I don’t answer right away. I feel guilty for lying about Langston, but I can’t exactly tell her the senator’s shifty henchmen bailed me out. That would invite too many other questions. And every minute I waste, Preston’s killer might be getting farther away. It’s like Amanda’s newest cop show, The Clock Is Ticking. In the opening credits, a movie preview voice-over man informs viewers that only forty percent of criminals not apprehended in the first forty-eight hours are eventually brought to justice.
I hear the telltale drip as the coffee starts to brew. I turn away from Darla to grab a pair of chipped coffee mugs from the cabinet. “Your car,” I say finally. I give Darla the Humane Society mug and keep the surfer mug Amanda painted for me. “Or Ben’s truck. Is there any way I can borrow a vehicle, just for tomorrow?”
“When do you think you’ll be getting your car back?”
She must think that the police impounded it as evidence. Instead of correcting her, I trace one of my mug’s surfboards with my finger. Behind me, coffee rains down into the glass pot, filling the kitchen with an earthy smell. “I’m not really sure,” I say.
“I see.” Darla’s face does its drooping thing again. We both know I’m not telling her the whole story.
“But I have to find Pres’s killer, because everyone thinks I’m guilty, and I’m not.” The coffeemaker hisses. “You believe me, right?” I jump up to grab the coffee, almost sticking my hand in the cloud of steam it belches out at the end of the cycle. I’m afraid to look at her right then. I know what she’ll say, but what if I see something different reflected in her eyes?
Her voice is soft. “Oh, Max, of course I believe you. I just wish you had come to us for advice before you ran off.”
I turn around slowly, but there’s no doubt or judgment in her face. Just a divot of sadness between her thinning eyebrows.
I set the mug of coffee down in front of her. She always drinks it black. I add a slosh of milk to mine, and a spoonful of sugar big enough to kill most of the coffee taste. “I got scared and I messed up,” I say. “But I’m coming to you now.” I give her my most hopeful look.
I don’t tell her where I’m planning to go with the car—back to the Rosewood Center for Boys. I never told her how much that place sucked, but she knows I hated it. We had to return for visits with the social worker, Anna, for the first couple of months after I got adopted, just until a caseload spot opened up for a Vista Palisades social worker. Anna was the nicest person there, but I still used to get all tense in the car on the way, as if part of me was afraid the building would swallow me up when I went back inside. As if I’d spend the rest of my life getting my ass kicked by Henry the Happy Sociopath. “I need to find out the truth.”
Darla runs one finger around the rim of her coffee mug. “What you need is to let the police handle that. Go to school. Make up the work you’ve missed. Graduate.”
School? Seriously? “Darla. The FBI is just waiting for the forensics report to link me to the fire in Vegas. They think I killed Pres. Probably everyone at school does too. I can’t go back there.”
She shakes her head like I’m being overly dramatic. “I don’t want you to drop out. That could wreck your whole future. Just tell the truth and everything will be fine.”
I never believed that, not even before someone put a bloody phone in my trunk and called the cops to tell them Preston and I were arguing at the top of Ravens’ Cliff. The truth doesn’t get you very far on the streets, or in a group home, or even in high school. That’s probably why the idea of Liars, Inc. appealed to me. Everybody lies. You might as well get paid for it. I shake my head in disbelief as I think about sitting at the cafeteria table with Pres and Parvati, joking about our new business venture. It seems like a million years ago. “I tried,” I say finally. “They didn’t believe me.”
“What does Parvati think about all of this?”
“Who cares?” I mutter, stirring my coffee violently.
Darla’s eyes widen slightly. She’s never heard me say anything even remotely unflattering about Parvati. “Are you two fighting?”
“I wish that was all.” I glance up for a second and then train my eyes on my coffee again, trying not to think about how the creamy, tan color reminds me of Parvati’s skin. “Let’s just say she lied to me about some important stuff.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Fu—hell no,” I say. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
“Does it have to do with the investigation?”
“Sort of.” I pause. It might feel good to tell someone, to release a little bit of the rage inside me. Maybe I would be able to think more clearly afterward. “You really want to know? The FBI found videos on Pres’s computer of Parvati and him together,” I blurt out.
Darla almost chokes on her coffee. “She cheated on you? Could they have been from before you started dating?”
“Maybe. Does it matter? Either way she lied to me. According to her, she and Preston were never more than friends.” My sharp voice cuts through the quiet kitchen. I take a deep breath and try to tone it down so I don’t wake the babies again.
Darla reaches across the table and pats my hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sure you feel betrayed, but maybe it’s not as bad as you think. Maybe she has an explanation.”
I shrug. “You think it’s okay to lie about stuff like that as long as you have a reason?”
Darla shakes her head. “No, but everybody lies sometimes, Max. And I’ve never seen you happier than when you’re with Parvati. It seems like she’s the only person you actually confide in.” She sips her coffee. “I wouldn’t be too quick to kick that person out of your life.”
Darla is right that Parvati was the only person I really talked to. She knows so many things about me that other people don’t. But I always assumed that was a two-way street. Finding out she kept something so major from me . . . cuts deep.
I don’t think I ever lied to her.
Darla adjusts the collar of her nightgown. “Do you love her?”
I slouch forward. “I don’t know. What does that even mean?”
A smile plays at her lips. “Remember when you hit that kid with a rock because he was bullying Amanda?”
“Yeah.” Not my finest hour, but he kind of deserved it.
“It’s like that. When you care about someone so much that you’ll do anything—even stupid or destructive things—for them.”
“That sounds more like mental illness than love.”
Darla doesn’t respond. She’s staring down into the bottom of her cup as if she could tell my future by the inch of remaining coffee. “You know, before we adopted you, your dad almost left me because of a lie.”
“You? Seriously? I always thought you were perfect.”
“No one’s perfect.” She laughs under her breath. “I really wanted to adopt a child, but the shop had been struggling and Ben thought we should wait until we were financially stable. I thought that would never happen. I ended up getting back in contact with a guy I dated in college.”