Liar (7 page)

Mom's never gone back to France. When I ask her if she misses it, she laughs.

Here, she is a schoolteacher. Teaching French, while Dad writes. He's a professional liar, Mom says. Even his journalism is lies. Travel writing. Appraisals of hotels, spas, and resorts. If they pay him enough he'll say whatever anyone wants him to say.

He's away a lot. When he's away they don't fight so much.

I never tell anyone about my family. Especially not counselors like Jill Wang.

I never talk about the family illness and how Dad passed it on to me.

AFTER

Sarah is following me home from school. She thinks she's being stealthy.

She's managed to stay a block behind me since we left school. But the blocks between school and my home aren't that crowded even after school on a weekday. So at every corner, as I turn, I glance back and see her. Finally I'm around a corner waiting.

Sarah turns and there I am staring at her.

“Oh,” she says, taking several steps back, looking away. “Oh.”

“Hmmm,” I say.

“I,” she begins, looking at me briefly, slipping her hands under the straps of her backpack, resting her left foot on the curb.

“You,” I say, mocking her. She blushes and looks down.

“I was . . .”

To increase Sarah's discomfort I continue to stare at her.

“I was going to . . . ,” Sarah says. “I was just . . .”

Sarah hasn't found the rest of her sentence yet, so I give it to her: “You were just following me?”

“Yes,” she says, incurably honest. “I wanted to see where you live.”

“Why?” I ask. She's still not looking at me.

“I heard that he'd come visit you.” She slides her right hand out from under the backpack strap, wipes it on her skirt, and then slips it under again. “I wanted to see.”

“To see what? Him with me? He's dead, remember?

Sarah shakes her head, her heavy loose curls swaying.

She's still looking down.

“What did you want to see, Sarah? The outside of my apartment building? The inside? My bedroom?”

She looks up. Her eyes are wide and wet. “Yes,” she says. “No. Maybe. I don't know. I didn't think it all the way through.”

“Come on,” I say, turning on my heel. I am tempted to run flat out and leave her in my wake. Instead I march fast up Second Avenue. She has to scurry to keep pace.

AFTER

“Your desk is so big,” Sarah Washington says, looking around. “It's bigger than your bed.”

It's not that the desk is big, more that the room is small. In any other city in America it would be a closet, not a bedroom. The desk, the chair, the bed, the crate beside it are the only furniture. I sit down on the bed, cross my legs underneath me. I prefer to sit on the floor, but Sarah is standing on the only floor space.

She picks up the silver packet of tiny pills by my bed, holds them in her hand and stares at them, then holds the packet out to me. Her eyes are too wet. A tear leaks out and then another. I wonder what it's like crying so easily.

“You were sleeping with him, weren't you?”

“They're for my skin,” I tell her.

“Your skin?” She drops them back on the crate as if they might contaminate her. “You take birth control pills for your
skin
?”

I nod. It's odd how often telling the truth feels like lying and lying like the truth. “I have acne. When I take those pills I don't have acne. You can look it up.”

“So you never slept with him?” she asks, emphasizing each word.

I hadn't said that. “No,” I answer.

“Then why do you have his sweater?” she asks, much louder this time. She squeezes past my bed to where it hangs on the back of my desk chair. She holds it to her nose. She can smell him, too. Her eyes leak more water. She better not cry on the sweater.

“I was cold.” I am never cold.

I only let Sarah into my room to stop her from bothering me. She's one of those people who cannot let things be. I thought about hiding the sweater. I thought, too, about wearing the sweater. But I don't want to lose his smell.

“Put it down,” I tell her.

She does. I can smell salty fear on her. She is afraid of me. She is afraid of everything.

“I don't have anything of his,” she says. “Not one thing.”

“What about the chain around your neck?” It's thin and gold. It would be easy to break. “Or that ring on your finger. He gave you those.”

“He bought them. They don't . . .” Sarah trails off, glances at the sweater again. “They weren't ever
his
.”

She means that they don't smell like Zach. Sweat doesn't soak into metal. Jewelry doesn't have the fragrance of where it's been; only of what it is. Besides, he never wore them. He bought them for her to wear. He never bought anything for me. I think about telling Sarah this, but it will only confirm that me and Zach were together.

“When was the last time you saw him?” she asks, sliding away from the sweater, her back against my desk.

“Why is everyone asking me about that?” I know why. Ever since Brandon told about Zach and me, everyone has been staring, whispering. But I want to hear her say it, to admit that she suspects me of killing him, too.

I miss Zach so much. The thought of him makes my breath hurt. I'm afraid I'll choke. His death, his absence makes everything tighten, thicken, break.

“We're all trying to figure out what happened. Who did this to him. Why.” She doesn't look at me directly. Her hand reaches toward his sweater again. She stops herself before she touches it.

“Who killed him, you mean?” It's what everyone's saying: Zach was murdered. But no one knows who or how or why. The why is huge. Zach is a good guy. Was. I cannot imagine a reason to kill him.

“Last time I saw him was Saturday night,” Sarah says. Her voice wilts on “Saturday.”

“Me, too,” I say, though I didn't. I don't know why I say it. Those two words mean I'm admitting to seeing Zach. To being his—his whatever I was.

“You're lying. I was with him Saturday. We were at Chantal's party. You weren't invited.”

As if I would want to go. So much noise. Not just the music, but their voices all loud and raucous from drinking. I never drink. None of the Wilkins do.

“The party didn't go all night,” I say. “He saw me after.” I cross my legs the other way, stretch out my spine.

“At 5:00 a.m.?” she asks. “When he was so drunk Chantal's older brother ended up helping him get a taxi home?”

“He wasn't that drunk. I climbed in through his window.”

“Through the window? Of a seventh-floor apartment?”

I nod. I've climbed into higher windows. “I went up the fire escape. His bedroom's right next to it.” Not true.

The kitchen is. I have to climb across ledges to get to Zach's room. Sarah's not the kind of person who'd notice where the fire escape is. “He always leaves the window open a crack. He used to anyway. He was snoring. I crawled in next to him. He woke up.” I can see it clearly though I know it didn't happen. Not that night.

“I thought you said you never slept with him?” She's crying again. It amazes me she can do that even through her questions and her anger.

“I didn't. There are other things you can do.” Sleep for instance. He
had
been drunk. He'd woken up, grunted “Micah,” then rolled over, and gone back to snoring. Or at least that's what would have happened if I'd been there that night. It had gone that way before.

Sarah takes a long look at me, without any fear for a moment. “You,” she says, at last, “are nasty. I don't believe a word you've said. Can you even describe his bedroom?”

“Lots of trophies.”

“What jock boy's bedroom
doesn't
have lots of trophies?” She shifts against my desk. It's hard and metal, even with the cloth draped over it. She can't be comfortable. “What color are the walls?”

“At night? Dark.”

“Very funny. What's the rest of the house look like?” She's sneering.

“I told you. I get in through his window.”

“What's—?”

“Why am I answering your questions?” I want her to go. I want her to stop interrogating me. I want her to leave me alone.

“Why won't you tell the truth?” she asks, glaring at me.

“Why won't you?” I ask, even though she is an incorrigible truth teller. I glare right back.

“You're not even pretty!” Sarah shouts, pushing off from the desk, past the bed, opening the door. “You look like a boy. An ugly boy! What did he even see in you?”

She slams the door behind her.

So she doesn't hear me say that I have no idea.

HISTORY OF ME

“Did you take your pill?” is the first thing my parents ask me each morning. Well, mostly my dad.

It annoys me. It annoys me a lot.

Especially when Jordan echoes their question. It's too icky to have your ten-year-old brother ask you that. It doesn't matter that I don't take the pill for that reason. It's still not something he should be thinking about.

It's not something I want to think about.

I hate the whole thing: menstruation, pills, blood.

So. Much. Blood.

I don't take the pill just for my skin, it's to fix my periods, too.

They used to be awful. Lie-in-bed-sobbing-with-pain awful and an ocean of blood: instant anemia once a month. The first time I got my period I thought I was going to die. The pain was so bad. The bleeding wouldn't stop.

My doctor cured it by making me take a birth control pill every single day. No fake sugar pills—I take the real ones every single day of my life. Now I never get my period. I never have that awful pain. My blood stays in my body, keeping me upright.

My mom freaked out a bit. She was worried that it wasn't natural. She thought having your period was what makes you a woman.

I wish I was a man.

I asked my doctor to explain how it worked, but what he told me about cycles, and uterine lining, and elevated risk didn't make any sense, so I asked Yayeko Shoji. She's a biologist, I figured she would know.

She did.

She told me that women used to have so many babies they hardly menstruated at all. But now women have only one or two or no babies, and they have them when they're already old, which means they have too many periods. All that bleeding puts a strain on their wombs.

I try to imagine being a woman in the olden days, being pregnant over and over again, having a dozen children. But I can't imagine being pregnant even once.

Yayeko says that taking the pill to stop bleeding is more natural than bleeding all the time. She does the same thing. She hasn't had a period in two years.

Yayeko talked to my mom, explained it to her, and Mom felt better about it, but she still wasn't happy. “You are my daughter,” she said. “It is difficult to be happy for you to take these
très
adult pills.”