Strange Lies Read online

  “Sorry, sorry,” Virginia said, letting out a final peal of laughter and wiping the tears from her eyes.

  “This could be Craig,” he said, taking the phone and pulling up a particular photo. It was one of the juniors sword-fighting with their golf clubs. In the foreground were the legs of someone lying facedown on the grass. Benny pointed at them. “This could be Craig. He could be posing. Or maybe he drank himself unconscious. Or maybe they actually hit him with their clubs. Do you see the smears on his pants? It could be dirt, or it could be blood.”

  “Maybe they are Satanists!” Virginia said excitedly.

  Benny held up his hand. “Please don’t corrupt my thought process with hasty narrative-forming.”

  Virginia rolled her eyes. Your precious, precious thought process.

  “Did you notice the caddie?”

  “Huh?”

  Benny pulled up a different photo. “Here.” He pointed. “And here.”

  In two photos there was a man in the background. He was hard to see because the image was so grainy. Virginia squinted. He was a black man, and he was wearing a white polo and a green visor and carrying one of those golf bags.

  “This is what’s really weird to me,” Benny was saying. “Obviously they broke into the golf course to drink and conduct their shenanigans—”

  Virginia snickered. Shenanigans. Sometimes hanging out with Benny was like hanging out with an eighty-year-old man.

  “—which is breaking and entering. It’s illegal. Why would the caddie allow them to do this?”

  “Maybe they hired him privately?” Virginia suggested. “Maybe he’s just some guy who doesn’t care.”

  Benny got out his own phone and pulled up the website for the Beau Ideal Driving Club. “Look,” he said, showing it to Virginia. “White polo, green visor. It’s the Beau Ideal uniform. Why would a Beau Ideal caddie just stand around watching them debauch the golf course?”

  “Maybe he’s the cult leader!”

  Benny shot her a look. “Stop.”

  “Fine. Money, then.” She made the “money” gesture with her fingers.

  Benny shook his head. “Unless he’s a moron, he’s not going to take some cash from a bunch of children over the prospect of losing his job.”

  “People are morons,” Virginia said, shrugging. “It’s pretty much the one thing you can count on.”

  Benny looked out the window, thinking. “We’ll go to Beau Ideal tomorrow. I’ll pick you up here at eleven?”

  “Me and you?” Virginia balked. “At Beau Ideal? You’re not a member. I’m not a member.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s not like they check names at the door. The whole point of a country club is that people pay ninety thousand dollars to feel like they belong. They don’t stoop to prove themselves to the staff. We just have to blend in and act like we belong too.”

  “Um, blend in?” Virginia repeated. Benny was a little delusional if he thought he was going to “blend in” at Beau Ideal. She was pretty sure they didn’t have a ton of Jewish people there.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Benny assured her. “Just make sure you look the part—pink and green and all that.”

  “Okay!” Virginia said, starting to feel excited. Investigating incognito! She only wished her character were more interesting, like an eccentric young widow or a visiting French circus performer instead of a boring and blah preppy girl.

  Benny kept staring out the window, appearing deep in thought.

  “Do you want to hang out tonight?” she asked him. “Just like, watch a movie?” Did Benny watch movies? Virginia imagined not. He probably spent all his free time reading the Wall Street Journal. But she was bored, and there wasn’t a football game to go to or anything.

  Benny was looking at her like she’d suggested they go to the zoo and set all the animals free. “Hm? Oh, I can’t. I need to go to a camera store. I’m installing a motion-sensitive camera in the girls’ room to catch the drug dealer when he comes back for his X10 device.”

  “Oh. . . . Well, what about after that?”

  “Um, after? I have to go to temple with my grandma. It’s Bingo and Chinese Night.”

  “Cool! I love Chinese food.” She let the words dangle, leaving a wide opening for Benny to invite her. She’d never been to a temple before, and she was curious to see Benny’s other world—his true world. Not to mention it was taco salad night in the cafeteria, a fate she was eager to escape.

  “Well . . .” Benny stood up. “I better go. See you tomorrow.” He waved, not quite meeting her eyes. Virginia kept looking at him. Is he seriously not going to invite me?

  He left.

  Virginia sighed and flopped back on her bed. She was not going to eat gross, soggy two-day-old taco salad. That was just totally out of the question. She racked her brain. Who has a car. . . . Impulsively she got up and went to the common room. She turned on the computer and logged into her e-mail.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: hungry

  Craving Chinese food. Wanna take me out to dinner?

  She pressed “send.”

  Oh my god. Maybe she should have thought about that for more than five seconds. What was she doing? There were other ways to get Chinese food. She could have asked Chrissie to order take-out and charge it to her AmEx. You pretty much just asked Calvin on a date! Her heart was pounding. She was about to turn off the computer and pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened when an e-mail popped in her in-box.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Re: hungry

  I’m grounded. Parents go to sleep around ten. Come over then if you’re still hungry. Back door.

  Benny’s house, 9:15 p.m.

  BANANA PEEL: HISTORY

  Benny pulled up a Word doc on his laptop and started typing. He’d been researching the cultural significance of the banana. The yellow fruit (technically a berry!) had a very racially charged history. There were incidents—even recent ones—of bananas being thrown at black athletes, stemming from an age-old idea that Africans were inferior and related to monkeys. It reminded Benny of all the Nazi-era propaganda equating Jews with rats.

  And that wasn’t all. The classic slip-on-a-banana gag, it turned out, came from minstrel shows in the 1800s, where black characters were portrayed as clumsy, dim-witted, banana-peel-slipping fools for the enjoyment of white audiences. By the time Donald Duck was slipping on banana peels in cartoons on TV, the gag’s racist origin had been largely forgotten.

  But maybe all that symbolism was a coincidence. Maybe Benny was the racist one for focusing on racial undertones instead of viewing the situation color-blind: a couple of kids, a deer on wheels, a banana. Besides, Benny couldn’t imagine Trevor being that subtle. He was the biggest Neanderthal in school, a designation he seemed to wear like a badge of honor. If Trevor wanted to kill DeAndre, he’d probably just get drunk and beat him to death.

  Benny sighed and closed the laptop. He was tired and distracted and his stomach was growling. He’d barely eaten dinner, even though he loved Chinese food. Who didn’t love Chinese food? But he kept picturing Virginia in the dingy Winship cafeteria eating meatloaf resembling roadkill or whatever vile slop the evening staff had uncaringly nuked for the boarding students. Why hadn’t he invited her? She had clearly wanted him to. But the proposition had just seemed impossible. He couldn’t bring Virginia to his temple. With his grandmother. Who knew what sort of random things she might have said to people. Her yellow hair would have attracted everyone’s attention, and she probably would have worn that way-too-short skirt of Zaire Bollo’s. It was better that he didn’t invite her, he’d assured himself. But he’d felt so guilty he’d hardly eaten a bite.

  He got up from the dining room table and peered in the refrigerator. Nothing looked appetizing. He poured himself a glass of chocolate milk. In the next room his dad was asleep in the big leather easy chair. His mother and grandmother w
ere watching the TV intently. The volume was very low—unusual for them. When Mrs. Flax noticed Benny, she picked up the remote and changed the channel.

  “What are you watching?” he asked her.

  “Nothing worth interrupting your studies.”

  Benny went into the living room and picked up the remote from the side table. He hit the “last” button, bringing the TV to the previous channel.

  “Benny, stop. Stop!”

  A business-looking man with silvery-blond hair was speaking haltingly to a group of reporters: “The situation is—regrettable, but—I assure the public that—a new plant will be opened in Alabama—”

  “What’s this?” Benny asked.

  His grandma waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, some silliness your mom and I are watching. Just frittering away our brain cells. Not that I was using them! You know what they say, use it or lose it!”

  Benny gave his grandma a sideways look. He was pretty sure that saying was about sex, not brain cells. But maybe it applied to both. Mrs. Flax sat stonily while her mother rambled.

  Benny watched the TV for another minute, trying to figure out what they were guarding from him. The blond-haired man was “lobbyist Garland White,” according to the text on the screen. He looked uncomfortable in front of the microphone. Clearly he was accustomed to machinations that played out behind the scenes, not on national news. He continued to speak awkwardly, while across the bottom of the screen, the news scroll read: SHUTDOWN OF WAYCROSS PLANT, STATE TO LOSE 4,000 JOBS.

  Then the news switched to a story about a bombing in Indonesia. Benny handed the remote back to his mom. They shared a long, tense look in which Mrs. Flax barely blinked.

  “Isn’t that the plant where Dad worked?” he asked.

  No one answered.

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “Good night, bubele!” his grandmother chirped.

  In his room Benny got out his laptop and searched “Garland White, plant shutdown.” The full story was a lot more interesting than the brief clip on the news had shown. An aerospace engineering plant outside the city was being shut down, disgracing Governor St. Martin with massive job losses. Furthermore, a reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was claiming that the plant closure was due to a personal feud between the governor and an airline lobbyist, Garland White. Leaked e-mails showed the two men engaged in vicious personal attacks: the lobbyist had called the governor a “Jay Leno–faced bastard”; the governor had called the lobbyist a “greedy, money-grubbing cum rag.” Each described a desire to crush the other “like a cockroach.”

  The scandal had reached a national level of interest. People were outraged that four thousand hardworking men and women with families had lost their jobs because two hotheaded alpha males with the maturity level of sixth graders couldn’t make a compromise. But the story was confusing; the reporter didn’t seem to know exactly what the root of the hatred between the two men was, or how it had escalated into such an extreme political screw-up. The governor’s office had released a statement that the plant closure was in no way related to the e-mails, or to the acrimonious relationship between the state executive and the “discontented lobbyist.” The lobbyist hadn’t commented one way or the other, and seemed mostly focused on bringing attention to the new plant in Alabama.

  Benny couldn’t figure out why his mother and grandmother hadn’t wanted him to see this. Just because it was an aerospace plant, which would remind him of his dad? He was reminded of his dad every day. His dad was still there, for god’s sake—a permanent fixture in the living room. Benny wished the women in his household would stop treating him like a neurotic child who couldn’t deal with life.

  He created a Google alert for himself flagging the following words: Garland White, Waycross plant, Georgia plant shutdown, Governor St. Martin. Then he closed the computer.

  He felt so tired all of a sudden. He took off his shoes and turned off the lamp, not bothering to change out of his clothes. The second he closed his eyes, the face of the deer and its severed antlers accosted him. Get out of my head! he wanted to yell. Why couldn’t he stop thinking about it? The deer’s eyes seemed to grow angrier every time he pictured it, sometimes morphing with DeAndre’s pained face. Benny wondered what had happened to the deer after the science expo. Had Trevor taken it home? Had it ended up in a garbage heap somewhere? He felt haunted by it.

  Benny fell asleep and slipped into a dark dream. He was at a dance, but his clothes were wrong. Virginia was laughing at him. He knew he had the right clothes in his bag, but every time he reached inside, he couldn’t seem to pull them out. By the refreshments table, the wheel from Wheel of Fortune spun around and around. Benny knew that when it stopped, someone somewhere would die. As the spinning slowed down, Benny could see that the deer head had been nailed to the wheel’s center, its black eyes staring into a reeling void. Then somehow Benny was the deer head, and he felt relieved. I can’t die, I’m already dead.

  He awoke with a jolt, covered in a sheen of cold sweat. It was two a.m. Suddenly he knew what was going on. He knew exactly what was going on.

  It was Calvin.

  Calvin’s house, 9:50 p.m.

  It was scary to walk alone at night, a fact Virginia always managed to forget. The rubber soles of her cheap shoes padded quietly on the pavement, but even that sound seemed too loud. The road to the headmaster’s house was deserted and silent.

  Virginia had seen the house a million times, but never imagined she’d actually go inside it one day. It was technically on-campus, just up the hill and past the tennis courts—a five-minute walk from the Boarders (though in the emptiness of night the walk felt longer). It was a large brick mansion with old-fashioned dormer windows and a grand columned portico framing the front door. The yard was illuminated by floodlights placed strategically in the surrounding trees, creating the effect of supercharged moonlight. Virginia stood in the darkness at the edge of the grass, nervous to set foot on the property. She checked the time on her Indiglo watch. She was early—too early. She’d felt so hyper and restless sitting around in her room waiting for ten o’clock that she’d left at the earliest reasonable moment. And now she was here.

  She crept along the trees at the edge of the property toward the back. Around ten. What did that mean? 10:01? 10:15? She guessed she’d knock lightly on the back door. Would Calvin be there waiting? Would there actually be Chinese food? What if as soon as she was alone with him, she didn’t like him anymore? It was a pivotal move, going to his house at night. She wasn’t sure why she’d put herself in this position. But it felt exciting and daredevilish.

  She reached the back of the house. Huge windows revealed a beautiful living room full of dark wood and crimson furniture, and a vaulted ceiling at least twenty-five feet high. There was a fireplace, and an immense leather sofa, and a spotless tile floor covered in Oriental rugs. It looked like a photograph from Better Homes and Gardens. Virginia wasn’t usually the type to go apeshit over interior design, which in Florida meant making everything look like a hotel. But Calvin’s house was spectacular, and she couldn’t wait to be inside. There was so much to look at that for a second she didn’t notice Calvin and his dad were standing in the middle of the room.

  She jumped back into the shadows instinctively, though she knew they probably couldn’t see her. They were talking—or rather, Headmaster Harker was talking. And the conversation was obviously not a pleasant one. Virginia watched Calvin, who kept opening his mouth to speak, but his dad wouldn’t give him a chance. Suddenly Virginia felt a surge of . . . she didn’t know what to call the feeling. Pathos? Was that a word?

  Calvin was crying. His chin quivered and a tear fell down his cheek. Virginia had never seen a man cry before. She’d seen boys cry, but Calvin was so grown-up-looking, she’d unconsciously categorized him as a man.

  What’s going on? She couldn’t look away.

  Calvin was shaking his head. More tears were streaming down his cheeks. He wiped them away with his hand.
Virginia couldn’t tell what they were talking about at all, but it definitely involved Headmaster Harker saying “yes” and Calvin saying “no.”

  And then the headmaster did something that chilled Virginia to the core. He grabbed Calvin by the throat. His face was calm but menacing. He leaned toward his son, their faces now inches apart, and stared into his eyes. Just stared at him. They were the same extreme height, almost mirror images, as if Calvin were looking at a projection of himself from the future, hardened and corrupted by time and now turning on his young self. It made Virginia shiver.

  At that second, Virginia realized that Calvin could see her through the window. He looked right at her, inching his head to the left as far as the grip of his father’s hand would allow.

  Go.

  He hadn’t been saying “no” to his dad. He’d been mouthing the word “Go.” To her.

  Virginia shook her head. She wasn’t going to abandon him to be strangled in his own house! Not that his dad was strangling him, exactly, he was just . . . gripping him. But it was scary.

  Go.

  Headmaster Harker’s eyes cut to the window, following his son’s gaze. Virginia ducked quickly behind a tree. Oh my god. She stood frozen, trying not to make a sound even though she knew there was no way they could hear her inside. After a long moment she peeked around the tree. The living room was empty. They were gone.

  She stood in the shadows for five entire minutes. Was Calvin coming back? She checked her watch. It was long past ten at this point. A strong gust of wind blew against her face, like it was trying to push her away. But the immaculate living room—warmly and perfectly lit—still seemed to say, Hello, do come in.

  What would Benny do? Virginia knew what he would do. He would leave, and enter all the data into a color-coded spreadsheet and then stare at it for four hours. But how could she leave Calvin alone with that man? She’d always been scared of Headmaster Harker—everyone was. He was strict and dour and notoriously harsh. But that was like, scared he’d call your parents and give you six hundred detentions, not scared he’d strangle his son to death.