Tell Me No Lies

by Adele Griffin

  “Matt, is that you?” Mrs. Ashley’s voice floated to us like that of a ghostly hostess. “And did you bring Lizzy?”

  “Yes!” I called.

  “This way.” Matt took my hand, and together we walked through a living room so formal I could feel a nervous prickle on the back of my neck. A grand piano made a display of silver-framed wedding pictures. I pointed to a pretty bride in a recent-looking photo.

  “Your sister, Erin, right?”

  “Yep. This is our multigenerational Ashley-family wedding gallery. I’m next. My spot’s already reserved.” Matt tapped the corner of an empty frame.

  “Seriously?”

  “Mom is a planner.”

  It seemed ridiculous to me that anyone would put an empty frame on a piano. “You might not get married for ten more years!” I objected. “Fifteen, even!”

  But Matt was already leading me through the living room, and then down two steps into a smaller room where his mother stood on a stepladder before a regal cone of Christmas tree. Stacks of opened boxes on a side table held tissue-wrapped ornaments. Matt’s mother looked a bit like an ornament herself, glassy and breakable.

  “So this is Lizzy.” She dropped her hand on my shoulder and patted it twice, which made me feel like a noble service dog. “Can you believe we’re already into December?” Her smile wasn’t unkind. “So much to do, with these holidays.”

  “Yes, at school, too. Your tree is beautiful.”

  “Thank you. Every year, we get a Canadian blue spruce. The decorators come to trim it and do the lights. But I hang the ornaments. I’m the family touch. Will you hand me that?” She pointed to an ornament.

  “Sure.” I wondered what Mrs. Ashley didn’t like about a good old Pennsylvania Douglas fir. The Swift-family tree was always plump and strong, even if it was decorated with a mess of junk my brothers and I had made in art classes over the years. My mom tried to keep the ornaments in shape, though it wasn’t like they’d ever known greatness, birthed from Styrofoam or macaroni and yarn.

  But still. Our tree looked like Christmas. This tree looked like a hotel lobby.

  I passed Mrs. Ashley a spindly wooden reindeer by his pretty gold clothespin, which I’d been holding open for her to clamp to the tree.

  “Ouch!”

  “Oh, no! I’m so sorry!” So awful—I’d accidentally snapped the tip of her finger. “I didn’t mean to do that!”

  “It’s fine, it’s fine.” But her eyes went as wide as those of a child who’s been smacked, and when she hopped down from the stepladder, sucking on her finger, I felt like I’d committed a secretly intentional, sadistic act. “Matt says you’re very bright, Lizzy.” Her voice accused me as she cast an eye over my bleach-striped hair, the print of pink glitter gloss on my mouth.

  “Lizzy applied early to Princeton,” said Matt.

  “That’s wonderful.”

  But no, I wasn’t wonderful to Mrs. Ashley, I could feel it. I wasn’t Nectarine-y enough, I didn’t have the tennis bracelet or the hairband or the Joan & David flats. I didn’t accessorize nicely with the Ashleys’ manicured, Merchant Ivory sitting room and imported Christmas tree and their Golden Boy son.

  We heard the front door slam.

  “Dad’s home. Two for one.” Matt’s smile was grim. “We’ll need to keep out of their way,” he added quietly, though I didn’t see how we were creating a disturbance.

  “Heigh-ho!” Matt’s dad said to nobody specifically as he headed to the bar cart. He was small and bald and apparently not very interested in who was in his house.

  “Hey, Dad, this is my friend Lizzy.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I added.

  “And you.” But Mr. Ashley seemed more pleased to get busy with his scotch and ice tongs, and to start telling a happened-at-the-office story that was for Matt’s mom alone. The Ashleys weren’t kid-friendly parents, not that this surprised me. I wasn’t sure why I needed them to like me so badly, why I wanted to linger even as Matt took my hand. “C’mon, we’ve got our own den,” he said quietly. “You can meet the young’uns, my little brother and sister.”

  When we left, the Ashleys didn’t even seem to notice.

  The “den” turned out to be a barely made-over basement. It was messy and smelled like mildew, with a carpet that felt spongy under my boots. I could see how Matt could throw a party here—there just wasn’t much to look after or destroy. Right now, the creaky tank of an old console television was blaring an ancient rerun of Gilligan’s Island. A gum-snapping college-aged baby­sitter who didn’t introduce herself was sunk in the couch, wedged between Matt’s little sister and brother, who I knew were in fourth and fifth grade. The kids were cute in that Irish-pixie Ashley way, and the den seemed like a sad place to keep them. If there was a housekeeper—a house like this surely had one—it felt like she hadn’t been down here in weeks.

  With his palm at my back, Matt kept us moving past the den and through a door, into a boxed-in laundry room, and then a supply closet, which he slammed into darkness.

  He was at me in an instant, his lips slightly parted in a kiss that felt strange and hungry as his hand went straight up my shirt.

  “This is like Seven Minutes in Heaven,” I murmured when I could collect a breath. I’d never been invited to any of those boy-girl parties back in middle school, but Gage and Mimi always had an ear out for those daring stories of pilfered beer and kissing games, like Truth or Dare or Spin the Bottle or Seven Minutes in Heaven, when a girl and boy would slam themselves into a closet, and a timer would be set.

  Matt snorted. “I played that game with half your class.”

  It was such a zingy thought, so exactly how I loved to imagine Matt, hot and in demand. “And now you play it with me,” I whispered.

  “Mmm.” His mouth was demanding a deeper kiss, his hand cupped over my bra, and then under it, his fingers circling my nipple. “My parents really wouldn’t want us doing this,” he murmured. “It’s basically a sin, in their book.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just, with my brother and sister so close, and them upstairs.”

  “A little bit of sin feels okay.”

  In answer, Matt tightened his arms around me, kissing me intensely as shivers played catch through my body. I sensed maybe that Matt was excited by this weird idea of disobeying his parents. It excited me, too.

  I unbuttoned the top button of Matt’s school-uniform khaki pants and unzipped his fly to his flannel boxer shorts. I couldn’t tell what he wanted, but when I closed my hand over the flannel around the outward spring of his dick, he pressed in closer, his breath urging me. Okay, but—what next? What was his dick about, exactly? Wasn’t it sort of an up and down thing, a rhythm like brushing your hair if you’re in a hurry? I’d seen something like that in a movie but it was in a car, and they didn’t show it, and Matt wasn’t showing me now.

  I relaxed my hand. Maybe it was more of a gentle slide or massage.

  “You don’t—” His voice was hoarse as he broke off. “Have you ever given a hand job before?”

  I’d thought about trying it at my house, but the room had been too bright, not the right atmosphere. This felt different, more secretive. “Show me how.” My voice notched above a whisper. “I want to know.”

  “Not over clothes.”

  “Oh, right. Right.” I pushed my hand through the opening in his boxers and was immediately relieved that this secret skin seemed so friendly to the touch, like a new-made sculpture of warm firm clay, and then the slightly softer head. “Whoa.”

  I still wasn’t sure about the specifics of how to do it, though, and it seemed like my slow back-and-forth wasn’t even close to correct, since Matt’s dick was changing in my hand, actually shrinking from me and retreating like a disappointed animal.

  And now Matt was laughing softly, zipping himself up, and I’d never been so glad fo
r the darkness that hid the shame on my face. “It doesn’t matter, Stripes. You don’t have to do this. Some other time, maybe not in the laundry room.”

  “No, let’s . . .” I wanted to do more. I just didn’t know how to ask for it.

  Matt kissed me one more time, a sweet kiss that didn’t care about my inexperience, though Claire’s words were at me like bees—you’re such a kid he doesn’t feel the pressure—as we looped back into the den.

  The babysitter raised her eyes oh-so-slightly to smirk at me, and I wondered if she’d seen Matt lead other girls into the infamous supply closet. Girls who knew what they were doing, girls who’d been expertly practicing hand jobs since middle school, while my nerdy friends and I’d spent weekends playing board games, snarfing Chipwiches, and fantasizing about a day we’d be everything we couldn’t be in real life.

  thirty-one

  “Hey, do you want to see Dead Ringers with me this weekend at the Ritz Cinq?” Claire had virtually ignored me in Tuesday art class, and for the millionth time I’d figured she was done with me, so her Wednesday-evening call took me by surprise.

  “I want to,” I said, “but my parents are keeping me locked up on the grounds of debt.”

  “You sound stressed.”

  “Maybe stressed about my Latin test. I don’t know why I didn’t take French like any normal person.”

  “Because all the nerds take Latin.” She added, more thoughtfully, “You know, my shrink is helpful for stress, when I need a place to dump my problems. Don’t you see someone, too?”

  “No, I don’t. Actually you asked me that before.”

  “Did I?”

  My voice was as tight as it had ever been with her. “It’s like you think I should see someone.” When what I wanted to say but couldn’t was, Yeah, I see someone for my epilepsy. You know I have that, right?

  Her answering laugh shrugged me off.

  I couldn’t figure out how to ask Claire for the sixty dollars on the phone. But after I hung up, I felt the pang of regret. After all, she owed me. Claire had more spending money than I did. Maybe not a ton, but I could tell by her lipstick brands and cassette tapes, and the fact that her gas tank was always full, she was doing okay.

  Friday at lunch, I risked my mom’s annoyance to bill my student account with a fresh pack of lunch tickets. I used up a twenty-five-cent ticket for a cup of black coffee. I needed that bounce.

  Claire was in the art room. In one hand, she held a bagel while she worked on a washy green watercolor painting. When she saw me, she smiled. “Is your mom relenting? Can you come out to the movies? Do you want to invite the guys?”

  “No, she’s not, and I can’t—I wish I could, it sounds like so much fun. But listen, me being grounded actually relates to this other thing.” I pushed myself a step closer. “You know how sometimes I’ve covered some expenses for you? When I’ve charged meals and cabs to my credit card? Anyway, I feel embarrassed to ask, but”—I took a breath—“I need a refund.”

  Claire rattled the tip of her brush in her jam jar of green water. She daubed at the paint cake. “You know my sitch, Lizzy. I’m so broke all the time. Maybe if you need to borrow, you could try Gage?”

  “Well, this is more about you paying me back. Because I’m kind of in a state of emergency, money-wise.” My blood was in a coffee-heated boil. “Obviously I hate to ask, because you’ve been so cool to me.”

  “I guess I don’t get it,” said Claire after a moment, and there was no mistaking the ice on her words. “I didn’t realize I was borrowing money from you. But I can ask my mom. How much?”

  “It adds up to about sixty dollars.”

  Now Claire looked plain stunned. “What are you talking about? It couldn’t be more than twenty-five bucks for some overpriced bar food and a hard cider.”

  “But there was also the Hinata bill last month, and the train into Philly. A couple of taxi rides. Liz’s party cover charge.” I felt so incredibly petty, tallying it.

  Claire’s answering silence was painful, as if she were holding us both underwater and counting the seconds before she finally spoke again. “Lizzy, that black cardigan sweater I gave you, the one you always wear? I gave it to you because Jay gave it to me. I didn’t want it anymore, for certain reasons—but it’s probably worth about two hundred dollars. It’s cashmere.”

  Of course I knew the sweater was cashmere. It was the only cashmere thing I owned. “I’ve got to dig out of this debt, Claire. It’s not personal.”

  “It feels pretty personal. It also feels kind of like an ambush. Are you sure this isn’t about when Matt and Dave and I went into the city?”

  “No!” My voice squeaked in outrage. “That has got nothing to do with this. Why would it?”

  “I was annoyed when you took Jay’s letters, and I should have dealt with it. I should have said something, but instead I clammed up about it. I know when I don’t talk to you it upsets you, so that’s what I did. Now you’re annoyed that I’m hanging out with Matt and Dave, and you’re trying to upset me, too—making me pay you money I borrowed.” Her fingers clipped angry quote marks for the word as her eyes bore into me. A fresh sweatiness itched my neck and under my arms. “Maybe it’s time we deal with this, and give each other a break.”

  “I’m s-so sorry for taking that envelope,” I stammered. “It was stupid. I was too curious, and it was a bad impulse. I’ve been trying to figure out for weeks how to make that right. I’d planned to slip it back in its place when I stayed over at your house last time, except we ended up spending the night in the city. But I’m not trying to get you back for hanging out with the guys. Money is a whole other problem for me, Claire.”

  Her head tilted. “What did you think of them?”

  “Think of what?”

  “Jay’s letters. What was your opinion?”

  Was this a trick? “I don’t know. Um. Bad handwriting, I guess. To be honest, I felt so awful that I took them, I feel like my main opinion about them is just my guilt.”

  Was I imagining Claire’s disappointment with my answer? Her face was already stony again. “Look, are you seriously asking me for sixty dollars?”

  “Do you think this makes me feel good? It’s totally the opposite. I feel like a jerk.”

  “Money doesn’t grow on trees in my life, either. Give me the weekend.”

  “It doesn’t need to be the weekend. It can be whenever works best for you.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do.”

  “You might wish it, but you don’t mean it.”

  “You’re making this so different from what it is. It doesn’t have to be like a business deal between us. I really think of you as my friend.”

  “Maybe I don’t know what I think of you.” She was looking at me with something I was too scared to believe was open dislike. “Three days. Count on it.”

  Then she plucked her paintbrush from the jar, dismissing me.

  thirty-two

  “You’re grounded for money you have to pay back?” In the silence, I could sense Matt trying to puzzle it out. “Actually it reminds me of how my dad says this superwitty thing, that he should ground my mom for the damage she does to her Neiman Marcus card.”

  “Oh, yes. That is hilarious.”

  “Since the thing about my dad is he’s not sexist.”

  “Also, I bet that joke gets funnier and funnier, the more he tells it.”

  “Totally.” Whenever Matt brought up this topic of his hyperconservative family—his chauvinist dad and his passive mom—he needed it to be a joke. But I could always hear that it bothered him. Perfect on the outside was the Ashley-family way.

  “The other night I told them I was thinking about heading to Hawaii after graduation, to surf, pick up jobs along the way. My dad acted like he hadn’t even heard me. Next day, I see the summer intern application to his law
firm, Drinker and Lewis, on my desk. Mom’s put a Post-it with a smiley face that says if I fill it out, she’ll drive it in and drop it off.”

  “You’re looking at it now, right? I dare you to fill it out in crayon.”

  Matt laughed. “I should.”

  “Seriously, though. Fold it up and put it away.”

  “Yeah, I hate looking at it. This assumption I should be a lawyer because Dad’s a lawyer and Uncle Ed’s a lawyer and my granddad was a lawyer—so who cares what I want, why should anyone listen to me?”

  “If they’re not listening to you, then you don’t have to listen to them. At least put it out of sight.”

  I heard Matt’s desk drawer open as he shoved it in. “Hey, if you’re grounded, I’m gonna hang out with Tommy and the guys.”

  “If you get bored, come by Ludington on Sunday.”

  “You know I will, Stripes. The least I can do is make a conjugal visit.”

  As bummed as I was not to do anything with Matt, at least being grounded would give me time to write Claire an apology. I practiced a few drafts, made a final copy at Ludington, and had it enveloped and ready by Monday morning, when I slid it through her locker.

  Monday night, there was no call from her.

  “You’re reading too much into it,” said Matt, who did call. “Give Claire the time to pay you back. She’ll come around.”

  I hoped so. Claire wasn’t at the next morning’s assembly, and so she missed Maggie Farthington’s talk on Roe v. Wade.

  “First assembly that had me halfway awake,” said Gage at lunch.

  “All I could think was if the rumor was true,” Mimi admitted. “Do you know, Lizzy? Her boyfriend went to Lincoln, he was in that jock scene.”

  In fact I did know the rumor—that Maggie herself had an abortion last summer—was true. Matt had told me in confidence, because he was close friends with Karl Adler, Maggie’s boyfriend at the time. They’d broken up even before Maggie knew she was pregnant, and Karl had graduated last year and now went to school in Michigan. But over Thanksgiving, he and Maggie had gotten back together, and Karl told Matt that Maggie felt really brave and scared about giving the assembly.