be honest, I don’t think anyone cares. Girls look good in whatever, guys not so much, maybe if I wasn’t a guy I wouldn’t feel the way I do, I don’t know. All I know is Lie looked amazing in the lacy red set and the black version too, and she ended up buying them. While she was in the changing room she had said that the secret on the website was true, she knew because she was one of those girls. “It’s scary to think what could happen next. But its also kinda fun” she had said.
“Are you going to masturbate to the mental images of me in my underwear tonight?” she said as she took a sip of her wine while I choked on mine. We came for a drink in the local bar- the bartender really likes Lie, I could tell by the way he filled her glass to the very brim. “I’m just joking with you, but you know we can talk about that stuff, you don’t know me yet, but you will, and you will learn that I’m a very freeing person. You can talk to me about anything. So what’s the deal, why are you here so late?”
“It’s a long story”
“We’ve got nothing but time”
“Well I guess because my sister is president or whatever, I got a place”
“Well why were you looking for a place two months after everyone else?”
“I just needed a change of scenery I think. Where I’m from its like everyone’s a ghost and everything is super-glued together, I don’t know how to explain it”
“I get it”. We held hands on the walk back to campus, I like the way her hand feels in mine. I use to think, before I actually ever held a hand, that all hands would feel the same in yours, because they’re just hands. This is entirely not true- one time I held this girls hand back home and it was horrible, her hand was dry and wrinkly and hard, not even my dad’s hands felt like that. Her fingers were also too long and her palm too thin, I could not wait to say goodbye to her, but the bus didn’t come for ages. Then this other time I held another girls hand from back home, but it wasn’t back home, and it was so lovely I could have cried right there. See her hand was soft and warm and a little sweaty and it kind of shot electricity up my arm, I swear I was receiving super powers from her or something. It was a cold February night but I forgot about everything, especially when I looked over to her and she had this casual toothy smile. No one smiles casually with their teeth unless they’re so comfortably happy. I was.
Later that evening my sister came into my room while Lie and everyone else was hanging out with me. It was so nice, I was just playing them some of my music and they were trying to guess what it was and when it was first played and stuff like that. They complimented my music and I think that’s the best compliment to give someone. “Hey, just wanted to see how you were finding things?” my sister, her name is Naoko, said. She was always pretty; I honestly cannot remember a time when she wasn’t, even when I made her cry when I accidentally cut some of her hair. She was crying and all the adults paused before they comforted her because they were taken aback by how cute she was. She kind of cried with big open puppy dog eyes and puffed her cheeks a bit and clenched her fist by her side. “Glad to see you’ve made some new friends” she said like a true Student President. “Hey, Ms Prez, tells us about this website, you get to the bottom of it yet?” Lie asked pointing at her with the wine bottle. “The IT technicians have been working on taking it down but have not succeeded at this moment in time” it was funny how she switched into president mode, I had never seen it until now, “I cannot confirm or deny any information in regards to the website at this moment in time, however, I can assure you that everyone is going to be okay”. That was a funny thing to say. Naoko lifted up her right foot and looked at me as if to say hurry up, and I as fast as I could turned and tapped her foot with mine. It was a thing we did, we couldn’t leave a room we were both in without doing this. “We should have dinner some time okay” I kind of heard as she walked away.
The next morning I discovered that Will Wiseman, the boy whose secret was revealed on that website, lived four doors from me. I learnt this as I was walking down the hall early, around 6am, to go for a jog and noticed a puddle under that door. As I got closer I knew what it was. The metallic smell filled my lungs and clenched my jaw. It was blood. I called my sister, who called the appropriate people, and eventually I learnt that the evening before Will Wiseman talked to Billie Doughty on the phone. She said she didn’t want to do this anymore, she said he wasn’t worth it and he wouldn’t change. He said he would, and they were honest mistakes and the girls meant nothing to him. I couldn’t look away from the crimson puddle that looked thick and rich. I couldn’t even move. I couldn’t even itch my wrists.
3
I woke up the next day and checked the website straight away, I knew it was practically impossible, but I was worried one of my secrets would be up there, even though I didn’t know what it could be. In fact, there was a new secret and it didn’t belong to me, it belongs to a boy named Noah Fletcher. The secret was that the water in his expensive water bottle wasn’t water, but vodka mixed with still lemonade. I didn’t think this was a major secret, nothing to the calibre of the previous. Apparently Noah was a perfect student and had some of the best grades in the year, what did it matter what he used as fuel? He was in my maths class, it was strange because a Council member ran the class for the first ten minutes before Ms. Sarry came and took over, and shortly after that someone came and took Noah away. He didn’t have a bottle with him, he looked very ‘on edge’, I don’t like saying that because I don’t like the imagery but he did look it.
After maths I had English and both Lie and Niche were in my class, and it was a lot of fun, even though Niche kept raising her hand and saying how she disliked this male character and that male character and how they were problematic. I sometimes think what it feels like to be a girl, if I would see the world differently and even books. I think maybe being a girl would be easier than being a boy, but I’ve been told they both have their challenges.
I’ve never had lunch with someone, let alone a group of people, but there we were, all my new friends, eating the subpar food and talking about school. “Okay, look guys this guy is for real and real serious about this shit, we need to locate him and neutralise him” even with a cheesy chip in her hand Lie’s threatening factor was not reduced. “Look we’re a shady bunch, the shadiest bunch in the year for sure, so before long one of us is going to be targeted. I don’t know what the end game is for this guy- Will Wiseman and Noah Fletcher are unrelated targets. And Will is fucking dead, even though the Student Council are trying to keep that on the low”. Lie looked us all in the eyes as she spoke and added weight behind her words- I never knew people like her existed. Halfway through lunch a girl came over and sat down, she didn’t have a tray of food, but she did have a delicious smelling bag, “and this” Lie said looking to me while gesturing to the new girl, “this is Mittsu, call her Mitty or Mittens or Flowerchild or whatever the fuck you want, she’s with us, she’s pretty cool I guess for a film student and all”. I nodded and smiled and she did the same, flashing a peace sign back my way. I’m not sure if her cheeks were naturally as rosy as they were or if it was makeup, but they were indeed the rosiest cheeks I had encountered. They were the only things about her that looked real and stable and just there. Her hair was so blonde it was almost like sunshine and you couldn’t look at it for too long. Her eyes were a misty blue, they reminded me of the time I went to the beach on a foggy day and an old man sat there in a beat-up chair reading a batter book. Her clothes were so colourful it was as though she was the walking colouring-book of a child who cared nothing for lines and order. She did not look real to me, like a dream person who feels familiar but you’re sure you’ve never seen them before. The kind of dream person you wake up from and spend the whole morning out of sync as she washes over you. “So my short film I’ve been working on is finally being screened tonight, all of you, room 83, eight o’clock”.
It started with a man in a bar. He orders a whiskey and lights a cigarette. Then this girl, like fourteen maybe, comes up to him and dri
nks his drink and he starts talking to her real smiley like, which is weird cause when you first see him he doesn’t look like the smiley type. Then he goes to the toilet. He washes his hands, and then his face and he just stares at the mirror for a bit- pulling and stretching his skin. Then he just punches it, the mirror. Right where his right eye was. He puts a shard in his pockets and goes back to the girl all smiley. They drink and drink but the camera ever so slowly pans down. We see his hands in the pocket of his beige pants, and there’s a small speck of blood. The fabric sucks it up and the speck becomes a dot and then a patch and then blood if just flowing down his leg. The camera pans back up and we can see their faces again and they’re laughing about something that probably wasn’t funny. There are more empty glasses on the table with the ice melting gradually. Then it cuts to a close-up of the girl, I think she says something. Then a hand, the man’s hand, caresses her cheek. She has his blood on her now. Her smile gets even bigger and her eyes wrinkle at the edges.
Lie, Mitty