Seven Ways We Lie(14)

I end up at Paloma High somehow, parked in the junior lot. Our school is a different building at night, an empty body with no light in its eyes. Staring out my windshield at the three-story mishmash of brick and modernism, I can only think about the tiny sound of those two people kissing. The remembered whisper, I love you.

Part of me wonders what it would feel like, a kiss. I’ve never felt compelled to try putting my mouth on somebody else’s mouth. I refuse to believe it feels like a symphony of violins, or a ferociously panning camera, or an eruption of emotion in the center of my chest, or anything else it’s supposed to be.

I look at my hands. I lift two fingers, close my eyes, and press my lips against them.

Nothing. It feels like nothing at all.

After a motionless second, I take my hand away. I exit the car and slam the door, embarrassed all of a sudden that I felt compelled to do that. Embarrassed that I even wondered. I clamber onto the hood of the car, lean back against the windshield, and stare upward, my hands deep in my pockets. The galaxy is spray-painted across the sky. Looking at it, I feel swallowed up. Infinitesimally small.

I know Earth is whirling on its axis at one thousand miles per hour. I know it is whipping around the sun at sixty-six thousand miles per hour. I know we’re all hurtling around the center of the Milky Way at four hundred and eighty-three thousand miles per hour. But lying here, I feel motionless. I take a breath, hold it for a count of ten, and let it go. It billows out over my head and trails off into the black sky.

You’ve done your part, a voice says in the back of my mind. You have no more information to give the school. Worrying about this is pointless.

But the girl’s voice lingers in my ears, low, husky, and sweet.





Since Monday, I’ve heard three days’ worth of theories.

Theories about who would be enough of a creep to screw a student.

Theories about who would be enough of a whore to screw a teacher.

The lunchroom has felt like a den of wolves, table after table filled with sharp teeth.

Strangers in line behind me yap and bark— they have new meat to tear into, today: Claire’s candidate list, newly posted.

“The student government lists are so hilarious, I almost died—”

“Matt Jackson is on there, what on earth—”

“—and Olivia Scott, which, like . . . you know?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve heard Olivia is, like, super nice. But she’s suuuch a sluuut, it’s insaaane, oh my God.”

“Yeah, holy shit, did you hear about her and Dan Silverstein last weekend?”

“Who wants to bet it’s her who’s dating the teacher? Oh my God, wait. I’m a genius. What if those guys are, like, a smoke screen of sluttiness?”


(I round on them because this week has built up and up,

and I can’t hold this towering weight anymore.) “Don’t

you

dare!”


This student body is a body

poisoning itself deliberately and intravenously.

Acid and hatred and bile.

No wonder I feel sick.


It’s quiet.

Two glossed O-mouths, four lined eyes staring.

I have never seen these girls before.

I hope I will never see them again.

If they’ll condemn Olivia’s open legs, they’ll condemn me if they ever find out— and they can go ahead.

Isn’t the number of partners as unimportant as the height, the weight, the eye color?

The age . . .?

But no, no, of course not, because we’ve been trained to obey adults; because rejecting somebody takes a steely, undeniable power when you’ve been brought up to accommodate, to appease, to please; because age does matter—I know that.

I swear.

“I’m sorry, Juniper,” one of the girls says, “I didn’t mean—”


I dash away. Past our table. Olivia and Claire look at me with widened eyes, as though I am made of stardust

and they cannot drink in enough of my strange, unfamiliar light.

A shocked look in the hallway as I walk as fast as I can, two, three, four scandalized glances for the girl showing emotion in the light of day.

I splay my fingers across my face, as if no one can see me past them, I wish, I wish, around-the-corner-through-the-door slammed-locked-shut—shaking—trembling— safe.


Light echoes off the bathroom walls, rings off the inside of the stalls.

Minutes. I spread calm like sunblock onto my skin.

There is a scream cupped somewhere in my ribs.

I shove my fingers under hot water. They turn red.

I look at my eyes in the mirror, but something there is not mine.

I have not settled back into my skin, and I cannot coerce myself into believing it: we are through, we are through, we are through.





YOU KNOW THAT FEELING WHERE YOU’RE EMBARRASSED on someone else’s behalf, and you want to dive under a blanket, thrash around, and yell, Why on earth would you do that?

I never thought I’d experience that sort of secondhand humiliation for Juniper, of all people. She’s so put-together all the time, it’s sometimes hard to believe she’s real.

Not that she’s perfect. Nobody’s perfect. I’m not perfect.

Still. It’s kind of reassuring when Juniper shows the world she’s not. Yelling at two random girls in the middle of a crowded lunchroom is far from perfect. I’ve never done anything that embarrassing.