Seven Ways We Lie by Riley Redgate Read Free Book Online Page B

home from my mother. At 6:00, long after the halls emptied, I passed the faculty break room in the new wing. A voice seeped through the closed door. I came just close enough to catch it.
    â€œNobody’s going to find out.” That phrase caught me mid-step. A girl’s unfamiliar voice was speaking, carrying an undercurrent of anxiety. “Please—try not to worry. I’m not in your class, nobody sees us together, and I haven’t told anyone at all. I promise.” A pause. The sound of a kiss. “I love you.”
    I backed away from the door. As what I’d heard sunk in, I scurried away, my pulse quickening. I sent the message that evening through the anonymous submission form on the school’s website:
Teacher and student in romantic relationship. Overheard in faculty break room after school. Identities unknown
.
    It’s strange, but now I almost feel as if I shouldn’t have done anything, which is absurd. Wouldn’t that make me an accessory to the crime?
    What little appetite I had vanishes. I excuse myself, and for once, my mother doesn’t say a word about my neglected food. I return to my room, but none of it offers any comfort: not the cracked spines of favorite books, not the cool glow of my laptop, not the frame of blackish night through the skylight. I spin the gyroscope I keep on my desk—once, twice—but its hypnotizing whir hardly calms me.
    I grab the spare keys to my mother’s car from a hook on thedoor. Bundling my coat on, I stride through the kitchen, where my mother still sits. “Where are you going?” she asks.
    â€œOut,” I say. I don’t wait for a response.
    DRIVING AROUND AT NIGHT ALWAYS HELPS CLEAR MY mind. I’m not sure why. It’s certainly not the view; there isn’t much to see in Paloma, Kansas, population 38,000. I suppose solitude just feels more excusable if you’re in motion.
    I pass the series of glorified strip malls that comprise our downtown, local businesses and antiques shops. After they peter out, a lonely-looking McDonald’s stands on the left, the only evidence that corporate America acknowledges our existence. The rest of this small city is a maze of residential neighborhoods. Some are cookie-cutter suburbs with identical mini mansions; some are yuppie projects liberally adorned with round windows and organic gardens; some are tiny forgotten streets with chain-link fences and our meager police force lurking around.
    I end up at Paloma High somehow, parked in the junior lot. Our school is a different building at night, an empty body with no light in its eyes. Staring out my windshield at the three-story mishmash of brick and modernism, I can only think about the tiny sound of those two people kissing. The remembered whisper,
I love you
.
    Part of me wonders what it would feel like, a kiss. I’ve never felt compelled to try putting my mouth on somebody else’s mouth. I refuse to believe it feels like a symphony of violins, or a ferociously panning camera, or an eruption of emotion in the center of my chest, or anything else it’s supposed to be.
    I look at my hands. I lift two fingers, close my eyes, and press my lips against them.
    Nothing. It feels like nothing at all.
    After a motionless second, I take my hand away. I exit the car and slam the door, embarrassed all of a sudden that I felt compelled to do that. Embarrassed that I even wondered. I clamber onto the hood of the car, lean back against the windshield, and stare upward, my hands deep in my pockets. The galaxy is spray-painted across the sky. Looking at it, I feel swallowed up. Infinitesimally small.
    I know Earth is whirling on its axis at one thousand miles per hour. I know it is whipping around the sun at sixty-six thousand miles per hour. I know we’re all hurtling around the center of the Milky Way at four hundred and eighty-three thousand miles per hour. But lying here, I feel motionless. I take a breath, hold