The Secret to Lying (11 page)

When the Steves were out playing basketball that evening, we broke into their room with a coat hanger. Dickie set up a few standard pranks — plastic wrap on the toilet, baby powder on their pillows — but these were merely diversionary tactics. The real prank was what we did to their shower. Inspired by
Psycho,
I unscrewed the shower nozzle and stuffed it full of cotton soaked in red food coloring, then screwed it back on. Meanwhile, Dickie stole their soap so they wouldn’t be able to wash away the food coloring. To top things off, he emptied the only bottle of shampoo (the Steves shared shampoo!) and refilled it with vegetable oil.

It worked brilliantly. In chemistry class the following day, Steve Dennon’s normally pale face glowed red and his hair dripped oil onto his shirt. Steve Lacone, on the other hand, obviously hadn’t dared to shower at all. Baby powder still dusted his wavy black hair. I had to hold my breath to keep from laughing.

After the prank succeeded, Dickie pushed the idea of sneaking into the girls’ dorm more. He let the plan drop around Jess in the hall between classes. “Hell, yeah!” she said. “You boys better come over.”

“You’re in, superstud,” Dickie told me afterward. “The ladies await.”

I slapped his hand and faked excitement. There was no way to back out now.

Friday night, we stayed in our dorm room until after Mike went around for eleven PM check-in. As soon as he was gone, we stuffed our beds with pillows and dressed like ninjas — black pants, black hoodies, black socks, and shoes. Dickie grabbed some condoms in foil packets from the teapot he kept near his bed. “Need some?” he asked. “Boy Scouts are always prepared, right?”

I slipped a couple foil packets into my back pocket without looking at them.

Dickie checked his watch and called Sunny. “Five minutes till launch, Sunshine,” he told her. “Keep a lookout. Flick the lights if you see trouble.”

We opened our door, careful to stop the latch from clicking. Hassert had night duty. Normally, he stayed in the office watching TV, but sometimes he wandered the halls, pounding on doors if he heard anyone talking. “Shut your yap traps,” he’d say, like he was some badass drill sergeant.

We had to sneak down to Heinous and Cheese’s room, since they lived on the first floor and there was no way to dangle out our second-story window without being spotted by a security guard. Dickie tapped a code on the door, and Heinous let us in.

Their room smelled funky, like athlete’s foot spray and soggy Cheetos. That’s how Cheese got his nickname. His fingers and clothes were permanently stained orange from constantly eating bags of puffed cheese. Even though Cheese acted like a perverted koala — sleepy, sex-crazed, and harmless — he was wicked smart. He’d scored a perfect 240 on his PSATs. Then, on a dare, he’d taken the real SATs while completely drunk and missed only one question. The weird thing was, he almost never did homework, so his grades sucked. He mostly slept — twelve hours a day.

Cheese rubbed his eyes and groaned when we came in. “All my money’s in my underwear,” he said.

“Nothing’s happening,” Dickie said. “Go back to sleep.”

“Oh, yeah,” Cheese muttered. “I’ll show you sleep.”

We kept the lights off and looked out the window. “Well, boys,” Heinous said, like a general addressing his troops, “tonight you go where few have gone before. If you survive, you’ll be men. But it could get rough out there, so if you need me to take your place . . .”

“Dream on,” Dickie said.

I peered out the window for security guards. At least one usually patrolled campus, and part of me clung to the hope that he might be camped between our dorm and the girls’, forcing us to call things off. No such luck, though. Dickie spotted the security guard on his normal rounds, walking between two dorms at the far end of the quad. “Here comes our opening,” he said.

We waited for the guard to disappear behind a wall before climbing out. Heinous slid the window shut after us.

On three, Dickie and I bolted across the expanse of grass between dorms. I never ran so fast in my life, practically diving to the ground once I reached the girls’ dorm. Dickie crawled to the base of what he thought was Sunny’s window and tapped the glass while I struggled to catch my breath. If an RC looked out, we were screwed beyond belief.

After a long, freaky silence, the window slid open. “You there?” Sunny whispered.

“Right-o,” Dickie said, popping up.

I gave him a boost. Once he crawled in, he leaned out and gave me a hand. Sunny closed the blinds after us like a pro.

“Hey,” she said to me.

“Hey,” I replied, my voice tight.

“You made it,” Jess crooned. She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me. “You kids have fun,” she said to Dickie and Sunny, then she led me to her room on the second floor. She didn’t bother checking for RCs or stopping the doors from clicking, as if being bold was enough to keep us from getting busted.

“Where’s Rachel?” I asked once we were safe in her room.

“I kicked her out for the night. She understands.”

Jess lit a few candles and dimmed the lights. I sat on her bed, careful not to hit my head on the top bunk.

“I wondered if you’d come,” she said.

“I told you I would.”

“There’s a difference between what people say and what they do.” She slid off her shoes and sat beside me. “I’m impressed — that’s all.”

“It’s nothing. I’ve done far more dangerous things than this.”

“I bet.” She stared at me, but didn’t say anything else.

“So, are you tired?” I asked.

“A little.”

“Do you want to go to sleep?”

“What do you think?”

I glanced at her walls, feigning interest in her music posters. “I like your room. Are all these posters yours?”

“You are such a dork.”

I opened my mouth to explain why I thought her posters were cool, but before I could, Jess pushed me back and straddled my waist. The plastic condom wrappers in my pocket crinkled. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes and slid her hand into my pocket, fishing out the condoms. “Expecting something, mister?”

“No.” My face flushed. “I, uh . . . They’re not really mine.”

She tossed the condoms onto her desk. “That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s true.”

She laughed and kissed me. “I’ve got better ones,” she whispered, pulling off my shirt.

I started to pull off hers, but I forgot to unbutton the top. “Very slick,” she said. “How about I take off the bra?”

“I’ve got it.” I fiddled with the back clasp with one hand, only it wouldn’t come undone.

Jess smirked. “Try two hands, hotshot.”

I did, but those little hooks were impossible. She finally reached around and undid her bra with a smooth, easy flick.

“How’d you do that?”

“One of the mysteries of being a girl.” She leaned over me, her skin warm against mine.

My gaze kept drifting to her chest. I acted like I was only interested in her tattoo, brushing my fingers down her cleavage, over the black lines in her smooth skin. There were five Japanese characters, each slightly larger than a quarter. Before, I’d only seen the first two characters and the top half of the third, but now I could see all five, nestled between the slopes of her bare breasts.

“Is this your first time?” she asked.

“No.” My voice cracked. “How about you?”

Jess chuckled. “Very funny.”

She kissed my neck and unsnapped my jeans, so I unsnapped hers. Then she slid her pants over the curve of her hips, pulling her legs free one at a time. It was a lot like danger golf — like we were daring each other to go further. I struggled out of my jeans, bumping the wall with my elbow.

Jess paused, wearing only her black underwear. Images from movies shuffled through my head. What came next? Kiss her? Slide my hand up her leg? Say something manly?

Luckily, Jess took over, placing my hands on her hips and moving against me.

Even though I’d fantasized about sex for years, now that it was actually happening, it was different from what I’d expected. I mean, it felt intense, yet part of me kept getting distracted, so I couldn’t fully experience the intensity.
This is it,
I told myself,
I’m in bed with Jessica Keen,
but telling myself that only took me one step further from feeling it.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine being with Jess, which was weird, since I actually was with her. Then I opened my eyes, but I didn’t know where to look. My gaze finally settled on her chest, tracing the lines of her tattoo. I pictured her lying on a padded table while some guy carved those symbols into her bare skin with needle and ink. She’d probably used a fake ID, because she wasn’t yet eighteen. I wondered what the Japanese characters meant and why they were so important to her that she’d want them etched between her breasts, near her heart. Together, the five characters resembled a ladder. It reminded me of a passage from
The Great Gatsby
that I’d read recently — the one where Gatsby is walking with Daisy and he looks at the lines on the sidewalk and thinks of them as a ladder that he could climb to a place where everything would be exactly the way he’d always imagined it. Except a few of the black lines tattooed on Jess’s chest were diagonal, so if it was a ladder, some of the rungs must have been broken.

Jess bit me, bringing me out of my thoughts. Why the hell was I thinking about
The Great Gatsby
when she was right there? Naked. I tried again to focus on her. Things got more intense, but only distantly, like my body was having sex in a different room from my mind. Our breathing picked up until at last we collapsed against each other.

Her hair, damp with sweat, stuck to my cheek. I wasn’t certain if that was it, only there was no way to ask without sounding stupid.

“Was that okay?” I whispered.

She drew back to look at me, and I liked her then. I really did. Because I could tell she was just as lost as me, even though she hid it well.

I wanted to laugh and say something about how that wasn’t what I’d expected. Something about how I could never get the world inside my head to fit with the world outside. But I couldn’t think of a way to say it without offending her. “It’s like
The Great Gatsby,
” I whispered.

“You’re a strange egg,” she said.

Jess pulled on her shirt and curled with her back to me.

After a while, I fell asleep.