Tell Me Lies

by Carola Lovering

  I told Lydia everything, and she said he was way too old for me and that I’d better be careful because if anything happened between us, Gabe could go to jail for statutory rape. I told her that was nuts—I wasn’t ready to have sex anyway—but I did want to kiss him. I wanted his hands all over me.

  One Thursday near the end of the summer, slate-colored clouds gathered in the sky halfway through my tennis lesson, and soon rain was pounding down in sheets. Gabe and I ran into the tennis hut for shelter.

  He turned to me. “Doesn’t look like the rain’s gonna stop, and it’s almost five. Maybe we should call it.”

  I nodded. Rain crashed on the roof above our heads in loud blasts.

  “Do you want to call your mom to come get you?”

  “She’s teaching Pilates till five. I’ll just wait here.”

  “I can drop you off, if you need a ride.” Gabe’s eyes flickered, cornflower blue.

  We climbed into his car, a navy Jeep. It was messy and littered with beef jerky wrappers, but it smelled like Gabe and I loved it. I buckled my seat belt and was so aware of myself, of just the two of us in the tiny, confined space of Gabe’s car.

  He asked where I lived and I told him, even though my house was only ten minutes from Cove Club and I wanted to make something up, some faraway address that would maximize our time together. Out of the corner of my eye I stared at Gabe’s cheek, which looked like it had just been shaved. The hairs on his arms stood on end as he used his strong, tan hand to shift the gears.

  “I want to learn to drive stick,” I said, breaking the silence.

  “Stick is the way to go. You can’t drive yet, can you?”

  “No. But I get my learner’s permit next summer.” I cringed at how young I sounded.

  “Ah.” The car accelerated, rain still pitter-pattering on the windshield. I was running out of time.

  “How old are you?” I asked, feeling suddenly gutsy.

  “Oh, man.” Gabe laughed. “Not answering that.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “I’m twenty-three, Lucy.”

  “I’m seventeen,” I lied, grinning.

  “No way. You’re Macy’s age. Which makes you . . . fourteen.”

  “A mature fourteen, though, don’t you think?”

  “This is your road.” Gabe pressed the brake, ignoring my question. “Where’s your place?”

  I pointed ahead to the green mailbox, number 34, and Gabe drove up the winding driveway and stopped in front of the house I’d lived in all my life, limestone nestled with blooming hydrangeas—CJ’s favorite.

  “Pretty spot,” he said.

  “Gabe.” I stared at him, overcome by something unbearable. I just liked saying his name. Gabe.

  “It’s not raining anymore.”

  “Thanks for driving me.”

  “Lucy,” he said, and chills prickled every inch of my skin as he took his index finger and lightly brushed it against my cheek. “You’re beautiful.” He said it slowly. I savored each syllable. I was floating. When a guy calls you beautiful, there’s nothing quite like it.

  I wanted him to kiss me so badly that I must’ve willed it to happen, because then he was leaning down and his pillow lips were touching mine, soft as a cloud, and in that same motion his hand moved up inside my shirt, under the elastic band of my double-A bra and over the buttons I had for breasts. But it didn’t last nearly as long as I craved, and all too quickly he pulled away, his breath shallow, something sorry flashing in his eyes.

  “I’m not really close with Macy,” I offered, panicky, half shaking. “We’ve never gone to the same school.”

  “Lucy, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have, you—you’re gorgeous, but—you’re so young.”

  Just then CJ’s Lexus pulled up, a crunch of gravel that jolted me alert as Gabe rolled down his window and our perfect moment evaporated. CJ climbed out of the car in her black spandex holding a bunch of shopping bags.

  “Hi, Mrs. Albright,” Gabe said, his voice rushed. “It poured rain so we had to cut the lesson short. Lucy needed a ride.”

  “Please, Gabe, call me CJ. It was raining buckets, no? I got soaked just walking to the car. Well, thank you, Gabe; that was super sweet of you to drop off Luce. Tell your parents I said hi, will you? I owe your mother a phone call.”

  “Of course.”

  CJ seemed to be waiting for me to get out of the car, and unwillingly I detangled myself from the air around Gabe. I told him I’d see him the following week.

  “Next Thursday is her last lesson,” CJ said. “Because we’re going to the Cape for ten days and then school starts. School! Can you believe it? The summer flies, every time.”

  But the next week Gabe didn’t show for our lesson; he’d called in sick that day, apparently, and I was stuck with another tennis instructor, named Hugh, who was short and bald and nothing like Gabe. I waited until after the lesson to run into the women’s locker room and burst into tears.

  High school started in the fall, and girls started getting boyfriends. There were lots of interlocking hands and tables of two in the cafeteria, but by then, the Unforgivable Thing had happened, and the relationships unfolding before me seemed dishonest and laced with betrayal, or the promise of betrayal. They were too easy, too carefree. I was sure of the inevitability of the pain they’d all cause; I felt it hot and deep in my bones.

  By the end of sophomore year enough of my friends had started having sex that I knew I wanted to do it, too. I didn’t want sex to get off—I’d figured out how to do that on my own, pressing that sweet spot, images of Gabe blurring my vision until the world fell away. It was easier with a vibrator, which I’d bought with my “edgy” friend Antonia at a sex shop in the city (I didn’t think Antonia was edgy, but Lydia and Helen said she was. Lydia and Helen would never buy vibrators).

  Still, I wanted real sex. Some boys liked me, but I didn’t like any of them back. Sometimes I hooked up with them, but usually I just thought about Gabe and wished that I could feel that again. I’d just about had it with myself when blond-haired, squash-playing Parker Lines asked me to the hayride junior fall. There was nothing wrong with Parker, no flaw that I could point out to Lydia and Helen other than the fact that I wished he were three inches taller. They told me I wouldn’t find anyone better to date in Cold Spring Harbor, and I couldn’t argue. I needed something. Antonia’s father had gotten a new job and they’d moved to Michigan at the beginning of the school year, so I was no longer spending weekends getting drunk with her. Parker was popular, attractive, athletic, and decently smart—all the good-on-paper stuff. I have no idea why he liked me so much, but by spring he was telling me he loved me, and I was saying it back, the words meaningless syllables gathering in my mouth.

  We slept together in April. I was ready, and it was underwhelming. It hurt less than I expected, but even after months it never felt like anything special; I knew I was doing it for the sake of doing it. I was going through the motions of having a serious boyfriend without really having one. CJ was over the moon. She loved Mrs. Lines—they played tennis together. She thought Parker was absolutely perfect and invited him over to our house for dinner more than I ever did.

  By senior winter I was so miserable with Parker that I could barely be around him. His touch had started to feel like a child molester’s. I wanted to break up with him before spring formal in May, but Helen persuaded me to wait until after because the pictures, Lucy! Think of the pictures.

  I had taken all the APs our high school offered and gotten good grades because it was easy enough, and if nothing else, I wanted to have choices. When my college decision came down to Baird outside Los Angeles and Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire, CJ offered to buy me a Range Rover if I chose the latter. I knew it was just because she wanted to increase the chances that I’d stay with Parker. He’d been accepted early-decision to play squash at Bowdoin. She said she thought he would have trouble with the distance—Maine and California “will be tough.” I wanted to laugh in her face
at the same time that I felt horrified. I didn’t even want a car. Dartmouth was ranked higher, but I just had to get out of the northeast, and I sent my acceptance to Baird the next day. When CJ threw a fit, I emphasized my interest in the smaller liberal arts environment and Baird’s esteemed English program, especially one course, called Writers on the Riviera: From Hemingway to Fitzgerald, taught abroad on a sailboat on the Mediterranean coast of France. The course was the main reason I’d applied to Baird; it was a six-week immersive study of Riviera-inspired literature, particularly that of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who both lived and wrote in the South of France. Spaces were competitive, but I’d get into the program if it killed me.

  On the evening of spring formal, my hands shook as I applied mascara. CJ had bought me this beautiful, expensive dress—the cream-colored Shoshanna one that I wanted—and I could barely step into it, my whole body was teetering with dread. Parker would arrive in thirty minutes to pick me up. We would go to the Montgomerys’ for pictures and sips of champagne, and then we would spend all night together, dancing and eating cake, followed by an after party at Kelsey Nelson’s, followed by ten minutes of mechanical, clinical sex in whatever room we could find. The whole thing was a lie, a stage, a trap I’d been too insecure to avoid. And worst of all it was cruel to Parker—my friend turned boyfriend who now filled me with disgust. All of it was unfair, and all of it was my fault.

  When the doorbell rang and I opened it to Parker, handsome in his tux, holding a corsage that perfectly matched my dress, I knew what I had to do. Except that in these situations my emotions have always been one step ahead of my logic, and so I just collapsed right there on the front stoop, my face breaking into a mess of tears and makeup. I told him everything I had rehearsed—that he didn’t deserve me, that it was my fault, that I was so sorry I felt sick. He still hated me, though. He didn’t understand why I was doing it then and there, leaving him high and dry the night of our senior spring formal.

  “The world doesn’t revolve around Lucy Albright, did you know that?” he spat. “You’re not that fucking special. I don’t understand one fucking thing that goes through your head.” It was a particularly harsh blow, because Parker never swore.

  I didn’t blame him. I didn’t understand me, either. I considered telling him about CJ and the Unforgivable Thing; I thought that it might help him get me. But I could never use the Unforgivable Thing to my advantage; I could never give it that kind of power. And regardless, I could never tell Parker. I had always known I could never tell him. I couldn’t tell anyone.

  And so I spent spring formal in a ball underneath my covers sobbing, Parker’s corsage wilting on top of the trash. I lay there feeling sorrier and sorrier for myself, wishing I could love Parker the way I’d loved Gabe, wondering what was wrong with my stupid, stupid heart. CJ was hysterical, of course, but I couldn’t make myself talk to her—I said only that Parker and I’d had a fight and I wasn’t going to formal.

  Ironically, my sister, Georgia, was the one who made me feel better that night. In the three and a half years since the Unforgivable Thing, Georgia and I had become strangers. But she was already home for the summer after her freshman year at Yale. She came into my room, sat down on my bed, and smoothed the back of my head. I peeked up to see a curtain of her blond hair, her flawless face. My perfect, premed, saving-the-world-one-African-baby-at-a-time sister.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” she said calmly.

  I told her. Georgia wasn’t frenetic like CJ, so it was easier to talk to her. I explained about Parker and how I’d felt about our relationship since day one, the pressures I’d let crush me.

  Georgia was quiet for a while. She’s one of those people who thinks carefully about what she’s going to say before she says it, so she always says the right thing.

  “Lucy, promise me something. Promise yourself something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t ever settle again. What’s the point? Everybody gets hurt. Besides, life is too short. Wait to find someone you’re really crazy about, even if it takes time. It’s just better that way.”

  I knew Georgia was right, though I wondered if she really took her own advice, or if love just came more easily for her, the way I wished it would for me. Georgia was a serial dater—her boyfriends were all serious, slightly boring intellectuals, and one always came right after the next.

  “I promise,” I told Georgia anyway, meaning it.

  That promise carried me through graduation. I clenched my teeth as I walked across the stage to accept my diploma and felt Mrs. Lines’s seething glare on me from somewhere in the crowd. I will not settle.

  Lying in my bed at Baird, I glanced out the window at the dark outline of the mountains. Even at night you could see that they were there, sustaining, enduring. I fingered the knotted fabric on Puff, my ratty, old half of a blanket and lifelong sleeping companion. Georgia has the other half. Puff was originally Georgia’s, but we both loved it so much that one day CJ just ripped it right in half so we could each have a piece. I cried at Puff’s mutilation, but Georgia didn’t—even as a four-year-old she calmly accepted CJ’s rationale.

  An unexpected wave of homesickness clobbered my chest, sinking down like a paperweight. I had the urge to call Georgia, to hear the composed, melodious rhythms of her voice—but then I had to remind myself that, in spite of that night we bonded over my breakup with Parker, we weren’t close anymore, that we hadn’t been for years, and that my calling at eleven on a Tuesday would be so unexpected she’d think something was seriously wrong.

  Suddenly my phone buzzed on my nightstand atop Anna Karenina, which we were reading for Professor Tittleman’s nineteenth-century Russian literature class.

  A 516 number flashed on the screen—the same as my home area code in New York.

  “Hello?”

  “Lucy.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Have you heard of the new sushi restaurant downtown, Sakamoto?”

  “No. Who is this?”

  “It’s supposed to be fantastic. Want to go tomorrow night?”

  “Who is this?”

  I sat up straighter in bed. Pale yellow moonlight filtered through the blinds, striping my sheets.

  “Oh, excuse me. This is Stephen DeMarco. We met at Lake Mead.”

  The Christian Bale guy. With the green eyes. Stephen was from Long Island, like me? My skin suddenly felt coated with electricity. I had been wondering about him ever since that last day at Mead, but not because I liked him. It was just curiosity.

  “Yes, Steve. I remember.”

  “Stephen. I don’t do Steve.”

  “Stephen. Sorry.”

  “You’re probably wondering how I got your number.”

  “I wasn’t, but now I am.”

  “Ha!” He laughed throatily on the other end of the line. There was a satisfaction in making him laugh.

  “How, then?”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow over sushi. How about it? The weather’s supposed to be gorgeous.”

  “The weather always seems to be gorgeous here.”

  “Valid point. Sunshine and palm trees and mountains, can’t hate it. Temps drop a little in the winter months. You’ll see.”

  “Ah.”

  “So tomorrow, seven thirty?”

  “Well . . .” I bit the insides of my cheeks.

  “Lucy. Do you want to get dinner with me or not?”

  I didn’t think I should go. He wasn’t really my type. Plus something about him worried me, made my stomach flip in a funny way.

  “I don’t think I can. Sorry.”

  “Bummer. All right.” He didn’t sound fazed.

  “Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “How did you get my number, though?”

  “Well, my friend Wrigley is fucking your friend Pippa. I wanted your number, and . . . voilà.”

  “Wrigley and Pippa are more than that.” I knew that Pippa liked Wrigley a lot, and I felt an obligation to
defend her.

  “More than what?” Stephen asked.

  “More than . . .”

  “You can say it.” I could nearly hear him grinning, and the pit inside me deepened.

  “Fucking.” It came out in an embarrassingly low whisper.

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” Stephen said. “Wrigley and Pippa are making love.”

  “That is not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “I meant—I just meant that they also go on dates and stuff.”

  “I’m trying to take you on a date.”

  An image of Stephen DeMarco in his red bathing suit flashed across my mind. Hairy, overweight, crass. Sure, handsome in some obscure way, but I hadn’t felt attracted to him. Had I? I couldn’t remember.

  “I don’t think now is a good time,” I said.

  “Don’t sweat it, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Stephen replied evenly. “But don’t show up to any house parties wearing a bikini, or I might not be able to restrain myself.”

  The base of my stomach pinched again. He made the most ordinary sentences so directly sexual. Talking to him made me feel like a child.

  “Why would I wear a bikini to a house party?”

  “Touché, pretty girl,” he said.

  I hung up the phone and rolled over in bed. I felt clueless, even turning down a date from a guy I wasn’t interested in. I knew nothing about dates. Parker never took me on actual dates. We grilled dinner in his backyard and got brunch on the weekends, but those weren’t real dates. Or were they? Was I supposed to go on a date with a guy who asked, just for the hell of it, even if he made my insides lurch in a peculiar way? Was that what you did in college?

  For a brief moment, I wished I could ask CJ, because she would probably know. But just thinking about that made me grit my teeth together, made me forget to blink for a whole minute, which is what happens when I think about CJ for too long. Because when you have a mother who did the Unforgivable Thing, you can’t ask her those kinds of questions.

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