Beautiful Lies

by Jessica Warman

  Mr. Morelli opens the door before we have a chance to knock. My stomach flutters a little bit at the sight of him leaning in the doorway, sipping a mug of coffee. He might be thirtysomething, but he is dreamy: thick black hair, six-pack abs, piercing green eyes, and a smile that could make a girl melt.

  When his eyes meet mine, he gives me a casual grin. I can feel my face growing hotter by the second, and am thankful that my foundation is thicker than usual in order to cover up my bruises.

  “Hey, Rachel. Haven’t seen you in a while.” He takes a step back, opening the door farther. “Come on in, you two.”

  I see him all the time, but I never fail to get flustered around him. Today is no exception. “I can’t, Mr. Morelli. I don’t have time.”

  His grin widens. “Mr. Morelli is my dad’s name, Rachel. Seriously, call me Sean.” And he shifts his attention to Charlie. “Hey, Chuck.” He nods toward the foyer behind him. “Go ahead in. Sheba’s waiting for you.” Sheba is Mr. Morelli’s dog, a Labrador. Charlie adores her. He loves all animals.

  Charlie hurries inside, barely bothering to nod good-bye in my direction. Mr. Morelli remains in the doorway, looking at me.

  “So … how are you … Sean?”

  “I’m well, Racquel.” He pronounces the rhyme in a singsong tone, still grinning ear to ear. He leans out the door and shades his eyes to gaze up at the clear sky, the sun already blazing. There isn’t a cloud in sight, cirrus or otherwise. Looking me in the eye again, he gives me a wink. “Never better, actually. And how are you?”

  I want to tell him the truth: I’m doing terribly. I should ask him if he’s seen my sister. People need to know that she’s missing, or they won’t understand they should be looking for her.

  Before I can respond, though, a maroon sedan comes around the corner and rolls to a slow stop in front of me. Kimber sits in the driver’s seat, smiling and waving.

  The idea that I’m supposed to go to school right now seems insane. I need to look for Rachel. I have no idea where to start, but there must be something I can do aside from sitting in classrooms all day, wasting time.

  “I have to go,” I tell Sean. “That’s my friend.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He waves at Kimber. She waves back.

  “Pretty girl,” Sean says.

  His comment strikes me as odd. I’m not sure what he expects me to say. “Um … okay.”

  He gives me another killer smile, but his expression shifts when it’s obvious I’m uncomfortable. “Rachel, hey. Are you okay?” He glances behind him, I assume to make sure that Charlie is out of earshot. “Is anything the matter?”

  “No.” I shake my head. I force a smile. “I’m fine. I just have to get to school.”

  “Where’s Alice? Is she home sick today?”

  From the street, Kimber has rolled down the passenger window of her car. “Hey,” she calls. “Are you coming? We’ll be late.” She pauses. “Where’s your bookbag?”

  My bookbag. Or rather, Rachel’s bookbag. Shit. I can picture it on the floor of our bedroom.

  My vision tunnels. I need to get away, to go anywhere else but here. I feel like I’ll suffocate if I get into Kimber’s car.

  “Rachel. Are you okay? I asked you if Alice was sick today.” Sean studies me, concerned.

  “She isn’t sick,” I blurt. “She’s missing.”

  He pauses, mid-sip of his coffee. “What?”

  “We can’t find her.” Saying the words out loud brings a warm rush of relief to my body. “Mr. Morelli—I mean, Sean—Alice disappeared on Saturday night. While we were at the carnival. We don’t know where she is.”

  “Okay.” He nods. “Calm down, Rachel. I’m sure Alice is fine.” He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he says, smiling. As quickly as it surfaced, his concern seems to vanish. “This is what Alice does, isn’t it? She gets herself into trouble. She probably ran off with her boyfriend again.”

  “No.” I shake my head. “No, it’s different this time.”

  “Did your aunt and uncle call the police?”

  “Yes.” I nod.

  “Rach!” I turn my head to see Kimber holding up her hands in an expectant shrug. “Come on!”

  “And what did the police say? Are they looking for her?”

  I don’t have time for this. Even though it’s chilly, the wind strong enough that it blows my hair across my face, I feel hot and clammy all over. “I think so. Listen, I have to go now. Just … will you keep an eye out for her? Please?”

  “Of course I will. Sure.” He pauses. “Don’t worry, Rachel. They’ll find her. They always do.”

  I don’t say anything else. I turn away, toward the street. I need air, space, to get away.

  Kimber stares at me as I approach her. “You look horrible.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean it, Rachel. You don’t look like yourself at all.”

  I almost laugh out loud. Instead, I look right into her eyes. A small part of me hopes she’ll realize who I am.

  But it doesn’t happen. “Meet me in front of my house, okay?” I tell her. “I need to run in and get my bookbag.”

  My aunt’s car is still parked on our street. She’s probably getting ready for her meeting. Maybe she’s in the shower or blow-drying her hair. It doesn’t really matter. I have an idea.

  As Kimber’s sedan idles in the street, I take a few steps closer to it. “You know what?” I say. “You can go ahead without me. My aunt will give me a ride.”

  She frowns. “You don’t need to do that. I’ll wait.”

  “No.” I give her a pleading look. “You’re my friend. Right?”

  She’s confused. “Sure. Of course I am.”

  “Do something for me then. Go.”

  “Rachel …” She shakes her head. “You’re being really weird.”

  “If you’re really my friend, you’ll do this for me. It’s important.”

  She stares at me, then sighs. Finally, she shrugs. “All right. Whatever.”

  She pulls away as I walk toward my house, and I watch as her car disappears around the corner. I take a quick look up and down the street, checking to make sure none of my neighbors are outside. I don’t see anyone. Then, slowly and as quietly as possible, I open the front door a few inches to peer inside.

  I don’t see my aunt anywhere downstairs. I slip into the house without making much sound, and I take off my shoes. Holding them in my hand, I hurry on tiptoe in my socks down the hallway, toward the kitchen.

  In a single, practiced motion, I press on the edge of the hidden door. It springs open without so much as a creak. The stairway within is completely dark. Once I shut the door behind me, I might as well have my eyes closed for all I can see.

  My plan, for the moment, involves waiting here until my aunt leaves the house, so I’ll have a chance to collect a few things after she’s gone. I count the steps in my mind as I go up: one, two, three, four, five, six, then there’s a small landing as the stairway curves toward the front of the house. I can hear water running upstairs. My aunt is in the shower.

  In the darkness, I sit down on the landing and pull my knees against my chest. The air is cool and stale. I take deep, calm breaths. I cannot see a thing, not even my hand in front of my face. When I was younger, I used to love being all alone in the darkness. Somehow, it seemed full of possibilities.

  Today, though, I feel afraid. For my sister, wherever she is. For myself. For my family. For everything. I feel more helpless and alone than I have in years.

  Chapter Ten

  It was Rachel’s idea to switch places the first time, when we were in the ninth grade. Even though we were in the same year at school, my sister was on an accelerated schedule by then. Always the smarter of the two of us, she’d been advanced enough the previous year to take biology, while I struggled my way through earth science with the rest of the mediocre minds in our class. So when we got to ninth grade, Rachel went on to chem, while I finally had a crack at bio.

  For most
of the year, things went pretty much the way I expected. I did as little work as possible for the class and managed to scrape by at the bottom of the curve with a C minus, which was fine by me, while Rachel brought home straight As and seemed to genuinely enjoy studying.

  In early spring, we started a unit on dissection. Our first project was an earthworm. I sat at my desk, ready to get started, with a piece of cardboard, a small kit that included a probe and scalpel, and two dozen pins. Mr. Slater was our teacher; he teaches every section of bio at our school and also a couple of chemistry classes. He put a detailed transparency on the projector, illustrating exactly what we were expected to do to our worms. He called them “specimens.”

  And there they were, in a clear glass jar of fluid on his desk: gray and dead, their outsides patterned with endless smooth ridges. They were only worms, and I’d never had a weak stomach. What was there to be afraid of?

  But as Mr. Slater made his way around the room doling out worms to my classmates, who were giddy with excitement to see the real-life insides of a once-living thing, I got a whiff from the stagnant jar in his hands. The smell was like watered-down alcohol. It was so different from the smell I’d always associated with earthworms until that day. After a hard rain in the warmer months, our street would often be littered with them. The odor of their flesh as they crawled along the sidewalk, fat and glistening, was definitely unpleasant, but it was also something else. To me it was lime green, almost pulsing. It was bright and busy, the smell of countless lives thrumming along just as they should be. Everything around us is alive, from the sky to deep inside the ground. The earthworms on the concrete outside my house, and the smell of their bodies as they wriggled along under the sun, was a reminder of that. But now here they were in biology class: gray and colorless, almost odorless except for the dull smell of preservative.

  For the remaining forty minutes of class, I sat at my desk, staring at my worm on its piece of cardboard. I couldn’t even bring myself to pin it down, much less make the first cut.

  Holly Willis and Nicholas Hahn were both in class with me. Holly sat directly to my right, and Nicholas was on her other side. They were already a couple by then, both of them intermittently giggling and groaning as they probed the insides of their worms. Our instructions had been to make a single cut down the center of their bodies. Then we were supposed to flay them, pulling back the skin on either side and pinning it to the cardboard in order to get a perfect view of their internal workings.

  For the first time since we’d been given our specimens, Holly glanced in my direction and noticed that I hadn’t touched my worm. She and I were still pretty good friends back then.

  “What’s the matter, Alice?” She seemed genuinely concerned. “Are you grossed out?” She’d wrinkled her nose and nudged her desk a few inches away from mine. Frowning, she said, “Whatever you do, don’t puke on me.”

  I forced a smile. “I won’t puke on you.”

  Nicholas leaned across his desk and said, “If you’re not grossed out, then what’s the matter? It’s just a worm.”

  “You three.” Mr. Slater clapped his hands at the front of the room. “Is there a problem?”

  “Alice doesn’t like her worm,” Holly explained. To me, she said, “It’s not bad. They’re just, you know, guts. And you only have to make one cut.”

  By then Mr. Slater was at my side. He seemed weary and frustrated, as usual, like he’d rather be anywhere but in a classroom full of teenagers. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him that day; I was so embarrassed by my odd behavior, so frustrated that I couldn’t force myself to make a single incision in a dead thing.

  In a rare moment of kindness, he knelt beside my desk and put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay? Do you feel nauseated?”

  I shook my head, staring past my desk at a scuff mark on the white linoleum floor.

  “All right. I’ll help you then. Here.” He placed his hand over mine and began to guide me. Together, we pinned the worm to the cardboard. It wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. Then he helped me pick up the scalpel. He pressed it against the dull, tough flesh of the worm until it broke, and a bubble of clear fluid burst from the incision.

  I jerked away so quickly that the scalpel in my hand went flying. It landed on the floor a few feet away from my desk, only an inch or so from Nicholas’s bare toes, which were poking out from his sandals.

  By then we had the whole class’s attention. Even as I covered my face with my hands, I could feel them staring at me.

  “Okay. Everyone calm down.” Mr. Slater reeked of cigarettes, as usual, as he knelt by my side; I tried to concentrate on his smell, desperate for some relief from the stink of formaldehyde and dead worms. “Stand up,” he whispered. “Go get a drink of water. Calm yourself down.”

  I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I slammed the door shut behind me, leaving my things behind. I ran down the empty hallway to the girls’ bathroom and locked myself into a stall, sitting on a closed toilet lid with my knees pulled against my chest. The smell from the classroom lingered all over me: it was on my clothes, in my hair, like an invisible layer of sludge. I stayed in the bathroom until the end of the period, and I didn’t go back to the room for my things until the end of the day.

  That night in our bedroom, my sister and I sat quietly at our desks. We were supposed to be doing our homework. Rachel chewed absently at a string of black licorice as she worked on a sheet of algebra equations. My bookbag was on the floor across the room, untouched since I’d come home that afternoon. I had no plans to do any actual schoolwork. Instead, I concentrated on a sketch. It was a pencil drawing, the same one I’d been doing over and over again for months by then. My hand gripped my pencil as I drew the features of a young girl’s face. She was pretty, probably in her late teens. She had long, straight hair, wide-set eyes, and a smile—like she was sharing a secret. Her appearance was marked by a gap between her two front teeth; that, and the fact that she wore earrings made from tiny blue feathers, like something you’d find in a Native American store.

  I had no recollection of ever meeting the girl in my sketch. I didn’t even know if she was real. But she was in my head almost every day, her image so clear that she might as well have been standing right in front of me, begging to be drawn over and over again.

  “I heard what happened in bio class today,” Rachel said, still doing her homework.

  I felt a flutter of embarrassment at her words. “You did? How?”

  “Holly told me.” My sister put down her pencil, pushed away from her desk, and pulled her legs against her chest. “Why were you so upset? Was it because of the worms? They’re already dead. They don’t feel anything.”

  “I know that. I know.” I shook my head, frustrated. “I’m not sure what happened. I just couldn’t do it. I felt awful. It was like … like a violation. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  She squinted at me. “Like a violation,” she echoed. “A violation of what, exactly?”

  I stared at the hardwood floor of our bedroom. It was dark and shiny with lacquer-filled grooves in the thick planks of wood. More than a hundred years ago, when the house was new, the third floor used to be the servants’ quarters. That fact never bothered Rachel or me in the least; we knew we had the best spot in the house. Servants should be so lucky. We’d been begging to move up here since we were ten years old, once we’d grown comfortable enough around our aunt and uncle to start asking for the things we wanted.

  “I’m not sure,” I told her. “Life? Their dead bodies? Cutting them open seemed … oh God, I don’t know. It felt wrong, okay?”

  Absently, she reached into her open mouth with an index finger to probe a piece of licorice stuck in her back teeth. Then she nibbled at the end of the same finger. She knew how much I hated black licorice—she thought it was funny. “It’s because you’re so sensitive,” she said, wiping her hand on the back of her jeans. “Isn’t it?”

  I shrugged, pretending to brush away the lab
el with indifference, but Rachel and I both knew better; by then we had plenty of evidence that I was most definitely sensitive, at the very least.

  “You’re like Mom,” she continued. “You’re like Grandma too. It runs in the family, but not with me.”

  I shook my head. “Aunt Sharon doesn’t think so. She thinks Grandma’s just crazy.”

  Rachel gave a dismissive wave. “Maybe she is. So what? That doesn’t mean she can’t be special too.”

  I couldn’t help but feel a little bit proud. I loved knowing that I was similar to our mom and grandma. It made me feel like I belonged somewhere, like I was a part of something bigger than myself. Our gift was something that couldn’t be explained, but it was real, and it bound us together permanently—nothing could take it away. Even then, I felt an urgency to hold it close, to nurture it as much as I could. I felt like I’d been entrusted with our family’s legacy, and it was my responsibility to preserve it.

  Rachel’s gaze drifted to the sketch on my desk. I knew she’d noticed that I’d been drawing the same girl over and over again for weeks, but she hadn’t mentioned it yet. She didn’t mention it now either. Instead, she said, “I have an idea. I can help you with bio class.”

  I could hear strains of the Jeopardy theme song playing from downstairs, the sound drifting through the kitchen and up the secret stairs. My uncle watched it every week-night. He was good at answering the questions—even better than most of the contestants. I imagined the three of them sitting together on the living-room sofa with all the lights dimmed, captivated. It was like that sometimes, no matter how much they tried to include us. The three of them were a family. My sister and I were mere interlopers.

  I shrugged at Rachel’s idea. “You don’t need to help me. I’ll probably still pass with a D.”

  “But you can do better.” She took another big bite from her licorice stick. I could smell her breath from a few feet away. “You could get a C. Maybe even a B.”

  “No, I couldn’t. I’m not smart like you.”

  “Stop it. Don’t say that.” She continued to chew. She was still squinting. Our room was only lit by a few floor lamps in the corners, a small light on each of our desks, and a night-light beneath the front windows. The night-light’s cover was a pink-and-gold butterfly, hand-painted onto a translucent ceramic cover by our mom. It had been in our bedroom ever since we were infants. “What if you let me help you?” she asked.