Tell Me Lies

by Carola Lovering

  It had been the night of Carl’s everyone’s-going-away-to-college party. Jenna got too drunk and took a cab home early, and Macy picked me up. She was sober, on her way home from some babysitting job. She was chewing bubblegum. Bubblicious—I saw the opened pack in the center console. I told her I wanted to drive so she could give me road head, and she pointed that she was driving her brother’s manual car, and asked if I could drive stick and I said that I could—Carl had taught me—and so she let me. And I’d had too much to drink, and though I was doing a fair job of masking it, I shouldn’t have been behind the wheel.

  I’ll never forget how Macy removed the pink wad of gum from her mouth and placed it in mine before unzipping my shorts. I hate the memory, but it still gets me hard. Her lips were moving up and down at an exquisite pace and my mind slipped into oblivion, and then all too suddenly her brother’s Jeep was off the road, Carl’s stick shift tutorial a distant black hole, my foot uselessly pounding on the brake, the car sliding hard and rolling once, twice, then coming to a juddering halt at the bottom of a small hill. The Jeep was undoubtedly totaled; I still don’t know why the radio didn’t shut off. Zombie zombie zombie—I can’t fucking stand that song.

  I knew she was dead right away because her neck was snapped against the gearshift, her pale eyes open, unblinking, my dick still hard against her white cheek. The end of Macy’s short life. There was no point in calling the cops. It wouldn’t have saved her.

  What I did next was never a choice or an internal debate. There was college, law school, my whole future. The fact that it was her car was my greatest stroke of luck. Some people don’t get a way out of these situations, but life had handed me one. When the cops found Macy the next morning she was sitting in the driver’s seat, her neck wrapped around the steering wheel, her head cut open. I was warm in my bed, tired from the three-mile walk home in the middle of the night.

  What’s in your head, in your head

  Zombie, zombie, zombie

  Pieces of that night still surface and when they do they’re as vivid as they were then, even though I was drunk. Macy’s smooth face. The taste of Bubblicious bubblegum. My erection rubbing the back of her wet throat. My hands too loose on the steering wheel. The petrifying realization that the wheels were spinning out of control. Macy’s terrified scream-gag. Swerving hard to avoid the tree. An impossible amount of glass. Her fixed eyes, like marbles. Creeping home in the misty dark, the dewy grass wet around my ankles. The feeling of knowing I’d escaped. Jenna’s tears soaking my shoulder the next day when the town learned that Portledge’s rising junior Macy Petersen had died in a car crash the night before. She was the driver and sole passenger. Her parents didn’t want a full autopsy—they didn’t want anyone cutting into their beautiful daughter—but authorities did measure her blood-alcohol level. It was zero; Macy had been sober.

  Zombie zombie zombie zombie zombie zombie zombie zombie zombie.

  Making my way down Lex I suddenly felt so sick I could barely walk, and the sun was so bright I could barely see, and when I hunched over and squeezed my eyes shut I felt something warm and unfamiliar between them, and when I touched my fingers to my eyes they were wet. I sat down on some stoop and buried my head between my knees. I let the tears run until my eyes dried up again. I don’t know how long I sat there.

  I couldn’t stomach another attempt on the subway, so I hailed a cab. I wanted to go home and sleep forever, but the sane part of me knew I couldn’t miss my torts exam.

  I made it to my classroom just before nine.

  The exam was hard but not impossible, and after it was over I decided to walk back to Chinatown. The midday sun splintered down through a thin wedge of clouds; it had turned into a nice autumn day. I listened to my father’s voice mail, which said that my mother was still out and I didn’t need to come back uptown until she woke up. Thank fucking God.

  I felt my appetite again and stopped at my favorite deli on Mott Street for a roast beef sandwich. Luckily my roommate wasn’t at the apartment, so I sat down at the table in the tiny living room to eat my lunch. I got a cold beer out of the fridge, set my laptop in front of me and turned on an episode of House of Cards. My sandwich tasted delicious; the roast beef was cold and fresh, and there was just the right amount of mayonnaise between slices of meat. I felt myself relax for the first time in days. Pent-up tension from the exam rolled off my back, and the beer helped diffuse any lingering agitation from earlier.

  Just then my phone rang. Lucy, the screen read.

  “Hey, Luce.”

  “Hey.” Something in her voice was off, I could tell immediately. I didn’t think I had the energy to deal with another problem.

  I paused House of Cards. I waited for Lucy to say something, but she didn’t. Of course she was going to make me press her and then she would reveal the nature of the issue. My Budweiser was already gone; I walked over to the fridge to grab another.

  “What’s up?” I asked. “Aren’t you at work?”

  “I’m on my lunch break. I’m sitting in Bryant Park.”

  “Nice day for it.” I cracked open the new beer.

  I heard her sigh through the phone. I imagined her sitting on one of the benches in the sun, wearing her jean jacket and a pair of brown leather boots over fitted pants, her hair pulled back. Maybe she was nibbling on a salad or an apple with peanut butter—something healthy like that.

  “What’s up, Luce?”

  “Look, I need to ask you something and I don’t know how to approach this, so I’m just going to come out and say it.”

  She sounded shaky but proud, as though she’d been rehearsing her words.

  “All right, what is it?”

  “Well, Lydia’s friend Charlotte—the one you met in Montauk this summer, remember? That night at Ruschmeyer’s? Charlotte said she saw you out to dinner at Crif Dogs with some girl last week. She said it seemed like you were on a date—that you were basically holding hands across the table.”

  The trill in her voice told me she was scared in her defiance. I drummed my fingertips on the surface of the table. The other half of my sandwich sat there in all its mouthwatering glory. I considered hanging up the phone and eating it.

  I’d become so bored and weighed-down by Lucy’s concerns about me, about the so-called shady things I had done and the shadier things she anticipated I would do. I often wondered, especially lately, why she wanted to be with me at all. Lucy had proof that I cheated, proof that I lied, and though I could persuasively promise not to do those things to her, she still knew, at the end of the day, that I had those abilities within me.

  Last week I’d gotten dinner with a girl. A very casual dinner, but I suppose it could be called a date because I paid for our hot dogs and beers at Crif Dogs. The situation had unfolded naturally and I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. What happened was, a couple of weeks ago my buddy Dave from school had a birthday party at a bar in Red Hook. I didn’t invite Lucy. I just needed a night off. I hadn’t felt like dealing with her and having to introduce her to everyone while she flaunted her legs in some short dress.

  So I went to the party alone and met a girl named Jillian. Talking to her was refreshing. It was nice chatting with a girl who wasn’t scouring my eyes for signs of trouble; there was absolutely zero at stake. I found myself telling her about my mother and her mania, my father’s depression problems, and Luke and Kathleen’s obnoxiousness. She listened without judgment. I bought a round of gin and tonics; she bought the next. At the end of the night I asked for her number. I suggested we grab dinner sometime.

  A few days later I found the piece of paper with a scribbled phone number in my pocket. Without a thought I dialed. We chatted. She lived on St. Mark’s but had never been to Crif Dogs, which seemed like a crime. We made a plan to go the following week.

  When I walked into the restaurant I realized I didn’t fully remember what Jillian looked like. But I recognized her once I saw her sitting on one of the red stools: she was broad-shouldered,
like a swimmer, with chin-length strawberry-blond hair that brought out the freckles dusting her narrow face. We ordered our food and sat. Jillian’s smile revealed straight teeth, and I counted four studded earrings on each of her ears. She was pretty but not stunning, attractive but not beautiful.

  From the moment I sat down the feeling was back—the liberating notion that I could say anything and be anyone and she would accept me. When it came time to pay at the end of the meal I laid down my credit card. A part of me hoped to fuck her, I suppose. But we just walked and kissed a little on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building.

  It had been innocent, an isolated incident, except for the fact that Charlotte had seen us. I barely remembered Charlotte. I swear, New York is the fucking biggest and smallest city in the world.

  Still, it caught me off guard that Lucy knew about the so-called date, because in the moment it had felt so private, so detached from reality. I lingered in the limbo of my options. I could’ve lied; I could’ve easily said it was a girl from school who I was eating hot dogs with—Crif Dogs doesn’t exactly evoke romance. I could’ve convinced her that Charlotte had been mistaken about the holding hands. But I was suddenly so tired of defending myself—it was all I’d been doing for years. From Jenna to Diana to Lucy to Diana to Alice to Lucy—it was a long, tangled web, the problems with one relationship somehow always infiltrating the next, a never-ending knot of toxicity, and I was too exhausted to keep trying to fix it. Lucy’s appeal had always been that she wasn’t truly my girlfriend; in the back of my head I’d suspected a relationship with her wasn’t sustainable. We’d been running in circles for too long. What was the fucking point anymore?

  “I went to dinner with someone, yes,” I said. “But I wouldn’t say it was a date.”

  Lucy exhaled. “You wouldn’t say it was a date? Then why were you holding hands with her? Like what the fuck?”

  Like what the fuck? My temples ached, and I felt flooded with pent-up exhaustion from the previous night and morning. All I wanted was a shower and a long, long nap.

  “It was nothing, Lucy. Believe me; don’t believe me. Your call.” I felt like being a dick suddenly.

  “But you went to dinner with some girl? Who did you go to dinner with? I don’t get it.” Her voice wobbled.

  “She’s this girl I met. It wasn’t really anything.”

  “What the hell, Stephen?”

  “It wasn’t a date, Lucy. We went to Crif Dogs. They barely even have tables there!”

  “You’ve never taken me to Crif Dogs!”

  “That’s because you don’t eat hot dogs!”

  “That’s because hot dogs are disgusting! They’re processed sacs of pig intestines and God knows what else.”

  “Jesus Christ, Lucy. What is the point of this conversation?”

  “You’re just being so weird. I have to go back to work.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can you come over tonight? I want to talk in person. I feel weird right now.”

  “I don’t know. I have to work on my brief.” I didn’t feel like telling her about my mom. She would just offer to come to the hospital with me.

  “Cool.” Her sarcasm wasn’t effective, and I almost felt sorry for her then.

  “Look, I just finished my exam and was up all night at the hospital because my mother got hurt, okay? I’m going to take a shower and finish up some work. I’ll call you later.”

  “Shit,” she said. “I didn’t know. Is she okay? What happened?”

  “She’s fine, it’s just a few stiches,” I lied. “Not worth getting into the specifics.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s honestly not a big deal. I have to go. I’ll call you later.”

  “Okay. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Thanks.”

  “By the way, we’re still on for Gramercy Tavern with my parents on Thursday, right? I know you have a lot going on, but this dinner has been rescheduled so many times already.”

  “Thursday. Right. I’ll make it work.”

  I hung up with her and ran a shower, hotter than usual. As the water trickled down my back, I dreaded the dinner at Gramercy Tavern—having dinner with Lucy’s parents was the last thing I wanted to do at this point.

  I scrubbed myself with soap and thought about how wrong Lucy was for me—she had always been wrong for me. Whatever Lucy expected from me in her naive perception of our relationship was laughable. I would never give her what she wanted. Didn’t she know that? And why should I? It wasn’t as if Lucy had ever made me feel like my best self; she’d never made me truly happy. And she never would. She was pretty, but sometimes, lately, when I really looked at her, she wasn’t that pretty. I’d let the sex get in the way. Again.

  By the time I got out of the shower and wrapped myself in a towel, I knew what I had to do. In the meantime, maybe I would ask Jillian on a second date. I craved a fresh start, and she seemed cool enough.

  45

  LUCY

  OCTOBER 2014

  My phone buzzed on my desk like a mosquito.

  LYDIA: Call me.

  Something in those two words was urgent. I peered into Harry’s office; he was still tied up in meetings. Melissa—the girl who worked under Harry, who pretended to be my boss whenever Harry was busy—was parked at her desk, barricading me from the exit with her hawk-eyed glare. When Melissa finally surrendered her post, I grabbed my phone and lunch and fled the office.

  “What is it, Lydia?” I said when she picked up.

  “Don’t panic,” Lydia said, which made me panic more.

  “Just tell me.”

  “Okay. So I saw Charlotte last night, and she told me that last week she was with Max at Crif Dogs—you know that hot dog place everyone is obsessed with in the East Village? Anyway, she saw Stephen. She said he was having dinner with some girl and that it seemed like they were on a date. Maybe it was nothing, but I had to tell you.”

  My stomach seesawed. I’d wandered into Bryant Park for my lunch break. I sat down on one of the wooden benches.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. How does Charlotte know they were on a date? She barely knows Stephen.” Charlotte was Lydia’s friend from Amherst who I’d met in the Hamptons a couple of times over the summer.

  “She doesn’t know for sure. She just said it looked like they were—”

  “How did it look like they were on a date? I don’t understand.”

  “I dunno. She said they were, like, holding hands over the table or something.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I repeated, my insides wrenching. “Maybe it wasn’t Stephen.”

  “She seemed pretty sure it was Stephen, Luce. But who knows. Just ask him about it. It was probably nothing.”

  “Do you remember what day Charlotte saw him?”

  “Lucy, don’t spiral.”

  “I’m not spiraling. But do you remember?”

  “Lucy.”

  “What, Lydia? I’ve dealt with your shit enough times. You’d be freaking out about this, too.”

  “I don’t remember. I’ll ask Charlotte, okay? But I think you should just talk to Stephen. Don’t freak out yet.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’m getting nervous for the race. Are you guys ready?”

  “I guess.” Lydia, Bree, and I were running a half marathon in East Hampton that Saturday. We’d been training all summer. “I just want to get it over with. Stephen was supposed to come out and watch.”

  “That’s right. Is he not anymore?”

  “Not now that he’s apparently dating other people.”

  “Lucy, stop,” Lydia sighed. “I told you, don’t jump to any conclusions yet.”

  “Ugh. Fine.”

  “I should go back to work. Don’t worry. I’ll call you later.”

  I hung up with Lydia. I couldn’t blame her for thinking it was nothing. She didn’t know Stephen the way my friends from Baird did, the way I did. She didn’t know what he was capable
of; she didn’t know the extent to which I’d lowered myself for him in the past. Lydia was my oldest friend and though we’d grown up telling each other everything, there were things I’d started to omit.

  I decided I had to call Stephen—I couldn’t wait until after work. It had to be a misunderstanding; at the least he would deny it or explain it. Or maybe he hadn’t even been at Crif Dogs. Charlotte was probably wrong. Charlotte was kind of dumb. She’d only gotten into Amherst because her dad was some oil heir.

  As the phone rang, the qualms and anxieties continued to creep in, and I felt sick to my stomach. I’d sat by for years and watched Stephen go behind Diana’s back, then Alice’s back. Why had I thought anything would be different for me?

  I heard Dr. Wattenbarger’s voice. People like Stephen, they don’t change.

  But isn’t the whole point to believe that people can change? To believe that we can all become better versions of ourselves? Otherwise, what hope is there for anybody? Maybe Dr. Wattenbarger didn’t know everything.

  Stephen picked up, his voice interrupting my reeling thoughts.

  “Hey, Luce.”

  I knew I should keep my mouth shut. I finally had what I wanted and accusing Stephen of going behind my back would only cause tension.

  But I couldn’t, and before I could change my mind I was repeating what Lydia had told me about Charlotte and Crif Dogs and the so-called date.

  Worry encased me when he didn’t deny having gone to dinner with a girl, and even though he said it hadn’t been a date, there was a nonchalance to his tone that pooled my gut with dread. Something in Stephen’s voice sounded unfamiliar and very far away. I asked him to come over that night so we could talk in person, but he seemed preoccupied with a paper and casually mentioned that his mother was in the hospital. He said he’d call later.

  I felt a little better after we hung up, but only a little. Clearly Stephen was distracted because of his mom—they’d never had a good relationship and seeing her in the hospital was probably complicated. Still, I’d lost my appetite, and I tossed my salad in the trash on my way back to the office.