Beautiful Lies

by Jessica Warman

  I was drawn to her back then because she was damaged by what her father had done, sort of like Rachel and I were damaged by our parents’ deaths. The three of us never talked about it at all, but there was always a sense of defiance to our fun, our laughter loud and alive, proof that we still existed, and that we mattered to one another.

  I can’t leave her alone in here to cry. I lean against the door and tap gently on it with my fingertips. “Kimber? Hey, it’s me. It’s Rachel.”

  Her crying stops abruptly. “Shit,” she murmurs. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her swear before. Her voice is so smooth and lilting that the word actually sounds pretty coming from her. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” There’s a rustling sound as she gets to her feet and opens the door to stare at me.

  “What do you want?” she asks flatly. Her face is streaky with makeup. Her lips are chapped beneath a layer of gloss. She looks so different from her usual, chipper self. She seemed fine this morning—better than fine. So what happened between now and then to make her go to pieces?

  I’m not sure why I think of the little carved monkey at this moment, but all of a sudden it springs to my mind. I put it in the front pocket of my sister’s bookbag this morning; for some reason, I wanted to keep it close to me throughout the day. Silly. I have the strongest urge to feel it in the palm of my hand right now, to hold it in my closed fist. But I don’t reach for the bookbag slung over my shoulder; instead I step closer to Kimber and place my hands on her arm. Her skin feels hot, like she has a fever.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “You can talk to me. We can lock the door and stay in here if you want. Or we could go to the library.” The librarian, Mrs. Dodd, is about a hundred years old and pays absolutely no attention to the comings and goings of students throughout the day. She’ll never notice us if we stay in the back of the room and keep our voices down.

  Kimber shakes her head, blond hair whipping against her face. “No. I should go back to class. We both should. We’ll get in trouble if we skip.” She narrows her eyes at me, a twinge of resentment in her expression. “I mean, if we skip again.”

  “Forget about class. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Maybe not to you.” She tries to push past me, toward the door, but I stop her. I put my arms around her torso and feel the scars in her back, deep and warm and grotesque, even as I’m struggling not to think of the wounds as gross in any way. But they are, no matter how I try to pretend otherwise. They’re horrifying. And Kimber has to live with them for the rest of her life.

  I want to help her right now. She thinks I’m one of her best friends. I know I shouldn’t be deceiving her, but I don’t have much of a choice.

  She breaks away from me, but she doesn’t move closer to the bathroom door. She leans against the shiny pink wall and presses her hands to her face, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms, smudging her mascara all over the place. As her arms fall limp at her sides, she lowers herself toward the floor again. She sits cross-legged, staring at the dirty beige octagonal tile.

  “Do you know what it feels like to hate somebody?” she asks. She is suddenly calm, but as her words move into the space between us, I feel like all the air has been sucked from the room. I close my eyes; in my mind I see the wreckage of the green pickup truck in the ravine, still bodies floating in filthy water, the heartbroken plea scrawled in spray paint on the side of the boulder: I loved you more. The same thing Robin said to me last night.

  “Yes,” I tell her. “I know what that feels like.”

  She looks up at me. “Who is it? Who do you hate?”

  Saying the words out loud makes me feel like something raw inside me is cracking open, seeping everywhere, suffocating me from within. “I hate the man who was driving the truck that killed my parents.”

  She’s quiet. Her breathing is even and slow. “Of course you do.”

  “My aunt and uncle are Christians,” I tell her. “They believe in forgiveness. They used to try to bring it up sometimes, a few years ago. They’d take me to church with them on Sundays. They must have told their pastor the whole story about what happened, because he used to look at me sometimes like …” I stop. I’m sweating, thirsty, suddenly drained.

  “Like what?” Kimber prompts, tilting her head. I can see her scars climbing up the left side of her neck, near her spine. With her right index finger, she draws a slow figure eight around two of the tiles in the floor.

  “Like I was hopeless,” I finish. “And he was right. I never wanted to forgive that man. I never even considered it, not really. I just … it’s a part of me now, the way I hate him. It’s like something inside me that I keep feeding, every time I remember my mom and dad.” I swallow. My heart goes thumpety-thump in my chest, which feels hollow. “Sometimes I wish he hadn’t died in the wreck, just so he would have spent the rest of his life living with what he took from us.”

  Kimber nods. I know she understands. She probably always has.

  “What was his name?” she asks.

  The question surprises me. Nobody has ever asked me before. And the truth is that I don’t know the driver’s name; I don’t know the names of any of the other passengers in the truck either. I’m sure my aunt and uncle do, but they’ve never told me, and I’ve never asked. I could go online and find the newspaper archives from the accident, but I’ve never felt any desire to do so. I never felt the need to know what other people called the man behind the wheel, or his friends; to me, he’ll always be the man who killed my parents, his friends the ones who helped it to happen. It’s the only information about any of them that I need.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I don’t want to know.”

  Kimber is quiet. She pulls her knees against her chest and hugs her legs.

  I let Rachel’s bookbag slide to the floor, and then I sit down beside Kimber. I unzip the bookbag’s front pocket and reach inside. My hand closes around the monkey.

  “Raymond Shields,” she says. “That’s who I hate.” She sits up a little straighter and gazes at the opposite wall, where one of the sinks is dripping without making any sound.

  “He’s my father,” she continues, “and I hate him.” Her expression remains calm but steady as she looks straight ahead. “He used to play the guitar for me before I went to sleep at night. I was born in April. You know that song by Simon and Garfunkel? ‘April, Come She Will’? He used to sing it to me. He was good on the guitar too. His fingertips were callused from practicing all the time. He called me Kimmy. I loved him so much.”

  I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “Kimber,” I say, “I’m sorry.” I roll the monkey in my hand, feeling the grooves in the pit against my fingers. They feel like the scars on her back.

  “Don’t be,” she says. “It’s not your fault. My parents used to fight all the time. Then, when I was six years old, my mom kicked my dad out.” She pauses. “He was gone for a while, and my mom seemed happy about it. But he came back a few months later, on the Fourth of July. Mom had taken me to see the fireworks in Hollick Park that night. We came home and went straight to bed. And while she and I were sleeping, my father came inside our house and poured gasoline all over the downstairs. Then he went outside, into the front yard, and he lit a sparkler. My neighbors were watching him. They thought he was drunk. They didn’t know what he’d done already.” She closes her eyes. “He stood in the grass and spun around, watching the sparkler burn down. When it was almost out, he threw it inside our front door.”

  “Have you seen him?” I ask. “I mean, since he got arrested?”

  “No. But he writes me letters sometimes. He says he’s sorry, and that it doesn’t matter where he is—whether he’s in prison or not—because he’ll regret what he did for the rest of his life. He wants me to forgive him.” She laughs. “To forgive him,” she repeats. “He’s my father. My father tried to kill me. I’ll probably never get married, Rachel. I’ll never wear a strapless dress or go to the beach in a bikini.”

  “You could get marr
ied,” I tell her. “They’re only scars. If someone loves you, he won’t care.”

  She doesn’t respond to the comment, like the possibility that someone could look beyond her flesh is unimaginable. “My mom says she forgives him,” Kimber continues. “It makes me so angry every time she brings it up. But my mom says that you can’t hold on to your hate forever. She says that hating my father won’t change anything that happened; all it will do is eat me from the inside out, like cancer. She says that if I forgive him, I’ll be free. I’ll be able to get on with my life, instead of wasting my energy on things that can’t be changed. What do you think, Rachel? Do you think she’s right?”

  “Maybe,” I say. “I never really thought of it that way.”

  “Well, I think she’s right,” Kimber says.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. I know she’s right.” She pauses. “But sometimes I feel like I need to hate him. Like it’s become so much a part of who I am. If I let it go, then what do I have left?”

  “Jesus,” I say. “God. Kimber, you’ve never told me all that before.” I’ve heard the general story plenty of times, of course—people at school still talk about it—but we’ve never discussed it in as much detail as we are right now.

  Finally, she looks at me. She smiles. “I never told you,” she repeats.

  I nod. “Yes.”

  She laughs at me. She shakes her head. “You’re right. I never told you.”

  Her gaze locks onto mine. The room is so still.

  “But I told your sister all about it, a few weeks ago.”

  The room deflates. “You told my sister.”

  “Yes.” Her smile widens. “I told your sister. I told Rachel.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  As the weight of Kimber’s words sinks in, the room seems to shrink around us, leaving little space for me to breathe, let alone think. My first instinct is to lie to her, to deny everything and insist that I am Rachel. I only have to pretend for a few more days. Maybe it won’t even take that long. Maybe everything will work out, and Kimber will never have to know any different. I could pretend to be disoriented, like I’m getting a headache. I could claim to have forgotten what she told me about her father, and the night he started the fire that almost killed her.

  Except who could forget a story like that? As Kimber stares at me, waiting for a response to her accusation, I know that I can’t lie to her anymore. I don’t have the energy. And she deserves to hear the truth.

  My voice is suddenly hoarse, my throat dry. “When did you know?”

  She leans her head back and stares up at the ceiling. Just above us, there’s a circular brown stain on the paint. It’s probably from a water leak. The discolored area is puffy, its paint beginning to chip and peel away, the faintest layer of condensation glistening on the surface of the mark. I wonder how long the leak had been there, seeping through the plaster, before the ceiling showed any external signs of a problem.

  “I knew something was weird the night of the fair,” she begins. “When Rachel wandered off, I knew from the way you panicked that things weren’t right. If it were really Alice who’d snuck away, why would you be so worried? Alice runs away all the time, right?”

  I nod.

  “But this time was different,” Kimber continues. “You were so upset, like you knew it didn’t make any sense for her to disappear. But even when I first had the idea, I thought it was ridiculous. I mean, the two of you? Switching places? It’s crazy. Twins don’t actually do things like that, not in real life.” She pauses. “And then when you made me skip school, and we went to visit your grandma, it was all so … I don’t know, so surreal. It wasn’t the kind of thing Rachel would do. It didn’t make sense. So I paid closer attention. And you know the funniest thing? I almost believed that you were her, and that I was just imagining things. Because you’re so good at being her. I mean, Alice, you look exactly like her. The way you move, the way you talk, everything.”

  As she’s speaking, she gets up and crosses the room. She turns the lock on the door, and as it clicks into place I feel a sense of finality combined with the urge to tell her everything. Maybe she knows far more about Rachel’s life in the past few months than I do. Maybe she knows about TJ. The question is whether or not she’ll be willing to tell me anything. My best shot, I know, is to be honest and see where it gets me.

  She leans against the sink and crosses her arms, waiting for me to explain my side of things.

  Where am I supposed to begin? If I tell her the whole truth right away, she’ll only think I’m crazy, if she doesn’t already.

  I grip the monkey in my hand. I feel so alone, so completely out of control. It’s unlikely that she’ll believe what I’m about to tell her, but what do I have to lose?

  So I begin in what seems to me like as good a place as any. “You want to know how my grandma’s dog died?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “Not really. Aren’t you going to admit the truth? You’ve been lying to me for days.”

  “I know.” The space still feels impossibly small, like there’s not enough room to breathe. It’s like my tension is weaving a cocoon around my body, closing me off from the rest of the world.

  “Then tell me why,” she says. “Please.”

  “I will, Kimber. But first you need to understand how things are between me and Rachel. If I tell you what happened to the dog, it will make more sense.” I pause. “Will you listen? Please?”

  For a second I think she might refuse to hear me out. But she doesn’t protest; she just gives a reluctant nod and waits for me to keep talking. Apparently she isn’t concerned about being late for study hall anymore.

  “Our grandma owned the Captain ever since before Rachel and I were born. He was a really good dog. Every time we’d go to visit her, we’d spend most of our time playing with him in the yard. We both loved him, but Rachel was always a little more timid than I was. When we were younger, like five and six years old, he was so much bigger than we were. He was always gentle, never mean at all, but our parents still used to warn us to be careful around him.

  “Anyway, this one afternoon we went to visit my grandma. She’d been in the hospital for a while, and she’d just gotten home a few days earlier, so my parents brought over a cake and we had a picnic outside. Afterward, Rachel and I were running around the yard, playing with the Captain, trying to keep him from catching this tennis ball we had. We were throwing it back and forth between the two of us, over his head.”

  “How old were you?” Kimber asks.

  “We were about to turn seven.” I stop, shutting my eyes. It’s like I can see everything happening right in front of me, almost like I’m living it again: My parents are sitting at the picnic table behind my grandma’s house, deep in conversation, barely paying attention to me and Rachel. A nearly empty pitcher of sangria sits on the table, along with the half-eaten cake. My grandma looks like she’s lost a ton of weight in the last few weeks; she seems weak and frail and not like herself at all. That day was the first time I realized she’d been dyeing her hair for as long as I’d known her. It was naturally red once, but now her roots were coming in gray. She must not have had time to touch it up in between her return from the hospital and our visit, and it made her look so much older than usual.

  The Captain ran toward my sister. Just before he reached her, she threw the tennis ball high overhead, in my direction. Every other time we’d done this, the dog would quickly change direction to continue chasing after the ball. This time, though, he kept heading toward Rachel. When he reached her, he jumped onto his back legs and tackled her to the ground.

  “He bit her. She was wearing shorts, and he bit her on the calf. Our parents didn’t realize what had happened at first, but I did. I ran over to her and started screaming at the dog. His teeth were still in her leg. He started to drag her body downhill. I threw the tennis ball as hard as I could, and he let go and went running after it. The whole thing happened in less than ten seconds, and then it was over. By
the time our parents got to us, I had my arms around Rachel; she was screaming, and I was crying. She was bleeding all over the place. There were deep bite marks in her calf. My parents took her to the hospital right away. She needed sixteen stitches.”

  “Okay,” Kimber says, “so the dog bit your sister. What does that have to do with anything, Alice?”

  I’ve never told anyone this story before in my whole life. The only people who ever knew what happened were the ones who were there. What I’m about to tell Kimber is going to sound impossible, I know. She probably won’t believe me. But I have to try.

  “My parents left me at my grandma’s while they drove Rachel to the hospital,” I continue, “and my grandma took me inside and gave me some lemonade. She left the Captain outside, in her front yard.” As I’m speaking, I begin to roll up the left leg of my jeans to expose my bare calf. “I was sitting at her kitchen table and I felt something running down my leg. I thought it was sweat. I leaned over to wipe it away, and when I looked at my hand, there was blood all over it.” I extend my leg, showing Kimber. “Here. See it? I was sitting in her kitchen, and it just appeared. Bite marks identical to the ones in Rachel’s leg. You can still see the scars.”

  Kimber crosses her arms against her chest and kneels down to take a look. She stares hard at the scar, which is so faint that you wouldn’t even notice it unless you knew what to look for.

  She stands up. “I don’t know what you want me to say. It’s a scar.” Her voice wavers. “Everybody has them.”

  “Kimber,” I beg, “please believe me. Rachel and I aren’t ordinary twins. We’re different.” I take a deep breath, ready to spill more of the unbelievable truth. “I know things about her sometimes. Things I shouldn’t know, things she hasn’t told me yet. I can even sense things before they happen to her sometimes. I know it’s crazy, I know, but please listen. On Saturday night, I had this terrible feeling that something bad had happened to her. Then the feeling just vanished, and I was so afraid, and that’s why I made you skip school, so we could look for her. But then I saw her in the barn at my grandma’s house, except I couldn’t talk to her. I don’t know why. She wouldn’t tell me anything. I don’t know why she’s doing this. I don’t know what’s happening to me. And the more I try to figure it out, the more confused I get.” I pause. “Maybe she hates me. Maybe all she wants is to get away from me forever.”