Liar

by Justine Larbalestier

  “Does that mean if the test says you’ve got no African DNA, it’s wrong?” Sondra asked. She’s very light-skinned. Lighter than Chantal even, several shades lighter than me. White people usually think she’s white, despite her relaxed curls and full lips. She’d been still since reading her results. Like me and Zach she hadn’t said a word.

  “Definitely,” Yayeko said firmly. “If we did the test with a different company using a different database your results would change. Biologically speaking, the so-called races have more similarities than they have differences. There is only one race: the human race. Sickle-cell anemia is sometimes called a black disease because it is more common in people of African descent, but it is also relatively common in those of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Indian descent. We are one race.

  “Right now, what you know about your ancestry and cultural heritage is likely to be more true than anything a test like this can tell you. That may change if we ever get to the point where all the world’s DNA is mapped. But right now, you are what you think you are.”

  I thought about my family and found myself nodding. Sondra was, too. I’ve seen her parents. Unlike mine they’re both black. I wondered what my DNA test looked like, but I still didn’t open the envelope that night.

  FAMILY HISTORY

  Jordan and me?

  We hate each other. He thinks I should be locked in a cage; I think he should never have been born.

  You think I exaggerate? That siblings often say they hate each other, but don’t mean it?

  You’re wrong. We hate each other. Like Cain and Abel. Siblings fight and kill each other all the time. I read about brothers who fought on opposite sides of the Civil War. Fought and killed each other.

  Jordan’s worse than that. It’s not that we believe different things, it’s that he doesn’t smell right. There’s something wrong with Jordan. I think he’s a bad seed, but Mom and Dad won’t believe me. He steals from me. Sneaks into my room and takes things. I told him I’d kill him next time he did it.

  So he took Zach’s sweater.

  AFTER

  I love my mom more than my dad, though sometimes the fractured un-American way she talks is embarrassing. She doesn’t nag me the way he does. She doesn’t always take Jordan’s side.

  At breakfast Dad starts in again about my going upstate. We’re all squeezed into our tiny kitchen, around the table that’s not a whole lot bigger than a school desk. There’s barely enough room for our plates. Our bikes are hanging upside down over our heads ’cause there’s nowhere else to put them. If I get up too quickly I forget they’re there and bash my head. Unfortunately Jordan’s still too short to get clobbered. He’ll grow.

  If I stretch out my right arm, reach past Jordan, I can almost touch the fridge. When we sit at the kitchen table you can no longer open the pantry door. My feet are tucked up under my chair because the food processor, coffeemaker, and toaster live under the table.

  “I hate the Greats,” I tell Dad, shoving bacon into my mouth. “Don’t,” I snap at Jordan, who’s just elbowed me in the process of twisting to pick up the toast he dropped. “Brat.”

  “Leave it, Jordan,” Mom says. “I will clean after. You do not want to be late for school.”

  “Yes I do!” Jordan says, sticking his tongue out at me.

  “I do not want you to be late for school. Stop with these wriggles! Eat your breakfast. You have ten years, not two!”

  “No, you don’t, Micah,” Dad says, ignoring Jordan and Mom. “You always have a wonderful time up there.”

  “No, I don’t. I always run away and hide so I don’t have to be anywhere near them. Or my stupid cousins.” I’m keeping my elbows firmly by my side so I don’t whack into the wall or Jordan’s sticky mouth. Not that I object to hurting him, but I don’t want slimy syrup all over my elbow.

  “Jordan! Stop!” Mom takes the maple syrup away.

  “But I don’t like bacon without sweet.”

  “Your bacon, it drowns! You have ten minutes to finish. We must go. Vite!” Mom walks Jordan to his school on her way to the posh one where she teaches French. Every school day she battles to get him out the door.

  “I think it would be good for you to get away, Micah. With everything that’s been going on. Fresh air—”

  “You mean with . . .” I falter. “With him being dead?”

  Dad nods. “Yes. Zach was your friend. You’re taking it hard.”

  “She mourns, Isaiah,” Mom says. “We must allow her this.”

  “Zach’s a fart!” Jordan says. I am tempted to strangle him right there at the kitchen table. I would love to watch his head fall into his syrup-drowned bacon.

  “Quiet, Jordan. You must act your age,” Mom says, squeezing out of her seat, avoiding the bicycles, putting her plate in the sink, and the maple syrup in the fridge.

  “There’s much more space upstate,” Dad says.

  “There’s more space in a coffin than there is here!” I imagine Zach stuck in one. The bacon loses flavor. I’m chewing dust.

  Dad turns to Mom. “She belongs there.”

  I force myself to eat the rest of my bacon.

  “She should be put to sleep,” Jordan says.

  “Quiet,” Mom tells him.

  “You should be flushed down the toilet,” I say, without even looking at him. “With the alligators.”

  “Mom!” Jordan wails.

  “Quiet, please. You know she doesn’t mean it.”

  Dad looks at me. He knows that I do.

  “You do not have to go where you don’t want,” Mom says, her back against the kitchen sink. “But perhaps you could think about it. Things have been so . . .” Sometimes she struggles to find the right English word. “So . . .” She pauses again and notices Jordan pulling his bacon to pieces and then pushing it through the lake of syrup. “Stop, Jordan! Either you eat or you don’t.” She turns her attention back to me. “Foul. Things have been so foul. Perhaps it would help to get away? It does not have to be with the Greats.”

  “Where else would she go?” Dad says. “Are you proposing we send her to Club Med?”

  “Well, couldn’t you take her along on your next assignment?”

  Dad and I look at each other. “No!” we say at the exact same time.

  Mom starts laughing. “You two could not be more alike.”

  Dad is wearing the same scowl I can feel on my own face. The sight of it makes me scrunch my forehead even more.

  Mom leans forward over Jordan’s head, ducking to avoid the bicycles, and kisses my cheek. “You do not have to go anywhere you do not want.”

  “Did you take your pill?” Dad asks.

  I don’t bother answering.

  AFTER

  “I don’t think he loved me,” Sarah tells me.

  I am sitting alone. She slides in next to me as if we’re friends. How can she have forgotten how much we’re not? Why is she talking to me about whether Zach loved her?

  “Did you?” she asks.

  “Did I what?” I don’t want her to sit next to me. I want to eat my lunch alone, undisturbed, unobserved. Ever since Zach disappeared—no, ever since Brandon blabbed—people have been watching me, talking about me. But me and Sarah sitting together for lunch? That’s too weird. Everyone in the cafeteria is watching, leaning forward, trying to overhear.

  “Did you love him?” she asks, lowering her voice.

  I roll my eyes so I don’t have to say out loud how stupid I think her question is. “He’s dead, Sarah,” I say quietly. “Thinking about him, talking about him all the time, that’s not going to make him come back to life. You do know that, right?”

  She flinches but her eyes don’t fill with tears. “I just asked you if you loved him. Why’s that such a hard question to answer?”

  I sigh. “It doesn’t matter. He’s dead.”

  “You’re scared of answering,” Sarah says. “That means you loved him.”

  “If you say so. I suppose you think you loved him.” I
don’t want to talk about Zach with her. I don’t want to talk about Zach with anyone. Saying his name hurts, thinking it . . . I realize then that neither of us has been saying his name. We say “he” or “him” or “his” but never “Zach.”

  “Of course,” Sarah says.

  “We weren’t together, Sarah. Brandon was lying. And I’ve been messing with you. We’d run together sometimes. There wasn’t anything else to it.”

  “You have his sweater.”

  “I was cold. He loaned it to me.” I wasn’t cold. My head was in his lap. He was stroking the tiny curls on my scalp. All I could smell was him. I said I liked his sweater. He took it off, gave it to me. It stank of him. Zach reek. I love that sweater.

  “I’m not stupid,” Sarah says, and I don’t laugh. “You think you’re so good at hiding things but I can read you. I know you were together. You can’t keep the way you think about him off your face. I know you loved him. You did, didn’t you?”

  I shrug. Sarah starts to cry again. Quietly, but it doesn’t matter. Everyone is staring. They can see. I wish I could cry.

  “Why are you so cynical?” It’s not an angry question. I think she really wants to know.

  “Trying to be like my dad,” I tell her, which isn’t even close to true. But she’s seen my arms-dealing daddy so she probably believes he’s all tough and cynical and worldly-wise. Dad isn’t cynical at all. Not really. He’s chock-full of hope and optimism.

  I suspect my cynicism comes from pretending to be what I’m not; covering myself in lies makes me cynical. I know I’m not trustworthy. How likely is it that the world is true if I’m not?

  But my dad lies as much as I do and he’s not cynical.

  “Do you think he loved you?” Sarah asks, wiping her eyes discreetly. I wonder who she thinks she’s fooling.

  “Who? My dad?” I ask, even though I know exactly who she means. “Of course he does. He’s my dad.”

  “No, Zach. Do you think Zach loved you?”

  I have a strong urge to punch Sarah in the face.

  She said his name.

  Instead, I turn to my cold BLT, peeling away the damp bread, pushing the wilted lettuce aside. The bacon is burned. I have to chew hard to get it small enough to swallow.

  “As much as he loved any of his running partners, I suppose,” I say at last, hoping that I never have to speak to Sarah again. But June is so far away.

  FAMILY HISTORY

  The family illness isn’t just acne and excessive blood. There’s more to it than that—yet another reason I take the pill every single day of my life.

  Remember the fur I was born with? The light coat of hair all over my body?

  It came back.

  Along with the usual puberty horror, I got hair in all the wrong places.

  No, you don’t understand. In the wrong places.

  Like my face and back and stomach.

  My face.

  Yeah.

  So the pill. It keeps the hair away, as well as my period, and acne, too.

  Without it, I’m a freak.

  Though, according to the kids at school, even with it my freakishness is not well disguised. But there’s no pill for that.

  I blame my family for contaminating me with their weirdness and their tainted hairy genes. The family illness, they call it. If I were from a different family—a normal family—I wouldn’t have it.

  To my grandmother’s credit, she did try to dilute the family disease. Instead of marrying her cousin Hilliard, she left the farm to find a father for her baby. Grandmother was convinced that too much cousin-marrying was responsible for the family illness. She was going to have a child whose father was as unrelated to her as she could find.

  Grandmother went to San Francisco and got pregnant by a black sailor. She said they spent a week together and that he loved to gamble. He was from Marseille, she said. His English wasn’t very good. That was all she could remember. She was relieved that Dad hadn’t inherited the gambling love.

  Or the family illness.

  That was left for me.

  BEFORE

  One time I was walking along Broadway playing dodge the crowd. Which is me testing myself, moving as fast as I can, weaving through them all without accelerating into a run, and without touching anyone or having them touch me. Any time I make contact I have to go back to the beginning of the block.

  It’s a game.

  I’m really good at it. When I play it I don’t think about anything else. Not Zach, not anyone.

  I only ever play it on crowded streets and avenues. Broadway works. But Fifth Avenue’s okay as well. Times Square is the best.

  This time it was Broadway. A Sunday.

  I was weaving, concentrating on the muscles of my body, on the air around me. It was like those few inches of air above my skin were part of me, too. An extra layer. Antennas. Me, stretching into space.

  When I spread like that I can go for miles and miles untouched and clear.

  I could feel everyone as they moved through air, feel them and their clothes and their bags, swinging arms, hands clutching cell phones, sodas, other hands, closed umbrellas for the rain that wouldn’t come even though my nostrils prickled with the smell of it.

  Then there was someone looking at me as I slid past them. Looking straight at me. A stare more direct than my mother’s. Like how the Greats stare.

  I twitched and stopped and turned to look back at the person with the staring eyes.

  Two people walked into me. They swore. I said sorry.

  It was a white boy. Same age as me, I thought. Maybe younger. He was smaller than me, skinny.

  He was standing and staring at me standing and staring.

  Then he took off the way I would. And there was me, too befuddled to follow. How did he do that? How did he see me first?

  AFTER

  I force myself to go to school.

  I regret it almost immediately. The first words I hear as I walk up the front steps: “I heard they were killed with an axe.”

  The school is floating on rumors about what happened to Zach and Erin Moncaster. He’s dead, so she must be, too.

  An axe murderer did it.

  A serial killer.

  Her father’s religious. He caught Erin and Zach together. If Zach went with that Micah girl he’d go with anyone.

  Her boyfriend did it.

  This, despite Zach and Erin not knowing each other. Despite no one knowing if she has a boyfriend. Or a religious father.

  They were both locked in a basement. The serial killer tortured them and then dumped the bodies in Times Square. Or was it Rockefeller Center? Only Erin hasn’t been found yet. And no one at school knows where Zach’s body was found.

  Maybe she’s still in the basement. So are Zach’s ears. The killer kept souvenirs.

  The worst rumors are the ones about me. Some are saying that I killed him. That I killed them both. Everyone talks about me. Even the teachers. They stare. Some are not talking to me. Cutting past me on line. Averting their eyes, whispering: We know she’s a liar. A slut. Killing’s what comes next.

  Liar. Slut. Bitch. Murderer.

  Always whispering.

  It doesn’t matter that there are also whispers about Brandon. (Though not nearly so many.) And Sarah and Tayshawn. Were they sleeping together? Did Zach find out and Tayshawn accidentally kill him? But that doesn’t explain Erin. Maybe Brandon killed her? A copycat killing and now he’s waiting till he gets someone alone to do it again.

  Doesn’t matter that none of this stuff is true. The less we know, the more ferocious the talk gets.

  All we have is a dead boy, a missing girl, and rumors.

  How can they say those things about Sarah and Tayshawn? They’re the most popular kids in school. Yet now, while they grieve, they have to deal with these stupid rumors?

  The school is nastily off-kilter. Everyone’s gone nuts.

  Teachers stutter-step their way through their lesson plans. Students keep drifting back to ta
lk of Zach, of Erin. (Of me. Of Tayshawn. Of Sarah. Of Brandon.) They try to talk about school, games, TV, their boyfriend/girlfriend, regular gossip. But they can’t stay there. Zach. Erin. They have to talk about it, speculate, imagine, scare themselves so bad that no one’s walking or riding the subway home alone anymore. Despite the crazy traffic some parents are sending their children to and from school in cars.

  All of them worry about who’ll be next. I’m hoping Brandon. But right now they can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned. Especially the ones calling me Liar. Slut. Bitch. Killer.

  I can’t imagine this ever ending.

  I will always be at school. Skin tight, head high, acting like I don’t care. Avoiding everyone. Avoiding everything. Only when I’m running in the park does my head stop throbbing.

  It will be like this for the rest of the year. I bet they’ll still be talking next year, too, when there’ll be a new set of seniors and we’ll all be off to wherever it is we go next.

  I’m hoping hell for most of them.

  I’m not sure where I’m going. I’ve filled out applications, sent them off, but I’m not optimistic. CUNY is my best chance. Though I’m not sure we can afford even that. Part of me would be happy to wind up somewhere no one’s heard of Zach or what happened to him. Somewhere far from the city.

  Wherever I go, I doubt I’ll be with anyone from here. Sarah will be at some Ivy League school: Harvard or Yale or Princeton. Or at the very least, Vassar. Tayshawn will be at MIT. Brandon will be in jail. I’ll never see any of them again.

  I’m glad.

  I think.

  I don’t want to talk about Zach. But how will it feel not to be able to?

  I try to imagine myself at college. I fail. I want to keep studying biology but I’m not sure why. If all else fails then I guess I can work up on the farm.

  A fine way to spend the rest of my life.