Here We Lie. Paula DeBoard Treick

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СКАЧАТЬ a foot. She was in bed, her body a slight hump beneath the covers. Maybe she’d skipped out on ice cream and come back early, exhausted by her parents’ constant nagging.

      Then she moaned, a ragged and gasping sound that made me look closer. Her head was turned to one side, hair plastered against her face and half-covering her mouth. Across her pillowcase was a trail of vomit.

      Fuck. Not now.

      “Ariana?” I asked, then repeated her name louder. When she didn’t respond, I dropped to my knees, shaking her shoulder. “Are you okay? Should I call someone?”

      Her head flopped backward, mouth open. Flakes of white powder stuck to the corner of her mouth.

      “Did you take something?”

      I had to put my ear almost to her face, wincing from the stench of her breath, to understand what she was saying. Your pulse. Yourpilse. Your pills.

      My pills.

      * * *

      Later I told the paramedics about the generic bottle of ibuprofen I kept in my desk drawer, taking a pill here and there for a headache. There had been a hundred pills initially, and I wasn’t sure how many had been there earlier that night. Seventy? Eighty? Ariana had taken whatever was left, as evidenced by the empty bottle on her nightstand. I tried to imagine her swallowing the pills, one by one or two by two, washing them down with water from her Peanuts mug, the one that read The Doctor Is In, 5 cents.

      After the lecture, Ariana had told her parents that she needed to study, and they’d gone out for dinner without her. She’d already taken the first pills by the time I met Joe at Slice of Heaven, and she’d finished them by the time we’d begun our game of darts at Moe’s, when her parents were having ice cream sundaes without her. She must have been unconscious by the time Joe and I kissed; she’d vomited later, when Joe and I were in his car, when I was being reinvented by his touch, inch by inch. And I’d found her in time, so lucky, everyone noted. Only I wasn’t sure if Ariana meant for me to find her earlier, or hoped I would only find her after it was too late.

      Viv, our resident advisor, kicked into supervisory mode and took charge of the situation—which meant contacting Ariana’s parents and taking care of me. “You cannot blame yourself for this,” she said, taking hold of my shocked shoulders. Until that point, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was responsible. Then guilt kicked in hard: I’d been planning a night of reckless abandon, and Ariana had been trying to end it all.

      Worse, I felt just as bad for myself, for the lost possibilities of that night. By the time I’d alerted Viv and the paramedics had arrived, twenty minutes had passed, maybe more. When I finally wormed my way through the cluster of girls and their parents in the hallway to look down into the parking lot below, Joe’s car was gone.

      Lauren

      Although I hadn’t mentioned it once, somehow everyone at Keale knew my father was a senator. It had started out with a little joke: my resident advisor, Katy, mentioned during our first floor meeting that we all had to follow the rules—whether our fathers were elected officials or not. She said this with a wink in my direction, and I heard the general buzz around me. Who? And he’s an actual senator? Later that week, a mousy blonde girl sat next to me in the Commons and over eggs on toast mentioned that her grandfather had been an ambassador to Ghana, as if that made us related somehow, like second cousins.

      “Do you have like, diplomatic immunity or something?” another girl at the table asked.

      “No,” I assured her, to general laughter.

      Later I thought about it and realized that a more accurate answer would have been yes.

      My parents had more or less ignored me since I left for Keale, but they came for Parents’ Weekend, bustling into my dorm room with a towering gift basket from Harry & David, as if I were a client and not a daughter. It didn’t occur to me until I was giving them an abbreviated tour of campus that this was an opportunity to see and be seen. For Dad, it was an unpaid advertisement, a chance to shake hands and trade college stories with other dads, homing in on the ones from Connecticut, his constituents. More than once when we were walking across campus, I was aware of camera flashes, of people catching the three of us in motion—Mom with an arm linked through Dad’s, each of us holding bags from the Keale College bookstore, full of the sweatshirts and visors and coffee mugs that proclaimed them the proud parents of a Keale College student.

      I was sure we would show up in future brochures advertising the college, with some kind of pretentious caption: Senator Mabrey, His Wife, Elizabeth Holmes-Mabrey, and Their Daughter Lauren Enjoy Family Time during a Visit to the Fine Arts Auditorium. It wasn’t so much a visit as it was a campaign stop.

      We went into town for pizza, but the line at Slice of Heaven was out the door.

      “We could bring it back to my dorm,” I suggested. “There’s a little kitchen down the hall.”

      “It’ll be like old times, Liz,” Dad said, draping his arms around Mom’s shoulders. She smiled up at him, and I wondered how much of this was genuine, and how much was for show, another chance to impress Scofield’s voting public. Photographic evidence of my parents in their twenties did exist, but I’d never seen snapshots of them eating pizza out of a cardboard box, sitting cross-legged on the floor. In the photos I remembered, they were at important dinners, separated by centerpieces and goblets and place settings with three different forks, Dad in a suit, Mom’s hair in a complicated updo held together by a million bobby pins.

      I recognized a few other people in the pizzeria, including Cindy Hardwick, a girl from my dorm. We’d only exchanged the occasional hello as we passed in the hall, but she bounded over to shake Dad’s hand and then, for good measure, Mom’s. She lingered for longer than necessary, beaming up at them. “You must be proud. Lauren is so talented,” she said. I tried to steer her away with an arm on her elbow, but it was too late. “I love her work.”

      Worse than the explanations that I would have to provide were the subtle frowns on my parents’ faces, their hesitant glances between Cindy and me, as if to confirm she was in fact referring to their daughter.

      “Lauren hasn’t told us much about her classes, actually,” Mom said, the question mark buried in her words.

      “It was going to be a surprise,” I said.

      Cindy’s perky face fell, her cheeks literally deflating. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

      Mom touched her reassuringly on the shoulder. “You couldn’t have known. Lauren’s so modest. Why don’t you tell us, honey, so we can all be on the same page?”

      Dad’s smile was nervous, his focus drifting around the room. This conversation wasn’t part of the scheduled event, not even a bullet point on his agenda.

      “I’m putting together a photography portfolio for one of my classes,” I said.

      “It’s so brilliant,” Cindy gushed. “She takes the best pictures—she really does. I can barely hold a camera steady...”

      One of the pizzeria employees called a number, and Dad stepped forward to collect our order.

      “Maybe you can show us some of those photos before we head back,” Mom suggested. “It was wonderful to meet you, Cindy.”

      We gathered plates and napkins and little packets СКАЧАТЬ