Liar (4 page)

“You know it is, Micah. We're closer to nature up here. Nature fixes everything.” Great-Aunt Dorothy always says that.

Nature also breaks things into a million pieces. Storms destroy, winds erode, and everything rots.

“I have school.”

“You're young—that's not so important. Besides, we can help you study if that's what you want.”

I'm a senior! My whole future is being decided. How will two high school dropouts help me study? They're crazy if they think I'm going to go live with them. How will they help me prepare for college? They call jeans “dungarees.” They don't know anything.

They talk as if I'm not going to college. They don't think I'm smart enough.

I know I am. My favorite teacher, Yayeko Shoji, says so.

“You're much happier up here, Micah.”

They always say that, too. But it's not true. They think I am made of country, with forest in my veins. But I'm a city girl: sewers, rats, subways—that's what's in my veins.

SCHOOL HISTORY

Our school is progressive. We call our teachers by their first names. No mister or missus or miz. They're Indira and Yayeko and Lisa. The emphasis is on ideas and learning and encouraging the students to reach “their full potential.” Sports are not a big thing. There are teams, but no specialist coaches, just teachers taking it on 'cause they love basketball or football or softball.

Not all our classes have normal names.

We're not channeled toward the SATs.

But we do get into good colleges. Even if we don't test well. They like our “depth and breadth.”

And our integration.

We're independent thinkers. We volunteer. We don't discriminate. We recycle and care and argue about politics.

In class, anyway.

Out of class it's the same as any other school. Except with money. And toilets that work and heating that doesn't shut off. We have all the textbooks we need. Computers, too. Bars on every window to keep the badness out.

Real-life forensic scientists come in to talk to our biology class. Real-life writers come to talk to us in English.

Our school looks after us.

BEFORE

The first and second week of my freshman year were bad. Really bad. After Sarah Washington and the banana peel, everyone knew who I was: the girl who pretended to be a boy.

So much for being invisible.

I was called into Principal Paul's office and forced to explain.

“My English teacher thought I was a boy,” I said. “I thought it would be funny to go along with it.”

He said it most decidedly wasn't. Then lectured me about the danger of lies and erosion of trust and blah, blah, blah. I tuned him out, promised to be good, and wrote an essay on Why Lying Is Bad.

“So why's your name Micah then?” Tayshawn asked me. He was the only one who agreed that me pretending to be a boy was funny. He even asked me to play ball with him again. Will was less happy. Zach ignored me. I didn't go. Though I played H-O-R-S-E with Tayshawn a couple of times.

“It's a girl's name, too,” I told him. “Just not as often.”

“It's as if your parents knew you was going to look like a boy.”

“Well.” I paused, feeling the rush I always get when I begin to spin out a lie. “You can't tell anyone, okay?”

Tayshawn nodded, bracing himself.

“When I was born they didn't know if I was a girl or a boy.”

Tayshawn looked confused. “How'd you mean?”

“They couldn't tell what I was. I was born a hermaphrodite.”

“A what?”

“Half boy and half girl. You can look it up.”

“No way.” His eyes glided down my body, looking for evidence.

I nodded solemnly, figuring out how to play it. “I was a weird-looking baby.” (Which is true. I like to thread my lies with truth.) “My parents totally freaked.” (Also true.) “You won't tell anyone, right? You promised.” In my experience those words are guaranteed to spread what you've said far and wide. I liked the idea of being a hermaphrodite.

“Not anyone. You're safe.”

Tayshawn never told a soul. I know because days later there still wasn't a whisper about it. Turned out that he's good that way. Trustworthy.

I figure the rumor finally spread all over school because I told Lucy when she was hassling me in the locker room. I went for the sympathy card: “You keep calling me a freak. Well, guess what? I am!”

She looked more grossed out than sympathetic.

Or it could have been Brandon Duncan, who overheard me telling Chantal, who wanted to know how I managed to fool everyone on account of she wants to be an actress and thought it would be useful to know. She had me show her how to walk like a boy. I taught her how to spit, too.

Or maybe it was all three of them. Most likely. Hardly anyone's as tight-lipped as Tayshawn.

However it spread, it reached Principal Paul, who contacted my parents, who told him it wasn't true, and there I was in his office again, explaining how I had no idea how the rumor got started and was hurt and upset that anyone would say anything so mean about me. “I'm a girl. Why would I want anyone to think I was some kind of a freak?”

Because I wanted them to pay attention to me.

Something like that.

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.”