Paula DeBoard - Here We Lie

During my first week on the job, I fell hard for Marcus, a sophomore art major at Capitol Community College and one of the few paid staff at The Coop. That summer he was working on a giant mural going up on the south side of the building, where previously there had been only the initials of taggers and a giant F YOU in five-foot letters. Marcus had a broad chest and ropy arm muscles, and his fingers were permanently paint stained with a crusty layer of blues and yellows and greens. The first time he touched me, brushing a piece of hair out of my face as I stood over the sink washing brushes, I felt a thrumming all the way to my toes. The next night he stood behind me at the sink, his thumbs pressing into the knots of my shoulders as the water ran from blue-purple to clear. When I turned off the faucet, he wrapped his arms around me in a giant backward bear hug, rocking me from side to side in a goofy, loose way, as if to tell me I shouldn’t take it or him too seriously.

Another girl might have left it at that, but not Lauren Mabrey. Marcus was the exact opposite of everything that had been planned for me from day one. He had never known his father, had three half siblings, lived off student loans and a stipend from The Coop. He didn’t own any button-down shirts, and he hadn’t recognized my father until I pointed out a campaign advertisement with the five Mabreys all lined up, Dad’s arm around Mom’s shoulders. “That’s cool,” Marcus had said. “So your family is famous or something?”

I laughed, not denying this, although famous was the wrong word. Powerful was more accurate. Influential.

At any rate, I knew Marcus was the exact wrong pick for me, but when the bear hug ended, I turned around, pressed my wet hands to his T-shirt and kissed him full on the lips.

Twenty minutes later, I’d lost the rest of my virginity on the sagging couch in the break room, and soon enough sex became an everyday thing, part of our closing ritual after the paint caps were tightened and the brushes laid out to dry. Marcus locked the outside door and flipped off the light switches, and we undressed each other in the semidarkness, laughing at our more adult version of blind man’s bluff. Afterward, staring up at the bulbous tubes of exposed piping near the ceiling, I felt for the first time that I could have been anyone in the world, not Lauren Mabrey, not part of a political family, not a prep school kid, not wealthy.

I was just happy.

Marcus always had a baggie of pot in one pocket or another, and sometimes we went up to the roof of The Coop to smoke, the sky darkening in lazy purple drifts, and listened to the sounds of the city: horns and sirens and barks and scraps of conversation that floated upward from street level. That summer, more and more, I was flirting with disaster, arriving home long after The Coop closed, sometimes after my parents had returned from one fund-raiser or another, picking a fight with them the moment I walked through the door. I was lazy, I was irresponsible, I had a bad attitude and I didn’t care.

I’d smoked here and there at Reardon, whenever one of my classmates went home for vacation and connected with a local hookup, returning with a few buds. The most I could handle was a hit or two before I felt sleepy and weak-kneed, but I didn’t want Marcus to see that I was a lightweight. When he passed me the joint, I always took my turn.

“I can get you more, if you ever need any,” Marcus said into my ear, a sweet trail of smoke wafting past my nose.

I laughed. “Pretty sure my parents bought into the whole Just Say No thing.” My words came out slurry—sure as soor, bought as brought.

“I mean like a side business, for when you go back to school. I bet those Reardon kids have deep pockets.”

I shifted, leaning back against his chest, hoping he would drop the idea if I didn’t offer encouragement. This time when he passed me the joint, I only pretended to inhale. My body felt heavy, and I still had the drive back to Holmes House.

“Or bennies or ’shrooms. Whatever you want, I could probably get it.”

“What are you, my dealer?”

He pinched out the end of the joint and dropped it in a plastic baggie, which he returned to his pocket. “Hey, some of us have rent to pay, you know.”

I’d been to a pharm party last January at Reardon, where everyone was required to contribute a few tablets filched from their parents’ medicine cabinets to enter, and then got to take from the bowl whatever they wanted to try. I’d added three muscle relaxers, my dad’s drug of choice for his occasional back spasms, and fished out two pastel pink pills for myself. On a beanbag in the corner, I’d waited for the pills to do something, to make me feel anything, but it never happened. The only thrill had been from the idea of getting busted, of my parents driving up from Hartford, the blue veins in their foreheads pulsing with rage as they helped me pack my suitcases and then led me in disgrace from the dorm. But nothing so exciting happened. A staff member came in, took one look at the pill potpourri and unceremoniously flushed the remains down the toilet, before ordering us back to our rooms.

This fall, if everything in the campaign went as planned, I would be Lauren, the senator’s daughter. It gave me a perverse thrill that I might also—or instead—be known as Lauren, the girl with the pot. I stood up, brushing my palms on my jeans, trying to sound casual, like this was the sort of deal I negotiated every day. “Maybe,” I said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

A week later, at the beginning of my shift, he showed me a quart-sized baggie fat with green clumps of pot, then shoved it deep into the zippered interior pocket of my backpack. “It’s good stuff,” he said. “Two hundred should do it.”

My stomach turned, a weird, queasy flip-flop. I’d pictured myself at a party this fall, casually producing enough to roll a joint. I couldn’t possibly hide this much at Holmes House, where Mom would sniff it out with her razor-sharp sense for whatever I was doing wrong. I thought about telling Marcus that I’d made a mistake, that I couldn’t do it—but that would mean losing whatever reputation I had with him. It would mean, most likely, losing him. Maybe I could ditch it somewhere on my way out of Hartford, make some homeless person’s day when he found it in a Dumpster.

“I know you’re good for it,” Marcus said, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek, and I said, “Course I am.”

That afternoon, I was replenishing paint palettes from giant tubs of tempera when the police officer came in, a radio crackling at his hip, a drug-sniffing German shepherd at his side. It was like watching an after-school special, some cautionary tale about what happened when a good girl met a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. I watched as the officer and my supervisor chatted with their heads bent close together before they disappeared into the break room. Later, the rumor would be that someone had smelled marijuana and called the police. More likely my supervisor had been watching Marcus and me all along.

A minute later, she reappeared in the doorway of the break room, scanning the studio until her gaze settled on me, frozen in place, a blob of yellow paint running down my arm.

It was one thing to flirt with disaster, to tiptoe up to the edge of the canyon and peek over the side. It was another thing entirely to jump.

I said, That’s my backpack, but I don’t know what that stuff is.

I said, Someone must have put that there.

I said, I need to make a phone call.

A lawyer met me at the police station, demanding that I be released immediately. Marcus, it turned out, had a previous misdemeanor; he was cuffed and led away, and he passed me without making eye contact.