Every Single Lie Page 3

  “Is that not a test?”

  “It’s West Point’s way of assessing my athleticism.”

  I know that too. He has to do timed sets of exercises and a one-mile run (child’s play, for Penn). And he has to be able to throw a basketball, like, around the globe. From a kneeling position.

  I’d collapse halfway through any one of those, but Penn will kill it.

  “I’ll be glad when this is over. For your sake,” I tell him, thinking back to his nomination interview with our congressman. Penn was so nervous that he sweated through his shirt.

  “Some people have already been accepted, but most of us won’t hear back until April,” Penn says as he sticks an earbud into his left ear, jogging in place again now. “So it could be a while.”

  Four more months of watching him stress over every test and run himself into the ground. Which will only get worse when baseball season starts up.

  I think he’s lost his mind. I mean, yes, Mom and Dad both served in the army. But West Point is something else entirely. I’ve looked at the brochures he leaves lying everywhere. He’ll have to wear a uniform to class and go on long runs with a twenty-pound backpack, while upperclassmen yell at him. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

  No thanks.

  But Penn’s convinced the only way he can afford college is if he gets into West Point, because his four years there would be free, in exchange for a service commitment. Because according to our guidance counselor, only 41 percent of the kids who graduate from our school go on to college, and even fewer of those finish a bachelor’s degree. And most of those who do wind up with a ton of student debt.

  I look up when I realize Penn’s staring at me. “What?”

  “Your junior year’s half over, and you haven’t even taken the ACT yet.”

  “So?”

  “So, time’s running out.”

  I roll my eyes at him. “Just because you have every minute of your entire existence already planned out doesn’t mean the rest of us should.”

  “No, but you should plan something. You don’t want to be stuck here for the rest of your life do you?”

  I shrug. “It was good enough for Mom and Dad.”

  Penn looks thoroughly disappointed in me. “Fine. I’ll be back before dinner,” he says as he jogs through the doorway into the living room.

  “Mom and Landry won’t be home, so make yourself a sandwich!” I yell after him, but I can’t tell whether or not he can hear me over his music.

  A second later, the front door slams shut.

  My phone buzzes with a text from Jake.

  on my way

  “I’m not even sure why I’m here.” Jake sinks into the wobbly chair in front of my desk.

  That’s new. Before we broke up, he always flopped onto my unmade bed.

  “I don’t care about the stupid duffel bag. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. Everyone’s saying you found a dead body.”

  He frowns when I close my bedroom door, because we’re the only ones in the house. But I don’t want to be overheard if my mom or my brother comes home early. Or if Landry changes her mind about the sleepover.

  “What’s going on, Beckett? Did you actually find a dead body?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  I study his face, looking for a lie in features I know as well as my own. We were together for nearly a year. I would never have gotten through what happened with my dad—not just his death, but all the crap that led up to it—if it weren’t for Jake. In fact, he slept over three nights in a row after the funeral, when it all really hit me, and Mom was so out of it that she didn’t even notice.

  That’s why it hurts so much to know he was cheating. But this . . . The baby in his gym bag . . . That’s something else entirely.

  “I only know what I’ve heard. What am I doing here? Where’s my bag? I hadn’t even realized I’d lost it until you texted.”

  “That’s your story? You’re going to go with ‘I lost it’?”

  “What’s going on, Beck? Why would that be a story?”

  I watch dawn fade into dusk in his eyes, and suddenly I realize what this moment is for him. He thought I wanted to start over, like he suggested in the parking lot. He thought his duffel bag was just my excuse to get him over here, and that light dying in his eyes . . . that’s the death of hope.

  It hurts me to see him in pain, even after what he’s done to me. Even with the worst-case scenario of how he might be connected to the dead baby swimming around in my soul like a shark waiting to take a huge bite out of me. Because it isn’t simple, Jake and me. Love, betrayal, forgiveness, truth, pain . . . ​they don’t all carry equal weight. We were messy from the get-go, and my dad only made that worse.

  Jake made that better.

  And now I feel bad for hurting him, and I’m confused, because I can’t think of any other way for that baby to have wound up in his duffel bag. It has to be his kid. But if he thought the bag was just an excuse to get him over here, then he really doesn’t know where I found it. Or that this has any connection to what happened in the girls’ locker room.

  “Beckett.”

  His frown deepens, and now Jake’s looking at me the way he used to when my dad was “sick.” Because Jake thinks I’ve lost my mind. That I’m about to ride a dark, dark spiral into nothing.

  He stands, like he might reach for me, but then he thinks better of it. “Say something.”

  “Something.” The word comes out on its own, and my bark of laughter is an awkward self-defense against the sob clogging my throat. That stupid joke doesn’t work now, because we aren’t curled up in my bed, exploring a silence that got too comfortable.

  I clear my throat and start over. “Your duffel bag is in police custody. Because I found a dead baby in it.”

  “You what?” He blinks, and I can see him trying to put my words together like a puzzle, waiting for the image to make sense. “I—What?”

  “I did find a body in the locker room. It was a baby. And it was in your duffel bag.”

  “Oh my god.” He sinks back into my desk chair.

  “Is it yours, Jake?”

  “I don’t know! I didn’t see it.”

  It takes me a second to understand what he means. “Not the bag. That’s definitely yours. I’m talking about the baby. Is it your baby?”

  “Of course not!” He pops out of the chair again, and suddenly he’s looking at me like he’s just figured this whole thing out.

  “This is still about last night, isn’t it? You’re so convinced I cheated on you that you’re seeing things that aren’t there.” He shakes his head, and his astonishment bleeds into a patronizing kind of sympathy that makes my teeth grind together. “Is there even really a baby? Because if there is, it’s messed up of you to make that about us. About you.”

  “Don’t—” I spring up from my perch on the edge of the bed. “Don’t do that. I’m not crazy, and I’m not making this up. Look.” I pull my phone from my pocket and open the most recent photo, then I shove it at him.

  He starts to refuse to take it. But then his focus drops to my screen, and he goes so still it’s like someone tapped the pause button. I’m not sure he’s even breathing.

  “Oh my god, there is a dead baby.” He takes the phone and sinks into my desk chair again. “That’s so fucked up.” He frowns up at me. “Why would you take a picture of it?”

  “Look at the bag.”

  Still frowning, he uses two fingers to zoom in on the image. “It’s a CHS duffel bag. Every athlete in school has one. They even sell them to the golf team.”

  “Look at the bottom of the bag, on the left side.”

  He zooms in again, and I can tell the instant he sees the stain. He keeps blinking while he stares. “Bleach.” Finally, he looks up. “Okay, that doesn’t mean anything. I mean, it’s creepy, because that’s definitely my bag. But I already told you. I lost my duffel.”

  “You said you hadn’t realized you’d lost it until I texte
d.”

  “I hadn’t. But that doesn’t change anything. I have no idea how it got there, and I have nothing to do with that baby.” He shoves my phone at me. “Is my bag really in police custody?”

  “Yes. They don’t know it’s yours yet, but—”

  “You didn’t tell your mom?”

  “I wanted to ask you about it first.” Because I had to know. And because I felt like I owed him that, after everything he did for me after my dad died. Night after night of holding me while I cried myself to sleep. Calming me down after nightmares. Riding out emotional outbursts I couldn’t even explain. He was so there in those moments. So present. Which is why I can’t understand how things changed. Why he’s lying now. Hiding things. Unless . . . “You’re sure that’s not your baby?”

  His gaze hardens. “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Is there any way that could be your baby without you knowing it?”

  “No!” He stands and runs one hand through his hair again. “What are you now, a cop?”

  “You look scared.”

  “Of course I’m scared. If you don’t believe me, why would the police?”

  “When they figure out that’s your bag, they’ll take your DNA and run a paternity test. If the baby isn’t yours, you’ll be cleared. But if it is . . . Well, lying about it now is pointless.”

  “I’m not lying!” He takes a deep breath, and I can see him trying to calm down. “Since when am I just a suspect for you to interrogate?”

  “Since you started getting texts you don’t want me to see!” I don’t expect to read his messages, but the fact that he’s actively hiding something—practically lying right to my face—is a humiliation I can’t just ignore.

  If he’s cheating, I can’t be the last to know.

  “Beckett, I—” He opens my bedroom door, then he turns back to me, still holding the knob. “You need to get help.”

  I follow him into the hall just as he stomps past Penn and bumps his shoulder.

  Startled and sweaty in spite of the cold, my brother pulls his earbuds from his ears. He glances from me to Jake. “What’s wrong?”

  “Your sister’s lost her mind.” Jake disappears into the living room. The front door slams shut, then I hear his car start. His tires squeal as he backs onto the street way too fast.

  “What the hell?” Penn says. “I thought you two broke up.”

  “We did.” And I’m sure that’s awkward for my brother, because he and Jake have been friends since long before Jake and I got together.

  “What was he doing here?”

  Instead of answering, I go back into my room and close the door.

  Penn follows me in without knocking. “Beckett. What happened?”

  “The bag is his.” I flop down on my bed and stare up at the ceiling. “The duffel.”

  “Whoa, seriously? Are you sure?”

  “I recognized the bleach stain on the bottom left side. He swears he doesn’t know how his bag got there and that the baby isn’t his, but if it isn’t, what the hell was it doing in his duffel?”

  Penn shrugs, leaning against the door frame. “Maybe someone stole it.”

  “He says he lost it.”

  “Okay, so maybe someone found it.”

  “And held on to it, just in case they needed somewhere to put a dead baby?” I sit up so he can see how skeptical I look.

  “That’s probably not exactly how it played out.”

  “If he did cheat on me, maybe he doesn’t know he had a baby. Maybe he left his bag at the girl’s house, and she just kept it.”

  “Is that why you broke up with him? Because he cheated?”

  I shrug. “He denies it. But something went wrong between us, Penn. He’s been hiding texts from me.”

  “And obviously that could only mean that he’s cheating.”

  I sit up to frown at him. “I can’t tell whether you’re playing devil’s advocate for the hell of it or defending him because he’s your friend.”

  Penn doesn’t answer, and I can see from the dip in his eyebrows that he’s moved on. “Does Mom know? About the bag?”

  “If she does, she didn’t find out from me.”

  “Are you going to tell her?”

  “I think I have to. There’s no reason the police should have to spend time and money finding out something I can tell them for free.”

  Mom complains about the Clifford PD’s budget almost as often as she worries about ours.

  “But . . . ?”

  I flop back on the bed again, my arms tossed over my head. “But . . . ​as mad as I am at Jake, telling Mom about the bag still feels like betraying him.”

  Penn lifts one brow at me, in this way he has of saying a lot without saying anything at all.

  “Yes, I’m aware that it sounds like I still care about him. But that’s irrelevant.”

  “You caring about him is irrelevant to your relationship?”

  “He cheated, Penn. And he won’t admit it. I can’t forgive either of those.”

  I can’t stop him from hurting me, but I can make sure he does it as my ex rather than my everything.

  “Okay. But is it possible—just possible—that he didn’t cheat, but now that you’ve said he did, you can’t let yourself be wrong? Even if you’re wrong?”

  “No.”

  Penn snorts. “You’re not right all the time, you know.”

  “I know.” But I’m not wrong about this.

  When my mom isn’t home by eight o’clock, I make myself a peanut butter and Nutella sandwich and eat it in my room, while I fill out the note card I’m allowed to bring to my chemistry midterm.

  My phone beeps with a Twitter notification, and I hardly glance at it. Then my phone beeps again, and I turn off the notifications. They’re probably questions about why I was escorted into the library by a policeman during seventh period, and I can’t deal with that right now.

  I’m halfway through my sandwich and a third of the way through the formulas I’m printing as small as I can when Penn knocks once on my door, then bursts in without waiting for a response.

  His hair is still wet and he smells like shampoo.

  “Have you seen what’s going down on Twitter?”

  “I turned off notifications. Why?”

  I open the app, and a string of new @ mentions scrolls rapidly down the screen. There must be at least two dozen of them. The one on top—the one with the most interaction—is from someone I’ve never heard of, retweeting someone else I’ve never heard of, with added commentary demanding to know how I could be so heartless.

  “What the hell?”

  I click on the original tweet and read the username. “Crimson Cryer. Who is that?”

  “It was the name of our school newspaper, until it got cut for lack of funding, after my freshman year.”

  “So then, it’s definitely someone from school. Probably a senior. No one younger than that would know about the paper.”

  Then my focus snags on the image, and shock sucks the air from my lungs. It’s a picture of the baby I found in the girls’ locker room.

  It’s the picture I took of the baby I found in the girls’ locker room. The angle and lighting are identical, though the photo has been zoomed in.

  “Everyone’s saying someone leaked a photo from the police,” Penn says, looking at my phone from over my shoulder. “Or that the Clifford PD was hacked.”

  It wasn’t the police department that was hacked. Fortunately, Penn doesn’t know I took that picture. The only person who knows is Jake.

  He wouldn’t.

  “Beckett,” Penn says, and I look up to find him staring at me. “Read the caption.”

  CRIMSON CRYER

  @crimsoncryer · 2hr

  Rumor has it someone left a dead baby in the Clifford High School girls’ locker room. Rumor also has it the mother is @BeckettBergen, who only *pretended* to find the baby she actually gave birth to.

  #CliffordBaby

  #Discuss

  56 30
2 493

  FOUR

  When I went to bed last night, the Crimson Cryer account had just over five hundred followers, despite being only a couple of hours old and having posted only that one tweet. Because a picture of a dead baby is evidently destined to go viral.

  This morning I slept in, because it’s Saturday, and when I woke up around ten, the Cryer had two thousand new followers, including two of the three news stations in Jackson, and it had retweeted two posts. The first is from the Clifford PD (@CliffordTNpd), confirming that the remains of a newborn were found on the grounds of Clifford High School yesterday afternoon, but that no further comment will be offered, because police are still investigating.

  The second retweet is of a picture from Lilly Copeland (@LillyPadCopeland), confirming for the world that the #CliffordBaby is not hers, along with a mirror selfie showing her still very swollen belly, in profile.

  I spend ten minutes sitting in bed while I scroll through nearly two hundred Twitter mentions of my own, most from people I’ve never heard of, demanding to know why I would abandon my baby like garbage. By the time I get out of the shower, there are twenty-eight new mentions, all on that same theme. Except one, from someone I’ve never heard of.

  Watch yur back @BeckettBergen b4 sum1 leaves you ded on the floor like your baby

  Wrapped in a towel, wet hair still dripping, I sink onto the edge of the tub and stare at the message in shock. Is that a death threat? A warning?

  This can’t be real.

  I click the button to report the threat for violating Twitter’s policies. Which seems like a pretty serious understatement.

  I only have two hundred followers, and in my entire two years on Twitter, I’ve never had more than twenty replies or fifty likes on a single post. This is insane. Yet suddenly, thanks to the Crimson Cryer, I’m “popular” enough to be threatened.

  If this is Jake getting back at me for accusing him of cheating—and of fathering the #CliffordBaby—I’m going to kill him. If this isn’t Jake, and it really doesn’t feel like something he’d do, then I have an even bigger problem.