Friends and Other Liars

by Kaela Coble

  I close my eyes, just for a second, and picture the crew as it used to be. Aaron and Ally remain unchanged except for the wedding bands on their fingers, but suddenly it’s Emmett’s high school girlfriend, Nicki, by his side instead of Steph. Danny is in the corner, making out with whatever below-the-tracks girl he’s found to entertain himself this month. And I, without anyone thinking anything of it, am able to lean into Murphy for support. In this world, at the end of the night, it’s quite possible I’ll return home to find Nancy either high or low—or one of those plus drunk—but it still feels lighter and simpler than the reality I return to when I open my eyes.

  Charlene holds a stack of envelopes and two sheets of loose-leaf paper. I can see Danny’s scribble through the white-lined sheet, and I remember the first time I looked over Danny’s shoulder at this same handwriting. He was showing me a poem he had written, which was better than I expected, much better than my own drippy attempts anyway. After that, he and I started the Dark Children of Chatwick Poetry Society. There were only two members: him and me. We didn’t always read poetry; sometimes it was personal essays or journal entries or little stories we made up. We met in secret in this very basement and never breathed a word of it to anyone, inside or outside the crew.

  It was such a long time ago, and yet not so long. And whatever Charlene is about to read is the last prose of Danny’s I will ever hear.

  Charlene flaps the piece of paper. “I found it when I finally made myself strip his bed this morning.”

  My eyes dart over to the bed I had been avoiding until this moment. The little twin mattress is made up with sheets so crisp and tightly tucked in that even Nancy at her most manic would approve. Then I remember that Nancy was helping Charlene with the arrangements, and I realize the hospital corners were probably her handiwork.

  Charlene reads:

  Dear Mom,

  I’m sorry I have to leave you this way. With all we have been through together, I always hoped I could someday make you proud. But life is hard, and sad. It has been for a very long time. At first, pot made it better, and then it didn’t so I moved on to other things. They all helped at first, but then they didn’t anymore. And now I’m nothing but a junkie.

  Charlene’s voice falters here, and it takes her several minutes to get through the rest of the letter.

  I’m a disappointment as a son and a human being. Nothing I do now can change that. I hate myself for what I’ve done. For what I am. I don’t even deserve the grief I know you must be feeling. Please don’t hate me. Try to be happy I’m finally at peace. I want you to know there is nothing you could have done to prevent this. You tried to help me as best you could.

  I can tell when she breaks down at this part that no matter what Danny says, she will always wonder what she should have done differently. As will we all.

  The trouble is, if a person has no hope things can get better, there’s not a whole lot anyone else can say to change that.

  I love you very much.

  Danny

  P.S. There’s another letter I’d like you to read to Ruby, Murphy, Emmett, and Ally if you can get them all together. Please read it to them before you give them their envelopes, or else they won’t understand.

  I barely hear the last part of the letter, I’m so furious with Danny. I’m sorry I have to leave you this way. As if he had no say in the matter. I could kill him if he hadn’t already done such a thorough job of it.

  The weight of Danny’s words hangs in the air, already dense with emotion. Ally’s hand springs to her mouth, and Aaron wraps his arm around her. Murphy leans forward and hides his face in his hands. My hand shoots out instinctively to rub his back, freezing about an inch above his shirt when I realize the intimacy of what I’m about to do. I pat him awkwardly a few times and then return the disobedient hand to my lap. I look over at Emmett. Steph is looking at him too, but he stares straight ahead, white as a sheet. No one knows what to say. I mean, what do you say?

  Finally, Emmett seems to return to himself. He clears his throat. “The note says there’s letters for us?”

  I shoot him a sharp look. He’s trying to get this over with, and I understand the urge but don’t think rushing Charlene is very kind. He doesn’t notice my glare.

  “Yeah,” she says. She puts the first sheet behind the second. “I haven’t read this one yet, since it ain’t addressed to me.” Oh, Charlene. Even with her bastard ex-husband and her troubled son in the ground, she’s still waiting for someone’s temper to explode. She sniffs deeply and reads:

  To my old friends,

  So here you all are. Nice to see you can show up for a person once he’s dead.

  Charlene stops, her mouth open, her eyes horrified at the abrupt change in tone. Her expression almost exactly matches Ally’s, Aaron’s, Emmett’s, and Steph’s. My face and Murphy’s have not changed; he and I were expecting this. Probably because we know we deserve it.

  Charlene’s eyes scan the rest of the page, and then she looks at me, as if she’s asking permission to continue. I nod my head to grant it.

  She looks down at the page again, her hands shaking visibly. She looks back up at me and shakes her head. The first note was bad enough. She doesn’t want the last memory of her son to be this.

  I stand up, grab the box of tissues from the top of the TV, and guide her back to my seat with them. Murphy takes one of her hands. With the other, she dabs at her eyes with a tissue. I take Charlene’s place at the head of the class and continue reading:

  I haven’t heard from any of you in a while. Some of you I see down at Margie’s Pub every weekend, so I don’t know what makes you think you’re so much better than me. I doubt Ruby and Murphy are even here. They’re both really good at ignoring problems.

  I look at Murphy, who glances at me and then returns to staring straight ahead.

  If any of you actually showed up at my funeral, don’t feel like you deserve some medal. None of you bothered to try to help me when I was alive, when it counted.

  Ally is audibly crying now, her head in her hands, slumped into Aaron’s chest.

  Charlene’s eyes dart between each of our faces guiltily, as if she were the one who wrote the hateful words. “I’m sorry,” she says to us. “I didn’t know. I thought it would be like mine, not…” She waves her hand at the letter I hold. “Maybe we shouldn’t—”

  But something in me tells me that Danny’s last words deserve to be read. Maybe the part of me that feels I contributed to his demise by abandoning him all those years ago. I turn my eyes back to the page.

  You always talked about “the crew, the crew, the crew,” like we were some untouchable entity. But when it comes to things that really matter, you guys barely even know each other. I think it’s about time you did, if you’re going to continue to pride yourselves on being friends since the womb. I know things about most of you that you didn’t trust the rest of the crew to know.

  Here, I pause, a hot spring of acid burning my throat. If I choose not to continue reading, someone else will snatch this piece of paper away from me. If I read it, I can edit the information if it reveals too much.

  There is one envelope for each of my dear friends who once pledged to always be honest with each other, and each envelope contains evidence of your betrayal of that pact. I’ll leave it up to you. You can either share them with each other, or keep them to yourselves. Just remember that all things done in the dark have a way of coming to light. If you don’t tell each other your secrets, you never know how, or when, I might have arranged for them to come out.

  He didn’t sign the letter Love, Danny, which is no surprise after the content. He simply dashed off a large, loopy D.

  I’m not sure what to do with the piece of paper. I don’t want to give it back to Charlene, so I just place it on top of the television, next to the pile of envelopes, which I pick up. Each has a name on it. There is one for
me, one for Ally, one for Emmett, one for Murphy, and, oddly enough, one for Danny. I hold them in my hands, little grenades of paper. If I tear them up now, will it stop them from detonating? Judging by the ferocity of Danny’s letter, I’m guessing not.

  I hand out the envelopes, and as I do, each person looks at me, looking for answers to the questions on all of our minds. I drop the envelope with my name on it back on the TV set, now left only with Danny’s envelope in my hands, which has a note next to his name.

  I’ll go first.

  I know what it will say, and I wish I could somehow shrink down and disappear inside the envelope so I don’t have to deal with any of what’s about to happen. But I don’t debate with myself if I should open it, or if I should give it to Charlene for her to sort out instead. I just rip open the seal and pull out a small piece of paper. It says what I thought it might say.

  I read aloud the truth that changed everything for him:

  I killed my stepfather.

  2

  RUBY

  BACK THEN—(ALMOST) EIGHTH GRADE

  I’m used to waking up in the middle of the night. Danny throws rocks at my window every couple of weeks. So tonight, when I bolt upright in bed, I wait to hear the next pebble before I bother getting up. I hold my breath, waiting for the ping! against the glass to slice through the thick summer air, but I don’t hear it. I draw the curtain to look out to the street, but no one’s there.

  I lie down and try to fall back to sleep. Sometimes my ceiling fan, tired from the effort of keeping my room cool in the humidity of the Vermont summer, starts to creak in the middle of the night, and in the past, I’ve mistaken the noise for Danny’s SOS. But my fan hasn’t been on since the storm knocked the power out hours ago. My phone call with Ally had cut off midsentence after a flash of light, which I’m sure made her more worried. The first night I had a sleepover at her house—we were maybe five or six—there was a thunderstorm so big I couldn’t help but tell her I was scared, and she stayed up with me all night playing Go Fish, giving my hand a squeeze with every boom of thunder. Ever since then, she calls me to make sure I’m okay when it storms. Even though I’m over the fear, I love that she still checks on me.

  After we lost power, I tossed and turned, replaying a much more powerful storm that swept through earlier: Hurricane Nancy. She’s off her meds again.

  “You don’t understand how they make me feel, sweetheart,” she said, her words racing as she paced my room, gathering discarded clothes from the floor and hanging them in my closet, picking up items from every surface to wipe imaginary dust away with her hands. “I just can’t live underwater anymore. You know what they say, water is for fish and seaweed and coral, and speaking of Coral, that sister of yours just keeps antagonizing me, she’s so ready to get out of this house; well, she’s in for a surprise when she gets out into the real world and realizes there are people in this world a whole lot crazier than me, and…” On and on she went, climbing further up the mania ladder without taking a breath.

  The power must have come back on just before I fell asleep, because I could hear her banging pans and cabinet doors in the kitchen, preparing to bake. When I was little, I used to sneak into the pantry and watch her as she kneaded and rolled out the dough in perfect, flat circles. Her baking was magic to me. Now that I’m almost a teenager and have been through this enough times, I know I will wake up in the morning to fresh scones, a mother who has crashed so hard she can’t get out of bed, and a father nowhere to be found after conveniently remembering some work that has to be done at the office.

  I am so sure I feel trouble that I keep sitting back up to check the window. Finally, I get out of bed and tiptoe downstairs. Sure enough, a tray of baked goods cools on the counter, although the kitchen is dark except for the blinking digital clocks on the stove and the microwave. I open the back door—slowly, so the creaks in the old hinges will be quieter. I don’t turn the back porch light on. I never turn it on, even though the dark scares me, because I can’t risk waking anyone up.

  The earth smells damp and clean, but the storm didn’t break the humidity. Steam rises from the driveway. Wind chimes collide on the Bronsons’ porch, but there is no breeze. A chill runs down me anyway. The only other sounds come from the pool. I listen to the low hum of water being pumped into the pool and the sucking sound of the filter trying to pull out bugs and leaves from the surface.

  Danny is not on the glider, where he usually waits for me. I suppose it’s possible I woke out of habit, or just heard the clinking of Nancy washing her dishes before turning in for the night. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that something’s out of place. I’m about to chalk it up to paranoia and go back to bed when I hear a rustling coming from the lilac bush in the farthest corner of the backyard. I stand on the rough wood of the deck, staring at the bush and telling myself I’ll be thirteen next week—too old to believe in monsters in the bushes. But I hug my arms to my body anyway, goose bumps popping up on my arms despite the heat, too scared to move.

  Feeling stupid, I whisper “Hello?” into the darkness.

  I hear the noise again, and right when I’m about to wet my nightgown, I hear “Don’t be scared, it’s me.” A few seconds later, I make out Danny’s figure coming from behind the bush.

  “Jesus, Danny, what are you doing?” I whisper yell at him. I want to punch him, but by the look of the bruises on his cheek, he’s gotten it bad enough tonight.

  “I just needed a place to hide out for a while,” Danny says. “I didn’t want to drag you into this.”

  This is weird of him to say, considering he’s been “dragging me into” every beating his stepfather has handed him since we were in second grade. When Charlene started dating Roger Deuso, our parents told us how lucky Danny was to finally be getting a father. His real dad left when Danny was just a baby. And Roger, who owns the famous (in Chatwick, anyway) Deuso’s Deli, is known for his charity. He’s always giving free subs to neighbors in need, and considering the deli is below the tracks, I’m surprised he makes any profit at all.

  He became even more of a hero when he married Charlene. “A single mother and her ‘troubled’ child?” the Chat said. “That Roger Deuso sure is a saint.”

  So when the neighbors started hearing Danny screaming bloody murder a couple of months after Charlene and Roger got married, they decided Danny was just “a little hell-raiser” and “God bless Roger for putting up with it.” Danny’s bruises and cuts were waved away. “Must have gotten into a scuffle at school,” they’d say. He was called a “sour one” and a “bad egg,” and even though he’d never been an angel, it wasn’t long before Danny really started living up to his reputation.

  Murphy, who’s been his best friend since First Communion, still has to pull him off boys at recess more days than not. Danny is not even allowed at Emmett’s, and while Ally never comes out and says it, when Danny is with us, we always play in her back field instead of going in the house, so I don’t think he’s welcome there. It makes me so angry that he gets all the blame, but Danny made me promise not to tell anyone what Roger does to him. I think he’s afraid his mom will pick Roger over him. Can you blame him? She’s not deaf, dumb, or blind. In a way, it’s like she already has.

  That’s why Danny comes to me. He knew I understood the value of discretion back before that was one of our vocabulary words in fifth grade. I know how to hide stuff because my family’s almost as screwed up as his. Almost. I’ll take my mother and her tendency to self-medicate her bipolar disorder with alcohol over Roger any day. But still, we’re different from our friends. We know what it’s like to not just worry that the bottom will drop out from under us, but to be certain that it will, because it always has. We stick close together at Christmastime, afraid to go home, while the rest of our friends are merry and chipper and filled with the Christmas spirit.

  On Christmas Eve, Danny and I sneak out of our houses and climb to the v
ery top of one of the bare maple trees on my street to mock the Christmas carolers as they make their rounds. Last year, Danny slipped on an icy branch, fell out of the tree, and broke his arm. It ended up being the best Christmas he’d had in years, because he was in a cast for a normal-kid reason, and because Charlene actually stood up to Roger and made him leave Danny alone since he was already hurt. Of course, come New Year’s, she couldn’t leave the house because even sunglasses wouldn’t cover the black eye Roger gave her.

  We sit on the glider, and Danny winces when I reach out to examine his face. Because I wasn’t sure he was here, I am not prepared with the first-aid items I usually meet him with—a towel of ice, Neosporin, and some Band-Aids. His eye is swollen shut. If I hadn’t seen him from the other side, I would barely be able to tell it’s Danny. I get up to go inside and retrieve my supplies, but he grabs my hand.

  “Don’t go.” He whispers it so quietly I’m not sure he really said it. He starts to shake, so I sit down and wrap my arms around him sideways to warm him up, to steady him, whatever he needs. But he jumps away from me. He usually flinches when people get too close to him—in fact, that’s what most of his recess fights are about—but he’s not usually like that with me.

  “What set the asshole off this time?” I whisper, savoring the feeling of the swear word on my tongue.

  “Don’t call him that,” he snaps.

  This is also new. Usually Danny doesn’t start defending Roger until he’s already called him every name in the book and is trying to prepare himself to return home. He’ll say stuff like “I shouldn’t have left my skateboard in front of the shop. He says it looks trashy” or “I shouldn’t have left the laundry basket open. He’s told me a million times to keep it shut.” I mean, my house has a lot of dumb rules like that too, but if I break one of them, I get yelled at. I don’t get hit.