Friends and Other Liars

by Kaela Coble

  Ally’s face turns to a pout. “I swore to you I wouldn’t tell anyone about your secret, and I didn’t. How could you think I would lie about something like that?”

  “Al, I love you, and you know I would understand if you told everyone what you know. Especially if Aaron’s told anyone…” And by anyone, of course I mean Murphy. “I can’t expect you to take that hit for me. If you let it slip that Danny switched your secret for someone else’s… I mean, I am the only other crew member with a uterus.”

  Ally’s face hardens as I speak. “First of all, I would like to think the people I’m closest to in this world believe me when I tell them the truth. That goes for you”—she jabs a finger in my direction—“and for all the assholes out there.” She jabs her finger toward the living room. “If they heard some rumor that I had an abortion and chose to believe it, then I don’t really care. They can think what they want. And if you don’t believe I can’t keep a secret to protect one of my oldest”—her voice breaks—“friends, then I don’t know what to tell you.” She starts to move past me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, catching her arm. And I mean it. I realize I’m treating Ally like a person she clearly isn’t anymore. A person maybe she never was. She looks into my eyes and must know I am sincere, because she softens. I pull her into a hug. “I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything,” I say. “I’m acting crazy.”

  She lets me hug her for a moment before I feel her stiffen. When she pulls away, her face is quizzical. “Why are you acting so crazy?”

  I freeze. In that instant, I know she’s got me.

  “Seriously,” she continues, “if I don’t care that much what people think of choices I made in high school, why would you care? You’ve never cared what anyone thought about you. Except”—her face goes to a faraway place, remembering, calculating, watching as my eyes widen—“Murphy,” she finishes. “Oh…my…God. Hardy wasn’t the father.”

  I stare into her eyes, my breath caught in my throat.

  “It was Murphy. Wasn’t it?” she asks.

  I don’t move.

  “Ruby!”

  Slowly, I nod my head. This isn’t how this was supposed to go, but this is how it’s going. I wait for her to scream at me, to scream for Murphy, but she doesn’t. Her face wrinkles. She shudders. “Ewww!” she cries. She starts hopping around, flicking her hands as if trying to shake off the visual image. “You did it with Murphy Leblanc?” She shudders again and continues to jump.

  I can’t help myself. I break into giggles. She starts to laugh too, and before we know it, we’re clutching our bellies—hers swollen, mine empty. It’s not until she starts to loudly sing “Ruby and Murphy, sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G” that I stop laughing.

  “Ally, shhh. Shhh,” I say, covering her mouth with my hand. Just like when we were kids, she licks my palm. “Jesus, Ally,” I say, wiping my hand on the back of her dress. “Listen, you can’t tell anyone.”

  She stops playing then. “Really, Ruby? More secrets?” She says it like she’s disappointed in me.

  “I’m going to. I decided today that I would. But not until after the wedding, okay? If he’s mad, I don’t want it to ruin the wedding. After I tell him, you can tell—”

  “No one. Then I’ll tell no one. It’s a secret between you and Murphy. It’s no one else’s business.”

  I want to kiss her with relief. “Thank you, Ally.” I think back to the night in the fields by her house, the flashlights we had brought for one last game of tag at our feet, our hands in a circle. Reeling from her parent’s divorce, Ally’s impossibly tortured face as she made us vow to fight for our friendships and to always be honest with each other. She had needed us to do what her parents could not. And we would have promised anything to make her happy. “I appreciate you understanding. I know how important honesty is to you.”

  I did not mean it sarcastically, but I realize after I say it that she is, of course, lying to us all too. She hasn’t revealed the contents of her envelope, no matter what she says.

  Something strange appears on her face. “Yeah, well,” she says, “some things are better left in the past. Some people too.” She looks beyond me, beyond the walls of the beautiful house her husband has built for her. When it comes to things that really matter, you guys barely even know each other.

  Even without knowing what her secret is, I suddenly understand something about Ally that I never did before. Behind each of her backhanded whisperings, there is a little girl desperate to confirm her beliefs are right, her choices are beyond reproach. When Ally makes snide comments about New York, or looks at the bookcases of my apartment and asks me where my great American novel is, she’s really looking for confirmation, if only from herself, that she was right to stay in Vermont, to marry young, to pursue the career she’s in. She deals with the fear of judgment by going on the offensive so she never has to play defense. I, on the other hand, have chosen to sit out of the game entirely.

  She turns back to me. “Is that why you didn’t come clean and say the secret was yours? You knew he would figure it out, because obviously he would have known if Hardy had knocked you up?” There is so much pain in her eyes—the old pain that I always favored Murphy’s company over hers, the pain that I lied to her again. The pain of knowing how little trust I’ve placed in the girl who always saved me a seat.

  I nod. “I never even slept with Hardy. I mean, I did junior year…all that happened. But the night of that party, the one after we graduated? I was just trying to prove a point to Murphy, but when I got in the car, I realized I was taking a giant leap backward and asked Hardy to drive me home.”

  “And he did? Just like that? You’re lucky he didn’t—”

  “He might have, but I was so drunk I threw up in his middle console. He dumped me at my house pretty soon after that.”

  We share a laugh, conspirators in the systematic destruction of a boy who treated us both badly.

  “Let’s get back to the party,” Ally says, brightening in preparation for her audience. “It’s time for the group photo. Maybe we should ask Krystal to take it. Would that cheer you up?”

  I move to protest, but am ashamed to find myself nodding as I follow her back into the living room.

  It ends up being a four-glass night.

  • • •

  I lie awake all night, every memory I have of Murphy running through my head. At seventeen, watching him hit home runs in his starched white baseball uniform, feeling a confusing secret thrill when he winks at me after crossing home plate. At ten, telling me my haircut makes me look like a mushroom, or a boy, and he’s not sure which one is worse. At fourteen, confessing in a whispered late-night phone call that he’s been having nightmares about Danny stabbing Roger in the chest. At twenty-eight, the pressure of his hands, now calloused from his work, on my bare skin.

  I hate myself for what I’ve done. For what I am.

  Now I remember Danny, the way he looked that first night he came to me for help. Roger had practically yanked his arm out of its socket, and he hobbled toward me in the dark like a wounded bird. If I had been smart enough then, or had trusted Nancy not to break under the stress, if I had called out for her instead of keeping Danny’s secret, would everything be different? Would Roger have been sent to jail? Danny freed from his abuse?

  Could Danny have had a better life? Gone to college with me, even? If Murphy and I hadn’t shouldered the weight of Danny’s secret together, would we ever have become best friends and then lovers? Would Danny still be alive? And what if things had gone differently when he came to New York? I could have saved him one last time. Or really, for the first time.

  None of you bothered to try to help me when I was alive, when it counted.

  21

  RUBY

  BACK THEN—FRESHMAN YEAR, NYU

  It is way too early for my buzzer to be going off. I groan awake, resentfu
l that my roommate, Lisa, has undoubtedly left her keys and ID behind in some fellow pretentious drama major’s dorm room—again. Security at NYU is strict; even if they know your face, they don’t let you up without your ID. Then I remember Lisa requested a room transfer and moved out yesterday. She swears it’s to be closer to the theater where all her classes are, but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s because I’ve been crying for two weeks straight—pretty much since I got here. (I guess it’s hard to soak in New York when you’re already drowning in your roommate’s used tissues.)

  I don’t really care. In fact, it’s nice to be able to experience my sorrow without the pressure of trying to appear normal. Besides, I have enough drama to carry me through freshman year without a roommate who majors in it.

  I drag myself up, glancing at my alarm clock on the way to the door. It’s five thirty in the morning. I press the brass button. “You’ve got the wrong room.” There’s no other explanation for it. Who would be visiting me? I haven’t made a single friend here, due in no small part to my complete lack of effort. I’m about to flop myself back into bed when a voice crackles through the speaker. “Ruby St. James? There’s a young man here to see you. Are you expecting him?”

  A young man? I haven’t had a single interaction with a male since I’ve been here. I’ve barely left my dorm except to go to classes, and there I just sit silently in a cavernous lecture hall among hundreds of other students. But what if…? My heart stops. If it’s not someone I’ve met here, there is only one young man who might be looking for me.

  I press the button again. “Let him up.”

  Oh my God. The words echo in my head: Are you expecting him? No, not expecting. Fantasizing, yes, in my darkest and weakest moments, but not expecting. This is too much like a movie to be happening to me. Girl is homesick and alone, thinking the boy she loves doesn’t care about her. But now that she’s really left, and the reality of her being out of his life is too much to bear, he drives all night—and he must have driven; there are no flights this early from the Burlington airport—to rescue her from her heartache.

  My heart is pounding so hard I have to sit down on the bed, but I pop back up almost immediately when I realize I cried myself to sleep last night and haven’t showered since the day before yesterday. I hastily spritz perfume, tie my hair back in a ponytail, and pinch my cheeks like I really am a girl in a movie, before there’s a knock on the door. I force myself to wait a few seconds before I open it.

  My face falls.

  “Try not to look so happy to see me, Tuesday,” Danny says. I try to rearrange my face from obvious disappointment to pleasant surprise, but as with so many things, I fail.

  “You look like shit,” I blurt out. It’s true. His eye is swollen, his nose looks broken, and there are flecks of dried blood in his goatee. I thought I was done with battered Danny showing up at my door in the middle of the night.

  “Thanks,” he says. “You too.”

  I laugh. It’s the first time in weeks that I’ve laughed. And then I realize this is Danny in front of me. Danny, who knows me, who’s known me for as long as we both remember. I don’t ask him what happened to his face. Perhaps I should, but I’ve learned my lesson about asking questions I don’t want to know the answer to.

  “I’m really, really glad you’re here,” I whisper. My eyes water despite my best efforts. It’s like they’re defective or something; they’re a goddamn faucet I can’t turn off.

  “Hey now,” he says. He drops the backpack he’d slung over one shoulder and pulls me into a hug. “No tears. My face will heal, I promise.”

  I laugh again, and a fresh wave of tears comes after it. He squeezes me tightly, and I inhale his unique mixture of menthol cigarettes and Old Spice deodorant and home. He pulls back and puts his hands on either side of my face, wiping my tears away with calloused thumbs. “I was hoping to find you here with some trust-funded film major, smoking flavored tobacco from a hookah and wearing a beret.”

  I knit my eyebrows together. “Why would you hope that?”

  We both laugh. “Okay, maybe not exactly that. I just mean I was hoping to find you happy. I wanted to see Ruby St. James in her grand new life. The one you always dreamed about.”

  I pull away from him, under the guise of clearing a space on Lisa’s old bed for him to sit. It’s piled high with clothes I haven’t had the energy to deposit into the hamper, let alone wash. “Yeah, well, I guess it takes more than two weeks to build a new life,” I say.

  “Especially when you’re in love with someone from your old one.” He says it softly, gently, but it’s not a question.

  I almost laugh. He, like Ally, thinks I am in this state because of Hardy Crane. That I am broken by such a sack of scum. It would be easier if I let him believe it, like I let Ally believe it. But it’s Danny, and he’s trusted me with much worse than this. “This isn’t about Hardy, Dan. That night at the party…it wasn’t what it looked like. Nothing happened.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Hardy.”

  “Then who—”

  “Same asshole who gave me this,” he says, pointing to his black eye. “Murphy.”

  My mouth falls open, my tongue lying heavy as lead. I’m not sure which revelation is more shocking to me, that Murphy and Danny came to blows or that Danny knew something about me and Murphy. I decide to start with the less-selfish line of questioning. “Murphy did that to you?”

  He nods, then waves me off, apparently deciding the same thing. “But I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s talk about what he did to you.”

  I wait a beat. Maybe if I don’t speak, he will elaborate on his thing. No such luck. “What did he tell you?” I finally ask.

  He shakes his head. “Not a thing, I swear.”

  The gratitude I feel toward Murphy for respecting my privacy is quickly replaced by disappointment he didn’t find it so unbearable that he couldn’t help but talk about it with someone.

  “It was the Fourth of July,” Danny continues, and my heart thuds into my stomach, remembering what happened that night. “You went MIA again after Luke’s party, and yeah, I figured you were hanging out with Hardy again. But we always watched the fireworks from your roof so I thought I would take a chance and stop by. Murphy’s truck was parked outside. I had asked him earlier if he was going to your house like always, but he said since no one could get ahold of you, he was going to go to Burlington with his brother. The fact that he lied about it, combined with how weird you guys have been with each other…” Danny holds up two fingers on his left hand and two fingers on his right and then connects them. He put two and two together.

  “So if you knew about it since July…I mean, that’s not what caused that, right?” I point at his eye, wondering if Lisa might have left her ice pack behind in my mini-fridge. Although it’s probably too late for ice at this point, since he’s been driving for six hours.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Dan.”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it!” He turns away from me and picks up a book of short stories lying next to my bed. As he flips through, he says casually, “So you’re in love with him?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “But you are.” I don’t confirm or deny, but he takes my silence as his answer. He whistles. “You’re in love with Murphy Leblanc, and I never want to see him again. This calls for a smoke.”

  I start to panic. How to handle this?

  “Come on,” he says, elbowing me. “I finished my pack in the car. Can I bum one?”

  “Nonsmoking dorm,” I say. “Sorry.”

  “Well, we can go outside.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “You’re out? Seriously? You always have some. Well, whatever. This is New York. We can just go out and buy some.”

  “I quit.”

  He looks at me for a long moment. Eerily long. “You
quit smoking after moving to a new place where nothing is familiar, and your heart is clearly broken?” He waves his hand at the moat of wadded-up tissues surrounding my bed.

  “I haven’t been feeling well,” I say, hastening to pick up some of the tissues and stuff them in the pockets of my robe. “I’ve had a cold. Trying to give my lungs a break, you know.”

  He cocks his head. “Never stopped you from smoking before.”

  “Well, I’m an adult now. Out on my own. Gotta grow up and learn how to take care of myself.” I know I sound like a lunatic, particularly because my voice keeps cracking. Danny’s not even listening to me. He moves toward my desk, his eyes fixed on something.

  “Is that what these are about?” he asks, holding up the pamphlets that I picked up from Student Health but haven’t been able to bring myself to read: Unplanned Pregnancy: Your Choices, What to Expect When You’re Unexpectedly Pregnant, Your Body, Your Baby.

  “Tuesday,” he says, his voice a mixture of compassion and disappointment. “You’re pregnant?”

  • • •

  Danny goes with me to Planned Parenthood for the initial appointment. They assume he’s the father, and this doesn’t seem to bother him. They ask a lot of questions about my mental health and ask me like four hundred times if I’m sure about my decision. They pull me into a room separate from Danny to confirm this is my choice and I’m not being coerced into it. I wonder if this is standard protocol, or if the state of Danny’s face has something to do with it. Although, if they were taking that into account, they would probably assume that I am the one in charge.

  I try to schedule my appointment—the big appointment, the one for “the procedure,” or “the termination,” as they kindly call it—for tomorrow. But I am ten weeks pregnant, and since I have two weeks before I have to make a decision, Danny thinks I should give it a few more days.