*
The lies you tell to get yourself out of trouble are sneaky. They evolve during the telling, because their sole purpose is to keep the truth—that I’d been involved in a drug deal with Marlena when I was skipping, maybe, or that I’d had too much to drink—protected. These lies don’t necessarily need to be elegant, though they do require a magician’s sleight of hand, the ability to draw attention to your fingers when it should be kept on your sleeve, where the cards are disappearing. I ask Liam about his day, no eye contact, and go straight to the bathroom for a shower, for example. That day, I described what I liked to do downtown, how I’d hide in the stacks at the bookstore and the library, where I went for coffee when I had spare change. I talked and talked, and the more I talked, the greater the distance between what they believed I’d been doing and what I’d actually been doing. Lying felt like flexing a muscle. It turned out, I was good at it.
*
Mom didn’t speak during the drive home. She jumped out the second she parked, leaving me alone in the passenger seat, engine ticking as it cooled. The air around me sharpened until it matched the temperature outside. Marlena’s house had a few lights on but no cars in the driveway. Sal was home, but he was probably alone, even though he was young enough to need a babysitter. I stared myself down in the rearview until it grew dark and my hands lost feeling.
Inside, Mom was on the phone with Dad. Her words were awake, wheedling, as if she was trying to make a deal and play it cool at the same time. I pressed the front door until it clicked almost silently into the frame, and slipped off my shoes and coat, hovering in the hall’s shadows so I wouldn’t attract Mom’s attention. She strode circles around the kitchen island, yelling into the receiver. I grabbed the extra cordless from its dock against the wall near the bathroom and took it into my room, where I slid open the closet, nudged aside a pile of sandals and summer Keds, and curled myself up in the far back corner before pushing Talk.
“You can pretend all you want like this is just a phase, but I’m telling you right now, Rick, there’s something wrong. Have you ever known Catherine to do something like this? Doesn’t it bother you one tiny bit that your daughter’s been floating around, ditching school, hanging out God knows where, and that she doesn’t even seem remotely concerned about the consequences?”
“I’m not sure how this is my fault. I’m not the one who’s there every day, who’s supposed to be in charge of her coming and going,” Dad said. “She’s a smart kid. She’s allowed a few mistakes. Don’t make this into some big hoopla because you’re trying to get my attention.”
“This isn’t about us, for God’s sake,” Mom hissed. “This is about your daughter. Your real daughter, not that midlife crisis getting your dick wet.”
Getting your dick wet getting your dick wet, my brain shrieked over and over.
“Well,” Dad said. “There goes your credibility.”
On his end, a girl’s voice. “Jesus Christ,” Mom said.
I hung up.
*
I texted Marlena what felt like a dozen times that night, stupid, desperate things. I need to talk to you, My mom is crazy, Help, Where are you, four-or five-word fragments composed while I was possessed by such feverish emotion that I was almost blind with it. Great loneliness, profound isolation, a cataclysmic, overpowering sense of being misunderstood. When does that kind of deep feeling just stop? Where does it go? At fifteen, the world ended over and over and over again. To be so young is a kind of self-violence. No foresight, an inflated sense of wisdom, and yet you’re still responsible for your mistakes. It’s a little frightening to remember just how much, and how precisely, I felt. Now, if the world really did end, I think I’d just feel numb.
I stuck two cigarettes into my bra, sliding them between my breasts and tucking the filters into the place where my bra met in the middle. I wanted a drink. I wanted something. At the barn’s back door, I peered through the window before knocking. Marlena and her dad were on the couch, Sal between them. They were watching something on their shitty little TV. I left without knocking and smoked both cigarettes by myself in the jungle gym. There would’ve been nowhere for me to sit. Back inside my house, while Mom was taking a shower, I filled a tall glass to the brim with wine and shut myself up with it in my room, plugging my headphones into my CD player to listen to one of Marlena’s burned mixes—Pink Floyd, Weezer, a lot of Janis Joplin and Neko Case—turned up so loud my thoughts, my body, dissolved into sound.
*
In my earliest memory, Dad and I are sitting on the floor in the pantry, our knees poking each other. He’s helping me organize the cans. I don’t know how to read, so we organize by color, by the length of the names, by size. Blue cans on the bottom, big red cans on the top. We stack tuna cans in a tall cylinder. When we’ve taken them all out and put them all back in the best order, he scoops me into his lap and rocks me crazy-fast, not at all like a baby. He stands up and takes me with him, squeezing so hard my ribs flex inward and all the noise is pressed out of me. When he puts me down, there’s a dull band of pain around my chest. I love you, he says. I love you the best.
*
Instead of dropping me off in front of school, Jimmy parked in the lot and turned off the car. “I’m walking you in,” he said. A smear of salt formed a snowflake pattern on the dashboard. When I was little, I believed that nobody could see me unless I wanted them to. After Mom and Dad kissed me good night, I’d sneak downstairs and stand in the corner of the living room while they watched TV, Mom’s head on Dad’s lap, his arm draped across her body. I moved through the shadows and tucked myself between the wall and the back of an armchair. The screen cast dancing light on the pages of my book. It was only after Mom and Dad shut off the TV and went silent behind the door to their bedroom that I crept back upstairs, the house so dark I felt like I’d changed into darkness with it, the same nothing color as everything around me.
I pulled down the visor mirror, ignoring Jimmy’s groan of irritation. What would it feel like to be a student preceded by a bad reputation instead of a good one? I looked different. A yellowy color stained the corners below my eyes, fading into purple above my cheekbones. My hair brushed my shoulders, middle-parted so it hung straight on either side of my eyes. No bobby pins, no makeup, a spray of tiny pimples across my chin. After my alarm rang, I’d stared into the closet for half an hour, trying on outfit after outfit, before pulling a pair of jeans and a State sweatshirt out of the hamper. I’d thought that the freedom to dress how I wanted would be one of the few good things about KHS.
“Now.”