“Just think. We’ll be co-conspirators. It will be a surprise for Daddy, but he won’t care now. We’re moving away. He’ll forgive us for violating the rules.”
I think my heart actually stopped for a few moments. She was sitting there describing the nightmares I had about Buddy.
She laughed at the shock on my face. “Think of how funny this will be,” she said.
“Funny? How can you say that?”
“You can invite him to meet your father. Finally, you can do what I know you’ve always wanted to do, Lorelei, bring a boyfriend home to meet Daddy.”
17
Lies
“You keep our little secret,” Ava told me, rising, “and I’ll help you today with Daddy and Mrs. Fennel. I’ll tell them I was the one who called you at school to tell you I’d be late for dinner. I know Buddy was the one who called you, Lorelei. Don’t try to deny it. But I’ll take some of the blame off you this way.”
Once I would have told her that I never lied to Daddy, but that seemed stupid now. I said and did nothing to lead her to believe I agreed and walked away. She left to pick up Marla at school. Daddy and Mrs. Fennel arrived less than a half-hour later, earlier than Ava and I had expected. The moment Daddy saw me, he knew something was wrong. I should have been at school and not home yet. He glanced at Mrs. Fennel and then asked me what was going on.
“I got suspended from school for two days,” I immediately confessed. Was there any way to skirt the truth? I struggled to think of a way around it and came up with nothing else.
“Suspended? You? Why?”
“There’s a strict rule about the use of cell phones in the building. I used my cell phone in the hallway between classes. Actually, I was a little late for a class because of it. I’m sorry, Daddy. I just wasn’t thinking. I shouldn’t have left it on, but when it rang, I answered.”
“Who called you?” Mrs. Fennel immediately demanded.
Choices bounced back and forth in my mind like Ping-Pong balls. Should I become indebted to Ava and accept her help? Should I try to convince them of the same story I had used on Ava and say it was a wrong number? I could even say that whoever called realized it was a wrong number and there was no one on the line when I answered. The only choices I had were lies. I certainly couldn’t tell the truth now.
“Ava,” I said.
Mrs. Fennel grimaced. “Ava? Why would she call you? What did she want?”
“She wanted to tell me she would be late for dinner,” I recited.
Daddy’s eyes narrowed. I tried to avoid his gaze and look only at Mrs. Fennel.
“Why was she going to be late?” Mrs. Fennel asked.
“She wouldn’t say,” I replied. “There wasn’t time to ask her. Once I got caught and was sent to the principal’s office, I was too upset to care. I knew how unhappy you would be about my suspension, Daddy. I’m sorry. It just happened.”
“This is quite unlike you, Lorelei, to forget an important rule like that. Something very serious must have been on your mind.”
“There was. I wanted to speak to Mrs. Fennel about it, but you were both gone.”
“About what?” she asked. “What was distracting you to such an extent?”
“Things have been happening to me recently, things I described before,” I told Mrs. Fennel, “only now they’re more intense and more frequent.”
“What things?” Daddy asked impatiently.
“For no apparent reason, muscles in my body start to harden.”
Mrs. Fennel looked at Daddy. “I gave her something to make it easier,” she told him.
He nodded. Whatever was happening to me was something they appeared to have expected. My using it was succeeding in deflecting their scrutiny.
“I guess that was heavily on my mind, and I didn’t think about anything else,” I continued. “Ava thought I was still at lunch and could take the call outside the building. It was all just an unfortunate accident.”
“Where’s Ava now?” Daddy asked.