Tell Me No Lies

by Adele Griffin

  She unwrapped her chopsticks, split them, and rubbed them together as if to start a tiny fire. She used one chopstick to daub at a bamboo-green lump on the edge of the board, delivering the dollop to a saucer, adding a splash of soy sauce, and mixing it to a paste.

  “What is that?”

  “Wasabi. It’s like a horseradish-y mustard, for kick. Now pick up your chopsticks and think of it this way. Rest a pencil on your ring finger, hold a pencil on top.” She snapped the chopsticks as if to bite my nose, then swooped and pinched something off the board that looked like a piece of chewed Wrigley’s. “Eel,” she said, and popped it neatly in her mouth.

  After a couple of minutes of trying to work my own chopsticks, I gave up. Why had I always reached for a fork at Mimi’s house whenever we ate kimchi?

  In the end, I used my fork and knife to cut up a black-bordered rice wheel that was center-packed with green and pink slivers of crabstick and avocado.

  “You don’t like it.”

  “It’s bland.”

  “California rolls are beginner’s sushi. That’s why I ordered one for you.”

  I took another stab with my chopsticks, accidentally sending an entire disk Frisbee-ing across the room.

  Claire winced. “Oh my God. I don’t even want to know you right now.”

  “Hang on, I’ll get it.” I stood.

  She held up a palm. “Don’t.”

  I sat. I could see the California roll under a far table. Introduction to Claire Reynolds was a class I was flunking in spite of my very best efforts. Claire would never be friends with me after this afternoon. No doubt she regretted doing my eye makeup and letting me be her hop-along. A crawling, prickling behind my eyes startled me. Now I was shaking. Now I was shaking too hard. Was it happening?

  “Try the eel.” Claire pointed.

  No. I hadn’t been shaking. I took a breath. When I picked up my fork, she frowned, so I put it down.

  “So, are you an Argyll lifer?”

  I nodded. “Since kindergarten.”

  “Aunt Jane was a lifer. She’s all rah-rah Argyll, but honestly I don’t see why.”

  “It’s pretty small potatoes compared with boarding school.” I decided to brave it. “Why aren’t you graduating from Strickland? Why are you here at all?”

  Claire was quick with her answer. “My dad lost his money in the crash last year, and he couldn’t pay alimony anymore. He and my stepmom moved to Florida, and I had to leave school, so Mom and I came here to live with her sister, my aunt Jane. She’s a crazy cat lady, but we were out of options.”

  “Oh.” My mom had been right—something bad happened. In a hazy way, I knew about that stock market crash, but it hadn’t affected us. My dad was the senior accountant for Lupini’s Valves, Pipes & Fittings. Everyone needed plumbing, no matter what happened on Wall Street.

  “Your aunt wouldn’t even pay for your last year at Strickland?”

  Claire looked evasive. “No, just Argyll.”

  “That seems unfair.”

  “It is, it really is! Aunt Jane lives for those horrible cats!” Claire spoke in a burst, as if she’d been waiting to commiserate with someone. “There’s sixteen of them, and there’s no place they aren’t allowed and the fridge is crammed with opened tins of liver-flavored cat food, so the kitchen is, like, disgusting. I do takeout whenever I can—canned soup if I’m desperate.” She speared another piece of sushi. “It’s been weeks since I had anything decent.”

  “Sixteen cats?” My nose scrunched. “That’s fifteen too many.”

  “Right!” Claire laughed. “Exactly!”

  She told me the cats had the run of the house and could do anything they wanted, plundering like pirates, knocking over vases, scratching curtains and portraits, sleeping anywhere. Picturing those cats was so creepily enthralling that the waiter’s interruption with the check startled me.

  “Nineteen dollars and fifty-six cents,” I said, glancing oh-so-casually at the bill. “But we each put in eleven, that covers the tip.” Whew, since I had only fourteen dollars.

  “I forgot to hit an ATM.” Claire frowned out the window. “Who even knows where the nearest bank machine might be. Dammit.”

  “It’s okay, I have a card.” Strictly for emergencies—I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d used my Mastercard, so fresh that its raised numbers resisted from the imprint they’d worn onto my wallet’s plastic insert when I tugged the card free.

  “Next time, it’s on me,” she said. “And I’m not just saying that.”

  The rosy idea of a next time buried my worry about using the card. I tipped twenty percent and signed with a flourish.

  Outside, the low sun cast long shadows onto the street. “It’s not even five,” said Claire. “When Jay and I came here, we planned to go to the Mütter Museum, but we never did.” She looked at me. “You’re cold.”

  “Not really.”

  “Here. I’m in two layers.” In one fluid motion, she’d shrugged off her army jacket, and then her cardigan, which she tossed to me. It instantly shot to the front of the line as the nicest thing I’d ever worn.

  “Thanks.”

  “You can keep it. Want to go?” As she slid back into her jacket.

  It wasn’t really a question. We jumped in the car and found a parking place on the street, just a few blocks down from the museum. As we walked over, I kept stealing glances at Claire. She moved—chin up, shoulders back—as if she knew she was being observed.

  “Do you and Jay still talk?” I asked as we waited for the light to change. My finger traced up and down the black silk placket—did she really mean I could keep the cardigan forever?

  “No. He graduated.”

  “What’s he doing now? Is he dating anyone else?”

  Claire turned on me. “You need to grow this out.” She yanked at my bangs like she was crushing a dead leaf.

  “Hey!”

  “And then bleach some of it, maybe. That’d look cool. If you kept the rest short, it’d be a style, at least. Think about it.”

  “Um . . . okay.” So Claire didn’t want to discuss Jay. Her leggy stride left me winded as I struggled to keep pace. She looked quietly pleased when we wheeled up on a brick, colonnaded building enclosed by an iron gate.

  “I never forget an address. And it’s open.”

  Our student IDs let us in for free, and from the foyer we entered a grand room of Victorian portraits, garnet-red velvet carpet, and brass-railed stairs. In my history of school field trips—the Betsy Ross House, the Liberty Bell—I’d always moved in a herd. This felt like a special private viewing.

  “Remind me, what is this museum about?”

  “Medical curiosities from the College of Physicians.”

  “Medical what?”

  “Like fetuses and organs. I think Einstein’s brain is somewhere.”

  Claire veered off into one room, but I stayed where I was. This museum was awful, like we’d stumbled into someone’s personal freak show, a depressing display of disfigurement. The glass-fronted cabinets showed me nothing but horrors: plaster casts of death masks, misshapen skulls, and wet ugly things in jars.

  “I wish I could unsee all this,” I told Claire when I found her on the second floor. She had stopped to stare at a life-sized plaster cast.

  “Chang and Eng Bunker,” she read off the placard. “The original Siamese twins—it says here they’re actually from Thailand.” She lifted her eyebrows. “Mrs. Birmingham told me each of us has to do a senior assembly. Mine’s not till sometime in February. I could talk about this place, right?”

  “You can talk about anything. Mine’s in January, sometime after we get back to school.” I hadn’t decided what topic I’d pick—I hated even thinking about speaking in public. But I’d never choose anything as tragic as Chang and Eng Bunker. I felt unhappy just looking a
t their death cast, the chest-to-chest artery pipeline that forced them to spend their whole lives facing each other.

  Claire walked to the car so fast, I struggled to keep up. Her head was down, her body hemmed in with private thoughts. She was still preoccupied as we drove down 22nd Street. “Which one of those twins had it worse, do you think?” she asked abruptly, like she’d just remembered I was in the car with her.

  “Stuck together forever is an equal problem for both of them.”

  Claire shrugged. “Maybe one of them didn’t mind the closeness as much.”

  I wondered if she wasn’t thinking about Chang and Eng, but herself and Jay. Whatever was on her mind, Claire missed our next turn, burrowing us deep and then deeper into a residential neighborhood. “Okay, detour. We’ll take Ben Franklin Parkway.” I envied her easy grasp of the city, piecing it together, mapping it out.

  But I was the one who saw the mural first. “Look at that!”

  She slowed down and we stared. It covered the whole side of a building, a bold, bright dance scene of interlocking figures, and red and yellow and blue bodies on a clean white background. I felt like I was seeing two things at once, the fun and the dare of graffiti but also real art. Each body was composed with such perfect balance that it turned the whole wall into a perfect harmony of motion. I could feel the joy in it, too, and loved its splash, a blast of fun at the end of this tired old street.

  “That’s a Keith Haring,” said Claire. “He does those murals all over. Last summer, some of my friends and I went to his Pop Shop down in SoHo. I bought a radiant baby button. I don’t really know what Keith Haring looks like, but I swear he sold it to me himself. Little nerdy guy with glasses. That’s how I like to tell the story anyway. I mean, wouldn’t you?”

  I didn’t know who Keith Haring was, or what radiant baby meant, or what a Pop Shop was, and while I’d heard about SoHo, I’d never been there, either—New York for me was the sixth-grade class trip to the Statue of Liberty. The whole story seemed so glamorous, yet another glittering example of Claire Reynolds as someone who knew all things I didn’t, and who had done all things I hadn’t.

  “Totally,” I answered.

  six

  “How was your study group?” Mom asked at family dinner that night.

  I shot Peter a look, as in: Thanks for taking down my message—NOT!

  “Peter said you were in a study group at the library?” Now it was Mom who shot Peter a look.

  “I told Peter I was at Claire Reynolds’s house.” I felt indignant. Somehow Peter’s carelessness with my message canceled out my lie.

  Peter looked surly. “I thought you were at the library because you sounded weird and you were whispering.”

  “I was never at the library. I never said that.”

  “Then why were you whispering?”

  “I wasn’t!”

  “The message pads aren’t just decorative,” Dad said mildly.

  Peter reached for his glass of milk and took a swig to show he was finished talking with all of us about it.

  “Claire’s aunt, Jane Sleighmaker, lives at that enormous property off Merion Square Road, is that right?” asked Mom. “Laven—no, Lilac House.”

  “I didn’t meet her. She’s a crazy cat lady, according to Claire.”

  “She’s been very reliable for Annual Giving. The house is supposed to be stunning, one of the great old properties. She used to host fund-raisers for Argyll. I did hear that she took her husband’s death very hard.”

  I shrugged. It seemed like a betrayal to confirm anything.

  “So is it enormous? More ridiculous than Gretchen Drinker’s house?”

  I nodded and hoped Mom would stop. Peter went to Radnor High, where Owen would go, too, after he finished at our local middle school in Wayne. But I’d learned to read at age three, could recite all the state capitals in pre-K, and as a result, my parents scraped to send me to a school that felt like a country club. We were always aware of Argyll’s lofty connections, too, like my friend Gretchen Drinker, who’d transferred to Choate for high school, and whose family lived in a mansion complete with its original ballroom.

  Meantime, I was stunned that my lie kept working so well. I couldn’t think of the last time I’d told my parents I was doing one thing while I went off and did another; it was as if Claire Reynolds had put a spell on me. But I didn’t call Mimi or Gage after dinner to give them the scoop about Philadelphia. I felt protective of my afternoon. It wasn’t a thing to gossip about. I’d have to let it come up naturally.

  I’d saved a matchbook from Hinata and a business card from the Mütter Museum. In my room, I arranged them in my sock drawer with last fall’s U2 ticket stub and this past summer’s James Taylor ticket stub—two of my favorite nights.

  In one day, I’d doubled my secret brag display.

  After homework, I took my sketchbook to the living room, switched on MTV, and tried not to care that homecoming parties, including Matt’s, were happening from Paoli to Ardmore. Matt Ashley’s best friends were Tommy Powers and Jonesy Sweet. Jonesy was dating Kristina Roe—“Kreo” to her Nectarine friends—and last spring, Matt, Jonesy, and Tommy had stopped by Argyll to watch Kreo’s lacrosse game. When I’d caught sight of Matt in the upper school breezeway, dropping quarters into our soda machine, I felt ill: clammy palms, light-headed, the works.

  Go, walk up to him, say something.

  But I’d backed away. And spent this whole past summer regretting my decision.

  I flipped a page of my sketchbook. Matt was probably hooking up with a Nectarine right now. Maybe they were in his room, listening to Forever Young.

  My mind flipped through things Claire had told me earlier, details of her boarding school friends and stuff about Mr. Français, Jay. The afternoon already felt like a dream. Claire was probably somewhere fun tonight, too.

  I ached with missing out. Why couldn’t Mimi and Gage live a little?

  Later Peter and Owen joined me on the couch, overruling my channel choice with an Indiana Jones marathon and plowing through bowls of cereal as if they hadn’t just eaten dinner a couple of hours ago.

  It was midnight before the boys went to bed. I switched back to MTV.

  Martha Quinn was veejaying. Late-night videos were outdated, obscure, and mostly lame. Usually someone had filmed the band standing around playing their music and added in some random visual effects. But the music itself was good, and reminded me of Claire’s taste. Martha kicked off the hour with Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love.” The video made it easy to watch, sketch my hand, watch some more. When the song changed, I wouldn’t have known to look up if I hadn’t heard the next band earlier that same day. But I instantly recognized the bass-heavy chords, and the proof was printed at the bottom of the screen: Joy Division, She’s Lost Control/Factory Records.

  Ian Curtis was singing in a close-up. My heart jolted. When I’d first heard his deadpan alto, I hadn’t expected someone so boyish, so good-looking—in a choirboy way, the kind of guy who’d have made Mimi and me nudge elbows and raise eyebrows if we’d jostled past him in Suburban Square. Knowing Ian Curtis had killed himself made him seem otherworldly. There was a hypnotic quality to his glassy eyes, like he was an alien caught between one world and another.

  And his dancing! His arms and legs moved so crazily, like a man trying to catch a train. Moves that seemed barely contained by his willpower, but also purely connected to his music. An alien—or a spaz, Wendy Palmer might call him—but he was in control of it, too.

  By the time the video was over, my nose was nearly touching the TV set. I felt like the whole song was his attempt to explain a journey to a dark, familiar place where I’d also been, and when Joy Division was gone, replaced by the Psychedelic Furs, for a while I just sat there, listening to the pound of my heart, flooded with that awful memory of my first seizure, when I’d been an alien, too.


  seven

  Gage called me Saturday—she’d won her fencing match at Trenton and she wanted to celebrate. She picked up Mimi and me in her jeep that night for a movie. The only one worth seeing was Pumpkinhead, which was so terrifying I kept my eyes closed through most of it while Mimi and Gage, on either side of me, pinched my arms in attempts to force me to watch.

  “Lizzy, your screaming is scarier than the movie,” teased Mimi as we raced back to the jeep. “And you hardly even cracked open your eyes for five minutes!”

  “Are we hitting Chili’s or Boston Chicken for dinner?” asked Gage. “Yeesh, I hate walking around in the dark! Pumpkinheads are everywhere!”

  “I vote Boston Chicken,” I said. “You guys, that movie was stupid. A murderous ghost with a pumpkin for a head? Give me a break!”

  Gage laughed. “You can’t give a review if you hardly even watched it! Maybe you should just stick to PG movies until your birthday.”

  “Hey, did you know Claire Reynolds is the new oldest?” I asked. Finally here was a semi-easy way to talk about her. “She’s even older than Katie Fox. I didn’t tell you guys, but the two of us went to Philadelphia yesterday.”

  “What? Claire? How? Why?” asked Mimi. She and Gage traded glances as I climbed into the back of the jeep.

  “I don’t know.” I stayed nonchalant. “One minute we were in the art room, the next minute we were driving into town for sushi.”

  “Bizarre,” said Mimi. “Claire Reynolds seems so standoffish. Did you get any scoop? I just figured she got kicked out of boarding school for drugs or something, and her family pulled some strings for Argyll.”

  “I think her mom needed a change.” As much as I wanted Mimi and Gage to ask me about Claire, I also didn’t want to betray Claire with the personal juicy details of her life.

  “Her aunt lives in a mansion,” said Gage. “I heard some girls on the team talking about it—how she used to have big parties there but now she’s an old hermit.”

  “Ooh, maybe it’s a cursed house like the demon in Pumpkinhead!” Mimi squealed. “Don’t go in there, Lizzy. You’ll never come out!” Then Mimi began telling Gage about how Noah and some of his Bowdoin friends were seeing a campus band later that night.