Seven Ways We Lie(8)

Then a familiar voice splinters my nirvana with an “Hola, Mateo,” and I keep my eyes closed and slur out a “No hablo Spanish,” and the voice says, “Yeah, sure, Mr. Half-Mexican,” and I say, “Please, man, I’m, like, six hundred percent American,” which Mamá would kill me for saying, because it’s probably an Insult to My Cultural Heritage or something.

I peer off the side of my car at Burke. In the red light of sunset, and with my head tilted sideways, he looks like something out of a horror movie, his nose and ear and eyebrow piercings glinting, a sleeve of black-and-purple tattoos twisted up his left arm like an injury. He’s wearing his bleached hair in gelled spikes today.

“Yo, man,” I say, and as he climbs up the back of my car onto my roof, he grunts, “You been out here smoking, huh?” and I’m like, “Yeah, nothing else to do. You?”

“I was reading. Waiting for one of my sculptures to cool.” He waves a book at me. When Burke’s not welding metal sculptures out of abandoned hubcaps and steel rods, he spends all his time reading, which people never guess, because he looks like every gang-member stereotype ever conceived. In reality, he’s probably the most well-read, intelligent person at this school—not counting Valentine Simmons, because I refuse to count that pretentious dickhead—and no one knows it, because Burke’s way sneaky about the whole smart thing.

Sometimes I’d swear Burke is from a different planet. He’s normal if you talk to him, but besides me, nobody ever talks to him, because they can’t get past the way he looks. It’s not just the ink and the piercings and the hair, which he dyes a different color every other week. It’s his clothes, which are weird at best and embarrassing at worst. Last Friday, he strolled into school wearing neon-yellow skinny jeans and platform shoes. Today, he has on a green peacoat, jean leggings, and a kilt. It looks like a Goodwill threw up on him.

He wears makeup, too. Not standard emo-kid guyliner, either. Like, bright blue lipstick, the other week, and orange eye shadow, the day before yesterday. Today he’s clean-faced, but back in freshman year, he didn’t go a day without it. His whole persona, this whole thing he does with the way he looks—it happened so suddenly, right out of middle school, I wondered if it was performance art, maybe. Some big stunt I wasn’t part of. Now, though, I’m so used to it, I hardly notice when he goes crazy with winged eyeliner and purple eyebrows.

At first I thought he’d get beat up, but it turns out that people are terrified to talk shit about Burke because he’s six foot five and built like a Mack truck, and sometimes when he’s dressed down he looks as if he’d knife you without thinking about it. But Jesus, if he were my size, he’d get laughed out of Kansas.

I take his book and squint at the title. It’s called The Gay Science, written by some foreign dude whose name looks like a sneeze. How can he read this stuff for fun?

“What?” he says, looking hard at me, and I’m like, “Nothing, man, you do you.” I drop the book into his backpack and pass him the blunt. He takes a hit.

“So Dan got with Olivia Scott,” I say, and Burke’s like, “Yeah, I heard him talking about it. Apparently she was great,” and I stare up at the sky, and he’s like, “What?” and I’m like, “I didn’t say anything,” and he’s like, “Your silence is more silent than usual silence,” and I’m like, “Shut up,” and he’s like, “So I’m right.”

I shrug. “Fine. Olivia’s awesome, and Dan sucks, and why does he get to have sex with her, is all I’m saying.”

“Hey, why you gotta shit on Dan? Just ’cause you’re jealous doesn’t mean—”

I chuckle. “Dude, I couldn’t be jealous of Dan if I tried.” And that part, at least, is true, because it’s hard to describe the soul-sucking blandness that is Daniel Silverstein. He has no personality anymore; he just wants to stick his dick in things. Sometimes you look at people, and you can see every second that’s going to make up their lives, and it depresses you, because they’re clearly fated to do nothing that’ll last even a decade after their death, and it’s like, why are you sitting all cushy in this suburb when a million disadvantaged kids out there could do so much more with your place in this world? That’s Dan these days. It blows seeing him turn into that, too, since he used to be different.

Back in middle school, Dan and Burke and I used to hang out all the time. Middle-school Dan loved dubstep and Mario Kart and late-night walks, where the three of us would talk about everything from what aliens might look like to the meaning of life. But the second we hit freshman year, high-school Dan took over. He stopped talking to us and found new friends, and now every time we pass each other in the hall, he doesn’t even nod. Burke and I try not to take it personally, but getting friend-dumped is kind of personal by definition.

Burke taps my shoulder and passes the blunt back to me. I take a long hit—too long—and sit up, my eyes watering, and Burke says, “So why’re you mad at Dan, huh?” and I sigh, because I feel he should get it by now. “Because,” I say, “I’ve had a thing for Olivia Scott for, like, thirty years,” and Burke says, “But you haven’t ever spoken to her,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but . . .”

I trail off, floundering to find actual justification for being upset. After a minute, I give up. “Forget it,” I mumble. We watch sports teams walking by, red-faced and sweaty from practice. Guys’ tennis. Girls’ cross-country. Lacrosse. Football . . .