One of Us is Lying(39)

Nate


Friday, October 5, 11:30 p.m.


My father’s awake for a change when I get home Friday from a party at Amber’s house. It was still going strong when I left, but I’d had enough. I’ve got ramen noodles on the stove and toss some vegetables into Stan’s cage. As usual he just blinks at them like an ingrate.

“You’re home early,” my father says. He looks the same as ever—like hell. Bloated and wrinkled with a pasty, yellow tinge to his skin. His hand shakes when he lifts his glass. A couple of months ago I came home one night and he was barely breathing, so I called an ambulance. He spent a few days in the hospital, where doctors told him his liver was so damaged he could drop dead at any time. He nodded and acted like he gave a shit, then came home and cracked another bottle of Seagram’s.

I’ve been ignoring that ambulance bill for weeks. It’s almost a thousand dollars thanks to our crap insurance, and now that I have zero income there’s even less chance we can pay it.

“I have things to do.” I dump the noodles into a bowl and head for my room with them.

“Seen my phone?” my father calls after me. “Kept ringing today but I couldn’t find it.”

“That’s ’cause it’s not on the couch,” I mutter, and shut my door behind me. He was probably hallucinating. His phone hasn’t rung in months.

I scarf down my noodles in five minutes, then settle back onto my pillows and put in my earbuds so I can call Bronwyn. It’s my turn to pick a movie, thank God, but we’re barely half an hour into Ringu when Bronwyn decides she’s had enough.

“I can’t watch this alone. It’s too scary,” she says.

“You’re not alone. I’m watching it with you.”

“Not with me. I need a person in the room for something like this. Let’s watch something else instead. My turn to pick.”

“I’m not watching another goddamn Divergent movie, Bronwyn.” I wait a beat before adding, “You should come over and watch Ringu with me. Climb out your window and drive here.” I say it like it’s a joke, and it mostly is. Unless she says yes.

Bronwyn pauses, and I can tell she’s thinking about it as a not-joke. “My window’s a fifteen-foot drop to the ground,” she says. Joke.

“So use a door. You’ve got, like, ten of them in that house.” Joke.

“My parents would kill me if they found out.” Not-joke. Which means she’s considering it. I picture her sitting next to me in those little shorts she had on when I was at her house, her leg pressed against mine, and my breathing gets shallow.

“Why would they?” I ask. “You said they can sleep through anything.” Not-joke. “Come on, just for an hour till we finish the movie. You can meet my lizard.” It takes a few seconds of silence for me to realize how that might be interpreted. “That’s not a line. I have an actual lizard. A bearded dragon named Stan.”

Bronwyn laughs so hard she almost chokes. “Oh my God. That would have been completely out of character and yet … for a second I really did think you meant something else.”

I can’t help laughing too. “Hey, girl. You were into that smooth talk. Admit it.”

“At least it’s not an anaconda,” Bronwyn sputters. I laugh harder, but I’m still kind of turned on. Weird combination.

“Come over,” I say. Not-joke.

I listen to her breathe for a while, until she says, “I can’t.”

“Okay.” I’m not disappointed. I never really thought she would. “But you need to pick a different movie.”

We agree on the last Bourne movie and I’m watching it with my eyes half-closed, listening to increasingly frequent texts from Amber chime in the background. She might be starting to think we’re something we’re not. I reach for that phone to shut it down when Bronwyn says, “Nate. Your phone.”

“What?”

“Someone keeps texting you.”

“So?”

“So it’s really late.”

“And?” I ask, annoyed. I hadn’t pegged Bronwyn as the possessive type, especially when all we ever do is talk on the phone and she just turned down my joke-not-joke invitation.

“It’s not … customers, is it?”

I exhale and shut the other phone off. “No. I told you, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m not stupid.”

“All right.” She sounds relieved, but tired. Her voice is starting to drag. “I might go to sleep now.”

“Okay. Do you want to hang up?”

“No.” She laughs thickly, already half-asleep. “I’m running out of minutes, though. I just got a warning. I have half an hour left.”

Those prepaid phones have hundreds of minutes on them, and she’s had it less than a week. I didn’t realize we’d been talking that much. “I’ll give you another phone tomorrow,” I tell her, before I remember tomorrow’s Saturday and we don’t have school. “Bronwyn, wait. You need to hang up.”

I think she’s already asleep until she mutters, “What?”

“Hang up, okay? So your minutes don’t run out and I can call you tomorrow about getting you another phone.”