Truth and Lies by Norah McClintock Page B

school and had taken a detour up the street where Billy and I used to live. I was just coming up to the corner when I spotted him, a slight guy in jeans and a T-shirt, shaggy blond hair hanging in his eyes. My heart had started to hammer in my chest. Billy. It was Billy!
    Except it wasn’t.
    It was just some guy I’d never seen before. A guy with brown eyes instead of blue eyes, with a narrow face instead of Billy’s rectangular face, with a hookish nose instead of Billy’s bent and crushed nose.
    So when I came out of the arcade on Yonge Street almost a week ago and blinked in the sun and thought I saw Jen, looking down the street, not noticing me, I thought I was seeing things again.
    Then she turned—pirouetted—and in that movement, fluid from all those years of ballet lessons she had taken, I knew I wasn’t seeing things. It was really her. She pirouetted, pushed off, and then all I saw was her long blond hair swaying in sync with her hips.
    I could have called her name: “Hey, Jen!”
    Before, if I’d done that she would have flashed me a smile, would even have thrown herself into my arms if her mood was right and I hadn’t done anything stupidlately. But now? Now I wasn’t sure how she’d react. What if she was on her way to meet some of her rich drive-their-own-cars private school friends?
    But what if she wasn’t? What if she was just heading to HMV or the Eaton Centre or any one of a hundred stores? What if she was on her way to the subway? What if she was about to go home? If she was, and if I let her get away one more time, I’d never have a chance to talk to her. Her mother was like a jailer or a gatekeeper—or a Rottweiler or a pit bull. To get at her, you had to go through Mrs. Hayes. Jen had a cell phone, but she must have changed the number because when I tried it, I always got a message that said No Service. I’d screwed up enough courage to ask Jen’s friend, Voula, but she wouldn’t tell me anything. Her answer, delivered in that snotty tone some girls have nailed down: “If she’d wanted you to have the number, she would have given it to you.”
    But now there she was, Jen, for the first time in over a month. All alone, no girlfriends around. No boyfriends, either.
    I went after her.
    Down Yonge Street. Across Dundas. Into the Eaton Centre. It was easier to track her in there. The place was crowded with shoppers, and I could always turn away and pretend to be studying a jacket in the window of Gap or Old Navy if she started to turn.
    She walked straight through the north mall, down the main mall, through the food court, out the otherend, and down the short escalator into the subway station. Then she surprised me. She stopped, boom, like she’d run into a wall. She looked right, then left. Then she ducked into a pay phone. Why a pay phone when she had her own cell phone?
    There were two phones set almost back-to-back into slots in the wall. Jen was in one of them, her back to the opening. I ducked into the other. I lifted the receiver and pretended to be using it when, really, I was eavesdropping.
    I missed the beginning of her phone call and had to strain to catch what she was saying.
    Midnight. I definitely heard her say midnight. She sounded surprised, even a little nervous. Midnight, sure, she could do that. I strained to hear every sweet word she said, to hear her voice that lilted musically even though I could tell she was nervous, maybe even upset, about something. Then, faintly, a
thunk
, followed by silence.
    I froze. I kept the phone pressed to my ear and my back turned to the opening in case she doubled back the way she had come. Seconds slipped by. When I had counted out enough of them to make a minute, I turned. There was no sign of Jen. I dropped the receiver into its cradle and stepped out of the slot. She was gone.
    She was always gone.
    As I walked across the viaduct now, I had a picture of her in my