Three Truths and a Lie

by Brent Hartinger

  This is complicated, I thought.

  “Well, I agree with the part about her not shaving her legs very often,” Galen said. “That part’s definitely true.”

  “Fuck you,” Mia said, and Liam laughed.

  “Hold on,” I said to Mia. “Don’t you have one more?”

  Mia glanced toward the window in the kitchen. It was too dark to see anything outside now, so it was just this rectangle of blackness reflecting back the candles and lanterns inside the cabin. She took another swallow of beer and said, very quietly, “I think I killed someone when I was thirteen years old.”

  It sounded like—well, a drunken confession. Is that what it was? What had Mia said before? That you just had to listen if you wanted to know if something was true or not? This one sure sounded true.

  For a second, no one said anything. It was so quiet you could hear the trees dripping in the forest outside.

  “Are you kidding?” Liam asked.

  “Am I kidding that we’re playing Three Truths and a Lie, and I just said something that might be a truth and might be a lie?” She shook her head. “Fuck no!” Her demeanor had shifted again. Now she didn’t sound like she was making a confession. Now she sounded like she was playing a stupid party game, and she was getting impatient the rest of us weren’t playing along.

  But that didn’t change anything for Liam, Galen, and me. We all sat there. Outside, the trees continued to drip, but the dripping actually sounded slower now, even more sporadic than before. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that time itself had somehow slowed down.

  Could Mia really be telling the truth about the fact that she’d killed someone? Maybe it had slipped out because she’d been drinking. Or maybe this was another example of what Galen had pulled: saying something so incredible that it sounds like a lie, only to have it be true from a certain point of view. But how did you “kill” someone from a different point of view? “Someone” definitely implied it was a person. Was the loophole that she only thought she’d killed someone? But what difference would that make?

  “Um, can we ask a follow-up question?” Liam said.

  “Fuck no!” Mia said. “Come on, come on, make your guesses.” Now she sounded irritated.

  Outside, the dripping was faster again, like time was back to normal.

  “I think it’s the second one,” Galen said quietly. “Star Wars.”

  “You do?” I said, surprised. It’s not that this was such an incredibly unlikely lie for Mia to tell. It’s that if number two was a lie, that meant he thought number four had to be true.

  Galen winked at me. “Nah! I think it’s number four.”

  It was my turn to guess, but I didn’t know what to say. I could say anything and Mia would have to tell us the truth, if the last one was a lie or not. But I guess some part of me wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “The fourth one,” I said quickly. “That’s the lie.” Mia was simply a good actor, and she’d been setting us up with everything she’d said before.

  Naturally, Liam nodded, agreeing with me.

  What does it mean when you say there’s a “pregnant” pause? When there’s a pause full of anticipation and expectation, right? That’s what this was.

  Mia wiped her lips.

  Then she burst out laughing. “Oh my God, you should see you guys’ faces! You really think I killed someone! Of course that’s the fucking lie!”

  I felt stupid. Mia had tricked us.

  Or had she? If the point was to get us to think a lie was the truth, it hadn’t worked; not a single one of us had gone for it. Unless that’s not what she’d been doing. Maybe it had been a genuine drunken confession. Or maybe she had some deeper agenda. Maybe this whole dumb party game was some kind of mind game, like Galen teasing Liam out by the lake.

  Liam had some fun friends, huh?

  I scanned the room. Everyone was smiling except me. Galen twisted open another beer. Liam’s admiration for Mia was obvious on his face.

  “How could you have never seen any Star Wars movies?” Galen asked.

  “It’s because my brother loves them so much,” Mia said. “I’m not watching them to piss him off.”

  “That sounds healthy,” Liam said.

  “Doesn’t it?” Mia said. “Okay, whose turn is it now? Liam?”

  I stood up and walked to the door again.

  “Hey, I have a Star Wars joke,” Galen said. “A guy walks into a droid bar and the bartender says, ‘We don’t serve your kind in here!’”

  Galen stared at us with a big grin on his face, but no one laughed.

  “It’s a joke,” Galen said.

  “I figured,” Mia said. “I don’t get it.”

  “Of course you don’t get it,” Galen said. “You’ve never seen Star Wars. It’s a line from the first movie. They go into the bar in Mos Eisley, and the bartender says about the droids, ‘We don’t serve their kind in here.’ Only this is a droid bar, so they say it about people. See?”

  “I guess,” Mia said, barely smiling.

  I opened the door and looked outside.

  “Did you get it?” Mia said to Liam.

  “Yeah,” Liam said. “I just didn’t think it was funny.” Liam finally had Galen on a hook and was determined to make him squirm.

  Standing at the open door, I said, “Ha! And you guys said there wasn’t anyone out here!”

  “Really?” Mia said. “Who’s there?”

  “Hey there!” I said, calling out into the yard. “Isn’t it kind of late to be going for a walk?” I turned to Mia and the others. “He looks friendly enough.”

  “Really?” Mia said, even as she and the others stood up to see who I was talking to.

  I stood aside as they gathered in the doorway. But a second later, everyone turned to me. They hadn’t seen anyone out in the darkness. There wasn’t anyone there.

  Confused, Mia said, “What’s going on?”

  It was finally my turn to smile mysteriously. “Nothing,” I said, mostly to Mia. “Just proving that maybe I’m not such a terrible liar after all.”

  6

  The sex with Liam that night was incredible.

  That’s too much information, isn’t it? Well, I already told you about the skinny-dipping. Besides, it ends up being kind of important to the story.

  At first I thought it was the fact that we had actual privacy for the first time since we’d started dating—or at least all the privacy that a sleeping loft allows. There was no way either my or Liam’s parents were going to walk in on us way out here at this cabin in the rain forest.

  But it was something else too. Something that’s embarrassing to admit.

  It was Galen. I kept remembering what he’d looked like naked down at the lake, or even with his jeans tugged partway down when he was doing that striptease. It didn’t take me long to realize that Liam was thinking about Galen too. It was something about how often he was closing his eyes, and how he would sometimes stop and listen to the noises Galen and Mia were making in the bedroom—the squeaking of their bed, Galen’s moans and grunts. Or maybe it was how passionate, even angry, Liam was. Somehow I knew he was totally pissed off at Galen even as he was also completely turned on by him. I know this should’ve upset or offended me, that he was thinking about someone other than me, but it didn’t. It turned me on. I don’t know if it’s ever this way in straight sex—I’ve never had straight sex—but there was some kind of weird, unspoken feedback loop going on between the two of us, the way we were both turned on by the same thing, this thing that wasn’t quite right. But we were giving in to it, surrendering to the mutual, wordless desire, which was pushing us both to greater and greater heights of urgency and passion.

  Before long, we were slick with sweat, and I couldn’t tell the difference between the pounding of Liam’s heartbeat and my own. But no matter what we did, no matter how we explored and used each other’s bodies, we couldn’t find satisfaction, at least not for long. We kept waking up and going at it all over again,
doing things we’d never done before, things I knew I’d be embarrassed about the next morning.

  That’s the one thing no one ever really tells you about sex. That it can sort of take you over. Most people say sex is healthy, that it’s part of what it means to be a human being, and that’s true. But there’s another side. Sometimes you can lose yourself, and afterward, it’s a little scary to realize you’re not the person you thought you were.

  • • •

  I woke up the next morning to the sound of pancakes sizzling and the smell of batter on a hot skillet.

  I groaned and rolled over, looking down from the sleeping loft. The cabin was so much brighter than the night before, even from just two windows—the one in the kitchen and one in the dining area directly under the sleeping loft. Only now did I realize there were no curtains.

  “Morning, asshole!” Mia said, looking up at me from the stove. She was the one making pancakes.

  How was it, I wondered, that she’d managed to fire up the stove and mix the batter, but it wasn’t until it had actually hit the skillet that I’d finally woken up? It was something about that particular sound and smell.

  Next to me in bed, Liam moaned, and I realized I was naked. I pulled the sheet and blanket up, trying to cover myself even though I knew Mia couldn’t see me all the way up in the loft.

  “What time is it?” Liam said, rubbing his face.

  “It’s morning,” Mia said. “Time has no meaning up at Moon Lake.” You’d never have known it from school, but Mia was apparently a morning person. Liam and I were not, even on those mornings when we hadn’t been up all night.

  “If time has no meaning,” Liam said, “you won’t mind if I go back to sleep for another three hours.” He rolled over toward the wall, taking most of the sheet and blanket with him. But I knew there was no going back to sleep for me now, not with the smell of those pancakes filling the cabin.

  “I know why you’re so tired,” Mia said.

  I blushed redder than I’d ever been. I knew I’d be embarrassed by what Liam and I had done the night before, but I hadn’t expected to be this embarrassed. How loud had we been anyway? We’d definitely gotten carried away at times. And if we’d been able to hear Mia and Galen, they’d probably been able to hear us too. But even if Mia had heard, she had no way of knowing what we’d both been thinking.

  “Where’s Galen?” I said, attempting to change the subject. But as soon as I said it, I realized I hadn’t really changed the subject at all.

  “He went to take a shit,” Mia said.

  Lovely, I thought. I hoped Liam had heard her say that. For some reason, I wanted him to realize how crude his best friend could be. But he’d already buried his head back under a pillow.

  I lay back, staring up at the ceiling. There were spiderwebs in the crannies, lots of them. We hadn’t gotten them all the day before, like I’d thought.

  A moment later, Galen came back inside and said, “We have a problem.”

  “You’re right,” Mia said. “I could swear I packed syrup.” Something else she’d forgotten.

  “Someone knocked over the outhouse.”

  “What?” Mia said.

  “Go look.”

  This was definitely something I wanted to see for myself. I pulled on my clothes and followed Mia out into the yard.

  It wasn’t raining now, but it had during the night. It must’ve been after Liam and I had finally fallen asleep. The ground was even soggier than before—now it was like walking on a wet sponge—and the road was muddier too. The sky was overcast, but not quite gray. You couldn’t tell if the rain clouds were coming or going.

  The outhouse was a total wreck. The whole thing had been pretty simple—hardly more than four wooden walls and a roof around a box with a toilet seat over a pit in the ground. The box with the seat on it was more or less intact. That was good, because at least it meant nothing had spilled. And we still had a bathroom of sorts.

  But the rest of it? It was a total mess, like a house after a tornado. The wood of the outhouse was really old, so when it had hit the ground, a lot of it had split and crumbled. That also meant there was no easy way of reassembling the thing.

  I sensed Liam standing behind me. He must’ve heard us talking and followed us out of the cabin. He was buttoning his pants.

  Mia stared at the wreckage. “Who would do this?” she said.

  “Last night,” I said. “Remember that cough I heard? I told you there was someone out here. I wasn’t lying about that.”

  “Hold on,” she said. “I used this thing hours after you heard that. Didn’t we all? Before we went to bed? It was fine then.”

  “Who’s to say the person kicked it over then,” I said. “Maybe they did it later. After we went to bed.”

  “So this person hung out in the middle of a rain forest for a couple of hours? At night? Waiting around until we knocked off so they could tip over our outhouse?”

  I guess she had a point, but did she have to be such a bitch about it?

  I was about to remind everyone about the missing phone when Liam said, “Who’s to say it was a person who knocked it over? Couldn’t it have been an animal? Like a bear.”

  A bear? I thought.

  “Why would a bear knock over an outhouse?” Mia said. But I could hear a note of concern in her voice.

  “Are there any tracks?” Liam asked.

  This seemed like a good question, but the only tracks I saw in the moss were from all of us, traipsing back and forth to the outhouse all night.

  Galen held up a couple of the rotten planks, trying to piece them together like a puzzle. “What if it wasn’t anyone or anything?” he said. “What if it fell over on its own?”

  “Why would it do that?” I asked.

  “Well, look at this wood,” Galen said. “How rotten it is. And all this moss on the roof.”

  “That’s a pretty big coincidence,” Liam said. “I mean, no one from Mia’s family comes out here for years, and then the weekend we do, the outhouse just happens to collapse?”

  Liam was still annoyed with Galen from the day before.

  But Galen didn’t seem to notice. “Maybe that’s what did it,” he said. “Maybe it was ready to go, and whoever shut the door last, that’s what made it finally topple over.”

  What Galen was saying made sense. Plus, it was a more comforting theory than mine, the one about someone lurking in the woods. It was also more comforting than the theory about the bear, something even Liam seemed to concede.

  So that was that. The Mystery of the Tipped-Over Outhouse had been solved. And for the time being, none of us gave it another thought.

  7

  “So what do we do up here?” Galen asked, back in the cabin, waiting for a fresh round of pancakes. The ones from before were stone cold now, but everyone says you need to toss the first few away anyway.

  “Here at the cabin?” Mia said. “All kinds of things.”

  “Like . . . ?”

  “Go fishing.”

  “We didn’t bring any equipment.”

  “Go swimming.”

  “Tried that. Froze our balls off.”

  “Go for a hike.”

  Even Galen couldn’t think of an objection to that.

  “There’s a really great view from the top of the hill on the other side of the lake,” Mia said. “The hike’s a bitch, but it’s worth it.”

  • • •

  It’s strange using an outhouse with no walls. You can’t help but feel really exposed. I guess it’s because you are really exposed. You’re about as vulnerable as a person can be.

  It was after breakfast, and we were all taking a turn at the outhouse, with everyone else sort of agreeing to wait inside the cabin. When it was my turn, I sat there looking around at the wreckage of the fallen walls, and I couldn’t help but wonder again if there really was someone up there in the woods with us. I thought I’d heard that cough outside the night before.

  Except I was just being an idiot. T
he only people I had to worry about were Mia or Galen sneaking up on me, and that seemed like too much even for them. I was freaking myself out again, the way I’d done in Marot.

  Later, the four of us set out for the trail Mia had talked about. The trailhead started just up the road from the cabin.

  “I’m surprised there are still trails up here,” I said. “Who would ever come this far in to go on a hike? And how would they get past that gate at the start of the logging road?”

  “It started out as a hiking trail, but now it’s probably an animal trail,” Mia said. “Deer and goats and elk. They use trails too, you know.”

  But once again, Mia had forgotten about the clear-cut. Five minutes into the trail, the rain forest fell away and we were standing right at the edge of it.

  “Fuck,” Mia said. “Well, that was stupid of me.”

  It was weird being so close to the clear-cut, having it be right in front of me. From a distance, it had looked like total devastation. Even from the car on the way in, these clear-cuts had looked like nothing but a wasteland of churned dirt and twisted stumps littered with the skeletons of long-dead branches.

  Closer now, I saw it wasn’t lifeless. There were little trees growing up around the stumps—saplings or seedlings, I’m not sure which, a foot or more high. They looked fresh and bright with lots of new spring growth on the tips of their branches. Meanwhile, the old stumps and branches were slowly rotting away. It made me happy, knowing a new forest was rising even as the old one faded away. After a while, you might not even know the clear-cut had happened at all, not unless you looked really closely or knew a lot about forests.

  It was almost enough to get me to forget what Mia had said during that stupid game the night before, about how she’d killed someone when she was thirteen. She’d said it was a lie, and it probably was—Mia trying to screw with us all—but it unsettled me even now.

  Galen started up the trail in front of us, right into the clear-cut. “Who cares if they cut down some trees?” he said. “Hey, the view will still be the view, right?”