Never have I ever rubbed one out in school,” Tabs said.
I picked up my vodka and orange juice halfway. Was juvie hall a school? Yes and no. I opted for no and put the drink down. We were in Tabs’s room—a pretty nice-size one, meaning her materialistic parents must’ve been doing a good job of keeping up with the Joneses.
“Your turn,” Tabs said.
“Never have I ever thrown up during sex.”
Tabs took a swig of her greyhound. “Like who hasn’t?”
“Me.”
If you’re trying to get to know new friends, this is a great way to go about it! What better way to get to know someone than by learning about their past experiences, no matter how trivial? Tabs’s parents had the Never Have I Ever party-game edition—which provided the statements for you, so you didn’t have to think of any yourself. Mostly of the pretty boring variety—like Never have I ever double-dipped and Never have I ever danced in the rain. The raciest one was Never have I ever gone commando.
We’d decided to go off the reservation and make up our own.
“Your turn,” I said.
“Never have I ever peed in my pants.”
Mom was walking away from me in the motel parking lot. Turning the corner and then gone. Dammit, what did you just fucking do . . . ?
I downed my drink.
Tabs had a poster of Kurt Vile on her wall. Next to one of the Brooklyn Nets. Next to that ubiquitous one of Che Guevara. Her room an odd mix—just like her. We were the only ones in the house—her mom was a tax lawyer and her dad a professional asshole who both worked long hours, so we’d taken our sweet time raiding the liquor cabinet.
“Never have I ever used the same sanitary pad twice.”
“Eww,” Tabs said. “Really?”
“I didn’t.”
“Does anybody?”
Yes. A girl in the first juvie hall, where pads were hard to come by. I stayed quiet.
“Never have I ever sent nudes on Snapchat.”
“Never have I ever been with two guys in one day.”
“Never have I ever had a foursome.”
“Never have I ever been with a friend’s dad.”
We veered into the sex stuff and stayed there. Maybe it was the vodka.
Confession. I might have been sexualized at an early age like that social worker said, but like most things with Jobeth, I’d been playing pretend. Starting way back then. Pretend you like it. Pretend you’re somewhere else—back under the Billy Goats Gruff bridge in that kids’ playground. Or out rowboating on Shanshaw Lake. Or circling Pluto.
Anywhere but in that house. In a bedroom with shit-colored water stains on the wall.
Sex was my personal bartering system. If I did it without trying to run out the front door, or down to the basement, quietly agreed to lie there without their having to strap me to the bed, I got to stay out of that pitch-black pantry. Thanks, Mom and Dad.
If I flashed Mr. Charnow in the shower, I got to live in the house a little longer. Or I would’ve, if his wife hadn’t caught me and sent me straight to juvie hall. On the street, sex sometimes got me fed and clothed and out of the rain. It was something I used when I had to—IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK HERE.
My head was starting to swim. More like a bad dog paddle, in clear danger of going under. I’d never been much of a drinker or a huge druggie—though I’d tried pretty much every one in the book and some that weren’t. I had this fear of losing control—probably because I’d lost every single bit of it at the age of six. Couple that with one more fear. Getting kicked to the curb—it was hard to stay hypervigilant on eighty-proof vodka.
Things seemed safe with Tabs, though, safe enough to blow through two bottles of her parents’ best.
“Never have I ever mixed coke and X.” Tabs’s turn.
I took a drink.
Tabs’s text had suddenly popped up on my iPhone—courtesy of Laurie and the new Verizon Family Plan. Wanna hang?
I’d sent her back a thumbs-up emoji.
She gave me a house tour for laughs, making fun of the furnishings—like My parents saw this in Martha Stewart’s house in some magazine so of course they had to run out and buy it. And This is my parents’ idea of humor—pointing to the TIPS ACCEPTED sign above the liquor cabinet.
I provided a laugh track, but I actually thought the house was pretty impressive. Maybe because the ones I grew up in featured Naugahyde couches, dirty shag carpeting, and pitch-black pantries where you had to bang on the door to be let out.
After we’d tapped the liquor cabinet, we scoured the party-game drawer—Clue, Trivial Pursuit, Boggle.
Never have I ever played Never Have I Ever, Tabs had said.
“Whose turn?” Tabs, starting to slur her words.
“I forget,” I said.
Tabs giggled. “Never have I ever been so drunken.”
“That’s not a word.”
“What do you mean? Tabs got good and drunken.”
“Good and drunk.”
“Who are you, Alex Trebek?”
“I spent a lot of time in libraries.”
“Why?”
“Somewhere to go where they wouldn’t kick me out.”
Tabs was lolling on the carpet in her skinny jeans and Alice Cooper T-shirt. “Jesus . . . the room’s actually spinning,” she said. “Like stop the merry-go-round, I want to get off.”
“Want to stop playing?” I asked.
“No. Never have I ever wanted to stop playing.”
“Okay. So, you go.”
“Little old me?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, let’s see. I got one. Never have I ever pretended to be someone I wasn’t.”
I almost reached for my drink.
“You sure?” Tabs asked. “Like you’re absolutely positive about that?”
My heart was beating faster.
“Yes.”
“Like you never, ever pretended to be someone you weren’t?”
“No.”
“Even when you were like six? You never pretended to be Ariel or Dora the Explorer? Really?”
“Sure. I guess.”
“Buzz. If you’re caught lying, you have to take two drinks. When I press the buzzer, you have to get more buzzed.”
“Huh?” The game was starting to annoy me.
“Them’s the rules.”
“Okay. Fine.” I took two swallows—two small licks of flame.
“What about when you weren’t six?”
“What?”
“When you got older. You never pretended to be someone you weren’t then?”
“I said no.”
“I know what you said . . .”
“I want to stop playing. This game sucks.”
“Never have I ever been a party pooper. Go ahead, you’ve got to take a drink. Because you’re pooping on this party.”
“I’m going home.” I got up—the room was spinning crazily.
“Never have I ever pretended to be a kidnapped girl who came home,” Tabs said.
And things went dark.
A cold compress.
When I was four or five, during one of my mom’s “I’m getting straight” periods—which generally lasted only as long as my periods did later on—I’d come down with the flu. Your forehead feels like I could fry an egg on it, my mom said when she rested her hand on it, but her hand itself felt like cool water, like sticking your head in a playground fountain in the middle of August.
It felt like love. The closest thing to it, anyway. After that, I used to pretend to be sick in the hope I could get her to rest her hand on my head again.
Get up, you’re fine, she’d say, having no patience for me in the middle of the heebie-jeebies or when she was spacing out on the couch with the crystal pipe practically falling out of her hand.
There was a cold compress on my head.
Tabs’s hand was attached to it.
I was on the floor.
“Shit,” Tabs said. “Sorry. Did I do that to you? You scared the living shit out of me.”
I shook my head.
“Too much vodka.”
“Really? Really and truly? It wasn’t what I said to you?”
I shook my head again. My throat felt like sandpaper. I waited for the room to come into focus. I needed my brain to do that right now.
“How did you know?”
Tabs sighed. “I did a search. There’s a face recognition app you can run with someone’s picture—I used one of the pics we took at the mall. The app hits on anything similar. You know, sometimes it fucks up. Sometimes . . . bingo.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d you run a search?”
“I don’t know. A vibe. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, it’s not. I . . . like you. I mean, we’re friends. I’m an asshole.”
“What picture came up?”
Had Becky put that picture online—the one of us sitting on the porch? Laurie had sent her packing with that bullshit DNA story—but maybe Becky had seen right through it. Maybe she’d gone home and posted my picture on some online site, like tacking a wanted poster on the post office wall.
No.
“It was from over two years ago. This family called the Greers? Some local news site.”
The Greers. The ones who’d left the night-light burning in their daughter’s room for more than ten years hoping she’d come back one day. Until she had. Kind of.
“I mean, you were younger,” Tabs said. “But the more I stared at it, the more I realized it was you. And then there were the circumstances . . . I mean, it’d be a super-colossal kind of coincidence that the app would find a hit with another girl who’d been kidnapped and made it home, right?”
I closed my eyes.
“What are you going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Give me a head start, okay? A day. That’s all I’m asking. A day to clear out and then you can tell whoever you want.”
“Why would I tell someone?”
“Because . . . ’cause . . . I’m a fucking imposter.”
“So?”
“So when people find out about me, they usually don’t keep it to themselves.”
“I’m not people.”
“So you’re not going to tell anybody?”
“Why the fuck would I? I told you about hacking into the NRA, right? Are you telling anyone?”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just is. I’m pretending to be someone’s kidnapped kid.”
“I’m pretending to be a law-abiding citizen. See, we’re even.”
I looked at her. At my first real what . . . confidante . . . coconspirator . . . friend?
I’d go with friend.
Other than the one on Facebook, that is.
Are you being careful?
“Don’t you even want to know how it started? How many times? Why the fuck I do it?”
“Of course. Do I appear to you to be an unintellectually curious dullard? Why . . . you feel like telling me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I do.”