Paula DeBoard - Here We Lie

It wasn’t until we were in Scofield itself, just a few miles from Keale, that Mom cleared her throat. I waited, steeling myself.

“Your father and I disagree on certain things,” she began. “He’s willing to give you more chances, Lauren. He’s willing to excuse what you’ve done, saying you’re young and you’re still learning. He thinks we might have made some mistakes ourselves, taken our eye off the ball.” Her eyes were dark shadows behind her lenses. “But not me. I don’t agree with him, not for a second.”

I looked from her face with its slightly raised jaw to her white-knuckled hands on the wheel, a two-carat diamond winking in the sunlight.

“As far as I can tell, we’ve given you plenty of opportunities, and you’ve squandered all of them. You’ve had chance after chance to do anything, one single thing, to make us proud. But even when you were under our noses, you were involved in unspeakable things—”

Speak them, I thought, like a dare. Say his name, the one we promised never to say.

“—and we had to scramble to cover for you, in the midst of all the stress of the campaign. But I won’t do that again. I’m ready to cut you loose. The first time you get in any kind of trouble at Keale, I’m going to say, ‘Too bad, so sad,’ and let you figure it out on your own. What happens if you burn through all the money in your bank account? Too bad! What if you get caught for drinking and doing drugs because you haven’t learned your lesson? So sad! I’ll tell the officer to let you sit in jail until you figure it out on your own.”

I closed my eyes, as if I could ward off her words. I wondered if she really believed them, or if she had already come to accept that Dad’s career would always be paramount, the mountain that would bury all our sins.

“Can you at least nod to let me know you understand?”

“Mom,” I said, “I’m not going to—”

She waved a hand, like she was swatting away a fly. “Or you could choose to see this as a fresh start, a chance to fall in line. And if you do that, of course, there will be rewards. There are benefits to being in a family like ours.”

The laugh escaped my mouth before I could stop it. If MK had been here, we would have quoted lines from The Godfather to each other and talked about family with a capital F.

Mom’s voice was icy. “You’ll make your bed, Lauren, and you’ll lie in it. And maybe then you’ll see what it’s like to be cut off from all of this.”

We were heading out of Scofield by this time, in stop-and-go traffic on the tiny main street. I made eye contact with a little girl on the sidewalk holding a balloon in her chubby fist. Don’t let go, I thought.

“Lauren!” Mom snapped. “Are you listening to me?”

Behind us a car honked, and Mom pressed on the gas. The Mercedes jerked forward, only to come to a halting stop again a few feet later. I focused on what was outside the car—the hair salons and antique stores, a building with a giant tacky ice cream cone pointing toward the sky.

I already hated Scofield.

* * *

By the time we arrived on campus, Mom was back in loving mom/senator’s wife mode, schmoozing with the other incoming freshmen and their parents, shaking hands and commiserating about “our babies going off to school,” like she hadn’t rushed to ship me off to Reardon each fall and to sleepaway camp each summer. A few Keale upperclassmen were on hand to help lug things from the parking lot to the elevator bank, and Mom asked them polite questions about their hometowns and majors. “Oh, let me help you,” she said, holding the elevator for a harried-looking woman carrying a giant plastic bed in a bag. And then she held out her hand, introducing herself in her full, hyphenated glory.

“Elizabeth Holmes-Mabrey,” one of the upperclassmen repeated as we stepped out of the elevator. “Isn’t that—” The question was cut off by the doors closing, and by the time I caught up with her, Mom was already halfway down the hall, pushing open the door of room 207.

There were already two women in the room, wrestling with the corners of a fitted sheet. From the doorway, it was difficult to determine which was my roommate and which was her mother—they were both tall and slim in jeans and saltwater sandals, blond hair spilling to the middle of their backs.

I dropped my bags on the other twin bed and said, “Hi, I’m Lauren.”

One of the women stepped forward, holding out a hand with a perfect French manicure. Up close she was clearly the younger of the two, wearing only slightly less makeup than her mother. “I’m Erin.”

“Oh, goodness,” Erin’s mom gushed, clasping her hands together nervously. “I know who you are. I voted for your husband in the last election. Carole Nicholson.”

Mom beamed. “Oh, that’s wonderful. It’s so nice to meet you, Carole.”

The four of us bustled around each other, unpacking boxes and trying to navigate a space designed for two. Then Carole Nicholson let out a squeal and clapped her hands. “Oh, look, you two have the same sheets! Those are from Garnet Hill, aren’t they? The flannel ones?”

Mom looked back and forth between Erin and me, as if we’d pulled off a noteworthy accomplishment. “Well, this couldn’t have worked out better.”

“We’re practically twins,” I said drily.

When Mom stepped around me to begin organizing my toiletries, the heel of her sandal ground into my instep as a warning.

* * *

That night Erin chattered away in her bed about her boyfriend back home and how amazing it was to meet all these other girls, and my thoughts drifted to Marcus, who had been dead for almost a year. If he had lived, we would have broken up at the end of that summer and gone on to the rest of our lives. If he’d lived, he would have finished the mural and gone on to other projects, other dreams. Instead, I was here, and I had no dreams at all.

Erin’s questions interrupted my thoughts. “Were you a good student in high school? Did you have straight A’s and everything?”

“I did okay.”

She laughed. “I bet you’re just being modest, and you were like class valedictorian or something.”

“I wasn’t a valedictorian,” I assured her. It occurred to me that the Keale girls had probably all been at the tops of their classes, the sort of motivated girls who took seven classes a semester, played two sports and one musical instrument and spoke conversational French. Basically, they were just younger versions of my sister, Kat.

“Don’t you think it’s exciting?” Erin gushed, and I realized that I had no idea what she was asking, or what was supposed to be so exciting.

“I guess,” I said. From her silence, I knew it was the wrong answer.

“Maybe it’s not so exciting for someone like you,” Erin said, and she snapped out the light.

* * *

The day before the semester was scheduled to begin, I made an appointment with the registrar. Mom had scheduled me for five general education classes, and there wasn’t a single one that interested me.

“My parents are concerned about my class load,” I told Dr. Hansen, who had a severe white bob and owlish eyes behind her oversize frames. I leaned close to her desk, keeping my voice conspiratorial. “I was hospitalized for stress last fall.”

Dr. Hansen raised an untrimmed eyebrow, frowning at her computer screen. “There was no mention of a hospitalization due to stress,” she murmured, tapping keys.

“No, there wouldn’t be. My parents were trying to protect me, I think. They probably said it was mono or something.”

“Ah,” Dr. Hansen said, nodding. “Well, of course it’s best for you to talk with your academic advisor, but—”

“Oh, I’ll absolutely do that. But for now, with classes starting tomorrow...”