girl who was hooking up with Mr. Kaminski?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I was. Not anymore. I was sort of the one who spilled the beans.”

  “Really?” Lizzie scooted down the bench closer to me.

  “I didn’t mean to,” I said.

  I had no intention of telling Lizzie how I’d been pretty sure I saw Mr. Kaminski on a TV show about fugitives and thought he was the guy who bombed that bridge in Pennsylvania, and how when I saw Amy getting into his car, I assumed it was because he was trying to get her to join his rebel cause and go on a suicide mission or something.

  That was the only reason I’d called Amy’s mom to tell her about it. I hadn’t imagined Amy might be sleeping with him. Which, honestly, was maybe as disturbing as her becoming a suicide bomber, because Mr. Kaminski is not an attractive man.

  Later, after everything got crazy and the whole school was talking about the secret relationship, Emily asked me why, if I was sure Mr. Kaminski was a terrorist, I called Amy’s mom instead of the police. Which was a really good question. One I didn’t have an answer to.

  “I heard they started fooling around in, like, July or something,” Lizzie said.