Listen for the Lie

by Amy Tintera

A podcaster has decided to ruin my life, so I’m buying a chicken. I make plans for this chicken as I sit in my cubicle at Walter J. Brown Investment Services, waiting to be fired. I stopped pretending to work two hours ago. Now I’m just staring at recipes on my phone, dreaming about sticking lemons up a chicken’s butt. It’s an apology chicken, for my boyfriend. It’s like that engagement chicken. The one women make to persuade their boyfriends to propose? Except this is a “sorry I didn’t tell you I’m the prime suspect in my friend’s murder” chicken. Apology chicken, for short.

Every evening, when Jerry Howell walks out of his office, he leaves absolutely no evidence that he was ever there. He probably missed his calling as a serial killer.

My phone buzzes the next day, as I’m sitting in Mom’s office, staring at the poster above her desk that says Make Today So Awesome That Yesterday Gets Jealous. I look down to see a text from Ben. Are you free this afternoon? I am currently spending my days staring at a motivational quote that borders on toxic positivity, thinking up ways to write kissing scenes without using the word lips fifteen times on one page. Of course I’m free. I type a one-word response: Why?

We’re just going in different directions. I guess that’s fair. I’m possibly headed to prison, and he is headed back to the dating apps to find a new girlfriend.

“You didn’t push him down the stairs,” Savvy said. I hadn’t, but I was fairly certain that Matt actually thought I had. He’d said the lie so many times he’d started to believe it himself. Hell, I was starting to believe it. The (fake?) memory of me violently shoving him now plays next to the (true?) memory of me flailing out my arms in anger and of him tripping because he was drunk again. “But the truth doesn’t matter,” she said again. “I should have controlled my temper,” I said softly. I should have just cried. Taken the hits and crawled away to show my scars. I should have been a better victim. The truth doesn’t matter if you fight back. “I have an idea.” Savvy leaned closer to me. She met my eyes. Her mouth was set in a hard line, her gaze steely and serious. “Let’s kill your husband.”

I wonder whether he’s disappointed he never got out. Or whether he’s jealous of me, for up and moving to Los Angeles. But I didn’t really get out. I wasn’t here physically, but in a way, I’ve spent every day of the last five years here. Other people moved on with their lives. Look at Nina and Emmett. I’m still defined by everything that happened to me in my hometown. By my first husband, and the life I had in my early twenties. I’m like the football jock who never gets over peaking in high school, except I’m the tragic murder version.

Men don’t protect us, not really. They only protect themselves, or each other. The only thing men ever protected me from was happiness.” “Oh shit,” Ben murmurs under his breath.

She was a real no-nonsense girl. Just didn’t have time for any shit, you know? I’ve always admired that about her. I was so concerned with whether or not everyone liked me at that age. And people hate that quality in a young woman, don’t they? They don’t know what to do with a girl who isn’t looking for their approval. They feel like they have to bring her down a peg.

“If I pull out her chair and make a big show of talking about how moms are heroes and women are actually the strong ones, they won’t notice that I don’t have any interest in listening to a single word that comes out of their mouths.”

Lucy called me all excited, telling me Matt proposed, and I said, “Honey, why don’t you wait a bit? You’re so young. Go to Europe. Buy an old van and travel the country. Don’t get married. You have your whole life to be married.”

if he really loved her, he would understand that she wanted to wait a few years to get married. What kind of twenty-two-year-old boy wants to get married these days anyway? We’re not Mormons, for Christ’s sake.

Right away, she knew that I didn’t want to just leave. I wanted fucking revenge. “Let’s Thelma and Louise this shit,” she’d said, and I’d laughed.

“Do they even have Uber in this town?” “There’s one dude. Apparently he takes forever to show up.”

“Who was he? What did he do to you?” “Troy. An asshole I met in a bar who thought he could put his hands on me. He was wrong.” She flashed me a dark grin. “Jesus, Savvy—” “I’m fine.” “Did you go to the police? It was self-defense, right?” “The police.” She snorted. “No. I think the self-defense argument would have looked a little thin, given how many times I stabbed him.”

I remember always feeling conflicted when Matt and I would have sex. Because on the one hand, I wanted to fucking murder him. On the other hand, we always had really fantastic sex.