Tell Me No Lies

by Adele Griffin

  “Cool.” Claire didn’t seem to care about any of this information. But my heart was thudding at the thought of going back to some random apartment with Matt.

  Take a chill pill, Lizzy. We hadn’t even gotten into the Bank. Nobody was making any decisions yet.

  At the club’s entrance, Dave’s and Claire’s IDs passed, and they disappeared. Through dungeon-thick doors, we stepped into a vaulted marble space and a heavy bass beat. It really did look like a bank that had been hijacked by a club. Purple and red strobes flashed from the upper balcony DJ booth.

  Strobes weren’t good for me, since they could trigger a seizure. I looked down at my boots and counted back from ten, then let myself reconnect.

  The whole place was dark, with one far wall banked by dozens of TV screens, all flickering with the same old black-and-white movie. Everyone was pulsing to the beat. It was hot, too—I pulled off my sweater and added it to the lumpy hill of scarves and coats in a deep corner of the room. As my eyes adjusted, I could see that my bra was visibly pink under my T-shirt, but people were wearing so many getups—from bubble skirts to biker shorts—that a peekaboo bra didn’t seem like a big deal.

  When Dave pointed to the bar in the back, I shook my head. “I’m good, thanks.” I didn’t need a repeat of Halloween.

  “I’ll see what they’ve got.” Dave looked to Claire, hoping she’d join him, but she shrugged him off. Matt and I stayed on the floor as Dave left us, soon to reappear from the smoky bar zone with two beers and two full plastic cups balanced in his hands. After a couple of minutes, I ducked off with my drink and set it over on a far window ledge.

  The music shifted to the more chilled-out sounds of Art of Noise. Dave and Claire had migrated to a corner. I’d had some last-minute doubts about them—that he’d be too bold, that she’d get aloof. But they’d clicked even better than I hoped. Free to dance, I loved how each mix strung into the next, a nonstop reason to stay out on the floor.

  Matt seemed as happy as he’d ever been since Walt’s death, busting out on the dance floor with anyone who wanted to join us. When we took a break, hot and sweaty and sharing a cup of water by the cooler, he wound an arm around me, and the soft surprise of his mouth pressed against mine burst me awake like a flower blooming in time-lapse mode.

  “It’s nice to be with you and not have all the guys around,” I confessed.

  Matt nodded as he looked around, taking in the dance floor, the DJ. “You can be yourself here,” he said. “So many styles of people. Nobody’s telling you what you’re supposed to be.” But he looked more wistful than gleeful about that.

  When I slipped into the ladies’ room a little later, it was like a whole other all-female party was happening. Girls in ribbed tank dresses and claw-moussed perms stood hip to hip, their eyes judging their reflections as they resmeared lip glosses. Matt was right, there were more intriguing types of kids in a downtown club than in our schools.

  I scooped some pink glop from the communal vat of hair gel and gave a scrunch to my bangs. I hadn’t gotten a trim since Claire told me to grow my hair, and now the front drooped over my eye.

  In a far corner, a girl was dealing with a gross popped blister on her heel.

  “You need to cover it,” said her friend. “You don’t want to be, like, exposed.”

  The blister girl looked worried. “We should go, maybe.”

  “I’ve got a Band-Aid,” said another girl, who’d been doing her eyeliner, Claire-style, in the mirror. She dug in her purse and handed one over. “My bag’s, like, nothing but condoms and Band-Aids. You can’t be too careful, right?” Others murmured agreement.

  The music had morphed into acid house, a man bloodlessly intoning “Give it to me” over a robotic loop. I looked over to where Claire and Dave were standing by a back wall, talking intensely. Matt and I traded a smile as we moved to join them.

  When I caught Claire’s eye, I tapped my watch. “Hey, it’s half past eleven. If we grab a cab now . . .”

  But Claire was already shaking her head. “Let’s go back with the guys.”

  “Yeah, it’s the least you can do, to keep the party going,” said Dave.

  “We’re not your consolation prize,” said Claire. “It’s just a better plan than taking the train home late tonight.”

  Dave grinned. “Don’t sugarcoat it for my sake.”

  Outside, we grabbed a cab that took us to a needle-thin high-rise on Liberty Place, and it was a relief when Matt picked up the fare. I’d hardly ever been up so high over the city, and I felt strangely trapped, like a princess in a tower, though the apartment itself wasn’t much. The furniture was covered in clear plastic, a crackly dead fern rested on the radiator, and its one bookshelf was stacked with textbooks about accounting law.

  “Remind me why your dad needs this place?” I asked.

  “He brings his dates here,” Dave answered. “He doesn’t want me finding out about his swinging bachelor life.”

  Matt and Claire kicked off their boots at the door and were already in the bedroom, hauling out pillows and blankets to make a living-room lounge pit. I sat on the edge of it, with my back against the plastic-sheathed couch. I pulled off my Docs and wriggled my cramped toes. The others had been drinking more than I had—they were goofier, and I felt overly sober. Then Dave emerged from the kitchen with a bottle of white wine. “Who’s thirsty?” He didn’t listen for answers as he uncorked it and poured four juice glasses, then handed them all out.

  “I’m not in for any stupid drinking games,” said Claire as she settled in against the opposite wall, propped on pillows, glass in hand.

  Dave laughed. “Okay, then how about this—anyone want to hear my badass ghost story?”

  We all chorused yes. I sipped my wine and immediately felt calmer.

  “Hang on, first I gotta take a leak.”

  In the pause, Matt jumped up to switch off the lights “We need some ghostly atmosphere. Dave’s badass ghost story needs all the help it can get.” On returning, he sat right next to me and dropped a light kiss on my lips.

  Now it was pitch-black. I could hardly see my hand in front of me. When he kissed me again, I kissed him back, and our kiss tasted exciting, like wine.

  “Some kids with bad IDs were getting turned away at the door as we left,” Matt said quietly as I shifted into the weight of his arm around me. “I keep thinking how Walt would have been psyched to know that one of the last things he did was give us a night like this. He loved big open spaces, where you could meet all kinds of different people and be chill.”

  “That’s awesome,” I said. “We’re carrying the torch, like a secret club.”

  “If that’s a club, I want in,” said Claire. “Even though Walt didn’t make me a fake ID.”

  “Hey, who is Stephanie Moser, age twenty-six, of Morristown, New Jersey?” I asked. I’d seen the ID when Claire and I had been carded at the restaurant, earlier tonight.

  There was a pause that made me wish I could see her face through the darkness. “A gift,” she answered. “Stephanie gets me in everywhere. Even though she’s four inches shorter and eight years older than me. Bartenders and bouncers only see whatever. Pale skin and dark hair.”

  “Mine belongs to my cousin,” said Dave as he joined us. “Okay, I know nobody can see me but I’ve got the bottle. Who wants a top-up?” We all laughed and held our glasses out into the dark as he refilled us, and then went to be near Claire on the other side of the room.

  “I never met Walt Powers, sorry to say,” Dave added, “but I won’t turn down a membership.”

  “To belonging,” Claire said softly, and Matt and I clinked.

  Dave began his ghost story, and I could hear in his voice someone who knows he’s got a good one, and then after he’d managed to terrify us all, Claire was telling the story about the ghost of Lovell Pond—and then their voices dropped to a whisper. Ma
tt and I were kissing, not too noisily, I hoped, as our hands dipped under each other’s clothes, exploring.

  “I’m getting a second bottle,” said Claire from far away. I heard shuffling and then a kitchenette light snapped on, and Matt and I pulled apart, smiling shyly.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  Claire opening the fridge seemed like a good moment to excuse myself to head for the one bathroom, at the end of the hall. When I snapped on the light, it woke me up a little, a whole different space from the dark togetherness I’d just left. My face looked strange in this midnight mirror, my makeup smudged off, my hair rumpled. When I closed my eyes, I could feel the strobes in the walls of my eyelids, and I could still hear acid house, Give it to me give it to me give it to me.

  I had to relax. It was okay to relax. Even though Matt was down to boxers and a T-shirt, my jeans were still on, and he wouldn’t do anything I didn’t want to do. He wasn’t going to push me to have sex or anything. Yet I was still anxious, because all of them seemed so cool and sophisticated, and I felt like an impostor.

  But I shouldn’t have worried, because when I came back, Matt was almost asleep. While I could hear Claire and Dave giggling and whispering animatedly, Matt reached one sleepy arm and pulled me in next to him, and I cozied into the hollow, and closed my eyes, and let myself drift off.

  twenty-three

  Oof. I woke up in the morning next to the couch—exactly where I’d fallen into a deep, uninterrupted sleep—with the aching print of last night in my body.

  It wasn’t until I sat up that I saw the others still asleep and sprawled on the other side of the room, so far away from me that I felt like some ghoulish observer. When had Matt moved over there? They all looked innocent as puppies in their nest of blankets and pillows. Claire was curled up and facing Matt, who was on his back, one hand resting on his stomach and the other thrown across Claire’s middle, while Dave faced her from behind, his arm flung up and curved over her head like an umbrella.

  I took them all in—Matt’s angelic pixie face, Claire with her jutting nose and racehorse cheekbones, and Dave’s marble-chiseled Hollywood profile. Slowly I stretched out my arm, my hand, my fingers star-fished as if I could gather them all up. In their stillness, they all seemed intimately mine, and at the same time so unknowable.

  Finally I reached down, picked up a free pillow and hurled it at Matt, startling him awake.

  “Ahhhh!” He rubbed his eyes.

  “When did you guys decide to have a ménage à trois?”

  “I woke up about an hour after we crashed, and those two were still drinking and gabbing, so I decided to join the party.” Matt grinned, and then decided his best plan to change the topic was to crawl over and throw himself on top of me, tickling me.

  “Stop, stop!” I laughed as I squirmed out from under him.

  Now Dave and Claire were awake, stretching and yawning.

  “I’m starved,” she said.

  “My breath rots,” he added.

  There was mouthwash in the bathroom, but nothing to eat in the apartment. Dave mentioned a neighborhood diner, and after some rushed tidying up, we walked blinking into the bright and icy November morning and followed Dave’s lead to Lonnie’s, his favorite greasy spoon a few blocks away.

  When Claire broke off to walk a few paces ahead, Dave leaped to keep pace with her. “Slowpokes! Keep up!” he called over his shoulder.

  Matt’s hand folded over mine.

  “So how late were you all up?” I asked, a little bit forlornly.

  “Oh, man.” He smiled. “The sun was coming up by the time we crashed. We kept shooting the shit. Claire’s so cool. I see why you like her.”

  I tried to feel comfort in his steady grip. Matt was still mine. But I’d lost something, too. For a moment, I’d been the connective piece uniting the four of us, but this morning the balance of power had readjusted, and at its center was Claire. Of course Matt and Dave were both transfixed by her. Just to follow behind her—right now my view was of her wool coat and matchstick legs, her glossy hair, black as paint beneath her beret—was like falling halfway into a dream. She was never better than when she was a cosmopolitan girl, breezy and knowing, hard to resist. Next to her, I must have seemed so young and plain, a wren hanging out with a Lilac House peacock. It was hard to stay totally confident, even with Matt’s pace perfectly matched with my own, his hand clasped in mine, and the memory of his mouth burning up my skin last night.

  As we settled into a booth at Lonnie’s, I felt even more kiddish as Claire, Dave, and Matt talked about a bunch of things I couldn’t comment on—like getting stoned on pot brownies, where they’d partied last New Year’s Eve (I’d been at my grandparents’ house), and a bunch of people I didn’t know who all played hockey for Fieldstone. I listened quietly and sketched Dave’s profile on a napkin.

  “Hey.” He looked startled when he saw what I’d done. “Can I have this? Actually I’m just gonna rob you.” He snatched up the napkin and folded it into his coat pocket. “It’s too good not to keep.”

  “She’s the best artist in the school,” said Claire.

  “Easily,” agreed Matt.

  It was strange to be admired by people I considered to be more exceptional than I was. I felt both embarrassed and happy.

  We ordered, and a few minutes later, platters of pancakes and omelets landed in front of us. A man, thin as a coat hanger under his old-fashioned gray fedora and overcoat, waited at a complete standstill for the waitress to finish unloading the tray. He gave her wide space as he moved past.

  I couldn’t stop staring, my gaze traveling with him as he passed. I’d never seen anyone in real life with his sickness; the nothing weight, the waxen skin, the liverish welts on the edge of his nose.

  “Did you see that guy?”

  “Yes, shh.” Claire nodded. “We get it. We saw.”

  Under the table, Matt’s hand found mine. “You can’t catch it from air,” he assured me. Which I knew, but then I became conscious that I was holding my breath. I thought of the girl with the bloody blister at the club, how tense the other girls had been about her exposed, ragged heel.

  “You get it from fluids,” I said.

  “Beware the evil HIV dogs,” muttered Dave.

  “Don’t say it that way.” Claire twisted her mouth. “It’s grim enough without your idiotic misinformation. You don’t need to beware that guy, and he’s got more than HIV, he’s probably got full-blown AIDS.”

  Dave squirmed. “I wasn’t saying it any way.”

  “You said it like a homophobic bastard,” Claire answered matter-of-factly.

  The guys started laughing, but I was still holding my breath. I made myself exhale, and breakfast continued.

  When the bill got dropped, Dave quick-drew his American Express, and I was grateful I didn’t have to stick out my own card for the slap of another charge.

  From Lonnie’s, we launched ourselves in the direction of the train station. Claire would get off at Merion, I’d detrain in Bryn Mawr and walk to Ludington, Matt’s stop was Saint David’s, and Dave’s was Paoli. But splitting off from Claire freaked me out. I’d left my overnight bag in her bedroom, and at the bottom of it, stuck in the back pages of my paperback copy of Song of Solomon, was Jay’s envelope of letters.

  My plan had been to replace them in that carved wooden box where I’d found them. The problem was that yesterday there hadn’t been a right time, since we’d never gone to her house.

  “It’s not a problem. I’ll bring it in on Monday,” Claire told me.

  “Thanks.” I smiled. Nothing to hide here!

  Dave paid Claire’s ticket, and Matt paid mine. We sat together, my leg over his, his finger absently tracing circles on my palm as we looked out the window, its sparkling view of the Schuylkill skimming past in a final blaze of fall, college rowing shells gl
iding soft as moccasins across the water.

  “Look.” I nudged him. “The water is the same color as your eyes.”

  Matt leaned up to stare. “If you say so.”

  But I knew so. I wished I had my notebook and some paints, to chip off this moment of seeing the navy-blue water and feeling this rush of recognition for everything I loved about Matt’s face. I didn’t even know what image I might have captured. I just wanted to preserve the emotion, so that I’d never forget it.

  Claire’s stop was first. “See ya,” she said as she hopped up. “That was fun.” She’d never before seemed so free-spirited—because of me, and because I’d connected her to Dave and Matt, who’d been just right for her, I reminded myself, as we all blew her mock kisses. The light in her eyes, this weekend, was partly my doing.

  I watched her as she sprang onto the platform and into the bright morning sun, her cheeks going insta-rosy from the cold.

  Claire would never go through my stuff.

  “Can I just say Claire Reynolds is radical,” said Dave, moving to sit across from Matt and me, and speaking out loud the very thoughts in my own head. “Nice work, little Lizzy. Great night. She’s a keeper.”

  “Yeah, I know. Totally.” Chasing down Claire’s friendship had been one of my most ambitious social leaps. But as for Claire being a keeper, I wasn’t totally confident that was up to me.

  twenty-four

  “Can I borrow your car?”

  “Where are you going?” Mom and Dad both looked up from the TV. They’d just settled into their favorite hour of the weekend and the ticking clock start of 60 Minutes.

  It was Sunday night after dinner, and I had a plan.

  “I’ve left some of my homework at Claire’s. She’s twenty minutes away. I need to pop over. I won’t stay.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Mom. “You can still be the driver if you want. I’d love to introduce myself to Jane Sleighmaker. Now that her niece is at Argyll, we’re all hoping she’ll re-up her commitment to Annual Giving. The business office is doing more research, but we think she’s got deep pockets.”