Page 66 of Jar of Hearts
Fucking tell her!
But the words wouldn’t come. Instead, Geo heard herself say, “I can call around. If I catch up with her, I’ll tell her to call home.”
Whoever said lying was hard was so, so wrong. Lying was easy. Lying was like a hot knife slicing through room-temperature butter.Lying was a bunch of words strung together in a pretty sentence designed to make the other person feel like everything was fine.
Telling the truth, however, was impossible.
They said their good-byes and hung up. Geo’s leather Day-Timer, containing the phone numbers of all her friends, was sitting on her nightstand. She would have to call them all, ask if they’d seen or heard from Angela, ask if they knew where she might be.
Because that’s what liars did. They lied. And then they lied some more to protect those lies.
She got up off the bed, looking down when she felt something small and pebblelike underneath her foot. It was a cinnamon heart candy, an escapee from the near-empty jar on her bedside table. The gift from Calvin. Looking down, it resembled a little splotch of blood on the cream-colored carpet.
Her stomach turned. She was not going to make it to the bathroom. She reached for her small trash can and threw up into it, heaving painfully, as there wasn’t much left in her stomach after vomiting the night before. Clutching the can, she made her way down the hall to the bathroom. She was horrified to find her dress on the bathmat, lying in a crumpled heap where she’d left it. She snatched it up. Through the bathroom window, she could hear the lawn mower still going strong. Her dad was doing the backyard now. He’d be out there for another twenty minutes.
She stuffed the dress and bathmat into the trash can, on top of the vomit, and headed downstairs to the kitchen, making a beeline for the door to the garage. The cement floor was cold and dusty under her bare feet as she stuffed the trash can into the larger blue bin, piling other garbage bags on top of it. Then she headed back to her room to call her friends, exactly as she’d promised Candace Wong she would do.
It wasn’t like she had made one monstrous decision to lie. It was a series of small decisions and a series of small lies, but together, they were growing into a mountain.
The police rang the doorbell shortly after dinner. Geo’s knees went weak at the sight of the two uniformed officers. She led them into the living room to where her father was finishing up the pizzathey’d ordered. Walter knew Angela’s mother had called earlier and was concerned, but he also knew his daughter’s best friend had a reputation for being a bit of a party girl. His theory was that Angela had met a boy she hadn’t told her parents about, and Geo hadn’t said anything to the contrary.
As she spoke to the officers, Geo kept calm. But on the inside, she was screaming. If the cops suspectedanything, she would tell the truth. She would.
“I got drunk last night,” she said to them. She didn’t have to look at her father to know that his face would be a mask of shock and disapproval. He’d never known her to drink, because she hardly ever had. “I didn’t mean to, but I hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, and there was fruit at the bottom of the punch barrel—”
“You never eat the fruit,” one of the cops said, the younger of the two. He wore a rueful smile, and his name tag readVAUGHN. “I’ve learned that the hard way.”
The other cop, only slightly older, glared at him. His name tag readTORRANCE. If there was ever a good cop/bad cop situation, this was it, and these two were perfectly cast. Torrance was the ass, Vaughn was the one who was nice to you and got you talking.
“Keep going,” Officer Torrance said to her.
“I didn’t feel well. I wanted to go home, so I went to find Ang. We’d gone to Chad’s together after the game. She was with Mike Bennett, and they were… close. She’d had a bit to drink, too. She seemed comfortable where she was, so I said good-bye and headed out.”
“You’re only sixteen,” Torrance said, his face like stone. “You girls drink often?”
“Not at all,” Geo said, feeling a bit defensive, despite the fact that she had no right to be. Her father’s lips were pressed into a thin line; he wasn’t impressed. “I don’t even like alcohol, and Ang only drinks if absolutely everybody else is. She’s not the kind of girl who needs to drink to have a good time.”
“Keep going,” Torrance said.
“That’s it. I ran into my friend Kaiser on the way out and wetalked for a few minutes. Then I walked home by myself, was home before midnight. I was feeling pretty terrible. I got sick before I went to bed.”
She couldn’t help but think about her dress, currently covered in last night’s evidence, stuffed into a vomit-filled trash can inside the garbage bin in the garage. Maybe the cops would sense something fishy about her story, demand to see what she was wearing last night. Maybe they’d find the dress in the garage.
If they did, she would tell the truth.
But they didn’t ask. They didn’t seem suspicious at all. They questioned her father instead, who confirmed—somewhat guiltily—that he’d worked all night at the hospital and wasn’t aware that his daughter had come home drunk.
“And you said the last time you saw Angela she was with Mike Bennett at Chad Fenton’s house?” the younger officer asked.
“Yes.” She wondered if he was repeating the question to try and trap her in a lie. She had left Chad’s alone—Kaiser, if asked, could vouch for that, along with a dozen other people—but surely someone had seen Angela leave a few minutes later and catch up to Geo on the street.
If someone did, and they asked her about it, she would tell the truth.
But again, they didn’t ask. Instead, the older officer said, “Angela have a boyfriend her parents don’t know about? She ever say anything to you about running away?”
Is that what they thought? That was the direction they were going in? Geo glanced at her father, who seemed mildly triumphant that they were echoing his own theory.
“If she has a boyfriend other than Mike, she didn’t say anything to me,” she said, and it was the first completely truthful thing she’d offered all day. “As for the running away, I don’t know how many friends of hers you’ve talked to already, but Ang has a lot going for her. I think running away is for people who don’t like their lives. Ang loved hers.”
