Tell Me No Lies Read online

  “You don’t have to make it sound so smart.” I looked down, skidded a finger along the hem of my uniform kilt. “Since I don’t think it is,” I mumbled to my lap.

  “Phil and I believe you’ll place out of the introductory art courses easy, and go right into advanced technique. Lizzy?” I looked up. Mrs. Custis-Brown was staring at me so intensely, her hands buckled tight over her knee. “I’ve only once, in all my twenty years of teaching at Argyll, given a student a ninety-six. And that was your grade last semester. I hoped it would be a signal to you.”

  “Oh.” It hadn’t been.

  “There’s no doubt that your concentration is exceptional,” Mr. Custis-Brown added. “It’s forceful and passionate and shows a seriousness of intent. We realize that you haven’t spoken much about studying art after Argyll.” He sat back in his chair. “Not with us anyway.”

  “Right.” There was nobody to roll my eyes at, or I would have. Art after Argyll?

  “We want to make sure that you have a full understanding of your potential, Lizzy. And how truly exciting this path might be for you,” said Mrs. Custis-Brown.

  “I appreciate that. I really like art class.” What ridiculous idea was this? As if I could just reverse course, forget my whole academic life of the past dozen years, and everything I’d worked for, to become—what? A studio art major? Insane. Pursuing art—that was what you did when you weren’t good at anything else.

  My knees were shaking, I capped them with my hands.

  “There are so many schools.” Mr. Custis-Brown began to list them on his fingers. “Rhode Island School of Design. Carnegie Mellon. Moore College. The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.”

  “Philadelphia College of Art,” added Mrs. Custis-Brown. “Bard. Hunter. Temple.”

  I was nodding into their enthusiasm, but I could hear my parents, a pair of cobras in the back of my brain, hissing their rejection of these schools. I stood up. “Thank you so much. I will totally think about it. Good to see you again, Mrs. Custis-Brown.”

  “We hope you’ll give this some deep consideration. We can write letters of recommendation, we’ll find out which schools have rolling admissions policies—we know lots of people who work in the arts community, and we’re here for you as a resource anytime.

  “And call me Jean.”

  Permission for me to call Mrs. Custis-Brown Jean, one tiny step away from Jeanie, felt like permission for me to look at her naked again, which I also didn’t want to do. But I tried to stay neutral as I nodded and made my getaway.

  I didn’t want to see anyone. Not Claire, who’d skipped AP Art anyway, not the Custis-Browns, and at the end of the day, I didn’t want to deal with Matt, either—which made the news that he was on campus all the more of a jolt.

  “Just saw your boyfriend,” sang one of the juniors as she passed me in the hall. “He’s in the lounge.”

  “Oh. Thanks.” I reversed direction.

  He was sitting on the couch, sipping a Coke, casually chatting with Maggie and Kreo, as if a million things weren’t between us now. But my heart tugged a little, knowing how Matt must crave to be exactly the way he was presenting himself—as the perfect Lincoln ex-boyfriend, so unquestioned and accepted.

  “Hey, Matt.”

  “Hey. Thought I’d give you a ride to work.”

  “I don’t work Tuesdays.” But he knew that already.

  “So maybe we can grab a burger at Lonnie’s?”

  “I’m not hungry.” Kreo and Maggie were now pretending very hard to watch TV. I motioned for Matt to stand so we could leave the lounge, and then the school.

  “I wasn’t sure I was ready to see you, after everything,” I started as soon as we were outside. “But you don’t have to explain anything to me.”

  “What would I be explaining?” he asked.

  “Just about—you and Dave.”

  “Dave and I aren’t—we’re both dealing with—”

  “Right. That was a gay bar we were in, last month. And the only person who was surprised to be in it was me.” I hadn’t meant to sound so bitchy, hadn’t meant for my pain to come out like that.

  “Okay, okay,” Matt said quietly. He hated this, maybe even more than I did.

  He didn’t say anything until we were in the parking lot. I felt like he was giving my words even more time to sour. I wished I hadn’t said them.

  “I knew about your epilepsy,” he said as we turned into the lot. He reached into his blazer pocket for his car keys. “For years, I guess. I can’t remember who told me. Maybe some Argyll girl who’d seen it happen. The way I heard about it, they made you sound kind of like a freak. That was also why I didn’t call you, freshman year. Too risky. When I was younger, I was obsessed with what other kids thought of me. I’m still scared of what I am. I hate admitting any of that. But it made me feel good to know this thing about you that scared you, too. I even read up on epilepsy. I know a lot about it.”

  I stopped walking. “You do?”

  “In case you ever had a seizure.” Matt stopped, too. His eyes on me. “I wanted to be prepared, but I was fine if you never wanted to talk about it. I was okay either way.”

  I hadn’t expected such sweetness. My face burned with shame and maybe gratitude.

  “You never let on.”

  “An epileptic didn’t seem like a thing you wanted to be.”

  “I am, though.”

  “Yep.”

  And then he stepped forward, cupped his hands around my face, leaned over, and kissed me. A real kiss, from his heart. Slow, soft, perfect as a shooting star.

  As we broke apart, a few girls, heading over to the fields for lacrosse practice, hooted at us and made stupid kissy faces.

  “It’s so easy to pretend that we’re this normal couple,” I said as we watched the girls dip across the fields. “But it must have always felt like a lie to you.”

  “My whole life feels like lies,” said Matt. “All these decisions my parents make for me—where I go to school, what I wear, what sports I should play, my haircut, my future. But you never felt like a lie, Lizzy. I really chose you.”

  “You just liked that your mom would never pick me for her empty wedding frame.”

  He laughed. “Well, yeah. There’s that.”

  “What is your deal with Dave anyway?”

  “He’s just a friend who knows me. Knows me for real.” Matt shrugged. “When I met him, he was pretty up front about who he was. I wasn’t ready to be like that, but he made me see myself. Face myself.”

  “The first time I hung out with Claire,” I said, “she did my eyeliner. Then she turned me to the mirror and told me to face the strange. I knew what she meant, that I needed to look at the real me. I never even thought of myself like that. After that, I couldn’t see myself any other way.”

  “You were lucky to meet her.”

  “I was lucky to meet you, too,” I said.

  Matt nodded. “Back atcha.”

  “Let’s be something better than we were,” I said. “Remember when you asked for that? I didn’t understand why you wanted that. Now I think I might.”

  When Matt looked at me, my heart hurt for all of it—for everything Matt was trying to be, for all that prevented us from being together, and for how ridiculously important he was to me anyway.

  “I’m in,” he told me. “For whatever we are, Lizzy, I’m in.”

  forty-eight

  “Eighty-eight? Congratulations. Especially considering it was the creepiest assembly of the year.” I flipped the index card onto the dashboard of the Beetle as we pulled out of the school parking lot.

  Icy, sleeting rain was falling slantwise. Claire’s windshield wipers squeaked back and forth in effort.

  “My best grade all semester,” said Claire. “So don’t knock it.”

  “I’ll give you big points for hol
ding the audience’s interest—but your topic?” I shivered. “The Mütter Museum is the worst. Pictures of brains and tumors in jars.”

  “I could have done my second choice, Ted Bundy.”

  “Ted Bundy, the serial killer? Ugh.”

  “My shrink agreed. Too intense.”

  “A few years ago, Dr. Neumann said I should do my assembly on living with epilepsy. When I realized she wasn’t kidding, I almost passed out in her office.” I laughed uncomfortably past the dryness in my throat. My first try with Claire on that word. “Can you imagine?”

  “As far as advice goes, it’s not totally shitty.” Claire gave me a sidelong look. “I bet people would have been pretty interested. Me, for example. I don’t know anybody else with epilepsy.”

  “I’ll tell you about it one day maybe.”

  “Deal.”

  We pulled into the Acme and dashed inside. My idea, Claire’s credit card. We filled the shopping cart with bananas and apples, bagels, instant soups, granola bars, price-slashed Valentine’s cookies, and sodas.

  Down from the paper goods section, I spied a bottom-shelf toaster oven. “Check this out. No box, on sale, half off. Probably because it’s dinged on this side.” I hauled it up and then, because she wasn’t disagreeing with me, I lowered the toaster carefully, like it was a sleeping dog, into the cart.

  “It’s still a lot of money.” Claire looked hesitant.

  “Your aunt’s kitchen wouldn’t pass one single health inspector’s code. The way I see it, she owes you this toaster oven. It’s your health at stake. Seriously, think of all the things you can do, Claire—heat soup, roast a potato—”

  “Toast cat tails.” She wasn’t making a move to put back the toaster oven. “Aunt Jane never comments on the grocery bills if I come back with all the things she needs: tissue boxes, soda pop, cat food . . .” One corner of the cart was piled high with Kleenex boxes, Fancy Feast tins, and Dr Peppers.

  “You’re doing her a favor, always shopping for her. She can do you a favor.”

  “Okay.” She blew out her lips. “Let’s get it.”

  At the house, we stopped in the kitchen to unload Aunt Jane’s items, then we kicked mewling cats out of our path on the way to Claire’s bedroom. I cleared out the bookcase, restocking a whole shelf with grocery items. Claire made space for the toaster oven.

  “I’m way more excited about this than I thought I’d be.”

  “It looks cute. And these groceries should keep you till March.” I brushed off my hands and stepped back to survey it all. “If you made this corner of the room into a tiny kitchen, you could fit a microwave right there.”

  “Or a mini fridge.” There was a shine in Claire’s eyes. “The less time for me in Aunt Jane’s kitchen, the better. This will help me stomach Lilac House—literally—till summer, when I head out to California.”

  “Have you thought about where in California?”

  “Nope. That’s what I like about it. A new start, maybe with an ocean breeze.”

  When Claire talked like that, I didn’t feel as crazy about the thoughts chasing around in my own head. School for art. Art for school. A new plan had been hatching in my brain: I could stay home, save money for a few months, and then enroll in RISD for January. As cool as this plan seemed one moment, in the next breath RISD seemed like somebody else’s lunatic dream. But I’d never reflected on whether I should lift art above my real, practical ambitions. I got good grades in art because I got good grades in everything. And that didn’t mean anything.

  Except that possibly it did?

  “Want to see a secret room?” Claire wriggled her eyebrows. “It’s upstairs.”

  “Show me.”

  We left the library for the hall. Claire stopped in front of a narrow closet and hauled out a sleeping bag and a couple of thick plaid-backed field blankets, then began climbing the stairs to the second floor.

  She pointed out Aunt Jane’s closed bedroom door as we hurried past.

  Another flight of stairs, and at this landing Claire opened a paneled door, revealing a staircase that led to an empty dome-shaped room, its ceiling crossed with open beams and rafters. On the floor was a double-armed candlestick and Bic lighter.

  “I know where we are. Your gargoyles are right outside this tower.”

  Claire nodded. “But no bats in the rafters, luckily.” With a snap, she unrolled and then unzipped the sleeping bag. “Although I’m sure if we had bats, Aunt Jane would name them and dress them in doll clothes and feed them milk from a bottle.” She sat, her legs crisscrossed on a blanket. “The silence is nice here, right? I’m always searching for the most beautiful kinds of silence.”

  I dropped down next to her, pulling my own blanket over my shoulders to insulate me from the wall. Leaning back, finding support for my head. My meds could make me feel sleepy. But it also felt so, so good to be friends with Claire again, in this secret room with the ancient sound of pattering rain all around us.

  She lit the two candles, and we watched their flames jerk and cast shadows. She pulled her blanket over her lap.

  For a while, we were quiet, listening to the rain and the peace, until in a soft voice, Claire spoke. “It started at the beginning of last fall. All the girls loved Jay. He was so good-looking, with that crooked smile and green eyes, his cute laugh you could hear all the way down the hall. He drove a vintage Alfa Romeo Spider and he’d park it right on the field during games—just a little bit of a bad boy thing. But it wasn’t until last year that I got him for a class, French Lit. That’s when he began paying extra attention to me. That’s when I really got to know him.

  “Of course I was flattered he’d picked me out. I signed up for his office hours, and he started to bring me morning coffees in to-go paper cups—no big deal. And then at some point we started passing notes, making plans. Tiny little spillover plans, like once we shared a Sunday-afternoon picnic to read a book by Victor Hugo that he’d left off the syllabus. Or a few times we met up on a garden bench in the local cemetery to continue an office-hours chat. Another time we went to see a matinee in the town just one over from Strickland.”

  “Did it always feel like a secret between you two? A bad secret, I mean?”

  “Jay never acted guilty. Maybe that helped fool me? His only rule was ‘No joiners,’” Claire said. “At first I thought he meant no other kids—as in tagalongs. But I guess what he was really always on the lookout for were the other Strickland teachers. The other adults.”

  She told me about their road trips, including the one to Philadelphia when she lost her virginity and got her tarot tattoo—at the last minute, Jay decided not to get a matching one. She told me about their endless searching for “privacy,” and their wishful conversations about their being “really together” once she graduated from Strickland.

  “I thought it was real. I trusted him. I had no idea what forever meant. I mean, not that I understand it much better now. But I had even less idea then.”

  “He was married, Claire. Didn’t that feel like an obstacle?”

  “I don’t know. He gave me Steph’s expired driver’s license so we could get into bars, which seems kind of psycho. But at the time I was just, like, cool. I didn’t want to think about Steph, so I didn’t. And believe me, Jay made it pretty easy to forget about that little thing about him being married.”

  “Weren’t you scared of her?” I asked. “You could have been caught anytime.”

  “I should have been more scared of all of it,” Claire agreed. “But in the end, see, we weren’t caught. Jay just . . . ended it. In the beginning, he chased me down so hard, and then a couple of months later, when it all bored him or got too complicated with my feelings, he told me I was clingy. He told me Steph had become suspicious, and that he needed space. It’s probably the textbook behavior for this situation, except who owns that textbook? Not me.” Claire’s grip around her
calves had tightened and her chin dropped to rest on her knees. “One afternoon, he told me Steph had found the Rati amulet I’d given him. It was a private gift—Rati is a Hindu goddess, and it was a name Jay had for me. Probably it was his pet name for her, too. I don’t know.

  “Anyway, when Jay confessed it to Steph, I’m sure he made it sound like I had a schoolgirl crush that he’d let go too far. They both went arm in arm to Strickland Human Resources, like they were this worried couple complaining about me, basically. Painting me as this unstable kid, and if Jay maybe had taken some advantage, the real problem was how messed up I was. By the time any of this had got back to me, Strickland had called my parents, and all the supposed adults had worked out a decision: Jay’d go to counseling and he’d keep his job, minus teaching French Lit, so that he wouldn’t be tempted by female students. But as for me, I’d have to leave the school I loved, the school I’d been going to since seventh grade.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” And then, after a pause, I made myself ask it. “At the time, did you think maybe you were a little bit unstable?”

  Claire seemed to sink into herself, wrapping up in the blanket like it was armor. “I don’t know. I thought I was doing fine before Jay, but I was probably lonelier than I knew. After he dropped me, I wasn’t sleeping or eating much, my grades were tanking, I was cutting classes and sports. So, sure. Call me unstable.” She closed her eyes. “Mostly I couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened to me.”

  “After he confessed it to the school, were you two in touch at all?”

  “I phoned him a couple of times at home, right after it all went down. I was in shock. I just wanted Jay to understand how much I needed to stay at Strickland. But that’s when he cut me off completely. He reported me, twisting it up so that it looked like my calls to his home proved his point, that I was overly emotional and needed to go.”

  “What about his letters? Those are pretty incriminating.”