A Field Guide to Deception by Jill Malone

didn’t answer, the blond went on, “They think you’re someone else. You look a lot like her actually; it’s kind of marvelous.”
    Claire considered this as the blond smiled, drank her beer. The woman was slender, long-legged to spectacular effect in her black Capri pants, and artfully made up. More than anything, though, she was not like the girls before her, and this, Claire realized later, allowed Claire to relax, pick up the conversation politely, and hand it back to the blond.
    â€œI’m a little less confused now. I appreciate your telling me.”
    â€œOh,” the woman said, and waved the sentiment away, “I should have done it earlier, but I was enjoying myself too much.”
    â€œAh, glad to amuse.”
    â€œNo, no. It’s not like that. Liv has been an ass—my friend, your twin, Liv—and this little parade is proof of it. I’ve been enjoying myself at her expense, not yours.”
    Claire felt the fetal shift again. She took another drink to avoid speaking.
    â€œSorry,” the blond said. “I’m Bailey. I’ve been kind of an ass myself tonight. Let me buy you a drink.”
    â€œNo bother,” Claire said. “Let’s forget the whole thing.”
    They ordered more drinks, and Bailey began to tell Claire a story about the first time that she’d met Liv in an Early American Literature class as undergraduates. “We had the most bizarre professor—beady little mole eyes, random lectures—but he could recite anything. It seemed like he had all of literature inside his head. We were afraid of him.

    â€œAnyway, he had us write a daily response, only a page, to our reading assignments and picked someone to read every class. The first time Liv read, I thought I’d been struck with something. She was talking about how a particular essay gave her a sense of yellow, about how the sentences felt like butter when she read them. I’d never heard anything like it. I thought, listening to her, that she was some kind of genius.”
    Bailey finished her drink. She looked at Claire, and blushed. “It’s funny. I’ve never said that to her. And I can only tell you because you aren’t her. Isn’t that strange?”
    â€œLet me buy you another drink,” Claire said. And Bailey agreed, smoothed her finger across her lower lip as though she were applying gloss.
    â€œI’ve been back in Spokane,” Bailey was saying, “for eighteen months and I can’t meet anyone. I’ve got a great job and I love my house and I just can’t seem to meet anyone.”
    â€œIt’s easy to be isolated here. I think this is where people come to be left alone.”
    â€œToo alone. People here are too alone. It’s not good for people to be so alone.”
    Claire thought of her own loneliness, and agreed.
    â€œI’m almost thirty years old,” Bailey went on, “and I thought my life would mean something by now. No, don’t look at me like that; I’m talking about real meaning. Let me tell you something. My grandmother lived in a retirement home on the South Hill and I used to go up there in the afternoons to sit with her. We’d read or talk or whatever. And one day she tells me, ‘Love, Bailey, love is a collision.’”
    Bailey took another drink. “Wait, I’m telling this wrong. My grandmother was married for sixty years when my grandfather died of liver cancer. Fucking horrible. He lost half his body weight before he finally died, in constant pain. Horrible. And my grandmother, she was made of steel then. That whole time he was sick, she took care of him.
    â€œSo this day in her apartment we’re talking about my grandfather, and how she met him and when she knew—you know—knew that he
was the one. She tells me, ‘Love is a collision. It blows out the glass, and bends the fenders, and wrecks the engine, and it moves you. My god, it