The greatest lie the Devil ever told is that
White Lies
are little.
When they gave me the badge, they gave me the first lie.
Like a good lie, it was elegant in its simplicity: blue border, photograph. The girl there stared hard, giving you nothing but unruly black hair, dark eyes, and cappuccino skin. There was no adornment, nothing indicating to any who might find it lying on the street that it was anything but an ordinary identification card. Of course, that discoverer might puzzle at the lack of a name, lack of a logo, lack of anything that might signal what this photo badge could possibly identify. It was conspicuous in its plainness.
That was how it worked at the company. You only noticed that you hadn’t noticed after we reminded you that you’d already missed it.
The uniform was another lie. It was a stealth suit.
We didn’t do ninja stealth. Oh, man, ninjas! Rookies. Guys, when you’re up there with Nazis and Imperial Stormtroopers in terms of your body count in any given movie, you are clearly screwing up at invisibility.
Look left. Now look right. See that person over there, wearing the thing?
That’s not me. I’m the one standing behind the ninja.
Didn’t see me? That’s because the stealth suit is green. It’s the color of a shamrock shake that’s had special ops training. Actual, honest-to-god spies can’t see the stealth suit. These people who are trained to Wage War on Terror, the ones we entrust to find shoe bombs and suicide belts and needles in very sandy haystacks take one look at the stealth suit, and their brains say "nope".
Snooty style experts would cough and tell you it was dated or something like that. They could see the stealth suit. Anybody who could prefer the word "cravat" to "garrote" was looking for an entirely different sort of bombshell, and before I left for work, Reem ar-Rahmani DeGrace had peered back at me out of the mirror to make sure she expressed Opinions on her only daughter leaving the house wearing shoulder pads. “I taught you better,” she huffed while I was just trying to figure out if I had cereal in my teeth. “Absolutely not.”
"You're not real, mother," I answered, but the wisp of her that was still there to nag me ignored the observation.
"You're only saying that because I left," she crooned. "But you don't have to be who they expect you to be, my dear. Just because you expect me to be gone..."
She was there in my reflection, and for a second I had the impression that I had some kind of womanly figure. Hips? Oh, man, she had hips. Was... was my butt looking good in these pants? I gasped, twisted, and looked down: nope, same ass as always. It was just her memory, and when I looked back into the reflection after that fleeting moment, my slouch had reasserted its postural dominance.
My green eyes that were her green eyes narrowed suspiciously in the mirror. "Are you wearing makeup?"
I had put on a touch of eyeliner this morning. And some foundation. And blush. And mascara. And, uh, lipstick. I mean, it was obnoxious that she was even asking, am I right? Moms.
I snorted in my own reflected face. “Do I ever?”
"My dear Gwen, I only want what’s best for you. You live in America now, where a little makeup will not kill you, but too little might. I’m teaching a class next semester on the cultural and social cost-benefit of female decorative coloration. You could at least do your nails for your first day of work."
Eye rolls are like egg rolls but extra delicious. “And have another creepy old man who you’ve invited to giant parties at our house come up to me and tell me that I’ve inherited your figure? Gosh, that’d be great. Maybe this time I actually will show him my bedroom.”
She sighed, kissed my forehead, muttered something in Arabic, and was gone.
Again. Gone again. She hadn't really been there at all... just my mind playing tricks. Mother was gone. Mother had left.
But my forehead felt cool where her lips had pressed.
I strained after her in the mirror, hand fluttering to my brow, down my temple, tracing the outline so familiar yet suddenly new again. It was my face, but the high curve of my cheekbone was her curve... and for a split second, I thought too that maybe the swell of my hip had been...
I sighed. The girl who looked back at me may have inherited her figure, but hadn’t gotten any of her penchant for leveraging it. I knew girls with serious acne who had serious boyfriends. My moneymaker? Strictly pro bono.
I checked one last time. My makeup was on point. My stealth suit was in place.
My back forgot about slouching. My mother abandoning me didn’t matter right now. It was time to go to work.
Leo had left early—“Big day on the Hill, kiddo,”—but that hadn’t stopped him from making waffle batter from scratch, with freshly-sliced fruit and homemade whipped cream. He must’ve been up early; maybe he just hadn’t slept in a cold bed. I stuck a finger in the cream: a hint of caramel, just like he knew I loved. He would make exactly this breakfast every Sunday for me and my mother, and just watch us as we laughed and feasted.
My stomach turned at the thought of it now. I clearly saw the kicked-puppy hurt I’d see in my stepfather’s eyes if he found it all untouched, but I just couldn’t with any of it. I did my best to scrape it all into the disposal and let the sink growl it into oblivion for a full minute as I gritted back salt tears.
No tears. My mother had no patience for runny mascara.
An entirely inappropriate amount of bumper-to-bumper honking later, my eyes lit again on my unadorned fingernails. I sighed. Blinking into the rearview mirror, I was acutely aware of my badly disciplined hair—dark, ropy strands struggling against a ponytail—and then of my elbows, which fumbled past each other as I swung the steering wheel of my brand new Audi to the right and drove past the guard shack outside of work. Inside the tiny building of brick and mirrored glass was a man with a gun big enough to punch through an elephant made of cinder blocks eight hundred times per minute. He didn't even need to open the door to kill you. Keep those elbows steady, girl.
The road split as the trees reached overhead, and I joined the line of dark men and women proceeding to the security checkpoint that straddled the path ahead. {Many of the cars had open windows: with gas prices hiked yet again, air conditioning was a luxury people chose to forego despite the suffocating heat of the DC proto-summer. My new ride was fully electric: mom would not have me contributing to President Ronald Triumph’s oil wars, and we could afford the new "infrastructure tax" that was supposed to offset our increased burden on the electric grid. As my stepdad Leo pointed out, it was also offsetting our lack of financial support for the oil wars, but my mother had been emphatic. And she knew how to leverage.}
To the right, the fork in the road led to the Visitor's Center, where yesterday I'd presented myself and my unadorned fingernails for onboarding. Then, I'd needed my ID, my social security card, and a second photo ID; I’d brought my recent high school diploma for moral support. Today, the only things standing between me and company headquarters were a scanner and the heavily-armed man holding it.
It was time for the first lie.
I pulled the car to a halt in the dappled shade of the trees over the checkpoint, rolled the window down, and presented my ID to the guard. He was a burly man in a police officer’s uniform: crisply-pressed but not starched, with a single straw-colored hair caught on the epaulet on his shoulder. A napkin was stuffed into his pants pocket, with the hastily-scrawled numbers two-oh-two in black ink disappearing into his trousers. I could see immediately that he was a cat person. His hair was close-cropped and brown, with a fading sunburn that crept over his scalp. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes had the flatness of someone who half-expected violence at any time. Typical beat cop. He could have been on a stroll through your neighborhood, making sure people didn't jaywalk or go streaking or murder one another.
Except that in his left hand he was holding a funny little scanner-thing, and his right rested on the M16A2 assault rifle that was slung over his shoulder.
"Morning!" he greeted me brightly, eyes flickering vaguely to my badge and face before crash landing on my breasts. The sun glinted off of a ring as he reached the scanner toward my outstretched badge. The movement was automatic, but it still took him a second to get the scanner anywhere close to where it needed to go. His eyes had no interest in my face, or in the picture of it.
BEEP, beeped the scanner.
"See you around," he nodded to my chest. His mouth hung open slightly, a little grin tweaking the corner of his lips.
Inappropriate, observed my inside voice.
My back straightened minutely, an instinctive reaction that probably only made things worse. Sure, it was a push-up bra, but I was wearing a sensible blouse, buttoned all the way to the top: my cleavage was emphatically not cleaving. I thought of before, straining to see something of a woman in the mirror, and I felt my cheeks go hot. It had been imagined, but it had been time spent with my mother, the kind of time I couldn't have anymore. The memory seemed dirty now. Bitterly, I swallowed the lump forming in my throat, ready to force a smile. I didn’t need trouble with a cop on my first—
Allow me.
My mouth opened.
"You will see me, Rick, in the course of our respective professional engagements!" I waved to him. "Also, stop telling yourself that your wife is probably cheating on you: she is not. She loves you. She is behaving strangely because she is pregnant, but the two of you never wanted children. She has not yet figured out how to tell you, because she wants to keep the baby. That attractive blonde you have been flirting with is not worth it. Clean up your life, because fatherhood is a serious responsibility."
He looked like he was choking for a second. "What the... Pregnant? How do you...?" His eyes narrowed. "Did Shelly put you up to this, you little terrorist? Blonde? Have you been spying on me? I've got a buddy who's an ICE Marshal... I can have you on the Wall in a hot- hey, I'm talking to you!"
My foot accelerated my mouth away from him. His sunburn got redder in my rearview for a moment, and he took a half-step after my retreating tail lights. His lip curled as he thought better of it and turned back to the line of cars. Ahead, I eyed the CIA Police chase cruiser nervously. It sat fifty yards past the security checkpoint, there in case some maniac made it through the other various levels of automatic weapons and needed a more head-on sort of deterrent. I wouldn’t put it past Racist Rick to radio them just to harass me at this point.
I adjusted the rearview mirror so I wouldn't have to see him, and it fell on me for a second. My mother shook her head at me inside it. "Your mouth is why you have no friends, my dear."
I put the mirror back where it was supposed to go. The chase car stayed where it was supposed to stay.
His assertion that you are a terrorist was unsupported and likely motivated by racist ideology. You would not want that cretin for a friend.
It had felt good. Even if he hadn't had any defense against my party tricks.
A certain arrogance comes with the arrangement, I fear. That said, you are entering a realm where few will appreciate you revealing their secrets.
That's me. Brown and under-appreciated.
