Even When You Lie to Me

by Jessica Alcott

  Asha’s eyes widened. “I hope not too much or this room’s going to smell even worse than it already does.”

  I laughed, surprised that she’d made a joke. She hadn’t spoken much in class the day before, and I had assumed she was shy.

  The music finished and there was silence for a moment. I realized a couple of girls were breathing heavily. It took another minute for Mrs. Deloit’s head to bob up. Asha and I snickered.

  “Okay, girls,” she said, blinking slowly. “That was very relaxing, wasn’t it? I see a few of you were as relaxed as I was. Let’s head back.”

  I deliberately avoided walking to the changing rooms with Asha. The sudden pressure of having to talk to her stopped up my thoughts, and it was easier to avoid conversation entirely. But when I started toward Mr. Drummond’s classroom, she appeared out of nowhere in the hallway.

  “My mom would not have called that yoga,” she said.

  “I don’t think most people would have,” I said. I smiled at her tentatively.

  She was silent for a few steps, and then she said, “Mr. Drummond is interesting.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, that seems to be the general opinion.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Don’t really know him well enough yet,” I said. “But hopefully he’s a step up from Mr. Mickler.” Mr. Mickler had been known as the English department’s tenure jockey until he’d retired the year before.

  “Oh, him,” she said. “Dev heard that last year he made them watch movies while he napped.”

  “And you’re sure he won’t come out of retirement?”

  Asha laughed. “Not likely.”

  Lila gave me a smug look when we walked into our classroom. I quickly waved goodbye to Asha as she headed to her seat. Lila glanced at her suspiciously.

  “What now?” I said.

  She looked back at me. “I’ve solved your dilemma. I accept Weird Al merchandise.”

  I sat down next to her. “What’s your brilliant solution?”

  “Drummond’s taking over the newspaper,” she said. “So you’ve got your extracurricular.”

  I glanced at him. This time he really was ignoring us, scribbling something in a notebook. “That involves a substantial amount of interaction with people. You know how I feel about people. All that talking.”

  “You can be a columnist. Have strong opinions on things you know nothing about.” She pointed at me. “Don’t say it. I am not a writer.”

  “So I have to do it alone?”

  “Sorry. I actually would like to, but field hockey is every afternoon.”

  I considered it as the class started discussing Catch-22. I’d been too overwhelmed on the first day of school to think about spending a minute longer than I had to in the building, so I hadn’t come up with any alternative ideas. Our school paper came out maybe twice a year. I’d never joined because it was mostly a stoner occupation—it was called Truth Bomb and it mainly contained rants about how overpriced the vending machines in our school were—but it did sound like the most painless option. I’d always liked writing, and it probably wouldn’t be too much work.

  Mr. Drummond confirmed my suspicion at the end of class.

  “Before we wrap up, guys,” he said, clapping his hands together as he stood up, “I just want to let you know that I’m reviving the school paper this year.”

  “Truth Bomb?” Katie said.

  “Indeed,” Mr. Drummond said. “Truth…Bomb.” He said it slowly, waiting for the laugh that he must have known he would get. “I heard it was defunct, so I found an old issue, which contained an article on whether we should allow cigarette smoking in school bathrooms. It will probably not come as a surprise to any of you that the author of the article was pro.”

  “Was there a con article?” Frank asked.

  “No,” Mr. Drummond said. “I guess they assumed the smell coming out of the bathrooms was argument enough.”

  “So how do you feel about smoking in the toilets?” Dev asked.

  “As an educator, I am of course against. As a fellow human being, at least open a window.” He lowered his head almost shyly as we laughed. “So I’m looking for volunteers. Three days a week after school for an hour. This will count toward a college credit, but of course the main benefit will be the fantastic education you will get at the feet of this communications minor.” He pointed at himself. “Who graduated from a school that did not offer a journalism degree. I assure you, though, that I am very pro crossword puzzle. So if you’re interested, let me know, and please also tell your literate or semiliterate friends about it. And if you know anything about newspaper layout software, I will pay you cash money to join.”

  I lingered after the bell rang, and Lila nudged me as she left.

  “Just get it over with,” she said. “Like a Band-Aid. Right off.”

  Soon everyone was gone. I’d be late to lunch, but Lila would save me a seat.

  Mr. Drummond noticed me after a moment. He put down the papers he’d been looking through. “What can I do for you, Charlie?” he asked.

  “I thought I was Chuck now,” I said, and then felt my neck heat up.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I just started calling you that without asking you first, didn’t I? Would you rather I called you Charlie? Or Charlotte?”

  “No, no, Chuck is fine. Or Charlie. Or whatever.” I realized I did like it. It was the first nickname I’d had in a long time.

  “Okay.” He leaned back in his chair slightly, making it creak. “So are you interested in journalism?”

  “I’m interested in an extracurricular,” I said, and he smiled. “I mean, yes, I am interested in writing.”

  “Great,” he said. “I was hoping you’d sign up, actually. Even if it’s only because you need an extracurricular. We could use bright kids like you on the paper.”

  All I could hear was him saying I was bright. Any compliment from a teacher snagged in my head and looped there for hours. But how did he know? Had he looked at my report cards? It certainly wasn’t because of my performance in class. “I’m not actually— I am actually interested in writing. I don’t know why I said that about needing an extracurricular.”

  He spread his hands. “Doesn’t matter to me why you sign up as long as you sign up. I’m hoping it’ll be fun, though. I’d like to put out an issue every month, which I know sounds like a ridiculously low bar to clear, but when you’re starting from nothing it’s a lot of work just getting everything together.”

  “I can imagine. So you have experience running a paper?”

  “Yeah, some,” he said. “I was the editor of my college paper for two years. We’re not talking about the Crimson or anything, but we did a few good stories. Exposed a financial aid scandal. Traced the origins of the dining hall’s Tater Tots. The Tater Tots thing was actually much more disturbing.”

  “If they were anything like the Tater Tots here, I can’t imagine the depths of malfeasance you exposed.”

  He laughed. He had a nice laugh—low, almost private, as if he were laughing to himself. “Malfeasance. See? You’re a natural. I’ll put you on word search detail.”

  “I’m just good at studying my vocab words,” I said. “So you’re keeping the name?”

  “Are you suggesting that Truth Bomb is not a worthy name for a school paper?”

  I laughed. “I don’t, uh…no?”

  The bell rang.

  “I should go,” I said. “Lila gives me shit—uh, crap, sorry—if I make her save me a seat at lunch.”

  He waved at my apology dismissively. “Swearing is the last thing you have to apologize for in front of me. We’ll start meeting in a week or two, I think, but I’ll let you know more in class when I’ve gotten things organized.”

  “Well, I can’t fucking wait,” I said, thinking for a moment that it would be funny. Then I lost my nerve and skittered out of the room, but all the way down the hall I could hear him laughing.

  I found my dad in the basement later that afterno
on. He was hitting his computer monitor and cursing softly.

  “Sounds like it’s going well,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said. “Can you get me that hammer over there, sweetheart? I need to fix something.”

  “Let me look before you break it,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said. He got up and went to his worktable, which bristled with scraps of unfinished projects. “How was school?”

  “Fine, I guess,” I said. “How do you manage to screw the website up so much in so little time?”

  “Practice,” he said. “Tell me about your classes.”

  “Not much to say. Boring as ever.”

  “I’m here with Frida all day and no one else to talk to. Give me something.”

  “You’re not missing much. We did yoga for gym class and learned how to relax our groins. Oh, and we have a new teacher.”

  “A new teacher who’s instructing you to relax your groins? Do I need to get in touch with someone about this?”

  I laughed. The basement door creaked open and Frida came bounding down. My mother was home.

  I turned toward my dad. “Mrs. Deloit was teaching her first yoga class. Well, I say teaching. She fell asleep.”

  “Yoga?” my mother said as she came down the stairs, flushed from the sun. She must have come back from a workout. She flicked on the overhead light, and my dad and I both winced. “I don’t know how you can work down here when it’s so dark,” she said. She’d scraped her hair back into a clean glossy knot, but she was wearing a baggy T-shirt, thin and corroded with age, that had been my dad’s. “That must have been fun. Remember when we took that class together, sweetheart?” Her voice was high and constricted. She knew I was still mad at her.

  My dad and I both watched her for a second; she looked bright and out of place. Then I said, “Yeah, vaguely, I think,” and returned to the computer screen.

  My dad went to give her a kiss. I knew he would; he always did.

  “So what are you guys doing down here?” my mother asked. “I didn’t realize you still needed help, Paul.”

  “Charlie’s just saving me from myself,” he said.

  “This whole operation is going to fall apart without me,” I said.

  I could hear them talking to each other behind my back, but I didn’t move. I didn’t want to know what they were saying.

  “So what else happened today, Charlie?” my mother said eventually.

  “Got an extracurricular, like you wanted.”

  “Did you? That’s wonderful.”

  I turned around again. “It doesn’t involve marching in lockstep, so that’s something.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. So what will you be doing?”

  “Our new teacher’s restarting the newspaper.”

  “The newspaper!” she said. “You’ve always wanted to work on the paper.”

  She sounded so pleased that for a moment my resolve crumbled. I looked down shyly. “Yeah, it seems like it might be fun.”

  “I’m really happy for you, honey,” she said. “That will be a great fit.”

  “Thanks,” I said, still looking down. I tried to hide my smile.

  She paused. I saw her grab my dad’s hand. “I know I shouldn’t say I told you so, but do you think you would have joined if I hadn’t made you?”

  My mouth tightened. “Maybe not,” I said. “Um, I should do some homework before dinner. Dad, you want to take over here?”

  “Sure,” he said, and let go of my mother.

  She watched me as I passed her, but she still let me go upstairs.

  —

  Half an hour later my dad knocked on my door. “I brought a peace offering,” he said, and let Frida inside. She was carrying a package of Oreos in her teeth. “I wanted to talk to you right after you came upstairs, but it took this long to get her not to chew it.”

  “So this is how you spend your time while we’re gone all day,” I said. Frida offered me the Oreos with a faint wag of her tail.

  “Have to occupy the hours somehow.” He sat down on my desk chair. “Your mom is just looking out for you, kid.”

  “And she had to brag about it?”

  “You know she didn’t mean it like that.”

  I snorted. “How did she mean it? And why did she get you in here instead of coming to talk to me herself?”

  “You’re so upbeat and charming, I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t.”

  I ignored him. “And how did she mean it when she stopped me working for you?”

  “That wasn’t a punishment, you doofus. We—as in both of us—just realized it wasn’t fair to keep you locked in the basement, and you are so ridiculously stubborn that the only way to do that was to kick you out.”

  I looked at him. “I like helping you.”

  “I like it too,” he said. “But if I were a real employer, I’d be prosecuted for breaking about three hundred child labor laws.”

  I hefted the Oreos. “This is enough payment for me.”

  “Go talk to her,” he said. “Please. For me.”

  I sighed. “Okay.”

  “Tonight,” he said. “Not when you get around to it.”

  “All right, all right, I promise.”

  He paused. “The other thing I wanted to tell you, which I must stress is contingent on you being less of a pain in the ass in the future, is that I’m going to let you start using my car to get to school. I know it’ll be difficult to stay late if you can’t get the bus.”

  “Really?” I said. I sat up. “Are you sure? I’ll pay for gas with the pathetic wages you’ve given me.”

  “I know you will. And half the insurance. And any required maintenance.”

  “Yes, all of that, and I’ll even leave you some music so you can see what uncool teenagers are listening to.”

  “That’s very generous, but you know how I feel about post-Beatles music.”

  “You’re old,” I said.

  “I just learned many—”

  “Many.”

  “—many years ago that anything not available on LP wasn’t worth bothering with,” he said. “Just talk to your mom for me, okay? You don’t realize how much of an effect you have on her.”

  “Okay,” I said. I offered him a cookie and he crunched it loudly in the silence. Frida looked at him with wet, pleading eyes. “How’s it going with work now that I’ve averted disaster?”

  “Not bad, actually. I just got commissioned to make a sculpture for Holmesdale Park.”

  “The one on the other side of town?”

  “Yep.”

  “Wow, good job. Can I offer some input?”

  “No.”

  About fifteen students showed up to the first meeting of Truth Bomb: a mix of kids I recognized and some people I’d never seen before. The only ones I really knew were a few students from my literature class: Asha, Dev, and Frank. I exchanged smiles with them but sat at the other edge of Mr. Drummond’s classroom, since an underclassman was sitting in my regular chair.

  Mr. Drummond sat in his usual spot on the front of his desk. “Thanks for showing up, everyone, even if you were bribed to do so,” he said. “I hope at least one of you understands newspaper layouts. First of all I want to find out if you have any thoughts about what the newspaper should be, or if you’ve got any ideas for features or editorials. Keeping in mind, of course, that we cannot endorse anarchy or libertarianism. Or mayonnaise, which is the devil’s condiment.”

  There was a silence. Eventually Mr. Drummond said, “Frank? I know you have some ideas.”

  “Word search,” said Frank, and a few people chuckled.

  “Well, obviously. We need to keep people like you occupied somehow,” Mr. Drummond said in a way that I realized was deliberate. He’d used Frank to warm us up. “Anyone else?”

  “How about a profile of new teachers?” said a guy with a cloud of curly red hair that crackled out like it was full of static.

  “Fine, Scott, before you ask again, I wear boxers. Happy now?” The kid l
aughed and held up his hands as if he couldn’t help his curiosity. Mr. Drummond turned and wrote on the board: Find out Drummond’s favorite baked good; use for bribes. “Let’s also think of less obvious ideas. What have you wanted to see in a school newspaper but haven’t?”

  “Why so many bad teachers have tenure,” said a short girl with glasses.

  “Generally I’d like to stay away from topics that will get me blackballed from the teachers’ lounge, but it’s a good subject,” said Mr. Drummond. “We’ll see what we can do with it.” He wrote Tenure jockeys—the only thing they ride out is the clock. “No one tweet that.”

  Dev said, “What about the statistics for who gets into advanced placement classes? Like the number of nonwhite students in them versus white students.”

  “Yes, good,” Mr. Drummond said. “You might want to look into socioeconomic class as well. I have an article about it somewhere around here.”

  “Gender too,” Asha said.

  Mr. Drummond inclined his head toward Dev. “Gender too,” he said.

  Dev sighed as if he and Asha had argued about this before. “Feminists,” he said.

  Asha hit him. When she saw me watching them, she rolled her eyes toward Dev. Dev grinned at me.

  Suddenly I felt out of my depth. They knew about things like that? What did they know? Who had taught them?

  “That’ll be interesting,” Mr. Drummond said. He wrote Advanced placement elaborate scam to fuel sales of graphing calculators? “Anyone else?”

  “What about government subsidies for school lunches? Pizza sauce being classed as a vegetable because of agricultural lobbies,” said a guy in a Weyland-Yutani T-shirt. I stared at him. Where had these people come from?

  “Excellent,” Mr. Drummond said. On the board he wrote Tomato sauce a vegetable, high-fructose corn syrup a fruit?

  I was ashamed of staying silent, but fear made my tongue thick. I listened while a few other people made suggestions and Mr. Drummond wrote them out on the board.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “I think we’ve got enough for a respectable issue. Now, who wants which story?”