Truth and Lies (13 page)

I said that on Tuesday evening when somehow Robbie Ducharme had ended up getting himself kicked to death in the park, I was supposed to be doing my homework. But I couldn't study. I couldn't make myself concentrate on history and math. I had been thinking about Jen. Jen who was everything I wasn't—smart, liked by all of her teachers, popular, on her way, had her pick of universities, parents well off. Jen, who was also everything I wanted. Beautiful too, with her long blond hair and her green eyes and her slim sleek body. Jen, who for some reason that I had never understood,
had actually liked me. For a while there, she had maybe more than liked me.

Maybe.

How had that word crept into my thinking? It used to be that I had no question in my mind about it. Jen had liked me. She had even loved me for a while. Jen had let me kiss her and she had kissed me back. Jen came looking for me every day at school. She used to come over to my house and sit on my porch and complain about her parents. Or give me grief for not studying hard enough. She used to tell me, “You can do anything. Tell me why you
can't
do anything you put your mind to.” And then Jen had met Patrick.

But I didn't say all of that to Detective Jones and the video camera. I didn't say
any
of it. Instead I said, “There's this girl I know.” Correction. “
Used
to know,” I said. “Jen Hayes.”

Riel nodded. He knew her too.

“I went out that night to—” To what? What should I say? I went out that night to spy on her? Jeez, what would Detective Jones think?
You see, detective, I wasn't stomping Robbie Ducharme in the park. I have an alibi. I was following my former girlfriend
. That's what it would sound like. “I … ”

Detective Jones was watching me intently.

“I knew she was going to meet someone that night. And I wanted to talk to her. And I can't call her house because her mother always answers the phone, so I … ” I sounded pathetic. Worse than pathetic. I practically
sounded like a stalker. “I wanted to see if I could talk to her.”

Detective Jones didn't say anything. I glanced at Riel. He nodded, encouraging me to continue.

“I used to go out with her,” I said. “And I just wanted to talk to her.” I told the story carefully, not wanting to come across like a complete loser, but wanting to make sure they believed me because, right now, they didn't. Neither of them did. So I told them that I'd just wanted to talk to her, that was all. I told them that because of that, I had walked all the way down to the South Central Postal Station on Eastern Avenue. I said that I had taken care to get there before midnight—I had arrived at a quarter to—so there'd be no chance that I'd miss her. The parking lot was deserted. I didn't want to hang around in it—some security guard might see me and think I was planning to steal a car. So instead, I had stationed myself at a bus stop on the corner, where I had a good view of the parking lot, but where I wouldn't look suspicious. Then, I said, I had waited.

I said Jen had arrived a couple of minutes before midnight. I said that she had stood at one end of the parking lot for a few moments, looking around, watching for someone, and that I had ducked back into the shadows so that she wouldn't see me. I said that after that, I was afraid to peek out. I said that I kept thinking,
I'll look at her and her head will turn and she'll see me and that'll be it, she'll never speak to me again
—thinking, but not saying to Detective Jones, I'd never have another chance with her,
ever, she'd never go out with me again.

I said that I had hung back in the blackness, counting off the seconds, wondering which way her pretty face was turned, dying to know who she was waiting for and why. I said that when I had finally dared another peek, I had seen only the back of her. She was getting into a car. The car pulled out the far end of the parking lot. I said that in the darkness, I couldn't make out the color of the car. I couldn't tell whether the driver was a man or a woman.

“But you're sure Jen was in the car?” Detective Jones said.

Was I sure? I formed a picture in my mind—Jen's long hair, catching a ray of overhead light or a beam of moonlight, swaying across her narrow shoulders as she ducked down into the car. Her long, slender legs, tucking themselves up into the front of the car before she tugged the door shut. I focused on that picture as I said, “Yeah, I'm sure.”

“But she didn't see you?” Detective Jones said.

I shook my head.

“And the driver of the car didn't see you?”

“No. At least, I'm pretty sure.”

“Did anyone at all see you there, Mike?” Detective Jones said.

I thought for a moment. “No,” I said. And why would I lie about that? If anyone had seen me, I would have told the cops, right? Because if anyone had seen me, I'd have a surefire alibi. Airtight, as they always say on TV cop
shows. At least, that was one way to look at it. The other way, I realized, was that no witnesses added up to not much of an alibi. I glanced at Riel. He was staring down at the table in front of him.

All the way home in the car, I kept waiting for Riel to say something, but he didn't. He drove in silence, his eyes on the traffic ahead of him and around him.

The way Detective Jones had looked at me and questioned me had scared me. It was like he thought I really had done it, or at least that I had been involved. I was scared by Riel's silence too. What was he thinking? Did he believe the same thing the police did—that somehow I was mixed up in what had happened to Robbie Ducharme? I was afraid to ask him. Afraid that he would say, “Yeah, that's exactly what I think. You did it, didn't you, Mike?” Jeez, and then what? What would happen to me?

I went up to my room and stayed there. I knew I should probably call Sal and see how he was doing, but I couldn't make myself go downstairs to get the phone. Riel was down there. I could hear the music from his
stereo—old stuff, rock and roll, the kind of stuff they played on the oldies radio stations. That was all I'd heard from him ever since we'd got home. Just the music and, once in a while, footsteps from the dining room, where he sat to mark papers, to the kitchen, where the coffeemaker was. For a guy who was a major consumer of organic peanut butter and whole grain bread, Riel drank a lot of coffee.

I kept waiting for his footsteps on the stairs, kept thinking that sooner or later he was going to come into my room and stand there, filling the door frame, arms crossed over his chest, wanting to know more. Then, around midnight, the music stopped and I heard footsteps again at the bottom of the stairs, then halfway up, then at the top. I held my breath and ransacked my brain for some way to start, some way to explain everything that had happened. I had lied, there was no denying that. I had told so many lies that I felt like the kid in that story my mom had been so big on, the story about the boy who cried wolf. That was me. I had lied and lied and lied again. What could I possibly say now that would make Riel believe me?

It turned out it didn't matter.

Because when he got to the top of the stairs, Riel didn't take a right turn, which would have brought him to my room. Instead, without even hesitating, his feet went left, toward the front of the house, to his own room. I heard his door close quietly at the end of the hall. Call me a coward, but I was relieved. Relieved that
I didn't have to see that confused look in Riel's eyes, like someone had yanked a mask off my face and he was seeing me now for what I really was. But I was disappointed too. Disappointed that Riel didn't even want to talk to me, didn't want to ask me about it—jeez, didn't seem to want to waste his breath grilling me or yelling at me or lecturing me. Disappointed because he didn't seem to care. But then—and this was the killer part—why should he? How many times had I lied to him in the past few days? How many lies could a person expect to tell and still be entitled to the benefit of the doubt?

I went by Sal's house the next morning and rang the bell. No one answered. I stood on the porch for a few minutes. There were no sounds at all coming out of the house. Maybe no one was home. Maybe Sal and his family were finally getting some sleep. That would have been nice.

I walked to school alone. When I got there I kept to myself, which wasn't hard, not with Sal absent and Vin preoccupied with Cat. Just as I was leaving music class, Mr. Korchak asked me if I'd come in over lunch to reorganize the sheet music that the ninth graders were always messing up. He asked me nicely, like he knew he could count on me to take care of it for him. It made me feel a little better. Then I started to worry that Mr. Korchak was being so nice only because he hadn't heard
what was going on and that as soon as he did hear—
You know Mike McGill? The cops have been questioning him about Robbie Ducharme. They think he was involved
.—he'd stop being nice to me. Who wouldn't? Still, being alone in the music room over lunch would be better than being in the cafeteria, surrounded by people who were griping about what they thought were problems. You couldn't have a worse problem than the one I had—unless you were Robbie Ducharme.

The corridor leading to the music room was deserted. Trestles blocked off one side of it, where workmen were still laying tile and repairing the ceiling. They had been at it for weeks now. For a while the whole corridor was almost completely blocked, and the only way you could get to the music room was to make your way down a narrow pathway between huge sheets of clear plastic that hung from the ceiling to keep plaster and dust off kids and teachers.

I expected the music room to be as deserted as the hallway, so when I pushed open the door, the sound I heard caught me off guard. It was a gasp. A whole lungful rush of air into someone's lungs. The kind of gasp you hear some girl make in a horror movie when she finds herself face-to-face with Freddy Kruger or Dr. Chuckles. The sound came from Rebecca-with-the-red-hair. It came out of her at the exact second that she turned away from the music that was sitting on a stand in front of her and toward the door to see who was there. When she gasped, her eyes almost popped out of her head and
she jumped to her feet, clutching her instrument—tenor saxophone, the same instrument I played. She was so rattled that she knocked over her music stand, sending her sheet music sliding across the floor. It came to rest at my feet.

“What are you doing here?” she said. Said? Demanded, like the music room was her own private room, like, how dare I show up here!

I thought about saying some wiseass thing to her. Or maybe just ignoring her—she didn't have the right to ask me that. Maybe I would have too, if it wasn't for what I saw in her coppery eyes. You couldn't miss it, anymore than you could miss the wild way her eyes searched behind me, like she was looking for, maybe hoping for, even
praying
for, someone to come to her rescue. The force of that expression pushed me back a pace.

“Mr. Korchak asked me to clean up here over lunch,” I said. I said it quietly, the way you'd talk to a stray kitten you were trying to lure to a saucer of milk. I hardly even knew Rebecca, but there I was, working hard at conveying a simple message:
Don't be afraid
.

She kept her eyes on me as she removed the mouthpiece from her saxophone, tucked it into its case and then into her backpack. Her eyes were still on me while she put the sax back into its own case. It was as if she didn't dare look away from me because she was afraid I'd do something to her. But what? What did she think I was going to do? She didn't know me, so who was she to decide I was someone she had to be afraid of? Who
was she to pass judgment on me? And that's when I got mad.

I stepped farther into the room. All I was going to do was pick up the sheet music she had dropped. That's what I was here for, right? I was here because Mr. Korchak had trusted me to clean up the place.

Rebecca didn't just move back. She
leaped
back, like I was a foaming-at-the-mouth killer dog, and if she didn't move fast she was going to be a goner. I saw another flash of panic in her eyes when she realized that she'd just jumped farther from the door, farther from escape.

Jeez.

I snatched up the sheet music that she'd dropped and held it up over my head, like a white flag. Then, so she'd get the point, I backed away from the door. She fumbled for her backpack, still not taking her eyes off me, like she was afraid that if she did, I'd pick exactly that moment to attack. But
why?
That's what I didn't get. Why was she so afraid of me? Or was she this jumpy around everyone? She'd seen kids come out of the park. She'd said she couldn't identify them. She didn't even know what school they were from. She was new around here and didn't know many people. So, okay, I guess I could see she might be afraid that someone had seen her. Maybe she'd been standing under a streetlight. I bet that red hair of hers would have burned like flame in its beam. Okay, I could understand that. But I knew for a fact that I would never hurt her. I would never hurt anyone if I
could help it. So it bugged me that she was treating me like I was some kind of crazed killer.