The Secret to Lying Read online

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  “I’m a fast learner.”

  We went back and forth, daring each other to hit balls toward riskier targets. At one point, Jess pointed me directly at the faculty parking lot. I got under the ball, so it went high and came down next to Hassert’s van. Luckily, it took an odd bounce and rolled away.

  Jess told me all about how she’d grown up in the city sneaking into clubs and watching shows. When she was fourteen, she could pass for twenty-one. She talked about bands that I’d never heard of, and how she wanted to be a DJ. In addition to knowing a lot about music, she’d played a few concerts herself. Not rock concerts, though. Jess played classical piano. “Mozart’s pretty hard-core,” she said. “Seriously. Put in the third movement of Mozart’s Requiem Mass, crank it up, and tell me you don’t want to thrash your head and slam someone. Chopin is good, too.”

  I pictured her onstage in her black combat boots and fishnet stockings, blowing the stodgy audience away. “Maybe sometime I can hear you play,” I said.

  “Sure. You’d be amazed by what I can do with my hands.”

  I duffed the ball I was supposed to hit toward the school. Then Jess took the same shot and chipped it onto the roof. After that, we had to look for some of the balls we’d already hit.

  “So besides fighting, what do you do?” she asked.

  “I write letters,” I said. “Long, gut-wrenching, protean letters.”

  “Protean letters? What’s that mean?” She gave me a coy smile. I wondered if she really didn’t know what I was talking about, or if this was part of her game. “Are you one of those geeks who spends all his time in chat rooms?” she asked.

  “Could be.”

  “That doesn’t sound very exciting.”

  “Depends who you’re writing to.”

  “I guess.” Jess glanced away, as if avoiding something.

  The silence became awkward. I thought of what ghost44 had said, about how she could only be herself in secret. I didn’t want to risk losing her by asking too much, so instead I changed the subject. “I’ve also been in thirteen car accidents,” I lied.

  She laughed. “Thirteen?”

  “Well, they weren’t exactly accidents.”

  “You mean they were intentional?”

  “Call it purposefully accidental. My friends and I would borrow cars and drive them to the country to do Dukes of Hazzard moves. On dirt roads, I could usually pull a few 360s.”

  “Remind me to never let you drive.”

  “I’m a good driver. Most people don’t know how to crash. But I like crashing.”

  “Me, too.” Jess smiled mischievously. “I’m all about crashing.” She tossed me a ball and pointed to her dorm. “Your turn.”

  I hit a beautiful shot. The ball arced, becoming a tiny white speck as it floated toward a second-floor window.

  “Uh-oh . . .” I muttered.

  The sound of breaking glass echoed across campus like a starter’s pistol. We sprinted to the pond, and I tossed the club into the water. Then we ducked behind some bushes near the cleavage. Lights flicked on as security guards and RCs streamed out of the dorms like angry ants.

  “Crap! Crap! Crap!” I said.

  Jess giggled and kissed me. “So we blend in,” she whispered, glancing at another couple that was walking the pond.

  We kept kissing. My heart beat so crazily I could feel the blood thumping through my veins.

  “I like this game,” she said.

  ghost44: Knock knock.

  johnnyrotten: Nice try, but I’m not going to ask you who you are anymore.

  ghost44: Really? Have you finally moved beyond such superficial things?

  johnnyrotten: Nope. I figured it out.

  ghost44: You did?

  johnnyrotten: Yup. I know who you are. Only I’ve decided to keep it a secret.

  ghost44: If you wanted to keep it a secret, then why tell me that you know?

  johnnyrotten: Because — I like this game.

  ghost44: All right, Mr. Know-It-All, let’s play another game. Questions. I’ll answer one of your questions if you’ll answer one of mine. But no *who* questions.

  johnnyrotten: Do I go first?

  ghost44: Yes. My turn.

  johnnyrotten: Hold up. That doesn’t count.

  ghost44: It was a question. Rules are rules.

  johnnyrotten: Bring it on.

  ghost44: Do you like Jessica Keen?

  johnnyrotten: I can’t imagine why you’d ask that.

  ghost44: So what’s your answer?

  johnnyrotten: Depends what you mean by “like.”

  ghost44: Put it this way. Do you (a) lust after her hot body, (b) enjoy messing around with her, (c) like the idea of being with her, or (d) love her?

  johnnyrotten: That’s totally unfair.

  ghost44: Quit stalling.

  johnnyrotten: OK. I think she’s cool.

  ghost44: That wasn’t one of the choices.

  johnnyrotten: I’m rebellious like that. My turn. Tell me something about you that no one else knows.

  ghost44: Nice question.

  johnnyrotten: So?

  ghost44: How about this — My mom hates me.

  johnnyrotten: For real?

  ghost44: Yup. She won’t say it directly, and no one ever talks about it, but she does.

  johnnyrotten: Why?

  ghost44: You’d have to meet my mom to get that.

  johnnyrotten: Describe her.

  ghost44: Hmmm . . . Basically, she’s wealthy, successful, and perfect in every way. She even had the perfect divorce. In fact, the only thing that’s not perfect in her life is me. I’m the one piece that won’t fit her puzzle, so I ruin the whole thing.

  johnnyrotten: Sounds familiar.

  ghost44: Are your parents divorced?

  johnnyrotten: No. But I used to wish they were.

  ghost44: Why?

  johnnyrotten: Is that your question?

  ghost44: Yes.

  johnnyrotten: I guess I thought that if one of them moved away, my life would be more interesting.

  ghost44: Trust me: having two toothbrushes isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  johnnyrotten: That’s not what I mean.

  ghost44: Then what do you mean?

  johnnyrotten: It’s hard to explain. Do you ever wish you could be someone else?

  ghost44: Sometimes. Mostly, though, I wish I could be myself.

  johnnyrotten: Why can’t you?

  ghost44: Because I’m not good enough.

  johnnyrotten: Why not?

  ghost44: I’m just not. Anyhow, it’s my turn.

  ghost44: What’s your favorite childhood memory?

  johnnyrotten: Running away. Yours?

  ghost44: Sunday mornings eating donuts with my dad.

  johnnyrotten: Mmm . . . donuts.

  ghost44: He’d let me order anything I wanted. Cinnamon twists. Chocolate éclairs. The ones with the colored sprinkles on top. Sometimes I’d take a bite of each and leave the rest, and he didn’t care if I made a mess. It was the only day of the week that he didn’t work.

  johnnyrotten: I like that.

  ghost44: So tell me about running away.

  johnnyrotten: Hold on.

  johnnyrotten: I need to go. My RC is calling me over for a wing meeting.

  ghost44: Wait!

  johnnyrotten:?

  ghost44: Be careful, okay?

  johnnyrotten: Be careful of what?

  ghost44: Stay a ghost for too long and you might disappear.

  I FOUGHT MORE DEMONS in my dreams. It wasn’t every night — maybe once or twice a week. Some had claws, hair, and jagged teeth like animals, and some were almost human yet wrong. There were clowns with shark teeth. Hyena men. Fire-haired witches with snakeskin arms. A cat that changed into a corpse-pale girl whose eyes were bloodred pits. They terrified me, but I learned to control my fear and shape my dreams.

  The only thing I couldn’t face were the Nomanchulators
. Every time I bound a demon, Nomanchulators scuttled out of the cracks and shadows to feed off the body. I tried not to look at them, but the sound of their chittering as they dragged the demons away made my spine numb. It seemed like the more I fought, the more numerous the Nomanchulators became.

  “You’re doing good,” Kiana said one night after I’d bound a particularly nasty alligator demon. She must have sensed my disgust over the Nomanchulators. “Keep this up, and it won’t be long until you win this war.”

  “And then what?” I asked.

  “Then you can do whatever you like.” She grinned. “You’ll have total control, and you won’t need to struggle anymore.”

  “So who’s left to fight?” I asked.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself, hotshot,” Nick interrupted. “These are the easy ones.” He sniffed the air, as if he could smell the demons out there waiting to attack. “The hardest part is yet to come.”

  DICKIE WANTED ME TO SLIP OUT after curfew with him and spend the night in the girls’ dorm. He talked about the mission for almost a week, trying to get me on board. Every time he brought it up, I’d nod and say something like “I wish,” but sneaking over to the girls’ dorm after curfew was no easy feat. For starters, all the doors in the dorms had security cards that recorded whenever anyone went in or out. Leaving your dorm after curfew earned you an automatic suspension. On top of that, every dorm had an RC on duty throughout the night and there were security guards who patrolled the campus, so even if we made it out, we’d still have to cross the open, well-lit space between dorms without being seen. Every year, some desperate guy got busted trying to sneak into his girlfriend’s room.

  The way Dickie pitched it, the risk only made things better, as if running across a strip of minimally landscaped ground in the middle of the night would make us heroes. “Trust me,” he said. “If we go, it’ll be well worth it.”

  It wasn’t only the chance of getting suspended that bothered me. The prospect of spending the night in Jess’s room made me anxious for reasons I couldn’t name. Granted, she was completely hot and I wanted to be with her. Yet part of me felt a little weird about it, too, like maybe I was doing it for the wrong reasons — which is totally not the way guys are supposed to think. At any rate, I couldn’t let Dickie see my apprehensions. Rebels have to be raring to go, regardless of the consequences.

  “I talked with Sunny and she’s game,” Dickie said during lunch one day. “So what do you say, amigo? You up for some black ops this Friday?”

  “Hell, yeah,” I said, struggling to swallow my Tater Tots. “Except, I’m not sure if Jess is. We’ve only been together a few weeks and I don’t want to seem too eager, you know?”

  Dickie nodded. “Give her time. Pretend that sex is the last thing on your mind and she’ll beg you to come over.”

  “Right-o. Like maybe I’m questioning my sexuality and she needs to convert me.”

  “Don’t laugh,” he replied. “It works.”

  We kept joking about new ways to get girls to proposition us, like pretending to be ultrareligious and beyond temptation, or brokenhearted poets, or sheltered virgins who needed to be taught the ways of love. I’d never told Dickie that I actually was a virgin. He seemed to assume that I’d done it before, so I bluffed my way through most conversations. It was like we shared this secret understanding of girls that Heinous and the other sophs in our wing weren’t privy to. When social hour rolled around, we headed out together — the studs of Dingo wing, off to meet Jess and Sunny and mess around by the pond while Heinous stayed inside with Cheese and played video games.

  Dickie mentioned sneaking out again the next day, but I distracted him by bringing up the Steves and how they kept gloating over slaughtering us with water balloons. I convinced him that our honor needed to be avenged, so we set to work on a plan to get the Steves back. We didn’t deliberately exclude Heinous, but since the Steves were roommates, it seemed fitting to keep participation limited to just us — that way it could be roommates versus roommates.

  When the Steves were out playing basketball that evening, we broke into their room with a coat hanger. Dickie set up a few standard pranks — plastic wrap on the toilet, baby powder on their pillows — but these were merely diversionary tactics. The real prank was what we did to their shower. Inspired by Psycho, I unscrewed the shower nozzle and stuffed it full of cotton soaked in red food coloring, then screwed it back on. Meanwhile, Dickie stole their soap so they wouldn’t be able to wash away the food coloring. To top things off, he emptied the only bottle of shampoo (the Steves shared shampoo!) and refilled it with vegetable oil.

  It worked brilliantly. In chemistry class the following day, Steve Dennon’s normally pale face glowed red and his hair dripped oil onto his shirt. Steve Lacone, on the other hand, obviously hadn’t dared to shower at all. Baby powder still dusted his wavy black hair. I had to hold my breath to keep from laughing.

  After the prank succeeded, Dickie pushed the idea of sneaking into the girls’ dorm more. He let the plan drop around Jess in the hall between classes. “Hell, yeah!” she said. “You boys better come over.”

  “You’re in, superstud,” Dickie told me afterward. “The ladies await.”

  I slapped his hand and faked excitement. There was no way to back out now.

  Friday night, we stayed in our dorm room until after Mike went around for eleven PM check-in. As soon as he was gone, we stuffed our beds with pillows and dressed like ninjas — black pants, black hoodies, black socks, and shoes. Dickie grabbed some condoms in foil packets from the teapot he kept near his bed. “Need some?” he asked. “Boy Scouts are always prepared, right?”

  I slipped a couple foil packets into my back pocket without looking at them.

  Dickie checked his watch and called Sunny. “Five minutes till launch, Sunshine,” he told her. “Keep a lookout. Flick the lights if you see trouble.”

  We opened our door, careful to stop the latch from clicking. Hassert had night duty. Normally, he stayed in the office watching TV, but sometimes he wandered the halls, pounding on doors if he heard anyone talking. “Shut your yap traps,” he’d say, like he was some badass drill sergeant.

  We had to sneak down to Heinous and Cheese’s room, since they lived on the first floor and there was no way to dangle out our second-story window without being spotted by a security guard. Dickie tapped a code on the door, and Heinous let us in.

  Their room smelled funky, like athlete’s foot spray and soggy Cheetos. That’s how Cheese got his nickname. His fingers and clothes were permanently stained orange from constantly eating bags of puffed cheese. Even though Cheese acted like a perverted koala — sleepy, sex-crazed, and harmless — he was wicked smart. He’d scored a perfect 240 on his PSATs. Then, on a dare, he’d taken the real SATs while completely drunk and missed only one question. The weird thing was, he almost never did homework, so his grades sucked. He mostly slept — twelve hours a day.

  Cheese rubbed his eyes and groaned when we came in. “All my money’s in my underwear,” he said.

  “Nothing’s happening,” Dickie said. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cheese muttered. “I’ll show you sleep.”

  We kept the lights off and looked out the window. “Well, boys,” Heinous said, like a general addressing his troops, “tonight you go where few have gone before. If you survive, you’ll be men. But it could get rough out there, so if you need me to take your place . . .”

  “Dream on,” Dickie said.

  I peered out the window for security guards. At least one usually patrolled campus, and part of me clung to the hope that he might be camped between our dorm and the girls’, forcing us to call things off. No such luck, though. Dickie spotted the security guard on his normal rounds, walking between two dorms at the far end of the quad. “Here comes our opening,” he said.

  We waited for the guard to disappear behind a wall before climbing out. Heinous slid the window shut after us.

  On three, Dickie a
nd I bolted across the expanse of grass between dorms. I never ran so fast in my life, practically diving to the ground once I reached the girls’ dorm. Dickie crawled to the base of what he thought was Sunny’s window and tapped the glass while I struggled to catch my breath. If an RC looked out, we were screwed beyond belief.

  After a long, freaky silence, the window slid open. “You there?” Sunny whispered.

  “Right-o,” Dickie said, popping up.

  I gave him a boost. Once he crawled in, he leaned out and gave me a hand. Sunny closed the blinds after us like a pro.

  “Hey,” she said to me.

  “Hey,” I replied, my voice tight.

  “You made it,” Jess crooned. She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me. “You kids have fun,” she said to Dickie and Sunny, then she led me to her room on the second floor. She didn’t bother checking for RCs or stopping the doors from clicking, as if being bold was enough to keep us from getting busted.

  “Where’s Rachel?” I asked once we were safe in her room.

  “I kicked her out for the night. She understands.”

  Jess lit a few candles and dimmed the lights. I sat on her bed, careful not to hit my head on the top bunk.

  “I wondered if you’d come,” she said.

  “I told you I would.”

  “There’s a difference between what people say and what they do.” She slid off her shoes and sat beside me. “I’m impressed — that’s all.”

  “It’s nothing. I’ve done far more dangerous things than this.”

  “I bet.” She stared at me, but didn’t say anything else.

  “So, are you tired?” I asked.

  “A little.”

  “Do you want to go to sleep?”

  “What do you think?”

  I glanced at her walls, feigning interest in her music posters. “I like your room. Are all these posters yours?”

  “You are such a dork.”

  I opened my mouth to explain why I thought her posters were cool, but before I could, Jess pushed me back and straddled my waist. The plastic condom wrappers in my pocket crinkled. “What’s that?”