Liar

Lisa’s room was small but artful and Cassie coveted it. Her own room seemed that of a young girl still—the walls papered in images of red and pink giraffes and elephants, were thumb-tacked with posters of her heroes—William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy—yellowed and peeling at the edges from age. Her bed was a mess of stuffed animals and the floor a wasteland of rumpled clothing.

The floor of Lisa’s room was pale blue shag and the walls, a fine faux wood panel upon which hung matted and framed drawings and sketches from Lisa’s own hand. The lake at sunset. Their mother’s face in profile. An oak tree. A study of their dead father as a child—wearing a large hat, riding a white horse.

Cassie thought the pictures were nice, though they seemed hollow to her. As though their bones were exposed, their hearts beating too wildly through chalky ribs. They seemed desperate. But the teachers said that Lisa was gifted in art and she was meant for art school but she had not gotten enough aid and so worked at their stepfather’s five-and-dime store instead. Her plan was to save money, keep working on her art, and apply again in a year.

“I’m going to get out of here, Cassie,” is what she said, sitting on the shag, back leaning up against the box spring. “They won’t keep me here.”

And Cassie had nodded and cajoled. Agreed with her sister that, yes, she would escape and become an artist in New York City. But Cassie was secretly glad that her sister was kept back. Glad that she would not be going away. Cassie had feared being the one left behind to watch and listen to their mother and stepfather as they talked and ate with the air singing in and out their noses, lips smacking, juice gathering in their gullets. Had feared being the one left to hear her mother call out her stepfather’s name in the night behind their closed door.

After dinner, they would sit together in Lisa’s room and listen to Tom Petty or Bruce Springsteen over and over. Or they’d put on something older—something that would make them sad, like Cat Stevens and think about their father but not talk about him.

Instead they would talk about how things were with Lisa and her boyfriend, Scott. Recently, Lisa had admitted that Scott told her that she was very good at something. Very good. And then she had whispered, “Sex.” They had never used that word before—together, like that, as sisters. Cassie was embarrassed, titillated.

Her sister was good at sex.

Scott liked it when she was on top, Lisa said. He liked it when she reached her hand around and held his balls in her hand. He liked to put his penis between her breasts.

Cassie tried to picture these scenarios—her sister, hair wild and loose, straddling Scott, the farm boy. But all she could see was herself. Her hand reaching for Scott’s balls. Her breasts enfolding his penis.

Cassie and Scott had never talked much but she had known the sound of his mouth for years—his mouth on her sister’s mouth as they made out on the couch on Saturday nights while she sat in the barcalounger trying to watch television. Often Cassie would hear him moan as he smacked lips with her sister. On those nights she could not wait for him to go and for it to be a cool, crisp Sunday morning when she could get up alone, untethered. She would make Pop Tarts, which she would eat while watching reruns of Star Trek.

“He thinks you’re cute,” Lisa said and got up to flip the record. “Real cute.” Cassie blushed then, not wanting to admit that she knew for a fact that Scott thought so. He had smiled at her once. Looked her up and down and nodded. They looked very much alike, after all, she and her sister. Except Cassie was taller, lankier, less womanly, which both worried and pleased her.

Cassie had never had a boyfriend like Lisa had. Instead, she had Mr. Whiting her Chemistry and then Physics teacher whose dick she often sucked in the room behind the lab after school. He had once asked her to take her clothes off just so he could look at her. She stripped to her underwear and stood sock-footed on the cool Terrazzo tile with her back to the crusty beakers and large, soapstone sinks, as he examined her. “You are pretty,” he said, as if to convince himself. “A pretty girl.”

Cassie justified these moments by telling herself that Mr. Whiting was more like a friend than a teacher. He was into the same stuff she was, like Star Trek and the new Twilight Zone movie that was being made. They mourned together when the helicopter crashed on set, killing the star of the movie.

“It may be the biggest tragedy of our times,” Mr. Whiting said to her as they stood side-by-side and read the newspaper account. Cassie nodded. Yes.

She was his lab assistant for extra credit. It seemed a great item to add to her college applications. That’s how he pitched it to her anyway, “You know how hard it is for girls in science? Well, this will give you that extra edge, Cass.”

And she had been grateful but not so grateful that she went to the back room easily. It had taken some work at first. “Come on, Cass,” Mr. Whiting said, index fingers tucked in his pockets, “I won’t hurt you.” But then, after that first time, his cool penis in her warm mouth, his hand on her head, caressing and pushing down, it had gotten easier. She’d grown to like it. It made her feel special. She felt an alien on a strange planet. One that James T. Kirk would find and fall in love with.

*

The temperature had dropped overnight from the low forties to thirties. It was snow weather and a few flakes were swirling along the sidewalk in front of the IGA.

Ever since they banned cigarettes in the grocery store, their mother refused to go shopping anymore. If Cassie and Lisa wanted to eat, she said, it was up to them to get the food. They were shopping not just for regular food but for food for the annual Christmas Eve party their mother and stepfather held every year at their house for the five-and-dime employees. Lisa led the way and Cassie followed behind with the cart. The aisles were jammed with mothers and children, free from school for the holiday.

Cassie wanted to get a few bags of chips and call it a day. “These people are such scrounges anyway,” she said. But Lisa was insistent on her menu: clam chowder, mincemeat pie, and pigs in blankets. Cassie had a feeling it was because Martin was going to be there.

He was new to the five-and-dime, hired in for the holidays, and Cassie had hoped that maybe he wouldn’t be there but she knew he would. He was older, in his twenties, and had a mustache that made him, Cassie thought, look like an impostor. She had never known what he looked like without it, but it seemed to be hiding something about him. Her mother called him a flirt. He flirted with the female customers. He flirted with Cassie. And, especially, he flirted with Lisa when she worked her shift. Cassie had taken to making faces behind his back whenever she saw him.

A bearded man in a stained T-shirt started following them in Baking supplies. Whenever Lisa stopped to reach for something on the shelves, he would stop as well, pick up a box or a bag and read the ingredients. In Canned Goods, when Lisa had crouched down to grab some soup, he stooped next to her, flipped open a penknife and sliced a thread from the bottom of her sweater. Lisa froze until he held the thread up to her, offered it to her like a gift.

No one had ever done that for Cassie.

*

The party had been going for an hour and Cassie had already had two glasses of wine. It was packed not only with people who worked at the five-and-dime now but past employees as well. “Don’t these people have homes?” she whispered to Lisa as they filled the chip bowls. “I mean, you’d think they’d want to be with their families or something.”

“Don’t be such a brat,” Lisa said and tucked her hair behind her ears. Cold air from the open front door swept down the hallway as Martin entered the party. Lisa’s expression changed from placid to delighted as he shook off his peacoat and headed towards them.

Cassie moved away, then, not wanting to hear his voice and watched them from a distance. Lisa and Martin, mixing drinks at the breakfast nook and then laughing over a bowl of pretzels at the butcher block. She’d seen Scott standing alone, watching them, too. Seen his eyes skim up and down Lisa, as though she were a Ford F-150 he coveted. His face in that moment looked just like their stepfather’s had when he pinched Cassie’s nub of a breast at age 12 and said her mother ought to get her a bra. The eyes were black and thoughtless, like a dead animal, like a bird about to peck the dead eyes out of a dead, dead animal.

She understood his unhappiness, his anger, as he watched Lisa with Martin. She felt it herself. Lisa shouldn’t be laughing with Martin; Lisa belonged to them.

Cassie wanted to get Scott this message without speaking—telepathically. To pinch him in the neck the way Spock would and let him know what she was thinking. He turned to her. Met her eyes—his gray to her blue and smiled. It seemed like it would be a nice smile, to an outsider.

Then he was before her, without her realizing that enough time had passed for him to make the trip across the room. Perhaps the transporter had been utilized, breaking him down to his molecules and shuttling him across the room.

“Let’s go smoke,” he whispered in her ear, a hand on her elbow. She’d never smoked with him without Lisa before. She’d had her first joint with Lisa when she was twelve and had done her first line of coke with Lisa and Scott, in the backseat of his Monte Carlo the year prior. It felt wicked and so she wanted to do it. To show Lisa that she and Scott could have something private, too, like buddies, like people who loved her and were pissed off.

Cassie looked to where Lisa was leaning against the breakfast nook, Martin practically spooning her from the side, and realized that the warmth she was feeling was Scott’s hot breath in her ear.

The hair on her arms was on fire. The wine made her feel godless and elated. This gone-right-to-the-headness had never happened before in the history of wine. Never happened in the history of Cassie. Never, in fact, happened in the history of Cassie and wine as a collective. Never.

“Okay,” she said and followed him out.

Outside, below the stairs that led up to their house, an apartment above the store, Scott leaned his tall body into her and opened his wide, warm mouth onto hers. She felt those same smacking lips, smacking but this time it felt different. His tongue inside her mouth was a soft animal. Not so unlike Mr. Whiting’s penis, lying there and waiting for her to act, to bring it to life.

It was her own kiss. Too big and too generous. Not what she had expected. Mr. Whiting’s kisses had been tense. He had been alternately too terse with his mouth or too sloppy and greedy. But this kiss, this kiss was love and it was not meant for her but it was the most pure kiss. Because it was not just Scott kissing her but about the three of them kissing together, binding her to her sister, perfectly.

It was the kiss of a brother to a sister, to a sister, nothing more. It was a long gulp of wine burning down her throat. Until she realized it was all about giving back, getting even and then she moved into it and then pushed away, her hands on his chest. And when they went back up the stairs to the party, no one had realized they were gone, Lisa still frozen in the same laugh she had been. Martin still attached to her side.

It wasn’t until Lisa had left Martin to go to the bathroom that Cassie had a chance to say anything. She crowded in behind her sister.

“Hey,” Lisa said, pushing against Cassie. “Wait your turn, kid.”

It was something about “kid.” Something about the way it rolled off Lisa’s tongue so easily, pushing Cassie back and away. She felt something, then, moving across her back and into her armpits. It was that feeling she had in class sometimes when she knew the right answer and she knew that she knew but wasn’t sure whether she should raise her hand or not or whether she would have the opportunity to be called upon and to then say what she knew and receive the praise she deserved.

Cassie said, “He kissed me.”

“Who?” Lisa said. “Santa?”

“Scott kissed me.”

Lisa’s eyes turned white then. White-gold dead. Cassie felt them slice through her skull and reach down through her neck into her vertebrae, and slink into her heart, stopping it completely. “Are you sure?” is what Lisa said, but Cassie knew she was really saying, “You’re a liar.”

She pushed out of the room then and out the door, down the stairs. She was vaguely aware of people calling her name. Of Scott. Of Martin. Her mother’s soft-voiced, “Babe, where you going?” But she was gone. In the shed, she found her bike, creaky from the cold nights but still serviceable. She jumped on it and veered onto the snow-dusted road. She took her hands off the handles, and coasted down the hill to the lake.

Her sister thought she was a liar.

It was not something Kirk would have ever thought of Spock. And if he did, he never would have let Spock know. There would have been integrity.