Little Black Lies (10 page)

“Mormons.”

Everybody laughs, which only irritates Isabella further. So who does she turn on? Me. “What about your dad, London? What does he do?”

On cue, my uniformed father strolls along the third landing and down the steps, scooping up lunch litter and stuffing it into a huge trash bag, which is practically overflowing with waste. Faced the other way, Dad crushes the garbage down with his foot, and sets about tying the top of the bag together.

What does my father do?

He continues to make knot upon knot in the big black bag until there are eight, ten, maybe fifteen knots. A tornado full of cats couldn't get out of that sack.

Worse still is what this means. I was stupid to think his OCD might remain safely tucked away at an ugly little apartment building in Brighton. That it would behave itself until he gets home from work. That I could count on it like E = mc
²
. It was only getting warmed up, perfecting itself, and preparing for its ultimate audience—the most perceptive, precocious, intelligent teenagers in the country: the students of Anton High School.

“Speaking of freaks,” says someone.

What does my father do?

He doesn't stop his knot-tying until every last flap of plastic has been fastened together and the top of the bag stands up like a drunken bunny ear. He stares at it a moment as if debating undoing the whole thing and starting from scratch and I realize this isn't really new behavior for him—it's just the green plastic bag version of the VW's locks.

“Can anyone spell O-C-D?” says Isabella.

Carling whispers, “Someone should tell him there's a rehab center down the block.”

“Whacked,” says Griff.

Dad looks up and smiles when he catches my eye. My heart pounds as he starts down the steps and straight toward me with a great green sack of social annihilation bobbing against his leg. This can't be happening. I'm finally making friends, I'm actually being accepted by these genetically enhanced beings—being treated as one of their own—in this insanely elite school my dad is forcing me to attend, and with this one action, he's going to snatch it all away.

This OCD is grotesque in its greed. It doesn't rest until it seeps into every part of our lives and rots it from the inside out. I'm tired of fighting my dad's condition all by myself. I love my father, but he has no interest in managing his problem. He's happy to let it pummel him from every which way. Wherever. Whenever. With no real concern what it's doing to him.

Or me.

I watch, terrified, as Dad waves to me, moving ever closer. Then a well-timed herd of thundering seniors blocks him from my view. Which gives me a moment to compose my thoughts. Only I can't. All I see is Rascal in the grotty café just after he saw the old pawnbroker for the first time. He sat there drinking tea and was astonished to overhear two guys at the next table discussing the pawnbroker and how terribly she abused her sister. Treating her like a servant and nearly biting off her finger to the point of amputation. One guy threw up his hands and exclaimed a woman like that was better off dead and there was nothing to be done. What will be will be. It was nature. But the other said nature is to be “shaped and directed.”

Or else.

And I have about three seconds to shape and direct this situation before “or else” happens to me.

Feeling I might be killing more than just the OCD, I drop my granola bar down behind the others just before the cloud of jocks thins out, and vanish from view, fussing around beneath the cushions as I pretend to search for it.

Only when I'm sure my beloved, stubborn father has decided he was mistaken and gone on his way do I resurface, granola bar in hand, fully aware of the shift that has just taken place inside me. I am now, officially, a wretch of a daughter.

Sloane repeats Isabella's question. “So what does your super-clean father do, Sara?”

I tread water for a moment, sputter on the traitorous grime that's settled in my lungs, before telling the ugliest lie of my life. “Brain surgeon. My dad likes things clean because he's a neurosurgeon.”

“That's how you squeaked in here as a junior? Because your dad's a surgeon?”

I force a sly grin. “Well, it's all confidential, but let's just say he's tinkered under some very fancy hoods in the Ant community.” Not a total lie. Noah let him help tune up the Bentley last week.

A few kids nod and the conversation shifts away from me.

I can't believe how easy it was to lose my reality. Ironic, really. I swam down a no-hoper from a town pockmarked with liquor stores and pawnshops, nothing more than the janitor's daughter, and emerged something else entirely. A girl sparking and flashing with the very finest in genetic material.

A girl completely unworthy of the man who raised her.

“Are you going to grow up to be just like Daddy?” asks Isabella.

“Nah. I'm more of a math nerd.”

With the still-unforgiven Leo turned toward Griff, Carling tips her head back and lets some guy with long bangs snake the inside of her mouth with his tongue. The ultimate punishment. Then she pulls away, checks that Leo didn't see, and turns to me. “That reminds me, London,” she says. “A few of us are getting together Saturday afternoon to work on our calculus. You're welcome to come … if you want.”

Saturday afternoon. Mandy arrives Saturday morning. But our weekend together can be rearranged, can't it? Carling, however, cannot.

I knock the roving hand off my rib cage and hoist myself out of the bobbing heap of anonysexuality. “I want.”

“You're cooking dinner for Charlie? Dude. I beg you to reconsider and let the man live,” Mandy says into the phone that night.

“Hilarious.” I lean across the stovetop to adjust the burner flame. “He's not feeling great these days. I'm just trying to be a …” The words get caught in my teeth and I have to sweep them out with my tongue. “A good daughter.”

I've decided to step up and make Charlie's life easier in ways that go far beyond the odd game of Scrabble. I'm going to make all our meals. Tonight's dinner is more like breakfast: cheese-and-spinach omelets, sliced tomatoes, toasted bagels. I slide the spatula under one side of the egg mixture and prepare to fold it over.

“Just don't threaten to do the same for me Saturday night,” warns Mandy. “I'd like to live to see my birthday because I'm pretty sure Eddie's going to propose.”

“And then what? You'll have a two-year engagement?”

“A year and a half. And he'll be roped up good until I graduate.”

Mandy has been my best friend since third grade. When the teacher had us make paper chains to decorate the classroom for Christmas, Mandy poured white glue on her palm, spread it around, and peeled it off like a second layer of skin after it dried. I was fascinated enough to invite her over after school. So Mandy stuffed the glue bottle in her pocket and we peeled our palms until her mother picked her up and took her to swimming lessons at four thirty.

I've never wanted to spend a day apart from her. Not until today.

“I kind of have bad news about that.” I'm keenly aware I'm the worst friend ever. A true friend doesn't drop her pal just to spend a couple of hours with some girl she barely knows, no matter how fascinating her gravelly voice and billboard undies. But somehow I find the strength to go from lousy friend to dirty rotten liar. “I know it's last minute and everything, but I have to hole up and study all weekend.”

There's a long pause. “You're cancelling our weekend to study? That is just wrong.”

My omelet folding, like my dependability, has failed. I overshoot and slop wet egg and melted cheese over the side of the skillet and onto the stovetop, which I'll have to clean up before Dad gets any manic scrubbing ideas. “This school is different, I told you that. I'm in Honors Math, and if I don't keep my grades up, I'm screwed.”

“You've always been in Honors Math.” I can hear the pout in her voice. “It never stopped you from hanging with me.”

“I know. The workload here is completely ill.”

“I got someone else to ride Bo for me, plus Eddie has to work.”

Which makes me feel worse. While I'm bettering my social life at Carling's under the guise of teaching her calculus, Mandy will be stuck at home staring at her yellow-flowered bedroom walls and listening to her parents fight. “I'm sorry. I don't have a choice. There aren't that many spots at Ivy League schools. Even fewer if you're going for the Baxter scholarship.”

She groans. “Do I even want to know?”

“It's a Harvard scholarship that gives preference to Ant grads. But it's ‘need-blind,' meaning anyone can apply, rich or poor. So my complete lack of fundage won't even help me. Only perfect grades will.”

Mandy doesn't say anything for a long while. I hear a bit of crunching, then, “Seriously, Sara. People like you and me don't go to Harvard.”

Irritation rockets through my veins and I realize that, for the first time in my life, having a lid on my potential has been suffocating me. Even with top grades, my future used to look something like the ramshackle bungalows back on Norma Jean Drive: homely, with ceilings so low I could touch them on my tiptoes. But it's as if a quake has taken place. The pressure on the earth's plates has caused a huge seismic burp, temporarily allowing me to scrabble to higher ground, groomed Ivy League turf I never had access to in the past. But, as with all seismic activity, further shifts can change things again, so the smart girl climbs while she can. “Hey,” I say. “I'm not even seventeen. Don't squash my future just yet.”

“You want to go to Boston U and become a principal at Finmory, remember?”

“I still might. The Ants wouldn't even expect
that
much from me if they knew I was the janitor's kid.”

“Sara … how can they not know?”

“I haven't told them.”

“You mean, as far as these bug people know, your dad is not your dad?”

“Kind of. I said something about my dad being some kind of doctor. These kids are different, Mandy. It's not acceptable to come from nothing. Believe me; you'd have done the same thing in my position.”

Mandy is silent and I hear a flicking sound in the background. I don't have to see her to know she's picking at the bottom of her shoe. It's been her nervous habit since we were kids. “See, that's where
we're
different,” she says. “I may be the daughter of a cable repairman and a receptionist, and I may live in the lamest town on the planet, but not for
one second
have I ever thought I come from nothing.”

“That's not what I meant. It's not a class thing. It's—”

I don't get the chance to explain. She's already hung up. That I deserved it makes it worse.

Dad comes in and sits at the table. “Who was on the phone?”

I drop the phone into its cradle and set Dad's dinner on the table. Over-toasted bagels and crippled omelets. “Mandy. She can't come this weekend.”

“That's too bad. You could have used a little fun.”

“Yeah, well. Now I can study.”

He doesn't comment. As he eats, he lines up the salt and pepper shakers in front of his plate. Then pushes them slightly to the left. Then the right. Then moves them closer to his juice glass, where his folded napkin, glass, and the shakers now form the letter
L
. Wait a second, not quite perfect, because he's adjusting the napkin now, making it straighter. There. Now the
L
is as flawless as a glass/ napkin/salt and pepper shaker
L
could possibly be.

I watch as he dismantles the
L
, then lines it all up again. This time the napkin and the shakers make up the long arm of the
L
, and the juice glass becomes the short part. Lining things up like this is not a good thing. It's not a sign of neatness or boredom or an extreme fondness for the middle section of the alphabet. It's a sign his OCD is spreading into the tiniest corners of his life.

“You used to take pills for it, right?”

“For what?”

“You know, lining things up and stuff.”

“Dr. Harris put me on an antidepressant for a while. But the side effects were overwhelming. My concentration was off.”

“Why don't you see Dr. Harris anymore?”

He stabs a piece of egg and stuffs it into his mouth. “What for? I'm managing quite well now.”

His denial feels like food poisoning, piercing my stomach wall. I wonder if he believes himself. “But did he ever give you any guidelines? Like, how to tell if your OCD has gone from being just an annoyance to being something more?”

He takes a long sip of juice, sets down the empty glass, and wipes his mouth. “He said as long as my behavior remains within about twenty degrees of the spectrum of normal daily functioning, I am fine to manage on my own.”

God. We've sailed way past that one. “It's good we have his number. You know, just in case.”

Dad shakes his head. “I suspect that number wouldn't do us much good. Harris died about a year and a half ago.”

My math brain starts clicking and whirring as it tries—and fails—to find a solution it can live with.

(my unhappy father × tabletop items becoming letters of the alphabet) - normal daily functioning + one dead doctor = one Russian pawnbroker coming back from the dead

Early Saturday morning I wake to Dad shaking my shoulder and asking me to run to the corner market for milk for his coffee. Seeing as today is his birthday, I have no choice but to peel my bones from the warm, squishy mattress and step out onto the icy floor. Still half-asleep, I gather my hair into a ponytail and pull on a pair of paint-splattered gray sweats and fleecy boots. By the time I reach the foyer, I'm at least alert enough to take the back door to the alley to eliminate any chance encounters with early-morning Ants who might wander into Brighton. It's happened before.

It's even colder than I imagined outside. I step into the alley and shiver in the weak sunlight, pulling my sleeves down over my hands. In the parking area, heaving a trash bag into the Dumpster, is Noah, wearing nothing but wrinkled shorts and a torn undershirt that looks like he's been living in it for days—stained, with a collar so stretched out it's falling off one shoulder. His dreads are glued together in long, wormy tufts, like licorice ropes that've frozen together.

“
Geez
, it's cold,” he says when I wave.

“Yeah.”

He hurls a couple of pizza boxes into the recycling bin, then reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes. After lighting up he tosses a spent match on the roadway. “You're Charlie's kid, right?”

I nod.

“He's a pretty cool guy. I helped him with the van the other day.”

“You're the one who drives the Bentley?” I point at the shiny black car.

He nods. “You a friend of Carling's?”

Simple question, really. All I have to say is yes or no. But the answer isn't that clear. What he should have asked is, do I sit behind Carling in math class and analyze her lineup of underpants? Did I go through a half tube of gel trying to style my hair like hers before school this morning? Have I ever grabbed hold of her boyfriend's chest? Worn her skirt? To any of those questions, I could squeak out a definitive yes. But as it is, I can only mumble, “Kind of. You work for her family all the time?”

“Kind of.” He laughs to himself. “Not a bad job, riding around in a fancy car. Hanging out with a fancy family. I don't have much in the way of relatives myself, so this kind of works for me.” He sucks on his cigarette, exhales, and analyzes my face. “I worry about that girl, though. She's like a kid sister to me. But I can't be around all the time, you know?”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm not just her driver.” Another drag on his smoke. “I keep her safe.”

“Keep her safe from what?”

“Mostly herself.” He tosses his cigarette onto the pavement and flicks it away with his bare foot. “Carling Burnack is none too stable. Haven't you noticed?”

“Kind of.”

“Her father's nuts, and Carling … I adore her, but she's capable of just about anything. You'd be wise to avoid her.”

He's right. I should stay away from Carling.

Trouble is, I can't.