Here We Lie

“Hold on, cowboy,” I said, pulling back. “Give me five minutes.”

He groaned. “Five minutes is eternity.”

I gave him a teasing kiss and grabbed my backpack from the floorboard. “Five minutes.”

The night was cool, but I felt warm and reckless and happy. I took the side stairs and was breathless by the time I reached the third floor, where I paused to look down at the parking lot. Joe’s car was there, idling with its headlights on. I spotted my reflection at the same time—blond curls wild, cheeks flushed. I’m doing this, I thought. I’m doing it.

In the hallway, I waited for a group of parents to pass. They were chatting loudly about how college had changed since they were in it, how the cafeteria food was better, the exercise facilities first-rate. After I passed, I heard one of the men say, “And the girls are prettier, too.”

Our door was unlocked, although the lights were off. Ariana and her parents must have come and gone, forgetting to lock it behind them. I flicked on the light switch, moving fast. Fresh underwear, a tank top to sleep in, a clean shirt for the morning—if that was how it played out. I hesitated, momentarily frozen by the practicalities. Would he have condoms? Of course. This experience wasn’t the novelty for him that it was for me. Still, I cursed myself for not refilling my birth control. It had seemed a silly, extravagant expense to pay thirty dollars a month for pills I wouldn’t need at an all-girls school.

I was zipping up my backpack when I caught the movement from Ariana’s side of the room and jumped a foot. She was in bed, her body a slight hump beneath the covers. Maybe she’d skipped out on ice cream and come back early, exhausted by her parents’ constant nagging.

Then she moaned, a ragged and gasping sound that made me look closer. Her head was turned to one side, hair plastered against her face and half-covering her mouth. Across her pillowcase was a trail of vomit.

Fuck. Not now.

“Ariana?” I asked, then repeated her name louder. When she didn’t respond, I dropped to my knees, shaking her shoulder. “Are you okay? Should I call someone?”

Her head flopped backward, mouth open. Flakes of white powder stuck to the corner of her mouth.

“Did you take something?”

I had to put my ear almost to her face, wincing from the stench of her breath, to understand what she was saying. Your pulse. Yourpilse. Your pills.

My pills.

* * *

Later I told the paramedics about the generic bottle of ibuprofen I kept in my desk drawer, taking a pill here and there for a headache. There had been a hundred pills initially, and I wasn’t sure how many had been there earlier that night. Seventy? Eighty? Ariana had taken whatever was left, as evidenced by the empty bottle on her nightstand. I tried to imagine her swallowing the pills, one by one or two by two, washing them down with water from her Peanuts mug, the one that read The Doctor Is In, 5 cents.

After the lecture, Ariana had told her parents that she needed to study, and they’d gone out for dinner without her. She’d already taken the first pills by the time I met Joe at Slice of Heaven, and she’d finished them by the time we’d begun our game of darts at Moe’s, when her parents were having ice cream sundaes without her. She must have been unconscious by the time Joe and I kissed; she’d vomited later, when Joe and I were in his car, when I was being reinvented by his touch, inch by inch. And I’d found her in time, so lucky, everyone noted. Only I wasn’t sure if Ariana meant for me to find her earlier, or hoped I would only find her after it was too late.

Viv, our resident advisor, kicked into supervisory mode and took charge of the situation—which meant contacting Ariana’s parents and taking care of me. “You cannot blame yourself for this,” she said, taking hold of my shocked shoulders. Until that point, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was responsible. Then guilt kicked in hard: I’d been planning a night of reckless abandon, and Ariana had been trying to end it all.

Worse, I felt just as bad for myself, for the lost possibilities of that night. By the time I’d alerted Viv and the paramedics had arrived, twenty minutes had passed, maybe more. When I finally wormed my way through the cluster of girls and their parents in the hallway to look down into the parking lot below, Joe’s car was gone.

Lauren

Although I hadn’t mentioned it once, somehow everyone at Keale knew my father was a senator. It had started out with a little joke: my resident advisor, Katy, mentioned during our first floor meeting that we all had to follow the rules—whether our fathers were elected officials or not. She said this with a wink in my direction, and I heard the general buzz around me. Who? And he’s an actual senator? Later that week, a mousy blonde girl sat next to me in the Commons and over eggs on toast mentioned that her grandfather had been an ambassador to Ghana, as if that made us related somehow, like second cousins.

“Do you have like, diplomatic immunity or something?” another girl at the table asked.

“No,” I assured her, to general laughter.

Later I thought about it and realized that a more accurate answer would have been yes.

My parents had more or less ignored me since I left for Keale, but they came for Parents’ Weekend, bustling into my dorm room with a towering gift basket from Harry & David, as if I were a client and not a daughter. It didn’t occur to me until I was giving them an abbreviated tour of campus that this was an opportunity to see and be seen. For Dad, it was an unpaid advertisement, a chance to shake hands and trade college stories with other dads, homing in on the ones from Connecticut, his constituents. More than once when we were walking across campus, I was aware of camera flashes, of people catching the three of us in motion—Mom with an arm linked through Dad’s, each of us holding bags from the Keale College bookstore, full of the sweatshirts and visors and coffee mugs that proclaimed them the proud parents of a Keale College student.

I was sure we would show up in future brochures advertising the college, with some kind of pretentious caption: Senator Mabrey, His Wife, Elizabeth Holmes-Mabrey, and Their Daughter Lauren Enjoy Family Time during a Visit to the Fine Arts Auditorium. It wasn’t so much a visit as it was a campaign stop.

We went into town for pizza, but the line at Slice of Heaven was out the door.

“We could bring it back to my dorm,” I suggested. “There’s a little kitchen down the hall.”

“It’ll be like old times, Liz,” Dad said, draping his arms around Mom’s shoulders. She smiled up at him, and I wondered how much of this was genuine, and how much was for show, another chance to impress Scofield’s voting public. Photographic evidence of my parents in their twenties did exist, but I’d never seen snapshots of them eating pizza out of a cardboard box, sitting cross-legged on the floor. In the photos I remembered, they were at important dinners, separated by centerpieces and goblets and place settings with three different forks, Dad in a suit, Mom’s hair in a complicated updo held together by a million bobby pins.

I recognized a few other people in the pizzeria, including Cindy Hardwick, a girl from my dorm. We’d only exchanged the occasional hello as we passed in the hall, but she bounded over to shake Dad’s hand and then, for good measure, Mom’s. She lingered for longer than necessary, beaming up at them. “You must be proud. Lauren is so talented,” she said. I tried to steer her away with an arm on her elbow, but it was too late. “I love her work.”

Worse than the explanations that I would have to provide were the subtle frowns on my parents’ faces, their hesitant glances between Cindy and me, as if to confirm she was in fact referring to their daughter.

“Lauren hasn’t told us much about her classes, actually,” Mom said, the question mark buried in her words.

“It was going to be a surprise,” I said.

Cindy’s perky face fell, her cheeks literally deflating. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

Mom touched her reassuringly on the shoulder. “You couldn’t have known. Lauren’s so modest. Why don’t you tell us, honey, so we can all be on the same page?”

Dad’s smile was nervous, his focus drifting around the room. This conversation wasn’t part of the scheduled event, not even a bullet point on his agenda.

“I’m putting together a photography portfolio for one of my classes,” I said.

“It’s so brilliant,” Cindy gushed. “She takes the best pictures—she really does. I can barely hold a camera steady...”

One of the pizzeria employees called a number, and Dad stepped forward to collect our order.

“Maybe you can show us some of those photos before we head back,” Mom suggested. “It was wonderful to meet you, Cindy.”

We gathered plates and napkins and little packets of Parmesan cheese and smiled our way stiffly out the door and down the street to Mom’s Mercedes. The street was clogged with cars, and it took Dad a while to find an opening.

I popped the lid of the pizza box and put a slice of pepperoni on my tongue, relishing its salt and heat.

“I don’t remember signing you up for a photography class,” Mom said.

I chewed the pepperoni slowly, deliberately.

Dad’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Well? Your mother asked you a question.”

I shrugged. “It’s for a class called Introduction to the Arts. We study visual art, music—”

“You’re taking that in addition to your other classes?”

“No, I dropped the biology class.” I’d also switched out of math, but this didn’t seem like the best moment to mention it.

In the front seat, Mom’s mouth was set in a tight line. “You need to be taking your general education requirements, Lauren. You’re not just here to try a little of this and a little of that. There’s an educational plan—”

“It’s one class,” I repeated. “And I’m thinking of studying fine arts, so it’ll be part of the requirements for my major.” This much was true, although I had been planning to wait as long as possible—at least another semester or two—before announcing it to my parents. Before their visit, I’d carefully packed away my Leica and slid my burgeoning portfolio underneath my bed.

Dad sighed, adjusting the visor so the setting sun didn’t blind him. “At least your friend seems excited about your work. She said you were very talented.”

Mom couldn’t let it go. “Everything’s always a lie with you. It’s always about sneaking around behind our backs.”

I leaned forward, my head between their bucket seats. “It’s my education, Mom. You can’t control the classes I take, like you did at Reardon.”

“If I hadn’t intervened there, you never would have graduated,” Mom snapped.

I rolled my eyes. I’d earned mostly B’s at Reardon, with the odd A and a few C’s, yet the arrival of my report card in the mail had always felt like doomsday, as if I’d brought shame upon the family for not being as brilliant as my siblings.

A car slowed in front of us, and Dad braked suddenly, the motion shooting us all forward against our seat belts. The pizza box slid from the back seat onto the floor, but thankfully the pizza in all its greasy gooeyness remained inside the box, folded over on itself. I lifted the lid to inspect the damage and said, “Still edible.”

Dad smiled, meeting my eyes quickly in the rearview mirror before returning to the road. I felt sorrier for him than I did for myself. He didn’t seem to understand all the intricacies of being a Mabrey, although all of our lives revolved around him. He was the one who would have to drive back to Simsbury with Mom, after all, listening to her complaints about my thoughtlessness.

In the parking lot outside Stanton Hall, I unclipped my seat belt and Dad did the same. Mom sat stony, staring ahead.

I gestured to the pizza. “Aren’t you coming inside?”

“Now that I think about it, we probably have to get on the road,” Mom said.

“Liz, we have food to eat. We might as well—”

“I don’t think I’m particularly hungry.”

Dad sighed, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

I scooped up the pizza box. No point in letting perfectly good food go to waste. “It’s a class,” I repeated. “A stupid fucking class. That’s all.”

Mom said, “You will not talk to us that way—” And I knew there was more, but I wasn’t going to stick around to hear it. I’d already slammed the door behind me and was walking fast across the parking lot, pizza box in hand. I waited for them to do something—for Mom to come after me or for Dad to pull even with me in the Mercedes, but none of that happened.

In my room, I moved some papers out of the way and set the box on my desk. Erin was still out with her parents, probably having the sort of happy family meal that regular people had, laughing and reminiscing and making plans for the next time they would see each other. But maybe there was no such thing as a normal family, a happy family meal. Maybe everyone was secretly, deep down miserable and they only put on brave faces for the rest of us.

More out of spite than hunger, I ate half the pizza and lay down on the bed, still dressed in my jeans and sweater in case Erin and her parents came back. I must have fallen asleep with the overhead fluorescent light still beaming down because the next thing I knew there were people running past my door, their footsteps echoing down the hallway.

“What’s going on?” I called to a girl who stood near the elevators, a hand over her mouth.

“Someone on the second floor took a bunch of pills,” she said. “It’s horrible.”

“Is she...” I faltered. “Is she going to be...”

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