The Reverse

“What happened?”

“They found out.” He ran his fingers through his hair. It was a fidgety habit, something he’d done ever since I’d met him. It meant he was trying to come up with a story, a lie so enormous that nobody should believe it, but they would. They always did. “Somebody lied about me.”

“Oh?” I lifted my eyebrows in surprise. “How?”

“I don’t know. Nobody will tell me.” He dug his hands into his pockets. “They won’t look at me at all. It’s like I’m not even there.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.” He found a lighter and flicked it into life, holding to the cigarette dangling from his lips. A faint glow illuminated the edge as it sparked. A memory flashed through my mind. A faint glow, just like that, on a nightly walk. A faded promise to stop smoking forever. I shook my head as he exhaled, a plume of smoke vanishing into the night. He grinned at me. “Still don’t like it?”

“Nope.” I smile tightly. “Never did.”

He took another drag. “I remember differently.”

“I know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. He leaned forward, flicking the ash off his cigarette and spitting onto the ground. I grit my teeth. Another memory flashes through: me asking him to stop, him waving me off again.

“We always saw things a little bit differently," I said.

“And? What do you mean?” He repeated the question in a sing-song voice, as if I was a child. I tried to ignore it, but it still got under my skin. It always did. "Remember when you missed your sister's birthday party?" I asked.

"I didn't miss it," he said. "I never got the message."

"Right." I looked up into the empty darkness of sky. "Remember when you said your friend wouldn't bring you back from those tournaments, so I should pick you up?"

"He didn't like driving on your side of town."

"How about when you told your brother I was having an affair?"

His cheeks flushed, and his fingers closed around his cigarette. "Those were private messages."

I kept going. "What about your friend from New York? The model, the one you pretended to call in front of me? The one you said didn't pick up his phone, because he isn't real?"

He didn't answer this time. He just stood sullenly, staring at me from underneath his newsboy cap. He always stopped talking when I got too close to the truth.

"But it wasn't just me you lied to, was it?" I asked softly. "You lied to everybody. About everything. Me, you... and everybody else. It would be such a shame if they found out."

A terrible realization started to form in his eyes.

"I'm sure they'd hate to know what you said behind their backs," I continued. "Things they never said, stuff they never did, places they never were. Conversations they never had. I don't think you even know what's real any more, do you?"

He crushed the cigarette into the ground with his toe. "What... have you done?"

I smiled again, a predatory grin this time. "Everything."