Liar Read online

  Mostly it’s the joy of convincing people that something that ain’t so, is. It’s hard to explain. But like I said at the beginning, I’ve quit the lying game now.

  But that’s now, back then it was:

  “Why did you want everyone to think you were a boy, Micah Wilkins?” Principal Paul looked at me without blinking. I returned the favor.

  “You don’t know?” He sounded unsurprised. “Perhaps you will find out when you visit the school counselor.”

  I didn’t let him see how much I hated that idea. There have been way too many counselors and shrinks and psychologists in my life. I mean, I know lying is bad, that’s why I’m giving it up, but I’ve never understood why I had to see shrinks about it.

  “You’ve been at this school less than two weeks, Micah Wilkins, and already you have a reputation for telling falsehoods and making mischief. My eye is on you.”

  I didn’t ask him how that affected him seeing anything else.

  My second essay for the principal was on the virtues of honesty. I ran out of things to say on the first page.

  AFTER

  At school the word “murder” has seeped into everything. We look at each other differently. People stare at me. At Sarah. At Tayshawn. At Brandon. At all the guys on Zach’s team. At anyone who has ever hated, or loved, or hung out with him.

  We are all made of broken glass. The school grinds along on grief and anger.

  I track Brandon down.

  He is under the bleachers in the park, smoking. I creep up quiet and stealthy like the Greats taught me.

  “Brandon,” I say softly in his ear.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Brandon screams, startling and dropping his cigarette. “What’d you do that for?” he asks, stepping away from me and scrabbling for his cigarette. He picks it up and takes a long drag. “Freak.”

  “I’m not the one under bleachers smoking a cigarette that just fell in a pile of dog shit.” Brandon spits the cigarette out and looks down at where there isn’t any dog shit. I laugh.

  “Bitch,” he says.

  “Why’d you say that about me and him?” I ask, taking a step toward him. He backs away. “It’s not true,” I say, firm as I can.

  He laughs this time. “Sure it is. I saw you and Zach together.”

  “There was nothing to see.”

  “Right,” he says. “So I hallucinated you running together in Central Park. Him picking you up and swinging you around and then”—Brandon pauses to lean toward me and lick his lips as loudly and grossly as he can—“definitely lots of tongue action.”

  Now it’s me backing away. “Wasn’t me,” I say, strong as before, but he knows I am lying and I know that he knows.

  “Sure it was,” he says. “There’s no other girl on the planet that looks as much like a boy as you. Maybe Zach was secretly a fag.”

  “You’re a dick, Brandon.”

  “Whatever.” He pulls a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket, lights one, and deliberately blows the smoke at my face. “Need a new part-time boyfriend, do you? Now the old one’s dead. I could volunteer. I don’t mind slumming.”

  “Fuck you,” I say, stalking off, annoyed at how defeated I feel.

  AFTER

  The only teacher who’s okay is my biology teacher. Yayeko Shoji doesn’t coat things in sugar. She explains what meat is and how it works. How we are all meat. How meat gets into the vegetables we eat. She doesn’t modify her words for the vegetarians in the room.

  Meat is cells.

  Meat is flesh.

  Meat is muscle.

  Meat is 5 percent fat.

  Meat is 20 percent protein.

  Meat is 75 percent water.

  Zach was meat. Meat decays.

  “Yayeko,” I ask, “how long before a body begins to rot?”

  I can hear the sudden intake of air.

  “Gross, Micah,” Brandon says.

  “Do you have to answer that?” Sarah asks, her eyes filling with water again.

  “Decay, decomposition, are natural processes,” Yayeko explains. “The same basic things happen when anything dies: a flower, an ant, a dog, a human, anything.”

  “But do we have to talk about it now?” Sarah asks, speaking more firmly than I’ve ever heard her before. Especially to a teacher.

  Now is especially when I want to know. Now, with Zach in the morgue.

  “I understand that you’re all upset, but for some people understanding the processes involved can help with grief,” Yayeko says, and I find myself nodding. I am desperate to understand. “We are all of us subject to the same laws of nature.”

  “And of God,” Sarah says.

  “The first thing that happens after death,” Yayeko says, “is that blood and oxygen stop flowing through the body. Gravity causes the body’s blood to drain from capillaries in the upper parts and to pool in the lower blood vessels. So that parts of the body seem pale—those upper surfaces—and parts seem dark.”

  “What if you’re already pale?” Tayshawn wants to know. The class laughs but I’m not sure he meant to be funny.

  “Pale is a relative term, Tayshawn,” Yayeko says. “The lower parts of your body become darker than the upper parts.”

  “What do you mean upper part, then?” he continues. “Like your head?”

  “It depends on how the body is positioned. If it’s lying supine—on its back—then the blood pools there. In the heels and calves and buttocks, the back, the back of the neck, the head. The face will be pale.”

  Tayshawn nods to show he understands now. I wonder how they found Zach. Which parts of him were pale, which dark?

  “Next, the cells cease aerobic respiration so they can’t maintain normal muscle biochemistry. Which means what?”

  Only two hands go up. Mine and Lucy O’Hara’s.

  “Lucy?”

  “They stop making energy.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Glucose,” Lucy says. “Oxygen.”

  “Yes.” Yayeko continues, “And when that stops, calcium ions leak into muscle cells, preventing muscle relaxation, which causes rigor mortis.”

  “When the body goes all hard?” Tayshawn asks. There are more giggles, but he ignores them.

  “Yes,” Yayeko says. “The cells begin to die and can’t fight off the bacteria, which causes the body to decompose and the muscles to become soft again. As soon as the body dies, flies are attracted to it. They start to lay eggs in open wounds and orifices. The eggs turn into maggots—”

  “No,” Sarah says, holding her hand over her mouth and running from the room. Two girls get up and follow her. I’m also imagining maggots eating Zach. Maggots in his eyes, maggots between his toes, maggots all over him. Wriggling, feeding, tearing into his body. I have to concentrate to keep from joining the other girls in the bathroom.

  On the way out of class Brandon hisses at me. “You’re not normal,” he says.

  Tell me something I don’t know.

  AFTER

  “I bet you killed him,” Brandon says on the way out of biology. “You probably got your dad to make him disappear.”

  “I heard it was you,” I tell him. “That you read somewhere if you kill and eat the brains of people who are better than you then you get to be like them.”

  “That makes you safe,” Brandon says. “And everyone else in this school.”

  I laugh and almost tell him touché. He walks away. I follow. “How come you’re always hissing at me on the way in and out of class?”

  “Are you kidding? I can’t have anyone see me voluntarily talking to a murdering freak like you. I wish you’d go back to wearing that mask. That way none of us has to see your freaky face.”

  “Shut up, Brandon, or I’ll have my dad take care of you.” Briefly I imagine what it would be like to have such a dad. Ready at a moment to kill all my enemies.

  Brandon’s eyes flick at me as if he’s trying to assess whether what I said could be true, but doesn’t want to contaminate his
eyeballs by actually looking at me. “Like your dad took care of Zach?”

  I want to hurt Brandon. Slap his face, kick his nuts, spit in his eyes. “You’ll never be as good as him. No matter how hard you try.” It’s true, but that doesn’t make it sound any less lame.

  Brandon laughs and moves away from me as quick as he can. He knows he’s won.

  HISTORY OF ME

  Sometimes I am still for hours.

  It’s like I’m waiting. Watching. Biding my time. When I’m ready, I’ll leap.

  Sometimes my whole life feels like that.

  I never said that to Zach but I think he would have understood.

  There’s a lot I didn’t tell Zach that I should have.

  Sometimes thinking about him stills me, shuts everything else down.

  Other times I have trouble sitting still.

  I pace.

  Mom hates it. Dad looks at me nervously.

  When I pace, the apartment is so small I don’t understand how the four of us can fit in it.

  Four? you ask.

  Yes.

  Four.

  Me, Mom, Dad, Jordan.

  My brother. My younger brother. My ten-year-old brother, Jordan.

  He has the opposite effect on me. He is the opposite of Zach.

  BEFORE

  My next big lie of freshman year, after passing first as a boy and then as a hermaphrodite, was getting them to believe that my father was an arms dealer.

  I still can’t believe anyone bought it.

  It started when Dad came to pick me up in a long black limousine. Not just long, but ridiculously long. Almost as long as the block. He was reviewing a new luxury limousine company and had to test all their services, including the champagne and flowers and their promise to drive you wherever and whenever.

  So he picked me up from school, wearing the tuxedo he was married in, looking like James Bond. The chauffeur was at once respectful and jokey with him. They “hey man’d” and “brother’d” each other. Discovered they were both named Isaiah and made jokes about their super-strict religious parents. (Parents Dad does not have. The Greats never go to church.)

  “Who’s that?” Chantal asked me as Dad waved. I could see Sarah and Zach looking at my dad and then back at me.

  “My dad,” I said.

  She looked at me sideways as if she could see the truth better from that angle. “No way,” she said.

  I smiled.

  “He’s so cool. What’s he do?”

  “Stuff,” I said.

  “What kind of stuff?” Chantal asked, watching Dad walk toward us.

  “I gotta go,” I said, and walked up to Dad. He kissed my cheek.

  “Hurry up,” he told me, sweeping me into the limo. I was relieved to see the brat wasn’t already in there. I enjoyed Chantal and the others watching us.

  “Who else are we picking up?”

  “No one,” he said. “I thought we’d cruise for a bit.”

  “And help the planet warm up some more. Climate change not quick enough for you, Dad?”

  “I don’t see you getting out and walking.”

  “Can’t,” I said. “They’s watching.”

  “Are watching,” he corrected. “This is Isaiah. Yes, same name as me. He had a shot at the world middleweight title. Back in the early nineties. Isn’t that right, Isaiah?”

  We both climbed up closer to Isaiah. Dad repeated the stuff about Isaiah and boxing.

  “It is,” Isaiah said, nodding. “You must be Micah. Your dad says you’re a handful. That right?”

  “Nope,” I said. “It’s my brother who’s the bad one.”

  “They’re both bad seeds,” Dad said, patting my head ’cause he knows I hate it.

  “Dad!” I protested.

  “I am cursed,” he told Isaiah, who nodded back at him.

  “Who’d have children? Other than the two of us,” Isaiah said, laughing. “Mine are more than a handful. But none of them in jail yet. That’s the blessing I’m counting.”

  Then they started talking boxing. Dad told Isaiah about his career as a lightweight. Lightweight was right, but only if you left out the boxing part. Dad liked to say that he was “averse to violence.” As far as I knew he’d never hit anyone. Not even me. Though, trust me, he’d wanted to.

  “I got out before it was too late,” Isaiah said. “Wanted to keep a few of my original smarts.” He tapped his left temple to demonstrate there was still something in there. “I can add up and read and I know who the president is. That’s a lot better than some of the brothers I went through with.”

  Dad nodded wisely.

  “Dad got out after his nose was smashed up,” I said, and Isaiah peered at Dad’s nose in the rearview mirror. The crooked lump in the middle came courtesy of his oldest cousin, Cal, up on the farm. Or, at least, that was the story I’d heard most often.

  Dad nodded again. “ ’Course,” he said, “I was never going to be a contender. Nose was broke in my fifth bout.”

  “You did right,” Isaiah said. “Look at you now! Riding around in a limousine.”

  Dad laughed. “Just reviewing it.”

  “Good enough,” Isaiah said.

  Next morning at school without saying anything directly I let it be known that my dad was a man to be reckoned with. By the end of the day it was Micah’s dad, the arms dealer.

  I neither confirmed nor denied.

  AFTER

  The police interview all the seniors. The art room becomes the inquisition room. I am one of the first they call. I wonder why. I am a Wilkins so it can’t be alphabetical.

  When the officer says my name I stand up and walk slowly out of English. Everyone looks at me. The teacher, too. I lift my chin a little higher, threading my way through the desks, trying to close my ears to the whispers, but my hearing is too good.

  They talk about me and Zach. Disbelief echoes around the room and follows me out into the hall. How could he? With her?

  I hate English. Even when no one is whispering about me.

  The police officer smiles at me. “I’m Officer Lewis.”

  “Micah,” I say, even though she already knows that since she asked for me by name. I wonder if she heard the whispers.

  “The art room is this way,” she tells me, making it even. I told her something she knew, now she’s telling me something I know.

  She’s shorter than me. She looks young. Like she could still be in high school. Her uniform is neat and she has a gun in a leather holster on her side. I wonder if she’s ever fired it.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “One of your teachers, Ms. Yayeko Shoji, will be there. We just want to ask a few questions. You might be able to help us find out what happened to Zachary.”

  “Do you have any ideas at all?” I ask her. “Was he really murdered? Everyone’s saying so.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that. The investigation is ongoing,” she says, still smiling. “Was he a good friend of yours? It’s hard when someone you care about dies.”

  “No,” I say, feeling weightless for a moment. I skid on a tile. The officer puts her arm out to steady me. “Slippery,” I say. “He wasn’t a friend of mine. It’s weird. You know . . . someone you’ve seen around.”

  She pats my shoulder. “I understand,” she says.

  I hope she doesn’t, and follow her along the empty hall into the art room.

  AFTER

  “This is Micah Wilkins,” Officer Lewis says.

  Two men nod. One of them, tall and thin, is leaning up against the wall. His elbow rests against someone’s painting of a cow exploding. At least, that’s what it looks like. The other man is sitting in a chair that’s too small for him. It looks as if it might collapse under his weight. He’s much fatter and more gray than the man standing. Neither of them wears a uniform and if they have guns I can’t see them.

  Officer Lewis gestures to the chair next to Yayeko Shoji, who turns and nods at me. Under the table she squeezes my hand briefly. For a moment
I think I might cry.

  Officer Lewis stands by the door. I am perched on the edge of my seat, toes flexed. I haven’t been in the art room since the tenth grade. I hated it then; I hate it now. The smells of paint, paint remover, clay, glue, chalk, pencil, dust are overwhelming.

  I sneeze. Yayeko blesses me.

  Why is the art room never clean? I look around at the messy paintings, the sculptures, the cabinets and desks and chairs in every imaginable color.

  “Micah,” the older-looking man says, turning from his notes to me and then back to his notes. “Micah Wilkins. I’m Detective Rodriguez.”

  “Hello,” I say. I wonder if they picked the art room on purpose, hoping that ugly art will make us want to confess.

  The other man looks down at me, bares his teeth, and says, “Detective Stein.”

  I smile but it’s a little smile. I glance at Yayeko; she nods.

  “We’re going to ask you a few questions. That alright with you, Micah?” Detective Rodriguez asks.

  “Okay,” I say. It’s not okay. I don’t want to answer questions. I don’t want to talk about Zach. I want to run.

  “Anything you can think of, even if it seems kind of irrelevant to you,” Rodriguez continues. “It might help us with the case. We need you to think hard. Tell us everything you can remember.”

  “Okay,” I say again.

  “Did you know Zachary Rubin well?”

  I shake my head.

  “Did you know him at all?”

  “We were in some of the same classes.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Biology,” I say, glancing at Yayeko. She smiles. “English, math, Dangerous Words.”

  “Dangerous Words?” Detective Stein asks.

  “It’s a class about censorship.”

  “Interesting,” he says, but I can tell he means weird.

  “When was the last time you saw him?” Rodriguez asks.

  “Friday, I guess. In class.” Friday night sneaking around in Central Park. “The Dangerous Words class.”

  “Did you notice anything about him? Did he seem different?”

  “Different?” I ask.

  The man nods.

  “I didn’t really look at him,” I say. “He’s—he was—popular. I’m not. I stay out of his way. I don’t think he’s ever said a word to me in school. Or me to him.”