The Way of the Innocent

The Way of the Innocent

“I have a knife in my bag.”

Lisa leaned in toward me, a conspiratorial look on her face, and gestured toward the school bag she carried that was pointy with books.

“Why?” I asked, confused.

“For protection,” she said easily, and cracked her gum while studying my face, looking for a reaction.

I disappointed her. I didn’t have much of one to give. I was surprised, yes, but mostly I felt a need to move away from the conversation. It felt unclean, the idea of her carrying a weapon, and the way she told me, in the school hallway, in the middle of a rush of gangly, spotty-skinned teenagers seemed unreal. I wanted to think she was kidding, but knew enough that she wasn’t. Lisa was the kind of girl you intuitively felt had seen the grittier side of things, despite all of her efforts to appear pristine.

“Protection from what?” I asked, plunging my hand into my knapsack.

She looked at me and smiled before her eyes moved elsewhere. She wasn’t going to tell me anything more. It was her way to say something you didn’t want to hear, and just when you found yourself wanting to pursue it, she took it away. It was a game she liked to play.

Lisa had been one of my best friends for about three years. I had seen her on the first day of school when we were fifteen and was impressed by how confident she appeared to be. She was short, much smaller than everyone around her, but she didn’t seem aware of it, and she smiled at everyone who looked at her. She appeared dauntless, which I found intimidating, so I hung back and watched her from a safe distance, taking note of her stylish clothes, the way her hair seemed to glisten like gold, and marveled at how at ease she seemed to be despite it being the first day at a school she’d never been to before. When the bell rang, I made my way to homeroom and decided that I’d never be friends with her because girls like that didn’t mesh with girls like me.

A few weeks later, while eating lunch outside, she bounced over and took a seat next to me. She introduced herself and I was instantly at ease, with her croaking voice and sea blue eyes. What we talked about, I don’t know, because I was only half-listening. I was talking to someone who had sought me out, a girl who had captured the eye of most of the boys in our school, a girl who many of the other girls wished to be friends with, and for some reason she had chosen me. I tried my best to keep up with her, but it didn’t appear to matter much to her as she chatted happily, making sure to smile or nod at everyone who passed by who called her name or said hello.

Lisa was adorable, or so I heard the boys say. She was tiny, but pretty, delicate yet powerful, feisty and demure. By contrast, I was awkward and plain, and boys did not go out of their way to catch my eye. I was quiet and preferred books to socializing, something that made every lunch hour torture for me. I desperately wanted to be a part of things, but I was too sensitive to the possibility of rejection or ridicule. I hung on the fringe and hoped that I could make it to graduation without anyone trying to loosen my grip. Lisa, I believed, would be the person who would make this possible.

The friendship took. Before long she was sleeping over at my house, staying for dinner and she and I, along with my other best friend Kyla, would soon be incapable of doing anything without the others’ consent and encouragement. We did each other’s hair, went shopping every weekend, revealed the names of those we wished to share kisses with and dreamed about who we hoped to be as women. I felt myself blossoming during this period. I began feeling more comfortable in social situations, began dressing in clothes more in keeping with the fashion, and I experimented with different ways of wearing makeup. I knew that Lisa was the primary influence on me during this time, and that the transition I was making was largely due to her. The boys were taking note of these changes and it excited me. I felt I owed her a great deal for simply being my friend.

I accepted that Lisa was the one everyone wanted. When a boy came in our direction at a dance or while walking along the lakeshore, I assumed he was coming to speak to her, and most of the time, this was the case. She had skin that turned into a light caramel colour in the sun, and teeth that were even and white. She had a tiny waist and very large breasts, which I hadn’t really noticed until we tried on bathing suits one day. She came out of the dressing room in a one-piece suit and I remember staring at her chest without being able to speak. How had I not noticed this about her? Had she always been this well endowed?

“Those are some big breasts,” my friend Kyla said, laughing, after Lisa had gone back into the room to change.

“I know!” I laughed delighted I hadn’t been the only one to notice. “Where has she been hiding those things?”

“She dresses to cover them up, I guess,” Kyla shrugged. “If I had those, though, I’d probably show them off a little more.”

I didn’t know that I would, though. It made me feel strange when men looked at me in a way that was undeniably sexual. It made me want to hide, to wrap myself in a blanket, and I was glad that I didn’t have the kind of body that would invite unwanted attention. I wondered if this was why Lisa chose clothing that hid what was underneath. The shirts were bright and colorful, but safe and preppy, too. Her hair was long and curly, but she tended to pull it back off her face. She wore loose-fitting pants and sneakers, and she didn’t use a lot of makeup, mostly because she didn’t need to. They looked at her anyway, and for a while I couldn’t decide if she liked it.

I wondered if all the advances men made offended her as much as they did me. It wasn’t jealousy on my part, exactly, though I can’t deny feeling tiny bites of envy when the ones I found attractive were blind to me whenever she was around. It was tiresome, the way they tried to entice her, often with identical technique, and she was nice to them all, never showing favoritism or disdain. She laughed at their jokes, flirted with every one with a kind of skill I’d never seen before, and before long, she had a veritable legion of worshippers. Lisa was the girl who got flowers from secret admirers, or bunches of balloons on Valentine’s Day from dreamy-eyed boys. They offered her rides home, or to do her homework, and she seemed to want for nothing. She knew not to abuse any privilege and was very discreet about what she took and how often.

Lisa dated indiscriminately. She would accept dates with just about anyone who asked her, but when we’d get together and ask her about them, or more pointedly, how far she let them go, she was always very modest about it.

“Oh, he’s such a nice guy,” she’d say, “He kissed me, but that’s it. I plan on remaining a virgin until I get married.”

“Really?” Kyla asked, incredulous.

“Yes I do,” Lisa said emphatically. “I want to love the person and for him to love me, too.”

For all the time Lisa spent in my home and Kyla’s home, one would think she didn’t have her own family, but she did. I knew her younger sister, Candice, and that she had a five-year-old sister she adored named Shannon. I had met her mother, a loud-talking, bottle-dyed woman with buck teeth who drove us to the library on a few occasions, and her father, a heavy-set man with a moustache who barely ever spoke. Lisa seemed ashamed of her family, and though we often asked her about her past, she didn’t seem comfortable about it. When she did decide to tell us anything, though, the stories would be so full of colour and bizarre details that I found it hard to believe her.

“My house in Labrador had a ballroom!” she said once. “An actual ballroom! People used to dance there, and the chandelier was enormous. It was like looking up at a planet of diamonds.”

“Why would a house have a ballroom?” Kyla asked with eyes narrowed.

“It was a very old house,” Lisa explained, unfazed. “It was a mansion, really.”

Another time, she told us a highly improbable story about when she lived in British Columbia and she decided to take her canoe out into the Pacific Ocean.

“A hurricane came from nowhere, and I was all by myself out there, bobbing up and down on the waves, and so I started to row as fast as I could, broke all kinds of blood vessels in my arms doing it, too,” she said excitedly. “Soon, I could see the shore, and I knew I couldn’t give up, so I rowed and rowed and then suddenly, I passed out from all the excitement, I guess, and when I woke up, I was on land. I was covered in sand and it was raining like crazy, but I did it! I survived the hurricane!”

“Why would you even think to take a canoe out on the ocean to begin with?” I asked, baffled. “They’re not exactly built for that kind of thing.”

“Oh, I used to do it all the time!” she waved me off. “Your problem is that you’ve lead such a sheltered life.”

I wanted desperately to believe her stories, but after enough of them, I began to wonder who Lisa really was. She talked about the Capodimonte porcelain collection her mother had, how it was worth thousands of dollars, how one day it would all belong to her. She talked about the wealthy family out West she had, and the wealthy family she had out East, and after a while her stories began to fray. She talked of harrowing escapes from certain death as she ran from blood-thirsty wolves in a Newfoundland forest, or the time she was found clinging to the side of a cliff after she lost her footing while rock-climbing in the Rockies, and every story had such lush detail that a small part of me almost wanted to believe her, but I couldn’t.

One winter night, Kyla and I decided it was time to answer some of our questions, the first being where did Lisa live? In the years we had been friends, I’d never once seen her house and whenever I’d offer to come pick her up, she’d always politely refuse, asking me to meet her elsewhere. Kyla and I couldn’t imagine what the big secret was since we’d already met her family, but we were determined to find out.

We found the address and decided to walk there under the pretense of getting lost during one of our evening strolls. This was believable as Kyla and I often took walks around the city at night, never thinking about rapists or murderers, only wanting the blue-black freedom of the world without light. As we got closer to Lisa’s house, the snow began to come down heavy, which gave us the perfect excuse to stop by. We rang the doorbell and waited, giggling because we felt so sly, and then the door cracked open, revealing Lisa’s mother who was reeking of alcohol.

“Girls!” she screeched happily, “What in the world are you doing out in this weather! Look at you both. Come in, come in.”

She ushered us into the hallway where we shook off like dogs. Lisa’s mother then hollered up the staircase to Lisa to tell her to come down. I looked around and immediately felt bad for coming. The house was tiny, a little townhouse with scuffed walls and narrow doorways, and it was cluttered and unclean, with dust on the shelves and toys strewn all over the living room floor. Lisa’s dad sat silent in an armchair, his eyes fixed on the television, his hand gripping a beer bottle, and the dent at the edge of the couch insinuated the body of Lisa’s mother, a half-drunk glass of whisky and water on the table next to it. Kyla looked at me and I knew without words that she too thought this was a mistake.

Lisa bounded down the stairs and when she saw us, she froze.

“What are you guys doing here?” she asked, mortified.

“We were just out walking and sort of got lost,” I explained. “I knew you lived around here so we took a chance just to see if you were home.”

“Well, I am,” she said flatly.

“You want to go out for some hot chocolate?” Kyla asked sweetly.

Lisa studied us for a moment, her expression stony and her breathing slow.

“Yeah, sure,” she nodded finally. “I just have to get dressed if you don’t mind waiting.” It was only then that I noticed that she was wearing dirty looking flannel pajamas.

She did not invite us to her room and left us to wait in the hallway. Her mother had by now returned to her side of the couch and I could hear the tinkle of ice cubes as she slurped from her glass. Kyla and I whispered to each other how odd we felt about this, but also how surprised we were by what kind of life Lisa actually lived. I glanced in to the living room and saw a shelf with dusty porcelain figures on it, with horses pulling chariots and beautiful chalk-skinned ladies curtseying in eighteenth century dresses.

Lisa wordlessly descended the steps and threw on her coat before issuing a hasty good-bye to her parents who only grunted in return.

“Oh!” we heard her mother rush to add, “It was nice seeing you girls!”

As we walked along the snowy street looking for a coffee shop, the silence was enough that we could hear the snow land on the sidewalk. After a while, though, a conversation began, one that had nothing to do with Lisa’s house or our unexpected ambush. We had all decided to carry on as though nothing between us had changed, laughing about silly things, worrying about what the snow was doing to our hair.

I was insulted, though, that Lisa had thought I would care about what her house looked like, though I kept this to myself. I didn’t care that her mother drank or that their furniture was cheap. I was angry with her for thinking that this was something that mattered to me, but more than this, I now knew for certain that my friend didn’t always tell the truth, and this bothered me the most.

I never offered to pick Lisa up at home again, and it was an unspoken rule that her address was incidental. To go there would mean I would have to acknowledge all the lies she’d told and I knew that would damage the friendship we had, so I let it alone. The problem was, though, that once a lie is revealed, you begin looking for more. You wonder if there is a framework of them and if perhaps they’re not as innocent as the one you’ve discovered. On the surface, my friendship with her was sound, but there had been a shift in me that I couldn’t reset. I second-guessed almost everything she said, now. I stopped accepting her superiority over me and felt an incredible sense of resentment whenever a boy expressed interest in her.

“She is not real!” I wanted to scream at them. “Nothing about her is real! She is a fraud, a product of her own making!”

I would not shatter the illusion she’d created, though. I was all too aware that my own vanity and self-esteem were behind my anger to an extent. I was her friend, and I’d be a better one than I thought she was.

More little lies began to come at me over time. After months of denying that she dyed her hair, I saw a box of hair colour in her school bag under her books. She would often tell someone she had a date with that she had to break it because she was sick, only to go out with someone else who was better looking or had higher social standing. When she offered to repair the broken romance between Kyla and her first boyfriend who Lisa was friends with, I spied her twirling her hair and unabashedly flirting with him. When she inevitably began to date him, she asked me if I could smooth things over with Kyla, making sure to emphasize that it wasn’t her fault.

I was sick to my stomach when I called Kyla to tell her what happened and I was outraged with Lisa for putting me in the position. As I expected, Kyla began to cry, but it wasn’t just because a boy she’d liked had broken up with her. She was crying because someone who called herself a friend had intentionally deluded her and had done it in such a detached and calculated way.

“She’s evil,” Kyla hissed.

“I can’t believe she did it, either,” I said sympathetically.

“I’ve known for a long time that she was a little witch.”

“You have?”

“If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have been friends with her in the first place. She’s a phony little dwarf.”

Out of decency, or perhaps some kind of perverse pleasure on her part, Kyla decided not to say anything to Lisa about what she had done. Maybe Kyla wanted to make her ex-boyfriend uncomfortable by keeping Lisa close, but if that was the case, it was only a short-lived aspiration, as Lisa soon grew tired of him and ended their relationship under the guise of wanting to respect the bond of friendship with us.

Lisa had begun to reveal herself to me, slowly, unfolding one layer at a time. I soon learned that there was a real want in her, a need to have everything that she felt was owed to her, and she was skilful about how she got it. She smiled and she used her diminutive stature as a way to suggest a childlike innocence that seemed to me like it had never been there. When she was caught out on a date by not just one but two of her other boyfriends, who until that point had thought they were each the only one, she simply smiled coquettishly and explained that she was too young to be tied down to one man, but that each of them were invaluable to her in one way or another. She seemed to think she was Scarlett O’Hara, and for some reason, many seemed to tolerate it. I couldn’t understand what the attraction was, though. She had a surface-level beauty, that was indisputable, but beyond that there seemed to be little else that I could identify as desirable. If they weren’t having sex with her, what was it about her that had them unhinged?

“They can’t have me,” she said easily when I asked her how she managed to have so many boyfriends at once. “They want what they can’t have, and what’s more, they’re willing to fight for it. It’s not my fault that they’re all stupid.”

This offended my romantic ideals greatly, especially when she flirted with anyone that I expressed an interest in. I was crestfallen whenever one of them appeared to welcome her advances, because it meant that no matter how things turned out between them, the guy in question would never be someone I would go out with. To me, anyone who fell for her charms automatically lost appeal, became someone to pity instead of covet, because her attention was famously temporary. I believed that any boy who would date her automatically had some kind of character flaw that left them lacking, and that usually took the sting out of my losing.

One day, a girl I was only slightly acquainted with came up to me in the bathroom at school.

“You’re friends with Lisa, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, waiting.

“She better watch her step,” she said in a low voice, looking around to see if anyone was listening. “That girl is a real slut and it’s going to catch up to her.”

For some reason, I felt an involuntary need to defend Lisa’s honour, though I didn’t know why.

“She’s not a slut!” I said angrily. “She hasn’t even slept with anyone, yet.” Why I decided to divulge this information I will never know.

“Is that what she told you?” the girl asked, wide-eyed, grinning. “Man, you’re really naïve. She’s been with just about everybody.” The girl then moved over toward the mirror where she smoothed her hair. “I don’t like her, but that’s beside the point. I just thought you should know because people tend to make assumptions about who people hang around with.”

I understood then that she was telling me that I was getting a reputation for being easy because of my association with Lisa. I had always had a great sense of respect for myself and was proud of my virginity, so I was panicked by the thought that my reputation was in jeopardy.

“I have always thought she slept around,” Kyla said when I told her about the scene in the bathroom. “ I mean, come on. How many guys has she dated over the last year alone? Do you think it’s her brains they’re after?”

“I honestly thought she was just casually dating,” I said.

“It’s casual, but it’s not just dating.”

Why the façade? Why tell us she was a virgin? I couldn’t figure this girl out. It wasn’t like I would have judged her for having sex because a lot of people were doing it, but for some reason she not only lied about it, but she concocted an entire diatribe about abstinence until marriage.

The day she told me she had a knife in her bag was around the time I’d figured out that I wasn’t feeling the friendship, anymore. I felt dirty when I was around her, like I needed to run away from her and wash her off me. I stopped answering the phone when she called and came up with reasons why I couldn’t go out with her as much, but I couldn’t bring myself to end the friendship altogether. We still attended the same school, shared the same social circle and it wouldn’t be practical to stop speaking. I wanted the friendship to undo itself slowly, fade away without ceremony, thinking that by the time it did, we’d have graduated and moved in the direction we were meant to go.

“Lisa, what’s with the knife?” I asked again, anxiously.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said sweetly. “I just told you that it’s for protection, that’s all.”

“From who, though?” I was beginning to get frustrated with her. I felt like she was about to tell me another lie, something I was going to have to pretend I believed like I had done so many times before.

“You never know,” she grinned.

A little while later, while we were sitting in the cafeteria in our small group, one of the girls at the table innocently asked Lisa what her plans were for the weekend.

“My grandfather’s visiting, actually. I have to stay close to home until he leaves.”

“Oh, that’s nice. I mean it’s not cool that you have to stay home, but it’s nice that your grandpa is visiting.”

“Yeah,” she said quietly, twirling her yogurt with a spoon. “I don’t really like him, though. Actually, I hate him, but I have to be there, you know, because of my little sisters.”

It was something in the way she said this, something about the twisted look in her eyes that made me realize what piece of the puzzle had been missing all along. I began to thread the truth together, with all the lies and all the hints she’d left behind her, and suddenly, I knew.

I knew, and still, I said nothing.

I went home that night and I agonized about what to do. Should I call her and talk to her? Should I call her parents? All I could think of was the knife, whether it was still in her bag or if she’d used it for whatever purpose she’d intended it. I lay in my bed and I tried to think of the best way to handle things, even wondered if I were wrong about my suspicions, but I couldn’t stop my mind from thinking what I was thinking, so I sat up and dialed Lisa’s number.

“Hey,” I said.

“What’s up?” she asked brightly. “Kinda late, isn’t it?”

“I was thinking about you and the knife in your bag.”

“Why?” she sounded amused.

“Well, it’s kind of weird for someone to keep a knife in their bag, don’t you think?”

“Well,” she giggled, “it’s under my bed, now.”

I was officially alarmed.

“Lisa,” I whispered, “do you want to talk about this?”

“Talk about what?” she sounded angry then. “Look, I told you, it’s for protection, that’s all.”

“Yeah, but who are you afraid of?”

Silence.

“Are you afraid of your grandfather?”

More silence.

“You can tell me, you know.”

“I hate him, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Just stuff, you know? He has always been a real bastard, that’s all. I can’t stand the sight of him.” Her voice had geared down to a raspy whisper. “Just because someone is related to you, it doesn’t mean you have to like them much less love them. A bastard is still a bastard even if he’s in the family tree.”

She laughed then, and tried to reassure me that everything was fine.

“You worry too much,” she giggled.

I hung up feeling just as unsettled as when I’d called. Her cool way of speaking was startling to me because it impressed me as full of intention.

The next week, after her grandfather had gone, Lisa stopped carrying a knife in her bag. She seemed like she was her old self again, back to flirting and manipulating, as though nothing had ever happened. Now and then I saw her watching me, like she was trying to figure out if I really knew her secret and wondering how long I’d be able to keep it. The intensity of her gaze rattled me, but I tried not to show it. I honestly didn’t know what she was capable of doing.

Without warning, one night while we were vacationing in Florida, I erupted. It had begun when I had spotted Lisa kissing a guy she barely knew while she was dating a friend of mine. This newer relationship had been her most serious, and as he was someone I had a high regard for, I made it clear to her that she had better not treat him the same as every other guy she’d dated. I believe that was what made him more appealing to her, the fact that I appeared to care for him. In this way, he was hers and she had bested me and there was nothing I could do nothing about it. On this night, while standing on a balcony to smell the Gulf air, I looked down into the parking lot and saw a couple in a van climbing all over one another with frenzied desperation. I saw his hands moving under her shirt, and then, up her skirt, and I saw her hands rubbing the front of his pants. I was stunned when I realized it was Lisa and a guy she had met only the night before when he had catcalled from his van as we walked down the street. Kyla came up behind me and looked down at the van.

“Well, there’s a shocker,” she rolled her eyes.

“I am stunned,” I said, shaking my head. “ I honestly can’t believe it.”

“Watch this,” Kyla grinned. She bent down and picked up a few small pebbles that were in the corner of the balcony. She then let them drop, one by one, on top of the van’s windshield.

Lisa looked up, saw who it was dropping the pebbles, and hurriedly straightened her clothes, waving at us and smiling brightly. I turned away defiantly and stomped into the condo we were staying in. I was feeling a kind of anger I had never felt before, the kind that needs to be cast out by throwing objects or screaming until you think you can taste blood. I was breathing as though I had been running, and my face was hot with angry fever. Kyla had followed me into the condo and was watching me curiously.

“If she wants to sleep with strangers, you have to let her.”

“She’s dating a friend of ours! He’s a nice guy and he trusts her!”

“Well, it’s between him and her, then.”

“No!” I said aggressively. “She hurts people, it’s just what she does, but it isn’t right and I’m going to say something.”

At this point, Lisa breezed into the condo looking innocent and nonchalant. I felt my hand curl into a fist.

“You!” I bellowed. “You and I have to have a talk.”

“Sure, what’s up?” she smiled easily, as though my tone meant nothing.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I shrieked. “Were you really just making out with some random guy in a parking lot when you’re supposed to have a boyfriend?”

“He doesn’t have to know,” she said lazily. “It’s not important, anyway.”

“He’s a friend of mine, Lisa!”

“So am I.”

“Are you?” I asked. “Are you really a friend?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I don’t know that you’re capable of being a friend. I think there’s something seriously wrong with you, something that only a psychiatrist should have to deal with. You’re not right in the head, that’s what I mean!”

Lisa, to my utter astonishment, remained silent. She sat down on the couch and her eyes remained focused on me, waiting.

“You’re a pathological liar, and you’re promiscuous, and you have no regard for other people’s feelings. You go after every guy any of your friends show any interest in, and when you get them, you dump them. You taint them and then you leave them behind.”

Her eyes did not waver. Her mouth remained closed.

“I can’t handle you, anymore,” I said, shaking my head frantically. “I have let myself think for these past few years that it was okay that you got all the attention because I believed you were better than me, and then it dawned on me that you’re not. You’re just better at manipulating people, that’s all. You’re not even a real person! Everything about you is one weird story after another, and you tell them without thinking that anyone listening might be putting two and two together. I can’t figure out if you’re arrogant or just stupid.”

“Are you saying you don’t want to be my friend anymore?”

“I’m saying you need help, and I can’t be your friend unless you get it.”

“I don’t need help,” she sneered.

“You and I both know that you do. Normal people do not sleep with knives under their beds.”

We sat silent for what seemed like hours, but may have only been a few minutes. She looked like she was trying to cry, like she needed to and couldn’t, and I felt sad for her then. Part of me knew it was just another manipulation, but another part still wondered if she simply couldn’t muster one true emotion.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked roughly.

She rocked back and forth for a few minutes, and then I saw that she actually was crying, tears wetting the floor beneath her. She looked up, a decision made on her face.

“He raped me,” she said then.

“Who?” Kyla asked. “The guy in the van?”

Lisa shook her head.

“Her grandfather,” I answered.

“What?” Kyla asked, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

Lisa looked down at the floor and continued crying, a sight I found utterly amazing.

“You know?” she asked, looking up at me.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “ I do.”

“How?” she croaked, surprised.

“I guess I just figured it out. You left a few hints for me to find.”

Kyla sat down on the floor, her face pale.

“Over and over again,” Lisa said. “I was twelve.”

“Why haven’t you told your parents?” I asked softly.

“I have,” she cried. “My mother told me that I was a liar and that I was never to tell anyone such filth. I knew she’d never do anything to stop it. That’s why I had the knife, because I decided I was going to kill him if he tried to touch me or my sisters.” She wiped the tears away with her sleeve. “I would have done it, too. I would have slit his throat if he’d so much as tried to hug me.”

“Your mother is an idiot,” Kyla said. It was all she could think to say.

“He probably did it to her, too” Lisa said bitterly. “I don’t know, though, because I’m not supposed to talk about it. I had to stay with them for a summer when my mother was in the hospital after her car accident, and that’s when it started. It didn’t stop until we moved away, and when I tried to tell her what happened, she went nuts, told me I imagined it and to never repeat it.”

“She’s still an idiot,” Kyla said.

“Maybe,” Lisa said.

“You need to report him!” Kyla insisted.

“No,” Lisa said calmly. “No one would ever believe me, and besides, I can handle him by myself.”

“I believe you!” Kyla exclaimed.

“What can you do?” she laughed bitterly.

We sat like that for ages, listening to one another breathe, trying to find words that meant something. I was torn between feeling pity for the child she’d been, the innocent girl who had been brutalized by someone she’d trusted, and the person she now was, serpentine and calculating, with a heart that had gone cold. I was still smarting from all the tiny pinches on my skin that I felt every time she did something cruel or unfeeling and even though I knew why she had done it, they hurt just the same. Anyone else may have wondered if what she was saying had actually happened, or if this was just another one of her outlandish stories, but I didn’t think that even she was capable of being that diabolical. I felt it was true, sensed it on her as she wept across from me and knew that the dirtiness I felt around her had been empathic on my part. I wanted to help her undo it, find a way to make it so it hadn’t happened, but it had. We couldn’t change it.

“Will you get some help?” I asked her gently.

“I’m fine,” she said, smiling.

“No,” I shook my head. “You’re not.”

“I don’t need any help,” she said defiantly.

“Look,” I sighed before taking in a breath. “I hate what you went through, it was dirty and sick and if I could change it, I would, but I can’t do it anymore. I can’t be friends with someone I can’t trust no matter how horrible I feel about what made you like this. I can’t take another lie and I can’t handle the constant manipulations. I just can’t do it. You either do what I am asking you, or I’m going to have to step away.”

I knew it sounded cruel, but I knew I had to say it, even so. I could not let the grandfather’s rape spread itself to me. Every time she lied, and every time she worked some kind of voodoo it was like his fingers were on me. I was saying no, and I didn’t need a knife to say it.

It all ended that night. Lisa made only weak promises to seek help, but I knew she didn’t mean them. I wasn’t even sure I really wanted her to. So many disappointments had turned me on her, so that the possibility of continuing as friends became implausible to me. I knew that I may have seemed cold to some for turning away from her, but I also knew that it was a matter of survival, in a way. I didn’t think she was dangerous in a physical sense, but in an emotional one, she was a predator. She had taken all her hurt and anger and she’d sharpened it into a sleek-edged weapon.

Maybe that’s what drew her to me, my quiet, seemingly timid nature. I suppose she may have seen someone easy to conquer, someone she could control without resistance, but she hadn’t counted on me being able for her. It hadn’t occurred to her that I would eventually become strong and impenetrable, that I’d be someone who would say no. She had searched for a victim and got me instead.

I know she’s okay, these many years later; at least, she’s okay in the broadest sense of the word. She is still attractive, has a decent job and a large group of friends. She is divorced, but still loves to flirt, and she has a boyfriend with tree trunks for arms. I know all of this because she wrote to tell me so. I had thought I’d heard the last of her, but she has contacted me once or twice over the years, always in a fit of nostalgia, talking as though none of it ever happened. Maybe she remembers things differently than I do. I was happy to read all her good news, but I wasn’t surprised at how well she is doing. I had always known she would be okay. She had never been the type to quit on anything, even the friendship between us that I had hoped she would forget.

The loss of our friendship wasn’t just about the lies and deceit. She had lived in a kind of world I had once believed didn’t exist, one I hoped could not exist, and it scared me. I didn’t see her as a survivor or victim; I saw her as someone who had evolved from something dark and hungry, and knew that it would always be a part of her, that to know her would always mean looking over my shoulder and battling something I could never see. She hadn’t come away from it with a resolve to finish it. Instead, she had made the decision to co-exist with it, and this was the choice she made that made our friendship impossible to bear.

We are strangers, now, but I think that even she is happy about this, despite her infrequent attempts to reconnect. Her secret is better with a stranger than it would be with a friend and it allows her to live her life as though none of it happened. Without me around she has likely convinced herself that it didn’t and if she has told people about a wonderful childhood that she herself has come to believe, as lies you repeat sometimes let you do, I would never want to take that from her. I want her to have diamond chandeliers and glossy-floored ballrooms. I am happy that she has taken on a hurricane in a canoe and made it to dry land. Let her regain her footing after slipping on a mountain’s rocky side, so that she may look back from the top at what could have happened if she hadn’t been strong enough to climb.

It’s the kind of lie you can forgive a person for, from a distance.