Liar (15 page)

“No!” I yelled, trying to roll away, but I was against the wall. “You will not!”

I grabbed for his wrists. He twisted away. He was on top of me and then I was on top of him and we were going around and around and there was less tickling and yelling and mouths were close and hearts were beating faster and I forgot what he was asking. Lost it in the taste of his mouth. The feel of his tongue and lips against mine.

“Micah,” Zach breathed, “I don't care what you are.”

I did.

Do.

HISTORY OF ME

You're wondering if we slept together, aren't you?

I know you are. It's what everyone wants to know. Did they?

Then there's me telling you about us
in bed together
. With no mention of whether our clothes are on or off. And we're doing what?

Talking
.

You don't believe that's all we did, do you? Not with all that tickling and kissing and stuff. You want to know what else we did together. How far it went. First base? Second? Third? All the way home?

You know I'm on the pill so it's not like I'd get pregnant. You know I'm old enough. It wouldn't make me a slut, would it? He was my only one. But then there's Sarah—Zach's
real
girlfriend. She's allowed to think that I'm a slut, isn't she? I mean, it's her boyfriend we're talking about. If she's allowed, then everyone else can think it, too. Sleeping with someone else's boy is the definition of slut.

Except that, as it happens—and not that this is any of your business—we weren't.

We didn't.

It was kissing and holding and hugging.
Lots
of kissing. But we never took our clothes off. Never got past that very first base. He didn't touch mine; my fingers got nowhere near his.

See?

I am a good girl after all.

I didn't kill him either.

AFTER

For the first time in my life I want to be up at the farm, out of school, and out of the city. I want to go running with Hilliard. Have him show me some new tricks.

I know that after a few days up there I'll be longing to be back home, but right this instant it's what I want.

School is too much.

But I make myself go anyway.

A day in bed was more than I could stand. Dad worrying over me was too much. Everything is too much.

In the hall, Tayshawn nods at me. I nod back. He's always been nice to me. I don't know why. I've heard that the police have been interviewing him at home, too.

No one else greets me. They stare. They talk about me, but not to me.

I eat my lunch in Yayeko Shoji's room. She's not one of the popular teachers. It's not one of the popular rooms. I can sit in bio, eat, look at the diagrams and posters on the wall, think about evolution and fast-twitch muscles, entropy, death, and decay.

Zach.

All right, the biology room is not such a good idea. But what
doesn't
remind me of Zach? Of what happened to him. What place in this school, this city, is safe for me now?

Nowhere.

There are seven more months of school left. I don't think I'm going to make it.

But if I go upstate now I might not ever finish school.

Worse, if I go upstate now I'll miss the funeral.

AFTER

I haven't been entirely honest. I mean, I have been about the facts. About Zach and the police. How awful it was at school, at home. My family history. My illness. How I showed Zach foxes. How everyone suspects me, if not of killing Zach, then of something.

I haven't made myself out to be better than I am. Or worse.

But I haven't been entirely honest about my insides. How it is in my head and my heart and my veins.

Let me come clean:

This is what it felt like when the principal strode into the room to tell us that Zach was dead:

Sharp and cold and wrong.

Like the world had ended.

I thought I knew what the principal was going to say. I thought I knew that Zach was dead. Zach had been missing since Saturday. If he'd been found alive he would have texted me. The principal didn't drop in on classrooms, not unless something was seriously wrong.

But I'd been hoping. I'd been praying that I was wrong, that Principal Paul was going to say something else. That Zach had been found and was coming back to school. He could have lost his cell phone. He could be in the hospital with a broken leg. Hurt but nothing serious.

I sat there staring at the principal, thinking about everything Zach had ever said to me. That he needed me. That he depended on me. That the smell of me could keep him going all day.

Or did I say that to him?

Him being dead confuses things.

I know he told me that what we had wasn't love. It was something stronger. Me and him weren't like him and Sarah, or him and anyone else. Or any two people together ever.

Zach said that.

Then he went away. He didn't come back.

I thought he would. I was sure he would. Even now, I'm waiting for him.

I wore the mask to keep my face unmoving and unseen. To keep everything inside where it belonged.

When the words were leaving Principal Paul's mouth—in that moment—I wanted to leap at him. Hold his mouth shut. Or tear out his throat.

Keep the words in.

Because maybe then Zach would be alive.

And I wouldn't be so alone.

BEFORE

One of the true things I told the police was that Dangerous Words was the last class I had with Zach before he disappeared that weekend—before he was murdered. It's not nearly as good as bio but it's the only other class I don't actively hate. Partly because Lisa Aden is a blusher and partly because she's pretty smart and sometimes it's kind of interesting hearing about what gets banned, how the meanings of words have changed, censorship. All that stuff.

We need signed permission from our parents to take it. Because in Dangerous Words we're allowed to use any dirty words we want. But none of us does. It doesn't feel like we really can. It feels like a trick.

The only time we say dirty words in that room is when we're reading out loud. Some of the assigned books have them. But it feels awkward and forced and we stumble over the same words that, outside the classroom, flow from our mouths easy as lies.

Most of our mouths. I've never heard Sarah swear.

No one said any of the words we were supposedly allowed to say. Not until the teacher, Lisa Aden, invited a guest the Friday before Zach was killed. A writer. A foreign writer, from England or something. I wasn't paying attention when he was introduced or when he started talking. I didn't listen to a thing until he picked up a piece of chalk and wrote all the worst words on the board. One by one. Then everyone was paying attention to the chalk in his hands and the words he made.

He wrote each word up on the board, then he said each as if it weren't any different from saying “yes” or “no” or “pie” or “sky.” After each word he wrote a date. Really old dates. Every single word was hundreds of years old. From the 1300s or 1400s or 1500s. I tried to imagine people in the olden days saying them, but I couldn't.

“These dates, of course,” he said, “refer to the earliest written records, but it's very likely the words themselves are much older. Much. But they were not written down. This is often true of taboo words. Until very recently written language has tended to be more formal than spoken.”

He stopped and looked at us like we were supposed to say something. I noticed Lisa Aden had changed color. Even whiter than usual, except for her cheeks, where all the blood in her body seemed to have gathered.

“Of course, some of these words weren't always taboo. And the way we use them now is not necessarily the same as how they were originally used. Words change. I'm sure your teacher has mentioned how the word ‘girl' originally meant a child of either sex.”

She hadn't.

“This is my favorite.” He tapped the worst word on the board and underlined it. The red in Lisa's cheeks spread. “Here in America it's probably the most shocking. But back home, where I come from, there's little force behind it. In fact, it usually gets used as a synonym for ‘lad' or ‘bloke.' ”

“What's a bloke?” Zach asked. His voice buzzed in my ears even though he was at the back of the room.

“A guy. A fella. A man.”

“So you wouldn't say, ‘those guys over there'?” Zach asked. I didn't turn to look at him. “You'd say, ‘those—' ”

“Yes.” The writer nodded.

Lisa Aden was starting to sweat. I could smell it on her.

“What if they're your friends?” Zach wanted to know. “Or you weren't mad at them?”

“Wouldn't matter,” the writer said, and I wondered what kind of books he wrote. Probably not travel guides. My dad never even said “shit,” let alone wrote it. “Angry has nothing to do with it. Friends, enemies, acquaintances. They're all—”

“Um,” Lisa Aden said, then faltered.

“What about girls? Women?” Kayla wanted to know.

“Just men. If you say it of a woman it means the same thing it means here. So you don't. Unless you're really angry.”

Zach looked fascinated.

“So, um, that word doesn't mean the same thing here that it does where you're from?” Aaron Ling asked.

“That's right.”

“Like the way English people don't use ‘erasers'?” Aaron Ling asked. “Or say ‘lift' instead of ‘elevator' or ‘flat' for ‘apartment'?”

The writer nodded.

“Can you tell us a little about how you came to write a book about taboo words?” Lisa Aden asked.

The writer laughed. “Well, you could say it was a lifelong interest.”

Half the class laughed, too.

“This is my first book about language. Before that I mostly wrote true crime, which grew out of covering the crime beat in Glasgow. The kind of people I write about, they're not clergymen, you know? Not even close. Rough as guts, more like. I got interested in the words they used so often, and so, er, colorfully. Then I started looking stuff up and before I knew it I was writing a book about so-called bad language.”