Liar (11 page)

Doesn't matter that none of this stuff is true. The less we know, the more ferocious the talk gets.

All we have is a dead boy, a missing girl, and rumors.

How can they say those things about Sarah and Tayshawn? They're the most popular kids in school. Yet now, while they grieve, they have to deal with these stupid rumors?

The school is nastily off-kilter. Everyone's gone nuts.

Teachers stutter-step their way through their lesson plans. Students keep drifting back to talk of Zach, of Erin. (Of me. Of Tayshawn. Of Sarah. Of Brandon.) They try to talk about school, games, TV, their boyfriend/girlfriend, regular gossip. But they can't stay there. Zach. Erin. They have to talk about it, speculate, imagine, scare themselves so bad that no one's walking or riding the subway home alone anymore. Despite the crazy traffic some parents are sending their children to and from school in cars.

All of them worry about who'll be next. I'm hoping Brandon. But right now they can all go to hell as far as I'm concerned. Especially the ones calling me
Liar. Slut. Bitch
.
Killer
.

I can't imagine this ever ending.

I will always be at school. Skin tight, head high, acting like I don't care. Avoiding everyone. Avoiding everything. Only when I'm running in the park does my head stop throbbing.

It will be like this for the rest of the year. I bet they'll still be talking next year, too, when there'll be a new set of seniors and we'll all be off to wherever it is we go next.

I'm hoping hell for most of them.

I'm not sure where I'm going. I've filled out applications, sent them off, but I'm not optimistic. CUNY is my best chance. Though I'm not sure we can afford even that. Part of me would be happy to wind up somewhere no one's heard of Zach or what happened to him. Somewhere far from the city.

Wherever I go, I doubt I'll be with anyone from here. Sarah will be at some Ivy League school: Harvard or Yale or Princeton. Or at the very least, Vassar. Tayshawn will be at MIT. Brandon will be in jail. I'll never see any of them again.

I'm glad.

I think.

I don't want to talk about Zach. But how will it feel not to be able to?

I try to imagine myself at college. I fail. I want to keep studying biology but I'm not sure why. If all else fails then I guess I can work up on the farm.

A fine way to spend the rest of my life.

AFTER

At the second group counseling session Jill Wang asks us to tell her what we think about Zach.

“Are we going to talk about Erin, too?” Kayla asks.

Everyone starts talking at once. I close my eyes and wish I could shut my ears.

“Why would we talk about Erin?” Brandon shouts over the top of everyone else. “She's a freshman. Do you even know who she is?” I dislike agreeing with Brandon, but he's right. Looking around the room, I can see others agree.

“As a matter of fact, yes, I do,” Kayla yells back. “Her sister and me have been friends for years. I've known Erin since she was a baby.”

“Well, I haven't,” Brandon says.

“Just because you—”

“Erin's disappearance,” Jill Wang interrupts, raising her voice, letting us know that she's the boss, “is disturbing. We most definitely can talk about it—”

“Yeah, like, who's next?”

“You really think that?” Tayshawn says. “She could have run away. I heard she was fighting with her mom and dad a lot. Maybe it's got nothing to do with Zach.”

“Erin's a good girl,” Kayla says.

“Sure,” Tayshawn says. “I'm just saying it doesn't seem like the two things are connected. He's Hispanic, she's white. He's a senior, she's a freshman. He was on a scholarship, she's from money. They don't even live in the same part of the city.” Tayshawn talks as if he didn't know Zach, as if they weren't best friends.

“He
was
Hispanic,” Brandon says. “He
was
a senior.”

“We know he's dead,” Sarah says. “You don't have to go on about it.”

“Isn't that what we're here for?” Brandon asks, sneering. “To go on about it?”

Jill Wang holds her hands up, palms out, reassuring us, but all I can see are the calluses where her fingers join her palm. I wonder how she got them. “We are here,” she says loudly and clearly, “to try to cope with what happened. A senior, Zachary Rubin, who you all knew and many of you cared about, is dead. We all have a lot to say and a lot we don't know how to say. That's why I'd like us to do this exercise. What did you think of Zach? What did he mean to you? Sarah?” she asks, lowering her voice. “Do you want to go first?”

“No,” Sarah says. “Yes.” She pauses to look anywhere but at our faces. “He was gentle,” she says, and Brandon snickers so loud it ricochets around the room.

“That's enough, Brandon,” Jill Wang says. She's giving Brandon her evil eye.

“I meant,” Sarah says, “that he's—he was—a gentle person. Kind. He never said anything mean about anyone.”

That's true, too. He was both kinds of gentle.

“Thank you, Sarah. Brandon, since you're so eager to speak, what did you think of Zachary Rubin?”

Brandon shrugged. “He was alright. I didn't have nothing against him.”

“
Anything
against him,” she corrects. I don't think counselors are supposed to do that. Her dislike of Brandon is leaking out. Happens to all of us.

“Not that neither,” he says, grinning at his own wit.

“Do we have to say different things?” Lucy asks. “Because I was going to say he was kind but Sarah already said that.”

“You can say whatever you want.”

I want to say that this is bullshit and everyone should shut the fuck up, but I suspect that's not what the counselor had in mind.

“He was kind, then,” Lucy says. “And funny. He made me laugh. I liked him.”

He wasn't kind. Gentle, but not kind. They are confusing his easiness with kindness. A kind person goes out of their way to do right by people. Zach wasn't like that. He wanted smoothness. A life without agitation.

“All the girls
liked
him,” Brandon says, then he lowers his voice to a whisper. “But you were no chance, Luce. He liked dark girls.
Really
dark girls.” He smirks at Sarah. “Micah was barely dark enough.”

“It's no longer your turn, Brandon,” Jill Wang says.

I wonder if she heard all that he said. Sarah did. She's glaring at Brandon like she wants to smack him. I'd like to kill him.

I'm next. The counselor looks at me and nods.

“I don't know,” I say. “I pass.”

“You can't think of anything you'd like to say?” Jill asks. “Even something small? The exercise works much better if we all contribute.”

I can think of many things I want to say: the taste of his mouth. The smell of him after he ran. How it felt to run my fingers along his flank. Sarah is staring at me.

“Micah?” Jill Wang prompts.

“Like Lucy said. He was funny.”

“Andrew?”

He shrugs. “I didn't know the guy. I don't even know why I have to come here.”

“You were all in the same year as Zachary. Such a violent, unexpected death is shocking whether you knew him well or not.”

“I guess,” Andrew says, sounding bored, not shocked. “I try not to think about it, you know? Zach was okay, I guess.”

“I can tell you one thing,” Alejandro says. “No one but teachers called him Zachary. To everyone else he was Zach or the Z-Man.”

“Z-Man?” Brandon laughs. “How lame is that? Who called him that?”

“Me,” Tayshawn says. “The other guys on the team. It was respect. You wouldn't understand.”

“I thought he was cute,” Chantal says, smiling at Sarah. “I was kind of jealous of Sarah. You know, 'cause she was dating the cutest guy in school. Sorry, Sarah.”

Sarah gives a tight smile in return. Everyone else is looking at me.

Lucy nods. “Lots of us thought he was cute. We're all sorry.”

Sorry about what? That Zach's dead or that they didn't get to date him before he died? I never heard Lucy say anything about Zach before he died. She'd always been pining after Tayshawn. Did being dead make Zach cuter?

They continue to go around the circle. Each person says something meaningless. By the end of the session none of us knows a single thing about Zach that we didn't already know.

He's still dead, and we don't know how, or who made him that way.

FAMILY HISTORY

One time, I almost killed Jordan. I can't remember what he'd done. It could have been the time he told about my sneaking out at night down the fire escape. Or the time he drew all over my favorite running shoes. Telling, stealing, destroying—that's Jordan's standard m.o.

But one day the heinous thing he'd done pushed me over the edge. I stood looking at the broken fragments, or the ashes, or whatever it was, and glowered over him, clenching my fists, ready to throw him against the wall, smash his skull in. Have the shards of it pierce his brain. Watch the blood sprout from his nose. His eyes flutter, all whites, jaw loose, tongue lolls. Him falling, shuddering, stilling.

I could see from his eyes that he knew I was ready to do it. He was frozen and trembling. He didn't scream or cry. Or he knew it wouldn't make any difference. Even if Mom and Dad were home, which they weren't, they wouldn't get to us in time. They wouldn't stop it. Who knew if they could? I'd been stronger than them for years.

I drew back my right arm, ready to smash his nose across his face, drive him into the brick wall.

But I didn't.

I drew back from my rage. I didn't tear him apart limb from limb.

I wouldn't get away with it. Even with Mom and Dad away—the walls between apartments are not thick: if he'd screamed someone would have heard him.

I went into my room, shut the door, sat on the floor with my back against my metal desk, and decided to poison him instead.

I didn't want Mom or Dad to suspect.

He was still little back then. Four or five. Stupid enough to drink Drāno. I decided to put it in his path. Tell him not to drink it. Then walk away.

I didn't do that either.

Not for Jordan's sake, but for my mom's. Killing him would hurt her.

And me, too. If I was busted. Sitting down, thinking it through meant that I would never do it.

I had to hope for an accident.

BEFORE

Me and Zach, we were put on library duty together.

That's another thing about our school: you have to contribute, give back to your community. Community starts with the school, which is very clever 'cause that means we students save the school money by doing their work for them. Mostly you volunteer for tasks. I always volunteer to pick up the trash in the park and on the sidewalk outside the school. Anything that gets me outdoors.

But they also like to stretch you. Get you to do stuff you would never do otherwise. Like for me and Zach—neither of us readers—they make us work in the library. Shelving and all that.