I Don't Lie

By Maggie Jones, 14, US

Jaime

I see him at the bus stop out of the corner of my eye and just seeing him there makes me want to curl up like a poked potato bug. But I can't and I feel large and conspicuous when he looks at me. Talks to me.

He seems to like me and talks to me and wants to know things about me but the things I say are too quiet and uncertain next to his bouncing rattling words.

He asks questions that make no sense, that I can't answer. "Do you see the same colors I do?" He asks. "Do you like the taste of a snowflake or a raindrop better?"

I can't answer so I just smile and that seems to be good enough because he calls, he likes me (wants to talk to me and know things about me) and he is my friend like no one I have ever known.

Had ever known.

People like Julian and they are nice to me when I am with him, which is different. People being nice to you.

He has blonde hair like me but lighter and a sweet smile and everyone knows who he is. He knows about things. He knows about people, how to talk to them, how to make them like you.

I like him because he chews that gum with the zebra on the wrapper and rub-on tattoos on the insides. When he wears socks they don't match. Because his ears are always clean and his hair always looks slept on. He is always warm and he hugs a lot and he draws action figures. He likes it when I paint his nails. His favorite colors are orange and blue.

He smells like apple shampoo and a rose he once picked me, I put it in my hair and when I took it out at night the edges had turned brown.

Emmy Lee: my friend, toddler playmate, holding hand and retching throat.

She thinks I spend too much time with him.

"It isn't good," she says, "to spend all your time with one person. Especially him. He isn't fooling anyone."

Emmy Lee: suspicious with her conspiracy theories, her disbelief, her dramatics. Always trying to convince me there are aliens in my backyard, Agent Orange in the cafeteria's food, rat poison in the cigarettes.

"He's got secrets, Jaime," she says. "Bad ones."

"Jealous," I say. "Everybody has secrets."

Julian is good and sweet, but I have to share him.

I don't like that there is that boy. One of Julian's friends. He is tall and skinny and plays the drums, the electric guitar, he screams into microphones and people scream for him. His name is Will. He has staring eyes and long arms.

Julian

I guess it's okay not to say anything, as long as I'm not lying.

I don't lie.

Jaime. Circles under her eyes. Smart and small and sweet, she paints pictures of birds sitting on telephone wires. I see her (walking around school with her friend, seeing right past people as if they were ghosts). She's on the verge of becoming a heroin addict or bag lady or the moody lead singer of a punk band.

She's on the verge of something, she has things going on in her mind, I want to know how it's going down.

"She's sad," says Will. "She's in love with you."

I count to ten (1...2...3...). "Its not like that."

"Why didn't you tell her about us?" He asks. "She had no idea who I was."

"It hasn't come up," I say.

"Right."

"I'll talk to her," I say, kiss his nervous lips.

I walk with Jaime to school. She doesn't have anything in her arms. It's like she doesn't realize where she's going, what she will need there. I wonder how someone goes through life like that (unprepared).

She doesn't talk until I ask her questions. Anything I can think of. ("Does a raindrop or a snowflake taste better?" "Do we all see the same colors? Do you see the same colors as me?")

"I don't know," she says. "I don't know."

But she does know.

When she cries I put my arms around her shoulders.

I tell her about (spiders and sitcoms), (superheroes and summers) until she stops.

Her friend (Emmy Lee) found me. She knows everything, corners me at my locker. "Do you have any idea what you're doing?" She asks me, (little eyes narrow and little teeth glinting).

"Emmy Lee, right?," I say, (My back against the hard metal ridges of my locker door). Emmy Lee.

"You're ruining her, okay?" She has a black plastic spider on a string around her neck. "I know about you and I'll tell her if you don't."

"Know what?" I can feel the sweat on my forehead, my palms, my toes.

She backs off and I breathe. "You're a terrible liar," she says.

I don't lie.

Emmy Lee

On July 20, 1969, after Apollo 11 had crossed more than two hundred thousand dark miles in three and a half days, the American space crew landed. On the moon. At least that's what the world saw.

It was very convenient that after decades of space domination by the Soviet Union, the good old US of A won the space race by achieving the impossible, landing on the moon. It was very convenient that the entire moon was never shown during the "moon landing" tape, only the "moon surface" Neal Armstrong landed on. For all anyone knows, it was taped in some studio in Hollywood.

You know what I think? Would you like to know What The Fuck Emmy Lee Thinks? I think there was no moon landing. It was a swindle by the government, an exploitation of billions of taxpayers' money for the supposed "space exploration," a way to bring back some of the patriotic pride lost during Vietnam. It's easy to swindle people, I've seen it happen. All you need is a half assed alibi and a nice smile.

"Emmy Lee!" She calls but no one said I had to listen. I keep walking keep stomping through the puddles and make her run to catch up.

When she does her breath is fast and her cheeks and ears are flushed pink.

"How are you, Jaime?" I ask and allow myself to smile on her sweet pink face.

"Good," she says. We walk in our usual silence. Until

"Emmy Lee," she says. "I...met somebody." Her hands in her pockets and her eyes on her feet.

"Really." Do I Really Care? Why does she tell me these things? Jaime shouldn't meet people. They only hurt her. Jaime should sit in a tower and wait like a princess. Like Rapunzel. I would be the wicked witch.

"Yeah...He's really nice."

But the prince has to come along, eventually. Eventually. This one might not be the right one. There were probably plenty of princes who tried to get Rapunzel out of her tower before the right one came along.

"You know Julian? From school?"

Of course. Everybody knows Julian. "Yes..."

"Well, I met him is all." We were walking through puddles. Jaime

Julian has a lot of friends. Some people are like that. But I am his favorite, his partner in crime. He says if he could be alone with anyone on a desert island, it would be me. If a house was burning down and it had everyone he knew in it, he would save me first. He has his license, it's almost summer, we can go to the beach or anywhere I want.

I don't know where I want to go. I am waiting for him to take me somewhere new.

I spent more time with him and now Emmy Lee is jealous.

"You're a pawn," Emmy Lee says when I run into her in the hallways at school. I don't want to talk to her.

"He's just using you to cover it up," she says.

I will not ask what.

There is Julian turning the corner with his friends and I move towards him but Emmy Lee stops me.

"He's using you, Jaime. You're a front, I can see it. Stop being so stupid, Jaime."

Leave me alone.

"Jaime..." Emmy Lee catches the sleeve of my jacket in her fist.

"I have to go, Emmy Lee," I say, pull my sleeve out of her hand. She wasn't holding that tight, really.

"Let's go, Jaime," says Julian. His friends are gone and he is right in front of me.

"Why don't you just leave her alone?" Hisses Emmy Lee, behind me.

No, don't leave me alone.

"I know what you are," Emmy Lee says to him. "You're hurting her."

I open my mouth to say something, to say that he isn't hurting me, that he isn't hiding anything.

He is looking at me and his eyes are so sad. I never noticed how sad his eyes were.

And when I don't defend him, don't deny her words he shoves his hands in his pockets and turns down the hall.

"I told you," says Emmy Lee, and walks away behind me.

I dreamed: that I was being chased by chained dogs, I was trying to run towards a barbed wire fence but my feet were stuck to the ground. A crowd gathered, watching me try to run, and someone said, "Let's watch Jaime fall off of the edge."

Will

We were: electric, pulsing, moving people like those Mickey Mouse's that dance on top of stereos. From the stage you couldn't pick out a single person, it was like one collective enigma moving to our sound. Fuck voices from God, fuck blood coming out of the Virgin Mary's eyelids, playing to that crowd that night was a religious experience. Jesus Christ.

Blinding lights, screaming moshers, sweat dotting my face. Living. That's the way I want to die I think.

"You are so beyond...anything," shouts Julian. The next band has started up already and even from backstage they are too loud.

We are: at the party clad in leather taking pills out of the boy's hand. He is watching us swallow his money. We do.

"I love you," says Julian and I love him too because what's left after that? Nothing really. Then it gets dark, quiet, and your heart beats slower while everything else gets faster.

The next morning he needs to go to the emergency room. What The Fuck do I know about blood coming out his mouth, about vomit. Take him to the emergency room. Call that girl, whats her face with the blonde hair. She seems like she would know what to do.

"I don't know," she says. I drove all the fucking way to the land of the trailer trash and she Doesn't Know.

"Take him to the hospital," she says.

Jesus Christ.

She is beautiful.

Coffee.

All of the walls are beige and these posters are so cheesy. They ask questions, I let her answer. They write every word on that clipboard.

"Is there anything else he might have taken?"

Jaime looks at me and I shrug. I don't feel like talking to them. I do not feel like talking to them. Jaime took his wallet, his i.d. She hid it so they can't call his parents. She's smart.

"He can go," says the nurse. She's busy, she's got better things to do than find out where some overdosed pretty boy lives. He looks older than sixteen.

Thank you for not giving him a wheelchair.

I was afraid they would wheel him out like somebody really sick.

Like somebody dying, or somebody who might fall if they tried to walk on their own.

Kill me the day I can't walk on my own.

Emmy Lee

Well he hurt her like I knew she would. I told you so runs through my head but I won't say it.

She's crying all the time and I wish I had let things be. No, I don't. I do not let things be. I fight and I am punished but seeing her cry is worse than prison. My mom used to cry like this. I worry about Jaime, that they'll send her away if she doesn't stop crying.

Don't make her crazy, Emmy Lee. You fucked it up last time, but this time, don't make her crazy. What did my mom used to say?

"You are making me crazy, Emmy Lee."

Before she died things weren't like this. Things weren't always like this. Things weren't always Fucking Like This. She went crazy and she died and now I'm going crazy, look at me, look at the way they look at me, like I'm crazy.

"You are making me crazy, Emmy Lee!"

She always used to say that. My mother. But it wasn't my fault. It Wasn't My Fault. She wasn't really crazy anyway. She just started acting the way people aren't supposed to act, she said things you aren't supposed to say, she stopped caring about me or anybody and they said Crazy.

She wore clothes where they didn't go or not at all because it was all one big joke to her all of a sudden. One Big Joke. She could've killed herself but instead she just dropped out, stopped paying attention, made her own little world.

And they said Crazy.

Danya

I'm watching them and thinking these have got to be the most fucked up people I've ever seen. There's the blonde girl crying and the blonde boys making eyes at each other and in the middle of it all there's the witchy girl telling them all to go to hell.

"What are you looking at?" She screams at me when they notice I'm watching them. The crying girl looks up at me and the boy puts his hand in the other boy's back pocket.

"You," I say because I've given up lying. A week ago I would've said "Nothing," but there's no time for that anymore.

She's at loss for words which I can tell doesn't happen often.

Boy Number One laughs and says, "Wow. You got her to shut up." He smiles and he's got a great smile which in my other life I might have been impressed by.

The crying girl sniffles. Boy Number One puts his arm around her and even I can tell that everyone feels weird about him doing that.

"So who are you?" Says the other blonde boy. He looks like a rock star. He looks stoned but I think that maybe that's only part of his image.

Names float through my mind. Deirdre, Danielle, Dulcie, "Danya," I say and am proud that I forced those lying names out of my mouth.

"I'm...Will," he says. I think how it's too bad for me that he's got a boyfriend. I could use a rock star in my life.

"Danya," says the witchy girl and suddenly I remember her. Emily.

I've stopped lying but Sweets is always around to remind me who I used to be. When you see someone lying in the dirt it changes you I think. Someone you love and have come to depend on and was your partner in crime, being buried in dirt, it changes you. If I was a good friend I would clear away the space over her gravestone, but I prefer to let weeds crawl over it until it disappears into the green.