The Secret to Lying (14 page)

JESS CALLED ON FRIDAY NIGHT
to coax me over to her dorm to “study.” Finals started the next week and everyone was frantic about preparing for exams. I could have used a break, but the prospect of spending another hour in a laundry room making out with Jess made me anxious. I figured I needed to be alone to get my head straightened out, so I told Jess that I had to meet with my chemistry group.

“It’s Friday,” Jess said. “You can study tomorrow.”

“I’m supposed to meet them tonight,” I lied. “One of my lab partners is going home for the weekend, and we need to trade results.”

Jess paused. “That bites,” she finally said.

When social hour arrived, I threw on my coat and headed out to walk the pond and sip some whiskey. I didn’t worry too much about Jess catching me. The campus looked empty. Because of finals, and because of the cold, almost no one else was outside. Pausing beneath the willow tree, I threw back a swig.

“Nice night,” someone said.

I scrambled to hide the flask. The person had been standing so still by the tree’s trunk that I hadn’t seen her. When she moved, I recognized her slender silhouette.

“You can see a lot of stars tonight,” the Ice Queen said.

I looked at the sky, then back at her, confused. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m walking,” she said.

“Alone?”

“Don’t sound so surprised.”

I glanced at my dorm, but I didn’t want to head in yet and it would have been awkward to walk away from her. “Can I walk with you?”

“You don’t have to. I can handle being alone.”

“I want to,” I said. Then I realized how desperate I probably sounded. “I mean, I was going to anyway. That’s why I came out here — to walk around the pond. Here.” I got out the flask. “Want some?”

Ellie took the flask and sniffed it warily.

“It’ll warm you up,” I added, trying to sound suave, only as soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. It was such a sleazy line. She probably thought I wanted to get her drunk so I could bust a move. “Forget it,” I muttered, reaching to take the flask back. “Don’t let me corrupt you.”

She glanced at me and drank a swig before passing it back.

We followed the path around the pond, walking in silence. After all the time I’d spent obsessing over her, you’d think I could have come up with something interesting to say. But nope.
Nada.
My brain stayed blank as snow. I threw down another swig, then Ellie took the flask and drank without wiping the top.

“Do you have many finals?” I asked, even though it was the dumbest, most cliché question in the book.

“Mostly papers,” she said. “And the physics exam on Monday.”

“Sorry. Lame question. I don’t really care about finals.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, good luck on the physics exam.”

Ellie grinned. “Thanks, I think.”

I clenched my jaw and glanced away. We were almost to the far end of the pond, near where Sage Fisher’s dad had thrown the picnic. I thought of how I’d tried to introduce myself to Ellie after that, and how she’d ignored me and said she wasn’t impressed. That’s how I always felt around her — unimpressive.

The silence between us thickened. In another few minutes we’d be by the dorms again, and then we’d go our separate ways and she’d always think I was this quiet nobody.

I took a drink. The whiskey made my head light and warm. “What was it like?” I asked, looking at the pond.

“What was what like?”

“The Mark Watson triathlon. You know, having him run out here, and swim the pond and punch out some guy.”

She smirked. “Embarrassing.”

“But he did it for you.”

“Trust me: that’s not the way to win a girl’s heart.” Ellie kicked a frozen dirt clod. It slid along some thin ice near the edge of the pond, then plunked into the open water in the middle.

“Did you like him?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Mark Watson.”

“We only went out for two weeks before he got expelled,” she said. “I didn’t get to know him very well, but he was funny. He made me feel special.”

I pictured Mark Watson — tall, athletic, golden-haired — swimming madly across the pond toward Ellie. He could have run around the pond, but he didn’t.

“I’d swim it,” I said.

“What?”

“I’m just saying, it’s not like Mark Watson was that special. I’d swim the pond right now.”

“It’s frozen.”

“Just around the edges,” I said. “Dare me to go swimming?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Ellie looked at me, perplexed. “Because it’s too cold. No one would go swimming now.”

“I would.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m serious,” I said. “Cold water doesn’t bother me. I’m like a dolphin. I can lower my heart rate and control my breathing so it doesn’t feel cold.”

Ellie scoffed.

“I’ll prove it,” I said, throwing off my jacket. Goose bumps prickled my arms.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“You should try it.” I kicked off my shoes and socks. My bare feet snapped through the ice around the edge. “It feels good.”

“Quit joking.”

“I’m not joking. Dare me?”

“No.” Ellie started to walk away. Her legs seemed fragile and childish in her heavy winter boots.

“Come on, dare me.”

She didn’t stop. I had to do something to get her attention — something no one else would do — so I pulled off my shirt and jumped in.

Lightning flashes filled my head as soon as I hit the water. All I could manage was to dunk myself once and clamber out. My skin stung from the cold as I hopped around in my wet jeans to shake the water off.

“Hey!” I called, but Ellie kept walking.

I tried shouting her name, only my teeth were chattering too much. She didn’t even look back to see if I was okay. I couldn’t believe she was still ignoring me.

My jaw shivered uncontrollably and my hands weren’t working very well as I struggled to pull on my socks and shoes. Then my chest and arms started to shake. The shivers grew worse, becoming whole-body convulsions.

By the time I managed to get my second shoe on, the convulsions passed, leaving me pleasantly tired. I didn’t feel cold anymore. Sitting shirtless on the snow, I gazed across the pond. Ellie had gone inside, and I couldn’t see anyone else out. Not a single person. A few snowflakes glistened in the orange lights of the dorms, while stars shimmered in the crisp black sky.

The dorms looked far away and flat, like a painting of a campus. I wanted to be part of it — to be inside among the people, laughing in the warm light — but it seemed too distant and unreal.

After a while, my eyelids grew heavy. I lay on my coat and looked at the stars, thinking about how they were so far away they could have vanished a thousand years before their light ever reached us.

Later, someone shined a light in my eyes. I squinted into the brightness. Two figures knelt beside me where the Thief had been.

At first, I thought it was Nick and Kiana. They both wore dark uniforms, and their faces looked pale. The woman had her hand on my neck. “Careful not to jolt him,” she said.

One of them kept shining a flashlight in my face. I tried to tell him to quit it and let me sleep, but I couldn’t get my jaw to move. My mouth tasted terrible — stale whiskey and stomach acid. Walkie-talkies beeped, filling the silence with staticky chatter while the two figures slid me onto a stretcher and placed something heavy on my chest.

The sting of it woke me up.

Whatever they’d put on me burned like crazy. I pushed it away, but they strapped me down and put it on me again. My skin felt as if it were blistering off my body.

“Relax,” the woman said. “The blanket’s not hot. It’s barely even warm.”

My eyes focused on her uniform, illuminated by the red and blue flash of ambulance lights. It sounded as if a crowd of people had gathered nearby, but I couldn’t look because my head was fixed into a foam-rubber block.

They lifted me and carried me across the field toward the square, where the ambulance waited. I was like a baby — all swaddled up and ready to be carted somewhere. It was beyond embarrassing.

At the hospital, the doctor said I had hypothermia. I tried to explain that I was just tired and needed to sleep, but they wouldn’t leave me alone. They put a mask over my mouth with a hose connected to this machine that made the air warm and humid. Then they drew some blood and stuck a hot IV into my veins, so it wasn’t just my skin that burned. Every joint in my body ached. After a while, the convulsions started again, causing my teeth to chatter uncontrollably.

A nurse kept checking my temperature and fiddling with the dials on the blanket and hot-air thingy. Every time it stopped burning, she’d turn it up a notch and the hurt would come back.

Apparently, they had to be careful that I didn’t warm too quickly. During one of her visits, the nurse told me this story about these sailors who’d been shipwrecked in the Arctic and were left floating in icy water for almost forty minutes before a boat came and rescued them. Everyone thought it was a miracle that they were alive. Then the captain had them go down to the hold to drink some hot coffee so they could warm up, and ten minutes later all the rescued sailors died — something to do with shock and a low core body temperature.

“The only thing worse than hypothermia and caffeine is hypothermia and alcohol.” The nurse smirked at me, and I knew I was busted.

My parents arrived at the hospital a little while later. Moms hovered about my bed, tucking the blanket in and feeling my forehead with the back of her hand, as if she had some supermom ability to tell my exact temperature by touch.

“My poor baby,” she said. “What were you thinking?”

She acted especially concerned when the doctor came to check on me. “Are you sure he’s going to be okay?” she asked for the third or fourth time.

The doctor, a thirtysomething, surprisingly tall man, stifled a yawn. “Hypothermia is very treatable.”

“But what if no one had found him?”

“Things might have been more difficult then,” the doctor said. “However, the human body can come back from extreme cold, given proper treatment. There’ve even been cases where hypothermia victims were thought DOA, only to regain consciousness in the morgue. No one’s dead until they’re warm and dead.” He patted my shoulder, as if this thought should comfort me.

“Doctor, thank you for saving my boy,” Moms said.

The doctor cleared his throat and fidgeted with his clipboard. Dad stood off to the side, hands in his pockets, jangling change.

I lay between them, wishing this whole ridiculous exchange would take place without me. Moms was acting like a character in a soap opera, but I knew if I questioned her about it, she’d roll her eyes and say I wouldn’t know politeness if it bit me.

The doctor checked his beeper. “I’m afraid there’s another patient I have to see.” He patted my shoulder again. “The next time you want to swim, son, wait for summer. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, even though his condescending manner pissed me off.

Moms started in on me again after that. “Did you hear what the doctor said? You could have frozen to death. Honestly, James, what were you thinking? If your girlfriend hadn’t called security . . .”

“Who?”

“The girl that found you.” Moms looked to my dad for help remembering her name. “Ella? Ellen?”

“Ellie,” I said. “And she’s not my girlfriend.”

“She’s very nice,” Moms replied, glancing from me to my dad. “Wasn’t she nice?”

“Very nice,” Dad said.

I was too tired to tell them how wrong they were.

The nurses didn’t waste any time shooing me out once I got back to a normal temperature. It was two in the morning, but they didn’t seem to care. To them, I guess it was just another workday. The halls bustled with people, and the hospital lights were as bright as ever.

I had to wear some flimsy mint-green hospital scrubs home since my pants were wet and the paramedics hadn’t thought to grab the jacket or T-shirt I’d left by the pond. My dad signed the discharge papers while Moms busied herself talking with Hassert in the waiting room — just my luck that he’d been on duty. I guess he’d accompanied my parents to the hospital. He nodded at something Moms said, looking very serious.