Wagering the Truth
In my hand I hold the two and four of clubs, the seven of spades, the jack of diamonds, and the ace of hearts. My best bet is to keep the ace and try for high pair. I toss the other cards down and announce that I’ll be drawing four. Xander draws two. That’s not a good sign.
I deal to him, then me, arranging the new cards in my hand.
I still have nothing.
Xander puts down three sixes.
I cringe.
Why didn’t I just agree to play go fish? Why did I have to suggest poker?
I show him my garbage hand and he rubs his palms together like a villain in a Bond movie.
“Aha. First question is mine. Okay, I’ll go easy on you.”
My muscles relax a bit.
“Who is Lottie?”
I nearly choke on my own premature relief. “That’s an easy one?”
He looks surprised. “Is that not an easy one?”
“No!”
He twists his mouth thoughtfully. “Okay, fine. I’ll try something else. Where are you flying from?”
I exhale loudly. “Atlanta.”
“Why?”
“Nuh-uh.” I shake my head. “That was a new question. You have to win another hand.”
He smirks. “Clever girl.”
He deals the next hand. I get stuck with trash again. I try for a straight but fail miserably. Xander lays down a pair of nines. “Why were you in Atlanta?”
I suck in a sharp breath. “My dad lives there.”
“So your parents are divorced?”
I press my lips together and raise my eyebrows.
“C’mon!” he whines. “Your answers have to be longer than one sentence.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “I don’t remember that being part of the rules.”
“Well, it is now.”
“You can’t just change the rules.”
He stops to think about that for a second, then gathers up the cards and stuffs them back into the box. “You’re right. Let’s just go back to the party.”
I grab the deck from him and start shuffling. “Fine. Whatever. Yes, my parents are divorced. It happened when I was twelve.”
Xander opens his mouth to ask a question. I cut him off. “And I don’t know if it was messy because I wasn’t there. They shipped me off to my grandparents’ house for the summer. When I got back, my dad had moved out and it was done.” I glare at him. “Happy, Dr. Hale?”
This title seems to make him anything but happy. I can almost see the way it shuts him down. I really need to win a hand.
I deal the cards. This time, I’m confident I’ll win. I have a pair of aces. I keep them and draw three, hoping to secure my victory with a third ace, but no such luck. Xander lays down two pair—jacks and sixes.
My mouth drops when I see them. “What the hell? Is this a trick deck?”
“You shuffled,” he points out.
“Did you count the cards to make sure they’re all there?”
“Okay, sore loser,” he says, his mood seeming to lighten a bit. “Next question. Have you always lived in San Francisco?”
I stare down at my loser aces. “No. We used to live in Portland. We moved ten months ago.”
“Why did you—” Xander starts to say, but this time he stops himself. He grabs the deck and shuffles.
I know what question comes next. And I know I’m not ready to answer it.
But I suppose that’s not up to me. That’s up to the universe. The universe that’s never liked me. That’s been dealing me shitty hands for the past year. Maybe even the past eighteen years.
I pick up my five cards and my throat starts to tighten.
This hand makes my first hand look like solid gold.
Xander draws one card—which means he’s either going for a straight, a flush, or a full house—none of which are good news for me. I scrap all five cards and try again.
When he deals me a new hand, I don’t even bother to look. Looking won’t change them. It’ll only draw out the agony longer.
Xander lays down another two pair. I hold my breath and flip my cards.
In my epic, second chance do-over, the universe has dealt me a seven, a four, a nine, a jack, and a king. All hearts.
Xander lets out a low whistle. “Yikes. I guess that means I’m up.”
The funeral was one week after the accident. They were going to take my beautiful, bubbly, vivacious friend and bury her in the dirt. It was the most unfitting ending for Lottie that I could ever imagine.
I refused to go.
For three days my mom brought me dress after dress, presumably thinking that my decision to attend was only a matter of finding the right clothes. That was so like my mom. Making the whole conversation about a dress. Rather than what it really was.
I hadn’t left the house since the accident.
I’d barely left my bedroom.
The shock had worn off and all that was left was the numbness.
To be honest, I missed the shock. It felt like something. It had shape and meaning and definition. The numbness was a vast, infinite void with no entrance and no exit that you could feasibly float around in forever.
The service was scheduled to begin at eleven in the morning. My mom came in at ten fifteen, dressed in a wool, gray pencil dress and matching coat. She had one more contender in her arms. A last-ditch effort to convince me to bear witness to the most horrific sight imaginable: my best friend being lowered into the cold, unforgiving ground.
She held up the dress. This one was navy with a wrap tie.
“How cute is this?” my mom asked.
I rolled over and blinked at her in disbelief. My best friend was dead, and she thought I gave a shit about looking cute?
“Everyone is going to wonder where you are,” she prodded.
I shrugged. “So let them.”
“Funerals are for the living. For saying good-bye.”
“Good for them.”
I watched my mom struggle. I watched all the things she wanted to say but couldn’t flash across her face.
I needed her to say something real. Something not taken straight out of a textbook for grief. But she couldn’t do that. So she stuck to what she knew.
“Lottie would have wanted you there.”
I rolled back over and faced the wall. I’d had a lot of time to contemplate that wall, and I wasn’t finished.
The truth was, she had no idea what Lottie would have wanted.
None of us did.
Lottie was an enigma. That’s what made her Lottie. In fact, if I had to bet, I would say Lottie would have wanted us all to skip the funeral, because funerals are sad and depressing and boring and good lord, why are you putting me in the goddamn ground? I want to fly!
My mom left without another word, and I curled my body around my phone, incessantly turning the screen on and off to check the time. After Googling about funerals the night before, I’d determined that services usually last about one hour before the coffin is lowered into the large, gaping chasm.
I counted the minutes that Lottie was still on this earth, and not buried six feet under it.
When I couldn’t bear to count anymore, I stood up and rummaged around in my bottom dresser drawer until I found the birthday gift Lottie had given me only three months earlier.
I slipped the Doctor Who case over my phone and turned it round and round in my hand, examining the blue Tardis from all sides. It was a hideous thing. Why would anyone choose a bulky blue police box as their phone cover?
But it was the one thing I knew for sure that Lottie would have wanted.
I turned on the phone again and scrolled absently through the pages and pages of apps. How did my phone get to be such a mess? How long had I been haphazardly installing apps without bothering to care where they were? How did I ever find anything in here before?
All of a sudden, I didn’t know how I could live like this. I didn’t know how I would survive this chaos.
I spent the next thirty minutes Googling phone organization tips, deleting unused apps, and sorting everything else into appropriately named folders. I organized and reorganized and sorted and resorted until everything had a place and a purpose. Productivity, health, social, media, travel, entertainment.
When I was done, my phone was clean, but my life still felt like a mess.
And Lottie was buried in the ground.
I opened the text message app, which I’d placed front and center on the home screen, so it was the first thing I saw when I turned on my phone.
Lottie’s last text to me shone bright and vibrant against the white backdrop of the screen.
One unread message.
It had been a week since it arrived. A week since she pushed Send, turned the key in the ignition, and drove right to her death.
10:05 a.m.
10:05 a.m.
10:05 a.m.
My fingers trembled over the screen. Of course, I wanted to read the message. But then I thought of Lottie in the coffin and the coffin in the ground and the dirt filling the hole, filling her mouth until she could no longer speak. Until she could no longer say anything to me ever again.
My trembling hand fell to my side.
I wouldn’t read it. I couldn’t read it. Because all I could think was:
This is the last thing Lottie will ever say to me. As long as that’s alive, she’s alive.
And then, right there, sitting alone in my bedroom, while the community of Portland, Oregon, tossed ceremonial dirt on my best friend’s grave, Dead Lottie spoke to me for the very first time.
And she said, “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, Ryn.”
I take my time selecting my first question. It needs to be a good one. Because who knows how long it will take for the universe to deal me winning cards again? But the pressure of picking the best question is too much, so I just go with the first one I can think of.
“Who was on the phone before? When I found you in the concourse?”
I watch Xander’s body wilt as though this is the subject he was dreading most. That either means I picked the worst possible question or the best one.
“Right,” he says, emboldening himself. “Okay.” He takes a breath. “That was my parents’ publicist.”
The answer takes me by surprise. And also relieves me. I just assumed the worst. That he was talking to a girlfriend.
Why would that be the worst?
The question pops into my head immediately, and I immediately dismiss it. It’s not my turn to answer the questions anymore. It’s my turn to ask them.
It appears Xander is going to stop there, so I give him the same look he gave me. “No one-sentence answers. New rule.”
He chuckles. “Karma’s a bitch, huh?”
I just smile.
He hesitates, selecting his words carefully. “Something happened. Something that is going to deeply impact the sales of my parents’ new book, which just released this week. The one you were holding in the bookstore.”
I think about the news article I saw on Troy’s phone earlier. “Is this about your expulsion?” I ask.
The shock on his face lasts only a moment before fading away. I wonder if he’s used to people knowing more about him than he knows about them. I imagine, with parents like that—who fill their books with every nuance of your childhood—you kind of have to get used to it. “Nuh-uh,” he scolds. “That’s another question.”
I grab for the cards, shuffle hastily, and deal them out.
Just my luck, I get another dud. I swap out three cards, trying for a high pair, but somehow I manage only to make my hand worse.
With a sigh, Xander lays down his cards and says, “Yes, it was about the expulsion.”
Confused, I study his hand. It’s even worse than mine. He must have assumed as much.
“Claire—the publicist—thinks that it’s my fault the press knows about it. She thinks I told someone at school and they sold the story.”
“And did you?” I ask.
The silence that follows stretches on for just a beat too long, and Xander won’t meet my eyes. “No,” he finally says, averting my gaze and fidgeting with the three of spades in front of him. “I didn’t tell anyone at school. I mean, it would be good money for anyone who tried to sell the story. The son of the people who literally wrote the book on parenting expelled from school? That’s worth a pretty penny, I suppose.”
Seemingly anxious to move on, he scoops up all the cards, shuffles, and deals. Xander wins with an ace high, and I brace myself for the inevitable. I remember exactly where his line of questioning left off. He was about to ask me why we moved from Portland. And I will have to tell him the truth. I will have to talk about Lottie.
Of course, I could lie. I could tell him we moved for my mom’s work or some other bullshit explanation like that. But that’s not how the game works. And something tells me Xander hasn’t lied to me once. When he definitely could have.
I guess that’s the big difference between real poker and our unique variety.
In this version, you have to have faith in your opponent.
“Why are you always looking at your phone?”
The question takes me by surprise. I’d been steeling myself to talk about the move, already cherry-picking which details to include and exclude. But he didn’t ask that. Either because he already forgot about it or decided he had more pressing inquiries on his mind.
My hand instinctively moves to my pocket before I remember with irritation that Siri still has my phone. I really need to figure out a way to get that back. But I have a suspicion that after my little meltdown at the party, it’s going to be difficult to convince her that I know how to cut loose.
Xander must interpret my delay as hesitation, because he awkwardly rubs his neck and says, “You don’t have to say it. I think I can guess.”
Huh?
He can guess that I ask Google questions all day in a vain attempt to keep the one unanswerable question at bay?
I swallow hard. “You can?”
He nods, looking remorseful. “You have a boyfriend, right? He’s worried about you stuck here at the airport.”
It takes me an unusually long time to digest the words that just came out of his mouth. They’re so foreign and so off base, I have a hard time even making sense of them.
Once again Xander misinterprets my silence. He sighs. “Yeah. I thought so. I figured it out a while ago. I just kept thinking, or . . . I don’t know . . . hoping that I was wrong.”
What?
I’m assaulted by a barrage of confusing thoughts and emotions. They’re overwhelming me, kicking my anxiety up a notch. I’m still trying to process the last inane thing he said. Now he’s saying he was hoping I didn’t have a boyfriend?
Why would he want that? I’m insane. He’s seen it for himself. I’m not the datable one. Lottie was the datable one. Lottie was the hot one. If Lottie were alive now, she’d be the one he’d be hoping didn’t have a boyfriend. I’m just the default choice. Because I’m the only one left.
Xander keeps talking. “I mean, why wouldn’t you? You’re pretty and funny and cool to hang out with. Even if you do kind of overreact from time to time.” He stops talking rather abruptly and then lets out a stutter of a laugh.
Is he nervous?
My mind is still whirling, still trying to keep up.
This is exactly the kind of thing Lottie would know about. She spoke boy fluently. I can barely even read the alphabet.
“Okay, you can say something anytime now,” he prompts. “I mean, please say something. You’re kind of freaking me out. And when I freak out, I have a tendency to ramble.”
“Sorry,” I say automatically. Because it’s the first thing that tumbles out. And, unfortunately, the second thing that tumbles out is, “You think I’m pretty?”
I swear I see splotches of pink bloom on Xander’s dark cheeks, but it’s impossible to be sure, because he bows his head and starts shuffling the cards. “Yeah. I mean, sure. I mean, obviously anyone would think . . .” He interrupts himself with a throat clear and stops shuffling in the middle of the bridge. The cards fall into a messy, uneven heap. “It’s not my deal.”
He shoves the jumbled pile at me.
Speechless and more than just a little bewildered, I transfer all my energy into doing the best shuffling job in the history of card shuffling. I split, riffle, bridge, split, riffle, bridge, split, riffle, bridge. Over and over and over until even the universe can’t keep track of what card went where.
I can sense Xander watching me the entire time. No, not just watching. Studying. Observing.
I tap the deck twice on the table and deal. It isn’t until I pass Xander his fifth card that I realize I never actually answered his last question. He made an assumption about the answer and I didn’t correct him.
Is that being dishonest?
Is that breaking the rules of the game?
I never actually said I had a boyfriend, so I didn’t technically lie. But I also didn’t pay him his winnings with a truthful answer.
He picks up his five cards and organizes them in his hand. I think about stopping the game right now and admitting my wrongdoing. But if I did, then I would have to tell him the truth. I’d have to tell him that the real reason I look at my phone five thousand times a day is because I’m crazy. So crazy even my therapist doesn’t know the extent of my craziness. What would he think of me then?
Would he still think I’m pretty?
Most definitely not. Certifiable trumps pretty every time.
I decide it’s much better to just let him go on thinking that I have a boyfriend back home. That he texts me every hour to make sure I’m okay. That I’m in a happy, healthy, fulfilling relationship.
It’s cleaner that way.
No mixed signals. No eyes locking across the table. No flirtatious smiles.
Nothing can ever happen between us. And it’s much easier if we both agree on that.
I pick up my cards and nearly let out a gasp when I see that I’ve dealt myself four shiny aces. One of the best hands a player can get.
I peer up at Xander to make sure he didn’t notice my terrible poker face, but his eyes are cast downward at his cards. He looks kind of adorable. With his brow all furrowed in concentration and his perfect white teeth raking over his bottom lip.
He thinks I’m pretty.
And funny.
Despite my attempts to hold it back, a small smile starts to chisel its way across my face. I hide the expression behind my cards. As I focus on my four beautiful aces, a thought comes barreling into my mind that’s so terrifying and so unexpected, I don’t even know what to do with it.
I think my luck is changing.