Strange Lies Read online

  The hallway to the gym was ill-lit. This wasn’t an area were people were supposed to be tonight. The doors to the basketball court opened, and a pair of men came out—one man, actually, and a boy. The leather soles of their shoes echoed on the tile floor. It was Headmaster Harker and his son. It was always strange to see the two side by side. They were both unnaturally tall; they had the same thin, grim faces; the same vivid green eyes and pale skin. They resembled a pair of vampires: the headmaster an old-school Dracula with white-streaked hair receding sharply at the temples; Calvin his young and hungry scion. The headmaster led him sternly down the hall, a long, white hand gripping his shoulder.

  As they passed each other, Calvin shot Benny a long, pained look:

  Help.

  Benny stopped. But the headmaster and Calvin kept walking, and Calvin didn’t look back at him. They turned the dark corner and were gone.

  Benny entered the gym. It was dark around the edges, the basketball court lit up in the center. The school nurse was fluttering around, attending to a small collection of students and parents. There, sitting up on a gurney, was Virginia. Benny half walked, half ran over to her.

  “Virginia, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. . . . You’re okay?” He looked down at her shoeless foot. Her stocking had blood on it.

  “Ugh, I fainted,” Virginia said, rolling her eyes. “Did you see what happened?”

  “No,” Benny said. “I saw the blood . . .”

  “It was awful. People were, like, throwing their guts up. It was me who called 911.” She smiled, obviously expecting to be praised.

  “Well, who else was there? What happened? The deer was on wheels; obviously someone pushed it.”

  “Um . . . I don’t know. It was really chaotic. The lights were out, and then they came back on. Someone’s mom was next to me . . . and that girl with ten thousand freckles . . .”

  “Think hard. Close your eyes and see the scene in your mind.”

  Virginia closed her eyes. Then she shuddered. “God, all I can see is blood everywhere.”

  Benny tried not to get frustrated. Of course Virginia had no choice but to jump in and call 911. It was the right thing to do. But he wished she could have stepped back and observed the scene. Who knew the number of details she’d missed.

  “Have you seen Trevor Cheek anywhere?” Virginia asked. “It must have been his deer. He had that idiotic project.”

  “No,” Benny said. “I’ve just been looking for you. I saw your shoe in the blood. . . . I was worried.” A feeling of dejection washed over him. Virginia’s testimony was useless, and he’d spent the last critical half hour looking all over for her instead of gathering information. Everyone was probably leaving by now. The gym doors had been locked and draped with DO NOT ENTER tape. The scene was dead.

  “What should we do?” Virginia hopped off the gurney and then touched her head, seeming dizzy.

  “You should go home,” Benny said. “I mean, to your room. Do you want a ride to the Boarders?”

  “No, I’ll walk,” she said, to Benny’s relief. His mother tended to be less than subtle about her distaste for the yellow-haired, leg-showing shiksa in Benny’s life, and he wasn’t eager to be stuck in a car with them for any length of time.

  “We’ll talk tomorrow. . . . At morning assembly? Assuming school isn’t canceled.”

  “Okay! See ya.” Virginia waved tiredly. Benny noticed a piece of paper folded in her hand. He almost asked her what it was, but then decided not to. He didn’t want to seem nosy. Which was ironic because Virginia was the nosiest person on the planet and would not likely have paid him the same courtesy.

  They parted ways at the gym doors. Benny watched her walk away, her shoeless left foot splattered with blood. That was so Virginia, to just leave on a pair of blood-splattered stockings; a normal person would have ripped them off immediately. She really creeped him out sometimes.

  Benny stood there until she was gone, postponing the moment when he’d have to go to the library and find his mom and explain that there’d been an accident, and that the prizes wouldn’t be handed out tonight after all. Mrs. Flax was impervious to the chaos of life, and expected everyone else to be as well. It was unacceptable to be impaled by a taxidermied deer in the middle of a science expo. She’d look at Benny like it was somehow his fault.

  He leaned against the wall, trying to organize his mind. A deer. A student body president. A drug dealer in the bathroom, something Benny had almost forgotten about in the pandemonium. Two football players (Trevor Cheek and Winn Davis—three if you counted DeAndre). This was going to be tricky. He’d been on the wrong side of the gym when it happened. He’d have to depend on other people for the facts, which he hated doing. Other people were flaky and unreliable and stupid. But it was his own fault—he’d failed to fulfill the number one tenet of his own club: above all else, Be There.

  Benny’s house, 10:30 p.m.

  He couldn’t stop seeing the deer’s face. Its agony was imprinted on his mind: mouth open in a mute scream, eyes searing with futile rage. Benny was a logical person; he didn’t believe in New Age mumbo jumbo. But he couldn’t help feeling that some spiritual crime had been committed when they sawed off that deer’s antlers, leaving the stiff carcass on the floor like a piece of garbage. It seemed you could be anything in this world—a person, a deer—and life would find a way to mar your dignity.

  Stop thinking about it. He shook the image of the deer from his mind. He took out his many printouts of brains and spread them on the dining room table, feeling calmed by the array. One good thing had come out of the disastrous evening: the judges hadn’t gotten around to announcing the winners, so at least Benny was spared the embarrassment of being passed over in front of his mother.

  “THANK YOU FOR BEIN’ A FRIEEEND!”

  Benny’s grandma was watching The Golden Girls in the next room, with Mr. Flax next to her in a large leather easy chair. You’d think he was watching too, but if you looked closely, you’d see that his eyes were fixed at a point slightly below the TV.

  “Can you put on the news for him?” Benny asked his grandma.

  “It’s good for his mind to hear happy people chatting! Who wants to hear a bunch of sad news. Not us!” She patted her son-in-law’s knee. Benny gritted his teeth. In no universe was it good for anyone’s mind to watch The Golden Girls. He looked back to his array of brains, wishing his dad could have seen his project tonight. He would have appreciated it. He would have thought it was brilliant. And they would have gone to the kosher diner in Midtown together and ordered steaks and discussed Benny’s bright and promising future.

  Stop, he told himself. This had been happening more and more lately—Benny romanticizing his dad and indulging in unrealistic fantasies about how magical his life would be if the plane crash had never happened, if the test flight for the AeroStream V4 Spinetail—his father’s baby—had successfully landed. But truthfully, before the accident, Mr. Flax had been a remote and somber workaholic who was rarely around. In all likelihood he wouldn’t have gone to the science expo at all, and if he had, it would have been for fifteen minutes and he would have been distracted the whole time. The evening would probably have ended the exact same way: Benny alone and vaguely depressed, the sounds of gabbling old ladies blaring from the TV to mock him. Life’s dismal plan trudged on, unaffected by whatever accidents happened along the way.

  Except Tank would still be here.

  Benny was good at mental compartmentalization—stowing some thoughts deep in the recesses of his consciousness, where they had few opportunities to surface. Probably a psychologist would say it was unhealthy, but Benny didn’t know how else he was supposed to survive in his own mind. If he had to think about Tank every day, he’d never get out of bed in the morning.

  Benny went to his room and shut the door. Then he pulled out last year’s yearbook and flipped to the index in the back: Bell, DeAndre. The list of pages featuring DeAndre took up five entire lines. He started going through
them one by one: his class portrait, various club pictures, student government, candids from the spring formal. In each photo DeAndre had the same exact pose: a wide “Mentos: the Freshmaker” smile, his arm draped chummily around whoever happened to be standing next to him. Benny couldn’t quite picture DeAndre’s face without his signature grin; he certainly couldn’t picture it contorted in horrible pain.

  He flipped to the C’s: Cheek, Trevor. Trevor had famously run for student body president last spring as a joke. His platform had been “School sucks, but I don’t!” Trevor was a buffoon who loved making a mockery of anything anyone took seriously. Benny remembered him giving up on his speech halfway through and spending the rest of his allotted ten minutes leading the assembly hall in a thumping chant of “TRE-VOR, TRE-VOR, TRE-VOR!” People liked that stuff but not in their school president. In the end, DeAndre had won the election. This was particularly impressive considering that DeAndre was only a sophomore while Trevor was a junior; it was rare for underclassmen to achieve the coveted title of student body president. Trevor had made a dumb spectacle of claiming the election was rigged and threatening to “succeed from the Union,” which everyone laughed about even though it really wasn’t funny considering the historical context. But even DeAndre had laughed, and soon the joke lost steam and died.

  Now Benny wondered: Was it possible Trevor actually cared about student government? Enough to kill his opponent? Trevor was from an old Southern plantation family; he bragged about it all the time. Maybe he was secretly infuriated that a black student—possibly descended from slaves—had taken a leadership role Trevor felt entitled to. Maybe his “joke” platform had disguised serious ambition. Benny considered it, then shook his head. It was an interesting idea but one that failed to light. If Trevor had really wanted the position, he could have had it. He could have taken his speech seriously, and maybe even asked his dad (the president of the Board) to pull some strings for him. Besides, there wasn’t much that Trevor would gain from DeAndre vacating his seat. Trevor wasn’t the next in line; the vice president was, and that was Yasmin Astarabadi. If Trevor had pushed the deer, his motive hadn’t been ambition but revenge. Which seemed a little dramatic.

  Benny closed the yearbook. He knew he should get some sleep. He’d been reading a lot lately on how lack of sleep affected mental cognition. A series of tests on sleep-deprived people showed that without sufficient sleep, the body would siphon energy from the brain to power corporeal functions, which shut down creative thought like a zombie. To Benny, this was a reminder that the human capability for brilliance was a gift, not a given; the body would take any opportunity to become a mindless animal again.

  He changed into his pajamas and turned out the light. As soon as he closed his eyes, the image of the deer assaulted his mind. Stop! he ordered himself. If he wanted to solve mysteries, it would involve seeing disturbing things from time to time. It was part of the job. He couldn’t wince and shudder his way though a case like a weenie.

  Dewdrop, let me cleanse in your brief sweet waters . . . These dark hands of life. It was a four-hundred-year-old Matsuo Bashō haiku that Benny found relaxing. Half of Bashō’s poems were about dew: pearls of dew, chrysanthemum’s dew, dew that cleansed, dew that symbolized the swiftly evaporating beauty of life. It seemed like such an ancient thing, dew. Yet it was a simple function of nature that not even the stamping foot of suburbia could obstruct. Benny made a mental note to take a moment in the morning to reach down and touch the dew of the grass in the front lawn. Had he ever intentionally, meaningfully, touched a dewdrop? Suddenly it was clear that this was what his life was missing: a daily touch of dew. . . .

  And then he was asleep, his resolution to touch some dew relegated to the realm of midnight flights of fancy that by the morning are forgotten.

  The Boarders, 1:02 a.m.

  FREEDOM!

  (is an illusion)

  Carpe diem?

  NO!

  The day has seized you and me

  Its grip will never tire

  All are prisoners of time

  Even beauty

  Even the stars

  Virginia lay in her bed reading the words for the five hundredth time. She wasn’t sure exactly what they meant, but that didn’t matter. Obviously it wouldn’t be a poem if it were just a bunch of normal sentences saying stuff.

  She loved it. If a better poem existed, she couldn’t think of it off the top of her head. Granted, she never paid much attention in English class, which was just a boring lady insisting that some boring old book was important. But this was actually important.

  She jumped out of bed and crept down the dark hall to the common room. After eleven o’clock they were supposed to stay in their rooms. But gradually every boarding student came to the independent realization that they had been abandoned. The house mom, Mrs. Morehouse, appeared less and less frequently, making up for long stretches of absence with spit-spraying, Miss Trunchbull–esque tirades whenever she randomly appeared. But other than that, the Boarders was always quiet, especially at night. Every semester fewer overnight students returned, leaving the house increasingly deserted. At this point less than half the rooms were filled. The room across from Virginia’s had been Zaire Bollo’s; now it was just another set of beige walls containing a bare mattress and empty drawers. The room would remain vacant forever. The Boarders was famously haunted, and it was known that territory ceded to the ghost would never be restored to the living.

  She turned on a lamp, half expecting to find Gottfried the German exchange student sprawled out on the sofa. Gottfried was an insomniac and hung out in the common room at all hours eating junk food and staring at the ceiling fan. He wasn’t there now, though Virginia wished he was. It was spooky being alone in the common room. Huge, curtainless windows exposed her to the outside world, the black silhouettes of trees and the ill-lit street ideal for lurkers. She considered turning off the lamp to make herself less visible, but the idea of sitting alone in the dark was even creepier.

  The ancient desktop computer hummed awake. She pulled up the browser and typed in “best poetry.” A list of the “10 Best Poems” popped up, and she scanned them. They seemed to be mostly about farms and walking in the woods and describing daffodils. Boring! Virginia thought, excited by the confirmation that Calvin’s poem was better.

  She logged into her Winship e-mail account. Her plan was to send Calvin a short but intriguing e-mail and see how he responded. She still wasn’t 100 percent sure she liked him, but she didn’t want him to get taken by some other girl either. Her in-box was a slew of junk that she deleted without reading: inspirational Christian forwards by the Montague twins (and more from Chrissie White, who copied whatever the twins did); gobbledygook from her mother’s personal accountant in Boca Raton (why was Virginia always cc’d on this crap?); repeated memos from Mrs. Jewel, the new upper-school principal who had made it her mission to stop the girls from wearing their skirts so short (“Expose your minds, ladies, not your panties!!!”), and reminders to vote for Homecoming King and Queen.

  Then she noticed an e-mail from an address she didn’t recognize. She opened it.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Your the boss

  I can’t use this with my network. The whole point is their supposed to be virgins. But if u want to work with me we can expand. ($$$) Obviously i am shit at this, need a camera man (or GIRL, haha). Let me know cutie

  The message wasn’t signed, and at first Virginia was confused. She didn’t know anyone who called her “cutie.” Then her heart slammed in her chest. It was Min-Jun, the guy from Mr. Choi’s sordid jazz band/cheerleader porn ring. He was one of the creepiest people Virginia had ever met. Why was he contacting her? Was he a complete moron? The police had picked him up at the bonfire a few weeks ago after he’d gotten into a bloody fistfight with Winn Davis. They’d let him go, and as far as she and Benny understood, the guy’s low-rent production company, Locker Roo
m Wildcats, was over, and remained a secret. They’d both figured Min-Jun’s brush with the law was enough to scare him off the Winship campus forever. Evidently they’d been wrong.

  At the bottom of the e-mail there was a file attached. She hit download and watched the little wheel spin. Finally the file opened, and Virginia winced and held her hand up preemptively, in case it was a penis or something gross. Then she lowered her hand. The image was grainy, of a dark field lit by a single, faraway stadium light. Two people were rolling around on the short-clipped grass. Not rolling, really—undulating. It was people having sex! And Virginia knew immediately who they were.

  She looked over her shoulder to make sure she was still alone. Then she turned back at the screen. Corny Davenport’s huge, overflowing boob was pressed under Winn’s chest. Half their clothes were strewn around them, and their bodies were tangled and intertwined. Virginia had walked in on Chrissie White having sex once, and it had been completely gross and disturbing. She’d only witnessed about two seconds of it, but the image was burned into her brain: a guy in plaid boxers pounding Chrissie like a pumpjack while she lay there motionless with her mouth gaping open. It had been pretty much the least romantic scene in history. But what Corny and Winn were doing was nothing like that. They moved together rhythmically, Winn touching Corny’s head like it was a precious artifact. He was on top of her, but seemed considerate of her smaller body, careful not to crush it with his manly weight. Corny’s soft, naked legs pointed gracefully toward the black sky. The image of them was so intimate that it felt wrong to be watching. But Virginia couldn’t look away. They were gorgeous.

  Then a new message appeared in her in-box. It was from mjtheman. Virginia stiffened. The timing was freaky, like he knew she was online. Maybe he did know! Obviously he’d been skulking around campus taking videos of people. For all she knew, he was outside watching her right now. She glanced out the window, but all she could see was her own scared-looking reflection.