The Second Lie (4 page)

"How do they treat you when you're poor?"

Maggie shrugged shoulders that appeared way too thin and fragile for the weighty world she seemed to be carrying on them. "You know, like you're not worth much. Some parents don't want their kids hanging out with kids like me. Like I'd be a bad influence. And they don't want their kids coming over to my house."

"Highlights aren't going to change where you live."

"It's not just that. Like if you're sick or whatever, your life is worth less than someone who has a lot of money to pay for medicine and stuff."

My hand reached for the pen that wasn't there.

"Have you or your mother ever been sick?"

"No."

"Has a child in your neighborhood been sick?"

"I don't know. We aren't close with any of them."

"Do you know someone who's been sick?"

The girl nodded.

"A friend of yours?"

She nodded again.

"You want to talk about it?"

Maggie shrugged, looked at her hands. "There's nothing to say, really. We were best friends. All through elementary and junior high. Jeanine was like me, living alone with her mom. Only her mom didn't have a job and drank all the time. Jeanine used to stay with us a lot. Until she got sick."

"What was wrong with her?"

"She got leukemia." Maggie had tears in her eyes when she glanced up. "She could have gone into remission, or at least not had so much pain, but they didn't have insurance and social services only did so much and then stopped."

"Did she die?"

"Yeah. Last year. At the beginning of eighth grade."

The girl didn't sob. She didn't even let her tears fall. She just sat there, wide-eyed.

"Have you done any grief counseling?" I asked. Her mother hadn't said a word about the death of Maggie's best friend the year before they were to enter high school together.

The information was critical. Starting high school was intimidating enough and without your best friend...

Maggie was emotionally ripe for someone to take advantage of.

"Not really, not anymore. They did some of that at school for us right after Jeanine died. But I belong to this chat group on the Internet." Maggie grew animated for the first time. "It's for kids who are sick and can't get out to interact with other kids. One of my teachers told me about it last year. I talk to the kids that can't go to school. We're kind of like friends even though we don't ever meet or anything." The girl's eyes were bright with enthusiasm. "It's really helped a lot to talk to kids like Jeanine."

I had so many questions, but wasn't sure how long Maggie would be willing to speak with me. I decided to go back to the mother-daughter conflict.

"Why didn't you tell your mother the reason you wanted the highlights?"

"I'd rather she thinks I want to be hot."

Working with kids was difficult, sometimes excruciating, but their candor was refreshing. "Why would you want her to think something that upsets her when it's not true?"

"Mom's just, you know--she didn't finish high school. I mean, she could've if she didn't have me. She's smart and knows a lot about life and stuff, but sometimes she can't, I don't know, figure things out. And then she gets cranky."

"Cranky?"

"She yells and slams things and blames other people for stuff in her life."

"Who does she blame?"

"Depends."

"Does she blame you?"

"Sometimes."

"Give me an example of when that happens."

"Okay. When I'm doing homework and she tries to help and can't, she says it's because I didn't explain things right."

Unfortunately, it wasn't the first time I'd heard that one.

"What else?" I asked.

"Like the highlights. She doesn't get that people look down on us 'cause we're poor. She thinks I'm looking down on her if I say anything about fixing up our place. Or doing her hair. I bought her some makeup for Christmas and she thought I was cutting on her. Trying to change her. Like I thought I was too good for her." She shrugged. "I just figure it's better to let her think I'm interested in boys. It's what she expects, anyway."

"Why would she expect that?"

"By the time she was my age she'd already had sex."

I couldn't ignore the invitation she'd just handed me. "Have you had sex?" The offhand way kids talked of such intimacies was something I was used to. And worried about. But that was another issue.

"No."

I believed her. If her mother was right, and there was someone, which I was beginning to doubt, we'd caught the situation in time.

"Do you want to?"

"I'm a little curious, you know, about it. Some of my friends have done it and they say I'm missing out on a great part of life."

"So why haven't you done it?" I almost choked, asking that question of a fourteen-year-old. But I had several teenagers as clients. If I was going to help them, I had to meet them where they lived. Even if I hated the lodging.

I could guide. But not if I judged.

"I've never even had a boyfriend," Maggie was saying without much inflection.

"Do you want one?"

"One of the boys at school?" she asked. Her question made me curious. And a little edgy.

"Any boy." We needed to head out of the baby pool and into deeper waters.

"Boys my age are stupid, Dr. Chapman. Don't you know that?"

"Who doesn't know it?" I had to get her to trust me.

"My mom. People can be smart in some ways, but not in others. Mom, she's really smart when it comes to figuring out how to, I don't know, get away with stuff. But other things she just doesn't have a clue about. Like the way hormones affect boys and girls differently or that boys' brains don't catch up with girls' until they're out of high school."

She could have been spouting from a child development 101 textbook.

"Did they teach you that in school?"

"Uh-uh." She shook her head. "I read it on the Internet."

I pictured my pen writing furiously.
A lot of time on the Internet.

"You said your mom was good at getting away with stuff. What kind of stuff?"

"You know, like the new law that says they can't shut off the electricity in the winter. Mom doesn't pay the bill in December so there's extra money for Christmas. And she's great at making up excuses when she's hungover and can't go to work. She comes up with really creative stuff and they believe her every time. She knows how to avoid the manager of the trailer park when our lot rent is late, and then when she has the money she takes it to him personally and acts like she just forgot. He always just smiles and tells her not to worry about the late fee. Sometimes he even asks her out for expensive dinners and she brings back a doggie bag for me. And she hooked us up to cable and the Internet without paying for it. That kind of stuff."

"She knows how to survive."

"Yeah. Like whenever anything breaks, she knows some trick to fix it, or else she calls someone over to do it for us so we don't need a service that charges a hundred bucks just to walk in the door."

"Where does your mom work?"

Maggie named the local department store. "She's a cashier, but that's just because she doesn't suck up enough to the managers to get a promotion. I keep telling her she should just do what they say and quit arguing and pretty soon she'll be calling the shots, but she doesn't listen."

We were getting off track, and that sense I have that tells me when something's surfaced was kicking hard.

"So you're curious about sex, but you don't like boys."

"I guess."

"Did I misunderstand?"

"It's not that I don't like boys--as though I like girls or something. I don't. I like guys all right. Just not...you know...immature ones."

And she was curious about sex.

Uh-oh.

Maybe Lori Winston was right about Maggie having a new interest. Moms often knew their daughters well.

I refrained from biting on a fingernail in the absence of my pen. Or a new pencil. It's just that I seem to relax more, hear more, when I'm chewing something. Or writing.

"Is there someone you like now?"

"No." Maggie seemed to be inordinately interested in a flower on my couch.

"You sure about that?"

For the first time, when the teenager glanced up, she avoided looking me straight in the eye. "Positive."

Okay. Well, I'd file that reaction. As soon as I could get to my pad and write it down.

I had nothing solid. No real clues.

Which put me right back to square one. Damn.

It wasn't my job to like or dislike my clients. Or to open my heart to them. But this was my town. I cared about the people who lived here.

And I liked this girl. I wanted to help her.

"Is there anything you want to talk about?"

"I paid for the hair color. It was on sale." Interesting choice of topic.

"How do you get your money?"

"I have a paper route." She named the local weekly that regularly employed Chandler teenagers. Like the larger papers used to do when I was growing up. "And I babysit whenever I can."

Maggie and eighty percent of the other female teenagers in this town.

We'd been talking for forty-five minutes. Lori Winston was due to arrive in another fifteen. Which didn't leave me much time.

"What else is going on in your life? Any concerns about starting high school?"

"Not really. I mean, it'll be all the same kids I went to junior high with. Just the teachers and building are different."

"Why'd you quit cheerleading?"

"Guys think cheerleaders are hot."

"And that's a bad thing..." At Maggie's frown--her first full-out facial expression since she'd been there-- I added, "Because the guys who think they're hot are immature."

"Right," she said, and I was left feeling as if I'd just scored well on an exam. Sometimes my job was like being a soldier--you had to walk through some minefields to get the work done. You avoided them when you could, and prayed in case you couldn't.

"You said you read about teenage development on the Internet. And that you talk to sick kids online. Do you spend a lot of time on the Net?" Living alone with a working mother would probably give the girl plenty of opportunity to log on to what I considered the world's worst invention.

"Some."

"Do you talk to other people besides the kids?"

"Not much."

"But some."

"Yeah. I guess."

"Anyone in particular?"

"What is this, twenty questions?"

I'd just stepped on a mine.

"Do you know why your mother wanted you to come see me, Maggie?"

"Yeah. She thinks I'm doing it with an older guy."

"But you aren't."

"No. I told her that. But she doesn't believe me."

"Have you talked to any older men on the Internet?"

"I'm not stupid, Dr. Chapman. I know all about the sick stuff that goes on there. I stay away from it."

"If an older guy asked you out, would you go?"

"No. I'm too young."

"Would you want to?"

"Do I have to answer that?"

"No."

I waited, but Maggie didn't respond any further. I'd pushed as far as I could. The girl's entire demeanor had changed from willing cooperation to resentful suspicion.

"What else have you read about on the Internet?"

Maggie crossed her arms over her chest. "Just stuff. I read articles about all kinds of things."

"Do you smoke, Maggie?"

"Of course not. And I've never tried drugs, either. They're gross. And they'll kill you, too. That's what I keep telling my mom about her cigarettes. But she doesn't quit. Sometimes I think she'd rather be dead."

Did her mother do drugs?

"How about you? Have you ever felt like you'd rather be dead?"

"I'm only fourteen."

"That doesn't answer my question."

"Why would I want to die? I've hardly started to really live."

She had an edge.

"What do you and your friends do when you're together?"

"Hang out."

I had a choice. Let her go and hope I could get her to come back. Or try to help her and risk losing her.

"Do any of your friends know you like an older man?"

"Of course not. You think I'd tell them..."

Maggie stopped dead. And with a venomous glance, she got up and walked out of my office.

4

I
n the middle of lifting a bite-size piece of the most delicious-smelling pork to her lips, Sam paused. "What?" she asked, twirling the toothpick spear.

Her older brother, Pierce, wiped his hands on the white full-body chef's apron that was folded over and tied at his waist. "What
what?
"

"You're frowning."

"Sorry." Busying himself with the cooked pork, Pierce didn't elaborate. Sam stared at the big erase-board calendar on the wall beside him. Thursday, August 19. He had two functions that day.

"No, I want to know," Sam said, lowering the sample he'd just handed her. "What's on your mind?"

"Nothing." His fingers touched the food softly, gently, almost reverently, as he layered longer skewers with different-colored vegetables. Sam knew the finished product would look more like a work of art than the main course of the dinner he was catering that evening.

"Yeah, right. Nothing. And I'm quitting my job." Sam leaned on the cooking island Pierce had had installed when he'd remodeled the downstairs of the Victorian house they'd grown up in and opened his catering business. She always stopped by during her lunch hour, hoping her brother would have something tasty to sample.

"What'd you think of the pork?" Pierce turned around. "You didn't like it?"

"I didn't try it. Not until you tell me what the frown was about."

"You, of course. It's always about you. But you know that."

"Me." Grumpily, she closed her teeth around the toothpick and slid the meat off. It was good.

Almost good enough to distract her from her bad mood.

"What about me, specifically, and why today?" she asked, softening her tone a bit as she snagged another piece of pork.