A Fabrication of the Truth (5 page)

Not going to happen. I pushed away the thoughts. My life was too much of a complicated web of lies. It couldn’t happen.

That night, I went to open my window to let in some fresh air. I worked the old wood frame up and realized I could see across the way into a room in Dalton’s lola’s house. I knew our houses were close, and I knew I could see into their house, but I never paid much attention before. I looked over into what looked like a spare bedroom, but the main reason my eyes were drawn over there was because I saw Dalton hanging from the room’s doorway. I kept seeing him go up and down and at first was a bit confused, and then I realized he had a chin-up bar attached to the doorframe. He wore a pair of gym shorts and a t-shirt and, with crossed ankles, he pulled himself up and down, up and down. I could see his biceps flex, and the muscles in his forearms strain as he exercised. I didn’t mean to stare – I wasn’t even aware that I did so – but then Dalton jumped down and looked across at me, wiped a hand across his sweating brow, and smiled. I jumped back from my window, falling onto my bed.

***

“Oh my god,” Caroline said, slapping my shoulder. “That boy is going to devour you alive with his eyes.”

“Whatever,” I said as I walked next to Caroline down the school hallway.

“Word is that he’s been asking around about you.”

“Oh, yeah. He kind of told me.”

“Yep, somebody has the hots for you.”

“It’s not going to happen.”

“Lexie, Lexie, Lexie.” Caroline shook her head and her hair flitted all about in perfect waves. One of her goals was to be in a shampoo commercial, so she had hair tossing, flipping, and shaking down to an art. Her hair did look pretty in motion.

“Lexie, what?”

“You can’t stop love. It just happens.”

“He doesn’t love me.”

“Those eyes of his tell me otherwise,” Caroline said, grabbing my arm and pulling me closer to her.

“I’m going to have to tell him to start wearing sunglasses.”

“Don’t make him hide that face of his. Staring at it has become a highlight of my day. That bone structure.” Caroline hugged my arm and looked wistfully off into the distance.

“Then go ask him out,” I said, exiting the school by way of a bottle neck of students.

“I think he bites.”

“He does not bite. He’s the most harmless thing there is.”

“So now you know him well?”

“Ah!” I threw my free arm up in the air. What did Caroline want from me? “Listen, you know my life,” I said, stepping off to the side once we were outside.

“What, you think he’ll reject you because you’re a habitual liar?”

She’d never called me that before. She knew, but always seemed to accept it. I once looked up insistent lying on the internet, and it said what Caroline called me – a habitual liar. Psychologists used the term mythomania. I met Caroline in eighth grade – she caught on to my lies right away. Maybe because she’s an actress, she could tell when someone faked it, lied, told stories, whatever I did. But anyway, we had to do a family tree project for history. I stood in front of the classroom with mine – a visual web of lies. I dressed up nicely for the occasion—made the lie more convincing—and brought along the knowledge of what I learned a year or two prior; bring in souvenirs, actual proof to seal the deal. In front of twenty-three students, I stood in a pair of ballet flats and a swingy empire waist dress, holding my large board of life up for everyone to see.

“Okay, up here are my great-great-grandparents. My great-great-grandpa was a Furst of Lichtenstein, but moved here against his parents’ wishes and no longer held his title, took the last name Stein, and that was when he met my great-great-grandmother,” I said.

“So you come from royalty?” a classmate asked.

“Yes. I do believe I’m actually considered royalty.”

Then came in Caroline. I will say, at first, she was not my friend.

“You’ve watched one too many princess movies, or was it that one with the prince you saw?” she said, holding her cute little nose up in the air all snooty like.

I drew in my eyebrows, gave her my stink eye, and kept talking. “When he first met her, my great-great-grandfather didn’t know my great-great-grandmother was a runaway princess from Spain, avoiding an arranged marriage.”

A few of our classmates oohed and ahhed. Our teacher nodded her head.

“They married and had my great-grandmother.”

“What about your other great-grandparents?” Caroline asked.

“I don’t know about them. I don’t even know too much about my grandpa from that side, who’s here,” I said, pointing to his spot on the board. “But he was a big time movie star back in the golden age of Hollywood.”

“What about your grandma, your mom’s mom?”

“My mom has been out of the country, so I couldn’t ask her.”

“Oh really, where?” Caroline asked. She was really starting to get on my nerves.

“Fashion week in Paris.”

“Okay, girls, that’s enough,” our teacher said.

“Lexie, have a seat. Meet me after class and maybe I can help fill in the blanks.” That was my teacher’s way of nicely saying, “I know you’re full of it.” But to the students, I was thirteen when I became a descendant of royalty.

Before I sat down, I slyly gave Caroline the middle finger behind my back. I then curtsied and took a seat. She’d been my friend since.

“Lexie, you are,” Caroline said, snapping me back to reality and our discussion about my liar status.

“I know, but that’s not why.”

“Then tell me.” She looked at me with pleading eyes – eyes I almost wanted to give in and tell the truth to, be free of the weight.

“I’d have to dive too far into my web of lies and deceit.”

“I’m your friend. I almost want to say best friend. You’re supposed to tell me things,” she said, grabbing my wrist and lightly shaking my arm.

“Just almost?”

“Lexie, I’ve never even been to your house before.” Which was true. I was the queen of evasion.

I sighed. “Ugh.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Is that how you feel about our friendship?” she asked, dropping my arm like all of a sudden she realized she held a sack of poop.

“God, no.”

“You don’t have a lot of friends, Lexie.”

“I know,” I said. I looked Caroline over.  She looked perfect as always. If I dressed like her, I would have probably looked a slob. She pulled her hair up in a sloppy, beautiful mess. Her sweatpants hugged her just right, and her nose—which had nothing to do with her attire, but added to the ensemble nonetheless—looked small and button-like as it always did.

“Yes, everybody knows who you are, and you’re pretty, but people…”

“People what?” I asked, my hands now on my hips.

“They can’t make up their minds about you. They’re starting to catch on that you’re deceiving them, even after that Prince Tomas thing at the party.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.”

“I have to get home now.”

“Lexie, wait.”

“No, I gotta go.”

***

I sat on the bus brooding, knowing what Caroline said was the truth. Some guy who smelled like feet and wore a trench coat sat down next to me, partially on top of my thigh. I scooted as far over as I could, pressing myself up against the window, watching everything go by: a hospital, a soccer field, a family walking down the sidewalk, people crossing the street, people in the parking lot to a Jewel, all people who probably didn’t lie about everything. People who weren’t afraid to admit who they were, where they came from, their awful histories.

To most, I probably looked totally normal, sitting there on the bus – at least on the outside. Long light-brown hair down my back, pale brown eyes, eyebrows a little too unruly, my trusty scarf around my neck. But I was really a girl whose mother left her when she was five, whose dad led a drug ring covering the northern suburbs and who now sat in jail for his crimes. I hadn’t talked to him since he was sent there. He’d requested to see me, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t go. So besides my grandma, all I had were my lies – the way I wished my life was. I just didn’t want to face the real me. The one who felt so alone and abandoned, responsible for a boy almost dying, scared that once something good came into her life it would be taken away. It was just better living in my world of make believe. In that world, I could at least pretend I was happy.

“What’s wrong?” my grandma asked when I walked in the front door. She was on the couch watching a game show on TV.

“Nothing, everything, me.”

“That’s a lot. Want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Want to go to bingo?”

“Yes.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Maybe me screaming ‘bingo’ will fill the void.” I dropped my shoulders and dumped my bag on the ground.

“Oh my sweet.” My grandma turned off the TV. “Let me help fill that void.”

“With cookies?’

“If that’s a start, then yes.”

“Can I tell you what I think that void is from?” my grandma asked as we sat at the kitchen table eating sandwich cookies and watching the show that was on when I walked in the house. She glanced at the little white TV that sat on the table’s back corner and then back at me.

I sighed. I wasn’t prepared for an actual conversation. I just wanted a cookie.

“It’s your innocence. It was taken away that day. What you saw…”

“Oh please, not that again. Please don’t psychoanalyze me, Grandma.”

“Hey, young lady, you brought up the void.”

“Maybe it’s not a void, it’s…I don’t know. God, I don’t know what to do about him.”

“Ah, I see. Yes, makes sense.”

“What makes sense?”

“Boy troubles.”

“He just…ugh.” I shoved the rest of the cookie I held into my mouth.

“Please stay away from him, Lexie.”

“How do you know who I’m talking about?”

“I know.” She patted my hand and then handed me another cookie.

“Don’t worry, I told him to stay away,” I said, taking the cookie from her.

“I wish it wasn’t this way.”

“Why though? What’s so wrong with us being friends?”

“They’ve made it very clear that we are not to be near him.”

“How? I don’t get it.”

“You were too young.” My grandma shook her head and frowned.

“So tell me, Grandma.”

“It’s all part of the lawsuit. It was settled, long ago, but still.”

“What are you talking about?” There was still so much I didn’t know.

“Our family wasn’t supposed to be within so many feet of theirs. If we were, we could get arrested.”

“How is that possible? We live next door.”

“At first, we didn’t though.”

“I thought that was because of the investigation and evidence and stuff like that.”

“It was, but we also had to be careful. The restraining order was for a year.”

“And after that year we moved here, out of that little apartment.”

“Trust me, I didn’t want to live here, but there was no way I’d be able to sell this house.”

I nodded. Before that day, just me and my dad lived in the house. My grandma lived in Arizona, but she moved out here so I wouldn’t have to switch schools, and so she could take care of other affairs – mainly, selling the house – since my dad was in jail.

“So the restraining order ended four years ago.”

“They told me if we were ever within their son’s vicinity, they would sue us, and I believe them, Lexie.”

“Sue you for what? That’s absurd.”

“Maybe, but they’d find something. Causing undue emotional duress to their child, something like that.”

I didn’t feel like eating cookies anymore.

When I got home from bingo with my grandma, I went up to my room. I looked out the window, maybe just a bit curious, maybe just to see Dalton’s muscles flex again. He wasn’t doing his chin-ups though. He stood in the middle of the room wearing a t-shirt that said
The Flying Magpies
and some severely low-slung jeans, with his guitar strapped to him. I swore he was waiting for me. He didn’t look up, only bent over to flip on his amp and started playing. His head bobbed along to the beat, and then he looked right through the window at me and started singing, and loudly, because I could hear the hum of his voice and guitar through my window. Our eyes locked, and a smile started to creep up the corner of my mouth. He played my Prince Tomas song.

I struggled to pull up my window. Some cool air rushed in on my face, and I could hear his beautiful voice. It was so deep and soothing and made my heart flutter. This was not good.

I rested my chin on the windowsill and kneeled on my desk chair. He licked his lips and kept singing, his expression totally serious and concentrated.

“Get some new material,” I said through the screen, then realized he didn’t have his window open and probably couldn’t hear me. He quickly remedied that though, sauntering the few steps across the room and lifting his window. I repeated what I said, trying to erase the slow-mo image of him licking his lips that played on repeat in my head. He pointed at me, walked backwards, and started a new song. It was a fast one, and he started jumping around the room singing, probably too loud because his sister stuck her head in the door and shouted something at him. He laughed and continued his song a tad quieter. Luckily, his sister did not see me.