Little Black Lies Read Free

my skirt?”
    â€œWhat? No, I …”
    She spins around and I stand there like an idiot. As she runs up the remaining steps, I find myself staring up at her impertinent ass. Apparently not even days-of-the-week panties can keep this girl in line. Just before she pulls open the massive wooden door, I see she has SUNDAY IS THE DAY OF REST written in green across her perfect bottom.
    It’s Tuesday.

chapter 2
the little zygote that could
    Bentley Girl vanishes inside the school, leaving behind the zingy scent of tangerines, fresh wool, and something else I cannot quite decipher. Acid reflux? Bad dreams? I pause for a moment on the steps and try to calm myself before going in.
    My parents will never admit it, but I was born about a decade too early. All because of a cat who decided to nap behind the left rear wheel of my grandmother’s Toyota. The horror of having killed an innocent creature made her forty-five minutes late in arriving home from work, giving Charlie and Tina just enough time to push their usual after-school routine (necking until they heard her car engine in the driveway) three bases too far. By the time Grandma pulled up in front of the old brick bungalow at 67 Norma Jean Drive, I was a freshly pollinated zygote clinging to a uterine wall, waiting to force two randy teenagers into a marriage that never should have happened.
    My untimely birth blurred any focus my parents might have had on the pursuit of education and profitable careers. After I was born, my mother worked nights to free up her days to care for me, eventually working her way up to head chef of a French restaurant in a neighboring town. Dedicated father that he was, still is; passionate car nut that he was, still is; Dad snatched up the first job that promised decent health benefits and summers off to tinker with the crotchety engine of his VW love of the time—an orange two-door Karmann Ghia with the world’s smallest backseat. He became the custodian of a middle school in the southwest corner of Massachusetts.
    That he never aspired to more, that he rendered all his self-schooling useless by doing nothing constructive with it, was something my mom held up as proof that he was lazy. Unmotivated. Unfair to his family. It drove Mom crazy. More than crazy. It drove her far, far away to a cooking school in France.
    My entire existence is an accident. Had one cat felt marginally more energetic, my fingers wouldn’t be wrapped around the cold metal handle of Anton High School’s front door right now.
    The foyer, more like that of a shopping mall than a school, with escalators and koi pond surrounded by tropical plants, is about four stories high and is capped with skylights that offer peeks at the clear September sky. All the doors and window frames are reddish brown wood, as are the trophy-filled cabinet cases along the far wall. The floor is a mosaic of teensy colored tiles intricately arranged in the pattern of a warm sunburst.
    The office is just to my left and appears to be bursting with activity. With my bag pressed tight against my chest, I shuffle over to the counter and say to the closest secretary, “Hi. I’m new here.”

    Mrs. Pelletier, the vice principal, wraps a measuring tape around my waist and cinches it tight, making me catch my breath. The plastic is icy against my shivering flesh. As she bends over to get a good look at the numbers, several strands of pearls too white to be real clatter forward from her neck and I get a noseful of hairspray from her floppy bun. “Twenty-four inches.” She scribbles it down on a chart. “My waist was twenty-four inches once. Four children and two husbands ago.”
    She motions for me to follow her into the storage room, a big closet lined with metal shelving that boasts every kind of school supply you could ask for. Zillions of spanking-new pens, highlighters, and staples. Towering stacks of textbooks and cellophane-wrapped packages of blank