Even When You Lie to Me

by Jessica Alcott

  “He never actually finished an issue of the paper. He was relentlessly smug. He didn’t teach us anything we couldn’t have figured out on our own—”

  “Okay, okay,” Dev said. He glanced at me and away again. “Don’t cross Asha.”

  I smiled at Dev. He’d been different around me ever since my birthday, and I didn’t know how to apologize for how I’d acted.

  “I thought you had come around on him,” I said to Asha.

  “Well,” she said, “let’s not overstate it.”

  “Be grateful,” I said. “If he hadn’t left, you’d have nothing to complain about.”

  Asha laughed and hit my hand gently. “I’d find something,” she said.

  I glanced up to see Dev watching us. He looked away when I caught his eye. Asha noticed and said, “Him, probably.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’d complain about Dev.”

  “You do that anyway,” Dev said.

  “True,” she said. “But you give me a sort of focus point.”

  He rolled his eyes at me. I grinned.

  “I saw that,” Asha said.

  “That was the idea,” he said.

  I looked at him. He didn’t look away. Asha watched us carefully. Then she smiled.

  —

  Ms. Anders kept me behind after everyone else had left. I didn’t think there was any way she could know about me and Drummond, but I was still nervous as she closed the door.

  “So, Charlotte,” she said, crossing her legs as she sat down. I noticed there was a run in her stocking that jagged halfway up her thigh like a long skeletal finger and disappeared obscenely into her skirt. The skin underneath was so white it was almost blue. “I know you and Tom were close.”

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Sorry—Mr. Drummond,” she said. “See? I’ve gotten better about that.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “So you know what happened?”

  My breath caught. “What?”

  “You know why he left?”

  “A family emergency?” I said.

  “No, I mean specifically,” she said.

  “I, um…” I was suddenly sure she knew and was trying to tease it out of me. “No, I don’t think…Do you know?”

  “Dr. Crowley said his mother was sick,” she said. “But we’re not supposed to tell the students, so please don’t pass it around.”

  “Ah,” I said. It took a few moments for my heartbeat to slow down. “Okay. I won’t.”

  “I just wanted you to know in case you were worried,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “I’ve tried to get in touch, but his phone just goes to voice mail,” she said. “No forwarding address either.”

  “I’m sure they’ll give you that information eventually,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t count on that.”

  When I gave her a quizzical look, she said, “They’re hiring someone else permanently for my position next year.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I just—I just thought I had longer, I guess.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Do you have any plans?”

  She shook her head. “We’ll see what happens. Couldn’t be more of an adventure than this year, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Right.”

  She didn’t say anything. She ran her hand down her thigh and her nails snagged at the tear. “Oh, great,” she said. “Was this there the whole time?” She covered it up with her hand. “Just two more weeks, right?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Then we’re free.”

  The day we graduated was bright and clear, the sky so blue it looked endless.

  Everyone looked incredibly young in the sunshine. As I stood there listening to Dr. Crowley speak, I felt a silly, sentimental swell of love for them. I heard my parents cheer as I clutched my diploma.

  I couldn’t help searching the bleachers, but he hadn’t come. In a way I was relieved.

  Afterward I remembered that I’d left a jacket in my locker, and I ran inside. I couldn’t help taking one last look at our English classroom. He had never decorated the walls with posters or charts, and the room had always seemed a little bare. But now his desk was empty; most of his stuff had been gone for weeks, but he had left a few things—extra copies of books, old handouts and outdated syllabi—and someone had come by and cleared those out too. I realized suddenly that he wouldn’t get to sign my yearbook, something I had thought about occasionally before everything had happened. It seemed stupid now that I had been looking forward to it so much: so naive of me, hoping for so little.

  When I turned back into the hall, he was there. He looked exactly the same as he always had, but something about him had changed.

  “Hi,” I said, sounding calmer than I felt. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  He smiled ruefully. “I wasn’t sure I would either. But…” He shrugged. “It didn’t seem right, not seeing you graduate.”

  I nodded. “Well, thanks for showing up. It’s been a nice day.”

  “You guys looked great out there,” he said. “You looked like the future.”

  “I guess we are,” I said.

  “A somewhat terrifying thought,” he said, “now that I’ve spent a year with Frank.”

  I smiled a little. “True.”

  “You know, I realized the other day I never got you an internship for the summer.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I actually…I found something on my own.” I hadn’t, but I knew I could. I didn’t need his help anymore. “Um, anyway, my parents are expecting me, so…”

  “Oh,” he said. “Of course.”

  “But it was nice to see you. You know, good luck with everything.” I started to turn away and he caught my arm.

  “Charlie,” he said. He looked sick. “I just came because I wanted to— I know I owe you an apology. I owe you an apology so big that words can’t begin to touch it.”

  “Yeah, you do.” My eyes clouded as I said it. I paused, trying to gather my thoughts. “You don’t deserve my forgiveness,” I said finally.

  “I know,” he said.

  “You don’t deserve even getting to ask for it.”

  “I know,” he said again.

  “You don’t deserve getting to come here.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I glanced into the classroom so I wouldn’t have to see his face. “Why are you even here? What do you want?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “I had to see with my own eyes that they were allowing Sean to graduate.”

  I tried to frown at him so I wouldn’t laugh, but the expression wouldn’t stick. I looked up at the ceiling and then down again. “Why did you leave?”

  “I had to,” he said. He stepped toward me. “If I could change it, I would.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want you to change it. You don’t get to do that. I want to— I want to decide how it ends. Okay? I get to write it. I get to decide.”

  “Okay,” he said quietly.

  We stood there in silence for a minute. I stared at his hands, his feet, his ears, his mouth, his eyes. He seemed so ordinary now, just some guy I could have passed on the street. I never would have looked at him twice. I felt sad for him then, and all the anger drained away. He was just a person. Nothing more or less.

  Suddenly I wanted to give him something, but I only had one thing left.

  “Let’s pretend,” I said finally. “Let’s pretend we got married. In a castle in Germany.”

  He looked startled for a second, and then the corners of his mouth turned down and his eyes became glassy. “You’re sure you…you want to…”

  I nodded. He knew how this worked, and what to say, and how I wanted him to lie. He’d taught me.

  He uncrossed his arms and cleared his throat. “I protested, but you got your way.”

  “The food was awful. Bratwurst.”

  “Th
e DJ played Kraftwerk all night.”

  “My parents got drunk and made out on the dance floor.”

  “But you looked radiant,” he said. “I could never forget it.”

  My breath hitched, but I kept going. “You looked ridiculous,” I said. “You insisted on wearing lederhosen.”

  “And the alpine hat,” he said. “It looked jaunty.” He stepped closer. “Tirolerhut, if you want to get technical.”

  “And afterward we honeymooned in Austria.”

  “Every morning we were woken by flügelhorns.”

  “Accordions.”

  “Whatever.”

  “We moved to New York.”

  “For your job at the Times. And my residence at NYU.”

  “We turned them down when they offered you tenure. We couldn’t be tied down like that.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Our kids were world travelers.”

  “They turned out well, though. Rhodes Scholars.”

  “They had good role models,” he said. “We loved each other.”

  “Married fifty-two years,” I said. “And I never once farted on you.”

  He laughed. “I can’t say the same for myself.”

  I kissed him. As we pulled apart, he whispered, “Bye, Charlotte.”

  I made a sound between a laugh and a sob. “Bye, Tom,” I said.

  Then he was gone.

  —

  When I stepped outside, I had to shade my eyes from the sun, it was so bright.

  Lila appeared out of nowhere. “Hey,” she said. “You okay?”

  I nodded, my chin shaking. “I will be.”

  She hooked her arm around mine. “C’mon, Asha wants to take pictures. I’m going to give her my best devil horns.” She demonstrated, knowing it would make me laugh, and it did.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  Thanks first of all to Phoebe Yeh and David Dunton, my editor and agent. Without their excitement and encouragement, this book would have stayed on my laptop forever (so blame them).

  Phoebe, thank you for your editorial brilliance, which improved the book in uncountable ways; your dedication (I am still convinced you don’t sleep); and your incredible, passionate, dynamo-like backing of this book and of me, which I would be suspicious of if it weren’t so genuine. David, thank you for your steadiness and your kindness, and for putting up with my incessant emails about pizza. I wanted to find an agent I liked and instead I got you, who I adore. I still owe you a Hot Dog Johnny’s (even now), but not until you get me Louis C.K.’s number.

  Thanks also to the people I asked to read this thing before I even knew what I was going to do with it: Alice Swan (enthusiasm I knew was real because you do not lie, and advice on what word to lose in a crucial scene), Sung Woo (lots of excellent structural guidance), and Harriet “baggy” Reuter “Hopsgobble” Hapgood (twenty-paragraph emails, bucketloads of “WHAT are they CRAZY?” reassurance, Teacher Gave Me the D, general lols, and endless supplies of apposite gifs). And thank you to the people at Random House who’ve made the book better than I ever could have alone: Rachel Weinick (Bridgewater Commons forever), Alison Kolani, Jennifer Black, Courtney Code, Jocelyn Lange, and Alison Impey for a (third) fantastic cover.

  Thanks also to: Vicki and Lindsay for not killing me, Nikki for general awesomeness, Gen and Zoe for keeping my secret, Bon for everything, my family generally for all your support and occasional sassing, Dee for all the incredible ways you’ve helped us over the years and (not) for the story about Liam Neeson, and Mom for your love and for pretending you hadn’t read the sex scenes.

  Thanks to everyone who read this far for tolerating all the in-jokes.

  Finally, to John, who was my first and best reader, who cries at everything, who’s talked me down from more ledges than I can count, who is kind and thoughtful and curious, who always makes me laugh even when I don’t want to, who cannot pull off a hat JUST STOP TRYING: I love you.