As I Die Lying by Scott Nicholson Read Free Book Online Page A

honey."
    Sally leaned her mouth to my
ear and one of her pigtails tickled my nose. "I thought this place
was a secret ," she
hissed.
    "Sssh," I said, but I knew it wouldn't be our
voices that gave us away. It would be the pounding heart, spilling
out and carrying like the beat of voodoo drums across a black
jungle. Or maybe the scarring screech of a jet plane crash landing.
The fifty-megaton explosion between my legs. Something like
that.
    Mother shouted my name again, this time
farther away.
    Sally relaxed over me as if her bones had
failed, her body sagging onto mine like a water balloon. Our pulses
raced each other, working faster than bedsprings in the dead of
night. I had found yet another way that love could be scary.
    Sally rolled off me and smoothed her dress.
She picked up Angel Baby and all I could see of their faces was the
outline, twin shadows against a darker background. The feeble moon
was trying to rise, but it must have been as tired and drained as
we were.
    "I tore the knee of my stocking," she said,
her voice as cold and faraway as the dull stars or dead fish on a
beach or a mole in a winter cornfield.
    "Sally..." I searched the
night for words. I still love you? Want to
know a secret? Will you climb on me again?
    "Tell your mother you tripped over a tree
root and fell," I finished.
    Her soft sobs filled the doghouse. Had I hurt
her? I don't think I had used my babymaker on her.
    "Are you bleeding?" My tongue was as dry and
thick as an old board.
    She snorted, blowing bubbles of laughter out
of her nose. "Richard, you're such an idiot."
    She was stomping with words. They hurt worse
than boots. And I wish, sitting here typing, I could walk through
the years and stomp back. After all, I’m the one who gets to tell
how it really happened. But even now, this seems the best way to
remember it. Yes, this will do.
    "I'm going home now," she said, and I could
sense her pout even if I couldn't see it clearly. Her voice dropped
and her words slithered out like snakes. "This is a secret."
    I could still try to be brave. "I won't tell
anything.”
    "Cross your heart and hope to die," she said,
and she was telling me, not asking.
    But I wasn't falling for that trick again. No
more hoping to die, no matter what. She waited in the silent night
that poured as smothering and heavy as maple syrup. Or blood from a
savior’s palms. Or maybe just plain old smothering silence, the
kind you hear in your head if you stop and really listen and
everyone in the Bone House is asleep and not snoring.
    "I never even loved you at all," she said. "I
was lying. I just wanted to make you kiss me. Like I did all those
other boys."
    And I still had to love her, at least until I
could figure out a way to uncross my heart. If love was going to be
such a hot-and-cold ball of confusion, a strange mix of pain and
pleasure, a tangle of limbs and tongues, then I didn't want to love
anyone again for a long time.
    But suddenly I was beyond the reach of her
sharp weapons of hate, weapons that stabbed places even the boots
hadn't touched. I was shrinking into the dark place in my head,
hiding from this new kind of pain. She could not longer touch me, I
was safe in a dark hall of the Bone House, looking through the eyes
of my secret little friend, the secret that no external love would
ever make me reveal.
    “ Wait,” you must be
thinking, “how come you’re telling me this now?”
    I’ll let you in on the secret, if not her,
because I can tell you’re starting to trust me despite my warning.
We’re in this together, so you might as well have all the facts.
Besides, I think I’m starting to love you.
    Sally crawled out of the doghouse toward the
weed-choked hole in the fence, her knees making crackling sounds on
the crusty ground. My little friend sat alone in the dark, alone
but not alone, because I was there with him. We were bound together
more tightly than any lover's knot or hangman's noose or those
silly contortions newlyweds do over the