One of Us Is Back (ONE OF US IS LYING)

Phoebe

Monday, June 22

I hunch lower in my seat, wishing I’d thought to wear a hoodie even though it’s eighty degrees outside and the Eastland High School auditorium doesn’t have AC. I knew there might be cameras here, but usually the kids who sit way in the back, like I am, aren’t the type to ask questions.

I know Addy watches these things. What am I supposed to say if she sees me? How do I explain…this?

Deny, deny, deny, Phoebe. You’re good at that.

“Any further questions?” The man who introduced Jake Riordan gets up from the front row to stand beside him. “We have time for one more.”

Are you truly sorry?

Would you ever hurt someone again?

What made you like this?

Those are the questions I need answers to. I can’t bring myself to ask them, but I keep hoping that maybe someone else will.

Instead, a girl calls out, “Are you getting a new trial?”

Jake ducks his head. “I try not to think about that,” he says. “It’s out of my hands. I’m just living the best life I can, one day at a time.”

I search what I can see of his face and think, Please let that be true.

Like half my classmates, I had a crush on Jake Riordan once. He was a junior when I was a freshman, and he and Addy were already the It Couple of Bayview High. I used to watch them glide through the hallways back then, marveling at how glamorous and grown-up they seemed. When they split up after Simon Kelleher’s death, I’m embarrassed to admit that my first thought was Maybe I have a chance with him now. I had no idea how unhappy Addy had been, or what Jake was capable of doing. He hid his dark side incredibly well. A lot of people do.

I know how stressed Addy is, and I wish I could talk about it with her—really talk about it, not just offer empty reassurances. But I can’t. I cut myself off from that possibility back in April, and now the only person I can confide in is my older sister, Emma. Who moved to North Carolina to live with one of our aunts as soon as she graduated two weeks ago, and might as well be on the moon considering how infrequently she returns my texts.

What’s done is done, she said before she left. We had our reasons.

—

“Sorry, I’m sorry I’m so late, and thank you so, so much!”

My words are breathless, tumbling over one another as I scurry through Café Contigo to reach Evie, one of the new waitresses, who’s ringing up a takeout order at the cash register. I asked her to cover the beginning of my shift, knowing I wouldn’t make it back from Eastland in time, but I hadn’t anticipated so much traffic. I’m more than an hour late, and Evie, who’s been working since the café opened at ten a.m., has every right to be annoyed.

Instead, she gives me a cheerful smile. I wish Evie could bottle her always-positive attitude and sell it, because I would definitely buy. “No worries, Phoebe,” she says, handing a bulging paper bag to one of our regulars. “I told you to take your time.”

“The doctor’s office was so crowded,” I murmur, grabbing an apron from under the counter and wrapping it around my waist. Then I pull an elastic from my pocket and yank my hair back into a haphazard ponytail. All my hair doesn’t make it through the elastic, but whatever—speed is of the essence here. “Okay, I’m ready. You can go.”

“Relax, Phoebe. Grab a drink or something. And maybe check out your hair in the mirror before you try to serve tables like that,” Evie says with a grin, tugging at the end of her own bleached-blond braid.

“What?” I ask, just as Luis Santos, Maeve’s boyfriend, comes out of the kitchen, stops in his tracks, and starts to laugh.

“Nice horn,” he says.

“Oh God,” I mutter, catching sight of my reflection in the mirror that lines the far wall. Somehow, I’ve managed to make myself look like a deranged unicorn. I pull out the elastic, wincing as a few strands of hair come with it, and sink into a chair beside the register. “I’m a disaster. Is your mom mad that I’m late again?”

“She’s not here. Pa is,” Luis says, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I love both his parents, but Mr. Santos is by far the more lenient boss. “We’re not all that busy, anyway. It’s too nice out. Speaking of which.” His smile widens as the bell on the café door jangles and Maeve steps inside, waving to us with both hands as she crosses the room. “There’s my cue to take off. Maeve and I have big plans. Hey, beautiful.”

“Hi,” Maeve says with not quite her usual level of enthusiasm, even as she melts into Luis for a kiss. I turn away, wishing happy couples didn’t send such a stab of jealousy through me. It’s your choice to not be part of one, I remind myself, but that doesn’t help. Mostly because it doesn’t actually feel like a choice.

“You rode here, right?” Luis asks expectantly.

“In a manner of speaking,” Maeve says, scuffing the toe of one sneaker against the tile floor. Luis raises his eyebrows, and she says, “Mostly, I walked it.” He sighs, and she adds, “I’m sorry, but I don’t see why I need to get better at riding a bicycle when you’re perfectly capable of doing it for both of us.”

“You can’t ride on my handlebars forever,” Luis says.

“Why not?” Maeve counters. “It’s not like I’m going to outgrow them.”

“Heading for the bike path again?” Evie asks, hiding a smile. Luis bought Maeve a bicycle a couple of weeks ago, determined to make up for the fact that she never learned how to ride one between cancer treatments when she was a kid, but it’s slower going than he expected. Maeve doesn’t so much ride the bike as she straddle-walks it. Or just regular walks, while resentfully wheeling the bike beside her.

“It’s going to be great,” Luis says with what seems like misplaced optimism.

Maeve rolls her eyes and turns to me, one arm still around his waist. “Phoebe, it was the weirdest thing. I was watching Jake’s school visit earlier—”

Luis’s smile vanishes. “Fuck that guy,” he growls. There aren’t many things that pierce Luis’s laid-back vibe, but his former friend is one of them.

“I know.” Maeve gives his arm a comforting squeeze before turning back to me. “I saw a girl in the audience who had your exact hair and…” My heart sinks as her eyes rove over my sparkly tank top, which wasn’t exactly designed to be overlooked. “Shirt.”

“Really? That’s so weird,” I say, busying myself with creating a less ridiculous ponytail. “I meant to watch, but I got stuck at the doctor’s. How’s Addy holding up?” I hate lying to Maeve, but I’d hate it even more if she knew what I was lying about.

“Same,” Maeve says. She looks like she’s about to say more, but she pauses as the door jingles again and a familiar figure enters the café.

“Owen! What’s up, bud?” Luis asks as my not-so-little-anymore brother approaches the counter. “Jesus, did you grow another foot?”

“No,” Owen mutters, because he’s humorless like that lately.

“Your order’s on the counter,” Evie tells him. She doesn’t need to add It’s on the house, because Mr. Santos never lets my brother pay.

“Thanks,” he says in the same monotone, grabbing his takeout without even glancing my way. Maeve catches my eye with a rueful grin, like, He’s thirteen, what can you do? I force myself to smile back, even though my stomach twists as Owen slouches out the door and lets it slam closed behind him.

“Good talk, Owen,” Luis says, and Maeve lightly punches him.

Almost three months ago, when Owen was still twelve, Emma and I learned that he’d posed online as Emma—who’d been posing as me—to chat with a boy who’d roped Emma into a revenge-swapping plan. The boy, Jared Jackson, promised he’d make my ex-boyfriend, Brandon Weber, pay for the fact that Brandon had caused a forklift accident that killed our father three years ago. In return, Emma was supposed to help Jared get revenge on Addy’s brother-in-law, Eli, who’d helped send Jared’s crooked-cop brother to jail. Emma got cold feet and bailed—but Owen stepped in and kept the pact going.

Then Brandon died in what everyone thought was an accident, as part of a Truth or Dare game that Jared set up. When Owen abruptly stopped communicating, Jared decided to get revenge on his own and plant a bomb at Eli’s wedding rehearsal dinner. If Knox and Maeve hadn’t stopped him, everyone at that restaurant could have died. Instead, Jared was arrested and promptly gave me up as his accomplice. Emma, who’d landed in the hospital after weeks of guilt-fueled binge drinking, confessed that it was actually her. But we didn’t realize Owen was involved until we read chat transcripts between him and Jared and saw a word Owen misspelled while practicing for a spelling bee: bazaar instead of bizarre.

In that moment—seated at our kitchen table with our mother and Emma’s lawyer—my sister and I made a silent pact to keep that information to ourselves. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, because it was clear from Owen’s messages to Jared after Brandon died that he hadn’t understood what he was doing. My sweet, innocent, still-grieving little brother never meant for Brandon to get hurt.

But almost immediately, doubts started creeping in. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone—especially not Maeve and Knox, after they’d risked their lives to stop Jared—and the secret made me feel horribly isolated once Emma moved away. Owen turned thirteen a few days later, becoming tall and sullen seemingly overnight, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how he was the same age Brandon was when he accidentally killed our father. And how, if Brandon had ever taken responsibility for that, he might still be alive.

So now I lie to my friends, semistalk Jake Riordan, and compose late-night texts to my sister that I’m too afraid to send:

What if Owen turns into another Brandon?

Or another Jake?

Do you think we did the wrong thing?

Do you think we should tell someone?

—

By the time work is over and I’ve helped Mr. Santos close, I know I should drive straight home. It’s almost eleven o’clock, I’m exhausted, and I’ve got an early shift tomorrow. But when I come to a fork in the road that leads to my house, I take the opposite direction.

I can’t help it. Consciously or not, I’ve been looking forward to this all day.

When I reach a familiar house, I park in the driveway but bypass the front door and head around back instead. Then I hoist myself onto a tree, climb until I’m parallel with a jutting edge of the roof, and carefully step onto it. There’s a window in front of me, and when I tug at the sash, it lifts easily. I squeeze through, wishing like always that the space was a little bigger so the maneuver wasn’t quite so graceless. Then I land on the hardwood floor, dust off my hands, and close the window before turning to face the room.

“You know you could just ring the doorbell, right?” Knox says.

He’s lying in bed, propped up by a half-dozen pillows with his laptop open in front of him, so sleepy-eyed that I’m pretty sure he was dozing before I came in. My heartbeat quickens even as some of the day’s tension flows out of me, and I hold on to the edge of his dresser to steady myself while I pull off my sneakers.

“I don’t want to wake your parents up,” I say. “Besides, climbing through your window makes me feel like I’m in a teen movie, so it’s on theme.” I cross over to his bed, pull back the navy comforter, and slip in beside him, curling into the white T-shirt he always sleeps in like it’s a favorite blanket. “What’s up next?”

Knox taps a few keys before angling the laptop toward me. “She’s All That,” he says. We’ve been steadily working our way through classic teen movies since school ended, and we’ve finally reached the nineties. “I think it’s the one where the girl takes off her glasses and becomes prom queen.”

“She probably lets her hair down too,” I say, resting my head on his shoulder and breathing in the scent of the citrusy soap he uses.

“Life was so simple in the twentieth century,” Knox says. I wait for him to press Play, but instead, he drums his fingers against the edge of his laptop, for so long that I raise my head to give him a questioning look. “So,” he says, keeping his eyes on the frozen screen. “I’m glad you came, because—I mean, not that I’m ever not glad, obviously, it’s always good to see you, and it’s not like I wasn’t expecting you or anything—”

“Knox,” I say, fidgeting with the edge of his comforter. “You’re babbling.” That’s never a good sign.

“Right. Sorry.” His fingers keep drumming as I study his profile, wondering how there ever could have been a time when I didn’t find him attractive. How did I miss those cheekbones? “It’s just…I wanted to tell you that I kind of think we should stop doing this.”

“Doing what?” I lift my head from his shoulder, stung. “Watching movies?”

“No, not that. We should definitely keep doing that. It’s more…” He gestures to the inch of space between us, now that I’m sitting up straight. “This.” I stare at him, and he swallows visibly. “You. In my bed. It’s…too much.”

“Too much what?” I ask, pulling his comforter over me like a shield. “I’m not doing anything!”

“Yeah. That’s the problem.” Knox rubs the back of his neck. “Look, Phoebe, I totally respect that you want to be friends. I’m fine with it, I swear. I never expected anything else.”

My heart squeezes at the simple truth of the words. Knox and I kissed once, the night of Ashton and Eli’s wedding, and I thought—hoped—it was the start of something great between us. But then Owen happened. I couldn’t tell Knox about it, and I couldn’t get involved with him while lying about something that important. So when he asked me out, I told him I thought we were better as friends. Even though part of me was relieved at how quickly and easily he swallowed the lie, a bigger part of me absolutely hates it.

“But you being this close…look, I’m not, like, pining or anything,” Knox says, sending another knife through my heart. “It just makes it hard to stay in the friend zone, is all.”

Then don’t. The words are on my lips, and I want to cover his with mine while I say them, tossing his laptop to one side so I can finally, finally pull off that white T-shirt. But of course I can’t. And of course he’s right, and my one source of comfort was never going to last. This hasn’t been fair of me, and it’s been superhuman of Knox to put up with it for as long as he has. “I get it,” I say numbly, swinging my legs off the side of the bed. “No problem.”

“We can still watch the movie, though,” Knox says. “Just, you know, downstairs. I can make popcorn, if you want.”

Oh God. There’s nothing I want less than to traipse into Knox’s living room and sit on opposite ends of the couch with a bowl of popcorn between us. Watching a movie I couldn’t care less about, since the only reason I came here is to be close to him. But it would be a jerk move to refuse when he’s been nothing but honest, so I force a smile and say, “Sounds great.”

After all, what’s one more lie?