E. Lockhart - We Were Liars

“Mother, Dad,” said Carrie, “we brought Ed’s nephew to play with Johnny. This is Gat Patil.”

Granddad reached out and patted Gat’s head. “Hello, young man.”

“Hello.”

“His father passed on, just this year,” explained Carrie. “He and Johnny are the best of friends. It’s a big help to Ed’s sister if we take him for a few weeks. And, Gat? You’ll get to have cookouts and go swimming like we talked about. Okay?”

But Gat didn’t answer. He was looking at me.

His nose was dramatic, his mouth sweet. Skin deep brown, hair black and waving. Body wired with energy. Gat seemed spring-loaded. Like he was searching for something. He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. I could have looked at him forever.

Our eyes locked.

I turned and ran away.

Gat followed. I could hear his feet behind me on the wooden walkways that cross the island.

I kept running. He kept following.

Johnny chased Gat. And Mirren chased Johnny.

The adults remained talking on the dock, circling politely around Ed, cooing over baby Will. The littles did whatever littles do.

We four stopped running at the tiny beach down by Cuddledown House. It’s a small stretch of sand with high rocks on either side. No one used it much, back then. The big beach had softer sand and less seaweed.

Mirren took off her shoes and the rest of us followed. We tossed stones into the water. We just existed.

I wrote our names in the sand.

Cadence, Mirren, Johnny, and Gat.

Gat, Johnny, Mirren, and Cadence.

That was the beginning of us.

JOHNNY BEGGED TO have Gat stay longer.

He got what he wanted.

The next year he begged to have him come for the entire summer.

Gat came.

Johnny was the first grandson. My grandparents almost never said no to Johnny.

SUMMER FOURTEEN, GAT and I took out the small motorboat alone. It was just after breakfast. Bess made Mirren play tennis with the twins and Taft. Johnny had started running that year and was doing loops around the perimeter path. Gat found me in the Clairmont kitchen and asked, did I want to take the boat out?

“Not really.” I wanted to go back to bed with a book.

“Please?” Gat almost never said please.

“Take it out yourself.”

“I can’t borrow it,” he said. “I don’t feel right.”

“Of course you can borrow it.”

“Not without one of you.”

He was being ridiculous. “Where do you want to go?” I asked.

“I just want to get off-island. Sometimes I can’t stand it here.”

I couldn’t imagine, then, what it was he couldn’t stand, but I said all right. We motored out to sea in wind jackets and bathing suits. After a bit, Gat cut the engine. We sat eating pistachios and breathing salt air. The sunlight shone on the water.

“Let’s go in,” I said.

Gat jumped and I followed, but the water was so much colder than off the beach, it snatched our breath. The sun went behind a cloud. We laughed panicky laughs and shouted that it was the stupidest idea to get in the water. What had we been thinking? There were sharks off the coast, everybody knew that.

Don’t talk about sharks, God! We scrambled and pushed each other, struggling to be the first one up the ladder at the back of the boat.

After a minute, Gat leaned back and let me go first. “Not because you’re a girl but because I’m a good person,” he told me.

“Thanks.” I stuck out my tongue.

“But when a shark bites my legs off, promise to write a speech about how awesome I was.”

“Done,” I said. “Gatwick Matthew Patil made a delicious meal.”

It seemed hysterically funny to be so cold. We didn’t have towels. We huddled together under a fleece blanket we found under the seats, our bare shoulders touching each other. Cold feet, on top of one another.

“This is only so we don’t get hypothermia,” said Gat. “Don’t think I find you pretty or anything.”

“I know you don’t.”

“You’re hogging the blanket.”

“Sorry.”

A pause.

Gat said, “I do find you pretty, Cady. I didn’t mean that the way it came out. In fact, when did you get so pretty? It’s distracting.”

“I look the same as always.”

“You changed over the school year. It’s putting me off my game.”

“You have a game?”

He nodded solemnly.

“That is the dumbest thing I ever heard. What is your game?”

“Nothing penetrates my armor. Hadn’t you noticed?”

That made me laugh. “No.”

“Damn. I thought it was working.”

We changed the subject. Talked about bringing the littles to Edgartown to see a movie in the afternoon, about sharks and whether they really ate people, about Plants Versus Zombies.

Then we drove back to the island.

Not long after that, Gat started lending me his books and finding me at the tiny beach in the early evenings. He’d search me out when I was lying on the Windemere lawn with the goldens.

We started walking together on the path that circles the island, Gat in front and me behind. We’d talk about books or invent imaginary worlds. Sometimes we’d end up walking several times around the edge before we got hungry or bored.

Beach roses lined the path, deep pink. Their smell was faint and sweet.

One day I looked at Gat, lying in the Clairmont hammock with a book, and he seemed, well, like he was mine. Like he was my particular person.

I got in the hammock next to him, silently. I took the pen out of his hand—he always read with a pen—and wrote Gat on the back of his left, and Cadence on the back of his right.

He took the pen from me. Wrote Gat on the back of my left, and Cadence on the back of my right.

I am not talking about fate. I don’t believe in destiny or soul mates or the supernatural. I just mean we understood each other. All the way.

But we were only fourteen. I had never kissed a boy, though I would kiss a few the next school year, and somehow we didn’t label it love.

SUMMER FIFTEEN I arrived a week later than the others. Dad had left us, and Mummy and I had all that shopping to do, consulting the decorator and everything.

Johnny and Mirren met us at the dock, pink in the cheeks and full of summer plans. They were staging a family tennis tournament and had bookmarked ice cream recipes. We would go sailing, build bonfires.

The littles swarmed and yelled like always. The aunts smiled chilly smiles. After the bustle of arrival, everyone went to Clairmont for cocktail hour.

I went to Red Gate, looking for Gat. Red Gate is a much smaller house than Clairmont, but it still has four bedrooms up top. It’s where Johnny, Gat, and Will lived with Aunt Carrie—plus Ed, when he was there, which wasn’t often.

I walked to the kitchen door and looked through the screen. Gat didn’t see me at first. He was standing at the counter wearing a worn gray T-shirt and jeans. His shoulders were broader than I remembered.

He untied a dried flower from where it hung upside down on a ribbon in the window over the sink. The flower was a beach rose, pink and loosely constructed, the kind that grows along the Beechwood perimeter.

Gat, my Gat. He had picked me a rose from our favorite walking place. He had hung it to dry and waited for me to arrive on the island so he could give it to me.

I had kissed an unimportant boy or three by now.

I had lost my dad.

I had come here to this island from a house of tears and falsehood

and I saw Gat,

and I saw that rose in his hand,

and in that one moment, with the sunlight from the window shining in on him,

the apples on the kitchen counter,

the smell of wood and ocean in the air,

I did call it love.

It was love, and it hit me so hard I leaned against the screen door that still stood between us, just to stay vertical. I wanted to touch him like he was a bunny, a kitten, something so special and soft your fingertips can’t leave it alone. The universe was good because he was in it. I loved the hole in his jeans and the dirt on his bare feet and the scab on his elbow and the scar that laced through one eyebrow. Gat, my Gat.

As I stood there, staring, he put the rose in an envelope. He searched for a pen, banging drawers open and shut, found one in his own pocket, and wrote.

I didn’t realize he was writing an address until he pulled a roll of stamps from a kitchen drawer.

Gat stamped the envelope. Wrote a return address.

It wasn’t for me.

I left the Red Gate door before he saw me and ran down to the perimeter. I watched the darkening sky, alone.

I tore all the roses off a single sad bush and threw them, one after the other, into the angry sea.

JOHNNY TOLD ME about the New York girlfriend that evening. Her name was Raquel. Johnny had even met her. He lives in New York, like Gat does, but downtown with Carrie and Ed, while Gat lives uptown with his mom. Johnny said Raquel was a modern dancer and wore black clothes.

Mirren’s brother, Taft, told me Raquel had sent Gat a package of homemade brownies. Liberty and Bonnie told me Gat had pictures of her on his phone.

Gat didn’t mention her at all, but he had trouble meeting my eyes.