Even When You Lie to Me (16 page)

“Go home, Charlie, really,” Drummond said. He and I were working late on the newspaper layout—or rather, he had stayed after everyone left and I’d stayed with him.

“It’s okay,” I said, trying not to turn hot with embarrassment. “I don’t mind.”

“And I appreciate it,” he said, “but both of us banging our heads against the wall is just going to make a bigger hole.” He made a sound between a sigh and a whimper that made my stomach curl. I hesitated, not sure whether he was just trying to be nice or he really wanted me to leave.

“Why are you two still here?” Asha had appeared at the door.

“The first issue is almost finished,” I said.

Drummond shook his head. “Charlie has an interesting take on the word
finished.
”

“Why are
you
here?” I asked her. “I thought you left with everyone else.”

“Watching Jai practice,” she said. “I was walking past and I heard shouts.”

“He’s mad at the software,” I said, jerking my thumb at Drummond.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m going to find the people who made it and force them to create pie charts for the rest of time.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Asha asked.

“No, no, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m sure both of you need to get home.”

Asha moved toward us. “Let me see if I can help,” she said. Drummond got up with a
please, go ahead
gesture and Asha took his seat next to me. He stood behind my chair, his hand on the backrest. I moved deliberately to see what would happen; my shoulder brushed his hand and he pulled it away.

Asha shifted things around on the page for a few minutes. “What about this?” she said. “If we moved the editorial over two columns and then pushed the response to the right, that would make sense and still fit on the page.”

“Asha, you’re a genius,” Drummond said, and chucked her on the shoulder. “That’s perfect. We should have you doing layout. We’re terrible at it.” A gust of jealousy swept through me: he’d never chucked me on the shoulder and called me a genius.

Asha brushed her shoulder off. “I’m sorry to run, but I really need to get home for dinner. Will you guys be okay?” She raised her eyebrows at me.

“Sure, sure, go home,” he said, waving her out. “Charlie, seriously, you go too. There’s no reason you should be here this late on a Friday. I’ll finish up and then we can tackle it again next week.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said. “My parents are out for the night, so I don’t have to be home.” My parents were definitely not out for the night, but I decided I could apologize to them later.

Asha glanced at me again. “You sure you don’t want a ride?”

“No, it’s okay. I’ve got my dad’s car,” I said, not quite meeting her eyes.

“Okay. Well, have fun, guys.” She waved at me and then she was gone. Her footsteps faded quickly.

“You sure you want to be here? I’m just going to be a grumpy jerk,” Drummond said, sliding down into his chair. His leg bumped against my knees as he settled himself.

When I didn’t answer right away, he said, “What?”

I swallowed. “How’s that any different than usual?”

“Good point,” he said. He paused. “I didn’t mean to imply that I wanted you to leave earlier.”

“Oh,” I said, “good. I wasn’t going to.” I looked into the hallway. The building was completely silent. Usually by then there was the narcotic drone of a vacuum in the distance. “This is the only time of day I like this place.”

He grabbed his tennis ball from the desk and threw it into the air. “With the notable exception of my class,” he said.

“Uh, yes, sure,” I said. He threw the ball at me, and I laughed and caught it. “It has a different feel at night, though, you know? It feels—I don’t know—warmer. Safe.”

“Mm,” he said. “Back when I was in high school, lo those many—”

“Many.”

“—many years ago, I always came in early or stayed late so I could do my homework in peace.”

“Ugh,” I said. “You came in just to do homework?”

“I had a big family. I shared a room with my brother and there was always noise coming from somewhere. Sometimes school was the only quiet place I could find.” He held his hands out and I tossed the ball back to him.

“That sounds hellish,” I said. “On both counts.”

“You’re an only child, right?” he said.

He remembered. “Yep.”

He tipped his chair onto two legs and looked at the ceiling. He threw the ball up and caught it, up and caught it. “I often wished I were an only child.”

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

“One brother, two sisters. Two parents, which was more than enough.”

It was strange to think he had parents, people who had known him when he was young. Whenever we asked him personal questions in class, he’d deflect them with a joke. I knew I had to be careful.

“Do you get along with them?”

“Sure,” he said. “Mostly. How about you?”

“I liked my imaginary brother a lot, but they told me I couldn’t bring him to kindergarten.”

He smiled at me, still balanced on two legs. His hair had gotten shaggy and it curled like a wave cresting when he moved. “And your parents?”

“Well, you’ve met my mom.”

“Yes. Oh, I still need to find out about internships for you, actually.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said, waving the words away. “Anyway, you can imagine how well that goes.” He had put the ball down on the table and I picked it up and squeezed it. “I do love them.”

“But…,” he said.

“You know how when your best friend gets obsessed with somebody and you feel like a fifth wheel when you’re with them?”

“That bad?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes I think I’m imagining it.”

He rocked forward so the front legs of his chair hit the floor. “My parents got divorced when I was thirteen. Hated them for a good few years.”

“I think you have to hate your parents at least a bit when you’re a teenager.”

“Very wise. I went a little crazy at your age.”

“You?”

“Yes,
me,
Charlie. Got suspended once, even.”

I stared at him in surprise. Every time I felt like I knew him—had quantified him, made him containable—he would say something like this and a vast space would open behind the words, hinting at oceans, deserts, planets full of things I didn’t know. “Really? I always thought you were…”

He laughed. “I was a loser, don’t get me wrong. I just had a night of drunken stupidity.”

“What did you do?”

He grimaced as if even the memory was painful. “Vandalized a science lab.”

“Why? And how?”

“There was this girl,” he said. “Rachel.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Yes,” he said as if we were old friends, which made me flush with pleasure. “Anyway, she was an atheist—a very vocal atheist, as seventeen-year-old atheists tend to be. She was the one who introduced me to the idea that
Catch-22
might be about atheism, actually. She used to tell me how she suspected our biology teacher was a creationist, so one night I snuck in and—you know those bumper stickers they make, the ones where the Jesus fish have legs? I stuck those up all over the walls, into the books, onto the Bunsen burners. Stuck one right onto his reading glasses.”

“That is a pathetic prank,” I said.

“It was,” he said. “I thought I was Yossarian. Turns out I was Doc Daneeka.”

“So did you impress her?”

“What do you think?”

“What happened?”

“Never got up the nerve to tell her I’d done it.”

I slapped my hands on the table. “No!”

“Yes. But I did turn myself in, because the guilt was eating me up inside. Have I mentioned how I wasn’t popular in high school?”

I enjoyed the thought of him in high school. “What were you like?”

“Picture me now but thirty pounds heavier, with what can only be described as a visual assault of hair, and a hundred times more obnoxious and determined to get people to laugh at my jokes. I say this with a very loose definition of the word
jokes.
”

“You were Frank?” I said.

He laughed. “Now you understand our fraught relationship.”

“So was Rachel your great lost love?” I said. I tried to keep my voice light.

He cleared his throat. “Not exactly.”

I knew I had hit on something personal, but I wasn’t sure what. Maybe he still liked her. “Do you keep in touch with anyone from high school?” I asked, to change the subject.

“Some people,” he said. “I still talk to a couple of my friends, and a few people I became close to after we got older.”

“Are they different now?”

“Yeah, to varying degrees,” he said. “Some people change a lot.”

“I won’t,” I said. I rolled the ball to him.

He picked it up. “Maybe not,” he said. “You never know.” I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. “I, however, am not someone you would have liked in high school.” He was silent for a long time, bouncing the ball against the table. “We really should do some work,” he said eventually. But he didn’t move.

I wanted to draw him out before he snapped shut again. “I guess you probably have someone to get home to.”

He snorted. “The only thing I have to get home to is your classmates’ papers.”

“Oh,” I said. “Not even like a goldfish?”

He shook his head. “You’re fishing, though.”

I laughed. “You do tend to be stingy with the personal details.”

He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling again. “You seem to be pretty adept at getting them out of me tonight.”

I swallowed. “I guess I should ask for your credit card number while I’m on a roll.”

“Aim a little higher than that, Charlie. Fuck knows I don’t have any savings for you to plunder.” I felt a jolt of delight every time he swore in front of me—like he was including me as an adult, an equal.

“You really want me to ask you something personal?” My heart was pounding so hard now I was surprised my voice wasn’t shaking.

He was still looking at the ceiling, watching the ball as it arced up and down. “Sure. Why not? Three questions.”

“Three,” I said. I looked at my hands; they’d left damp palm prints on the table.

“Think of me as the shittiest genie ever. Instead of endless riches and immortality, you get the meaningless personal details of some schlub of a high school teacher.”

“You’re not—” I said, and stopped myself.

He looked at me. “I am, kiddo. But go ahead.”

“All right. Just give me a minute.” What could I possibly ask him? I knew what I wanted to ask—
Do you ever think about me when I’m not here? Do you think about me at all? Do you think about Lila?
—but I couldn’t think of anything appropriate.

“Oh,” he said, “and no questions about when I lost my virginity. There is a limit to how much I’m willing to humiliate myself in front of you.”

“All right,” I said, though it threw me to hear him mention himself in a sexual context. Finally I said, “How much do you make a year?”

He laughed. “What did I just say about my lack of savings? What’s the next question?”

“You didn’t answer!”

“I didn’t say I would answer them. Just that you could ask.”

“Ugh,” I said. I got up and started pacing the room, trying to think of another question. The windows were black, and I watched my reflection follow me, looking sick and sweaty. Were my eyes really that hollow? “Some game.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got, Chuck.”

“Why do you call me Chuck?”

“Is that one of your questions?”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting down on the window ledge, “sure.”

“It’s just a nickname.”

I pressed my finger onto my nose and made a noise like a buzzer. “Sorry, you’ll have to do better than that.”

He stared at the ball as if it would provide an answer. “Honestly, I’m not sure. It just fit you somehow.” He smiled up at me. The lines around his eyes crinkled.

“I looked like a man?” I said, trying to put some power behind my voice so it didn’t come out in a whisper.

“No, of course not. But you didn’t feel like a Charlotte to me.”

I made a face. “I don’t feel like a Charlotte either.”

“Maybe you’ll grow into it,” he said. He squeezed the ball so that his fingertips turned white. “I overheard you talking to Lila as you guys walked in and you struck me right away as really sharp. I meet a lot of new people every year, but it’s not—” He paused and started again. “I guess I wanted to give you a stamp.”