Dreamers Often Lie (16 page)

“If you want to.” Rob picked up his own mug. “But you’re a lot more interesting.”

“Me? Are you serious?”

“Yeah.” He nodded at me, frowning and smiling at the same time. “I have this theory that there are about ten basic people templates. And everywhere you go, you just meet slight variations on these templates. I mean, every place I’ve lived, every school I’ve been to . . . it’s the same models, over and over. You can tell right away. But you’re not—I don’t know. I’m not sure you fit any of the templates.”

“Maybe I’m damaged goods. Like factory seconds or something.”

“Or maybe you’re a limited edition.” Now only his smile was left. “Or maybe my whole theory’s BS.”

I spun the spoon in my coffee again. “I think most of us try to fit in categories. You know, so we’ll feel like we belong somewhere. But we really
don’t
fit. We’re really meant to be these totally weird, complicated, different-from-anybody-else things. That’s part of why I love acting. I don’t have to just be me, in my little category. I get to dye my hair every color and wear insane clothes and say things I’d never normally say. I get to be a whole bunch of weird, complicated things.”

“See?” Rob was smiling wider. “Interesting.”

My cheeks prickled.
Change the subject.
“I know. Tell me your favorite movie. No, wait. Tell me what movie you’ve seen the most times. And you have to be honest.”

“Hmm . . .” He gazed into the distance. “Probably
Labyrinth.
I watched that movie pretty much every day between the ages of six and ten.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” He grinned. “I still have confusing feelings for David Bowie.”

I laughed.

“What about you?” he asked.

“Me? I’m not sure.”

“Fast and Furious Two: 2 Fast 2 Furious,”
Rob suggested.

I laughed again. “Nope. I’ve seen
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
a lot. And there was the summer I got obsessed with Emma Thompson and watched
Much Ado About Nothing
and
Sense and Sensibility
about a hundred times. Wait . . . I know what it has to be.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
All of elementary and middle school, that was my go-to movie. It’s probably the reason I skipped school for the very first time.”

Rob shook his head in mock reprobation. “Hollywood and its propaganda. Corrupting the youth.”

“I thought it would be this wild adventure. We’d be dancing through museums, eating in fancy restaurants. But actually we just hid in Nikki’s basement and ate stale Doritos.”

“Did you get caught?”

“Of course. We got a week of detention, all of our parents got called, it was this whole big mess. Well—Nikki’s mom didn’t care. I don’t think Tom’s parents even noticed. But
my
parents . . .” I snorted. “I thought my dad was actually going to crack a tooth, he was clenching his jaw so hard.”

“He’s really strict?”

“He’s dead.”

The words flew out before I could stop them. Like a sneeze.

I expected Rob to look startled. But he didn’t flinch. His eyes widened very slightly, and his eyebrows went up, but he kept looking straight at me.

“What happened?” he asked.

“A car accident. It was winter, two years ago.” I stopped. “You know what’s weird? I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody the whole story before. Everybody I know already knows. Or they think they can’t ask. So it’s like—like I don’t have anything rehearsed.” I let out what was supposed to be a laugh, but it didn’t quite sound like one. “I almost don’t know what to say.”

Rob waited for a second. “If you don’t want to talk about it—”

“No,” I broke in. “No. I can. I . . .”
Just talk. You’re Jaye Stuart, and you’re sitting in the back of a coffee shop, across from a guy who’s waiting for you to speak again. You don’t have to be anything else.
I took a long breath. “Like I said, it was winter. We’d been having blizzards, ice storms. The roads were really bad. Afterward, they told us—I mean, the police said—they skidded out of their lane, clipped another car, and slid off the highway into a tree.”

“They?” Rob repeated. “Was he with your mother?”

I shook my head. “The Caplans. Pierce and his father.”

“Oh,” said Rob quietly. “Wow.”

“They were both all right. I guess Patrick had a broken rib and some cuts on his face. He was driving. Pierce was in the backseat, and he was fine. My dad had a fractured skull, kind of like . . .” I pointed briskly to my head. “But he had a serious hemorrhage, and there wasn’t much they could do. He just never woke up.”

I stared down at the edge of the tabletop.

I wondered what my face was doing. I wondered what Rob saw when he looked at me. I didn’t have a mask ready for this. I felt cold, and uncovered, like I’d just stepped outside without a jacket on.

Rob didn’t speak for a moment. Then, under the table, I felt his foot bump against mine. I didn’t move away. Neither did he.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yeah.” I looked up again. “Me too.”

“So . . . is that why you haven’t been talking to Pierce for the last two years?”

“Sort of. Maybe.” I shrugged one shoulder. “It was starting to happen before the accident, and afterward—I don’t know. It was like the door had already shut, and now it was locked.”

Rob nodded. For a while, we both kept quiet. But it wasn’t the kind of uncomfortable quiet that feels like
somebody has forgotten a line, and the pressure starts to build, and everything’s messed up and awkward. It was more like a deep breath.

“What was your father like?” Rob asked, after the minute had passed.

“Um . . . god.” I leaned my head on my hand. “I don’t know what . . .”

“Sorry—I shouldn’t have asked. I’m being an ass.”

“No,” I said quickly. “You’re not at all ass-like. I just—I don’t ever do this, either.”

“Describe him to asses?”

“Talk about him. With anybody.”

“Not even with your family?”

“No,” I said. “Especially not them.” I picked up a sugar packet from the center of the table. “My dad was . . . he was always moving.” I flipped the packet between my fingers, turning it around and around. “He was a runner. He ran marathons. He coached the high school track and cross-country teams. He was out on the streets before dawn every single morning, running for miles. Even when he sat on the couch, he’d be moving. Writing lists, jiggling his feet, flipping through paperwork. He could never sit still long enough to read a book or watch a whole movie.” I gestured to myself with the sugar packet, giving a little laugh. “I guess I’m like that. In a fidgety way. In every other way, we were pretty much exact opposites.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh god. Everything. He hated my clothes. He hated my dyed hair. He
hated
my friends. He hated that I quit sports to have time for drama. He thought theater was weird and boring and pointless, because according to him, it didn’t make money, it didn’t teach you any real world skills, and it didn’t get you in better shape. He stopped coming to my shows. He stopped including me in everything. Toward the end, he practically stopped talking to me. Even when the rest of the family went away on trips, they didn’t bring me along.”

“That’s kind of messed up,” said Rob softly.

I shook my head, looking down at a constellation of spilled sugar crystals on the tabletop. “It was my fault. I’m the one who started to pull away. They just . . . They just let me.”

Someone behind the counter switched on the coffee grinder. Rob and I went still for another minute. I could feel his eyes on me the whole time.

“You know . . .” I began as the whirr of the machine faded. “You know how when someone dies, everybody just wants to remember the good things about them? Well,
everybody
knew my dad. And they all thought he was this great, likeable, wonderful guy. He and my mother were like the ideal couple. My sister adored him. Pierce
worshipped
him. When he died, it was like—like suddenly, as far as everybody could remember, he had been completely
perfect
. So, if he didn’t like
me
”—I shrugged again—“he
must have been right. And I was wrong.” I picked up my mug. The coffee had grown lukewarm, almost cold. “Oh my god. I really don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Please ask me to shut up now.”

Rob leaned on one elbow. I could practically feel the pull of his eyes. “I think it’s easier to be who you really are with someone who doesn’t think they already know everything about you.”

I looked straight back at him. For a breath, it felt like there was nothing between us. Not the table, not the air. I wanted to reach out and touch him.

I sat farther back in my chair instead.

“You know there are all kinds of rumors going around about you, right?” I made my voice a little cooler. “Like that you’ve moved so much because you’ve been expelled so many times. That you have some crazy criminal record.”

He laughed, waving a hand dismissively. “I’ve only been expelled four times.”

“Oh.
Only.
” I laughed too. “Why must teenagers exaggerate everything?”

Rob nodded at my cup. “Want another coffee?”

“Yes. But first I want to know about the expulsions.”

“Fine.” He leaned back again. “My dad gets transferred around a lot for work. Something in IT training or networking—I don’t really know what he does, so don’t ask.” He grinned. “Anyway, because we were always moving, I
was always the new kid. The
weird
new kid. I was this skinny little bookworm with long hair, and I always liked the wrong teams or talked the wrong way or whatever. At first I got picked on. Then I became a smartass, so I got picked on and beaten up. And then I got mean.” He spun the dregs of coffee in his cup. “I got expelled from my first middle school in Chicago because I broke a kid’s nose. But that was basically an accident.”

“Basically?”

“He knocked me down, and I was lying there, flat on my back, with him above me, so I swung at him with my American history textbook. I got expelled for the second time because I brought a knife to school—”

“Like, a butcher knife?”

“A little Swiss Army knife. This bigger kid said he was going to kill me, and I was a twelve-year-old moron, and I believed him. Expulsion number three . . .” Rob looked up. His face began to curve into a smile. “This was in Denver. I was fourteen. I stole a teacher’s phone—she was really mean, so I still don’t feel bad about this—and I sent a text to everyone on her contacts list.”

“What did it say?”

“It was something like, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’ve had intense physical feelings for you for a long time now. Please come over tonight so we can talk . . . or not talk. Your choice.’”

“Oh my god!”

Rob’s smile grew broader. “I heard about six of them showed up. Including a relative.”

I hooted with laughter.

“Expulsion number four wasn’t even really an expulsion,” Rob went on. “My parents took me out of the school before anything could officially happen.”

“What did you do that time?”

Rob hesitated. “This was in San Francisco, a couple of years ago,” he said, instead of answering the question. “I’d started hanging out with this group of guys who thought they were punks. They were into skateboarding. And tattoos. And vandalism. And drugs. And petty theft.”

“I know how well things went with you and skateboards . . .”

“Yeah, well, the other stuff went even better.” Looking almost sheepish, Rob set his forearm on the table. His hand stretched toward me, palm up.

For a second, I wondered if he was reaching for me. If I was meant to put my own hand in his. I remembered the texture of his skin, the rough-smooth of his palm, the long fingers raising my wrist to his lips—

Stop it.

Before I could make a total fool of myself, Rob shoved his sleeve up to his elbow. A skull cut in blurry blue ink grinned from the middle of his forearm.

“Alas, poor Yorick,” Hamlet’s voice whispered from somewhere close by. “I knew him, Horatio . . .”

I put both hands over my ears. Then I remembered where I was and who I was with, and pretended to be rearranging my hair. “Ouch.”

“Yeah, well, at least it’s not a nipple ring.” Rob pushed his sleeve back down. “Some of the other guys decided to tattoo
and
pierce themselves.”

I glanced over both shoulders. No Hamlet. I turned back to Rob, sitting up straighter. “Is that what you told your parents?”

He gave a dry smile. “Actually, they barely cared about the tattoo. They were a lot angrier about the whole breaking into the principal’s office, spray-painting his walls, and stealing a bunch of stuff part.”

“What did they do to you?”

“They pulled me out of school, had me do a ton of community service and take online classes . . .” His words slowed. “And then Dad found out he was transferring to Seattle. And Mom decided not to come with us.”

“So—what? She just stayed in San Francisco?”

Rob nodded. “She said she didn’t know how to deal with me anymore, and she thought my dad should take a more active role in my life, so . . . That was two years and three moves ago.” He met my eyes again. “I basically ended my parents’ marriage.” He gave another very small, very dry
smile. “That’s worse than getting expelled for a fourth time, right?”

“I’m sure it wasn’t just about you,” I said quietly. “I mean . . . there must have been stuff going on that you didn’t even know about.”

He tipped his head to one side. “I don’t know. They always try not to blame the kids, but . . . sometimes it’s the kids.”

A little cyclone started to spin in my stomach. I could see Dad running up the sidewalk, away from home, away from us, his gray T-shirt fading out in the half-light. “Maybe,” I said.

Rob pushed back his chair. “So. Now you know my whole history. Including some things I don’t usually talk about with anyone either.” He stood up and took my empty mug. “Another French roast?”

“Sure.” I started to smile back at him. “Wait. Am I keeping you here too long? What about the other classes you’ll miss?”

He shrugged, picking up his own mug. “I’d rather keep talking with you.”