Seven Ways We Lie(35)

“I . . . okay,” I say, starting to see it from her angle. I don’t know why I feel so reluctant to agree with her. It’s not like I want this stuff to be her fault. “I mean . . . yeah.”

I hear her fumble with what I assume are blankets. “Aight,” she says, “I should go care for our dear, drunken June bug.”

“Night, Liv.” I plug my phone back in to charge and set it on my bedside table, then roll over, burying the side of my face in a cool pillow.

My eyes won’t close. My hands wander to my mouth, and I catch myself about to start biting again. I form fists, protecting my nails.

Skank bitch. Olivia made it sound as if the insult meant nothing to her. How many times has she heard that? How many times has she put up with it and not told me or Juniper?

Or is it only you she’s never told, Claire? whispers that voice in my head.

Of everything, that’s the thought that sticks: that yet again, I’m being excluded. I squeeze my eyes shut, selfishly hating myself, as if it’s the time for that sort of thing.





IT STARTS RAINING AT 3:00 AM ON SUNDAY MORNING. The rain starts and stops outside the window over and over. Sleep, I tell myself, but it doesn’t come, not like the focus I can drive myself into onstage. Lying here, I can’t clear my mind, let alone get out of my head into some other safe haven.

I hate nighttime. In the chunks of night before I drift off, my brain bombards me with every thought I’ve been kicking back since morning. Tonight, the spinning wheel has stopped on the topic of sadness and how unoriginal it is. People have always been unhappy. It’s only in the last hundred years—or fewer, maybe—that people have started thinking that unhappiness is this abnormal thing, that we’re all entitled to happiness somehow. Such bullshit. That’s not how the world works. I bet in Grigory Veselovsky’s time in Russia, all the serfs or peasants or whatever were probably major-depressive by our standards.

So for the last three hours, I’ve lain here being unoriginal. I don’t know.

Crying ceased to do anything for me ages ago. I just stare, these nights. Stare at the window, until a fitful sleep drags my mind under, kicking, thrashing, silent.

· · · · · · ·


A KNOCK COMES ON MY DOOR. I GLANCE TO THE wall, at the old-timey novelty clock Dad got me for Christmas back in seventh grade. It has a quote from Shakespeare’s As You Like It—“One man in his time plays many parts”—and the comedy-tragedy theater masks below.

The clock reads 6:00 PM. A whole day gone, and I hardly noticed. Thank God for the Internet. With a little help from addictive games, I can forget myself at home, turn into a shell of my own mind. It’s nicely numbing. This weekend, I’ve been marathoning Blade-X, which, despite its unfortunate name, is not a cheap brand of grocery-store razor, but a first-person shooter involving large quantities of badly animated blood.

Another knock. “Yeah, what?” I say, as my avatar slams a crate into a metal wall. A shiny shield falls out, and I strap it onto my back.

The door creaks open. Olivia slips in and shuts the door behind her. “Hey.”

“Yo,” I say, not pausing the game.

“Have you been in bed all day?”

“Yup.”

“What do you want for dinner?”

“Not hungry.” Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten with her and Dad on Friday. I hope she doesn’t think that’s going to be normal. The energy I had the day before yesterday is long gone.

“What are you playing?” she asks, walking to my desk and sitting down.

“It’s called Blade-X.”

“Sounds, uh, stimulating.”

I don’t reply, sheathing my knives so I can climb up a water tower.

“Do you meet many people playing those?” she asks.

“I don’t have, like, a social life through gaming, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Okay,” she says. “?’Cause this whole isolation thing doesn’t seem super-fun.”

As I edge around the side of the water tower, bullets spray up at me from below. I roll to one side and start climbing the second ladder, tilting the perspective. There’s got to be an entrance here somewhere. . .

“I was glad you surfaced Friday, because you’ve seemed so mad lately,” Olivia says. “I’ve been trying to give you space, ’cause I thought it was something I did.”

I’m hardly listening. I’m dying up here. Climbing the ladders drains my energy, and dark, insect-like enemies have started swarming out the top of the water tower. I can’t fight them with my vitals bar empty—I have to get inside, somewhere safe.

Olivia continues. “But someone said maybe you were going through something, so I thought I’d ask if—”

I slam the pause button, disbelieving. “Whoa, wait. ‘Someone’? You asked someone about how to, like, fix me?”

“What? That’s not what I said.” Olivia drums her gold nails on the glass top of my desk. “Look. I know it’s not my place to tell you what to do with your time, but—”

“You’re right. It’s absolutely not.”

“But, Kat, you’ve got to get out of bed. You’ve got to eat and have an actual sleep schedule. That’s not a lot. That’s, like, bare-minimum, day-to-day stuff.”