Every Single Lie Page 4

  I want to comment and tell everyone that it isn’t my baby, but I’m afraid that feeding the trolls will only result in more trolls. So I turn off my notifications again and get dressed.

  Mom is in the kitchen when I come out for breakfast. She’s staring into her coffee mug like it holds the secret of life, and I can’t tell if she’s already up or still up.

  “You okay?” she asks, and I nod, because whether she’s talking about the fact that I found a dead baby yesterday or the fact that I’m now being accused of having birthed and abandoned that baby, the answer is much the same.

  Life sucks, but I’m fine.

  I drop a Pop-Tart in the toaster and pour a glass of juice.

  My mother sips from her mug. The nearly empty pot says it’s not her first cup.

  “So, I have to ask,” she says, and I groan inside. “Is it your baby, Beckett?”

  “Seriously?” My temper flares like a fresh log thrown on a campfire, shooting sparks inside me. “Why, exactly, do you need to ask me that?”

  “Because if my daughter was pregnant, and I didn’t notice, that’s on me.” Guilt swims in her eyes, and it’s uncomfortable for me to look at. “What kind of mother would I be?”

  The kind who’s never here. But I can’t say that. It’s not like she stays out late partying. Cops work long hours.

  “No, it’s not my baby. You saw me in a halter top and black leggings yesterday morning, Mom. Did I look pregnant to you?”

  “No, but there are legitimate cases of women who don’t show until they’re seven or eight months along.” She shrugs. “The coroner says the baby was only at thirty weeks’ gestation or so. Which means it’s unlikely, but possible, that the mother wasn’t showing much. Or at all, depending on her body type and clothing choices.”

  The toaster pops, and I grab my Pop-Tart, hissing when it burns my fingers before I can drop it on a paper plate.

  “Did he say how it died?”

  “No. That’ll take longer. But he said there was no obvious external trauma.”

  I blow on my breakfast to cool it. “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl.” My mother refills her mug with the last of the coffee. “Again, though, you can’t tell anyone that. I’m trusting you with this information because I feel like you at least deserve a few answers, after what you went through. Finding her and all. And what they’re saying now.”

  I nod and sip juice from my glass.

  “Beckett.” She puts her hand over mine until I meet her gaze. “I’m sorry. I had to ask.”

  “I know.” I pull my hand free and carefully back away from this tender moment. Detective Julie Bergen may be more observant than the off-duty version of my mother, but she asks fewer personal questions. Which is why I’d much rather deal with the cop right now. “What I did not know is that you’re on Twitter.”

  “I’m not, but the Clifford PD has been made aware that an anonymous Twitter account has posted a picture of what may turn out to be a crime scene, and we’re obviously interested in finding out who opened that account. And where they got the picture.”

  “It isn’t from you guys? Penn said people think it’s a leaked police photo.”

  I should feel guilty for this obvious misdirection, but I don’t.

  “We’re looking into that possibility too, but unless one of our guys took a photo on a cell phone—which is done, sometimes—it isn’t ours.”

  “By looking into it, you mean . . . ?”

  “Chief pulled Doug off the street and parked him in front of a computer at the station with a gallon of coffee and a pizza. Until we know there’s been a crime committed, we can’t justify borrowing a tech guy from the state police. I’m going back in to help him in a few minutes.”

  “Can you get Twitter to remove the account?”

  “Not until it posts something that violates their terms. Unfortunately, hypothesizing on the parentage of a dead baby doesn’t do that.”

  “What about the picture? How is posting that okay?” I ask, without saying what’s really going through my head: Yes, I took the picture, but I had no intention of sharing it. And I didn’t take it to exploit that poor baby. I just needed to know if it was Jake’s.

  “That’s not against the terms either. In fact, there are hundreds of images of war victims out there, posted by journalists covering combat zones. This isn’t the same thing, though, and we have put in a request to at least have the photo removed. But I have no idea how long that will take, or whether Twitter will comply.”

  “So, what should I do?” I haven’t asked my mom that in a long time. “Should I reply? Tell people it’s not my baby?”

  “That’ll just invite more interaction. Delete your account.”

  “If I do that, I’ll look guilty.” And I won’t be able to follow what’s being said about me, as infuriating as that effort will no doubt be.

  “I’m not going to tell you what to do. But that’s my advice.” She takes another sip from her mug while I chew a Pop-Tart that has gone tasteless. “So, what happened with Jake?”

  “Am I still being interrogated?” I can’t tell her that I think he cheated, because if we do get back together—and I can’t seem to let myself rule that out—she’ll always have a grudge against him. Whether or not he deserves it.

  “Not interrogated. Interviewed. And that’s really the only choice I have, lately.”

  That’s not fair. I’m not the one who stopped talking after Dad died. Mom shut herself off for weeks. It was like she spent so much effort on him in the months before he died—so much wasted energy and pointless words—that she had nothing left for afterward.

  But I can’t hold that against her. Not after what he put her through.

  “We just broke up.” I shrug. “There wasn’t really a specific reason.”

  Fact-Check Rating: Liar, liar, pants on fire.

  By that afternoon, the Crimson Cryer’s follower count has tripled, even with no new posts. And that’s when my cell phone starts ringing.

  I have to hang up on three reporters before I realize this isn’t going to stop. Some asshole has given out my number. And because my phone won’t quit ringing, Penn calls Mom from his.

  “Turn off your cell,” she says the second she walks in the door, as I’m rejecting the fifth call in as many minutes.

  And for about half an hour, that does the trick. Landry comes home and starts talking about this new recipe she just found, but she can’t get out anything more than “fish tacos with mango,” because that’s when the home phone starts ringing.

  Mom fields the calls, turning down all requests for a comment. Landry goes back to Norah’s house. Penn goes out for a run that turns into a marathon. And I try to distract myself with a new streaming show, but I can’t concentrate on it.

  By that night, all the Tennessee news stations are running the #CliffordBaby story, even without a comment from me, or from Coach Killebrew or the Clifford PD, and by Sunday morning, the national media has picked it up. I don’t think I’ve ever watched the news, unless you count sitting through that headline channel my dad used to leave on during breakfast, but today I can’t seem to turn it off.

  The stories all say that a deceased infant was found by a student in the girls’ locker room, but other than that, the reporting varies. Some pieces lament the lack of access to birth control in rural, conservative communities, and others offer condolences to the anonymous teen mom and applaud her apparent desire to keep her baby, inferring that from the fact that she swaddled it—they can’t tell what it was swaddled in, from the photo—and made no attempt to hide its body.

  None of the news stations show the picture, and none of them mention me by name, but they all keep trying to contact me for an interview. Several of them have come to town, and there’s footage of them following my high school principal, asking for a comment. Then they camp out in front of the police station, and Chief Stoddard tells my mom to put out a statement. Live, in front of the media.

  On Sunday
night, I emerge from my room to watch the press conference on TV, but Landry and Norah Weston are on the couch, arguing about some extra credit project they’re working on for their earth science class.

  “But the carbon snake is so cool.” Landry flips her phone around to show Norah a picture of what looks like a gnarled black branch growing from a bowl full of sand.

  “Yeah, but I really want to build an infinity mirror,” Norah whines. “We could use little pink bulbs, and—”

  She jumps up from the couch when she sees me. “Beckett! Check out my new boots! Landry wanted to borrow them, but her feet are too big. Aren’t they adorable?”

  She sticks one foot out and rotates it slowly, so I can admire her white leather ankle boot, with little pom-poms hanging from the ends of the laces.

  There’s a knock at the door, and I veer that way to open it, but Norah jumps in front of me and throws the door open. Even though this isn’t her house.

  There’s an eighth-grade boy standing on the porch, tugging awkwardly at the zipper of his jacket. Behind him, a bicycle is lying on its side on our front lawn.

  “Fletcher!” Norah squeals, then she pulls him inside. “I invited Fletch, because he always gets an A.”

  “Hey.” He regains his balance, then he glances from Norah to Landry, his hands out in front of him, as if he’s about to perform a magic trick. “I have three words for you. Rube. Goldberg. Machine. I made one in fifth grade, and it won second place in the school’s science fair.”

  I shut the door and try to figure out how to get them out of the living room, so I can watch the press conference without an audience of middle school kids.

  “This isn’t fifth grade, Fletcher,” Landry points out. “We aren’t going to get many bonus points for something a ten-year-old can do.”

  Fletcher’s expression collapses like one of those controlled-demolition-implosion videos, where the buildings just kind of fold in on themselves, instead of exploding.

  “Fine,” he says. “But I am not building a potato clock.”

  When I realize I’m not going to get rid of them, I head into the kitchen and unplug our old iPad from its charger. Penn’s earbuds are lying on top of it, so I plug them in and pull up the Clifford PD’s Twitter page just in time to click the link for the live video feed.

  I watch from one of the kitchen bar stools as my mother stands in front of the media in a small room at the police department. She says she’s going to read an official statement, but that she will not be taking questions, and neither will anyone else from the Clifford Police Department. Then she reads a single paragraph acknowledging that she is the investigator in charge of the Clifford Baby case and insisting that it was just small-town coincidence that her daughter found the baby. And she says, very clearly, that her daughter is not the baby’s mother.

  The Crimson Cryer retweets the video of her statement, and I go to bed Sunday night hoping that when I wake up, my life will be back to normal.

  People stare at me as I walk down the school’s main hallway. That isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, but before, they’d at least wait until I passed by to start whispering about me. They’d look away when I challenged them with eye contact.

  Evidently “left dead baby in a duffel bag” trumps “father killed himself right in front of her.” Even if neither of those is true.

  There’s no way anyone at school could possibly have missed my mother’s statement. The Crimson Cryer’s retweet of it got more than a thousand comments debating its accuracy in twelve hours. But no one here seems to believe a word my mom said.

  It’s a sad state of affairs when the rumor mill is deemed more trustworthy than an official police statement. But that is definitely the case at school.

  “She wasn’t in class on Friday.” The whisper comes from behind me, but I can’t tell who’s talking. “She could totally have spent all day in labor in the locker room, then pretended to find her own baby during seventh period.”

  “—really think she killed it?”

  “Why didn’t she just call 911? The poor thing might have lived if it was born in a hospital.”

  When I can’t stand any more of the stares and whispers, I stop in the middle of the hall and take a deep breath.

  “Don’t,” someone whispers as an arm links through mine.

  And the next thing I know, Amira Bhatt is tugging me down the hall toward the junior lockers in the math and science corridor.

  “Don’t what?” I whisper back, but she only rolls her eyes.

  “I know what you were about to do.”

  “You know I was about to pull my waistband down to my hairline and show off my complete lack of stretch marks and postpartum pooch?”

  The internet says it takes a while for the uterus to contract to normal size, and mine’s never been anything but normal size. That has to mean something.

  Her full, perfectly arched brows rise. “Okay, that’s a little more graphic than I expected, but I knew you were about to make a scene.”

  Amira used to be my best friend, but we’ve hardly spoken in six months. We didn’t have a fight or anything. After my dad died, we just kind of drifted apart. I mean, she came to the funeral, and for a little while after that, she would drop by and try to cheer me up. But when I wasn’t ready to cheer up, she didn’t seem to know how to be with me, the way that Jake did. Being at my house made her uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to go anywhere else. So she just . . . stopped.

  And I just let her.

  “It isn’t my baby,” I tell her as we stop in front of my locker. “And I can prove it.”

  “I know. But there is no world in which pulling your pants down at school ends well. So unless you want your proof to go viral, you should just keep your pants buttoned. Besides, showing people your stomach won’t prove much. They’ve been googling ‘pregnancy doesn’t show’ all weekend, trying to figure out how someone at Clifford could be secretly pregnant, when Lilly Copeland’s situation is so . . . obvious.”

  I did the same thing. It turns out my mom was right; occasionally, and for various reasons, a pregnancy doesn’t show until it’s nearly over.

  “And a belly that didn’t have much pooch during pregnancy won’t have much pooch afterward,” Amira says. “Right?”

  I have no idea. But I do not want my soft, winter-pale stomach on the internet.

  “Just hang in there and ride it out,” she advises while I dial in my locker combination. “Wear tight clothes, so they can see that neither your stomach nor your boobs are any bigger than they used to be, and people will move on to whoever the Crimson Cryer points a finger at next.”

  “Any idea who the Cryer is?”

  “Nope. My mom says that was the name of the school paper before it got canceled.” Her mother teaches our one physics class, as well as all the Chemistry I and II sections.

  “Yeah, that’s what Penn said.” I take my history textbook out of my locker and shove it into my backpack, and when I look up, I catch Jake’s gaze from across the hall.

  He looks away immediately.

  “Thanks for saving me from myself,” I tell Amira as I close my locker.

  I’ve missed her, and it’s not like there were a bunch of people waiting to step into her place when she and I drifted apart. My friendship bench is not deep. These days, thanks to my dad, I basically have Jake and Penn.

  Wait, no. Just Penn.

  “I . . . ​um. I know we haven’t hung out in a while.” I clear my throat and stare at the front of my locker. “But if you wanna come over later, we could make spicy pretzels and study for midterms, like we used to.”

  “Yeah.” Her smile relieves a tension that seems to have my entire body in its grip. “I’ll bring the pretzels.”

  “Great.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Jake start to move down the hall. “I’ll text you. Sorry, I gotta go . . .”

  Then I fast-walk after Jake, hoping that’s at least a little more subtle than actually chasing him.

  �
�Do not run away from me,” I snap when I get close enough.

  Jake sighs and turns around. “I was just trying to avoid a scene.”

  “A scene?” I tug him into an empty classroom and pull the door shut. “You mean like reporters calling your house all night? Strangers calling you names on Twitter? The whole world thinking you gave birth in the girls’ locker room and left your dead baby in a duffel bag?”

  “I’m sorry about all that. But none of it has anything to do with me.”

  “So you’re not the Crimson Cryer?”

  “No!” And to his credit, he truly looks shocked by my accusation. “Why the hell would I do that? Everyone who thinks you’re the mom thinks I’m the dad! I’m getting the same weird looks you are.”

  Maybe. But he isn’t getting the calls, and the threats, and the national media onslaught. This is nowhere near as bad for him as it is for me.

  “Jake, no one else knows I took that picture.”

  He frowns. “What does the picture have to—?” Understanding dawns, and his mouth snaps shut.

  “You didn’t recognize it?”

  “I only saw it that once,” he says. “I knew the one on Twitter was similar, but the police could have taken a hundred shots just like it, and without anything to compare it to . . .” He shrugs. “But I swear it wasn’t me.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t believe him, but I do.

  “The police never came for that DNA sample.” He’s whispering, even though we’re alone in this classroom, because that could change any second. It will change, once the first bell rings.

  “Then they probably haven’t figured out it’s your bag yet. I didn’t tell my mom. The reporters started calling, and suddenly everything was crazy.”

  He sits on the edge of the nearest desk. “Did your mom say anything else about the baby? Do they know how it died?”

  “Not yet, but the coroner said she didn’t have any obvious signs of trauma.”

  “She?”

  Jake looks suddenly sad, and I know how he feels. Knowing something specific about the baby made her really real for me too. Made her death more jarring. Even more, somehow, than actually seeing her had.