Day 8

We sat there some time listening to the wind build up and die outside. After a while of listening it began to feel as though it were counting out the seconds between each wind shift. It got to the point that I shifted to stand up, but Claire laid her hand on my knee. “If you’re not going to tell me anything I’m going back to bed. I’m cold and sitting on this ice covered floor isn’t going to help anything.” Claire tapped more ash onto the stage before putting the cigarette out all together.

“I’m gonna say this once. You never tell people Johnny’s father is alive.” She gazed as me as though she were ready to snap off my head if I didn’t agree. “You caught me off guard, and so caught him off guard. He knows not to tell people and I’m not going to tell him he did something wrong simply ‘cause you out witted me.” She stepped off the stage and walked out. “But if I hear you mention one thing to anyone I’ll rip your throat out.” Her words echoed slightly in the empty cafeteria.

She was serious, I knew that. I would find out that she was nothing but serious. After that conversation she warmed up to me considerably, probably because I both knew her secret and she knew I wasn’t going to cause problems. Even now I don’t know if she was more scared for her son or for her secret, though I knew she cared deeply for both. What struck me the most though was her vigilance towards the other’s faults.

***

As I stepped back into the room Claire was already entertaining Johnny and, thankfully, Jessica in a corner out of the way. Coach K was still sitting in the door frame in his half asleep state, preventing anyone from leaving that shouldn’t. Mrs. Snowburn was pacing the room and no one else was around. “Where have you been?” She demanded as I walked in. Claire turned her entire body away from us so she couldn’t see us. “I’ve been worried sick. It’s freezing in this school. You shouldn’t be wandering around this room much less the rest of the building.” She quickly ushered me back onto one of the mattresses, which had grown cold in my absence.

I was reluctant. I was old enough to take care of myself I thought. I could decide when to leave and when to go, I wasn’t going to do anything dumb. I was also dumb enough to believe that. Though nothing major happened during this particular excursion I wouldn’t be leaving any time soon. In fact, through Mrs. Snowburn’s instance and Coach K’s vigilance I would find myself mostly contained in the room, besides a few excursions the Mrs. Snowburn herself allowed. There was and is nothing like being confined in close quarters, though freedom wasn’t all that fantastic of an option either. “If you’re so eager to get up and walk around maybe I can start putting you to work.” She tucked the blankets around me and I had to wonder what she would have me do when I couldn’t even move. “Rest for now and in a few hours, if you’re awake, I’ll have a job for you to do.” She was serious, though not in the way Claire was serious. What Claire said had the crazy edge to it. The things she threatened to do were just crazy enough that you had to believe her just in case. Mrs. Snowburn’s seriousness was a no-nonsense seriousness. The things she demanded were to be listened to and obeyed. Period.

I knew the moment she walked away that she knew me and my condition exactly. My eyes were dropping almost before her last tuck and the heat of the blankets were enveloping and relaxing my muscles. I briefly contemplated fighting back the incoming sleep, but was too tired to think of how.

I slept soundly, this time without dreams, for seconds before my eyes opened to a face curiously looking at me. “You sleep funny.” Jessica wrinkled her nose and walked away. That was it; just ‘you sleep funny.’ I was too tired to really comprehend what had just happened so I watched her walk away without uttering a word.

Besides Jessica, who was now coloring once again, there was no one else in the room. Coach K wasn’t at the door, Claire and Johnny were no where to be seen, even Mrs. Snowburn was absent. “Where is everyone?”

“Gone.”

I closed my eyes and sighed at the obvious answer. “Yes. But where?”

“Not here duh!” With that I was done. I was too tired to argue with the little girl and sat up to make myself more comfortable. As I sat up I watched Jessica walk over to a book that lay open in on the floor. She squatted in front of it, carefully closed it, then picked it up and walked over to me. “Here.” It was in my hands before I even knew my hands really free. She was also pulling the blankets up to sit underneath them with me before I realized I had a book in my hands.

I shook my head to try and force the sleep out of my eyes and brain. “What?” Jessica, with a ‘you’re so dumb’ expression on her face, leaned over and opened the front cover of the book for me. It was at that point my brain kicked in and was awake enough to connect the dots. Though the only thing that I knew for sure was that Jessica wanted to me to read the book to her I could assumed it was on Mrs. Snowburn’s orders. “Okay, so what book do we have here?” I asked as I looked at the cover page.

“It’s called The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.” As she said it she passed her index finger across the page.

Impressed I opened the first page and pointed at the first sentence. “Can you read that to me?” She looked up at me and shook her head. I could tell that she didn’t really mean it, her eyes were big and she shook her head slowly. “Can you at least try?”

We stared at each other for a few seconds. I know now that’s when I should have encouraged her and basically forced her to turn to the book and read it to me. She could do it, I knew she could do it, but I didn’t know how to tell her that she knew. Without blinking she took the book from my hands and held it out before her. “Once there were…” I sat there and listened to her struggle through the words, helping her every couple of sentences when there was a word that she couldn’t form.

We alternated chapters. I read the evens and she read the odds. We’d even spend a couple minutes discussing what happened and, since the reason she wanted to read the book was because she’d seen the movie, compare the two. It was when Edmund lied in chapter five, a chapter she read, that she stopped. “Why do people lie?” I hated the question the moment she spoke it and I would hate questions like it for years before realizing that the simplest truth was all they wanted. Like ‘gone’ they waned to know the basics, not the philosophies or psychologies or lying and humanity.

But I didn’t know that then. “Well, I guess the reason people lie is because they’re scared of the truth.” I tried to keep to the truth myself but I knew there were too many reasons and I didn’t even know them all.

“Is that why Mrs. Snowburn lies to me when Principal Tanner and Mrs. George leave? She scared of the truth.” I opened my mouth to argue the finer points of truths and lies to defend Mrs. Snowburn’s decision but Jessica was too quick and asked another question. “Is it okay to lie?”

I paused for a second to decide if I wanted to answer that. “You know, I want to say the answer to that question is no, but I just can’t.” Jessica played with one of the pages of the book. “You see, there are lots of different types of lies.”

“Like white lies and regular kinds?”

I nodded half in agreement and half because I wasn’t really ready to approach specific types of lies and wanted to stall for time. “Y-yes, like white lies and regular kinds. Except that-“ At that moment an idea popped into my head and I went on a limb. Without the interference of someone else I would have to make this as clear as possible on the first try or confuse the poor child horribly. “You see, each lie is graded.” I paused every few seconds to try and come up with the right words. “Just like you are graded on how well you do your work for school.” Jessica nodded in understanding. “Except that there are at least two people grading these lies. The first person that grades is the one that says the lie. If he or she thinks the lie is an okay lie to say, like if they thought that they were protecting someone from harm or reporting something bad to an adult when they promised they wouldn’t, then they’ll grade the lie as a ‘white’ lie or an okay lie.”

I began to sweat from the energy I was spending to try and keep the conversation as ‘correct’ as I could and understandable. “The other person is the person you’re lying to. If you promised not to tell on someone who did something bad and then break your promise you’ve just lied to them right?” Jessica nodded. “Well, that person might not like you lying to them. They might get mad that you told on them. But say it saved their life? Do you think they will stay mad at you when they realize what you just did for them?” This time she shook her head. “You see lies are tricky things because you have to think about what you’re doing. Do you yourself think the lie is bad? If it is you probably shouldn’t say it.” Another nod in agreement. “That was the easy step though. Since you don’t know what the other person will think you have to hope that they will also think the lie is acceptable.”

Jessica put the book on the bed and got out the blankets so she could kneel on the bed and look at me better. “How do you do that?” She asked.

I opened my mouth to respond. I was ready to tell her the big punch line to my explanation of when it was okay to lie, but someone walked in the room. Mrs. Snowburn was quick when she realized what was happening; she didn’t even have to know the specific topic. The book was closed on the bed and Jessica was more interested in our conversation than anything else. “What are you two doing?” She approached it gently though.

Jessica, unfortunately, did not. “I was being told when it is okay to lie.” She smiled as but as Mrs. Snowburn frowned. “What?”

The frown vanished and was replaced by a large, fake grin. “Jessica, dear, Coach K is in the gym. He and Johnny just finished icing the floor for you to skate on. They’re waiting for you as we speak.” I snorted at the lie she just fed the child but Jessica didn’t notice, she was off my bed before the sentence was done running out the door. “Be careful!”