The Girl Cried Wolf

Ash had lied to the group at dinner and every girl at the table knew it. The question that hung in the air was "why?"

Why would Ash lie about seeing a boy at school? Why wouldn"t she just tell her best friends about it?

Isabelle could not understand why Ash would keep her relationship with Hunter a secret from them. They would have been happy for Ash if she had told them about her boyfriend or fling or whatever it was that Hunter was. Isabelle"s feelings were hurt. Didn"t Ash trust her best friends?

She looked at Ash quietly eating her dinner across the table from her and Celia, and she wondered, concerned with what was happening to their friend Boots.

Celia, on the other hand, was angry. She did not say anything, but the way she mashed the potatoes on her plate spoke volumes about how she felt. She was going to have to share a room with this friend who lied to her face about where she was. And when Celia had confronted her about keeping secrets, she had lied to her face again: that was two lies in a row.

Celia did not appreciate being lied to. She had grown up around secrets and lies, and she found all kinds of lies reprehensible, regardless of the reason.

As Ash fell asleep in the bottom bunk of their shared dorm room, Celia stayed awake on the top bunk, staring angrily at the ceiling.

***

Secrets and lies had been how Celia"s parents made their money. When Celia was growing up, her family had lived in a rundown house in a poor neighborhood. Her father would disappear for days and would come back with bags of cash that they weren"t allowed to spend. Her mother would stay home and play with her, but every so often she would go into the master bedroom, lock the door behind her, and make whispered phone calls that sometimes lasted for hours.

Money came and went in Celia"s house, but even though they were technically poor, Celia"s parents made sure to get her a private school education.

However, when Celia was ten, her parents suddenly pulled her out of school in the middle of the academic year and had her transferred to a public school in a different city.

That year, Celia"s family had lived in a motorhome in a trailer park. Her father still disappeared for days at a time, but he no longer carried bags of cash back with him. Instead, he came home in a different expensive suit every time, until their small closet ran out of s.p.a.ce for all of his new clothes. Her mother had sold the suits for half their original price and they had eaten full-course dinners at a nice restaurant every night for nearly two weeks straight.

Her mother didn"t have any more secret phone calls inside the trailer, instead she would sometimes go away on weekends doing unexplained errands out of town.

By the time summer vacation had rolled around, her father suddenly got a job as a manager in a casino. The whole family moved into the hotel connected to the casino and they lived in two connecting rooms on one of the upper floors.

Two years later, Celia"s parents bought the casino and they were suddenly rich people.

At thirteen, Celia had asked her parents how they were able to buy the casino. All three of them sat in their big new house in the newly furnished living room with the twin gla.s.s sculptures, gilt mirrors, and plush white armchairs that matched a large white couch that would have been impossible to fit into the motorhome they had lived in only a few years before.

Celia"s mother and father had looked at each other, and they had moved together in a way that almost seemed rehea.r.s.ed. Celia"s mother sat down next to her on the couch and her father sat in the armchair closest to his wife. It was as if they had been waiting for the question and they were relieved to finally be able to answer it.

"Cece," her father began, "did you know that when you were born, you weren"t born alone?"

Celia thought at the time that it was the weirdest question to have ever come out of her father"s mouth. She immediately wondered if her parents were playing a prank on her.

"Daddy, you"re being weird!" she had said.

"Mija, listen to your father," her mother had said to her, smoothing down Celia"s hair.

Celia"s father continued.

"When mommy was pregnant with you, you weren"t alone. You had a twin. Mommy and I were so happy because we had wanted two kids and we got them all in one go. We were so lucky."

Cesar had looked at his wife Raquel as he said this, and they both looked wistful for a moment.

"We planned out your entire lives for you. We finally had the family we always wanted and Mommy and I wanted to make sure that you guys were gonna get better things and better lives than we got.

"But Mommy had it tough. We were both working so hard and she had it tough. She wasn"t eating right, wasn"t taking no vitamins, and she wasn"t getting enough sleep. So when it came time to bring you into the world, something went wrong."

At this point, Raquel had begun to cry. Her green eyes filled with years of unshed tears and she wiped them away quietly with her hands. Cesar handed his wife a white handkerchief from his pocket and paused his story until she had finished wiping her eyes.

"Your brother, rest his little soul, he didn"t make it. You came out just fine, screaming your little lungs out. But your poor brother, he didn"t get a chance. When he got out of your mommy, he was already gone."

Raquel started to cry again and Celia wrapped her arms around her mother. Her father kept talking and Celia remembered the rest of the story, always with the sound of her mother"s soft sobs.

"You had to stay in the hospital for a little while coz you were so tiny. Everybody said that you were gonna be fine but Mommy and I were so scared for you. So we promised each other in front of G.o.d, that if our little girl was going to make it through, we were going to give her everything we would have given to two kids. And your mommy was so heartbroken over your little brother that we decided that you were going to be our only baby."

"But what does that have to do with the money, Daddy?" Celia had asked.

She had been shocked to hear about the twin brother she never knew she had, but she couldn"t understand why her father would tell her about him when she just wanted to know where their money came from.

"I"m getting to that, Cece," Cesar had said. He stood up from the arm chair and walked over to his wife and child. He knelt on the floor beside his wife and kissed her on her cheek.

"Your little brother"s name was Mateo. Had he lived I would have taken him into the business with me. That"s how it is between a father and a son, you know? But Mateo was taken from us. And that"s when Mommy and I decided that G.o.d had a reason for doing that. G.o.d didn"t want Mateo doing bad things, so He took his gift back."

"But Daddy, what about me? Why come G.o.d didn"t take me?" Celia had asked.

Raquel tightened her hold around her daughter, shushing her immediately as if Celia had said a bad word.

"G.o.d left you with us to remind us of our promise, baby. Mommy and I promised that you were going to be our only baby and that you weren"t going to go into any bad business with us. We knew G.o.d took Mateo coz of my bad plans, so we promised G.o.d that if we got to keep you, we would raise you right and keep you out of the bad s.h.i.t."

Cesar got up from the floor and sat back in the armchair.

"Mija, all you need to know is that the casino is legit. And all the businesses we"re getting into, it"s all above board. We got the papers for it and we"re paying good taxes on everything," Raquel said to Celia, her green eyes staring through a film of tears into her daughter"s eyes.

As she stared into her mother"s teary-eyed but determined face, she could hear her father speaking to her.

"Cece, I promise, when you"re older I"ll tell you all about the casino and I"ll tell you all about the other businesses. Everything we have now and everything we"re going to have, that"s all for you, me and Mommy, sweetheart. It"s our family business.

"But I"m going to ask you, Cece. For the sake of your poor little brother Mateo and your poor mother"s broken heart, don"t ever ask us again about where the money came from. You don"t need to know, and we"re not going to tell you. We"ve kept you safe and out of bad business for years. We"re not about to start now. Okay, baby?"

Cesar had stood from his seat and opened his arms out to his little girl. Celia had gotten up from the couch and hugged her father. They never spoke about where the money came from ever again.

***

Celia hadn"t thought about that conversation with her parents in a long time. She hadn"t mentioned her dead twin to either Ash or Isabelle but that wasn"t exactly something you should tell anyone who asked if you had brothers or sisters.

Celia had lived in a house with a lot of shady secrets and because of that she had gotten really good at sensing trouble even if she couldn"t always name it.

When Ash had lied to them over dinner, she could sense that it wasn"t just about a boy. It was about something else, something that felt like trouble.

Ash was her best friend and she considered her to be family. And it seemed to Celia that just like her family, Ash was lying about something shady. It wasn"t the same thing, obviously, but for Celia, anything that needed to be lied about and kept secret was never anything good.

She had promised her father, and by extension her crying mother and her dead baby brother, that she would not ask about their family"s shady past and how they got the money to buy their first casino. But Celia had made no such promise to Ash regarding her shady business.

As Celia finally drifted off to sleep in the late hours, she resolved that she was going to get Ash to spill her guts.