Strange Lies Read online

  Be glad to have contributed to the school’s history, he told himself. Cary Grant was always buoyant in these situations. He wouldn’t let an embarrassing uncle get him down. And if Uncle Jeffrey thought it was weird that about three different kids had come up and asked him if he’d seen that there were real ham biscuits at the refreshments table, he didn’t show it. In fact, he seemed delighted that Winship students were such attentive hosts. He slapped their shoulders congenially and said to each one, “You fuckin’ bet I did!”

  The three judges appeared, and DeAndre got ready to make the volcano erupt. A group of students, mostly girls, were hovering nearby, obviously less interested in his volcano than in gawking at his family. DeAndre pretended not to realize this and greeted them warmly.

  “Hey, guys! Come on in!” He was good at bringing people together. As the student body president, it was pretty much his job. A few weeks ago when everyone thought Brittany Montague was dead, it was DeAndre who had stepped up to organize the candlelight vigil, while everyone else was dissolving into despair.

  “Come watch!” he said again to the girls.

  “Um, okay!” They came forward, everyone smiling now. If you’re nice to people, they’ll be nice back, he thought happily. It was the simplest truth in the world. Why didn’t people get it? Sure, it could be hard sometimes. Kids at Winship weren’t known for welcoming outsiders. But if you were nice, and you weren’t a huge nerd, life at Winship could be pretty all right.

  He poured vinegar into the crater and the papier-mâché mountain overflowed with burbling lava. His parents clapped and his little sister shrieked adorably.

  “Great job, D!” Mr. Rashid said. “Wow. What a crowd-pleaser!”

  Two girls were whispering to each other next to the volcano. “Omigod, did you hear about Virginia and Skylar?” DeAndre wiped up the table with a paper towel, trying not to look like he was listening. Gossip was in poor taste, but it was important to know what was going on in the lives of his constituents. But then Uncle Jeffrey appeared with a heaping plate from the refreshments table.

  “You gotta get some of this shit, D!”

  “I sure will, Uncle J,” he said, and by then the girls had left.

  “Death. Death. Black band leader of endless night.”

  DeAndre rolled his eyes. It was Calvin Harker again, in the booth across the row. Apparently his project was on morbid poetry or something.

  “Hot spewing magma hardens to igneous rock. The blaze of life snuffed by ash.”

  Oh god, please don’t drag me into this, DeAndre pleaded in his mind. Calvin used to be fairly normal, despite being freakishly tall and also the headmaster’s son, which was a serious social hurdle. But lately it was like he’d given up completely. DeAndre prided himself on never being cliquish or rude, but people like Calvin got on his nerves.

  I can’t help you if you insist on being weird.

  “No fire is eternal. Even the sun will burn out, our planet left an icy, forgotten globe.”

  Booth 29, 7:30 p.m.

  Why is everyone so willing to be boring?

  It was a question Virginia asked herself almost every single day. Why did anyone do homework? Or wear navy? Or date the same person for three years? The other day in Ethics class, they’d gone around the room saying what everyone wanted to be when they grew up, and Corny Davenport said, “A real estate agent, just like my mom!” It was pretty much the most depressing thing Virginia had ever heard.

  She’d been looking forward to the science expo all day. In her mind she’d conflated it with a dance somehow, imagining dim lighting and the promise of romance, except with science projects everywhere. Only now was she realizing how non-conducive to romance the science expo environment was. The gym’s fluorescent lights assaulted every corner. It was loud, and the roving panel of judges were making everyone uptight. This was going to be as boring as school, wasn’t it? Except worse, because at least at school you didn’t normally have to be around a hundred million parents.

  On the “Trees of Georgia” poster she’d made, several of the dried, crumbling leaves had fallen down, and another was lopsided. She’d known it wasn’t a great project, but now it seemed actually pathetic. As she looked around, some of the other projects seemed barely even related to science. A group of juniors were doing a project on The Fast and the Furious that was just pictures of exploding cars and Vin Diesel quotes. And Trevor Cheek had a project called, simply, “Hunting,” which was showing off all the heads of deer he’d killed. If Virginia had known you could just do whatever you wanted, she would have done a project on classic cocktails, or Body Language of the Rich and Powerful.

  In the booth next to her, Yasmin Astarabadi was erecting an immense pair of metal wires, one of which kept drooping perilously toward her. Virginia leaned away, not wanting her outfit to get stabbed. It felt different, wearing expensive clothes. It made her more conscious of her posture and of potentially ruinous stabbing wires. She’d never cared about perfect clothes before, but she loved this outfit and would probably literally cry if anything happened to it. You couldn’t find clothes like this in Atlanta. All of Zaire Bollo’s clothes had come from Paris and London and Milan. And back to Paris and London and Milan they’d gone after Zaire failed to return from fall break—except this one particular outfit, which Virginia had swiped from her closet and intended to wear as often as possible until she grew up into a person who bought clothes like this all the time.

  “What is that?” she asked Yasmin, who was bending the wire back into place.

  “A high-voltage traveling arc,” Yasmin said, not looking up from her weird equipment.

  “What does that mean?”

  Yasmin sighed impatiently and gave a long answer involving the words “cathode voltage drop” and “heated ionized air.” Virginia wished she hadn’t asked.

  On the other side of her, Lindsay Bean had a project called “Pudding Inventions,” which seemed to involve making pudding out of the grossest flavors imaginable, like seaweed and diet popcorn and lobster. Sophat Tiang and Skylar Jones, the biggest stoners in school, had wandered over to sample them. Virginia tried to look busy putting the falling leaves back on her pathetic poster. Skylar acted like she wasn’t even there.

  Hello? Virginia thought, getting annoyed. Skylar always ignored her as if they hadn’t totally had a thing last year. Not a huge thing, but enough of a thing that she deserved some respect from him. She’d only liked him because he seemed different from everyone else at Winship. He wore sandals, and a hemp necklace, and had once said, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” which Virginia had found unbelievably clever until someone told her it was a famous quote.

  “Is it going to explode?” Skylar was asking Lindsay. He was grinning and pointing at a cylinder full of white frothy substance.

  Lindsay giggled. “Maybe!”

  “It looks like jizz. I think it wants to be released.” Skylar and Sophat laughed. Skylar reached across the table and rubbed the cylinder up and down obscenely.

  “Skylar, stop. Skylar! Don’t!” Lindsay squealed. Virginia considered giving Skylar a shove to make him quit, but then decided it was better to remain aloof from his gross immaturity. Lindsay could fend for herself. But then, as she was turning back to her leaf poster, she heard a squishing noise and felt a hot thick liquid all over her neck.

  “Ew!” She touched her shoulder and her fingers came away sticky with a white, fishy-smelling goo. Skylar and Sophat were slapping each other’s backs and laughing hysterically.

  “Skylar, you moron!” Virginia hissed at him.

  “Was it good for you, too?” he said, grinning hugely.

  Virginia turned to Lindsay and pointed to the nasty white smear covering half her sweater. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s lobster paste.”

  Skylar laughed even harder. “What can I say?”

  Virginia grabbed a paper towel from Lindsay’s table and started dabbing at the ugly splotch
. She felt angry tears sting her eyes. Does lobster paste stain? She felt like kicking Skylar in the balls, but what if she didn’t kick hard enough and accidentally gave him a boner or something? It was just impossible, trying to get the upper hand with boys.

  Skylar and Sophat had moved on to poking Yasmin’s gigantic metal wires. Yasmin was ignoring them and messing with a transformer box. Nerds like Yasmin were used to this kind of thing, Virginia figured. They just conducted their lives as best they could amid constant disruptions from people who couldn’t build anything of their own, so they tore everyone else down. She couldn’t decide which side of the dynamic was more pathetic. Virginia grabbed more paper towels and started toward the bathroom, dabbing at herself.

  “Wait!” Skylar shouted at her, suddenly not laughing anymore. “Are you going to the bathroom?”

  Virginia paused. Why did Skylar care if she went to the bathroom or not? Was he going to invite himself along? She glanced at Yasmin, who was giving her a blank, weirdly hostile look, as if to her, she and Skylar and Sophat were all the same. I’m not with them, Virginia wanted to tell her.

  “You don’t wanna go in there,” Skylar was saying, his face serious. Sophat and Yasmin looked from him to her, like something was about to happen.

  Virginia narrowed her eyes. “Why, did you do something gross?”

  “No,” Skylar said. “Just trust me, dude. Don’t go in there.”

  Virginia tossed her hair and kept walking. You couldn’t take anything that loser said seriously. But then, the second she crossed into the hall, she sensed a shift in the air. It was quieter, and brighter. The hum of four hundred voices was instantly muted. Without daylight streaming through the windows, the fluorescent lights gave the white walls an eerie glow. A group of girls was huddled by the water fountain, talking in urgent whispers. They looked like paint swatches, each with a different vibrantly colored cardigan set. Virginia walked past them and was almost at the bathroom door when she heard her name.

  “Virginia,” one of them was whispering. “Virginia, don’t go in there.”

  Booth 33, 7:30 p.m.

  Benny stood surrounded by brains. His project was called “Mind Over Matter,” and it was a case study of brain-damaged patients who had “miraculously” overcome incredibly grim prognoses.

  Mrs. Flax was not happy. Benny had been vague about the topic of his project, knowing she would disapprove. Some of his own father’s brain scans were mixed among the ones he’d copied from neurological textbooks, and he knew his mother would recognize them. The unique purple splotch representing the damaged area of his cerebrum was distinct. To Benny it resembled a ghost leaning forward against a brutal wind. Mrs. Flax had never expressed precisely what she found objectionable about Benny’s interest in his father’s recovery. But he’d gotten used to a certain expression on her face: a vague, tired sneer, the face of someone exhausted from dealing with a child who insists on being stupid.

  Benny read his concluding thoughts from an index card: “In summation, ‘medical miracles’ do not exist. This concept is left over from our superstitious past. Advancements in medical science will prove that every ‘miracle’ has a logical explanation.”

  No one clapped. His audience included his mother—who had not looked him in the eye once—and the three judges scribbling on their reports. A steady stream of students had walked past, but none seemed to have found fifty pictures of brains sufficiently intriguing to stop and listen. One of the judges, Mr. Rashid, shook Benny’s hand.

  “Thank you, Benny. Would you make sure everyone in AP Science has the judging schedule?”

  He dropped a stack of papers on the table with a thump, and Benny frowned at them. He wasn’t even the teacher’s assistant, but people just assumed—in a way that felt vaguely anti-Semitic yet annoyingly accurate—that Benny could be always tasked with the business side of things while everyone else goofed off.

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks, Scooby.” Benny felt his stomach lurch. Had his mom heard that? He was too afraid to look at her and see. Scooby. When were people going to stop calling him that? It was against his philosophy to solve mysteries for personal glory, and it was against his nature to brag. The result was that no one at Winship knew that Mystery Club, mere weeks before, had rooted out a murderer among them: Zaire Bollo. For a brief, ecstatic moment, the experience had confirmed everything Benny believed about mystery solving—that it expanded the mind, that it made the world a better place, not merely through justice but through knowledge. But then Zaire had fled, and the moment had passed, and the world didn’t seem particularly better; it seemed the same. Same world, same Scooby.

  “This must have used a hell of a lot of printer ink,” Mr. Rashid was saying, gesturing toward the many pictures of brains.

  Benny felt annoyed. He’d spent over a month working on this project, and all Mr. Rashid could say was that he must have used a lot of printer ink?

  “Sure did,” he managed.

  “Well, you make sure you get those schedules around. Everyone’s project needs to get fair time. That’s crucial. It’s the American way. Everyone gets their fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay, Mr. Rashid.”

  It was absurd, Benny being placed in charge of making sure a bunch of spoiled rich kids got their fifteen minutes. All of life was their fifteen minutes! Winship was the most moneyed school in Atlanta, with only a handful of students there on scholarship. Benny was one of them, a fact he was never allowed to forget.

  Mr. Rashid and the other judges left, and Benny’s mom announced that she was going to read a magazine in the library. Benny watched her go. He wished the judges had been more complimentary. He’d been counting on impressing her tonight. He sat down in his chair, feeling gloomy and defeated. The decoder ring on his finger was slightly irritating. The metal was thick and substantial, not some cheap thing you’d find in a cereal box. Decoder rings weren’t actually very useful—they relied on a Caesar code, which was pretty much the most crackable code ever created. It would have been more practical if Virginia had just gotten herself a cell phone. In their last case, her weird lack of one had been a constant impediment. But Benny believed in personal freedom and didn’t want to embarrass her by bringing it up. He didn’t know exactly what Virginia’s deal was. He knew she was from Florida, or at least went there on vacation a lot. She’d mentioned a stepfather in Cuba once, but it seemed like something she’d made up to sound exotic. Benny didn’t feel comfortable prying into her home life, which was probably dysfunctional. All the boarding students had dysfunctional home lives; it’s why they didn’t live at home.

  Benny wandered through the maze of booths, passing out the judging schedules and trying to pick out the obvious winners. He’d assumed he’d be in contention, but based on Mr. Rashid’s lackluster response, he wasn’t sure now. Some of the projects were ludicrous. There was one project on tanning salons, and another on which was better, chicken wings or pizza. Trevor Cheek had all his grotesque murdered deer heads displayed, which maybe could have worked if the presentation were about taxidermy, but it was just Trevor telling self-mythologizing hunting stories.

  Benny located Calvin Harker’s booth. Calvin was usually serious competition; he always won almost every academic prize in their grade. But when Benny got to his booth, there was no one there. It was just a table with a bunch of facts printed out on plain paper.

  • Every five seconds a child dies of hunger. One just died while you were reading this sentence.

  • Tsunamis kill thousands in a single wave.

  • Every other day, a coconut falls on someone’s head and they die.

  • 41 percent of the people in this gym will die of cancer.

  Benny leafed through the pieces of paper. Calvin’s project seemed to be a collection of random and depressing ways people could die. It certainly didn’t look like an award-winning presentation.

  • A woman in Ireland beat breast cancer four times before dying from a cow falling through her roof
.

  • A man who had just received a miracle kidney transplant was discharged from the hospital and was immediately hit by a truck and killed.

  What the hell is this? Benny knew Calvin fairly well; the two of them were always being thrown together. There seemed to be a persistent expectation that they should be best friends, since they were both loners who got good grades. But the friendship never managed to bloom. Admittedly, Benny was a little jealous of Calvin’s undisputed status as the smartest guy in school. But beyond that, there was just something weird about Calvin that Benny could never quite connect with.

  At the bottom of the pile, the last paper read:

  So what is the point of living, you ask.

  Benny flipped back through the papers, wondering if he’d read them out of order. But there didn’t seem to be an answer.

  The whole thing gave him a chilling feeling, like Calvin was about to run out with a machine gun and shoot up the gym. Benny tried to shrug the thought away. That sort of thing didn’t happen at private schools. And besides, Calvin was on track to be valedictorian—not exactly the profile of a mass shooter. But Benny still found himself backing away from Calvin’s booth as if a coconut were about to drop from the sky and smash his head. It wasn’t even the weirdest project in the expo, but it was definitely the creepiest.

  So what is the point of living, you ask.

  The lobby, 7:50 p.m.

  “Don’t go in there.”

  Virginia whirled around. She squinted at the trio of girls huddled down the hall. In the fluorescent light, the paint-bucket colors of their sweaters looked drained. They stared at her. It was Constance Bouchelle and her friends Yu Yan and Beth. The three of them were always together, attached at the hip in a way that Virginia found annoying and childish. This wasn’t third grade anymore; it was time to start acting independent. And they did that thing Virginia truly hated, where they bogusly assigned themselves unique personas (Constance was “the smart one,” Yu Yan was “the cool one,” Beth “the crazy one”) when in reality they were interchangeable in every way.