Tell Me No Lies

by Adele Griffin

  Also by Adele Griffin

  Where I Want to Be

  Picture the Dead

  Tighter

  The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone

  Be True to Me

  Adele Griffin

  Algonquin 2018

  For Erich

  Contents

  My First One

  Part One: Fall

  Part Two: Winter

  Part Three: Spring

  Acknowledgments

  my first one

  I’m short, so I’m standing in the front row of chorus class.

  We’re all singing “Cupid” by Sam Cooke.

  “Nobody but meeee,” I sing, and then my left eye sputters into darkness.

  I look down at my Top-Siders, blink blink blink.

  The eye flicks back and forth like a burned-out strobe.

  Now there’s a tingling in my fingers and the back of my skull, a rush of heat.

  “Something’s wrong,” I say. “Help.” But I’m quiet. I don’t want to be the one to ruin the one fun number in our eighth-grade program of corny folk songs and creaky lullabies.

  My right eye blacks out next. I’m blind, my brain floods with panic as my bones bend, my feet give out, I slip and fall backward to the floor. My head slamming against the bottom riser, hot pain cresting up in waves.

  “Lizzy! Lizzy Swift is choking!”

  Lizzy Swift, so as not to confuse me with Lizzy DeBatista, who’s a foot taller than me and standing in the back, troublemakers’ row.

  Girls are shrieking and repeating my name, “Lizzy, Lizzy, Lizzy! Lizzy, talk to us! Is this some kind of a game?”

  Wendy Palmer’s voice cuts in lower, amused. Oh my God, she’s spazzing out.

  My friends are with me—Mimi’s hand is on my twitching shoulder, while Gage comes at me sidelong. “Lizzy, stop!” she hisses. “Why are you being so weird? Everyone’s looking!” But I’m drowning, I’m a plane plummeting to Earth, I’m lost to the sheer horror that this is how I die.

  Another planet away, the piano stops.

  “Get back, get back. Give her room, girls!” Then Mr. Hock tells Mimi to run to the nurse’s office as he rolls me on my side and unbuttons the top button of my collar.

  “Lizzy, I know you’re scared,” he says. “You’re having a seizure, and it’ll pass, I promise, it will pass and you’ll be fine.” Later on in the week he’d tell me about his college roommate, who also had epilepsy. But now it’s this morning, and I barely know that word.

  She doesn’t look fine.

  Shut up, Wendy.

  The billowing panic that I’m not fine.

  And then I black out.

  My mom’s in the infirmary when I come to. I’m crying and she’s nothing but a comfort—but this gets wrapped up in the awfulness of that day, when I learned the words grand mal, and began to fear the possibility of another one.

  I know girls still whisper about it. How crazy I looked. How freaky I seemed. The word spaz is a permanent haze around me, especially in those moments when Wendy catches my eye. I’ve heard she does a dead-on imitation of my seizure, though I’ve never caught her outright.

  Gage and Mimi promised it was hardly anything, but best friends are supposed to lie. As it is, I’m on guard forever. Imagining the next time, dreading it, trying not to think about it. Failing.

  part one

  fall

  one

  The new girl arrived at Argyll on the Tuesday after Columbus Day weekend, a month late for the start of school. Not that anyone was expecting her, late or ever. I’d slumped into the art room after lunch, my brain burned out on physics and history but reorienting for the one subject where I could lose myself.

  We all saw her right away, an elegant stork over by the stereo system, painting her nails with a bottle of Wite-Out.

  Who’s that? I mouthed to Gage and Mimi, who shrugged in sync.

  But seriously, who was that? None of us knew. Could you be a new girl and a senior? The two facts scraped against each other.

  She had on a navy school kilt, too new and baggy on her hips—upper schoolers wore our kilts short, faded, and (if you looked close) doodled on with Sharpie pen. But the rest of her style was a middle finger to the uniforms section of the Argyll handbook, from the pair of men’s boxer shorts that drooped below her hemline to her conspicuously wrinkled, untucked button-down to her beat-up pink espadrilles that she wore with heels crushed like bedroom slippers.

  We shuffled around her, retrieving our projects from the flat files, watching as she jiggered a cassette tape with one hand while blowing the nails of the other. She held herself in that alert, pose-y way of someone used to compliments. I couldn’t see her face full-on, but her hair was black and glossy as a doll’s. Tendrils fell soft to brush the pale nape of her neck.

  What was her story?

  AP Art was taught Tuesdays and Thursdays by the Custis-Browns, our husband-and-wife art teachers. The rumor was that lurid nudie pictures of her by him hung in galleries in Philadelphia—Maggie Farthington had sworn she’d seen one last fall, and it was a complete and total gross-out. But at least it wasn’t him naked, we all agreed, with his woolly beard and woodchuck’s overbite.

  For the first few minutes of class, Mrs. Custis-Brown made long-distance calls in her office. She’d fling herself into the main room eventually.

  Once the new girl had snapped in her cassette, she slid nearer to one of the long metal tables where Mimi, Gage, and I had spread out. My quick, shy glance proved my hunch that she was pretty, with dark eyes and delicate bones. She moved in a sort of purposeful trance, her fingers trailing the edges of easels and shelves.

  Last week, Mimi, Gage, and I had chosen our “concentration” to submit for AP portfolio credit. We’d had the summer to think about it. Mimi, who liked designs, had decided to focus on “Patterns.” Gage, the maverick, had gone with “Water.” I’d picked “Hands,” which had seemed like a clever challenge—or at least, Mrs. Custis-Brown had been pleased.

  “Hands are technical, but expressive,” she told me. “I think you could do something interesting there.”

  So far, I hadn’t.

  The new girl dropped at our table, resting her chin on its surface, her heavy-lidded gaze fixed on nothing, clicking her jaw and singing lyrics she knew by heart. The song was in French—an old man’s pervert voice, sometimes joined by a whispery girl-woman. It sounded nothing like what we loved, the British techno bands fronted by guys who sounded like they’d drive Vespas, make out with you in nightclubs, and know all the slang words for drugs.

  Mimi plunged in. “Are you new?” she asked. “Are you a senior? Are you in AP Art?”

  Without lifting her chin, the girl nodded a yes that answered all the questions.

  “Mrs. C-B will be out soon. Or I can go get her.” I sounded too helpful, which girls said about me. Teacher’s pet. Kiss-up. But it just came naturally, like preferring mint chip or being a good babysitter.

  “No, thanks.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “No.” The girl lifted her head, then raised herself higher, arcing her back and stretching her arms. As she glanced at me, I stared. Popcorn-pale skin dusted in freckles. A beaky nose balanced by her wide, kohl-smudged eyes. Knobby cheekbones, lips on the thin side. She had looks people got in arguments about, where some called her beautiful and others said no, too racehorse, too freakish, too harsh—a haunted face that was closed to me, to everyone, and yet I couldn’t shrug off the sense that any moment she might cry.

  “I can get you some sketch paper,” I said, “while you wait?”r />
  “Lizzy . . .” Mimi didn’t like when I got too eager-beaver.

  But the girl just shrugged. “Sure.”

  I jumped to tear a piece of butcher paper from a roll on the other side of the room, then slid it in front of her like a waitress providing a place mat.

  With a suggestion of thanks in her nod, the girl took a pencil from the coffee can of chalks and pencils I set down. She pulled a mirrored compact from her sling bag, opened it, propped her chin in her hand, and began to draw herself.

  Right away, the sketch captured an enhanced, Hollywood version of her, with a pouty mouth and swooping eyelashes. It was almost comic—if she’d been a friend of ours, we’d have laid right in:

  Hey, in love with yourself much?

  Oh, I didn’t know you were secretly Isabella Rossellini!

  Mimi, Gage, and I were now trading so many disbelieving looks around the table that we couldn’t even concentrate on our own work.

  When Mrs. Custis-Brown finally appeared, I could tell she didn’t think much of the sketch, either.

  “A portrait!” she said, and nothing else. “Are you Claire? Claire Reynolds?”

  “That’s me.” Claire Reynolds. As she stood, we all buttoned her into her name.

  A normal name. Almost plain, but pretty.

  Claire made a sophisticated contrast to Mrs. Custis-Brown, who—in her bright, shapeless smocks and clogs—looked like someone who worked at a Swedish day care. But Mrs. Custis-Brown was smiling, her blue eyes crinkling. More delighted by Claire’s artsy style than with her actual art.

  “Great! I’ve just read your transcript. Welcome to Advanced Placement Art. I teach the first semester and my husband takes over in January.”

  Claire was half listening, the way you hear a stewardess do the safety talk.

  “I don’t know if the girls filled you in that we submit AP portfolios come spring?” Mrs. Custis-Brown chirped on. “The panel judges between twelve and fifteen pieces on breadth, quality, and concentration. Technically it’s called a ‘sustained investigation,’ but that sounds so detective show, right? You don’t have to decide—” Mrs. Custis-Brown broke off, startled by the music, the woman’s voice saturating the room with gasps and animal breathing.

  “My mixtape,” said Claire.

  “Okay!” said Mrs. Custis-Brown. “I’m not familiar! And I’m from New York, originally—but we never get in to see the new acts anymore.”

  “But this song is old,” said Claire. “I’d have thought by now Serge Gainsbourg’s got zero shock value.”

  “Oh, Gainsbourg!” Mrs. Custis-Brown batted a hand. “It’s been so long since I heard him. Fine by me. It’s everybody’s art room.” She threw out a nervous laugh.

  Under the table, Mimi pushed her leg against mine. Gage rolled in her lips. I looked down—to start laughing would be to make the worst noise possible.

  “And I already know my art concentration,” Claire said.

  “Oh? Wonderful! What is it?”

  “Myself.”

  “Okay, right on!”

  The song had melted into liquid sighs and squeals.

  Gage was visibly shaking, in the throes of a silent laugh-attack.

  “The art room is also open after school, and you’ll want those extra hours,” Mrs. Custis-Brown continued loudly over the sex music. “As for someone taking you through the nuts and bolts of where we keep art supplies, I nominate Lizzy Swift.” She looked at me, knowing I’d be happy to.

  “Sure,” I managed to wheeze through a laugh-breath. “I’d be happy to.”

  With a nod, Mrs. Custis-Brown left us, her hands clasped behind her back as she moved to another table. We all exhaled relief.

  “My parents play this repulsive guy,” said someone at one of the other tables.

  I sketched my right hand with my left, watching my fingers shape into a pile of kindling. Nerves clenched in hope that Claire would ask me for the art room tour.

  Claire didn’t ask me for anything.

  two

  “What’s the story with Claire Reynolds?” I asked my mom that afternoon on the drive home. Mom worked at Argyll in the alumnae relations office, and she was my ride whenever I couldn’t bum from Mimi or Gage.

  “Jane Sleighmaker is Claire’s aunt, and she called in a favor to Barbara,” said Mom. Barbara Birmingham was our school headmistress. “Jane has given a fortune to the school over the years. So Barbara found Jane’s niece a place.”

  “Mom, that’s not an answer.”

  “I don’t know why she’s here.” Mom waved off the intrigue. “My guess is that something bad happened. Death, divorce. Coming in new as a senior isn’t anyone’s first choice. Oh!” Her mind was already hurtling toward the usual afternoon obstacles. “Before we pick up Peter, we need to hit the Stop and Shop. Your brothers went through an entire family-sized bag of tortellini last night.”

  Between a full-time job and three kids—me, Peter, and Owen—Mom was always running late for something and worrying about something else at the same time. Once we got to the Stop & Shop, she was worrying that we were late to pick up my brother Peter from the orthodontist. And by the time we retrieved Peter, late, she was worrying that she and Dad both had forgotten to take out chicken parts this morning to defrost for dinner.

  She was done with the mystery of Jane Sleighmaker’s niece, but her “something bad” stuck in my head.

  Except for Tuesday and Thursday art, Claire wasn’t in any of my classes, but Wednesday afternoon when I saw her in the hall, she’d layered her black bra with a white T-shirt, and had paired her ripped black tights with biker boots. The only evidence of a school uniform was the kilt. It was a frankly impressive amount of rule breaking.

  When I started waving, she raised a hand, but maybe just to get me to stop.

  She was alone again the next day, when I saw her in the library lounge after school, reading Paris Match magazine. I hadn’t changed from my dorky modern dance sweatshirt and jazz pants—not a “real” sport by Argyll standards, but the only option for nonjocks like me—so I hid a little deeper behind the potted plastic fern as I watched her. Claire had the air of a popular girl, and I wondered why she hadn’t jumped right in with Maggie and Wendy and other Nectarines—Gage’s name for the “It” girls, based on their collective obsession with frying their skin to radioactive-bright “tans” over at the Bronze Age tanning salon at the mall.

  “What do you think of the new girl?” I asked Gage and Mimi on Friday at lunch.

  “She dresses like a punk,” said Mimi. “She’s got on these storm trooper boots today. And she’s always slightly condescending in my French class. She thinks she’s smarter than she is, but French is her only honors class besides art.”

  “I dunno.” Gage shrugged. “She plays field hockey like a guy. She swears on the field, too. Boarding school manners, but it keeps everyone on their toes.”

  “Speaking of sports, do either of you want to stop by Lincoln?” I asked. “I’ll go if anyone’s up for it.” We were out early today, because it was Lincoln Academy’s homecoming weekend. Most seniors had cut out already to watch the football.

  Mimi sighed. “I wish. Dr. Rodriguez’s first big calc test is Monday. I need to start studying for that, like, right now.”

  “Count me out, too, but on the grounds of No Interest.” Gage looked annoyed. “Once I graduate, I refuse to waste another precious second of my life running up and down some stupid field—or watching anyone else do it.”

  “Watching the game isn’t really the point,” I said.

  Gage frowned. “Come hang out at my house if you’re itchy.”

  I’d been over at the Hornblows’ last weekend. Videos and pizza. Television and ice cream.

  “I just mean for a change. I just mean”—I took a breath and went for it—“that you have a jeep, Gage.” She’d gotten a
brand-new red Cherokee for her birthday this past June, which she used almost exclusively to pick up pizza or to ferry her little sister, Helena, to tuba practice. “We could pile in it right now and drive by Lincoln. People were saying Matt Ashley’s parents are out of town and he’s having a party. Maybe we could stop by later tonight?”

  “Nooo!” Mimi was laughing as she put her hands to her ears. “Even imagining that is so embarrassing. Just showing up at Matt Ashley’s house! I’d die before I’d let him see me out on his doorstep, asking if I can come in and party! I’d just die!”

  “Who’s people anyway?” Unlike Mimi, who was always crisp and smooth in her headbands and button earrings, Gage could look a little untamed, ink stains on her fingers and dried food clinging to her sweater, but she carried herself with an athlete’s ease. “I’m the friend who can open all the jars,” she liked to joke, but when she wanted to intimidate me, she could. Now she folded her arms and squared me off in her stare. “Who was talking about Matt Ashley’s party? Nectarines?”

  “Yes, in the senior lounge.” I turned to Mimi. “And Matt wouldn’t have forgotten me. He’d let us in.”

  Mimi shook her head. “I’m really sorry, Lizzy, but Noah and I have a phone date later tonight.” Noah was Mimi’s longtime boyfriend, a freshman at Bowdoin.

  “And I need to be up early for fencing tomorrow,” added Gage. “The tournament’s in Trenton.” Fencing was Gage’s weekend passion, though she acted like she needed it for her college transcript—as if three varsity sports weren’t enough.

  “Even if we skip the party, homecoming is not an insane suggestion.” My face was hot. I wasn’t used to sticking up for my point.

  Mimi flicked her fingers. “Okay, okay, then go do what you want, Lizzy Swift. You don’t have to drag us into it.” But she knew this wasn’t true. Without a car, I did have to drag them into it.

  Senior year was the summit of my Argyll journey that had started as a kindergartner in the main campus colonial house: “once a historic inn where General Washington himself had stayed!” according to our school brochure. As I graduated to middle and upper school, my glimpses of senior life—their mysterious snack pit, their VIP corner of the parking lot, their exclusive senior lounge with its saggy couch and bunny-ears television—just made me more hungry for it.