Little Black Lies (18 page)

Grub Day is less spectacular this month. As if, this deep into first term, everyone is too exhausted to care. Mr. Curtis's class is peppered less with equestrian wear and stripper attire and more with sweatshirts and yoga pants.

Yes.
Those
yoga pants. I count three girls wearing them, including Sloane. It's churning my stomach.

Sitting behind Carling in math class that morning feels like a lie. Smiling at her, telling her everything's going to be okay with Leo, pretending I haven't been praying this would happen since Saturday night. All lies.

“I can't
believe
him,” says Carling. Her eyes are puffy from crying. “He didn't even give me a reason.”

“Guys are such jerks,” whispers Isabella, rubbing her friend's shoulder.

Willa walks into the room and bends down to wrap her arms around Carling's neck and kiss the top of her head. “Stay strong, sweetie.”

Once Willa's gone, Carling's eyes fill with tears again. She turns to me. “You saw Leo Saturday night. Did he meet someone? Did you see him with some skank?”

“No,” I say. “He definitely wasn't with a skank.”

This seems to calm her.

Mr. Curtis stands up, grinning devilishly, and sets his hands on his hips. “This is about the time of year my students begin to despise me. So don't feel sorry about your malevolent fantasies about my driving my Acura into a deep-bottomed loch or my succumbing to some antibiotic-resistant skin infection. You won't be the first to feel this way about me, and God willing, you won't be the last.”

All movement, all whispering has stopped as we wait to hear the bad news.

“Your midterm will be two weeks from today. It will count for thirty percent of your final grade and there will be no make-ups for those of you who need a few more days to plan a bad case of mononucleosis. Nothing short of my seeing your name on a tombstone will get you out of taking this one.” He walks over to the window and forces it up a few inches. “My rules for this test will be strict. You will walk in on test day to find your exam booklets already on the desks, along with two sharpened pencils. No backpacks or purses will be permitted anywhere near your sweaty corpses—you'll drop them at the back of the class and search the desks for a test with your name on it. In other words, I'll decide who sits beside whom. Got it?” He looks straight at me.

Does he know?

I slump down in my seat to think. I'm just as guilty as Carling, aren't I? It's one thing if someone copies your answers without your knowledge. It's another thing entirely to enable it. My mouth goes dry as I recall the way I slid my quiz to the edge of my desk to allow Carling a better view. Mr. Curtis wouldn't see things my way. He would argue that I did actually have a choice.

This is all too much. The hiding, the guilt, the cheating, the lies. The roomful of yoga pants. I can't take it.

I've gotten myself into a dark and dirty corner that has no easy way out. If I confess about the test, I'll destroy things for Carling. If I come clean about my dad, he'll hear about my deception. And no matter how he reacts on the outside, it will kill him a little on the inside.

Dampness creeps along my back like Rascal's guilty fevers and I realize there is one thing I can do, today, that will hurt only me.

Standing up, I say, “Mr. Curtis? I think I have a fever.”

I run up the stairs of my building two at a time. The thought of having a closet that doesn't reek of brand-new Lycra has given me energy. I don't know why I didn't recognize it before, but just knowing they were in there has been like a stone in my shoe. Not anymore. I'm going to return them to the school. Confess. Just march into the office and tell Mrs. Pelletier about my poorly thought-out plan. Let her punish me any way she wants. I slow down on Noah's landing because there's an official-looking paper tacked to his door. As I move closer, I stop.

It's an eviction notice. He has thirty days to vacate.

Dad's never really had a friend before. Not as long as I can remember. But in all their hours spent under the hoods of the VW and the Bentley, Noah seems to have worked his way into Dad's life. They swap car magazines and tools. Dad even invited Noah over one afternoon to watch tapes of some Japanese Grand Prix. It was cute, seeing the two of them groaning through the wipeouts and analyzing the pit crew. They were like excited little boys.

I don't want Dad to lose that. I don't want Noah to lose that.

They're not so different from each other. One might reek of weed and unwashed dreads and the other might smell of Mr. Clean, but they're both alone in their adult worlds and they've found a way to bond. My mother would never have approved of Noah—there's not a hairnet in the world big enough to allow a guy like him in the back of a restaurant—but she didn't always know what was good for Charlie. And in the end, she didn't care.

Behind me, I hear footsteps and turn to see Noah climbing up the stairs with a small bag of groceries. He glances at the door and shakes his head, chuckling angrily. “You know how long I waited to get into this building? Two years. You don't find rent like this so easy.”

“Can you fight it?”

“With what?” He holds up his bag. “This has to feed me for a week.”

“Forget that. You'll eat with us.”

“I can't sponge off your dad.”

“What happened?”

He swings his dreads over one shoulder and unlocks the door. “Brice Burnack's career happened. Or didn't happen. That's what I get for working without pay.”

I follow him inside and watch as he sets the bag on the kitchen counter and unloads a few cans of soup and beans. A carton of milk. His place is so empty it's as if no one lives here. “I don't get it. If things were this bad, why didn't you quit? Go work for someone more reliable?”

“I could've. But I worry about Carling. She may be prickly, but she's had a tough home life. Who's to say either of us, in her shoes, would react any differently?”

“Still. You could have kept in touch with her. It doesn't make sense to let things get so bad you lose your apartment.”

He stops unpacking, both hands resting inside the bag. Staring at me, he thinks about it for a moment. “I guess I'm just a sucker for a family. Anyway, what are you doing, roaming free on a school day?”

“I'm headed straight back. I just needed something from my room.”

“It couldn't have waited until tomorrow?”

“No. It couldn't.”

He sighs. “Run up and get it. I'll drive you back to school.”

Forty-five minutes later, I step into the office and place a paper sack on the counter. I'm numb, shaking. But how I feel doesn't matter. All I can think about right now is my confession. Whatever comes next can wait. One step at a time.

The office is unusually empty. Eventually an older teacher rushes out of an office with an armful of files. He looks up at me, shocked. As if I were a cheetah standing here instead of a student.

My stomach flips and I tighten my fingers around the folded bag. “Is Mrs. Pelletier around? I need to speak with her for a moment.”

The phone rings and he holds one finger in the air as he answers it. “Yes, it's true. It's the third-floor science lab. Room three twenty-nine. We don't know. He hasn't said much at all. Just mutters things we can't understand and keeps right on scrubbing the sink as if he's lost his mind. It's been nearly an hour.”

Dad.

I grab the paper bag and run.

I can't see past the swarm of kids at the doorway of the science lab. They're all jostling and shoving to get a better look. Somehow when they're in uniform, a crowd of Ants seems smaller, more compact. In their Grub Day clothes, with everyone wearing every color of the rainbow, they seem ten thousand strong. A wall I can't penetrate no matter which opening I try to break through.

“What the hell?” says one kid.

“He's been at it for almost an hour,” says another.

“This guy's whacked.”

“The office called nine-one-one.”

Trying to attract as little attention as possible, I burrow through the bodies but don't seem to get any closer to the door. At one point Carling calls out to me, something about my fever, but I ignore her, busy as I am looking for gaps in the crowd. I lift myself up on my tiptoes and peer between Griff and some older girls, but my view is still blocked by heads. This is no good. I need to get in there.

The principal, Mr. Oosterhouse, arrives and starts herding students away from the door. “That's enough, people. Off to your next class. This is none of your concern.” He pushes his way through the kids and finally I'm able to make my move. I duck down and follow in his wake, not stopping until I'm standing in the doorway.

There he is at one of the sinks in the long counter, rag in hand. Red-faced and sweating, Charlie is scrubbing and scrubbing at the center sink. He has a wild look about him, with hair standing on end and eyes glazed, not really focused properly. I've seen this look before. In a rain-soaked garden in front of a little red bungalow in Lundon, Massachusetts.

This cannot be happening. Not here. Not now. It was hours before Dad allowed himself to be coaxed out of the rain, out of the sloppy black grave and into the house. And even then, he didn't stop because he felt he was done. I cannot produce the real reason Dad stopped. I cannot produce my mother.

Just before we came to Ant, the sweater lost my mother's smell. Something about being packed in a carton and shipped out of Lundon—where the sweater must have spent most of its life—stripped it of its scent. The cardboard greedily absorbed my mother's essence, taking her from me for a second time.

It was the last week of school when I saw the cartons. Three days before prom. What should have been the sweetest afternoon in my life. Almost eighty degrees, sunny, and the trees had that urgent, early summer, acid-green tinge that begs you to look at them in wonder every time you step out the door. This freshness is fleeting—you know that from the year before—it lasts only until the heat of July makes their color deep and lazy.

I'd raced home after the last bell had rung and dumped my backpack in the dining room, praying my mother would be home early enough to practice curling my hair into prom-worthy ringlets. Turned out she'd been home already but had left again. I should have guessed from the cardboard boxes and suitcase outside her bedroom door that she was leaving for good. Instead—maybe because of the silky breezes outside, or the happy prospect of a long summer of suntanning with Mandy—I stupidly entertained the idea that my parents were surprising me with an unannounced vacation. I looked at Mom's yellow plaid tote bag and green sweater placed neatly atop the big suitcase and hoped I wouldn't have to share the overnight bag with my dad because the zipper could never be trusted.

Days later I would remember other details, like all her perfume bottles and lotions were missing from her bathroom. Her antique alarm clock was gone. If I'd thought to open her closet door, I would have seen nothing but wire hangers on her side, huddled together at one end of the rod, trying to appear, to my father's jeans and shirts and bathrobe, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening, as if they hadn't been left behind at all but were simply waiting for fresh laundry to arrive.

But, drunk with anticipation of Friday night, I turned on the shower. Dropped my shorts and T-shirt to the bathroom floor, stepped into the scalding-hot water. It wasn't until I'd lathered, rinsed, repeated, that I realized something was missing from the front hall. Without stopping to reach for a towel or to turn off the steaming water, I bolted out of the shower and slipped and skidded my way to the front of the house. I stood there dripping water onto the floor, staring at a square of red paisley wallpaper that glowed brighter than the rest of the faded old wall, thinking it should be the other way around. It was the patch where our mother-daughter photo used to be that should be faded away, if only to show a little respect for the girl who'd refused to accept what the late nights, the broken promises, the affair with her teacher really meant.

Her mother was leaving home.

A group of teachers huddle behind my father in the science lab, unsure what to do. Mr. Oosterhouse approaches, lays a hand on Charlie's shoulder, but Charlie is too obsessed to feel it. It's as if no one is around and all that stands between life as we know it and deadly microbes taking over the earth is this stainless-steel sink and Charlie's overworked arm.

I want to lay my hand on Dad's shoulder. I want to run across the room and hold him. Tell him everything's going to be okay now. That I'm starting to like it here and won't study so hard anymore. Tell him I'll stay home every night to play Scrabble with him if only he'll go back to normal. Tell him I love him even if my mother doesn't.

“You've done a great job, Charlie,” Mr. Oosterhouse says. “We couldn't ask for a more pristine sink. Now what say we pack up and move on to another classroom?” He leans over and picks up Dad's bucket. “I'll give you a hand.”

“No,” says Dad, still erasing something that isn't there. In this light, I can see the sharp creases in his clothes from where he's been ironing his uniform. Some of the seams in his jacket, his trousers, are frayed white from repeated heat and stress. I look around. No one else is as unwrinkled as my dad. “No,” he repeats. “There's a small mark.”

Mr. Oosterhouse moves closer. “It's an old sink. One that has endured many science experiments gone wrong. There are many stains that will never come out.”

That's not it!
I want to shout. He's not scrubbing to rid the sink of stains. He's got it in his head that this spot is wicked with danger. It doesn't matter that his opponent doesn't exist, it just matters that he feels he won. That's the enigma of OCD.