Tell Me Lies

by Carola Lovering

  “What’s out back?” I knew very well what was out back—another beer pong table, a fire pit, and some yard space; it was a stupid question that told me I might, maybe, like him.

  “Room to breathe,” Billy replied. “You guys want to come?”

  “You two go.” Jackie eyed me intuitively. “I’m gonna say hi to Stuart.”

  Billy was already making his way outside, and I seemed to have no choice now but to follow him.

  “How’ve you been, Billy?” I cracked open the beer. I didn’t know if he’d wanted me to come outside with him, or if he’d asked out of politeness.

  “Oh, you know. Good.” He grinned with half his mouth, and my attraction to him was so surprising and strong that I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing.

  “I saw you in yoga the other day,” he continued.

  “You did? I don’t think I saw you. I didn’t know you did yoga.” I sipped my beer and tried to keep cool. I’d always been terrible at flirting.

  “Yup. You’re not the only one.”

  “So you must’ve been at YogaLab. That’s the only place I practice.”

  “Yeah. But I don’t love YogaLab. It’s too corporate.”

  “It’s not corporate!”

  “They have studios all over the country, Lucy.”

  The way he said Lucy made my spine prickle. I studied the definition of his biceps as they moved underneath the sleeves of his white cotton T-shirt, golden brown from days spent surfing and rock climbing with BORP.

  “I actually liked it when I went the other day,” Billy went on. “But have you taken Heather’s class? She’s awesome.”

  “Every guy is obsessed with Heather.”

  “Obsessed is a strong word.”

  “Oh, come on. She’s basically a model. You know she’s so pretty.”

  “She’s pretty.” Billy said. “Not as pretty as you.”

  I was trying not to smile too hard, but I couldn’t help it, the corners of my mouth poking my cheeks. Behind Billy, dense clouds were finally beginning to break over the mountains. The sun sank low in the sky, casting a tangerine glow over the horizon.

  “It’s a good sunset,” I said.

  He glanced up. “I want to show you something.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  He led the way inside the house. We wormed through the crowded kitchen and up the back staircase. On the second floor was a bay window that opened onto the roof. Billy unclasped it and squeezed himself through.

  I’d been on the roof of 622 before, with Stuart and Topher and their friends, but I followed Billy, who’d already hoisted himself up onto a higher level.

  “Come here.” He held out his arm and hoisted me up in one quick motion.

  “Wow.” I stood straight, my breath catching in my chest as I took in the view. “I’ve never been all the way up here.”

  Baird stretched around us, from Adler Quad past Swanson Chapel and all the way to the athletic fields at the perimeter of campus. The white-peaked San Gabriel Mountains rose on one side, and toward the other I could see beyond the freeway, and the western end of Claremont spilled on for miles, toward Los Angeles. The bottom of the sun nudged the earth, a fiery glow torching the horizon and rinsing up through the sky in a wash of sherbet hues.

  “It’s peaceful up here.” Billy sat down on the roof. I sat beside him, the warm air like a coat of velvet against my bare arms.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Are you hot?” he asked. “We can go back in.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “This is perfect.”

  Billy wedged closer toward me, and I felt my heartbeat quicken behind my chest as the side of his arm brushed mine.

  “How do you know about this spot?” I asked him. “I didn’t even know you could get up to this level of the roof.”

  “I don’t remember. I discovered it freshman year with some buddies, I think.”

  Billy and I watched the rest of the sun sink below the earth, and I felt like I was meeting him for the first time. He didn’t bring up anything about last year and how I’d been weird about things, and I was glad because I didn’t want to think about the murky state of my mind then or why I’d resisted him; I just wanted to put the past in the past and leave it there. At some point he leaned down and I knew he was going to kiss me, and when he did I felt safe, like a ship coming into its harbor.

  36

  STEPHEN

  MARCH 2014

  The wheels of the train growled and steamrolled under me as I sped out of Manhattan on an LIRR car packed with tired commuters in suits. Most of them, at least the ones visible to me, had their eyes closed. An overweight woman across the aisle wearing an ugly flowered blouse noisily slurped a cup of gross-looking Chinese soup. Peach-colored lipstick smudged the rim of the white Styrofoam.

  I closed my eyes and let the week drain from me like slush. It was only Thursday, but it had been a long, hellish week. I inhaled the musty scent of something ancient and boring, like ink. Like some jackass doing the New York Times crossword puzzle every damn day for fifty years on this stinking seat. God the train is depressing. I thought about how all these people zipping out of the city would zip right back in tomorrow to spend another day exactly like this one.

  Thankfully I would not be one of them. I was taking the day off because Sadie and I were flying out to California tonight for a long weekend. Sadie would be applying to colleges soon, and Baird was on her list.

  My father had gladly obliged when I’d offered to take Sadie to visit Baird. I was looking forward to a few days away from the cluttered filth of Manhattan, the stresses of law school, and my increasingly annoying girlfriend. Alice and I had moved in together in January, and it wasn’t all I’d had it stacked up to be. Financially I felt more secure, but Alice’s grandfather’s apartment was much smaller than I’d realized, and the two of us were basically squatting on top of each other, fighting for half a foot of space. I just needed a break.

  I’d also been bothered by Lucy’s continuous radio silence—she’d been ignoring me for months. I actually couldn’t stop thinking about her, and I didn’t like it one bit. I felt a strange sort of desperation to see her again, and not just because Alice was getting on my nerves. There was something about Lucy; whatever I’d had with her felt unsustainable but at the same time unfinished. Maybe it always would.

  Visiting Baird was the perfect excuse to see Lucy. She could ignore my calls and texts from afar, but she wouldn’t be able to avoid me on such a small campus. As the train roared east I looked out the window at the blur of bare trees and back parking lots, and somewhere in the bleakness I saw Lucy’s creamy thighs, her slender arms moving down the length of my body. The idea of having sex with her this weekend had become mind-consuming, and the more I thought about it the more I knew I needed to make it happen. Sex with Alice had become routine, and was difficult to appreciate unless we went at least a week without seeing each other, which rarely happened. Imagine watching Top Gun every night of your life—it’s good, great even, but you know exactly what’s coming and over time, with repetition, it loses its appeal.

  I closed my eyes and imagined Lucy’s face. It had been so long, I almost couldn’t conjure its clear image. In my head was a feeling, more than a picture. A mistake I had made. A two-thousand-mile barrier to something I had never seen through.

  My phone buzzed. One new text.

  ALICE: I miss you already.

  I responded that I missed her, too. She always had a hissy fit if I didn’t respond to her texts in a timely manner.

  I opened a new message window and tapped out another text to Lucy.

  STEPHEN: I know you want nothing to do with me but I need to talk to you. I’m taking Sadie out to visit Baird this weekend. I’m getting on a plane to LAX tonight. I’ll be on campus tomorrow. I miss you.

  Sadie picked me up at the train station. I climbed into the Explorer and immediately turned down the Kesha song blaring fro
m the speakers.

  “I will never get used to the fact that you can legally drive a car,” I said. “Nor will I feel safe as your passenger.”

  “I’m a better driver than you, idiot.” She shot me her classic Sadie expression, which told me my joke was less annoying than boring.

  “How’s school, Sade?”

  “Ugh, kinda stressful. Dad is all over me about the SATs.”

  We stopped at a red light and Sadie turned to me, her eyes clear. A wriggled line appeared over her brow and I could tell that she was truly frazzled. I felt sorry for her, for thinking that her life in high school was something to stress over. Life only got a hell of a lot harder.

  “But I’m so excited to see Baird,” Sadie continued. “I really think I’d love being on the West Coast, like you did. Anyway, how are you? How’s school?”

  “Still busting my balls. But I only have two and a half more years of hell.”

  “Hey, Eeyore.” Sadie punched my shoulder. “Snap out of it. You’ve wanted to go to law school for, like, forever.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you regretting it?”

  “No, of course not. I’m just in a bit of a funk.”

  “How’s Alice?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Doesn’t sound like nothing.”

  The truth was, my issues with Alice couldn’t be summed up into any kind of cohesive reasoning. There was no one glaring thing wrong; it was a general dissatisfaction that I had been too busy to seriously consider.

  “I need a little break from her, I guess,” I told my sister, though I knew my irritation was equally due to the fact that I couldn’t stop feeling hot and bothered by thoughts of Lucy.

  Two hours later our plane sat on the runway at LaGuardia. Sadie was already asleep, her head wedged against my shoulder. I’d always been jealous of her ability to pass out instantly in any setting.

  I shifted in my seat, a dull pain already forming in my low back. Once we got up in the air and the flight attendant came around I would order a Scotch or two. That would help.

  The captain’s voice emerged from the loudspeaker, announcing that we were next in line for departure on the runway and that all electronic devices needed to be shut off.

  I felt the plane’s engine fire up below. Gravity absorbed my body into the seat as the wheels flew forward. I loved the feeling of taking off in an airplane; the way you got suctioned backward, surrendering all control. The engine ripped and roared and the wheels glided smoothly as I relaxed into the magnificent surge, and suddenly we were floating in the air, among the clouds, and all was calm.

  As a kid I had a phobia of airplanes. I didn’t trust them. I’d never been on one before, and my parents booked a trip to Puerto Rico for spring break when I was in third grade. I made a big stink and refused to go because I thought airplanes were bullshit, that there was no way a giant, heavy metal contraption could stay suspended in the sky carrying hundreds of people across countries and oceans. My mother yelled at me and said I was ungrateful, and that most children didn’t get to go on nice vacations to Cancún, so I had better suck it up (as it turned out, Cancún was a dump).

  I decided to find the answer, the concrete logic behind the miracle of flight. I read about the Wright brothers, the mechanical engineering of the airplane and the physics behind it, the dorsal fin, laminar flow, loop antenna, drag, upwash, torque, accelerated stall. Once I understood the science of it, I was no longer scared of flying.

  I hated the notion that anything was insubstantial; my need for things to be tangible and concrete was an urge that came deep from within. There was never a time when I believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny; I was simply not ignorant enough. There were answers and why shouldn’t answers be known? Why should we drift aimlessly through an atmosphere of questions and emotions and fragile faiths, when it’s the hard numbers and mathematical truths that keep the earth spinning on its axis?

  So many people are petrified of science, of its harshness, but I take solace in it. It is the only truth we have. One plus one equals two. The world is so fucking simple when you break it down.

  37

  LUCY

  MARCH 2014

  I woke up to a pang in my chest, a gong striking my clavicle. My mouth felt like sandpaper, and my skin was clammy and cold. I huddled under my quilt, the crisp egg-yolk light streaming through the blinds.

  I wanted everything to be normal, unobstructed, but something in the air had turned overnight. Billy was already sitting up on the edge of the bed, putting on his Chacos. I stretched my neck to look at the alarm clock, which read 7:45.

  “Why are you up?” I asked him. Billy’s broad back faced away from me, and I placed my hand on the center of it, over his soft gray T-shirt.

  “I have that test today, remember? I’m meeting Greg for breakfast to go over some stuff before.” He turned around and kissed me quickly on the forehead, then leaped up and grabbed his backpack off my desk chair.

  “I’ll call you later,” he said.

  “Good luck.”

  “Oh, what time do you want to leave today?”

  “Huh?” My mind was a blurry bees’ nest and it took me a minute to remember what he was talking about. “Oh, for Bear Mountain?”

  “Yeah, where else?”

  “Around one thirty? After lunch?”

  “Okay.” He smiled. “Bye.”

  After he left I curled into the fetal position underneath the covers. Half of me wished Billy was still in the bed with me, and the other half was relieved to be alone so I could think.

  Billy had become familiar; I’d gotten used to waking up with him in the mornings, the clean soapy smell of his skin, his spine-tingling dimples and the way his body felt. He took me camping with the BORP, which wasn’t really my thing, but I was making an effort. Jackie said it was important to make an effort in relationships. I was trying to listen to her; I figured I was terrible at relationships, considering mine had all turned into small disasters.

  I couldn’t fall back asleep, and at eight fifteen I gave up and sat up in bed. My class didn’t start until nine thirty. I peered through the blinds at the blistering sun, as one persistent thought wobbled through me unsteadily.

  Stephen is in California. Stephen is coming to Baird today.

  I plucked my phone off the nightstand and reread his latest text for the billionth time:

  STEPHEN: I know you want nothing to do with me but I need to talk to you. I’m taking Sadie out to visit Baird this weekend. I’m getting on a plane to LAX tonight. I’ll be on campus tomorrow. I miss you.

  I clambered out of bed and into the kitchen to start some coffee. I washed my face in the bathroom while it percolated.

  The smell of caffeine calmed me, and I poured a large mug that I brought back to bed. I wanted to talk to Jackie, but she didn’t have class on Fridays and would kill me if I woke her this early. I stood in the center of my room and sipped the hot coffee, trying hard to clear my mind. It wasn’t like I had to see him, just because he wanted to see me. It wasn’t like I owed him that. I’d done a fine job of ignoring him all these months; I could easily ignore him for another weekend.

  I pressed my hands around the warm mug, just as the doorbell rang. Nobody ever rang our front door; friends knew to go through the back.

  When I opened the door to the sight of Stephen my body froze, my breath snagged in my chest.

  “Well,” he said. “If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad . . .” His green eyes narrowed in the shallow sunlight. The tips of his ears were pink. Stephen’s ears.

  Without asking, he let himself inside.

  “Fuck, that’s some strong sun.” Beads of sweat gathered at his temples. “I think I got burned just walking over here.”

  As I fully took in the sight of him, Stephen, back at Baird, inside my house, I could barely stand, my legs were shaking so badly. Sometimes I felt afraid of my hea
rt, the way it started and stopped.

  “I didn’t say you could come in.” My voice felt smaller than it had in months. I was wearing a pair of Billy’s boxers and a worn-in T-shirt without a bra. I folded my arms over my chest.

  “Lucy,” Stephen said softly. He stepped toward me, and then his arms were around me. His T-shirt was warm and damp with sweat against my cheek.

  I pulled away. I had to sit. I walked into my room and put on Marilyn’s cashmere sweater for armor. I sat down on the edge of my bed. Stephen sat beside me.

  “Luce . . .”

  “Stephen.” I didn’t know what to do. I knew if Pippa or Jackie were in my shoes they would kick him out, but I wasn’t Pippa or Jackie. I wasn’t going to kick him out.

  “I’m sorry to barge in on you like this. But I did try to call and text . . . .”

  “I know. I should’ve gotten back to you. I’ve been busy.”

  “Busy, huh?”

  “I’m going to be late for class.” I stood. His presence on my bed made it feel foreign, like it wasn’t where I’d slept every night for the past seven months.

  “What class?”

  “Comparative literature.”

  “Yikes.”

  “It’s not so bad.”

  “This is a nice room, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Why not?” His facial expression turned amused.

  “It’s not like we’re friends.”

  “No, I suppose we’re not.” His eyes met mine. “It’s really good to see you.”

  His olive skin was paler than I remembered, but his features were still the same; the thick eyebrows, the small bow-shaped mouth. As usual his dark glossy head of hair was in need of a trim.

  “This isn’t the best time,” I said. “I have to get dressed. I have to pick something up from the mailroom before class.”

  “Can I watch you get dressed?” He grinned. I wanted to punch him for the sleazy comment at the same time that I felt a familiar stitch of affection for him, for his uncompromising commitment to our chemistry. The lust pulled from deep below.