Chapter 5: Lies Like Liquor
The scarf was there, of course. A slip of emerald-green silk, tangled in the dust bunnies under Rio’s bed. She pulled it out, the fabric feeling like a accusation. She’d texted Ellie a photo of it, and the response had been immediate: The Rusty Nail. 9pm. You’re buying the first round because I had to witness my mother’s midlife crisis in architectural form.
Rio tried to beg off the night out, citing her thesis, but Ellie had bulldozed through her excuses with the cheerful persistence of someone who believed a problem could be solved with enough alcohol and loud music.
So Rio found herself at The Rusty Nail, a bar Ellie loved for its “authentic dive vibe,” which Rio now understood as a polite term for despair soaked in cheap beer. The place was a cave. Neon signs for brands that didn’t exist anymore buzzed and flickered, painting everyone’s skin in alternating washes of sickly blue and urgent red. The air was thick with the smell of fried food, stale sweat, and the cloying cherry scent of someone’s vape. A jukebox in the corner whined a decades-old country song about cheating.
Ellie, already tipsy, slammed two shot glasses of amber liquid onto their sticky, gouged table. “Okay, no more stalling. You’ve been a ghost for two weeks. You jump every time your phone buzzes. You’re either in deep shit or in deep lust. So, talk.”
Rio stared at the tequila. The last time she’d done shots had been with Ellie, weeks before Family Weekend, in a different lifetime. She picked up the glass, the salt crusting the rim. “It’s nothing. Really.”
“Bull. Shit.” Ellie leaned in, her eyes sparkling with conspiratorial delight. “Is it that guy from your seminar? The one with the tattoos?”
“No,” Rio said, too quickly. She threw the shot back. It burned a path of false courage down her throat. “It’s… it’s complicated.”
“Complicated is the best kind!” Ellie signaled for two more, her emerald scarf tied jauntily around her wrist. “Is he older?”
A cold trickle of sweat traced Rio’s spine. He. The pronoun hung in the foul air, a fundamental lie. Agatha’s voice from that final, horrific phone call whispered in her memory: “If you need a story, make it a man. Make him unattainable. A married professor. Anthropology. Safe distance.”
“Yeah,” Rio heard herself say, the word like a stone dropped into a well. “Older.”
Ellie’s grin widened. “I knew it! Tell me everything. What’s his name?”
“David.” The name came from nowhere, bland and harmless. “He’s… an anthropology professor. Guest lecturer.”
“Married?” Ellie asked, not with judgment, but with a giddy thrill.
Rio looked at her friend’s open, eager face. She saw the trust there, the absolute lack of suspicion. The lie was a rot she was about to spread. “Yeah. He’s married.”
Ellie’s mouth formed a perfect ‘O’ of scandalized joy. “No way! Rio! Dish. Now.”
The second shot arrived. Rio took it, chasing the first. The alcohol was starting to blur the sharp edges of her self-loathing into something more manageable, a dull, throbbing shame. She began to weave the fiction, using Agatha’s cold, strategic details as her framework. “He’s an anthropology professor. Visiting faculty. Older. Salt-and-pepper hair, sort of.”
“A silver fox!” Ellie crowed, banging the table. “I knew it! Where’d you meet?”
“A… a lecture series. On urban ecosystems. He was a guest speaker.” The lies came easier now, lubricated by tequila. She described a fictional attraction, stolen glances over PowerPoint slides, a first touch that was a deliberate accident in a crowded hallway. She borrowed the intensity from her own experiences—the desperation, the electric risk—and grafted it onto this imaginary man. She told Ellie about a tryst in his campus office after hours, the feel of a wool blazer under her hands, the fear of being seen.
With every fabricated detail, she felt Agatha’s presence in the room. It was Agatha’s calculated mind that had provided this alibi. Agatha’s marriage that had inspired the premise. Agatha’s fingers, Agatha’s mouth, Agatha’s devastating coolness, were all transposed onto this phantom professor. Rio was narrating their affair, but sanitized, made palatable for Ellie’s consumption.
“God, it’s so… clandestine,” Ellie breathed, enchanted. “But the wife? You feel shitty about that?”
The question was a knife twist. Rio looked into her empty glass. “It’s not about her,” she said, echoing something Agatha had once murmured against her skin in the dark. “It’s about… the impossibility of it. That’s what makes it feel so urgent.”
Ellie nodded as if this was profound wisdom. “Yeah. Yeah, I get that. Like, it’s a closed loop. No future. Just pure… sensation.” She sighed, a little dreamily. “It’s so fucked up. It’s so hot.”
Rio wanted to vomit. The sticky air clung to her. She felt a hysterical laugh bubble up in her chest. Here was Ellie, her best friend, finding the story of her mother’s affair with her roommate romantic. Thrilling.
“Is it good? The sex?” Ellie pressed, her voice dropping to a whisper.
The memory of the kitchen against her back, of the moth-eaten tablecloth in her face, flashed behind Rio’s eyes. The taste of dust and desire. “It’s… compulsive,” she said honestly, the first true thing she’d said in minutes. “It doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels like a system failure.”
Ellie misinterpreted the pain in her voice for passion. “Wow. Just… wow.” She played with her scarf. “You have to be so careful, though. If anyone found out—”
“I know.” Rio cut her off. The thought was a physical clamp around her lungs. “It ends when his visiting professorship ends. In a few weeks. It has to.”
“A tragic expiration date,” Ellie said, swirling her drink. “Poetic.”
The jukebox cycled to a new song, another mournful tune. Rio’s phone buzzed on the table. The screen lit up with a notification—an email. The sender’s name was Miranda Colson. The subject line: Interview Confirmation & Pre-Read.
The real world, Agatha’s world of sleek offices and professional consequences, intruded like a splash of ice water. The fiction she’d just spun for Ellie curdled in her mouth.
“You okay?” Ellie asked, noting her frozen expression.
“Fine,” Rio rasped. “Thesis stuff.” She flipped the phone over, screen down on the sticky wood.
“You know,” Ellie said, leaning back and surveying the dismal bar with a contented smile. “I’m kinda jealous. My life is so… straightforward. Mom’s finally dating again, some boring lawyer type she won’t let me meet. My roommate is having a torrid affair with a married academic. It’s like living in a novel.”
Rio stared at her. The neon light bled across Ellie’s features, turning her fond smile into something grotesque and unknowing. The foundation wasn’t just cracking. Ellie was dancing on it, laughing, completely unaware that the ground beneath her feet was hollow, and that Rio was down in the dark, holding up the rotten beams with her bare, breaking hands.
“Another round?” Ellie asked, already signaling the bartender.
“Yeah,” Rio said, her voice a stranger’s. “Why not.”
She had to live inside the lie now. She had to furnish the details, maintain the fiction. For Agatha. For Ellie. For the chance at a future that seemed to recede further with every perfect, poisoned word she spoke. The only thing left was to drink until she couldn’t tell the difference between the story and the ruin.
The only thing left was to drink until she couldn’t tell the difference between the story and the ruin. Ellie prattled on about her mother’s mysterious lawyer, a safe, fictional man Agatha had apparently conjured for her own alibi. “She says he’s ‘substantive,’” Ellie laughed, making air quotes with her fingers. “Which is mom-code for mind-numbingly dull.”
Rio forced a smile, her jaw aching. The tequila was a fire in her gut, but her mind was a clear, cold chamber of horror. She was narrating one secret life to cover another, and both were lies that originated from the same source. The jukebox scratched into silence. In the sudden quiet, Ellie slapped the table and stood.
“Gotta pee. Don’t let any anthropology professors steal my seat.” She weaved through the scattered tables toward the back, the green scarf a fading banner.
Alone, Rio’s manufactured composure cracked. The sticky wood grain of the table blurred. Her phone was still face-down, a flat, black slab. Miranda Colson’s email was in there. Agatha’s professional world, waiting. Agatha’s daughter, believing a fairy tale. Agatha’s voice, designing the lie: A married professor. Anthropology.
Her thumb found the power button. The screen lit up, blinding in the dim bar. She opened her messages, scrolling past Ellie’s name. She found the thread with Agatha. The last exchange was Agatha’s clinical text from a week ago, just the interview contact and a time. Nothing more.
Her fingers moved, clumsy and fast. The letters tapped out a sentence that was pure, distilled acid, boiling up from the pit of her stomach where the tequila and the truth fermented together.
She didn’t think. She just sent it.
> So am I the boring lawyer you told Ellie about?
The message delivered instantly. A tiny, digital point of no return.
A wave of immediate, sobering nausea washed over her. What had she done? This was the rupture. This was picking up a stone and hurling it through the pristine, silent window of Agatha’s meticulously constructed life. This was need, ugly and raw, screaming into the void where only professional courtesy had been permitted.
She stared at the screen, waiting for the three dots to appear, for the blistering reply, for anything. The phone was a dead weight in her palm. The bar’s noises rushed back in—the clink of glasses, the low hum of other people’s easier conversations. It all felt distant, muffled, as if she were trapped behind thick glass.
She saw Ellie emerging from the hallway, wiping her hands on her jeans, a smile already back on her face.
Rio dropped the phone into her bag as if it were radioactive. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic animal. The interview confirmation, the fictional professor, the green scarf, the decaying house—all of it collapsed into the single, silent scream of that sent text. Ellie slid back into the booth, bringing the smell of cheap soap and unwavering friendship.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Ellie said, her smile fading into concern.
Rio opened her mouth. No sound came out. In her bag, buried in the dark, the phone finally buzzed. Once. A sharp, vibrational sting against her thigh.
The buzz was a live wire against her skin.
Rio flinched, her entire body going rigid. Ellie was still talking, her mouth moving, but the sound dissolved into a dull roar. There was only the dark womb of her bag and the device inside it, now holding a verdict. She made a choked sound, fumbling for the zipper. Her fingers, slick with panic, slipped twice before she got it open.
She stared at the glowing screen in the bag’s darkness. A single word filled the message preview.
Agatha: Yes.
The world tilted. That was it. No denial. No explanation. No admonishment. Just a stark, terrifying admission. Agatha had confirmed the parallel lie, tying their two fictions together in a sick, elegant knot. Rio was the boring lawyer. The professor was a smoke screen. They were each other’s secret, reflected in funhouse mirrors.
“Earth to Rio!” Ellie’s hand waved in front of her face. “You are seriously spacing. Was it a sext from Professor Silver Fox?” She giggled, entirely pleased with herself.
Rio’s throat clenched shut. She managed to shove the phone deeper into her bag, as if burying it could change the word. “No,” she croaked. “Just a… a reminder. About that interview.”
“The big one? With the Colson group?” Ellie’s eyes widened with genuine excitement. “That’s huge! See, this torrid affair is fueling your ambition. I love it.”
The irony was so profound it felt like a physical blow to Rio’s diaphragm. She couldn’t breathe. The sticky air of the bar was syrup in her lungs. Agatha had set up the interview. Agatha had crafted the lie. Agatha had just confessed. Every pillar of Rio’s current existence was engineered by the same person, a person currently reducing their catastrophic connection to a single, loaded syllable.
Yes.
It was permission and a prison sentence.
“I need some air,” Rio stammered, lurching out of the booth. Her legs were unsteady.
“Wait, I’ll come with—” Ellie began, starting to slide out.
“No!” The word came out too sharp. Rio softened it with a brittle smile that hurt her face. “I’m just… the tequila. I need a minute. Alone. I’ll be right back.”
She didn’t wait for a reply. She shouldered her way through the crowd, a current of bodies smelling of smoke and cheap cologne. She burst out the heavy front door into the chilly night. The alley behind The Rusty Nail was a canyon of overflowing dumpsters and pooled, greasy water reflecting the security light’s jaundiced glare.
She bent over, hands on her knees, and dragged in cold, rancid air. It didn’t help. Her mind was a screaming collage: Agatha against the fridge, the tablecloth in her face, Ellie’s voice saying ‘my mom’s midlife crisis’, the green scarf, the word YES burning on a screen.
She straightened up, pulling out her phone again. The message thread was open. Her reckless question. Agatha’s devastating reply. She typed, her thumbs shaking.
> What does that mean?
She sent it. Immediately, the three dots appeared. Agatha was typing. Rio watched them, mesmerized, a prisoner awaiting a sentence. They vanished. Reappeared. Then stopped.
No new message came.
The silence was more violent than any answer. It was a door slammed in her face. It was Agatha retreating behind the wall of her own consequences, leaving Rio alone in the alley with the consequence of Yes. It meant everything. It meant nothing. It was an atom bomb disguised as a syllable.
The door to the bar swung open, spilling out a slice of noise and yellow light. Ellie stood silhouetted in the frame. “Rio? You okay? You’ve been out here forever.”
Rio turned. Her friend’s face was soft with concern, utterly innocent of the seismic shift that had just occurred. The weight of the secrets, now doubly confirmed, felt like it would crush Rio’s spine. She had to go back in there. She had to sit across from Ellie, Agatha’s daughter, and continue the fiction.
She had to talk about a made-up professor while the reality of her mother’s confession blazed in her pocket.
“I’m fine,” Rio said, her voice eerily calm. She walked back toward the light, toward Ellie. “Just a weird head rush. Let’s go back in.”
She followed Ellie inside, the door swallowing them back into the noise. The booth waited, their half-finished drinks sweating onto the wood. Rio slid in, the leather sticking to her thighs. Ellie was watching her, a faint line of worry between her brows.
“Seriously,” Ellie said. “You look pale.”
“I’m good,” Rio said. She picked up her glass, the condensation cold on her palm. “So. You were saying about your mom’s lawyer?”