Liar

by Justine Larbalestier

In the end all that’s left is the beating of my heart, the in and out of my breath. Sarah’s. Tayshawn’s. The rest of us who are left behind.

  We still tick. We still tock.

  It hurts.

  AFTER

  On the day of Zach’s funeral I leave Tayshawn and Sarah, I walk south to the park, Central Park, to the place where Zach and I first kissed.

  I’m not sure what I think this will achieve. It’s more like a compulsion. I want to pay tribute to him. The park seems a better place for that than a church crowded with people who mostly didn’t know him. Not the way I did.

  A better place than in Sarah and Tayshawn’s arms.

  I haven’t been there since. I’ve run along the path but I haven’t stopped. Haven’t stood there under the bridge and thought about that day. That first kiss.

  There are no icicles hanging from the bridge now.

  It doesn’t look the same. There’s still green. Leaves, not snow, underfoot. The air isn’t sharp to breathe.

  Nothing’s the same.

  I can’t think about that.

  I slip my mom’s shoes off and, holding them in my right hand, I run home, the wide skirt of Mom’s dress ballooning and twisting around me. I’m too tired, too jangled, too encumbered by the dress to play the dodging game. My head is full of thoughts of Zach. And of Sarah and Tayshawn, of the feel of their mouths against mine. It makes my longing for Zach burn in my chest. Breathing starts to hurt. My eyes burn.

  Running past Twelfth Street on Third Avenue I smell something rank, then I hear feet pounding lightly behind me. I tense but don’t turn. Then the white boy who’s like me is running beside me. He smiles. His teeth are more yellowy green than white. He doesn’t look very old, yet his skin is lined. Not as old as me even. He must spend a lot of time outside.

  I run faster but I’m fighting the dress.

  He keeps pace.

  This is the fourth time I’ve seen him. Once on Broadway when I played the dodging game. Once in the park when I ran with Zach. Once on the last day I ever saw Zach.

  I can hear his breathing. It’s as even as my own.

  The white boy dodges the crowd as well as I can. With me in this dress, he’s better.

  He’s fast but his technique is terrible: arms flapping like wings, shoulders too high, no lift in his knees, he thumps down hard on his heels. I wonder if my technique was that bad before Zach taught me. I hope not.

  This close he smells worse. He’s so filthy I wonder if he’s ever washed. I breathe shallow and wrinkle my nose. There’s something familiar in his stink. I know it.

  “You’re a wolf,” I say as we run past St. Mark’s.

  He reeks of it.

  But how can that be?

  The Greats say our kind mostly avoid cities. Except for boy wolves who don’t want to change. Is that what he is? Then why follow me?

  He stops in his tracks. I stop, too. But too slow. When I’ve turned around he’s already off again, half a block away. I sprint hard to catch him. Watching his ungainly form weaving along the sidewalk, avoiding other people, elbows sticking out. I should be able to catch him but the half-block lead is opening up to a full block. I am tempted to tear Mom’s dress, but she’d kill me. I press harder, dashing across Eleventh, narrowly avoiding being hit by a taxi, who hits his horn and screams abuse.

  The boy is even farther ahead, dodging the traffic on Fourteenth.

  I pull up short of Union Square. Tonight I don’t have the reserves to catch him. They were drained away by the funeral, by Sarah and Tayshawn, by Zach. I’m spent.

  I am unnerved. I head home. It’s a necessity. As I regain my breath, I find myself wishing the Greats didn’t live so far away. I have a hundred questions. If the white boy is what I think he is, if he did what I think he did, then I need their knowledge, I need them to tell me what to do.

  Right now I’m wondering what it would be like to tear open his abdomen, watch the innards fall out.

  I wonder what I should tell my parents.

  As I pull out my keys and unlock the door to our apartment building I turn. Across the street in front of the supermarket the boy watches me.

  LIE NUMBER TWO

  I kissed Sarah first.

  In the cave, after the funeral, when me and Sarah and Tayshawn were entwined, it was me who started it, not them.

  I don’t know why I lied. Does it matter who kissed who first? All three of us kissed. No one pulled away. There was no hesitation.

  I guess I wanted it to be that way. For them to start it, not me. As we sat there talking, I could feel my lips getting warmer, along with my skin—the cave, too—the air between us. I knew it wasn’t only me. Their mouths were glistening, redder than usual. Their eyes clear. They were as much in heat as I was.

  Sarah wanted to kiss me. I’m sure of that. Tayshawn, too. Otherwise why would they have responded? They needed me to set their heat free.

  But it does matter. Me making the first move? They’ll always be thinking I’m easy.

  By kissing them first I confirmed the thousand slut calls as I walk by.

  When I leaned toward Sarah, she was already leaning toward me.

  I should have waited.

  AFTER

  Dad is waiting, sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop.

  “Hi, Micah,” he says, looking up, smiling at me. He’s showing his concern, that he knows what day it is, and he cares. There’s no reason for me to be annoyed. I am annoyed anyway.

  “Hi, Dad,” I say, hoping that I can get this over with and be in my room quickly.

  “How’d it go?”

  I shrug. How does he think the funeral went? Well, probably not how it actually went. I am not going to tell him about walking out, about Sarah and Tayshawn. Nor about the white boy following me home. I’m not going to tell him anything that matters.

  “It was weird,” I say, because he needs to hear something. “I mean, the funeral was weird. All these people I never saw before and the preacher said stuff that was all wrong. Not like Zach at all. It was like no one had even met him, let alone knew him well. They were all talking about imaginary Zach.”

  “Funerals are always that way,” Dad says, closing his laptop to show that I have his full attention. “Everyone talks about an idealized version of the dearly departed. All their warts are removed and they become someone they’re not . . .”

  I lean against the fridge, knocking off a magnet and causing one of Jordan’s vomits on paper to fall to the floor. I ignore it. “The party after was worse. I only knew his friends from school and none of them like me. And they were all drinking—”

  “You didn’t—” Dad begins.

  “No, Dad. Of course not.” I’m not allowed to drink because they’re afraid I’ll turn wolfish even though the Greats say that’s horseshit. Well, mostly horseshit. Great-Aunt Dorothy remembered that it had happened once with her grandfather, but only once, and she doesn’t remember it happening to any other wolf. “I’ve still never had a sip of alcohol. Even if I wanted to try it, I wouldn’t surrounded by those creeps. They think I’m a freak. Which is true, just not the way they think I am. I can’t wait till school’s done,” I finish, hoping I’ve said enough for Dad to feel as if we’ve had a talk and he’s done his fatherly duty. I’m pretty sure that’s how it would have been if I had gone to Will’s place.

  “I’m sorry,” Dad says. “You okay?”

  I nod. Even though I’m not. I wonder what he’d say if I told him about the white boy. About what I suspect.

  “Your mom wants to talk to you.”

  “She in bed?” I ask, even though it’s obvious. It’s not as if there’s anywhere else she could be.

  “Uh-huh,” Dad says, reaching out to pat my shoulder. I don’t brush his hand off though I want to. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Tired.” Confused, guilty, sad, angry, worried, mourning. I am many things. I want to know who that boy is, why he’s following me, what he wants. I want to kno
w if he killed Zach. I want to know why.

  I want Zach to be alive.

  I knock on the door to Mom and Dad’s room. “Mom?” I call, not bothering to be quiet for Jordan asleep a thin wall away.

  “Come in,” Mom says.

  I open the door. Mom’s in bed, wearing her frilly pajamas that make us both giggle. She pats the bed. I sit. She pulls me into a hug and kisses the top of my head. My throat hurts so much it closes over. For a moment I can’t breathe, tears stream out of my eyes. I can’t seem to stop. I cry and cry and cry.

  “There, there, chérie,” she says, stroking my hair. “There, there, my love.”

  BEFORE

  Me and Zach, we raced each other a lot after that first time in Central Park. The result was never in question. He was fast, I was faster. I knew that. He knew that.

  But it was Zach who taught me how to run right.

  Running beside him, matching stride for stride, hearing his breath, smelling it. Duplicating it. Teaching myself to run as he did. No one ever taught me, you see. I had no technique. Learning from Zach made me even faster, copying all the things Zach learned from his coach: landing light on my heels, knees higher, longer stride. Fists pumping, elbows in tight by my side.

  I even tried to get my heart to beat at the same pace as his.

  I could hear his beating when I slept, taste his breath. It was as if he had crawled into my skin. Under it, always there.

  Even after he died.

  Maybe more after he died.

  I’ve never been as comfortable, as happy with another person as I was with Zach.

  I wish I hadn’t had to lie to him. I wish he knew what I really am.

  If he had lived longer I think I would have told him.

  Maybe.

  I told the police that I would never hurt him. I don’t think they believed me.

  Biology was Zach’s favorite class. Mine, too.

  Maybe if he’d known about me he would have wanted to help me figure out how my wolfishness works.

  Right now I’m thinking about how Zach was made, was unmade.

  Once in class we had to put together a model of the human body. We looked at how the organs sat together: spleen and pancreas behind stomach. Gallbladder behind liver. Kidneys in the middle of the back. Large intestine nestling the small. All shiny and plastic.

  Yayeko warned us that real bodies were only vaguely like the model. That spleens, pancreas, stomachs, gallbladders, livers, kidneys, large and small intestines are as varied as the nose and eyes and mouths on our faces.

  Does that mean the model is a lie?

  Zach’s organs are even less like that model than they were. They no longer fit together. Even before they started to rot, they were pulled apart, shredded, blood breaking through the veins and capillary walls that were supposed to keep them housed safe, sound, and circulating.

  Zach’s blood got free, drowned all his organs.

  But I don’t know how. I don’t know who did that to him. At least, I’m not sure. My suspicions are without any proof.

  All I know is that he’s gone forever.

  I wonder if I would have loved his lungs, his voice box, his pancreas if I’d seen them nestled safe within him. If you love someone, do you love all of them? Even the mucus in their throat, the cankers in their mouth, the cavities in their teeth?

  I want it to be winter always. Because I met Zach in winter. Really met him. Talked to him. Kissed him. Ran with him. All the things we did together. Those were winter things.

  In winter he was alive. Organs well-knit.

  In summer I was away, aching for him, being a wolf.

  But here in the fall, he’s gone. All the layers gone, too. Right down to his skin.

  I’m not sure what to do without him.

  The last time I saw him we were running. All the way from Central Park to his apartment building in Inwood. But I kept running, turned, ran backward slowly, waved, and then ran all the way down to the Lower East Side. To my apartment building, my tiny little room, where he had never been.

  I never saw him again.

  Not alive. Not with organs intact.

  LIE NUMBER THREE

  There were never any doctors.

  My parents were too afraid of blood samples being taken. Too afraid of what the doctors would find. Of what lives in my blood.

  I have never been to a doctor. Not one. I’ve never had any tests done. Never been vaccinated. Never had my ears or eyes tested. When I run a fever my parents give me aspirin, put cold cloths on my forehead, and hope that it will come down.

  No doctor ever told me to keep taking the pill. Mom wasn’t horrified by the suggestion. She’s the one who gets the prescription from her doctor. I added that detail to make it seem more real.

  There were hair-removal specialists though. By the time I was ten I swear we’d been to every single one in the city: electrolysis, waxing, laser, creams, and unguents. Mom found an old French woman who made me drink a foul-smelling herbal drink that tasted like dirt and made me throw up. Chinese and Spanish herbs and ointments. There was acupuncture, even a spirit worker.

  None of it worked.

  The hair came, stayed for more than a year, then the hair went, to return only when I am a wolf.

  SCHOOL HISTORY

  My school was founded by Quakers. They believed in equality and justice and wanted to make a school in that image. One of them was very wealthy, that’s why there’s so much scholarship money—that’s how they’ve kept the school fees low. Well, not low by my standards, but low compared to most private schools in the city. Low enough that with scrimping and saving my parents can pay the half of my tuition that isn’t covered by my scholarship.

  But that rich Quaker—isn’t that a contradiction? I thought Quakers were supposed to be poor—anyway, that Quaker left his Quaker wife and his many Quaker children and ran away with a much younger woman who was a dancer, not a Quaker. He moved to New York City to watch her dance every night. Until she up and left him, leaving him with a broken heart and—according to Chantal—a bad case of the clap.

  That’s when he founded the school and poured all his money into it.

  He founded it in this building that used to be a prison. A women’s prison. They kept the bars on the windows.

  None of the students at the school are Quakers and only one of the teachers: Principal Paul.

  I wonder if the Quaker sense of equality and justice extends to werewolves. Does it extend to me?

  I realize I don’t know much about Quakers.

  But I know a lot about cages, about prisons. I’ve been kept hostage by lies all my life. Imprisoned by them.

  This is how it is:

  I’m alone.

  Bars surround me. Prison guards bind my arms, bring me pills several times a day. They ask me—beg me—to tell them the truth.

  I am.

  Every single word.

  Truth.

  They don’t believe in my wolves.

  AFTER

  The day after the funeral, I almost stay home from school. I’m not sure I can face Sarah and Tayshawn. The thought of seeing them makes my cheeks hot. I don’t want to have a conversation about how it was a mistake, how we should forget about it, move on. I don’t want to talk about it.

  I keep my head down and go back into invisibility mode, which is much harder than it used to be. Zach is buried, but they still talk about him, still look sideways at me. Except now it feels as if there’s more reason for them to be staring. I’m sure everyone knows what we did after the funeral.

  No, not after. During. That makes it so much worse. Who noticed us leave together? Does everyone already know what happened? My cheeks get hotter.

  I take my lunch—burned meatballs—into Yayeko Shoji’s classroom, pretty sure I’ll be safe from them there. I sit down under the poster of the carnivores’ evolutionary tree, noting the branch where the gray wolf and the domestic dog split apart. It’s very recent. There’s 0.2 percent of mtDNA sequence
difference between a wolf and a Pekingese . . . dogs and wolves can still interbreed.

  The door opens while I’m contemplating how much DNA I share with black bears. Dogs and humans have 85 percent shared genetic material; wolves and bears share—

  It’s Sarah. I look away.

  “Okay if I join you?” she asks.

  I nod.

  I wish it hadn’t happened.

  No, that’s a lie. (See? I told you I was done with lying.)

  What happened, it was . . . I didn’t . . . I did . . .

  I liked it. It felt good. I wish we would do it again.

  But I don’t know how it happened. Sarah can’t really have meant to return my kiss. Neither did Tayshawn. It was something else overwhelming us.

  Grief.

  We were trying to find traces of Zach in the layers of our skin.

  “How you doing, Micah?” Sarah says, sliding into the seat beside me.

  “Fine,” I say.

  She puts her hands on the table and accidentally touches the side of my little finger. We both pull away quick.

  “Sorry,” Sarah says. “I didn’t mean . . .” She pauses. “Kind of creepy eating lunch here, don’t you think?” She’s looking at the plastic model of the human body. The guts are jumbled, the pancreas resting on the heart, the gallbladder on the place where the genitals would be if the model had them. The large and small intestines and the voice box are on the floor.

  “It’s quiet,” I say, wishing I didn’t have to speak. Zach didn’t like talking all the time either.

  “We should talk,” Sarah says.

  She never used to talk to me when I was invisible. But I’m not anymore.

  After my first two lies were exposed—they knew I was a girl, they knew I hadn’t been born a hermaphrodite—after that, I started to disappear. I didn’t talk in or out of class. If your mouth’s shut, lies can’t come streaming out. There were still whispers. But after a year they dulled down.

  I liked being invisible.

  I watched. I thought.

  Zach never saw me. I know that. I noticed him, sitting with Sarah, nuzzling at her neck, kissing her. Playing ball with the guys.

  I imagined what it would be like to be him. But I didn’t envy it. I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t not happy either. Invisibility suits me.