OK, yes. That’s how it actually happened. I prefer the first version, and I’d worry less about my bank account had it been true, but yes, I made that up. I do that sometimes. My application to move into the executive team for one of Charlotte’s best-known megastores had been unsuccessful. Again. Which meant that I would still be going into work at three in the morning, making sure the backroom kept the store stocked and that the previous day’s sales were steadily, constantly replaced, a new item slotted into the shelves as its counterpart left the building in Great Deal’s ubiquitous and horrible yellow shopping carts. That was my life. Another cog in the great yellow machine, working my eight or nine hours till I crawled back to my apartment at lunchtime, to the roommate I needed to share my rent but never saw because I was in bed by six every night. That was my life. Nine dollars an hour with a degree in biology and a minor in English, subjects almost comically irrelevant to what I did for a living, a job I had taken on as a way of building up cash while I was a student with the vague idea that it would help me prepare for med school. But I hadn’t gone to med school. Hadn’t even applied, though sometimes I pretended I had.
Once last week, I told a new employee in hardlines—cute in his way, but far too young for me—that I had been accepted at Chapel Hill and would start next fall. It was a stupid and unnecessary lie, and I knew it would bite me in the ass even as I was saying it, though even I was surprised at how quickly he started avoiding me. No biggie. I am used to being alone.
While I’m making my confession, I should also say that Chad Hoskins wasn’t my boyfriend and we hadn’t had dinner together the night before I left Charlotte. He was my occasional therapist, the closest thing to a psychiatrist my health insurance would cover, and though I fantasized about him occasionally, we had no relationship outside of his dingy office.
And there you have it. Me. Jan the liar.
Voted—in a dazzling bit of mean-spirited group creativity—most likely of her graduating high school class to have flammable pants.
So yes, I’m used to not being believed. I’m used to feeling stupid and humiliated, caught in the web of my own fantasies, mocked, passed over, and rejected, usually for reasons entirely in my own control.
Except that—painfully, inexplicably—they’re not.
I lie. I can’t help it. I don’t mean to. Not usually. I just prefer the version of my life that I make up, but then I say it, not out of malice or the desire to trick or mislead others, but to get that nicer, happier version of the world out there where I can see it, where I can believe in it . . . but then that’s not true either, is it? Of course I mean to mislead others. Or myself.
It’s pathetic. And it’s why Marcus left me.
Chapter Nine
He sits there in the dark. He? I have no idea, but I’m chained up, imprisoned, and someone is there, someone I assume is responsible for my situation, so yes, decades of books and movies and damsel-in-distress crime TV says he.
Unless . . .
“Are you stuck here too?” I say to the darkness, somehow steadying the quaver in my voice till I can barely hear it. “Are you tied up? Manacled? Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
I strain to see, leaning closer so that the chain around my wrist clanks and I feel its weight shift, but the movement doesn’t make my eyes any better, and I can’t make out anything in the darkness beyond that lumpen shape. Maybe he is asleep, drugged like I was, dragged in and left to wake in his own time. The sigh could have been a snore.
But he hasn’t moved, and what little I can see suggests he is sitting.
People sleep sitting up.
But the breath . . . if it was a snore, surely there would have been more than one? I stare harder into the blackness, not wanting it to be true, wishing I were anywhere other than here. I want to roll onto my side with my face to the wall, to pretend none of it is real, but I daren’t turn away. I can see almost nothing, but I can’t take my eyes off the shape, a huddled, oversize crow perched there in the corner.
“Can you hear me?” I try again. “Can you? Speak to me. I just want . . . I need to know what is happening to me. What is . . . going on. What . . .” And suddenly something inside breaks, and my voice, which had been low and raspy, is a ragged, full-throated scream that bounces off the walls like gunfire.
“What do you want?” I shout. “What have I done to you, you sick bastard? What do you want?”
And then there are almost no words. Just my screaming, crying despair, raw as the howl of a wounded dog. It gets me off the bed and a step toward the corner, to the full limit of the chain around my wrist, and my fury yanks at it, though I barely feel the pain, a squall of bellowing and cursing that takes the air from my lungs. It rings in the silence as I collapse back onto the mattress, trembling all over, unable to stand, sprawled on my side, my left arm keening from the edge of the manacle, my anger and fear folding around me. I have never done anything so clearly futile in my life. I’m weak from the exertion, cowed by my own powerlessness and terror.
For several minutes, everything is quiet. Then . . .
I barely notice at first, but it comes again—the faintest creak—and I see that the shape in the corner is different, taller, as if he has sat up straight. There’s a long, empty silence, and then a prick of light comes on at what I take to be waist height. It’s red, but it turns green almost immediately, and now the breathing sound is louder and different, sibilant somehow, like wind in dry grass or breakers coursing over shingle.
I go very still, not daring to swallow or breathe, too terrified to speak or move a single muscle. I am tense with the strangeness of what is happening, eyes and ears straining for something, anything that will make sense of the sound, the tiny green light. A moment passes, and then a strange inhuman voice uncurls from the corner of the room. It’s slow and deep, distorted so that it drags and rolls like a steel barrel on a hard floor. It is neither male nor female, and it says only one thing:
“Jan.”
Chapter Ten
Lying is creation ex nihilo. It’s parthenogenesis, the goddess Athena born fully armed from the head—the mind—of her father, Zeus. Lying is making things up out of thin air. Except that the air is toxic, corrupting everyone who hears the lie, and the liar most of all.