Dirty Little Secrets Read online

  Justine leaned back and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “You’re here with her?” I didn’t blame her for not believing him. I could hardly believe I was standing in front of a bunch of cheerleaders with Josh Lee’s arm casually draped around my shoulders.

  Josh pulled me closer to him, and I could feel the heat from his body and the muscles in his arm as he flexed. “Of course,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. I knew it was all a joke—he was only doing it so Justine would turn around and tell Cara. Josh probably wanted to get back together with her, and sparking some jealousy was always a good choice. Still, if I was being used, I can’t say I minded all that much.

  “What can I get you?” the old guy behind the counter asked as we reached the front of the line. Josh dropped his arm and my shoulders felt neglected and cold immediately.

  “One jumbo popcorn,” he said, turning his back on Justine and the other girls. “You don’t mind sharing, do you?” he asked, bumping my arm. I smiled and shook my head, prepared to go along with the joke as long as he wanted. Not only did I get to pretend to be with Josh, but I got to piss off Justine Hildebrandt, and that was never a bad thing. As we walked toward the theater, I couldn’t help but glance back at Justine and feel a secret thrill at the scowl on her face as Josh pretended to be interested in walking with me.

  I didn’t even really like popcorn, but I ate it through the whole movie because our fingers brushed as we reached into the bucket at the same time. I was glad the movie was blaring so I didn’t have to think of anything interesting to say and could just pretend we were on an actual date instead of playing some game that would end as soon as the lights came on.

  Steve and Kaylie weren’t exactly holding hands as they walked out of the theater, but their shoulders kept brushing as they bumped into each other. Cozy, for sure. I was walking behind them as slowly as I could to make the moment last as long as possible. Pretty soon, we’d reach the big glass front doors, and that’s where it would stop. Without Justine around, Josh wouldn’t have to pretend anymore, and I’d be just me, stuck watching him safely from a distance once again. We’d almost crossed the lobby in complete silence when Josh stopped and turned to me. “Listen, I play guitar in a band with a bunch of other guys. We’re not too bad—mostly covers, but I write some songs too.”

  He said this like I knew nothing about him. Like I didn’t lie in bed in the dark some nights and picture him saying something just like that. I held my breath, hardly believing it was really happening, partly hoping it wasn’t. It was the perfect guy saying the perfect thing at the perfectly wrong time. “Anyway,” he continued, “we’re playing at a party tomorrow night down on Marina. If you’re not doing anything, you want to come by?”

  Maybe it was the bright lights of the lobby after being in the dark theater, but the whole place seemed to start throbbing. “That would be cool,” I managed. I had to look down at the ground in order to actually say what had to come next. “But I, uh, don’t think I can make it.” Every fiber of my being was screaming “yes,” but I knew I couldn’t go. Pretending I was on a date with Josh Lee was one thing. Meeting him somewhere on purpose was another. Getting close to someone like him would just be way too risky.

  He actually looked a little bummed, which made my heart skip. Either he was a better actor than I thought or this wasn’t completely a joke. “Got a date with someone else?” he asked, watching me out of the corner of his eye.

  “Ha! No,” I said a little too quickly. “I mean, no. But…” God, I’d wished for this moment to happen since I first laid eyes on him, and now that he was asking me out, I was racking my brain for a good reason why I couldn’t go.

  He must have seen my indecision. “We play pretty early if you have to be home.” He reached out with his pinky and curled it around mine, playful but secure. I stared at the spot where we touched, hardly able to believe any of this was real.

  I looked into those big brown eyes, and against everything I knew I should do, I heard myself say, “Okay. I… I think I can make it.” It was going to be fine, I reasoned. Dating Josh Lee for real would be impossible. Hanging out one single night might be doable.

  Josh grinned and squeezed my hand for the briefest second. “I can pick you up if you want.”

  And there it was already. My whole body stiffened at the thought. I had to keep him away from the house no matter what. “Oh, no. That’s okay.” I tried to sound as casual as possible. “I’ll come with Kaylie. I’ll probably stay over at her house, anyway.” So much for no more sleepovers. I was sure Steve would be at the party too, which meant she’d be into it.

  “Easier to tell your mom you’re at Kaylie’s than you’re out at a party?”

  I swallowed hard. “Something like that. She’s, um, really religious and doesn’t let me go out much.”

  Josh nodded like he understood. “Must be rough.”

  “Yeah. Sometimes it is.” I nodded slowly and looked down at the floor so I couldn’t see his face.

  That was the trouble with secrets—the lies you had to tell to keep them hidden almost made you feel worse than telling the truth.

  Almost.

  chapter 2

  9:00 a.m.

  After spending all night at Kaylie’s going over every detail, I stood at the bottom of our cracked cement walkway the next morning, the ache in my stomach starting the minute I saw Mom’s car in the driveway. She must have switched schedules with someone at work again. Just when I’d counted on her to be gone.

  I really wanted to be alone to think about the party tonight—get it sorted in my head so I wouldn’t make any big mistakes, but if Mom was home, the hassling would start the minute I hit the front door. Kaylie was excited about the whole Steve and Josh double-dating angle and was going to spend the day figuring out what we were going to wear. It was hard not to get caught up in the excitement. Josh had asked me to come to a party. Me. To a party. Where his band was playing. Unbelievable.

  Kaylie’s mom didn’t have to be to work until late, so she’d given me a ride home on the way. Like always, I waited until she had driven around the corner and was safely out of sight before I headed for the front door. Our little gray and white house really didn’t look that bad from out here. If you were paying attention, you could spot the black mold gathering along the edges of the living room windows and the way the curtains were pressed against the glass by stacks of boxes. Those were just small hints about what was really behind the shingled walls, but nobody on the outside ever noticed.

  I kicked at the tufts of grass as I slowly made my way toward the porch. Even though Mom had to park the car in the driveway because of all the junk that filled the garage, from out here the house looked pretty normal.

  All of our secrets started at the front door.

  The TV was on too loud, as always, mercifully covering any noise I made as I came in. Standing on my tiptoes, I peeked into the living room over the tops of the newspaper piles and bags of junk that flooded every inch of open space in the house. Mom wasn’t in her usual spot in the vomit-green recliner, and the lady on television was trying to sell genuine synthetic sapphires to nobody. I let myself relax a little—maybe I could make it to the safety of my room without another confrontation.

  Hurrying past the kitchen and down the hall, I glanced around the narrow pathways we’d carved in the piles of newspapers and garbage over the years. It had gotten easier to get around since I’d grown tall enough to see over the top of a lot of it. Mom was only about five-foot six and she didn’t stack things higher than she could reach. When I was smaller, I used to pretend I was walking at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with the cliffs rising over my head, only instead of a steel blue sky with puffy white clouds, there was a cracked plaster ceiling and a burned-out lightbulb.

  At the bend in the hallway, a tall pile of National Geographics had fallen over and blocked the narrow pathway that led to her room. That’s really going to make her mad, I thought as I turned and walked
toward my room. Mom didn’t go into her room much anymore, but I wondered why she hadn’t straightened up the pile right away. Even with all this stuff crammed into the house, having things out of place made her even crazier. Especially if she thought I’d had something to do with it.

  That’s what last night’s argument had been about. As usual.

  I’d been throwing clothes in my backpack to go to Kaylie’s when I heard her shouting from the living room, “Lucy!”

  I pretended not to hear her until she called for a third time, then I pushed my door open and yelled down the hall, “What?”

  She squeezed past the piles of newspapers and overflowing plastic bags in the hallway until she could see me. Her red hair showed an inch of gray at the roots, and wiry strands of it were hanging in front of her face. She put her hands on her hips, and I watched her ropy veins wiggle and move underneath her chapped, red skin. “What did you do with them?”

  I shut my eyes and slowly opened them again. Here we go. “With what?” I asked, keeping my voice as even as possible. Any hint of sarcasm would send her over the edge, and I really, really wanted to go out tonight.

  “You know what. My good scissors. The ones with the black handles.”

  “I haven’t seen your scissors, Mom,” I said, allowing just a hint of a sigh to creep into my voice as I tried to duck back into my room.

  “Lucy Tompkins! You never put anything back where you found it. I need those scissors and I can’t find them anywhere.” She leaned forward and tried to peer over my shoulder and into my room. I quickly stepped into the hallway and tried to block her view, although I knew she’d be in there looking through my stuff within seconds of my leaving.

  Her eyes began to fill with tears. “I need them right now. There’s an article on dog training I wanted to clip for your sister, and I always keep my good scissors on the table right next to the chair. Now they’re missing and I know you took them.”

  In a voice you’d usually use on a three-year-old I said, “Honestly, I didn’t do anything with them.” For once, this was the truth. I hadn’t touched her stupid scissors. “Kaylie’s coming to pick me up in a couple of minutes, so I have to finish here.”

  The tears were starting to spill over her eyelids and run unchecked down her cheeks. “After sixteen years, this is what I get? No help at all? You’re just going to run off with your friends and leave me here alone? Can’t you spare two minutes to help me look?”

  I backed into my room and left her standing in the hallway looking old and defeated. God, I couldn’t wait to get out of here and get my own place. I’d live all by myself and not answer to anybody. Less than two years—I just had to keep telling myself, less than two years and I could leave this all behind like Phil and Sara had.

  I finished packing, but a lump of guilt settled into my chest. I listened to her shuffling around in the living room until I couldn’t stand it anymore. In a few minutes, I’d be out of here, hanging out with Kaylie at the movies, but I knew she’d spend the next twelve hours sitting on the recliner watching TV by herself, which despite everything made me feel kind of bad.

  Lifting my backpack onto my shoulders, I checked the time. Kaylie wouldn’t be here for a few more minutes, and it would make Mom happy if I at least made an effort. It’s not like I had a prayer of finding her stupid scissors in the avalanche of garbage, but I could fake it. At some point, I’d just started to go along with her and pretended everything was normal and this was the way everyone lived. It was easier that way.

  I squeezed through the hallway and spotted Mom sorting through a stack of pictures in the living room. “Did you find them?” I asked hopefully.

  She looked up from the pictures like she’d forgotten I was in the house. A frown settled on her face as she refocused her anger on me. “How could I find them when I have no idea what you did with them?”

  I looked around the room, trying to concentrate on all the horizontal surfaces where a pair of scissors could be set down and never seen again, like some crazy picture from one of those I Spy books. I inched my way over to the recliner. “I think I might have put them back over here,” I said, as cheerfully as I could manage. I picked up a plastic bag from the drugstore and looked inside.

  Mom leaned over and snatched the bag from my hands. “Don’t touch that,” she said. “I need those things for work.”

  It always came down to trying to find the right answer in a game where I didn’t know any of the rules. If I didn’t help look for the thing I supposedly lost, she’d be mad. If I touched any of her stuff, she’d be mad. It was just a question of what was going to make her less mad at any given moment. The exhaustion I always felt in these situations began creeping into my bones. “Okay,” I said in my most patient voice. “I’m going to retrace my steps back to the dining room.”

  As I tried to turn in the narrow pathway, my backpack clipped the corner of a box that was stacked on top of some newspapers. It wobbled and started to fall, but I caught it in time and eased it back.

  “Watch out!” Mom yelled. “I swear, you are such a klutz! Can’t you even walk through a room without sending half the contents to the floor?”

  No matter how many times she said stuff like that, it still settled heavily onto my chest. I dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands, hoping the pain would distract me from crying. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  Mom shook her head and sighed, as if the world’s problems had been placed on her shoulders. “That’s the best you can do? Always knocking everything over, losing my things. You never lift a finger—”

  She was just warming up when Kaylie’s signature two short beeps followed by one long beep sounded out front. It was like the cavalry had come to rescue me from hell.

  “I have to go,” I said. I pulled my backpack tight against my shoulders and inched carefully along the path toward the front door. The relief I always felt when I stepped out of the house was like plunging into a cold pool on a hundred-degree day.

  “I hope you have a lovely time,” Mom said, turning back to the pile of photos, the saga of the lost scissors temporarily forgotten. I said nothing, but shut the door just a little more forcefully than was necessary as I left, hopefully dislodging a pile or two to give her something to do for the night.

  Now, as I stood in front of my bedroom door the next morning, I wondered if she’d ever found those stupid scissors. I pushed it open and stepped inside, leaving the rest of the house behind me. Compared to everywhere else in this place, my room was like paradise, with surfaces that weren’t covered with bags of useless garbage, and with a bed you could actually sleep in.

  The first time I’d really cleaned my room a couple of years ago, she’d totally freaked. I’d been babysitting at the Callans’ when I got the idea to clean my room. I wanted my bedroom to look the same as the ones their kids had—carpet on the floor you could see and a desk you could reach without having to wade through drifts of crap. A room that could be dusted on occasion because there wasn’t so much clutter, with a bed that didn’t have to be cleared to be slept in. It’s not like anyone else would see it, but still it would be nice. I’d started one morning when Mom was at work, and by the time she got home you could really see the difference. Despite my better judgment, I thought she might be happy about it, might be glad that for once I’d done some work around here. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  The whole neighborhood could hear her ranting out by the garbage cans as she dug through them for the dirty stuffed animals, clothes that were too small, games with missing pieces, and everything else I had thrown out. I got the usual lecture about starving people in Africa who didn’t have anything nice at all as she marched the garbage bags back into my room. Not that I could ever figure out what a starving African child would do with a one-eyed Care Bear. After she’d fallen asleep in the recliner, I’d taken the bags back out of my room and shoved them deep into the dining room where they quickly got absorbed into the mess and disappeared. From then on, I cleaned my
room by relocating the junk to other parts of the house.

  Soon after that first time, she made Phil take my door off the hinges and put it in the garage so she could keep an eye on me. At least that’s what she said. Phil never said anything, but I could tell he felt bad about it. He was a senior in high school by then and did whatever it took to get by—just marking time until he could move out and be on his own like Sara had done years before.

  You’d think a person would get used to being completely exposed, but I never did. I always slept facing the wall, but it still felt like someone was watching me. It took almost a year of careful negotiation to get the door put back on, minus the lock and doorknob so it didn’t actually close all the way, but I wasn’t about to complain. Apparently, nobody as sneaky and selfish as me deserved any privacy—you never knew what I might get up to in here if I had an actual door that locked. I might go crazy and vacuum the carpet or, worse, wash the windows. Anytime I cleaned something, she took it as a personal attack, like I was saying she wasn’t good enough to do it herself. Which, in reality, she wasn’t.

  I reached into my jacket pocket for the ticket stub from the movies last night and smiled to myself. Smoothing over the corner that had gotten bent, I could almost feel the weight of Josh’s arm around my shoulders. I put the stub carefully in my vintage Partridge Family lunchbox. A calm feeling came over me as I sifted through the tickets I kept there—movies, the baseball game with Dad when I went out to see him that one summer, Disney on Ice when I was seven, and the circus from before Mom decided it was cruelty toward animals and we stopped going.

  My room was freezing, so I reached down and clicked on the ancient space heater. One hard smack to the side got it running again, the orange glow from the coil inside making me feel warmer even before the heat actually kicked in.

  I wasn’t sure when the furnace had broken completely, but it hadn’t worked right since last year. I’d have to call Phil and have him come try to fix it again. He hated having to come home from college to deal with the house, but we didn’t really have a choice. The last repairman didn’t get past the front hallway before realizing the place was too full of crap to even get near the hot water heater. He threatened to report Mom to Child Protective Services if she didn’t clean it up. He must not have, because CPS never showed up. Neither did another repairman. Mom said a lot of people in the old days had no hot water or indoor heat, and it didn’t hurt them any.