“Please,” she says, and can feel her palms and feet begin to sweat. “I really don’t. I don’t get it.”
“Come on, now. Drop the fake-innocence shtick. There’s no one watching.”
“Give me a break,” she says, applying her lipstick. She draws her lips in neatly and turns around to kiss Hal. His beard is wet, and he tastes of mint and last night’s drinks. He tries to dart his tongue into her mouth, but she pulls away and burrows her face into the warm darkness of his neck.
Hal knows her, and of course he is right. She’s still playing.
But I really don’t know how the game is played, she thinks. And it really does make me nervous.
And who is defensive in this way? It is the werewolf. She thought it was Claire for a moment, but it was still the werewolf.
Last night, when the party was winding down the group gathered to play Werewolf. She announced to Hal, just loud enough for the circle of players to hear, that she was scared to death of being chosen as werewolf. That whoever was God, who did the choosing, better not pick her. She was naïve; she was nervous. But the werewolf was conniving. Through announcing her fear, she ensured she would be chosen as werewolf, and that the others would not suspect nervous, sweet Claire. Already the werewolf was strategizing. But Claire was separate from that. Claire was afraid.
In the beginning, she really didn’t understand just how the game was played. At least, certain minor components, like the detective or the guardian angel. But what she did understand was her own role as werewolf, in which everyone would close their eyes and pretend to be a town that had gone to sleep, and then God, played by one of her friends, would tell the werewolf to open their eyes and “kill” someone. At this point she felt her face change from its peaceful, sleeping state to something maniacal and feral, and she’d open her eyes and point to the person she wanted to kill, careful not to rustle her dress as she pointed. Then she’d return her face to its sleeping peacefulness so she could wake authentically as a townsperson and talk over who they all suspected the werewolf to be.
After each killing, Claire tried to be kind — defensive of those who were accused of being the werewolf and suspicious only of those making accusations. And throughout each round Claire asked questions about how the game was played, answers, in all honesty, she did not have figured out.
She reapplies her lipstick, which is smudged from kissing Hal.
It was effortless to play the part of a townsperson. She just played herself. All she had to do was shut off the part of her brain that knew she was the werewolf. In that way it didn’t feel like lying. Between killings she thought nothing of the werewolf.
At the end of the game, once everyone had been killed off with no votes accusing her, she revealed her identity. Her friends shook their heads in disbelief and laughter, and glanced sidelong at her, saying things like, “You think you know someone.”
Because she couldn’t deceive her closest friend at the party, or Hal, she killed them off in the first and second rounds so she wouldn’t have to.
She says to Hal, “You’re right. I’m a mastermind, and I’m playing the game right now.” It comes out sarcastic when she means it to sound genuine, a confession to uproot the werewolf’s strategy.
How absurd, to be thinking mastermind about a silly game that necessitates manipulation and deceit. That’s just how you play if you want to win.
But it’s not the game, she thinks, in the car to pick up Paul with the radio blasting for distraction. It’s what the game reveals: that all the sweetness and kindness and feelings and tears that she displays to the world could be driven by some essentially bad second self.
She isn’t sure what that second self wants, but it has something to do with winning.
As a child, she was a liar.
The first lie she remembers, she was waiting for the school bus with her dad in his truck. It was raining. The bus sped past their driveway without stopping, so her dad honked the horn and the bus pulled over. She had to get out and run through the rain. When she boarded, a bully who was in her first-grade class said, “Hey, isn’t it your birthday?” The bus lurched forward, and Claire nodded yes even though her birthday was the next day, and braced herself down the aisle of seats. The bus driver overheard and he made the bus sing while Claire stared out the window. At school they announced the lie over the intercom, her class sang also, and her teacher gave her a cupcake with a candle in it. “But your birthday’s tomorrow,” her friend said as she was blowing out the candle. “No it isn’t,” said Claire. “Then why is your party tomorrow?” She couldn’t swallow the cupcake, so she wrapped it in a paper napkin and crushed it into her pocket. “It’s not,” she said. “It’s canceled.”
She sobbed as soon as she came home and saw her dad. While she confessed he held her in his lap, even though her rain gear was dripping wet. The next day, her real birthday, passed like any other regular day.
The second, playing Marco Polo on the playground, she sprinted with her eyes closed into the slide. Her mouth was bleeding, and she ran her tongue over the jagged stub where her front tooth had been, a tooth that had grown in the month before. When she opened her mouth, her friends gaped and said, “Oh my God,” some screaming and some laughing.
When her parents came to pick her up, she told them that someone had pushed her into the slide. They wanted the bully’s name. In Claire’s teens, when her fake tooth still gave her problems (a root canal, bloody gums), her dad said, “Come on, out with it, stop protecting that little fucker.” But she shook her head. She couldn’t confess. Too much time had gone by.
And then there was the third.
She was sitting on the pink window seat at her grandma’s house. It must have been Christmas, because Paul, her cousin, and his little brother, Reuben, were there with their mom, Aunt Ray. Claire was six at the time, which would’ve made Reuben seven and Paul nine. She can even remember her shirt: plaid and red. Her mom knew something was wrong, even before Claire left dinner and went to the window seat to be alone. Her mom followed.
Here’s what she didn’t want to telclass="underline" earlier that day, a man who worked on her grandmother’s farm took her into an old gardening shed that had been converted into a playhouse for the children. There were bunk beds inside the playhouse. They climbed up to the top bunk. The man took his pants off and asked her to touch him. She doesn’t remember if she did or not. All she remembers is that he kissed her, deeply enough so that she could feel that he had no teeth. She wanted to get away, but was afraid of going down ladders.
So instead she told her mom that she’d been playing with her cousins in the bath that day, and Paul went outside and came back with a stick and poked her with it.
Her cousins were upstairs getting ready for bed, and her mom took her hand and led her to the bottom of the stairwell, and yelled up for them, her voice shaking in fear and anger. Paul and Reuben came and stood on the stairs, in the Christmas hats that Grandma had knit for all three kids, lumpy hats with bells and too many points.
“Paul,” said Claire’s mom, “did you poke Claire with a stick?” “What?” asked Paul. And her mom said, “So you didn’t go get a stick while Claire was in the bath and poke her with it?” Paul shook his head. Reuben shook his head also and said, “We didn’t even have a bath today.” Then Aunt Ray came to the top of the stairs and Claire’s mom explained again what had happened. Ray went down to where Paul was standing on the stairwell in his Christmas hat, his cheeks red as he started to cry. She put her arms over his shoulders and asked, “Did you hurt Claire in the bath?” And Paul said, “No,” and Reuben said, “I swear it, he didn’t.”