Free The Safest Lies by Megan Miranda Page A

safe.”
    She nodded, but her hair fell in front of her face, and I couldn’t read her expression. She took a knife and started hacking at the dish, and I left.
    —
    We ate in silence, both of us pushing green beans around the plate. “Mom,” I said, seeing as she’d had some time to cool off. “I’m sure you saw, there’s the mayor’s ceremony tonight, and Ryan—”
    “So, this Ryan in the paper. Is this the same Ryan that had you glued to the phone yesterday?”
    “I guess,” I said. “We’re…friends.” At least, I’d hoped we were. Now I wasn’t so sure. Which was part of the reason I wanted to be there tonight. It felt like I needed to—the moment had become something bigger than the both of us. It had left its mark on him, too, and I was pretty sure I was the only one who could see it.

    She raised her eyes, sharpened them, like she knew what I was about to ask.
    “I should be there tonight,” I said. “I was going to see if Annika could take me.”
    “Absolutely not,” she said. “I don’t want you on television,” she said. “You know how I feel about privacy.” Oh, didn’t I.
    And then the walls felt too close, and the gates too high, and everything too narrow and constricting. And I wondered, for the first time, whether Jan was right—whether Mom made me this way. Whether she kept me this way, so I wouldn’t want to leave her.
    “You have to let me out of the house,” I said. “You have to —”
    “I don’t have to do anything, Kelsey. You were just at school. That sufficiently counts as out of the house. The rest? That’s up to the parent. That’s up to me. ”
    This was the first fight that I could remember truly having with her. Usually I agreed with her decisions, her ideas seeping into me, becoming my own, like fear itself.
    “Just let me explain—”
    “You’re not going. From now on, you go straight to school, you come straight home. The discussion is over.”

    I took my dish to the sink well before she was finished, and slammed my bedroom door.
    I turned on the music, turned it up loud enough to rattle the windows.
    I called Annika and asked her what she was doing tonight.
    And I prepared to do the one thing that every normal teenager must do at one point or another: I was going to sneak out.

I set the music on a loop and kept it loud, hoping Mom would let me wallow in my anger. Sometimes the house felt too big for just the two of us—each of us on a separate hallway—but other times, like now, it felt too small. Walls closing in, stale recirculated air, doors opening, doors closing, in unnecessary ceremony.
    I watched the clock from my seat at the edge of the bed, tapping my heels twice as fast as the beat.
    I checked my email on my phone to pass the time. Only one, from Annika a few days earlier:
Are you okay, doll? I’ve tried calling. And calling. I heard you almost died, and I would like confirmation that you aren’t, in fact, dead. Call me soon as you get this. xoxo—An
    I loved that about Annika—how she could make everything big and small at the same time. It was so different from my own life—everything over-examined and weighty.

    At seven-thirty, I took the key from my desk drawer and unlocked the metal grate outside my bedroom window, swinging it open. I held my breath, listening for signs of my mother. My room faced the front, which worked in my favor, because Mom’s room was down the other hall and faced the back. The dining room was the only other room with windows toward the front. Everything else—the kitchen, her office, the living room—had a clear view back to the mountains.
    I sat on the windowsill, willing myself to jump the four feet to the ground, and my heart beat wildly. Everything about this moment felt magnified. The night, crisp and unexpectedly alluring. My stomach churning. The feeling of spiders crawling out from the corners of the room, coming for me.
    At the last moment, I took my new cell phone from my purse and tossed