Seven Ways We Lie (4 page)

His questions baffle me, though. How could I want anything but an apology from Emily's character, after a decade and a half? And of course I lose at the end. My character's dream goes out the window, and she's saddled with a life she never wanted.

García tucks his clipboard into his satchel. “Kat, thanks for being off-book already. The rest of you, remember to off-book those last few scenes by Thursday. Nice work, everyone.”

I hop off the stage, hurrying out the side door ahead of the others. I jog down the grass of the hill, squinting into the sunset. I'm still not used to the sun setting so early thanks to daylight savings, which doesn't seem to save much daylight at all. Though maybe that's because we're locked in school buildings until sunset.

Crossing the parking lot toward the street, I pass Juniper Kipling's empty Mercedes, a shimmering foreigner in the crowd of scuffed Jeeps and mud-splattered pickup trucks. Weird—I thought Juniper was driving my sister home today.

As I reach the sidewalk, I stick my hands deep in my pockets, steeling myself for the journey. It's not a long way home—two miles, maybe—but it's getting cold these days. Soon I'll have to start asking people for rides after rehearsal. I dread the awkward car conversations already.

No matter what, when I talk to people, I come off as an asshole. They should leave me alone, for their sake as much as mine.
Whenever someone breaks my privacy, my head fills with panic, panic, panic. I lose my thoughts in white noise and fuzz. A short, sizzling fuse. And what comes out of my mouth is always angry bullshit.

Life is better when it's scripted.

AN HOUR LATER, I'M STILL THINKING ABOUT HER EYES
and her attention, lying back and letting that glance loop in endless repeat.

She looked at me
. The thought of it keeps turning, replaying, spinning like a mobile or a galaxy, and it feels even more impossible now that I'm this high.

When you're high, getting stares usually feels fine, because unless you're having a bad high and feeling paranoid as hell, the staring person seems like just another citizen of the world, and that's chill. But even if I weren't high, I'd be freaking out over Olivia Scott giving me the eye. I sit three rows behind her in English, and I spend about 108 percent of that class staring at the back of her head, wondering how she gets her hair that rich and straight and glossy. Everything I've heard her say is hilarious, and when she smiles, it's so high-voltage, I start a little, every damn time. Olivia Scott is magnificent.

Sometimes I can't help resenting her raucous laugh and her sexy, poised, confident body and her blaze-blue eyes, because she only notices assholes like Dan Silverstein, and I have no idea why. But then I remember that if by some miracle she noticed me
instead, I'd feel super-awkward, because we don't have any friends in common. I don't even know if we'd get along. From what I've seen, she's one of those semi-geeks who likes school enough to do well but not enough to try. Who even knows how that works? It's like . . . I don't know, but if you're going to not give a shit, at least devote yourself to not giving a shit, right?

But what the hell do I know? I've never spoken to her. She could be totally different from what I've seen and heard.

Still. She looked at me, and I can't stop thinking about it.

I pick up the joint from my car roof and play around with the smoke, sniffing it, licking it up, rolling it across my tongue and through my teeth. It's not sanitary, letting the thing sit on my roof like that, but I've done worse, and I know Burke's done worse. He picked a joint up off the sidewalk one time and took a drag for shits and giggles, and he didn't get sick, even though I insisted for a week that he was going to get oral herpes or some shit. Then again, Burke has the immune system of a god.

My watch hits five o'clock. The drama geeks pour down the hill from the auditorium, trickle into their scattered cars, and drive off.

I take a hit and stare up at the clouds, those plumes of cotton and Marshmallow Fluff, their underbellies pinkened by the dying sun. It's crazy that they're so huge, and crazier that something so colossal is so temporary, that they'll never be the same as they are now, and as soon as they turn heavy and cry themselves down in sheets of rain, they'll be gone, as if they were never looming a mile above the crown of my head. This day is lost already. This hour is as good as going, going, gone.

I shut my eyes and flush out the thoughts, and new ones float
in like breezes, like the sound of chimes. Minutes swirl around me, and seconds fall across my skin with the tingle, the prickle, the itch of dying sunlight, and Jesus, have I ever been this relaxed in my life?

Then a familiar voice splinters my nirvana with an “
Hola
, Mateo,” and I keep my eyes closed and slur out a “
No hablo
Spanish,” and the voice says, “Yeah, sure, Mr. Half-Mexican,” and I say, “Please, man, I'm, like, six hundred percent American,” which Mamá would kill me for saying, because it's probably an Insult to My Cultural Heritage or something.

I peer off the side of my car at Burke. In the red light of sunset, and with my head tilted sideways, he looks like something out of a horror movie, his nose and ear and eyebrow piercings glinting, a sleeve of black-and-purple tattoos twisted up his left arm like an injury. He's wearing his bleached hair in gelled spikes today.

“Yo, man,” I say, and as he climbs up the back of my car onto my roof, he grunts, “You been out here smoking, huh?” and I'm like, “Yeah, nothing else to do. You?”

“I was reading. Waiting for one of my sculptures to cool.” He waves a book at me. When Burke's not welding metal sculptures out of abandoned hubcaps and steel rods, he spends all his time reading, which people never guess, because he looks like every gang-member stereotype ever conceived. In reality, he's probably the most well-read, intelligent person at this school—not counting Valentine Simmons, because I refuse to count that pretentious dickhead—and no one knows it, because Burke's way sneaky about the whole
smart
thing.

Sometimes I'd swear Burke is from a different planet. He's normal if you talk to him, but besides me, nobody ever talks to
him, because they can't get past the way he looks. It's not just the ink and the piercings and the hair, which he dyes a different color every other week. It's his clothes, which are weird at best and embarrassing at worst. Last Friday, he strolled into school wearing neon-yellow skinny jeans and platform shoes. Today, he has on a green peacoat, jean leggings, and a kilt. It looks like a Goodwill threw up on him.

He wears makeup, too. Not standard emo-kid guyliner, either. Like, bright blue lipstick, the other week, and orange eye shadow, the day before yesterday. Today he's clean-faced, but back in freshman year, he didn't go a day without it. His whole persona, this whole thing he does with the way he looks—it happened so suddenly, right out of middle school, I wondered if it was performance art, maybe. Some big stunt I wasn't part of. Now, though, I'm so used to it, I hardly notice when he goes crazy with winged eyeliner and purple eyebrows.

At first I thought he'd get beat up, but it turns out that people are terrified to talk shit about Burke because he's six foot five and built like a Mack truck, and sometimes when he's dressed down he looks as if he'd knife you without thinking about it. But Jesus, if he were my size, he'd get laughed out of Kansas.

I take his book and squint at the title. It's called
The Gay Science
, written by some foreign dude whose name looks like a sneeze. How can he read this stuff for fun?

“What?” he says, looking hard at me, and I'm like, “Nothing, man, you do you.” I drop the book into his backpack and pass him the blunt. He takes a hit.

“So Dan got with Olivia Scott,” I say, and Burke's like, “Yeah, I heard him talking about it. Apparently she was great,” and I stare
up at the sky, and he's like, “What?” and I'm like, “I didn't say anything,” and he's like, “Your silence is more silent than usual silence,” and I'm like, “Shut up,” and he's like, “So I'm right.”

I shrug. “Fine. Olivia's awesome, and Dan sucks, and why does he get to have sex with her, is all I'm saying.”

“Hey, why you gotta shit on Dan? Just 'cause you're jealous doesn't mean—”

I chuckle. “Dude, I couldn't be jealous of Dan if I tried.” And that part, at least, is true, because it's hard to describe the soul-sucking blandness that is Daniel Silverstein. He has no personality anymore; he just wants to stick his dick in things. Sometimes you look at people, and you can see every second that's going to make up their lives, and it depresses you, because they're clearly fated to do nothing that'll last even a decade after their death, and it's like, why are you sitting all cushy in this suburb when a million disadvantaged kids out there could do so much more with your place in this world? That's Dan these days. It blows seeing him turn into that, too, since he used to be different.

Back in middle school, Dan and Burke and I used to hang out all the time. Middle-school Dan loved dubstep and Mario Kart and late-night walks, where the three of us would talk about everything from what aliens might look like to the meaning of life. But the second we hit freshman year, high-school Dan took over. He stopped talking to us and found new friends, and now every time we pass each other in the hall, he doesn't even nod. Burke and I try not to take it personally, but getting friend-dumped is kind of personal by definition.

Burke taps my shoulder and passes the blunt back to me. I take a long hit—too long—and sit up, my eyes watering, and
Burke says, “So why're you mad at Dan, huh?” and I sigh, because I feel he should get it by now. “Because,” I say, “I've had a thing for Olivia Scott for, like, thirty years,” and Burke says, “But you haven't ever spoken to her,” and I'm like, “
Yeah
, but . . .”

I trail off, floundering to find actual justification for being upset. After a minute, I give up. “Forget it,” I mumble. We watch sports teams walking by, red-faced and sweaty from practice. Guys' tennis. Girls' cross-country. Lacrosse. Football . . .

Eventually, Burke says, “If you want to meet up with Olivia, why don't you go to the thing at Dan's this weekend, huh? Maybe she'll be there.”

I make a grumbling sound. I'd rather chug cyanide than show up to Dan's sister's birthday party. It's sad, the thought that everyone I know is so repressed, they have to get,
like, oh my God, totally wasted
to have an excuse to act the way they want to act. “Thanks, man, but I'm good,” I say. “Like she'd talk to me, anyway.”

“Bro, don't be so fucking defeatist,” Burke says, and that's a Burke phrase if ever I've heard one,
so fucking defeatist
, but before I can tell him he's ridiculous, an overloud voice butts in:

“Hey. Are you Matt? Matt Jackson?”

I turn. A couple of varsity tennis girls have stopped near my car. The only one I know by name—the one who's talking to me—is Claire Lombardi, who has enough freckles for a family of four, as well as an arsenal of identical tank tops that display
Nike
across her huge chest. The girl is Paloma-famous, since she does every miserable extracurricular this place has to offer: debate team, French Club, Academic Bowl, Young Environmentalists, student government . . . the list goes on.

She moves to the front of my hood, brushing her frizzy red
hair out of her face. Since I can't remember having actually spoken with her before, and since I stay under the radar, it's kind of weird that she knows my name, but I reply, “Uh, yeah. Hey,” and she says, “We missed you this afternoon. I can send you the information later by email, though.”

“What?” I say, glancing at Burke. “Missed what?”

“Student gov. There are only three candidates, so your chances are pretty good.”

“I—chances for—?”

“Make sure you start campaigning next week. It'd be great for the program to have some competition in the presidential race, at least. For, like, visibility's sake.”

“Um,” I say, trying not to let my confusion show, and she's like, “You're running against Juniper Kipling and Olivia Scott, if you were wondering,” and I'm like, “But I—” and then one of her tennis friends nudges her. Claire glances to the right. Her gaze fixes on something near the far end of the lot, and she says too fast, “Heading out—see you,” and leaves me sitting there wondering what the hell just happened.

I check over my shoulder to see who scared her off. It's the guys' swim team. For a moment I wonder what Claire's issue is, but then, from the middle of the pack, Lucas McCallum gives me his usual cheerful wave, and I remember his and Claire's heinous breakup last spring, which nobody could shut up about for frickin' ever.