Tell Me Lies

Baird College junior Stephen DeMarco remembers his first encounter with Lucy at his friend Wrigley’s house party. He is immediately captivated by her and finds himself staring at her throughout the night. His mind lingers on her even as he, Wrigley, and their other friend Charlie snort cocaine. He notices that Lucy is also interested in and watching him. He then notices that his staring makes her uncomfortable, and he smiles, making her feel more at ease. He does not talk to her, instead getting drunk and having sex with fellow junior Diana Bunn, but he believes that Lucy’s openness to him indicates that she will trust him.

A week after freshman year starts, Pippa begins a relationship with Mike Wrigley, who goes by his last name. Wrigley and his friends are part of the fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha, also called Chops, which has been underground since being disbanded years ago for drug possession. Wrigley and his friends take their annual trip to Lake Mead in Nevada, and Pippa invites Lucy, Jackie, and Bree. While on a boat on the last day of the trip, Pippa and Jackie do some cocaine, while Bree and Lucy both decline. The next person after Lucy is Stephen, whose eyes captivate her. The group then watches Lucy funnel some beer. She staggers and nearly falls but is caught by Stephen, who introduces himself to her. She is drawn even more to him, and they quickly bond when he connects her name to the song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” by The Beatles, which her father sang to her when she was younger. As she drinks more beer, she thinks about how much she has drunk and how little she has eaten. She has been eating little ever since Pippa mentioned the “freshman fifteen.” Lucy then compliments Stephen’s captain’s hat before he tells her that the bikini she is wearing looks good.

Stephen wants to have sex with Lucy, but he worries about juggling his on-again, off-again relationship with Diana. Stephen finds that he is more productive with Diana than when he is with other women and stays with her for that reason, though they break up often. He reads Forbes’s “30 Under 30” and fantasizes about becoming a wealthy lawyer with an attractive, sexually available wife by the time he is 29. Stephen loves the idea of molding law to achieve his goals. He also wishes to be wealthy, feeling that his father does not try hard enough to make more money and gives in too often to his mother, who has bipolar disorder and refuses medication. Diana then comes in crying and wanting Stephen back. He reminds her that she broke up with him, and she expresses her desire for things to be the way they were when they were first together. Stephen remembers meeting her for the first time and being drawn to her. He learned everything about her in order to pose as her ideal man. Stephen then kisses Diana, and they have sex.

Jackie begins dating a freshman named Stuart and spends more nights with him, leaving Lucy alone in the dorm room. Lucy feels the need to find a man to date and thinks back to her past romantic relationships. The summer before her freshman year, she became infatuated with 23-year-old Gabe Peterson, the older brother of her friend Macy, and began getting tennis lessons from him. One day, it began raining, and Gabe drove Lucy to her house. He called her beautiful, kissed her, and touched her breasts under her shirt. However, he soon stopped himself, apologizing because she was still so young. Gabe then stopped giving her lessons, leaving Lucy heartbroken. Lucy’s friends, Lydia and Helen, pressured her to date Parker Lanes. However, she felt nothing for him. She broke up with Parker on the night of the spring formal, and he accused her of being selfish and confusing. She, herself, did not understand why she did not love him and spent the night crying in her bed until her older sister, Georgia, told her to not settle but instead to date only boys she felt strongly for. Lucy chose to go to Baird because she was drawn to a course on the “Lost Generation” of American writers who lived on the French Riviera in the period after World War I, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Lucy then gets a call from Stephen, who asks her on a date. She is surprised to learn from his phone number that he is also from Long Island, and she considers going, but she trusts her gut feeling and declines. She then asks how he got her phone number, and Stephen says he got it from Wrigley. She then rejects his offer for a date again, which he accepts before telling her not to wear a bikini to a house party, which amuses and confuses her. She then hangs up and wonders if she should date him even though he gives her an unpleasant feeling in her stomach.

One Saturday evening, Stephen and Diana are having sex, and since Diana is still angry with him, he focuses on his own pleasure. Afterward, Diana says that they cannot keep going like this. She does not feel like she can enjoy sex with him knowing that he might be having sex with other women. He asks her why she is still having sex with him, and she says she is not sure. He then leaves to go to Wrigley’s birthday party, bringing some cocaine for him and looking forward to seeing Lucy there.

Pippa convinces Lucy to go to Wrigley’s party and encourages her to date Stephen, who Pippa says is good at sex. Lucy remains unsure of her feelings toward him. While trying to find more alcohol, Lucy finds herself talking to Stephen again. He gets her talking about Long Island, revealing that he grew up in Bayville, and uses this connection to appeal to her. After Lucy notices that most of the partygoers have left, Stephen encourages her to come back to his house with him. Though she has that nervous gut feeling again, she agrees to go with him, feeling an excitement that she has not felt since she fell in love with Gabe. Stephen kisses her, which she enjoys. He then tries to initiate oral sex on her. She is wary, as she never enjoyed receiving oral sex from Parker, and she is tired from drinking so much. Stephen respects her wishes, and she soon vomits in his trash bin. Lucy then says that she will leave, feeling embarrassed, but Stephen insists that she stay and sleep in the dorm room. He promises not to try anything with her. She then wakes up with a hangover and hears Stephen snoring. She goes to leave and texts Lydia about her hookup.

Stephen is on the third floor of the library and looks down to see Lucy writing in a notebook on the floor below. Unaware that he is watching her, she walks up to the third floor and bumps into him. He learns that she is looking for a book for her paper in Professor Tittleman’s Russian literature class. The professor’s strict citation rules annoy Lucy, so Stephen offers a helpful guide, omitting that it belongs to Diana. He reveals that he is a political science major with aspirations of becoming a lawyer, and Lucy says that her father is a criminal defense lawyer. Lucy says that she wants to be a travel journalist and currently writes for the school’s paper, The Lantern. She then expresses her desire to make it into the Hemingway and Fitzgerald course, where the students sail on the French Riviera. Lucy imagines how wonderful it would be to get in. He tells her that if she works hard, she might make it. Lucy is embarrassed about having vomited in Stephen’s dorm room, but he accepts responsibility for giving her the tequila. He asks about going to eat somewhere again, and she struggles to decide, so he kisses her. He can tell that she enjoys it, and this further confirms for him that he will get the chance to have sex with her.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Jackie sees an incoming call from CJ on Lucy’s phone. She asks why Lucy calls her mother by her first name, but Lucy says that is just how it is and does not elaborate. Lucy says she will call CJ later. Lucy’s mother’s real name is Cornelia Jane Clifford Albright, but she started going by CJ in high school because she hated her first name. CJ grew up in a lower-middle-class family in northwestern Rhode Island with inattentive parents before running away to San Francisco to live with her paternal aunt Marilyn, a wealthy woman who traveled to help AIDS patients. Marilyn brought CJ with her on her travels, collecting jewelry from every country she traveled to until she died of cancer. CJ inherited many fine clothes and jewelry sets from Marilyn, and Lucy cherishes these items, many of which have been passed on to her. CJ got a scholarship to Berkeley and eventually met Lucy and Georgia’s father, Ben Albright, at a Fleetwood Mac concert. They soon married and had Georgia and Lucy. Lucy called her mother “Mom” until she did “The Unforgivable Thing,” after which she became CJ.

Stephen finds Lucy crying and smoking a cigarette outside the football house during the ugly sweater Christmas party. He asks her what is wrong, and she does not want to talk about it. He eventually gets her to reveal that she is having conflict with her family, though she does not go into detail. He talks about problems in his own family, revealing his mother’s manic episodes, including one in which she drove his younger sister, Sadie, out of town, leading his father to divorce her. However, his father still holds out hope that she might get better, change, and come back to the family. Lucy expresses sympathy and eventually agrees to tell Stephen about her family. She tells him about “The Unforgivable Thing” her mother did, but Stephen, high from cannabis-infused brownies and aroused by Lucy’s body, barely pays attention. He does get the idea that her mother did something terrible based on how angry she gets. He connects it with his own mother’s actions. She then says that she is tired and wants to sleep there for the night. He accepts and offers her a T-shirt for the night. He gives her an Eli Manning New York Giants jersey to wear, and she takes off her shirt and bra to put on the T-shirt. She then gets into his bed, and Stephen happily predicts that she is ready to have sex with him.