Author: E. Lockhart
Category: Literature
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/e-lockhart/page,5,39170-genuine_fraud.html
“Crazy cute,” said Jule. Her hand went into Shanna’s bag. She lifted the wallet and slid it into her tote. “My boyfriend, Paolo, is backpacking around the world,” she continued. “He’s in the Philippines right now. Can you believe it? So I’m in Vegas with my girlfriend. I should get a guy who wants to settle down, not backpack the world, right? If I want a wedding.”
“If that’s what you want,” said Shanna, “you can definitely have it. You can have anything if you set your mind to it. You pray and you, like, visualize.”
“Visualization,” said one of the bridesmaids. “We went to this workshop. It really works.”
“Listen,” Jule said. “The reason I came up to talk to y’all was, could I use your phone? Mine’s dead. Would that be okay?”
Shanna handed over her phone and Jule texted a random number. “Meet at 10:15 at the Cheesecake Factory.” She handed the phone back to Shanna. “Thanks. You’re gonna be the most beautiful bride.”
“Same to you, sweetie,” said Shanna. “Someday soon.”
The bachelorettes waved. Jule waved back and booked it through the lines of slot machines to a bank of elevators.
As soon as the elevator door closed and she was alone, Jule pulled off the wig. She kicked off the heels and pulled joggers and Vans from the tote, yanked the pants on over the short black dress, and slipped the Vans on her feet. The wig and the heels went into the bag. She put on a zip-up hoodie and the doors opened on the tenth floor of the hotel.
Jule didn’t get off. As the elevator went back down, she pulled out a makeup wipe and peeled off her false eyelashes. She wiped off her lip gloss. Then she opened Shanna’s wallet, snagged the driver’s license, and dropped the wallet itself on the floor.
She was another person by the time the doors opened.
—
Four casinos down on the strip, Jule surveyed six restaurants until she found a place to order a coffee and chat up a lonely college student who was just starting work on the night shift. The place was a 1950s diner replica. The waitress was a tiny woman with freckles and soft brown curls. She wore a polka-dot dress and a frilly housewife’s apron. When a crowd of drunk guys barged in talking about beer and burgers, Jule put some cash on the counter to pay for her food and then slid into the kitchen. She snagged the most feminine backpack off a line of hooks and left through a back exit into the casino’s service hallway. Running down a flight of stairs and then out into the alley, she shouldered the pack and pushed her way through a group of people lined up for a magic show.
A ways down she rummaged through the bag. In the zipper pocket was a passport. The name on it was Adelaide Belle Perry, age twenty-one.
It was a lucky take. Jule had figured she might have to work a long time before she got a passport. She felt sorry for Adelaide, though, and after taking the passport, she turned the backpack in to a lost properties office.
Back on the strip, she found a wig store and two clothing shops. She stocked up, and by morning, she had moved casinos twice more. Wearing a wavy blond wig and orange lipstick, she lifted the license of one Dakota Pleasance, five foot two. In a black wig and a silver jacket she snagged the passport of Dorothea von Schnell of Germany, five foot three.
By eight a.m., Jule was back in the joggers and Vans, her face wiped clean. She got a cab to the Rio hotel and took the elevator to the roof. She had read about the VooDoo Lounge, fifty-one stories up.
—
When a battle is over, when he has lived to fight again another day, the great white hetero action hero goes somewhere high above the city, somewhere with a view. Iron Man, Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, Jason Bourne, James Bond—they all do it. The hero gazes out at the pain and beauty contained in the twinkling lights of the metropolis. He thinks about his special mission, his unique talents, his strength, his strange, violent life and all the sacrifices he makes to live it.
The VooDoo Lounge early in the morning was little more than a concrete expanse of roof dotted with red and black couches. The chairs were shaped like enormous hands. A staircase curved above the roof. Patrons could climb it for a better view of the Vegas strip below. There were a couple of cages for showgirls to dance in, but no one was in the lounge now except a janitor. He raised his eyebrows as Jule came in. “I just want to have a look,” Jule told him. “I’m harmless, I swear.”
“Of course you are,” he said. “Go ahead. I’m mopping up.”
Jule went to the top of the staircase and gazed at the city. She thought of all the lives being led down there. People were buying toothpaste, having arguments, picking up eggs on the way home from work. They lived their lives surrounded by all that glitter and neon, happily assuming that small, cute women were harmless.
Three years ago, Julietta West Williams was fifteen. She’d been in an arcade—a big one, air-conditioned and shiny-new. She was racking up points on a war simulation. She was lost in it, shooting, when two boys she knew from school came up behind her and squeezed her boobs. One on each side.
Julietta elbowed one sharply in his soft stomach, then swung around and stomped hard on the other one’s foot. Then she kneed him in the groin.
It was the first time she’d ever hit anyone outside of her martial arts classes. The first time she’d needed to.
All right, she hadn’t needed to. She’d wanted to. She enjoyed it.
When that boy bent over, coughing, Jule turned and hit the first one in the face with the heel of her hand. His head flew back and she yanked the front of his T-shirt and yelled into his greasy ear, “I’m not yours to touch!”
She wanted to see fear on that boy’s face, and to see his friend crumpled over on a nearby bench. Those two boys had always been so cocky at school, afraid of nothing.
A pimple-face man who worked at the arcade came over and grabbed Julietta’s arm. “We can’t have fighting in here, miss. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”
“Are you grabbing my arm?” she asked him. “ ’Cause I don’t want you to grab my arm.”
He dropped it fast.
He was afraid of her.
He was six inches taller than her and at least three years older. He was a grown man, and he was afraid of her.
It felt good.
Julietta left the arcade. She didn’t worry that the boys would follow her. She felt like she was in a movie. She hadn’t known she could take care of herself that way, hadn’t known that the strength she’d been building in the classes and in the weight room at the high school would pay off. She realized she had built armor for herself. Perhaps that was what she’d been intending to do.
She looked the same, looked just like anyone, but she saw the world differently after that. To be a physically powerful woman—it was something. You could go anywhere, do anything, if you were difficult to hurt.
—
A few floors down in the Rio hotel hallway, Jule found a maid who was pushing a cart. A forty-dollar tip and she had a room to sleep in until three-thirty. The check-in time was four p.m.
Another night of lifting wallets and another day of sleep and Jule was ready to buy an inconspicuous used car off a sleazy guy in a parking lot. She paid cash. She collected her luggage from the bus station and stashed her extra IDs deep under the felt that lined the hatchback.
She drove herself across the border to Mexico with Adelaide Belle Perry’s passport.
LAST WEEK OF FEBRUARY, 2017
LONDON
Three months before Jule arrived in Mexico, Forrest Smith-Martin was on Jule’s couch, eating baby carrots with his straight, glossy teeth. He had been staying at her London flat for five nights.
Forrest was Immie’s ex-boyfriend. He always acted like he didn’t believe a word Jule said. If she said she liked blueberries, he raised his eyebrows like he highly doubted it. If she said Immie had flitted off to Paris, he questioned her about where, precisely, Immie was staying. He made Jule feel illegitimate.
Pale and slim, Forrest belonged to the category of scrawny men who are uncom
fortable when women are more muscular than they are. His joints seemed loosely attached, and the woven bracelet around his left wrist looked dirty. He had gone to Yale for world literature. He liked people to know he’d gone to Yale and often brought it up in conversation. He wore little spectacles, was developing a beard that never quite sprouted, and kept his long hair in a man bun on the top of his head. He was twenty-two and working on his novel.
Right now, he was reading a book translated from the French. Albert Camus. He pronounced it Camoo. He was draped on the couch, not just sitting, and wore a sweatshirt and his boxer shorts.
Forrest was in the flat because of Immie’s death. He said he wanted to sleep on the fold-out couch in the den, to be near Imogen’s things. More than once, Jule found him taking Immie’s clothes out of the closet and smelling them. A couple of times he hung them from the window frames. He found Imogen’s old books—early editions of Vanity Fair and other Victorian novels—and piled them next to his bed, as if he needed to see them before he fell asleep. Then he left the toilet seat up.
He and Jule had been handling Immie’s death from the London end. Gil and Patti were stuck in New York because of Gil’s health. The Sokoloffs had managed to keep the suicide out of all the papers. They said they didn’t want publicity, and there was no question of foul play, according to the police. Even though her body hadn’t been found, no one doubted what had happened. Immie had left that note in the bread box.
Everyone agreed she must have been depressed. People jumped into the Thames all the time, said the police. If a person weighted herself down before jumping, as Imogen had written she planned to do, there was no telling how long it might take before a body was found.
Now Jule sat next to Forrest and flipped on the TV. It was late-night BBC programming. The two of them had spent the day going through Immie’s kitchen, packing things as Patti had requested. It had been a long and emotional project.
“That girl looks like Immie,” Forrest said, pointing to an actress on the screen.
Jule shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Yes, she does,” said Forrest. “To me, she does.”
“Not up close,” Jule said. “She just has short hair. People think I look like Immie, too, from a distance.”
He looked at her steadily. “You don’t look like her, Jule,” he said. “Imogen was a million times prettier than you will ever be.”
Jule glared. “I didn’t know we were getting hostile tonight. I’m kinda tired. Can we just skip it, or are you really jonesing for an argument?”
Forrest leaned toward her, shutting his Camus. “Did Imogen lend you money?” he asked.
“No, she didn’t,” Jule answered truthfully.
“Did you want to sleep with her?”
“No.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“No.”
“Did she have a new boyfriend?”
“No.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“There are six hundred things I’m not telling you,” Jule said. “Because I’m a private person. And my friend just died. I’m sad and I’m trying to deal with it. Is that all right with you?”
“No,” said Forrest. “I need to understand what happened.”
“Look. The rule of you staying in this flat is, don’t ask Jule a million questions about Immie’s private life. Or about Jule’s private life. Then we can get along. All right?”
Forrest sputtered. “The rule of this flat? What are you talking about, the rule of this flat?”
“Every place has rules. What you do when you come into a new place is, you figure them out. Like when you’re a guest, you learn the codes of behavior and adapt. Yes?”
“Maybe that’s what you do.”
“That’s what everyone does. You work out how loud you can talk, how you can sit, what things are okay to say and what’s rude. It’s called being a human in society.”
“Nah.” Forrest crossed his legs in a leisurely fashion. “I’m not that fake. I just do what feels right to me. And you know what? It’s never been a problem, until now.”
“Because you’re you.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re a guy. You come from money, you’re white, you have really good teeth, you graduated from Yale, the list goes on.”
“So?”
“Other people adapt to you, asshole. You think there’s no adapting going on, but you’re fucking blind, Forrest. It’s all around you, all the time.”
“That’s a point,” he said. “Okay, I’ll grant you that.”
“Thank you.”
“But if you’re thinking through all that lunacy every time you walk into a new situation, then there is something seriously wrong with you, Jule.”
“My friend is dead,” she told him. “That’s what’s wrong with me.”
Immie hadn’t told her secrets to Forrest. She had told them to Jule.
Jule had realized the truth of it early on, even before Immie had told Jule her birth name, and before Brooke Lannon ever turned up at the Vineyard house.
It was the Fourth of July, not long after Jule had first moved in. Immie had found a recipe for pizza dough you made on an outdoor grill. She was messing around with yeast in the kitchen. She had invited friends, summer people she’d met a couple of days earlier at a farmer’s market. They came over and ate. Everything was fine, but they wanted to leave early. “Let’s drive into town for the fireworks,” they said. “We shouldn’t miss them. Hurry up.”
Jule knew Imogen hated the crush of people at crowded events. She couldn’t see over people’s heads. There was always too much noise.
Forrest didn’t seem to care. He just got in the car with the summer people, stopping only to snag a box of cookies from the pantry.
Jule stayed behind. She and Immie left the dishes for the cleaner and changed into swimsuits. Jule pulled the lid off the hot tub, and Immie brought out tall glasses of seltzer with lemon.
They sat in silence for a bit. The evening had turned cool, and steam rose off the water.
“Do you like it here?” Immie asked finally. “In my house? With me?”
Jule did, and she said so. When Immie looked at her expectantly, she added: “Every day there’s time to actually see the sky, and to taste what I’m eating. There’s room to stretch out. No work, no expectations, no adults.”
“We’re the adults,” said Immie, tilting her head back. “I think so, at least. You and me and Forrest, we’re the effing adults, and that’s why it feels so good. Oops!” She had tipped her seltzer into the hot tub by accident. Now she chased around three slowly sinking pieces of sliced lemon until she caught them. “It’s good you like it here,” Immie said as she fished the last slice out, “because there was a part of living with Forrest that was like—being alone. I can’t explain it. Maybe it’s because he’s writing a novel, or because he’s older than I am. But it’s better with you here.”
“How did you meet him?”
“In London I went to a summer program with his cousin, and then one day I was getting coffee at Black Dog and I recognized him from Instagram. We started talking. He was here for a month to work on his book. He didn’t know anybody. That was that, basically.” Immie trailed her fingers across the top of the water. “How about you? You seeing anybody?”
“There were some boyfriends at Stanford,” said Jule. “But they’re still in California.”
“Some boyfriends?”
“Three boyfriends.”
“Three boyfriends is a lot, Jule!”
Jule shrugged. “I couldn’t decide.”
“When I first got to college,” Immie said, “Vivian Abromowitz invited me to the Students of Color Union party. You’ve heard me talk about Vivian, right? Anyway, her mom is Chinese American; her dad’s Korean Jewish. She was set on going to this party because some guy she crushed on would be there. I was a little nervous about being the only white person, but that turned ou
t fine. The awkward part was that everyone was all political and ambitious. Like, talking about protest rallies and philosophy reading lists and this Harlem Renaissance film series. At a party! I was like, when are we dancing? And the answer was never. Were parties like that at Stanford? With no beer and people being all intellectual?”
“Stanford has a Greek system.”
“Okay then, maybe not. Anyway, this tall black guy with dreads, really cute, was like, ‘You went to Greenbriar and you haven’t read James Baldwin? What about Toni Morrison? You should read Ta-Nehisi Coates.’ And I said, ‘Hello? I just got to college. I haven’t read anybody yet!’ Vivian was next to me and she was all, ‘Brooke texted me and there’s another party that has a DJ, and the rugby team is there. Should we jet?’ And I wanted to go to a party where there was dancing. So we left.” Immie ducked her head under the water of the hot tub and came back up again.
“What happened with the condescending guy?”
Immie laughed. “Isaac Tupperman. He’s why I’m telling this story. I went out with him for nearly two months. That’s how come I can remember the names of his favorite writers.”
“He was your boyfriend?”
“Yeah. He’d write me poems and leave them on my bicycle. He’d come over late at night, like at two in the morning, and say he missed me. But the pressure was on, too. He grew up in the Bronx and went to Stuy, and he was—”
“What’s Stuy?”
“Public school for smart kids in New York. He had a lot of ideas about what I should be, what I should study, what I should care about. He wanted to be the amazing older guy who would enlighten me. And I was flattered, and kind of in awe, but then also sometimes really bored.”
“So he was like Forrest.”
“What? No. I was so happy when I met Forrest because he was the opposite of Isaac.” Immie said it decisively, as if it were completely true. “Isaac liked me because I was ignorant and that meant he could teach me, right? That made him feel like a man. And he did know about a lot of things that I never studied or experienced or whatever. But then—and this is the irony—he was totally annoyed by my ignorance. And in the end, after he broke up with me and I was sad and mental, I came to the Vineyard and one day I thought: Eff you, Mr. Isaac. I’m not so very ignorant. I just know stuff about stuff that you dismiss as unimportant and useless. Does that make sense? I mean, I didn’t know Isaac’s stuff. And I do know Isaac’s stuff is important, but all the time I spent with him I felt like I was just so dumb and blank. The fact that I couldn’t understand his life experience very well, combined with how he was a year ahead of me and really into all his academics, the literary magazine, et cetera—that meant that all the time, he got to be the big man and I was looking up at him with wide eyes. And that was what he liked about me. And why he despised me.