Lie to Me (A Touched Trilogy) (2 page)

BOOK: Lie to Me (A Touched Trilogy)
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I looked up at Nathan. This time, though, he didn’t meet my
gaze. His face flamed and now I understood why he’d looked so horrified when
I’d nabbed the note. Vivian tried to grab it from me, but I clenched my fingers
around the small square, refusing to give it to her. The bell rang and people
started moving all at once.

“Give it to me,” Vivian said, making another grab for the
paper. I shook my head and slid out of my seat, moving quickly to give Tonya a
chance to get between us. I ran from the room, oblivious to the shrieking calls
of Vivian.

“Phoebe!” Nathan raced through the hall behind me.

I turned into the art room and he followed me, closing the
door behind him. The last art class of the day had already finished. Ms.
Steward, the art teacher, was known for leaving early. The large space reeked
of paint fumes and dust that floated in the air, highlighted by the sunlight
pouring through the windows lining the wall. It had been more than a year since
I’d last been in the room, but the smell took me back. Every insecurity within
me rose, instantly deflating me.

“Give it to me, Phoebs.” Any embarrassment he’d felt before
vanished from his face, leaving anger and frustration glaring back at me.

I lifted my hand, the note still clenched in my fist. “What
is this?”

“A note,” he said.

“No shit. How can you do that?”

My heart beat frantically. What did I want him to say? It
seemed that no matter what he said, it wouldn’t negate the fact that he had
just dumped his girlfriend in a note. Or, he would have if I hadn’t intercepted
it.

“You don’t get it.” He sank against a table, lifting one leg
off the ground to kick at the air.

“Then explain it to me.” Anger forced the words from my lips
and they echoed in the empty room.

“Why? Why should I have to explain it to you?”

“Because you...we...”
Because you chose her over me.
I didn’t need to say it. The fact was there between us and had been everyday
for over a year.

“This isn’t about you,” he said, standing up. He took a step
toward me, tearing the note from my hands. He was at the door when I finally
got the courage to speak.

“You need to tell her to her face. Grow up and be a man.”
Only the stiffening of his shoulders let me know my dig bothered him, then he
was out the door, and it drifted closed with a gentle click, leaving me alone
again.

With elbows on the table, I plowed my fingers into my dark
curls. I wasn’t mad for Vivian. I was mad for me. That he had picked her
instead of me and that a year of pretending he hadn’t broken my heart had done
nothing to actually heal it. It was easier to smile and flirt than to let him
know how much it had hurt. He hadn’t told me to my face either. That’s what
hurt the worst. He’d chosen her, yet he was treating her even crappier than
he’d treated me.

When Nathan had first moved to town two years ago, I’d
fallen in lust. He was hot, smart, and best of all, he was new. He’d never
dated Chloe, he didn’t know about the weird things Lily could do to a person,
and he never questioned why I hated being with my sisters. Absolutely perfect.
Except he’d never acted on the interest he’d shown in me. I spent weeks
pursuing him, until finally I cornered him in the art room. After giving him
our first kiss, my first kiss, I asked him to Homecoming.

Too bad for me he’d already asked Vivian. That he obviously
told her about the kiss made it even more humiliating when she and her groupies
laughed about it in front of me.

Cringing at the memory, I dropped my head onto the table,
letting it roll back and forth. Reliving that incident was nearly as mortifying
as this. I’d acted jealous - okay, I was jealous - but what was worse was now
he knew it.

The gentle swish of the door opening brought my head up.
Chloe stood framed in the doorway. Just what I needed, an overbearing sister
relishing in the I-told-you-so moment, something Chloe and her all seeing eye
did way too often.

“Don’t say it,” I snapped, moving past her into the hall.

“Say what?” she asked, catching up to me.

I arched a brow. “I told you so.”

“Why would I say that?” Her brow creased.

“Because you knew he’d never like me.” I wondered if she’d
enjoyed bursting that bubble when she’d told me. I picked up my pace hoping
she’d get lost in the rapidly thinning crowd, but I just didn’t have that kind
of luck.

“I never said he didn’t like you. I only told you I saw him
with Vivian.” She swerved around a couple that had stopped in the middle of the
hallway then was back at my side. “Anyways, didn’t he just ask you out?”

“Yeah, right. You’ve already told me that wasn’t going to
happen.” Having all of my fantasies squashed by Chloe the Fortune Teller, was
just one reason why I avoided spending time with her.

 Her face paled and her mouth dropped open. “I never said it
wouldn’t happen. Besides, I saw him... I mean, I saw you go back to class. Then
he followed you to the art room and asked you out.”

“Uh, yeah, didn’t happen.” We reached my locker and I swung
it open, throwing in my jacket and grabbing my binder for Biology class. When I
glanced at her, she seemed completely unaware of anything going on around her.
“Anyways, aren’t you supposed to be meeting Nanna?”

“She plans on being there for a while. Besides you’re going
with us.” She gave a smirk and leaned against the neighboring locker. “I saw
it.”

I gritted my teeth. “Well, it ain’t gonna happen, so maybe
your vision isn’t as clear as you thought. Look at how wrong you were about
Nathan. What happened in the art room was about as far from him asking me out
as you can possibly get. You can’t be right all the time, Chloe.”

I slammed the locker closed and turned my back on her,
walking to class. After a few steps, I stopped and glanced back. Her pale face
was disturbing. She really was freaked out about her vision not happening.

“I’m sorry, Chloe, but maybe you just got the message
wrong.” As much as I hated her constant knowing look, I hated the idea I’d hurt
her even more.

“I’ve never been wrong before.” Her normally confident voice
whispered softly through the air, trailing behind her as she walked off.

I wanted to call after her, to reassure her, but didn’t know
how. I’d never had a gift, so how would I understand suddenly not having one?

Lily the Healer, Chloe the Seer, and Phoebe the Truth
Teller. That’s what my mom called us minutes before she died. She’d been right
about Lily and Chloe. Me on the other hand... well, it hadn’t happened yet. I
couldn’t even say I knew what I was supposed to do as a truth teller. I
definitely didn’t have a problem lying. Not that I was a chronic liar.
Sometimes though, it was just easier.

So just what does a Truth Teller do? The only person around
to ask was Nanna and I wasn’t really in the mood for her today.

I pushed thoughts of my supposed gift aside and headed for
my biology class.

“Hey girl,” Bianca called as I entered the biology lab. I
gave her a goofy smile, trying my best to lighten my mood. Thoughts of what had
happened with Nathan were bringing me down. If I wanted to survive the boredom
of the day, I definitely needed to focus on something else. I flopped into my
seat next to Tonya, flinging my binder onto our table.

“God, isn’t this day over yet?” I groaned, choosing to
discount the fact that I could have left with Chloe and Lily, but going with
them would have been even worse than sitting through an hour of Mrs.
Schaeffer’s video montage of her favorite dissections.

“Please tell me we have plans every day the next two weeks,”
Bianca said, twisting in her chair to face us across the aisle. “My parents
want Karin to tutor me.”

Bianca’s parents considered her a disgrace. They were a very
traditional Chinese family and while her older brother was entering medical
school and her younger sister was some kind of cello prodigy, Bianca was,
well...Bianca. She tinged her pixie cut hair with purple streaks and she wore a
bit too much eye shadow. According to her parents, she had no interests that
would lead to any future employment. Apparently being able to scout out hot
guys with her eyes closed wasn’t going to help her cut it in the real world.

“In what?” I asked, knowing that despite her apparent rebel
look she had the highest GPA of all my friends.

“Mandarin.”

“Isn’t that, like, Chinese?” Tonya asked.

“Yes.”

“And aren’t you Chinese?”

Bianca rolled her eyes. “So? Just because I’m Chinese
doesn’t mean I speak all Chinese dialects. My family speaks Cantonese, but my
parents say Mandarin will be more useful in the business world and the last
time Karin came over she blabbed to my mom about this Mandarin class she’s
taking at the community college.”

“Hey, Karin’s not so bad,” Owen spoke up from the other side
of Bianca.

Tonya made a barfing sound. Her dislike of Karin was well
known to everyone including Karin, despite the fact she was part of our group
of friends.

“I have family coming in, but I should be able to get away
some of the time.” I rolled my pencil back and forth along the table. “I can do
something tomorrow.”

“Let’s go shopping, we can have a girls’ day,” Bianca said.

“What about me?” Owen flicked her head and she gave him a
gentle elbow back.

“Okay, a girls plus one day then,” she said.

“Nah, I have better things to do.” He turned back to his
stack of books and pulled one out, flipping to a dog-eared page. Bianca and I
rolled our eyes. Owen was just plain weird sometimes.

“I might have some time after Christmas,” Tonya said, then
pulled out her cell and started punching away at some text.

I leaned over, trying to see what she was typing. She knew I
didn’t do texts and the only other people I could think she’d want to message
sat across the aisle from us. She shot me a dirty look, and tilted her phone
away from my eyes. I stuck my tongue out at her, and settled back in my chair.
She’d been acting really strange the past few months, always busy with some
vague thing she had to do with her grandma. Then again, she had a grandma who
wasn’t always nosing around into everything you’d done since you’d last seen
her, so maybe she didn’t mind.

Mrs. Schaeffer came in, and after ten minutes of lecturing
about the importance of dissection as a method of learning more about organisms
and the humane treatment of the specimens, the lights dimmed and the
computerized video projector started. Normally movie time was an opportunity to
catch up on some of my sleep, but Tonya began kicking me under the table.

“So?” she whispered.

“What?” I looked at her and smiled at the expectant
expression she wore.

“Come on, Phoebs, you know you can’t not tell me what the
note said.” She leaned closer, her eyes growing wide. “You took off with it
like the room was on fire. It must have been really good. Sex talk, right? I
always knew Vivian was a little skanky. And Nathan has always been a bit too
quiet.”

Her eyebrows wiggled and I broke out in a laugh. Mrs.
Schaeffer gave a sharp cough from her desk in the front corner of the room and
I stifled my chuckles. No way did I need an office referral the day before
Christmas break.

“No sex talk,” I whispered. “Honest. It was just some stupid
stuff. Their reaction was too much. Did you see Nathan’s face when I grabbed
it?” My soft laugh sounded forced even to my ears. I opened my binder and
focused on drawing a swirling flower pattern on a blank sheet of paper,
avoiding her gaze.

I didn’t want her to know what the note said. Although I
couldn’t figure out why it would matter, the idea of her knowing that he had
tried to break up with Vivian in a note just didn’t sit right. Hell, I didn’t
even want Vivian to know.

“He looked like he was gonna piss his pants. You sure it
wasn’t something important?” Tonya asked.

 She eyed me suspiciously and I tried to relax my smile into
something more natural. Considering I was supposed to be the one with some kind
of internal lie detector, she was a lot better at finding fibs than I was.

“Can you really picture Nathan and Vivian ever having a
meaningful conversation, let alone in a note?” I arched a brow and this time it
wasn’t as difficult coming up with a believable expression. Until I snatched
the white missile, I hadn’t thought it possible either.

“Ladies,” Mrs. Schaeffer’s voice boomed over the droning
commentator from the video.

Our heads whipped up to find her glaring at us. Most of the
time, a dirty look from a teacher didn’t fazed us, but Mrs. Schaeffer had a
wonky eye and a husband nobody had seen in five years.

“You’re more than welcome to watch the video after class
with me or you can stop your chatting and watch it now.”

Knowing from experience she was serious, our heads bobbed
frantically. The dissections continued and I slouched back in my chair, tipping
the hard plastic seat back on two legs. I really had no interest in biology and
even less in chemistry or physics. If Dad hadn’t made two science classes
mandatory, I’d have enrolled in three sessions of art. Closing my eyes, I let
myself drift off, blocking out Tonya’s groan of dissatisfaction. The noises
around me faded and I imagined Nathan at the beach, decked out in his surfing
gear. Fantasies were so much easier than real life.

I was almost asleep when something hit the back of my head
causing me to jerk up and nearly fall out of my seat as it skidded backwards
with a grating screech of protest along the tiled floor. Two dozen sets of eyes
focused on me and only the darkened room concealed my embarrassment. I gave a
grin and waved at my gawkers, putting in a little extra smirk for Owen and
Bianca, who tried so hard not to laugh.

Once everyone, other than Tonya, had diverted their
attention away from me and back to the screen, I glanced behind me to see what
had ended my nap. Resting inches from my black boot was a balled up piece of
paper. My eyes shifted around, looking for who had decided I was the new trash
can, and they came to rest on Vivian. Figured. How was it possible to have been
in this class with her for an entire semester and not even realize she was
there? I didn’t skip that often.

BOOK: Lie to Me (A Touched Trilogy)
2.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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