Seven Ways We Lie(79)

It swallows him, foot by foot.

He pauses in the doorway for one moment, a black-coated silhouette against the gold porch light, messy hair, strong profile, disappearing eyes.

I lift my hand.

The door shuts,

the click of a clean break.


I sway, expecting to dissolve,

but my body holds fast.

My hands don’t shake. My head is clear. My eyes are dry.

And I think—

somehow—

I will be all right.

This time, I will.





THE DOORBELL RINGS AT 5:30. “I’LL GET IT,” I CALL down the hall. Grace thanks me from the depths of her room.

I hop down the steps two at a time, catch sight of who’s behind the glass door, and slam to a halt at the bottom of the staircase.

It’s Lucas. The second I see his face, I’m sure of it: he knows.

I open the door. The sound of rain crashes in. The fact that he’s not smiling terrifies me.

We sit down in the living room, his curly hair fluffing out from the dampness. The wooden mobile hanging in the alcove twirls and bobs in the air current from the heating vent, distracting me.

“Hey. Why are you here?” I ask. It feels strange to ask, given the constant presence he used to be under my family’s roof. He’d pull into my driveway to pick me up every morning, and we’d drive back every afternoon talking. I kissed him on the roof, under the branches of our oak tree, in the humidity of a summer nightfall. I remember the roughness of his arms, his palms.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

What do I say to that?

I clear my throat. “How was, um. How was the meet yesterday?”

“Fine, good,” he says. “I PR’ed in the 500 Free. Two seconds faster than my old best.”

“I . . . congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

Seconds trickle by. I’ve never felt like I’m small-talking with him, not before now. Something is missing from us. Sometimes you can feel the detachment in the way someone looks at you, the way they arrange their body facing yours, the way they blink and sigh and put their hands on the table. Something has been subtracted. I don’t know if I lost it, or if he put it away, or if someone else has it, but this isn’t the pair we used to be.

Then he’s saying something in a different voice, one I remember more clearly.

“I’m sorry for being so . . . you know, after we broke up. I shouldn’t have acted like you weren’t—hadn’t been—special.” The veil of friendliness slips askew from the air, and I see his face. He’s saying sorry, but he means something else. What is it? This used to happen all the time. He’d make reluctant apologies, angry apologies, in the place of explanations or amends.

“Right,” I say, and I know he expects me to apologize in return. Apologize for what I’ve done to him.

The words, though, are somewhere else, somewhere I can’t reach them, because I’m looking at him and thinking, maybe it’s not so much that I’ve lost a grip on what we were. Maybe I never quite knew what we were in the first place.

Looking at him, I don’t feel satisfied, not like I did yesterday when I heard everybody talking about him and Norman. Now I remember the weight of telling him I loved him. In March, we went out on his birthday, and we spent the day hopping around Paloma’s antiques shops, imagining that weird old junk was lost treasure from another world. After dinner, we drove home. He kissed me good night, and I told him in a nervous blurt, and his smile brightened and widened until it looked almost painful, and he said he loved me, too.

No, this isn’t satisfaction.

“That’s my last apology, I think.” His voice is strangled. “I hope you got what you needed.”

“Right.”

Lucas shakes his head and stands. He takes a breath as if he’s going to say something huge. His eyes are lit with accusation, but he shuts his mouth and leaves, and for the first time, I don’t want to call after him. I don’t want to say another word.

I walk back to the kitchen, my steps uncertain. For so long, Lucas was my claim to myself. For months, I’ve lived on some hazy gas planet of confusion and bitterness. I never understood what made me so much worse than other people, that I deserved to be alone—

But it wasn’t about me, in the end, was it?

Maybe my self-blame was another kind of selfishness.

My hands go to my mouth, but I don’t bite my nails. I level my eyes at my warped, dark reflection in the oven door.

Some awful, acrid taste prickles at the back of my tongue, and it finally hits me. The weight of what I did. It slams into me so hard that I sit down at the kitchen table, the breath knocked out of my chest. I stare at my trembling hands.

I am finally irredeemable.





ZOMBIES PILE ONTO ME.

“Shit.” I hit the down key, trying to turn and run, but their teeth have already dug into my legs. “Shit, shit, dammit,” I hiss, shoving my laptop forward in defeat. The zombies’ decayed faces rise up the screen, loose-jawed, flaps of flesh peeling from their pallid foreheads. They overpower me. Continue? asks the screen, taunting me. Of course I’m going to f*cking continue. It’s been seven hours of me continuing.

I sink down in the kitchen chair. This level is impossible. After the miniboss, there’s an ambush. None of my weaponry, let alone my armor, is strong enough to take this much undead power, but I’ve been trying all day. My second day of skipping school, slouching from spot to spot in our house, gaming.