As I Die Lying Page 3

  Boyfriend? Didn't that mean I had to love her? But that wasn't as bad as being alone. What was it my little friend had said? About being brave enough to love?

  "Okay." My voice was as squeaky as chalk on a blackboard or throat with toast crumbs or a rubber ducky when you stomp it on purpose.

  "Then you can't be mean to me anymore. Or to my dolls. Cross your heart and hope to die."

  Hope to die? My invisible friend had said that the first time I met him. Love was even scarier than I thought. I swallowed the knot that lodged in my throat like a doll's head or other large, dry objects that you should never swallow but sometimes do. "Cross my heart and hope to die," I echoed.

  "And you have to love me forever."

  Did that mean all next year, even at school? School was only two weeks away. I pictured myself holding her bony hand in lunch line or carrying her books down to the bus stop. I pictured myself passing love letters in math class, avoiding the watchful eyes of Mrs. Elkerson. Those things weren't as bad as being alone.

  "Okay, then."

  "You have to say it." She leaned forward, her eyes serious.

  "Say what?"

  "Say 'I love you.' Just like that, only do it like they do in movies, kind of deep down and slow and out of breath."

  In movies, there was always music, violin players just off the set, and blossoms of spring erupting all around. Here there was only the party noise in the next room and a floor full of baby dolls. But I had the out-of-breath part down easy.

  My tongue was thick. My head buzzed, and I thought it might be my little friend telling me to not say it. Then the buzzing went away.

  "I...I love you."

  There. That wasn't so bad. That didn't hurt.

  Yet.

  "I love you, too, Richard. Now we get to hold hands."

  She put her warm, moist palm to mine and we sat on the floor in silence. Her room smelled of cake.

  "Is this all there is to love?" I asked after a minute.

  "No, now we can tell each other secrets. Oh, and one more thing...you have to love Angel Baby. Because I love Angel Baby and you love me."

  That made sense. But how many more would I have to love? Did the small hutch of my heart have enough room for more? What about those other dolls? Did I have to let all of them move into the Bone House?

  "What kind of secrets are you going to tell me?" I asked. "I have the secret place to show you, but you haven't promised anything yet."

  She looked hurt. "I promised to let you love me, didn't I? I promised to be your girlfriend."

  She pouted like Angel Baby, only Sally's lips weren't as red. I looked out the window. The sun had gone all the way down and a couple of dots of dirty starlight pricked the black sky. Shadows grew fat in the corners of the room. I scooted closer to Sally.

  She said, "I can tell you lots of things."

  "Things?"

  Her voice fell. "Things that you do when you're in love."

  Curiosity and fear struggled in my chest, and fear lost for once. "What kinds of things, besides telling secrets? I watch television. I already know about...kissing."

  She laughed, her mouth a flash of metal. Her eyes shone in the dim light, as glittering and piercing as a doll's.

  "You're not that dumb, are you?"

  Love's first hurt. My ears burned. My throat was a dry desert. My voice was lost somewhere in its sands. This love stuff was probably best kept in your own head or buried in the Sahara or the Mojave or some lesser-known but still-inhospitable geographic region.

  Sally said, "Kissing is just the beginning. When you show me the secret place, then I'll tell you more."

  More? Love wasn't scary enough already? Love had to have its own secrets, its own special set of fears?

  I whispered hoarsely, "There's more?"

  "I'll tell you about bedsprings and the things between people's legs."

  Like our mothers talked about? Did Sally know those kinds of secrets? Were girls born knowing them, and boys had to love a girl to unlock the mystery? Would love always be this confusing? Or was getting started the hardest part?

  She leaned over in the darkness and I felt her warm bubble-gum breath on my cheek. Her lips touched there, briefly, and then pulled away, her saliva already cooling on my skin in the night air. My cheek was still tingling when my parents called to take me home.

  I lay under the blankets in my bed, restless, listening to the night. Crickets chirped and an occasional car passed on the highway. Somewhere in the street, music played on a tinny radio. From down the hall, inside my parents' bedroom, came faint, rusty squeaking sounds. Questions circled around in my head like spun stars, burning brightly before dying and turning black, then falling one by one into the void of sleep.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next afternoon, still dizzy from promises of love, I showed Sally the nest. I led the way through the weeds and branches, and then held the vegetation aside so she could see the secret, sacred place.

  "Any bugs in there?" She gave me a silver grimace.

  "No, it smells a little like wet dog hair, but you get used to it after a while."

  She crawled through the tunnel, brushing a prairie rose vine away from her face and sending a pink snow of petals to the ground. She dragged Angel Baby by one arm, and the doll's yellow hair tangled in thorns, causing Sally to whimper until I tore it free. Once inside, she sat up and blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dimness.

  "Look at my stockings. My mother's going to kill me." She brushed at the dirt and grass stains on the knees of her white hose.

  "Tell her you fell, then she'll feel sorry for you instead of yelling at you."

  Sally looked around at the wooden walls that were brown with rot, then squinted up at the hole in the roof. "What do you do when it rains?"

  "Usually get wet."

  Her eyes grew dark, as if threatening clouds had passed over them. "You promised not to be mean, remember?"

  I touched my heart, the one I had crossed with a promise the day before, afraid it would stop beating. "I wasn't trying to be smart-alecky. Sometimes I'd rather sit here and get soaked than to be out there." I motioned to the world outside.

  She thought I must have meant the junkyard. "Why don't you play in the cars instead?"

  "Because cars have windows. People can see into them. Plus I think mice live in them. I've played in them before, pretended they were jets and spaceships and even cars I was driving. But I don't anymore, because of what happened."

  "What happened?" Sally sat Indian-style with Angel Baby in her lap. I thought for a moment, then decided to trust her. I could tell the story because she loved me. I'd never told anyone else. Love makes you do dumb things.

  I wanted to leave this part out, because it’s sort of embarrassing. But that one–you know, the one trying to steal my byline–believes this type of veracity just shows how foolish and untrustworthy I am. He's been revising this book, thinking it will get better over time, but he doesn't even notice if the structure is flawed.

  Here’s what I think: he’s jealous. He may be this ancient, soul-hopping, omniscient entity, but he can’t write worth a damn. He doesn’t have the patience for it. When you have the whole world at your fingertips and unlimited evil to unleash, who cares about a stupid page?

  For example, he doesn’t even realize drawing attention to the author is a bad idea. Look, here is a flashback told through dialogue. That’s a no-no in big-time New York-published autobiographies, even unauthorized ones. He’s the reason this book has been rejected so many times. Not me.

  So let us get by with it just this one time and I swear we’ll never do it again. Otherwise we’d be here arguing about it until hell freezes over. Which, by the way, comes up near the end of the book, assuming he lets me get there in one piece.

  "It happened before you moved here,” I told Sally. “This was back in March when it was just getting warm enough to play outside. The ground thawed out and the world was one big mud puddle. Mother told me not to
get dirty, so I went through those trees into the junkyard, careful so I didn't get scraped on torn-up metal. I scratched my leg there once, and it stayed red for about a month and all this yellowy juice kept coming out of the cut."

  Sally put the back of her hand to her mouth, revealing the pale flash of her open palm.

  "I was in that old black Ford, the one that's all rounded at the corners and missing all its wheels. It smells old, like a basement full of clothes that nobody wears anymore. My father said he had wanted a car like it when he was teen-ager, but never had the money because he had so many goddamned mouths to feed. Anyway, I was just playing with the steering wheel and pulling down all those gearshifts, going in for a landing on Mars, when this big old man runs over, wiping his hands on an oily rag. He must have worked there at the garage.

  "I slid down to the floorboard, trying to hide, but I couldn't fit under the seats. He opened the door and it creaked, just like those doors do in the movies when the monsters are coming to get somebody. He smelled like gasoline and his eyes were as dark as the stains on his clothes. I put my hands over my head, afraid he was going to kick me."

  "Why did you think that?" Sally said, half horrified and half disbelieving.

  "Because he had boots on."

  Confusion crossed her face. "Did he kick you?"

  "No, he squatted down and just said, 'What are you doing here, boy?', except he wasn't real mad. I told him I was flying the car like a spaceship. He said he used to do that when he was a boy, except he pretended they were boats. I couldn't picture him as a boy because he had gray stubble on his chin and creases around his eyes, like he'd started out old and had never gotten a chance to play.

  "Then he said the car was an antique, plus there were a lot of ways to get hurt playing around all this glass and metal and then their insurance would go all to hell. He said we'd both get in trouble if I hurt myself. I was afraid to look at him, and the gasoline made my eyes sting.

  "He asked if my mother knew I was playing out back here. I told him my mother never knew where I was, unless I was tucked into bed. Then he got a strange look on his face, like he'd just thought of a secret of his own. His voice got kind of quiet, and he said he wouldn't tell anybody if I wouldn't. Then he asked if he could play spaceship with me."

  Sally hugged Angel Baby to her bosom, that flat chest inside her cotton top where mysterious little bumps had started to swell over the long hot weeks of summer.

  "Is this a secret?" she whispered.

  "No, the garage man knows it, so it's not a secret. I was scared to tell him I didn't want to play with him, that what I really wanted to do was run into the woods, where there were shadows. So I told him okay. He stood up and looked around, still wiping his hands, and licked the corners of his mouth, sort of like a dog does when you feed it peanut butter. Then he bent down and said, in a real low scary voice, 'Move over and I'll drive. You can be the captain.' So I did, and as soon as he got in, the whole car smelled like gasoline."

  I was surprised at myself for telling so much. I guess I had kept my stories inside so long that they had built up and spilled over, like the bathtub did when I filled it full so I could pretend to be a deep-sea diver. Besides, you were supposed to share secrets with the person you had to love. Sally nodded, her pigtails bobbing, wanting me to go on with the story.

  "His eyes kept looking around the junkyard, especially at the row of trees that stood between us and the apartment buildings. Then he said, 'Where we going, Captain?' I'd never played with a grownup before, so I wasn’t sure if he knew how to pretend for real. Plus I didn't feel right giving orders to a grownup. So I just said, 'Mars,' and he acted like he was driving while he scooted over toward me. I checked the round dials behind the steering wheel to make sure we were in the right orbit. He dropped the rag in his lap and reached over and rubbed my hair. 'Aye-aye, Captain,' he said, and he laughed, but it was kind of wheezy, like he couldn't breathe or something.

  "Then his hand fell down to my shoulder and he was rubbing it. He took his other hand off the steering wheel and put it on the rag. He said the Martians might see us so we better slide down in the seat until we landed. Then he kind of leaned over on top of me. I told him we might wreck if he didn't watch where we were going, that we might run into an asteroid or something, or the Martians might send out fighter rockets. But he was breathing real funny and he pressed his lap against me. I felt the ball of the rag, and under that, something kind of hard, like he had a wrench in his pocket.

  "Then he said something that didn't seem to have anything to do with the Mars mission. He said, 'We keep having girls. I've always wanted a son,' and for a second, I thought he meant the sun in the sky, but that was nowhere near Mars. And he kept on breathing through his nose and I was afraid he was going to die, and he moved his hand from my shoulder to my leg. His other hand was on the rag, he was rubbing the wrench in his pocket against me, and he started moaning and I thought he was pretending to crash land. And I said, 'Back off the thrusters and we'll pull through. It's our only hope.'"

  Sally was looking at me like I was a hero, her blue eyes wide. Maybe she thought I was a brave captain, still able to give commands even while we were crashing. I liked the way she was looking at me.

  "And he kept moaning and rubbing against me and suddenly his body got all stiff and he squeezed my leg real hard. I thought he was pretending to be scared about crashing and doing it so well that I was afraid he was having a heart attack. His face was all clenched up and his eyes were shut. Maybe he was so good at pretending that he could really see our rocket plowing into the red surface of Mars. Except he wasn't making the crashing sounds in his mouth the way you're supposed to.

  "I told him, 'We survived the landing, we better get out our rayguns in case the Martians saw us,' and I was going to tell him that we better leave the ship in case it caught on fire. Because suddenly I wanted out of the car in real life because of the way he was looking at me. He was looking at me like I was the Martian. His eyes were tiny wet lines and his eyebrows were crunched down and he grabbed my arm and squeezed it, harder than he'd squeezed my leg."

  "Did he hurt you?" Sally asked, and at that moment I felt I could tell her a hundred stories, secret or not, lies or the truth. Because she was listening.

  "I didn't feel it too much because I was so scared. But he put his face close to mine and the gasoline fumes made me dizzy. For the first time, I noticed his teeth were sharp and yellow. Then he said, 'If you tell anybody, I'll come and get you and make you sorry.' He must have been afraid that he'd get in trouble for letting me play in the junkyard. Then he told me never to come back. He slid out of the car on the driver's side and looked around one more time. Then he held the door open so I could get out.

  "He grabbed my arm again and pulled me into the sunshine, then said, right in my ear, so that his breath sprayed on my skin, 'I mean it. I'll come get you, and I won't be playing make-believe.' I was looking at his greasy black boots, but he grabbed my chin and tilted my head up. I looked into his eyes and I could have sworn there were things moving around in them, mean things. And there was something I'd almost forgot about until yesterday, when you were telling me about the things between people's legs."

  "But that was one of the secrets I was going to tell," Sally whined. The sun had gotten higher in the sky and came through the roof, making her red hair shine like copper fire.

  "You can still tell me. I remember that I looked at his pockets and they were empty. I don't know what he did with the wrench. I was afraid he might hit me with it. But he just stood there holding me and grinding his teeth.

  "Then he let go and I ran into the woods and looked back at him. He was staring at me, wiping his hands on the rag. The spaceship was just an old black car again, rusty around the edges, and he was just an oily old man in dirty clothes. Then somebody called him from around the front of the garage. He shook his fist at me and I slipped into the trees. That's the last time I played over there."

  "Does the ma
n still work there?" Sally asked, maybe wanting to see what he looked like.

  "I haven't seen him at the garage lately. But the people who work there don't seem to stay very long. I guess they get tired of the gasoline smell or something. But I'm still scared to play in the cars. That's why I come in through the back of the fence to get here, so they won't see me from the garage."

  "This is a secret place, all right. It looks just like a big bunch of weeds from the outside. So, were you scared about that man?"

  "I don't know. Sometimes I dream that he's coming to get me, that he's in my bedroom. He's got on his greasy clothes and he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wrench and he tightens it around my arm and I can't get away and he's turning the wrench and my arm turns around and around and he keeps rubbing my hair and he smells like gasoline and he's got on a spaceman helmet and then he leans over on me and I can't breathe and I wake up and I'm kicking my legs against the blankets and it's morning. Then I go to the window and look at the Ford to make sure it hasn't blasted off in the night."

  "That sounds like a scary dream."

  "Dreams aren't scary. They're just dreams. That's not as bad as him really coming after me."

  "Grownups are strange. I don't know if I want to be in love like grownups after all."

  "But you said we were in love. And you have to tell me the secrets. You promised."

  "You mean you still want to be in love? It's already been almost a whole day."

  I was confused. "I thought you said love was forever."

  "I didn't cross my heart and hope to die."

  She saw the pain in my eyes. It didn't seem to bother her. Her blue eyes were as cold as the garage man's had been. Now that I think about it, she probably smiled. Or maybe I’m remembering wrong, or lying again, or one of my headmates has taken over the keyboard.

  "But it's okay, we can still play," she said, seeing the fallen look on my face. Did I still have to love her because I'd crossed my heart, even if she didn't love me?

  "I'll tell you some secrets, then," she said. "Here's the best thing about love: You can still pretend like we're in love, the way grownups pretend."