Liars, Inc.

by Paula Stokes

  “I have a laptop,” she said, “but the battery is fried.” She scribbled something down and then looked up, her gaze locking on to something over my shoulder. Before I could even ask what she was looking at, I felt fingers tap me on the arm.

  “Max?”

  I craned my neck to see who was talking. Amy Westerfield stood behind me in her silver-and-blue cheerleading uniform, awkwardly transferring her weight from one foot to the other.

  Parvati stared at Amy like she was an endangered species that wanted to eat out of my hand.

  “Yeah?” I said, expecting another grateful thank-you for preventing a swimming catastrophe of epic proportions.

  Amy leaned over close to me, resting her forearms on the table. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I have a proposition for you.”

  TWO

  THE DAY WAS TURNING MORE surreal by the minute. On a normal day, no girl besides Parvati even spoke to me, and now I’d been approached by school royalty twice in an hour. “Oh?” I said, taking extra care not to let my gaze drop below the neckline of Amy’s cheerleading outfit.

  She fished around in her purse, pulled out a permission slip for the senior civics field trip to Coronado Naval Base, and slapped it down in front of me. “My parents wouldn’t sign this. I’m grounded and they don’t want me to have a whole day away from school with Quinn. Ten bucks if you help me out.”

  Quinn was Amy’s meathead jock boyfriend. Even though I had nothing in common with either of them, I knew how bad it sucked to be banned from your significant other.

  “Why not just sign it yourself?” I asked.

  “Because I’d get caught. And suspended. And kicked off the squad. And grounded for a jillion years.” She pulled a pen from her purse.

  “What makes you think I can do a better job than you?” My eyes flicked across the table at Parvati. She was chewing on one of my french fries, watching the proceedings with what seemed like mild interest.

  Amy shrugged. “Because you don’t write in big, bubbly letters?”

  “Fine.” I grabbed the pen from her hand. “What’s your dad’s name?”

  Parvati slapped her hand on top of mine. “Twenty bucks,” she said.

  “Fifty bucks,” Preston said with a languid smile.

  “Preston!” Amy looked a little offended.

  “What?” He adjusted the gold band of a watch that cost more than my car. “I’m a businessman.”

  A mass of wrinkles formed across Amy’s normally smooth bronze forehead. “I don’t have that kind of cash on me.”

  “No worries. Max here’ll take an IOU,” Preston said. “If you don’t pay he’ll just have an attack of conscience and confess his little deed.”

  “I will?” I looked back and forth between Preston and Parvati.

  “You will,” Parvati assured me. She arched a thick black eyebrow at Amy. “Name?”

  “Tom. Tom Westerfield.” Amy’s tan skin was starting to turn blotchy and red in places. I wondered if she was that nervous about forging a permission slip or if she was just mad at being taken for fifty bucks.

  She coached me on the signature and I practiced a couple times on a napkin. When she nodded her approval I scrawled the name on the form and handed it back to her.

  “Thanks, Max,” she chirped, slipping the permission slip back inside her purse. “It’ll totally be worth it.” A couple of other girls in blue and silver waved at her from across the cafeteria, and she practically skipped over to their table.

  The bell rang, and most of the guys from the football team got up as a group. They all had fifth-period gym. “You coming?” Our center, a guy named Nate, looked straight through me to Preston.

  “Catch up with you guys in a minute,” Pres said.

  Nate grunted and turned to follow the others. They lumbered off like a herd of buffalo.

  “Let me know if any of your football buddies need their permission slips signed,” I told him. “I’m seeing serious business opportunities here.”

  “Sounds fun. Almost like old times, eh, Parv?” Preston said. “Like our shenanigans at Bristol Academy. Too bad you weren’t there too, Max. Parvati and I ruled that school.” He smiled to himself. “Good times, good times.”

  Parvati gave him a dark look. “Yeah, except those ‘good times’ got us expelled, and these little fibs have the potential to make us cold, hard cash. She gestured around the table with one hand. “Liars, Inc. All of your duplicitous needs serviced by Max et al.”

  “Et al.?” I glanced back and forth between the two of them.

  “Us, obviously.” Parvati’s skin was glowing the way it did after a major hookup session.

  “You two are both loaded,” I protested. “And college bound. Why would you want to help with an unethical and possibly illegal business?”

  “My parents have been stingy lately,” Preston said. “And as you know, I have expensive vices.”

  He was referring to his gambling habit. He bet on everything: online poker, college basketball, women’s tennis. Once he told me he won fifty bucks on the outcome of a minor military skirmish in the Middle East.

  “It’d be a good training exercise for me,” Parvati added.

  I snorted. Her main goal in life was to work for the CIA, and if there was one thing she did not need any training in, it was how to lie. When the Colonel caught us in the hot tub, she turned on the tears in five seconds, telling her dad that nothing had happened, that we were just kissing. And the hilarious thing is, he seemed to believe it, even though our clothes were strewn across the deck.

  “Fine,” I said. “If you two want in, then you’re in charge of drumming up more clientele.”

  “Word of mouth seems to be working so far,” Parvati said. “What is that? Seventy bucks in an hour? Not bad.”

  “I’ll spread the word a little,” Preston added. “Liars, Inc., huh? Could be just what we need to liven up our senior year.” He slid his chair back from the table. Parvati and I followed his lead. The three of us dumped our trays.

  Pres thumped his right fist twice against his chest. “Be good, you two.” He headed toward the gym.

  Parvati and I turned down the main hallway where all of the seniors had their lockers. “So I’ll see you tomorrow around ten,” she said with a wink.

  “Meet you by my car. Same as usual.”

  “We’ll talk more about our new business venture.” Her voice lowered to a growl and her eyes practically smoldered, like the idea of running a mini–crime empire with Preston and me really turned her on.

  “Okay.” I wasn’t convinced that anything was really going to come of it, but I’d talk about the new Boyz Be Bad album or the vegan-friendly cafeteria choices if it was going to make her keep looking at me like that.

  THREE

  October 22nd

  PARVATI WAS LEANING UP AGAINST the side of my beat-up Ford Escort by the time I got out of detention. Her wheels were a lot nicer, an almost-new VW Jetta with air-conditioning that actually worked, but it was too conspicuous. For some reason—probably just to see if her parents would do it—she had requested a purple paint job for her last birthday. Now the whole school referred to her car as the Grape.

  “Max time.” She glanced around to see if anyone was watching before giving me a peck on the cheek. “My favorite time in the whole world.”

  I unlocked the door for her and we both tossed our backpacks into the backseat.

  “So,” she started, as I pulled away from the curb, “Preston and I had a little brainstorming session last night about what other services we could offer our fellow classmates.”

  The muscles in my neck tightened. “You went over to Preston’s house?”

  “No, on the phone, silly,” Parvati said. “Don’t be jealous. I’m all yours.”

  I believed her, but I was still jealous. Pres and Parvati were friends before I knew either one of them. They had both attended the same ritzy private school until they managed to get expelled together as juniors. Neither of them ever
told me exactly what they did to get kicked out. Pres claimed substance-induced amnesia, and Parvati vaguely explained it as “stealing a bunch of stupid stuff from different classrooms, rare books from English, chemicals from chem lab, that sort of thing.” Apparently this was a dare game they played with their friends: one group would steal a bunch of crazy shit, and another group would have to put it back without getting caught.

  Each time I asked her about the story, the details got more vague, and part of me always imagined this string of thefts culminating with Parvati and Preston having wild sex on the headmaster’s desk. Both of them assured me this was not the case, but I still couldn’t shake the idea completely.

  I pulled my car out into the street and headed toward the beach. “What’d you two come up with?”

  Parvati ticked things off on the pads of her fingers. “Lying. Forging permission slips. Calling in sick for people. Switching tests. Creating alibis.”

  “Alibis?” I raised an eyebrow. “Wow, we really are starting a life of crime.”

  “Not for crimes,” she said. “More like cover stories. Maybe someone is grounded but wants to sneak out to a party, or maybe a guy wants to take his girlfriend to that crappy Seabreeze Motel for the night. We can pretend to have group projects to work on or make up overnight field trips, that kind of thing.”

  I nodded. “I guess the next question is, what are we going to do with all the money we’re going to make?”

  “Nights at the Seabreeze?” She laughed, but I knew she’d be down for it if I was, even though it was way below her standards.

  “Is there any chance we could sneak up to your dad’s cabin?” I asked. The Colonel’s cabin was on the outskirts of the Angeles National Forest, a remote wooded area an hour north of here. Parvati and I had driven up there occasionally this past summer so we could be alone, but her dad loaned the place out to his military buddies during hunting season, so it was only safe at certain times of the year.

  “It’s still deer season.” Slouching down, she rested her head on my shoulder and sighed. “Trust me. You’re not the only one going crazy.” She reached across the center console and curled her hand around my thigh, her fingers toying with one of the fraying strands of my jeans. Her light touch was all it took to get me excited. The car swerved slightly as the wheel twisted a little in my hands. I swallowed hard.

  Right on cue, we arrived at the Ravens’ Cliff Overlook parking area. The lot was empty except for a pea-green Volkswagen bus covered in rainbow dancing bears and surf stickers. It belonged to the Jacobsen brothers, Vista P’s resident clan of surfing demigods. Pres and I liked to surf, but the Jacobsens were surfers: shoeless, sand-covered, hand-wiggling, “chaka brah” surfers. If the ocean was right, you never saw them at school before lunchtime.

  I shut off the engine and looked toward the water. In the distance, the dark blue of the Pacific met the lighter blue of the sky. A seagull swooped low, dive-bombing the waves in search of a fish. I turned toward Parvati. It was always a little awkward, those few seconds before we started hooking up. “How was newspaper?” I asked, not caring remotely about the answer.

  “Scintillating,” she said, wiggling her way out of a black cardigan sweater. Underneath, she was wearing a form-fitting T-shirt with the word “Succubus” printed across her chest and a pair of gray leggings.

  My eyes followed the curve of her thighs. Skintight pants had a way of burning through the awkwardness. I leaned over and nuzzled my lips against her collarbone. “I find you pretty scintillating.”

  “Oh yeah?” She reached down with one hand and reclined her seat, extending her neck to give me better access. “Any particular parts?”

  I tugged at the collar of her T-shirt. “Maybe.” My hand inched the shirt downward, my lips trailing after it.

  She squirmed as if I was tickling her. “You’re bad.” She lifted my mouth to hers, biting my lower lip softly as she snaked her arms around the back of my neck. My fingers reached up under her T-shirt, fumbling with the clasp of her bra. She kissed me harder. The windows got foggy. An hour and a half passed in an instant and my phone alarm chimed.

  I sighed. “It’s time to go back.” We couldn’t be late. If we were, Colonel Dad would probably scramble a squadron of recon jets to find her. Her parents had threatened to send her to Blue Pointe Prep, a military school on the East Coast, if she got in trouble again. Being caught with me would be enough for them to make the call.

  Parvati nodded, raising her seat back up. She reached beneath her shirt to hook her bra. “I know this sucks, Max. I’ll work on my parents, all right? Worst-case scenario, Mom and Dad said they’d shell out for a private room at USC if I behave until then and declare myself prelaw.”

  “Great, so ten months from now you and I might get to be alone together.” I started the car and backed out of the parking place. “I thought you were going to major in Arabic or something.”

  She leaned over to check her reflection in the rearview mirror. She finger-combed her shiny hair. “You can be prelaw and major in Arabic,” she said. “I’ll play along for a while.”

  I turned onto the road that led toward school. “More playing along,” I muttered.

  Like the way she had convinced her parents that she and I were over by going to homecoming with Preston. Pres had called to make sure I was okay with the idea. He didn’t actually want to go to the dance any more than I did, but as the Vista Palisades football captain he was expected to show up. Parvati had actually wanted to go, which surprised me, but I guess even the coolest chicks get sucked in by stupid shit like high school dances. It had turned out to be no big deal and we all got drunk later on at Preston’s after-party, but she set up her “date” without even telling me, and I still got pissed when I thought about it. She never even apologized. “Sorry” wasn’t part of her vocabulary. She thought apologies were for the weak.

  Parvati ruffled my messy brown hair, pushing my bangs back from my eyes. “Speaking of playing along, my parents said I could go to Preston’s party next week.” She blinked her long eyelashes innocently.

  Of course they would say that—they loved Preston. Colonel Dad had no idea Pres and Parvati got expelled together from Bristol Academy. Senator DeWitt had donated a truckload of cash so Preston could finish out the semester and then announced that Pres was switching to Vista P for his senior year to play for a bigger football district. Parvati’s dad would probably shit a hand grenade if he knew the truth.

  “What party?” I asked. “I thought he couldn’t have parties anymore.” Senator DeWitt apparently had a shot at being appointed to the Presidential Cabinet next year, and he’d started cracking down on any activities that might be detrimental to his political career. He didn’t want any scandals.

  “The one I made up so we can hang out.” Parvati winked. “I told my parents it was a Halloween party. Maybe Pres will let us haunt one of the spare bedrooms for an hour.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” It wasn’t like Parvati and I would be the first high school kids to get it on at Pres’s house, but it felt a little sketchy. What was he supposed to do while we got naked?

  “Oh, come on, Max.” Parvati forced the corners of my mouth upward with her spangly blue fingernails. She leaned over and ran her teeth along my earlobe, sending a shot of chills down my spine and into my lap. “I promise to make it worth your while.”

  “Well, when you put it like that,” I said, my face relaxing, “how can I refuse?”

  FOUR

  October 28th

  PRESTON OPENED THE DOOR WEARING ripped jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with a pot-smoking zombie. A half-empty bottle of Irish whiskey dangled from his left hand. “Welcome to the party,” he said in a slightly slurred voice. He made air quotes around the word “party.”

  “Nice hair,” I replied. From the neck up, he looked like he was ready for basic training. He must have spent the time between football practice and now at the salon, getting what I jokingly referred to as his weekly trim.

&nbs
p; “Fuck you, Max Factor. My helmet wouldn’t fit right if I let my hair get all long and girlie like yours.”

  He disappeared into the cavernous living room, and I followed him through it and down to the basement, where a movie was playing on the big-screen TV. Parvati was stretched out on the sofa in a black dress and knee-high socks patterned with glow-in-the-dark skulls. She sat up when she saw me. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she purred, but her voiced hitched slightly and the words sounded forced.

  “Me too. Now she’ll quit talking so much.” Pres took a slug from the bottle of whiskey and then started fooling around on his computer. I flopped down on the sofa and started fooling around with Parvati.

  As she crawled into my lap, I smelled alcohol on her breath. I wondered how long she’d been here, how long she and Pres had been drinking together. She glued her lips to the place where my neck met my shoulder and proceeded to suck hard enough to leave a mark. She pulled her head back for a second and admired her handiwork. Then she pressed her mouth to my skin again.

  “I should be charging you for this,” Preston said. “You can be Liars, Inc.’s first official customer.”

  “My parents aren’t the ones threatening to send me to military school,” I said. “It’s her alibi. Charge her.”

  Parvati came up for air long enough to mumble something about putting it on her tab.

  Preston picked up a yellow squirt gun and managed to hit the back of her head from across the room. “Seriously. Cool off, Pervy. I sit on that sofa sometimes. At least wait until the maid goes home so you can use a guest bedroom.”

  Parvati wiped away a spray of water that was trickling down her neck. “What kind of weirdo just happens to have a loaded squirt gun lying around the house?”

  “A weirdo with badly behaved pets,” Preston said, aiming the gun at his mom’s Himalayan cat, who was curled up on an empty bookshelf and minding its own business. The cat jumped when the spray hit it, hissing, nearly falling to the floor. It gave Preston a baleful look with its smooshed-in face before abandoning the shelf and padding its way up the stairs.