Page 83 of The Last Time I Lied

I should have left. I knew it even then. I should have simply turned around and gone back to Dogwood. Yet I couldn’t resist taking a peek. That was something else Vivian had taught me. When you get an opportunity to look, you’re a fool not to take it.

I leaned toward the gap. I looked.

What I saw was Vivian. Facing the shower wall, her palms flat against it, breasts pressing into the wood. Theo stood behind her. Hands over hers. Hips thrusting. Face buried against her neck and muffling his grunts.

The sight of the two of them, doing something I’d only heard whispered about, cleaved my heart in two. It hurt so much I could hear it breaking. A sick, cracking sound. Like wood shattered by an ax.

I wanted to run away, afraid that Vivian and Theo would be able to hear it, too. But when I turned around, there was Casey, a lit cigarette dangling from her lips.

“Emma?” Smoke pushed from her mouth with each syllable. “Is something wrong?”

I shook my head, even though tears had already started to leak from my eyes. The movement set them free, flinging them away from my face.

“You’re upset,” Casey said.

“I’m not,” I lied. “I just—I need to be alone.”

I slipped past her, running not to the cabin but to the lake, where I stood so close that water lapped at my sneakers. Then I cried. I had no idea for how long. I just wept and wept, the tears falling directly from my eyes into the water, mixing with Lake Midnight.

—

After crying so much that my tears ran dry, I returned to Dogwood, finding Vivian, Natalie, and Allison all there. They sat in a circle on the floor, smack in the middle of a game of Two Truths and a Lie. In Vivian’s hand was the flask she had told me about. Its existence truly wasn’t a lie. Now she took a slow drink from it, as if to prove how foolish I had been to doubt her.

“There you are,” she said, holding out the flask. “Want a swig?”

I stared at her damp ponytail, her pinkened skin, her stupidlocket. And at that moment I despised her more than I had despised anyone in my life. I could feel the hatred boiling under my skin. It burned.

“No,” I said.

Allison continued with the turn I had interrupted. Her choices were, as usual, either self-aggrandizing or stupid. “One: I met Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. Two: I haven’t consumed bread in a year. Three: I think Madonna’s version of ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ is better than Patti LuPone’s.”

“The second one,” Vivian said, taking another hit of the flask. “Not that I care.”

Allison flashed a chorus-girl smile, trying not to act hurt. “Correct. I had pancakes this morning, and my mother made me French toast the morning I left for camp.”

“My turn,” I announced. “One: My name is Emma Davis. Two: I am spending the summer at Camp Nightingale.”

I paused, ready for the lie.

“Three: I didn’t just see Vivian and Theo fucking in the latrine showers.”

Natalie slapped a hand over her gaping mouth. Allison shrieked, “Oh my God, Viv! Is that true?”

Vivian remained calm, looking at me with a dark glint in her eyes. “Clearly that upsets you.”

I turned away, unable to endure the hardness of her stare, and said nothing.

Vivian kept talking. “I’m the one who should be upset by this situation. Knowing that you were spying on me. Watching me have sex like some pervert. Is that what you are, Emma? A pervert?”

Her calmness was what ultimately got under my skin. The slow way she spoke. So deliberate, accented with just the right amount of disdain. I was sure she did it on purpose, lighting the fuse that would eventually make me explode.

I gave her what she wanted.

“You knew I liked him!” I screamed, the words raging forth, unstoppable. “You knew and couldn’t stand the thought of having someone pay more attention to me than to you. So you fucked him. Because you could.”

“Theo?” Vivian laughed. A single short, disbelieving burst. It was the cruelest sound I’d ever heard. “You actually think Theo is interested in you? Jesus, Em, you’re just a baby.”

“That’s still better than being a bitch like you.”

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