The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett

by Chelsea Sedoti

  He added some paint to the white parts of my paper. “Growth comes from questioning our own hearts. But unrelenting self-doubt can lead you astray.”

  I wasn’t sure that qualified as an answer. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Your perception of the world is your own. No one can take it from you. Don’t let fear overwhelm what you know to be real.”

  I thought of Lizzie in the woods, howling at the full moon, learning how to be a werewolf.

  “But what if I’m wrong about what I think is real?”

  “If you believe it, then it can’t be wrong.”

  “Thanks for the advice.” I pushed my piece of paper toward Sundog. “You finish it.”

  On my way into the house, I passed Timothy Leary curled up in a patch of sunlight. I patted her on the head, forgetting the paint on my hand. She craned her neck toward me for more affection. She didn’t mind the streaks of color I’d left on her fur. Unlike me, she didn’t see it as a mess.

  Chapter 20

  Day Thirty-Seven

  I was at the sink washing my hands when Mychelle Adler left a bathroom stall, which I thought was pretty awful timing, especially first thing on Monday morning.

  “Well, look who it is,” Mychelle said. “I’m glad you’re not still feeling under the weather.”

  “And I’m glad you were so concerned about my health.”

  I finished rinsing my hands quickly so I could get out of there, but Mychelle stepped between me and the paper towels.

  “What were you doing at that party? Besides getting sloppy and embarrassing yourself, I mean.”

  I’d had enough of Mychelle. I was sick of her ruining my days. I was sick of having to dodge her because I didn’t know what she’d say and how much it might hurt my feelings. What made her think it was OK to be so horrible to people?

  “Wow,” I snapped. “I’m being called sloppy by a girl who’s gotten wasted at parties and spread her legs for half the football team since eighth grade.”

  Mychelle looked like I’d slapped her. She took a step toward me, and I took a step back.

  “If you want to have a cat fight, wash your hands first. You just came from the toilet, and you’ve already spread enough diseases to the senior class.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that,” Mychelle said, but she didn’t step any closer.

  “No. It’s the other way around. I’ve spent four years avoiding you in the halls because you only feel good about yourself when you make bitchy remarks to me. But guess what? I don’t care anymore. The difference between me and you is that I don’t have anything to lose. So say whatever you want to. Just know that you’ll be getting a response.”

  For a moment, the bathroom was dead silent. Then Mychelle said, “Go to hell, Hawthorn.”

  I laughed. “I’m already in hell. Welcome to Griffin Mills High School.”

  I pushed past Mychelle and out into the hallway. For a Monday morning, I was feeling pretty OK.

  • • •

  The feeling only lasted until lunchtime. Up until then, I was so busy replaying my victory over Mychelle that I didn’t worry that people were making fun of me for throwing up at the party. I didn’t even care about all of the stuff I was hearing about homecoming, because everyone was just concerned with what they were going to wear and where’d they’d have after-parties, and no one was thinking about how I was a loser because I didn’t have a date. Maybe. Probably.

  My good mood disappeared at lunch when Emily didn’t show up behind the gym.

  I ate my food slowly, thinking maybe she was late because she got caught talking to her third period teacher or something. It had happened before. But when my food was gone and lunch period was halfway over, I was pretty sure Emily wasn’t going to show.

  I gathered my stuff and went to the library. Emily wasn’t there. I knew she’d never break the rules and leave campus for lunch, which meant she’d done the unthinkable—gone to the cafeteria.

  Though I hadn’t been there for years, I worked up the nerve to step inside. Sure enough, Emily was sitting at a table with Logan and his musician friends.

  I knew I should leave. Emily had made her point. But didn’t I deserve an explanation? Couldn’t she have given me some warning before deciding to end our tradition of eating behind the gym?

  I walked over to the table. Emily was in the middle of a conversation with a girl who had pink-and-green hair. She didn’t even notice me.

  “Hey. Can I talk to you?”

  She looked up with a guilty expression, which somehow made the whole situation worse. “Can it wait until later?”

  “No,” I said, hopefully sounding more firm than I felt.

  Emily excused herself from the table and followed me to the side of the cafeteria, where we were mostly out of everyone’s earshot.

  “So you’re just ditching me at lunch now?” I blurted.

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Oh?”

  “Look,” Emily said. She twirled her necklace around one finger. She bit her lip. “I just think we could use a little space from each other. Just for a little while.”

  My stomach dropped. “Why?”

  “I meant what I said the other night. I feel like our friendship is always about you. You decide what we do and what we talk about and who we dislike. I’ve spent most of my life being forced to participate in schemes I don’t want any part of.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like when you thought the world was going to end and wanted me to steal supplies from my parents’ store.”

  Oh yeah.

  “Or when you were convinced that there was a serpent monster in Tappan Lake.”

  “I was a little kid,” I protested.

  “You were twelve. And that’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  “That I’m not like you, and you can’t accept that. You want me to help you on your missions and listen to your thoughts, never stopping to think that maybe I have my own.”

  I could feel my face burning, though I couldn’t tell if it was from anger or shame. “I never meant for it to be like that.”

  “I know you didn’t. It probably never even occurred to you. That’s the problem, Hawthorn.”

  “So, are we just not friends anymore?” I sounded pitiful. I felt pitiful. “Is this, like, a breakup?”

  “We’ll always be friends. I just need some space.”

  “OK,” I said. It wasn’t OK though. It was one of the most un-OK things that had ever happened to me.

  Emily hugged me and walked back to her seat next to Logan. I left the cafeteria and pretty much decided I never wanted to go back there.

  • • •

  After school, I knocked on the door to Enzo’s apartment and shifted back and forth, waiting for him to answer. I started to think he wasn’t home, but then the door swung open.

  “Hawthorn. Hey.”

  “Can I come in?”

  A record was playing loudly. A man with a deep voice sang about love tearing people apart. Enzo turned the music down, and the lyrics became a whisper.

  My eyes went from him to an easel that was set up in the corner. It was turned so I couldn’t see the canvas.

  “Are you painting again?” I asked.

  “Trying.”

  “Can I look?”

  “Not until it’s done.” Enzo pulled his tobacco from his pocket and rolled a cigarette. I wandered over to the bed and sat down.

  “Were you ever going to call me again?”

  “What?” Enzo asked with a half laugh.

  “You ditched me at the party. It annoyed me. So I decided not to call you.”

  “What are you doing here then?”

  “Don’t tease me.” I pulled my legs up to my chest and wrapped my arms around
them. “I needed a friend and didn’t want to wait for you to call me. Which is why I’m wondering if you ever would have.”

  Enzo took a deep drag from his cigarette and exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. “Don’t make our friendship like that. There don’t need to be rules.”

  “Can I have a cigarette?” I’d never smoked before, but at that moment, I wanted to feel like someone other than me.

  Enzo raised his eyebrows and passed me his cigarette instead. I took a drag. I could feel the burn all the way down my throat, like inhaling sandpaper. But I didn’t cough, so that was something.

  Enzo sat on the bed and put an ashtray between us. “I would have called.”

  “Good.”

  We passed the cigarette back and forth in silence. I listened to the music. A new song started, just as depressing as the last.

  “Saturday was the full moon,” I told Enzo.

  “I know,” he said.

  “We should probably check the woods. There might be some new clues.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  And just like that, we were OK again.

  Chapter 21

  Welcome, October

  Leaves turned gold and orange and red. The air was crisp. All over the Mills, people started to prepare for Halloween. Candy appeared in stores, cheesecloth ghosts hung from trees, and scarecrows stood sentry in front yards. The pumpkin patch was open for picking, and you could get apple cider there, fresh from the press.

  The thing about October is that it makes everyone want to believe in magic. Sure, it’s the spooky kind of magic, but it’s better than nothing. And with everyone planning their costumes, it was one of the few times a year I felt like I fit in. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to be someone else.

  I guess Christmas is a magical time too, maybe even more magical, but it comes with all kinds of pressure. You have to be cheerful and jolly and spend time with your family. And then there’s Christmas shopping. Not only is the act itself torture, but in the end, you have to come up with a super awesome present that’ll wow the recipient, and I’ve always been really bad at that. Like the time I got Rush a video called Overcoming Illiteracy, which I thought was really considerate. He disagreed. But it was better than what he got me that year, which was nothing at all.

  Halloween doesn’t have any strings attached. It’s a holiday for hanging out and eating candy and playing pretend. It was the kind of holiday I could get behind.

  My mom claimed she celebrated Samhain, not Halloween. It was some kind of Celtic harvest festival or something.

  “Halloween started as Samhain, Hawthorn,” my mom said in early October as she put out decorations.

  I raised my eyebrows. “So plastic skeletons were part of Samhain?”

  “I have to make do with what’s available,” she said.

  As much as my mom wanted to keep up her New Age facade, the truth was, she loved the Halloween season as much as I did. And if she wanted to call it Samhain, I didn’t mind. It was actually pretty cool—the night the boundary between the worlds gets thinner. I was certainly on board with that.

  I was also on board with my mom’s pumpkin pies. They were made with soy milk, of course, but you almost couldn’t tell. I was just happy to have sweets in the house that I didn’t have to smuggle in.

  The hippies didn’t celebrate Halloween or Samhain, but they also didn’t turn down the pie I took out to their bonfire. I sat down with them and tried to get them to tell ghost stories while they ate. They made an effort but always brought it back to astral projection or past lives, which was not really in the spirit of the season. I wanted stories about vengeful ghosts and witches who ate little kids and creatures that lurked in the dark—the kind of stories that scared me so much, they couldn’t help but make me feel alive.

  “Tell scarier stories,” I urged the hippies.

  “Why this fascination with darkness?” Sundog asked.

  I shrugged. “The world is dark.”

  “The world is whatever you want it to be.”

  • • •

  “Tell me a scary story,” I said to Enzo.

  “Real or fake?”

  “Real.”

  It was just before dusk, and we were walking through the woods. It was cold and windy and felt like the start of a horror movie. I loved it.

  “Have you ever heard of the brazen bull?” Enzo asked.

  “No. But it doesn’t sound scary.”

  “Give me a chance, kid.” He stopped to light a cigarette, using his body to block the wind. “It was invented in ancient Greece. A hollow bull, made out of bronze. For kicks, they’d lock people inside and light a fire under them. The person would roast to death, obviously. The creepiest part is, there were tubes inside that turned the person’s screams into bull sounds. So these rich assholes would be gathered at a party, and there’d be this bull statue making noises, and everyone would act like it was entertainment, not the sound of someone being tortured.”

  “OK, you win. That’s terrifying.”

  “Wanna know something else?” Enzo grinned. “The guy who invented it was the first person roasted inside.”

  “My mom would call that karma,” I said.

  • • •

  There were no more official searches for Lizzie, just small ones organized by her family. There were no more articles in the paper. No one at school whispered theories about where she’d gone.

  “Why’d you stop caring about Lizzie?” I asked Rush.

  He was standing at the counter, eating a bowl of cereal. The spoon stopped halfway to his mouth. He seemed thrown by the question, which made me wonder if maybe he hadn’t realized he’d stopped caring.

  “What? I still care.”

  “Not like you did when she first went missing.”

  Rush finished taking his bite and chewed for a long time. “I care. There’s just not much to talk about anymore. There’s no news. Nothing is changing.”

  “So out of sight, out of mind?”

  “What do you want me to say, Hawthorn? That you were right? That I was upset over a girl I didn’t know anymore, then realized I was stupid to care so much?”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “No. I just got over it.”

  It was so easy for Rush. Everything had always been easy for him.

  I wasn’t ready to get over Lizzie. Neither was Enzo. Everyone else might have given up hope, but we kept searching for her. We combed the woods and clipped articles from the newspaper and made lists of any information that might be relevant to the case.

  Pretty much, we spent all our free time together.

  • • •

  “She’s spending all her free time with him.”

  I stopped in my tracks. My dad was speaking. He and my mom were in the kitchen. If I’d been able to find my keys, I’d have already been on my way to Enzo’s and wouldn’t have overheard my parent’s conversation at all. I really needed to keep better track of my keys.

  “She needs a friend, James.”

  I crept closer to the kitchen door, unable to stop myself from listening in, even though I didn’t think I’d like what I heard.

  “There’s an entire high school of people she could be friends with” my dad said. “What happened to Emily?”

  “Rush says they had a fight.”

  My insides twisted with anger and embarrassment. I couldn’t believe how they were talking about my personal life. It was no one’s business but mine.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m just not comfortable with their relationship. What do we even know about him? Look what happened to his last girlfriend!”

  “She says they’re just friends.”

  “Off in the woods all the time, looking for werewolves. This is your daughter too, Sparrow. How can you sit there like this is normal?”


  Even my dad was calling me weird now.

  I’d heard enough. I stomped out of the house, slamming the door behind me. I hoped they noticed.

  • • •

  As the month progressed, I knew I faced a lot of Halloween parties I wouldn’t be invited to. I hadn’t been invited to a Halloween party since kids had moved from bobbing for apples to spin the bottle—at least, based on what I’d seen in movies, that’s what I imagined they were doing.

  I was also well aware that homecoming was the weekend before Halloween, which meant another chance for me to be pitifully dateless.

  Despite this, I didn’t feel like I was missing out. I didn’t need loud, obnoxious parties and dances packed with people I hated. I had Enzo. I had his dark, art-filled apartment where I could let down my guard and be myself. I had walks through the woods and werewolf lore, which was worth more than any high school event.

  We spent the middle of October watching werewolf movies on TV, making fun of the parts that had been badly edited to take out the gore and sex and cursing. We decided there was no such thing as a great werewolf movie. They always came out cheesy. My favorite was about a teenage girl werewolf, because it reminded me of Lizzie. Enzo’s favorite was the original The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney Jr. He thought all the old movies were better than any that had been made in the past twenty or thirty years.

  “There’s a magic to the old films that new movies can’t capture. The filmmakers try to hide it with special effects, but no one really buys it.”

  I disagreed. Movies were movies, whether they were old or new. They always captivated me, pulled me into worlds where anything was possible. Worlds where there were adventures and surprises, and life was never dull.

  The only thing I didn’t like about movies was when the credits rolled and returned me to real life. At least, that was how I used to feel. Leaving a movie world wasn’t so painful anymore. Spending time with Enzo made me realize anything could be an adventure if you looked at it the right way.

  One day, when the only horror movies playing were ones we’d already seen, Enzo let me watch a short film he’d made during his brief time in college. It was black and white and tried to imitate a French new wave film. Mostly, it depicted a little boy running through a cornfield with drums beating in the background.