Beautiful Lies (34 page)

Throughout the announcements, Mr. Slater shoots glances at the empty desk beside mine, the one I’d normally be sitting at if Rachel were here. Every few seconds, he shifts his gaze to me, then back to the desk. I notice him sweating
a little bit at his hairline, at the sides of his face. When the bell rings for first period, everyone stands up at once and heads toward the door. For a second, I think he’s going to stop me as I’m leaving, but he doesn’t. When I glance over my shoulder, I see him continuing to sit at his desk, hands balled into fists in front of him, his body held still. He almost looks like he’s going to cry.

English passes without incident; we have an in-class discussion on
Our Town,
which I haven’t read a word of, but I manage to avoid getting called on by nodding along with everyone else’s comments and pretending to listen attentively, even though my mind keeps drifting back to my inability to open Rachel’s locker. I remember Kimber’s comments yesterday, and my aunt’s one-sided phone conversation with my grandmother. My mentally unstable grandmother. My aunt and uncle are convinced that her abilities are not separate from her illness; they think they go hand in hand. That’s why I’ve never tried much to explain what I sense to my aunt and uncle; they’d only think I was crazy too.

But Rachel has always known. And she’s always believed me. Is it possible that she was starting to doubt our connection? My own twin sister. She must understand the way I am. She has to. If she doesn’t, then who will? Our
grandma, I guess, but lately she’s been drifting away, like she did yesterday, her thoughts slipping into nonsense while she was talking to Kimber and me.

There are worse things than death
.

No, there aren’t. Not as far as I know.

French class is a breeze. We spend the entire period watching a foreign film without the subtitles. All I have to do before lunch is make it through calculus and study hall.

I stop to use the second-floor bathroom before calc. I’ve just locked the door to my stall when someone else comes in behind me. I peek through the crack and see that it’s Kimber.

Before I have a chance to make myself known, she goes into the handicapped stall. Instead of sitting on the toilet, though, she takes a seat on the floor and pulls her legs close to her body. Her breath is shallow and quick for a few seconds. Then she begins to cry.

As I leave my stall, her cries turn into choked sobs; I can tell she’s struggling to be quiet but unable to control herself. I should leave and give her some privacy. She’d probably be mortified if I spoke up now.

But as I stand there, deliberating about what to do, it’s like the pain she feels is seeping from her body and filling the room. I want to help her. She and I used to be good
friends, before I started getting into trouble so much last summer, before Kimber’s mother decided she shouldn’t spend too much time around someone like me. Rachel and I used to have sleepovers at Kimber’s house on lots of weekends in elementary and middle school. She had this old record player in her bedroom, but she only had one record for it, a single of “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang. As little girls, we’d get all dolled up in her mom’s old dresses and high heels, and we’d pretend we were at a fancy party together, all three of us dancing like fools to “Celebration.”

I was drawn to her back then because she was damaged by what her father had done, sort of like Rachel and I were damaged by our parents’ deaths. The three of us never talked about it at all, but there was always a sense of defiance to our fun, our laughter loud and alive, proof that we still existed, and that we mattered to one another.

I can’t leave her alone in here to cry. I lean against the door and tap gently on it with my fingertips. “Kimber? Hey, it’s me. It’s Rachel.”

Her crying stops abruptly. “Shit,” she murmurs. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her swear before. Her voice is so smooth and lilting that the word actually sounds pretty coming from her. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” There’s a rustling sound as she gets to her feet and opens the door to stare at me.

“What do you want?” she asks flatly. Her face is streaky with makeup. Her lips are chapped beneath a layer of gloss. She looks so different from her usual, chipper self. She seemed
fine this morning—better than fine. So what happened between now and then to make her go to pieces?

I’m not sure why I think of the little carved monkey at this moment, but all of a sudden it springs to my mind. I put it in the front pocket of my sister’s bookbag this morning; for some reason, I wanted to keep it close to me throughout the day. Silly. I have the strongest urge to feel it in the palm of my hand right now, to hold it in my closed fist. But I don’t reach for the bookbag slung over my shoulder; instead I step closer to Kimber and place my hands on her arm. Her skin feels hot, like she has a fever.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “You can talk to me. We can lock the door and stay in here if you want. Or we could go to the library.” The librarian, Mrs. Dodd, is about a hundred years old and pays absolutely no attention to the comings and goings of students throughout the day. She’ll never notice us if we stay in the back of the room and keep our voices down.

Kimber shakes her head, blond hair whipping against her face. “No. I should go back to class. We both should. We’ll get in trouble if we skip.” She narrows her eyes at me, a twinge of resentment in her expression. “I mean, if we skip
again
.”

“Forget about class. It doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe not to you.” She tries to push past me, toward the door, but I stop her. I put my arms around her torso and feel the scars in her back, deep and warm and grotesque, even as I’m struggling not to think of the wounds as gross in
any way. But they are, no matter how I try to pretend otherwise. They’re horrifying. And Kimber has to live with them for the rest of her life.

I want to help her right now. She thinks I’m one of her best friends. I know I shouldn’t be deceiving her, but I don’t have much of a choice.

She breaks away from me, but she doesn’t move closer to the bathroom door. She leans against the shiny pink wall and presses her hands to her face, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms, smudging her mascara all over the place. As her arms fall limp at her sides, she lowers herself toward the floor again. She sits cross-legged, staring at the dirty beige octagonal tile.

“Do you know what it feels like to hate somebody?” she asks. She is suddenly calm, but as her words move into the space between us, I feel like all the air has been sucked from the room. I close my eyes; in my mind I see the wreckage of the green pickup truck in the ravine, still bodies floating in filthy water, the heartbroken plea scrawled in spray paint on the side of the boulder:
I loved you more.
The same thing Robin said to me last night.

“Yes,” I tell her. “I know what that feels like.”

She looks up at me. “Who is it? Who do you hate?”

Saying the words out loud makes me feel like something raw inside me is cracking open, seeping everywhere, suffocating me from within. “I hate the man who was driving the truck that killed my parents.”

She’s quiet. Her breathing is even and slow. “Of course you do.”

“My aunt and uncle are Christians,” I tell her. “They believe in forgiveness. They used to try to bring it up sometimes, a few years ago. They’d take me to church with them on Sundays. They must have told their pastor the whole story about what happened, because he used to look at me sometimes like …” I stop. I’m sweating, thirsty, suddenly drained.

“Like what?” Kimber prompts, tilting her head. I can see her scars climbing up the left side of her neck, near her spine. With her right index finger, she draws a slow figure eight around two of the tiles in the floor.

“Like I was hopeless,” I finish. “And he was right. I never wanted to forgive that man. I never even considered it, not really. I just … it’s a part of me now, the way I hate him. It’s like something inside me that I keep feeding, every time I remember my mom and dad.” I swallow. My heart goes
thumpety-thump
in my chest, which feels hollow. “Sometimes I wish he hadn’t died in the wreck, just so he would have spent the rest of his life living with what he took from us.”

Kimber nods. I know she understands. She probably always has.

“What was his name?” she asks.

The question surprises me. Nobody has ever asked me before. And the truth is that I don’t know the driver’s name;
I don’t know the names of any of the other passengers in the truck either. I’m sure my aunt and uncle do, but they’ve never told me, and I’ve never asked. I could go online and find the newspaper archives from the accident, but I’ve never felt any desire to do so. I never felt the need to know what other people called the man behind the wheel, or his friends; to me, he’ll always be the man who killed my parents, his friends the ones who helped it to happen. It’s the only information about any of them that I need.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I don’t want to know.”

Kimber is quiet. She pulls her knees against her chest and hugs her legs.

I let Rachel’s bookbag slide to the floor, and then I sit down beside Kimber. I unzip the bookbag’s front pocket and reach inside. My hand closes around the monkey.

“Raymond Shields,” she says. “That’s who I hate.” She sits up a little straighter and gazes at the opposite wall, where one of the sinks is dripping without making any sound.

“He’s my father,” she continues, “and I hate him.” Her expression remains calm but steady as she looks straight ahead. “He used to play the guitar for me before I went to sleep at night. I was born in April. You know that song by Simon and Garfunkel? ‘April, Come She Will’? He used to sing it to me. He was good on the guitar too. His fingertips were callused from practicing all the time. He called me Kimmy. I loved him so much.”

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “Kimber,”
I say, “I’m sorry.” I roll the monkey in my hand, feeling the grooves in the pit against my fingers. They feel like the scars on her back.

“Don’t be,” she says. “It’s not your fault. My parents used to fight all the time. Then, when I was six years old, my mom kicked my dad out.” She pauses. “He was gone for a while, and my mom seemed happy about it. But he came back a few months later, on the Fourth of July. Mom had taken me to see the fireworks in Hollick Park that night. We came home and went straight to bed. And while she and I were sleeping, my father came inside our house and poured gasoline all over the downstairs. Then he went outside, into the front yard, and he lit a sparkler. My neighbors were watching him. They thought he was drunk. They didn’t know what he’d done already.” She closes her eyes. “He stood in the grass and spun around, watching the sparkler burn down. When it was almost out, he threw it inside our front door.”

“Have you seen him?” I ask. “I mean, since he got arrested?”

“No. But he writes me letters sometimes. He says he’s sorry, and that it doesn’t matter where he is—whether he’s in prison or not—because he’ll regret what he did for the rest of his life. He wants me to forgive him.” She laughs. “To
forgive
him,” she repeats. “He’s my father. My father tried to kill me. I’ll probably never get married, Rachel. I’ll never wear a strapless dress or go to the beach in a bikini.”

“You could get married,” I tell her. “They’re only scars. If someone loves you, he won’t care.”

She doesn’t respond to the comment, like the possibility that someone could look beyond her flesh is unimaginable. “My mom says she forgives him,” Kimber continues. “It makes me so angry every time she brings it up. But my mom says that you can’t hold on to your hate forever. She says that hating my father won’t change anything that happened; all it will do is eat me from the inside out, like cancer. She says that if I forgive him, I’ll be free. I’ll be able to get on with my life, instead of wasting my energy on things that can’t be changed. What do you think, Rachel? Do you think she’s right?”

“Maybe,” I say. “I never really thought of it that way.”

“Well, I think she’s right,” Kimber says.

“You do?”

“Yes. I know she’s right.” She pauses. “But sometimes I feel like I need to hate him. Like it’s become so much a part of who I am. If I let it go, then what do I have left?”