The Girl Who Kissed a Lie
Copyright © 2014 by Skylar Dorset
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Cover image by Blake Morrow
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The gnomes are getting smarter.
At least according to Aunt True and Aunt Virtue, who I find with their heads in the oven on the first day of summer vacation.
I don’t even ask them what they’re doing because this is the kind of thing that happens all the time in our house, and I’ve learned not to ask questions. After sixteen years of responses like “The gnomes are getting smarter,” you stop asking.
My aunts are convinced that our house is infested with gnomes. I’ve never seen any, but I can’t remember a time in my life when my aunts weren’t engaged in an all-out war with them. They see evidence of them everywhere. They insist the creatures move our furniture around when we’re not looking and then replace it, but always off by an inch or so. They do the same thing with the paintings on the walls. I have never noticed any of this, but I’ve learned to go along with it.
“Are they in the oven now?” I ask, as I eat my cereal at our kitchen table.
“They have learned how to open the oven,” Aunt Virtue confirms.
“They moved the frying pan that was in the oven two whole inches to the left,” Aunt True adds, also backing out of the oven. “They’re getting
bold
.”
“There is nothing for it,” Aunt Virtue announces. “We must scour the kitchen.”
Aunt True nods. They exchange looks of grim determination, like spry, elderly aunt generals.
Then Aunt True turns to me. “Aren’t you off to school today?”
“It’s summer vacation, Aunt True,” I remind her. This whole school-schedule thing is still new to us. Up until last year, my aunts had homeschooled me, insisting that it was “safest.” I wasn’t sure what that meant but assumed it had something to do with gnomes, so I didn’t ask questions. Last summer, though, I asked if I could attend school. My aunts fretted about it for several days, and then finally grandly announced that yes, I would be allowed to go to elementary school.
And then I pointed out that I’m in high school.
After all the buildup, it turned out to be a bit anticlimactic. None of my aunts’ mysterious, threatening gnomes showed up, which was really disappointing. (I
know
that gnomes don’t exist, but I can’t help the little part of me that wishes that they did, just because then I wouldn’t have to feel like my aunts were crazy.) But no gnomes showed up—unless you count weaselly Mr. Brannigan, the biology teacher, and he’s just a weaselly little man, not a gnome (I’m fairly sure)—and the rest of school was just like how I’ve found the rest of life to be: there were bits of it I really liked and bits of it I could have done without. For instance, I liked getting to be around lots of normal people. I didn’t like getting to be around lots of normal people who had all established their friendship cliques years earlier.
And now it is summer vacation, and I am feeling somewhat at loose ends. When I was homeschooled, we didn’t really stop for summer. My aunts don’t pay attention to the passage of time. They always dress exactly the same: all in black. Long-sleeved black blouses, knee-length black skirts, black boots underneath. No concession to humid Boston summers. I’m not even sure that they realize the climate here contains four distinct seasons because they stay in our town house, fighting gnomes and not really acknowledging the world outside. So we didn’t stop for summers when I was a child, and I have never had a summer vacation before. You’d think this would be exciting. Everyone else at school was excited to be standing at the edge of an abyss of Nothing To Do. I seem to be the only one pointing out that, actually, it’s an
abyss
, and that’s not a good thing.
One thing I know I do
not
want to do with my summer vacation: scour the kitchen for gnomes. I want to do something utterly, perfectly normal, like all the utterly, perfectly normal people I go to school with.
“Summer vacation,” Aunt Virtue echoes, frowning thoughtfully, as if trying to figure out what those two words mean together.
“Oh, dear,” says Aunt True, wringing her hands. Aunt True wrings her hands a lot. My aunts are both nervous by temperament—they worry about gnome attacks, after all—but Aunt True tends to wail about it and Aunt Virtue tends to be snappish about it. “Were we supposed to plan something for you to do on summer vacation? I feel terrible about this. We should have planned something for her, Virtue.”
“Nonsense,” clips Aunt Virtue briskly. “Selkie can entertain herself. She can read some books. Can’t you, dear?”
At least I haven’t been asked to scour the kitchen. But generally my aunts like to keep me out of the skirmishes with gnomes.
“Yes,” I say with more confidence than I really feel (I hope). “Definitely.”
***
I really love Boston in the summertime. Unlike my aunts, I am very attuned to all of Boston’s seasons, to all of their good points and bad points. And Boston in the summertime can get hot and humid, but sometimes sunny days pile upon each other until I feel dizzy with the brightness in the very best way. I love the sun. Boston’s other seasons have their own charms, but none of them provide me with as much sunshine as summer does.
Ben loves sunshine too, which means he also enjoys this time of year. Not that we have ever had that conversation in so many words, but Ben hates rain, so the converse must be true.
And so maybe I should explain about Ben. Ben works on the Common, which is the huge park in the center of downtown Boston, still called the Common from the time when it was land shared by all of Boston’s early settlers. Boston is like that: things are frequently still called by the names they had centuries before.
I live right across the street from the Common, so for all intents and purposes, Boston’s sprawling, busy, people-clogged Common is my front yard. I’ve been going to the Common to sprawl in the sunshine for as long as I can remember, and Ben has also been there for as long as I can remember. It’s funny, because my aunts worry so much about everything, but they never seem to worry about my being on the Common. Or on Beacon Hill, even. I have always spent most of my time exploring the nooks and crannies of my home, and I know it and love it. There’s a way in which this little slice of Boston that I live in is really my oldest friend.
Followed by Ben.
Ben, actually, is kind of the only friend I have. It’s not like I made a lot of friends being homeschooled in an ancient town house infested with nonexistent gnomes. And I’ve found making friends in high school to be…difficult, to put it mildly. It’s hard to make friends when you’re different, when you feel like you’re so different that you don’t even
recognize
the people around you, that they could be an entirely different species. These people have, for the most part, been together since kindergarten. They’ve learned how to count together, and they’ve squabbled over the jungle gym together, and they’ve gone to each other’s birthday parties. I’ve never even
had
a birthday party. They all have stories that go back for ages, their own sort of oral tradition, and I’m not part of it. I sit in the middle of the inside jokes flying over my head, and I try to smile and join in, but for the most part I fail at it miserably. People are nice to me, generally, but there isn’t a single person I feel like I can talk to in the world.
Except for Ben. And, really, the way I feel about Ben is not exactly friendship. So if Ben’s the only friend I have, then I don’t really have any friends, because Ben’s much more than a friend. In my mind. In his mind, who knows?
And even though I feel closer to Ben than to anyone else, I can’t tell Ben half of the truth of my life. Let’s face it: if I told him I’d left my aunts scouring our kitchen for gnomes of increasing intelligence, Ben would smile at me politely and then rightly run in the other direction.
I take a seat on my typical stretch of the Common, squinting toward the subway station. I don’t see Ben, and I wonder if he doesn’t have to work until later in the day. I let myself tip backward, sprawling onto my back, and close my eyes. I’ve snagged a book from the library, but I don’t really feel like reading at the moment. It’s one of the first warm days of summer, the sky is a brilliant, cloudless blue, the air smells vaguely of the sea in that way the air in Boston does, and I just want to bask for a little while.
A shadow falls over me. “You’re here early,” says Ben cheerfully, and I peer up at him. He’s backlit, blocking the sun, and the unruly mop of curls on his head makes for a riotous silhouette.
“No school today,” I explain. “Summer vacation.”
Ben drops to the grass next to me, and I sit up, the better to talk to him. It’s warm, but he’s still dressed in the layers he always wears, a pale blue windbreaker pulled over a T-shirt.
“Isn’t it gorgeous out?” I say.
Ben wrinkles his nose. “A bit humid.”
“There’s not a cloud in the sky.”
Ben glances at the sky, then repeats, “It’s a bit humid.” He turns his attention back to me. “So. Summer vacation. Does that mean you’ll be spending lots of time sitting about on the Common? I’ll need to be sure to have enough lemons in stock for all the lemonade I’ll have to bring you.”
Ben makes fresh-squeezed lemonade in the summertime. It’s comical to watch him do it, because he hates to get his hands wet, so he swaddles all the cups in layers of napkins to protect himself from the condensation. I think most of his customers don’t know what to make of it, but I know exactly what to make of it: it’s adorable.
“Yes,” I say, but then reconsider. “Actually, I don’t know.” It sounds nice in the abstract, sitting around the Common all day, reading and talking to Ben when he gets time in between customers, but I’d get bored after about a week of it. My aunts say I get bored too easily. They say I am restless. They say it like it terrifies them. I think it reminds them of my mother. My aunts didn’t like my mother. She was, they say,
flighty
. “I want to do something
normal
. Have a
normal
summer vacation.”
Ben looks at me, squinting against the sun, his eyes half-green and half-blue, like the colors of the Common and the sky are running together. “This isn’t normal?” he says. He sounds genuinely curious.
I look back at him, confused. What does he mean by “this”? Does he mean us? Does he think we’re normal? Normal what? Normal friends? Normal boyfriend and girlfriend? He can’t mean that. A normal boyfriend and girlfriend would at least have gone out on a date.
“Do you think this is normal?” I counter.
Ben considers, tipping his head. “I think…I think it’s
us
. Is there an independent definition for
normality
other than ‘what is usual for your life’?”
I think of my aunts and the gnomes. I think of not even knowing Ben’s last name. “Yes,” I say. “I think there is.”
“I don’t know about that.” Ben leans back on the grass and tips his face up toward the sun. “I think that there’s no such thing as normal. I think there is just what is and what isn’t—the reality you make for yourself, the one you have around you. That’s what I think.”
I look down at him. I want to think that. I want to think my life is normal just because it’s my life. But I’m not so sure. How can I know when I’ve never had anything different?
“Anyway,” Ben says, almost lazily, “if this isn’t normal, then I don’t want normal.”
I wish I could determine if what he’s saying is entirely about
me
.
***
I am still thinking about it while I lay in bed that night, staring up at the ceiling, wishing I could fall asleep instead of contemplating normality. I listen to the grandfather clock on our landing—which has never told the proper time—chime eight, and I consider: an entire summer vacation stretching in front of me. What would “normal” people my age do? All those people I’ve never quite connected to in high school: what are they going to do all summer?
They’re probably going to hang out with friends. Which I don’t really have.
They’re also probably going to work summer jobs. I don’t really need money—I never go anywhere, so I never spend anything—but if I had a job, then I would have money, and then maybe I would go places. Maybe getting a job would help me get friends. Maybe they go hand in hand.
Get a job. Make at least one friend. Try out other people’s definition of “normal” for a little while. This seems like a plan.
The grandfather clock strikes six, and I sigh. Maybe the first thing I should try to do is fix the grandfather clock.
***
The next day, I stand in front of the grandfather clock and frown at it. Its pendulum swings steadily back and forth, tricking me into thinking it is keeping actual time, but it’s not. I stare at it, freezing into my mind that it thinks the time is 3:12. But I swear that I blink and the time moves to 11:23. But that can’t be right. Why is it doing that? And I frown further, and it’s 3:13. Which still isn’t the right time, but at least makes sense.
“Selkie, dear!” Aunt True calls up to me.
I turn from the clock.
She is at the bottom of the stairs looking up at me, and when she sees that she has my attention, she says, “What would you like for lunch?”
“How long has this clock been broken?” I ask instead.
Aunt True looks at me in alarm. “Is it
broken
?” she cries, and rushes up to the landing and peers at the clock, and then visibly relaxes. “Oh, it isn’t broken at all. Don’t frighten me so.”
“It doesn’t keep the right time,” I point out.
“Doesn’t it? That just depends on the time you’re keeping, you know. Come, we are just about to set out some cheese and crackers. Will that suit for lunch?”
Aunt True moves off the landing and down the stairs, and I frown at the clock and wonder why everything in my life is a riddle.
Normal
, I think. I am going to focus on getting things to be more
normal
.
