February 28, Thirty-One Days to Deadline
Tonight, Edie was going to lie to her parents for the second time in her whole life. Dinner was set, and the lamp-tinted lighting of the dining room was already closing in on her as she prepared her words. The lie bubbled up in her cheeks, threatening to spill out of her lips too early.
Time was running low on the lie. She usually loved staring at the retro clock on her parents’ dining room wall with its oddly shaped numbers and hues of orange, but now it just seemed to be mocking her with its insistent tick tick tick.
“Bow your heads and close your eyes.” Edie was stunned by her father’s voice, thunderous and cutting across the room, too caught up in her own thinking.
Her thoughts ran like rapidly unspooling thread as she grabbed her brother’s hand on her left and mother’s on her right.
“Dear Lord, thank you for blessing us with this meal and placing your holy hands over it so that it shall fill us,” he started.
Her eyes wandered around the table and met the people she called her family, each one of their heads dutifully tilted downward.
Her father’s rounded lips spoke with fervor, the wiry black mustache above them moving up and down as he grew more passionate. Even sitting, he was staunch and heavy-gutted. He looked like a child’s drawing of a Southern Baptist preacher.
Light played on her brother Marvin’s clenched hands, his little fingers entwining hers tight like vines as he prayed. He looked as close to their father as any nine-year-old could get. He always got his hair cut just the same as their dad’s. Even as early as five, he took pride in the militaristic straight lines cutting across his neck and down towards his cheeks.
Her mother was gorgeous; the complete opposite of Edie. All sharp lines and golden brown skin. When she laughed, her straight teeth showed. She had deep, rounded, coffee-no-creamer eyes, and greeted new people by holding out both hands as if to say we already know each other, and you can trust me more than anyone else in the entire world. Her bowed head let a single pressed curl fall against her cheek.
Edie caught sight of herself in the mirror above her father’s head. She was unremarkable. She was dark brown, soft, lips like blowing soup cool.
“Dear Lord, please heal the sick and feed the poor. Please allow me to watch over my family and keep them safe. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
Her mother’s hand squeezed tight as Edie listened to her father’s closing words.
“Amen,” they said in unison.
The light tinkling sound of metal scraping against dinner plates filled the room. Edie slid mashed potatoes onto her large plate as she gathered the lie up beneath her tongue.
She thought about her parents’ goodness and how it made it hard to lie to them. They bragged about her good grades at church, took her to all her quiz bowl competitions without complaint, made sure she had all the opportunities to do better than well in all her classes, even getting her a tutor when she got an, according to them, extremely disappointing B+ on a calculus test. They weren’t giving out As? her father had asked incredulously, just before dialing the number of one of the congregation members who taught math at the University of Houston.
“Can I go to Georgia’s to work on a project tonight? It’s due Monday.” Her eyes settled on her plate as she waited for her words to play out. She’d left the lie until the last minute, because her parents were much more likely to say yes to a school emergency. Making sure she had straight As was their priority, even if it meant missing church events sometimes.
Edie’s first lie took place at this table the summer before her junior year. She did it as a test, an experiment doomed to fail. Her parents were strict, but she was fifteen then, a reasonable age to ask for things just out of reach, she thought. She had asked her mother if she could go on a weekend road trip to a water park in San Antonio with a bunch of friends. There was no water park or road trip. She just wanted to go to a concert, make room for the possibility of getting drunk for the first time, and sleep over at a friend’s house thereby avoiding being wasted in front of her parents. It hadn’t worked, which is why she was back here again at the dining table, nervous, hopeful.
“It’s too late,” her father said. The night collapsed violently before her eyes. She hadn’t planned for no. She had to push. She had to do something.
“Please. I-I have to get this done. It’s huge for my grade.” She poked at their weakness, her perfect academic record.
“Gaile?” Her father looked to his wife as if to get a second opinion. Hope began to build itself a makeshift home again in Edie’s head.
Her mother evened her gaze. “What class is it for?”
“Physics. I really need to finish it tonight, because I won’t have time this weekend with the test review.” She thought adding more detail would enhance the quality of the lie and had planned out her words carefully over the past few weeks leading up to Ben’s party. Missing their birthday would be a disaster, so she had planned everything, even mentioning the fake physics project offhand earlier in the week during family dinner.
“Oh, yes. You can go, but you need to ask if you can sleep over. I don’t want you biking home late by yourself.”
Light burst from within her, and it was all she could do to stop from jumping up on the table and screaming in triumph. The lie worked and came with sleepover benefits.
“Okay. Can I go now?” She moved to pick up her plate and scoot her chair away from the table.
“Finish your food,” her father huffed as he scraped his fork across his plate.
“But we have to get as much done as possible before we get too tired.”
“I said it once, Edie.” She began to shovel the potatoes and meat into her mouth with a swiftness. Her mother shot her a critical look, so she slowed down in an attempt to act normal. Her seat couldn’t even get warm before she’d tossed her plate into the sink and gathered up the backpack she’d stuffed full of party clothes to pick from when she got to Georgia’s.
Edie yanked her bike from the junk piled in the corner of her family’s ever cluttered garage and pressed a button on the wall so that the huge metal door would open onto the driveway. Balancing her bike in one hand, she pressed another button on the outside and watched as the garage door came down slowly with achy metal noises. Edie mounter her bike and set off. She felt the quiet of the neighborhood in her breathing, in the wind brushing her cheeks, in her feet as they pedaled around and around. She looked up at the night stars and lost her balance as a few blinked back at her. There was too much pollution to see everything. Her heart raced from all the movement.
“I’m a liar,” she whispered close to her chest.
“I lied,” she screamed, pedaling hard. The wind caught her words and carried them down the sidewalk behind her.
Every time she got to leave her house, air rushed into her lungs like water through a gorge. The open night fell out beneath the wheels of her bike. She was some terrible, shaking particle finally returning to equilibrium. The moon washed her and made the night feel mystic.
Georgia’s house was only a few blocks from hers. She could already see the outline of her body through the curtains of the front window as she biked up to the lawn. Its yellow façade greeted her familiarly. The door flaked white like the underside of an orange peel.
One hand gripping her backpack, Edie balanced the handlebars of her bike as she swung her leg over the side. The wheels tipped over and the bike fell to the lawn. She rushed to the door she knew would be unlocked, already waiting for her.
Soft radio music drifted through the hallway leading to the kitchen. Edie let her finger drag along the mint-green walls as she hummed the tune: something she’d heard before but couldn’t quite place. Pictures lining the hallway walls showed Georgia and her mom, Frankie, in black and white through the years. There was one picture where Frankie glowed twenty-something-years-old and smiling into Georgia’s baby hair. In another, they both wore ski jackets and struggled to smile on a snow-covered mountainside, every picture a small story about how much they liked each other that day. In every single one, Frankie held Georgia like she was holding herself.
Everything about this house pitted itself against Edie’s idea of her own house. She drowned in Frankie and Georgia’s fishbowl world. Their colors and music and fantastical care for each other. She found it all romantic, the way they knew everything about each other.
Edie rounded the corner to see Frankie taking a frozen pasta dinner out of the microwave, Georgia perched on the counter next to her. Frankie floated around the kitchen to grab a paper towel, her movements somehow both clumsy and light in her floral wrap dress. “Edie, how are you?” she asked.
Edie warmed to Frankie’s words.
“I’m good. Just tired from school stuff.” She threw her arms around Georgia and slumped against her body. “They won’t give us a break.”
Georgia laughed. “We have to go get ready, Momma.” She gave Frankie a fast kiss on the cheek.
“Make sure your phones are on, okay?” They both nodded and turned to leave for Georgia’s room.
“Oh, and call me when you get there,” Frankie yelled after them.
They fumbled down the hallway. Edie dumped her bag out on the bed and looked critically at the clothes that spilled out. She held them up against her body. A simple red crop top caught her attention.
“Too much?” Edie asked, holding it up.
Georgia turned away from the mirror where she’d been looking at her own potential outfit on a hanger against her body.
“Too little. In the best way possible.” They laughed and settled into an easy quiet as they put their clothes on.
They’d always been this comfortable with each other. They’d met in middle school, the only two girls in an advanced writing course their school offered. Georgia wrote long stories about Korean girls suspiciously similar to herself falling in love and Edie couldn’t help but ask her for every detail. Does the dad ever find out about Callie’s depression? When the cat runs away, does that mean something? What happens at the end? Georgia answered every question like a professional, refusing to have holes in her stories. Even after the writing class was over for the year, Edie kept reading her work and asking for more chapters printed out on crisp white paper from the library printer. They became close friends over highlighted sentences and words crammed into tiny margins.
They ended up at the same high school, and when Georgia told her she had fallen in and out of love with a girl in a city far away over the summer break before ninth grade, Edie listened as if she were telling another one of her stories, every detail of the utmost importance.
Edie pulled the top over her head and tugged the fabric until it curved around her skin. The straps of the bra she’d been wearing looked silly peeking out under the crop top, so she slid it off beneath the top.
Georgia looked Edie up and down as she tugged at the shirt. “Do you think you’ll ever let Ben meet your parents?”
Edie stopped adjusting the outfit around her body and looked up. “No.”
“Edie,” Georgia urged.
“I know, but it’s not like I don’t want to. It’s my parents. The nonbinary thing.” She frowned at her own words, the weight of them heavy as she slid on her skirt. She suddenly felt cold and fully unprepared for Ben’s birthday party. “Ben said they were fine with it.”
“Well sometimes, people lie when they’re in love,” Georgia muttered, her head stuck in the neck of a tank top with the word LOVER written out in black, a small white bow sewn to the dip of the neckline
“You think Ben is in love with me?” Edie turned to grab her shoes from the bed.
“What? You’ve been dating for like five months.” Georgia pulled her head through a plain white dress and smoothed her hair down with both hands. “Have they not said it?”
“Not yet.” Edie felt herself shrink down to the size of a crumbled straw wrapper at the admission. She slid her earrings in and shoved her feet into her shoes quickly and without much care. She could feel Georgia’s gaze on her back but was too afraid to meet it.
Ben hadn’t told her they loved her yet, because she hadn’t let them. She liked Ben. She liked how they knew everything about her. She liked their freckles and unwillingness to say anything mean towards anyone. She couldn’t love them though. Because loving them meant being exactly what she feared most, a disappointment to her parents. She thought of it as a problem for future Edie.
“It’s okay, E.” Georgia pulled Edie into a quick hug. “Let’s go before the party dies a sad death.”
They slipped out the door past Frankie and started out into the night.