Liar. Part 21

Even after he died.

Maybe more after he died.

I've never been as comfortable, as happy with another person as I was with Zach.

I wish I hadn't had to lie to him. I wish he knew what I really am.

If he had lived longer I think I would have told him.

Maybe.

I told the police that I would never hurt him. I don't think they believed me.

Biology was Zach's favorite cla.s.s. Mine, too.

Maybe if he'd known about me he would have wanted to help me figure out how my wolfishness works.

Right now I'm thinking about how Zach was made, was unmade.

Once in cla.s.s we had to put together a model of the human body. We looked at how the organs sat together: spleen and pancreas behind stomach. Gallbladder behind liver. Kidneys in the middle of the back. Large intestine nestling the small. All s.h.i.+ny and plastic.

Yayeko warned us that real bodies were only vaguely like the model. That spleens, pancreas, stomachs, gallbladders, livers, kidneys, large and small intestines are as varied as the nose and eyes and mouths on our faces.

Does that mean the model is a lie?

Zach's organs are even less like that model than they were. They no longer fit together. Even before they started to rot, they were pulled apart, shredded, blood breaking through the veins and capillary walls that were supposed to keep them housed safe, sound, and circulating.

Zach's blood got free, drowned all his organs.

But I don't know how. I don't know who did that to him. At least, I'm not sure. My suspicions are without any proof.

All I know is that he's gone forever.

I wonder if I would have loved his lungs, his voice box, his pancreas if I'd seen them nestled safe within him. If you love someone, do you love all of them? Even the mucus in their throat, the cankers in their mouth, the cavities in their teeth?

I want it to be winter always. Because I met Zach in winter. Really met him. Talked to him. Kissed him. Ran with him. All the things we did together. Those were winter things.

In winter he was alive. Organs well-knit.

In summer I was away, aching for him, being a wolf.

But here in the fall, he's gone. All the layers gone, too. Right down to his skin.

I'm not sure what to do without him.

The last time I saw him we were running. All the way from Central Park to his apartment building in Inwood. But I kept running, turned, ran backward slowly, waved, and then ran all the way down to the Lower East Side. To my apartment building, my tiny little room, where he had never been.

I never saw him again.

Not alive. Not with organs intact.

LIE NUMBER THREE.

There were never any doctors.

My parents were too afraid of blood samples being taken. Too afraid of what the doctors would find. Of what lives in my blood.

I have never been to a doctor. Not one. I've never had any tests done. Never been vaccinated. Never had my ears or eyes tested. When I run a fever my parents give me aspirin, put cold cloths on my forehead, and hope that it will come down.

No doctor ever told me to keep taking the pill. Mom wasn't horrified by the suggestion. She's the one who gets the prescription from her doctor. I added that detail to make it seem more real.

There were hair-removal specialists though. By the time I was ten I swear we'd been to every single one in the city: electrolysis, waxing, laser, creams, and unguents. Mom found an old French woman who made me drink a foul-smelling herbal drink that tasted like dirt and made me throw up. Chinese and Spanish herbs and ointments. There was acupuncture, even a spirit worker.

None of it worked.

The hair came, stayed for more than a year, then the hair went, to return only when I am a wolf.

SCHOOL HISTORY.

My school was founded by Quakers. They believed in equality and justice and wanted to make a school in that image. One of them was very wealthy, that's why there's so much scholars.h.i.+p money-that's how they've kept the school fees low. Well, not low by my standards, but low compared to most private schools in the city. Low enough that with scrimping and saving my parents can pay the half of my tuition that isn't covered by my scholars.h.i.+p.

But that rich Quaker-isn't that a contradiction? I thought Quakers were supposed to be poor-anyway, that Quaker left his Quaker wife and his many Quaker children and ran away with a much younger woman who was a dancer, not a Quaker. He moved to New York City to watch her dance every night. Until she up and left him, leaving him with a broken heart and-according to Chantal-a bad case of the clap.

That's when he founded the school and poured all his money into it.

He founded it in this building that used to be a prison. A women's prison. They kept the bars on the windows.

None of the students at the school are Quakers and only one of the teachers: Princ.i.p.al Paul.

I wonder if the Quaker sense of equality and justice extends to werewolves. Does it extend to me?

I realize I don't know much about Quakers.

But I know a lot about cages, about prisons. I've been kept hostage by lies all my life. Imprisoned by them.

This is how it is: I'm alone.

Bars surround me. Prison guards bind my arms, bring me pills several times a day. They ask me-beg me-to tell them the truth.

I am.

Every single word.

Truth.

They don't believe in my wolves.

AFTER.

The day after the funeral, I almost stay home from school. I'm not sure I can face Sarah and Tayshawn. The thought of seeing them makes my cheeks hot. I don't want to have a conversation about how it was a mistake, how we should forget about it, move on. I don't want to talk about it.

I keep my head down and go back into invisibility mode, which is much harder than it used to be. Zach is buried, but they still talk about him, still look sideways at me. Except now it feels as if there's more reason for them to be staring. I'm sure everyone knows what we did after the funeral.

No, not after. During. That makes it so much worse. Who noticed us leave together? Does everyone already know what happened? My cheeks get hotter.

I take my lunch-burned meatb.a.l.l.s-into Yayeko Shoji's cla.s.sroom, pretty sure I'll be safe from them there. I sit down under the poster of the carnivores' evolutionary tree, noting the branch where the gray wolf and the domestic dog split apart. It's very recent. There's 0.2 percent of mtDNA sequence difference between a wolf and a Pekingese . . . dogs and wolves can still interbreed.

The door opens while I'm contemplating how much DNA I share with black bears. Dogs and humans have 85 percent shared genetic material; wolves and bears share- It's Sarah. I look away.

"Okay if I join you?" she asks.

I nod.

I wish it hadn't happened.

No, that's a lie. (See? I told you I was done with lying.) What happened, it was . . . I didn't . . . I did . . .

I liked it. It felt good. I wish we would do it again.

But I don't know how it happened. Sarah can't really have meant to return my kiss. Neither did Tayshawn. It was something else overwhelming us.

Grief.

We were trying to find traces of Zach in the layers of our skin.

"How you doing, Micah?" Sarah says, sliding into the seat beside me.

"Fine," I say.

She puts her hands on the table and accidentally touches the side of my little finger. We both pull away quick.

"Sorry," Sarah says. "I didn't mean . . ." She pauses. "Kind of creepy eating lunch here, don't you think?" She's looking at the plastic model of the human body. The guts are jumbled, the pancreas resting on the heart, the gallbladder on the place where the genitals would be if the model had them. The large and small intestines and the voice box are on the floor.

"It's quiet," I say, wis.h.i.+ng I didn't have to speak. Zach didn't like talking all the time either.

"We should talk," Sarah says.

She never used to talk to me when I was invisible. But I'm not anymore.

After my first two lies were exposed-they knew I was a girl, they knew I hadn't been born a hermaphrodite-after that, I started to disappear. I didn't talk in or out of cla.s.s. If your mouth's shut, lies can't come streaming out. There were still whispers. But after a year they dulled down.

I liked being invisible.

I watched. I thought.

Zach never saw me. I know that. I noticed him, sitting with Sarah, nuzzling at her neck, kissing her. Playing ball with the guys.

I imagined what it would be like to be him. But I didn't envy it. I wasn't happy, but I wasn't not happy either. Invisibility suits me.

"I like you, Micah," Sarah says. "Aside from Zach and all that . . ." She blinks, takes a deep breath. "Aside from that and from you being a crazy liar, too." She smiles at me and my cheeks feel hot again. I don't know where to look except at her. "Yesterday was the best I've felt since . . . Zach. The talking, I mean. The three of us being friends. I don't want to lose that, too. We can stay friends, right?"

I nod, though I really doubt it.

"Good," she says. The top she's wearing clings to her arms. They're slim and not at all strong-looking. How exactly do they think a girl like Sarah could have killed Zach? He was stronger and taller and bulkier than her.

And Tayshawn? Why on earth would he kill his best friend? His boy that he'd known since the third grade.

Sarah's waiting for me to say something, but I have nothing.

"Could you help me with bio?" she asks.

"Help you?" I repeat, not understanding.

She gestures at the plastic model pieces. "I'm not doing as well as I should. Biology's not really my thing."

"Sure," I say.

"I can help you with your other cla.s.ses."

"Okay." I'm not bad at any of them, but biology is what I'm best at.

Sarah's looking at me, expecting more words, but I have no idea what to say. She hasn't said anything, not really, about what happened. It's as if it didn't.

It did. When I'm not thinking about Zach, I'm thinking about what happened between me and Sarah and Tayshawn after the funeral. Would Zach be mad at me if he knew? I know he's dead. But I can't help thinking that he knows, that he cares. I'd undo what we did, I'd undo anything, if it would make him alive again. I'd stop lying. Tell everyone about the wolf within.

I miss him.

The ache of where he isn't is so large that sometimes I can barely manage to stay upright. Even with his coffin lowered into the ground, with soil on top of him, I cannot believe he's dead.

"Micah?" Sarah asks. She puts her hand on mine. Hers is warm, a little dry. Her touch makes me tingle. I wonder if it makes her tingle, too. I'm about to say something stupid when Tayshawn joins us.

Sarah pulls her hand away. "I was asking Micah if she'd help me with bio."

"Uh-huh," Tayshawn says. He pulls up a chair, sits. His eyes are red and he's a little sweaty, as if he's been running. I brace myself for what he's going to say. Is he mad about finding us alone together with Sarah's hand on mine? Does he think we're leaving him out? Is he going to be weird?

"Erin Moncaster isn't dead," he announces, looking at both of us.

AFTER.

Erin Moncaster was found in a hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with her skeezy eighteen-year-old boyfriend. Now she is back in the city and back in school.

In cla.s.s they're not talking about me. Erin the s.l.u.t replaces Micah the liar and possible killer.

I see her later that day between fifth and sixth periods. She's dressed the part, walking down the hall with too much paint on pale white skin, making her look as garish as a clown. Her short skirt and low-cut top are supposed to be clingy, but she's so skinny they hang off her, like the white boy, but she looks fragile, not fearsome. She keeps her head high like she doesn't care, but her eyes are red, and her lips tremble.

Everyone is staring at her. The whole whispering, giggling thing that I am so used to. It belongs to Erin now.

"Hey, Micah," Tayshawn calls, coming down the stairs.