Good Girl, Bad Girl(3)
“For fuck’s sake!” says Evie, sighing in disgust.
“We’re not here to pass judgment,” Guthrie warns her.
“But she’s making shit up. What’s the point of sharing if people are gonna tell lies?”
“Fuck you!” shouts Serena, flipping Evie the finger.
“Bite me,” says Evie.
Serena leaps to her feet. “You’re a freak! Everybody knows it.”
“Please sit down,” says Guthrie, trying to keep the girls apart.
“She called me a fucking liar,” whines Serena.
“No, I didn’t,” says Evie. “I called you a psycho fucking liar.”
Serena ducks under Guthrie’s arm and launches herself across the space, knocking Evie off her chair. The two of them are wrestling on the floor, but Evie seems to be laughing as she wards off the blows.
An alarm has been raised and a security team bursts into the group therapy room, dragging Serena away. The rest of the teenagers are ordered back to their bedrooms, all except for Evie. Dusting herself off, she touches the corner of her lip, then rubs a smudge of blood between her thumb and forefinger.
I give her a tissue. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. She punches like a girl.”
“What happened to your neck?”
“Someone tried to strangle me.”
“Why?”
“I have that sort of face.”
I pull up a chair and motion for Evie to sit down. She complies, crossing her legs, revealing an electronic tag on her ankle.
“Why are you wearing that?”
“They think I’m trying to escape.”
“Are you?”
Evie raises her forefinger to her lips and makes a shushing sound.
“First chance I get.”
2
* * *
CYRUS
* * *
Guthrie meets me in a pub called Man of Iron, named after the nearby Stanton Ironworks, which closed down years ago. He’s perched on a stool with an empty pint glass resting between his elbows, watching a fresh beer being pulled.
“Your regular boozer?” I ask, sitting next to him.
“My escape,” he replies. His fingers are pudgy and pale, decorated with a tri-band wedding ring.
The barman asks if I want something. I shake my head and Guthrie looks disappointed to be drinking alone. Over his shoulder I see a lounge area with a pool table and slot machines that ping and blink like a fairground ride.
“You’re looking good,” I say. Lying. “How’s married life?”
“Terrific. Great. Making me fat.” He pats his stomach. “You should try it.”
“Getting fat?”
“Marriage.”
“How are the kids?”
“Growing like weeds. We have two now, a boy and a girl, eight and five.”
I can’t remember his wife’s name but recall her being eastern European, with a thick accent and a wedding dress that looked like a craft project that had gone horribly wrong. Guthrie had met her when he was teaching part-time at an English-language school in London.
“What did you think of Evie?” he asks.
“She’s a real charmer.”
“She’s one of them.”
“One of who?”
“The lie detectors.”
I suppress a laugh. He looks aggrieved.
“You saw her. She knew you were lying. She’s a truth wizard—just like you wrote about in your thesis.”
“You read my thesis?”
“Every word.”
I make a face. “That was eight years ago.”
“It was published.”
“And I concluded that truth wizards didn’t exist.”
“No, you said they represented a tiny percentage of the population—maybe one in five hundred—and the best of them were accurate eighty percent of the time. You also wrote that someone could develop even greater skills, a person who wasn’t disrupted by emotions or lack of familiarity with the subject; someone who functioned at a higher level.”
Christ, he did read it!
I want to stop the conversation and tell Guthrie he’s wrong. I spent two years writing my thesis on truth wizards, reading the literature, exploring the history, and conducting experiments on more than three thousand volunteers. Evie Cormac is too young to be a truth wizard. Usually, they’re middle-aged or older, able to draw on their experiences in certain professions, such as detectives, judges, lawyers, psychologists, and secret service agents. Teenagers are too busy looking in the mirror or studying their phones to be reading the subtle, almost imperceptible, changes in people’s facial expressions or the nuances of their body language or their tones of voice.
Guthrie is waiting for me to respond.
“I think you’re mistaken,” I say.
“But you saw her do it.”
“She’s a very clever, manipulative teenager.”
The social worker sighs and peers into his half-empty glass. “She’s driven me to this.”
“What?”
“Drinking. According to my doctor I have the body of a sixty-year-old; I have high blood pressure, fatty tissue around my heart, and borderline cirrhosis.”