Even When You Lie to Me (5 page)

I found my dad in the basement later that afternoon. He was hitting his computer monitor and cursing softly.

“Sounds like it’s going well,” I said.

“Hey,” he said. “Can you get me that hammer over there, sweetheart? I need to fix something.”

“Let me look before you break it,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. He got up and went to his worktable, which bristled with scraps of unfinished projects. “How was school?”

“Fine, I guess,” I said. “How do you manage to screw the website up so much in so little time?”

“Practice,” he said. “Tell me about your classes.”

“Not much to say. Boring as ever.”

“I’m here with Frida all day and no one else to talk to. Give me something.”

“You’re not missing much. We did yoga for gym class and learned how to relax our groins. Oh, and we have a new teacher.”

“A new teacher who’s instructing you to relax your groins? Do I need to get in touch with someone about this?”

I laughed. The basement door creaked open and Frida came bounding down. My mother was home.

I turned toward my dad. “Mrs. Deloit was teaching her first yoga class. Well, I say teaching. She fell asleep.”

“Yoga?” my mother said as she came down the stairs, flushed from the sun. She must have come back from a workout. She flicked on the overhead light, and my dad and I both winced. “I don’t know how you can work down here when it’s so dark,” she said. She’d scraped her hair back into a clean glossy knot, but she was wearing a baggy T-shirt, thin and corroded with age, that had been my dad’s. “That must have been fun. Remember when we took that class together, sweetheart?” Her voice was high and constricted. She knew I was still mad at her.

My dad and I both watched her for a second; she looked bright and out of place. Then I said, “Yeah, vaguely, I think,” and returned to the computer screen.

My dad went to give her a kiss. I knew he would; he always did.

“So what are you guys doing down here?” my mother asked. “I didn’t realize you still needed help, Paul.”

“Charlie’s just saving me from myself,” he said.

“This whole operation is going to fall apart without me,” I said.

I could hear them talking to each other behind my back, but I didn’t move. I didn’t want to know what they were saying.

“So what else happened today, Charlie?” my mother said eventually.

“Got an
extracurricular,
like you wanted.”

“Did you? That’s wonderful.”

I turned around again. “It doesn’t involve marching in lockstep, so that’s something.”

“I’m glad to hear it. So what will you be doing?”

“Our new teacher’s restarting the newspaper.”

“The newspaper!” she said. “You’ve always wanted to work on the paper.”

She sounded so pleased that for a moment my resolve crumbled. I looked down shyly. “Yeah, it seems like it might be fun.”

“I’m really happy for you, honey,” she said. “That will be a great fit.”

“Thanks,” I said, still looking down. I tried to hide my smile.

She paused. I saw her grab my dad’s hand. “I know I shouldn’t say I told you so, but do you think you would have joined if I hadn’t made you?”

My mouth tightened. “Maybe not,” I said. “Um, I should do some homework before dinner. Dad, you want to take over here?”

“Sure,” he said, and let go of my mother.

She watched me as I passed her, but she still let me go upstairs.

Half an hour later my dad knocked on my door. “I brought a peace offering,” he said, and let Frida inside. She was carrying a package of Oreos in her teeth. “I wanted to talk to you right after you came upstairs, but it took this long to get her not to chew it.”

“So this is how you spend your time while we’re gone all day,” I said. Frida offered me the Oreos with a faint wag of her tail.

“Have to occupy the hours somehow.” He sat down on my desk chair. “Your mom is just looking out for you, kid.”

“And she had to brag about it?”

“You know she didn’t mean it like that.”

I snorted. “How
did
she mean it? And why did she get you in here instead of coming to talk to me herself?”

“You’re so upbeat and charming, I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t.”

I ignored him. “And how did she mean it when she stopped me working for you?”

“That wasn’t a punishment, you doofus. We—as in
both
of us—just realized it wasn’t fair to keep you locked in the basement, and you are so ridiculously stubborn that the only way to do that was to kick you out.”

I looked at him. “I like helping you.”

“I like it too,” he said. “But if I were a real employer, I’d be prosecuted for breaking about three hundred child labor laws.”

I hefted the Oreos. “This is enough payment for me.”

“Go talk to her,” he said. “Please. For me.”

I sighed. “Okay.”

“Tonight,” he said. “Not when you get around to it.”

“All right, all right, I promise.”

He paused. “The other thing I wanted to tell you, which I must stress is contingent on you being less of a pain in the ass in the future, is that I’m going to let you start using my car to get to school. I know it’ll be difficult to stay late if you can’t get the bus.”

“Really?” I said. I sat up. “Are you sure? I’ll pay for gas with the pathetic wages you’ve given me.”

“I know you will. And half the insurance. And any required maintenance.”

“Yes, all of that, and I’ll even leave you some music so you can see what uncool teenagers are listening to.”

“That’s very generous, but you know how I feel about post-Beatles music.”

“You’re old,” I said.

“I just learned many—”

“Many.”

“—many years ago that anything not available on LP wasn’t worth bothering with,” he said. “Just talk to your mom for me, okay? You don’t realize how much of an effect you have on her.”

“Okay,” I said. I offered him a cookie and he crunched it loudly in the silence. Frida looked at him with wet, pleading eyes. “How’s it going with work now that I’ve averted disaster?”

“Not bad, actually. I just got commissioned to make a sculpture for Holmesdale Park.”

“The one on the other side of town?”

“Yep.”

“Wow, good job. Can I offer some input?”

“No.”

About fifteen students showed up to the first meeting of
Truth Bomb:
a mix of kids I recognized and some people I’d never seen before. The only ones I really knew were a few students from my literature class: Asha, Dev, and Frank. I exchanged smiles with them but sat at the other edge of Mr. Drummond’s classroom, since an underclassman was sitting in my regular chair.

Mr. Drummond sat in his usual spot on the front of his desk. “Thanks for showing up, everyone, even if you were bribed to do so,” he said. “I hope at least one of you understands newspaper layouts. First of all I want to find out if you have any thoughts about what the newspaper should be, or if you’ve got any ideas for features or editorials. Keeping in mind, of course, that we cannot endorse anarchy or
libertarianism.
Or mayonnaise, which is the devil’s condiment.”

There was a silence. Eventually Mr. Drummond said, “Frank? I know you have some ideas.”

“Word search,” said Frank, and a few people chuckled.

“Well, obviously. We need to keep people like you occupied somehow,” Mr. Drummond said in a way that I realized was deliberate. He’d used Frank to warm us up. “Anyone else?”

“How about a profile of new teachers?” said a guy with a cloud of curly red hair that crackled out like it was full of static.

“Fine, Scott, before you ask again, I wear boxers. Happy now?” The kid laughed and held up his hands as if he couldn’t help his curiosity. Mr. Drummond turned and wrote on the board:
Find out Drummond’s favorite baked good; use for bribes.
“Let’s also think of less obvious ideas. What have you wanted to see in a school newspaper but haven’t?”

“Why so many bad teachers have tenure,” said a short girl with glasses.

“Generally I’d like to stay away from topics that will get me blackballed from the teachers’ lounge, but it’s a good subject,” said Mr. Drummond. “We’ll see what we can do with it.” He wrote
Tenure jockeys—the only thing they ride out is the clock.
“No one tweet that.”

Dev said, “What about the statistics for who gets into advanced placement classes? Like the number of nonwhite students in them versus white students.”

“Yes, good,” Mr. Drummond said. “You might want to look into socioeconomic class as well. I have an article about it somewhere around here.”

“Gender too,” Asha said.

Mr. Drummond inclined his head toward Dev. “Gender too,” he said.

Dev sighed as if he and Asha had argued about this before. “Feminists,” he said.

Asha hit him. When she saw me watching them, she rolled her eyes toward Dev. Dev grinned at me.

Suddenly I felt out of my depth. They knew about things like that?
What
did they know? Who had taught them?

“That’ll be interesting,” Mr. Drummond said. He wrote
Advanced placement elaborate scam to fuel sales of graphing calculators?
“Anyone else?”

“What about government subsidies for school lunches? Pizza sauce being classed as a vegetable because of agricultural lobbies,” said a guy in a Weyland-Yutani T-shirt. I stared at him. Where had these people come from?

“Excellent,” Mr. Drummond said. On the board he wrote
Tomato sauce a vegetable, high-fructose corn syrup a fruit?

I was ashamed of staying silent, but fear made my tongue thick. I listened while a few other people made suggestions and Mr. Drummond wrote them out on the board.

“Okay,” he said finally. “I think we’ve got enough for a respectable issue. Now, who wants which story?”

There was a murmur, and the curly-haired kid said, “I thought we’d get to do our own ideas.”

“That would make sense and be fair,” Mr. Drummond said. “But I want you to stretch yourselves. So let’s go around and choose. Chuck?”

I started as if he’d shocked me. “Sorry, what?”

He smiled patiently. “Which story would you like? First choice.”

“Uh.” I frowned feverishly at the board. The letters all looked like runes. “The first one, I guess.”

“It’s éclairs,” he said as he wrote my name next to the story idea. “For future reference.”

“I’ll make a note of it,” I muttered.