The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett

by Chelsea Sedoti

  Someone coughed, that awkward sort of cough when you want to say something, but you have no idea what that something is.

  “Griffin Mills is a town that’s perpetually bored with itself but too stubborn to dry up. So instead of dying gracefully, it’s a slow, painful process, one that’s embarrassing to watch. Because Griffin Mills is dying, and the people who live here are dying with it.”

  I heard a few whispers. I was pretty sure they weren’t about my fantastic writing ability.

  I said the last lines in a rush. “Every story has a beginning, and every story has an end. The Mills has reached its epilogue.”

  If my life were a movie, I would’ve been all nervous about reading my paper, but I’d do it anyway. There would be a really dramatic pause at the end, an awkward silence, but then someone would start a slow clap, and the rest of the room would join in, and just like that, I’d go from being me to being someone who is brilliant and likable.

  My life isn’t a movie.

  A glance around the classroom was enough to determine my essay wasn’t going to do much for my popularity.

  Mike Jacobs, who’s the captain of the football team, said, “Nice, Hawthorn.”

  Some kids laughed.

  Jessica Massi raised her hand and, without waiting to be called on, said, “I thought we were supposed to write a history of Griffin Mills, not insult the whole town.”

  The kids around her nodded in agreement.

  I looked at Mr. Romano. Sympathy was written all over his face, as if he was just realizing he’d made a terrible mistake.

  “I think Hawthorn’s paper raises a lot of interesting points for us to discuss.”

  “Yeah, like how she’s pathetic.”

  I couldn’t tell where that last comment came from, but it didn’t matter. I retreated to my desk while Mr. Romano tried to regain control of the class.

  Emily leaned across the aisle. “It really was a good paper.”

  “It was stupid.”

  “No, they’re stupid.”

  She was right. They were stupid. But not so stupid that they’d write an essay like mine. So really, who was the biggest idiot?

  • • •

  I had my first shift at the Sunshine Café after school that day. Christa trained me. There wasn’t much to learn.

  “As long as you’re friendly, you’ll be fine,” she said.

  If that was the case, I was a long way from fine, but I didn’t tell her that.

  The same old man was at the same spot at the end of the lunch counter. Christa told me his name was Vernon and he was always there. Other than that, there were only two tables of people the entire night. It seemed like working at the Sunshine Café mostly meant sitting around.

  “So there’s no word on Lizzie Lovett, huh?” I asked, trying to sound causal.

  Christa was showing me how to work the coffee machine, as if it were complicated.

  “Nope. But her boyfriend was in here the other night.”

  “In the diner?”

  Christa nodded. “He used to come here while she was working. I didn’t expect he’d show up now.”

  “I saw his picture in the paper,” I said. “They looked sort of mismatched to me.”

  “I couldn’t say. I didn’t really know either of them.”

  “But you and Lizzie worked together for a while, right?”

  “That doesn’t mean you know someone,” Christa said. “Lizzie kept to herself.”

  “Did you like her?” I asked, wondering if I was pushing the conversation too far. Christa was going to think I had ulterior motives. Which I did.

  “We got along.”

  If I’d known her a little better, I would have told Christa that didn’t answer the question. Instead, I let her lead me from the coffeemaker to the closet where extra napkins and sugar packets were stored.

  A little later, Christa asked me to watch the diner while she called her boyfriend. There wasn’t much to watch, so I sat down next to Vernon. He was halfway through a word search.

  “Hi.”

  Vernon didn’t respond.

  “My name’s Hawthorn. I’m the new waitress. Lizzie’s replacement. Did you know her?”

  Still nothing.

  “This is my first shift. Which is sort of bad timing, because my day sucked.”

  Vernon still didn’t speak, but he made a harrumph sound, which I figured meant it was OK to continue.

  “I had to write this paper about Griffin Mills, and I wrote the truth, which is that the town is totally lame. I didn’t think anyone besides my teacher would ever read it.”

  Vernon found the word stellar and circled it.

  “They can’t all think the Mills is a great place to live. Can they?”

  Lizzie Lovett must not have thought so. She left after graduating. Though, admittedly, she didn’t get far. Only down the road to Layton and a job at the Sunshine Café. Where, apparently, her boyfriend Lorenzo would visit her sometimes.

  I wondered how much Lorenzo Calvetti loved Lizzie and if her turning into a werewolf would ruin his life forever.

  “Why didn’t you leave Layton, Vernon?”

  Vernon finally looked at me and said in a high, crackly, old man voice, “Did leave. Fer nearly thirty years. Din’t git far though. Come back in the end.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Cuz it’s no difference wheresabouts yinz live, girlie. Zak same trouble everywhere.”

  I sighed. “Well, that doesn’t give me much hope for the future.”

  “Hope? Wah good ya think hope gonna do?” Vernon said, then threw back his head and cackled.

  I laughed too. Because maybe, probably, it was a better response than I’d get from anyone else.

  I spent the rest of my first waitressing shift reading The Book of Werewolves by this guy named Sabine Baring-Gould. It was written a long time ago but is still considered one of the most important werewolf texts. Every once in a while, I jotted down notes in a composition book.

  “Is that something for school?” Christa asked.

  “Uh. Sort of.”

  “Looks like a lot of work.”

  It was. I didn’t mind though. I wished I could show my teachers and Emily and everyone else that I could apply myself. I just needed the right subject to come along. Werewolves seemed to be just my thing.

  Chapter 9

  Lorenzo Calvetti

  Sometimes, I thought I was really observant, like I saw all this stuff that other kids at school missed, like how ninety-five percent of what they cared about was actually totally pointless. Then there were other times when I missed something so super obvious that I wondered how observant I was after all.

  What happened was, on my fourth night working at the Sunshine Café, I walked right by Lorenzo Calvetti without noticing him.

  I spent so much time wondering about him, what he was going through, how he was dealing with having a missing girlfriend who was possibly dead but more probably a werewolf, that I had a whole picture of how I would meet him and what we would talk about. I thought of Lorenzo Calvetti only slightly less than I thought about Lizzie. But I still walked right by him.

  Christa was the one who pointed him out while I was putting on my apron in the kitchen. I’d gotten to work late, since my car keys had gone missing again.

  “Did you see who’s here?” she whispered, nodding toward the dining room.

  I glanced out the little window. Vernon was at his usual place, and a guy was sitting alone at a booth near the door. I shrugged at Christa, who was acting weird and flustered, like Adolf Hitler was out there chowing down on biscuits and honey butter.

  “That’s him,” Christa said. “Lizzie’s boyfriend.”

  I froze.

  “He probably killed her, and I’ve been bringing him coffee for the last
hour. That’s all he wants. Black coffee.”

  I looked out at the dining room again. Lorenzo Calvetti. Lizzie’s boyfriend. It was him in the booth. I’d only seen him twice, once in a newspaper picture and once from far away at the vigil. He looked even skinnier up close. His hair was greasy. His clothes looked slept in. But since he was maybe, probably, going through a really awful time, I figured I should cut him some slack. I shouldn’t expect him to look the way he did in the newspaper photo when Lizzie was snuggled up next to him. That picture had been taken when he was happy. When he had a girlfriend. When he didn’t have half the county pitying him, which was better than the other half, who thought he was a murderer.

  Christa moved closer to me, as if Lorenzo could hear us from across the diner. “He totally creeps me out.”

  “I’ll take over,” I said.

  I could tell Christa was relieved, which sort of made me feel good but sort of made me feel guilty, because Christa’s discomfort hadn’t inspired me to make the offer.

  “Really? You don’t mind? My shift is almost over anyway.”

  I told her that it really wasn’t a problem until she looked like she believed me. I just had to make a quick phone call first.

  • • •

  “Emily? You won’t believe who’s here,” I whispered.

  “Who’s where?”

  “At the café. I’m working.” I’d gone into Mr. Walczak’s office to make the call, because I’d forgotten to charge my cell phone again. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t mind, due to the obvious importance of the situation.

  “Is it Lizzie wondering why you stole her job?”

  Since when was Emily such a comedian?

  “This is serious, Em.” I was so anxious that I was practically bouncing. The conversation was taking too long, and if Lorenzo was gone by the time I got back, I was pretty sure my plan would be ruined.

  “OK, Hawthorn. Who’s there?”

  “Lorenzo Calvetti.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Lizzie’s boyfriend?”

  “Yep.”

  There was another pause. This one was longer. I was thinking Emily and I’d gotten disconnected, but she finally said, “Please think about what you’re doing.”

  “Well, I’m not going to walk up and tell him Lizzie’s a werewolf.”

  “I have no idea what you’re going to do, Hawthorn. That’s what worries me.”

  Her response was too sad to bear. Emily and I used to have adventures. We used to talk about our lives and all the possibilities, and the future seemed so amazing. Emily didn’t lecture me back then.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Wait. I didn’t mean to upset you. Just… This guy is grieving. You know that. This is serious for him.”

  “It’s serious for me too.” I hung up without waiting for her response.

  • • •

  “More coffee?”

  Lorenzo barely glanced up. “Sure.”

  I filled his mug, and my heart was pounding so hard that I was sure it would burst right out of my chest and cover half the restaurant in blood and gore. Which would remind Lorenzo of his potentially dismembered girlfriend, and he’d probably go home and commit suicide or something. Then all three of us would be dead, me and Lizzie and Lorenzo, and Emily would walk around telling people, “I told Hawthorn not to talk to him.”

  But that didn’t happen. I finished pouring the coffee. He didn’t say thank you. I was about to walk away. But that didn’t happen either.

  “Hey, you’re Lorenzo Calvetti, right?”

  He looked up. “Yeah.”

  “Your girlfriend is missing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That really sucks.”

  He didn’t say anything, just stared at me. His eyes were dark blue and bloodshot. He must not have been getting much sleep lately.

  I was getting uncomfortable and wondered if I’d said something totally inappropriate, which I guess wouldn’t have been unusual.

  “Look,” I said, “I didn’t mean to be weird or anything. I just thought I should say something, because it would be weirder to act all quiet around you so you’d wonder if I was, like, thinking you killed her, which I wasn’t. Well. Maybe a tiny bit. You didn’t kill her, did you?”

  He stared at me like I was an escaped mental patient, like I was the only one who’d straight-out asked him if he was a murderer.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t kill my girlfriend.”

  “Well. That’s good.”

  We stared at each other for another second, and there were so many important things I wanted to say, but I didn’t know how. So instead, I said, “Let me know if you need more coffee.”

  I started toward the kitchen.

  “Hey, wait,” Lorenzo called.

  I turned back to him.

  “It’s Enzo. My parents are the only ones who use my full name.”

  “Enzo. Got it.” I smiled and then scurried into the kitchen.

  • • •

  I paced back and forth in front of the stove, still carrying the coffee carafe. I didn’t know what I was doing. Emily was right. Everything about the situation was getting out of hand. Vinny, the cook, watched me with a bemused expression, which I didn’t really appreciate.

  Enzo. People called him Enzo. His friends called him Enzo. Was I a friend? Of course not. I didn’t even know him. Could I be his friend? Maybe. Did he kill his girlfriend? Certainly not.

  I peeked into the dining room. Enzo was hunched over his coffee mug again. He looked like the kind of guy who shopped at thrift stores and wrote poetry, which was considerably different from the kind of guy who dismembered beautiful young girls in the woods.

  But how did I know that? I didn’t. I hadn’t even known he went by a nickname until five minutes before. I’d spent so much time thinking about Lizzie and Enzo but hardly knew anything real about them. It had started to feel as if they only existed in my head. As if I’d made them up or could make them into anything I wanted them to be.

  Meeting Enzo changed everything.

  It was Mark Twain getting on a bus and sitting down next to Huck Finn. Or F. Scott Fitzgerald running into Jay Gatsby at the grocery store. It was meeting someone I invented and realizing I hadn’t actually invented him at all.

  For once, I wasn’t just pretending.

  Something interesting was really happening.

  Vinny pulled me out of my thoughts. “You got a crush or something?”

  “No,” I said with as much scorn as I could muster. “I don’t have a crush.”

  “What then? You’re blocking the grill.”

  “Oh, because we have so many customers putting in orders?” I moved to the other side of the kitchen anyway, because there was no point in arguing.

  Enzo. I’d met Enzo Calvetti, the guy with a missing girlfriend. But not a dead girlfriend. And for sure not a girlfriend he’d killed.

  I thought about the full moon and Wolf Creek and the two of them in the tent that night. Something had happened to Lizzie; that was for sure. And maybe Enzo had been there, but her disappearance wasn’t his fault. No matter what people called him, he wasn’t a murderer.

  Maybe he just had the bad luck of dating a werewolf.

  I could see Lizzie so clearly, rushing into a clearing, not knowing what was happening to her and being afraid but at the same time feeling more alive than ever before. She would have understood that she was finally becoming what she was always meant to be.

  I saw Lizzie tilt her head back to look at the swollen moon, saw her golden hair falling over her shoulders. Her lips pulled back to reveal her perfectly straight, white teeth starting to lengthen, and then the beautiful young girl snarled and fell to her knees as the snarl became a howl and her bones reshaped themselves.

  I wished I’d
been there to see it.

  When I looked at the dining room again, Lorenzo Calvetti was gone. Enzo, I corrected myself. I wished I’d had a chance to talk to him more, but it wasn’t too much of a concern. I was sure he’d be back.

  • • •

  I was sitting outside on the porch reading The Werewolf of Paris, which a lot of people consider to be the werewolf novel, when a car door slammed shut. There were muffled voices and shuffling sounds and then another door slam.

  It was around midnight, and the neighborhood was dark. I got off the swing and walked to the edge of the porch to see a shape emerging from the darkness. It was looming, too big to be a person, and moving in an inhuman way. It figured that just when something fascinating was finally happening in my life, a monster would come along and kill me, ruining everything. The monster drew closer and split in two, and I saw that it wasn’t a monster after all. Rather, two people, one leaning on the other for support.

  My brother was clearly very drunk, and Connor struggled to keep him upright. When they neared the house, Connor noticed me.

  “Thorny. What are you doing out here?”

  “I live here. Is he going to throw up?”

  “I don’t think so. He already lost most of his dinner in my car.”

  “Gross.”

  Connor half dragged Rush up the porch steps.

  “Where’d you park?” I asked.

  “Down the street. I didn’t want to wake up your parents.”

  I helped Connor dump Rush on the swing, where he instantly passed out. He reeked of beer and vomit, which was not a combination I enjoyed. Since my seat had been stolen, I sat at the top of the porch steps. Connor sat down next to me.

  “The Werewolf of Paris,” he said, pointing to the cover of my book. “Any good?”

  “Yeah. It’s pretty dark. There’s a lot of rape and incest and stuff.”

  “Sounds charming.” He paused. “I hear you’ve taken an interest in werewolves lately.”

  I winced. How many people had my brother been babbling to?