Chapter Text
Clark Kent.
Chloe ran her thumb over the crinkled slip of paper in her hand, hardly able to believe her good luck. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t completely luck. Maybe she’d paid a little extra attention to where Clark’s scrap of paper had landed in Mr. Brown’s baseball cap when he’d tossed it in. Still, she hadn’t thought her best guess would be this accurate.
“What’s with the grin?” Pete asked, peering over his shoulder from his seat at the desk in front of hers. “You just come up with a headline for the next issue of The Torch or something?”
Chloe looked up from the paper, eyes darting automatically to Clark. He used to take the desk next to hers or Pete’s, but he was stuck sitting in the front of the class these days. He’d been late to English too many times, and Mr. Brown gave him an assigned seat to keep a closer watch over him.
Clark never did explain why he was always running late. Never the real reason, anyway. Just lame excuses about farm chores and forgotten homework that Mr. Brown obviously only pretended to believe.
Chloe didn’t blame Clark for lying to the teacher. There were plenty of things she would never willingly divulge to the bland, mostly ancient assortment of educators at Smallville High. But whenever she pressed Clark for the truth of where he was forever disappearing to—something that, as his friend, she felt she deserved to know—he would repeat the same lame stories he fed to Mr. Brown.
It hurt that Clark seemed to want to keep her at such a distance.
“Chloe?”
She started slightly, realizing she’d never answered Pete. “Um… Yeah. Sorry. I just got an excuse to demand some answers I’ve been wanting for a while.”
Clark was reaching into Mr. Brown’s baseball cap, selecting the name of the student he would writing about. Chloe couldn’t see his face from this angle. Just the back of his head tilting slightly to the side as he seized a neatly creased slip of paper and drew it out. His hair was dark and thick, and Chloe was definitely not thinking about what it might feel like to run her fingers through it.
Pete laughed. The sound was a little forced. “Clark’s never going to tell you everything you wanna know.”
Chloe felt her cheeks grow hot. She hadn’t realized her preoccupation with Clark had been so obvious. She looked Pete pointedly in the eye. “The assignment’s a student biography. He has to tell me everything. That’s basically what Mr. Brown wrote in the directions.”
“That’s not what the directions say.”
“Yes, it is.” Chloe whipped the instruction sheet she’d tucked away in her red English folder back out in front of her. She spun it around, so it was upside down from her point of view, and Pete could read it easily. She tapped the relevant part of the instructions with a burgundy-painted fingernail. “It says here that our student biographies are to be ‘complete’ and ‘detailed.’ Sounds like he wants us to dig deep to me.”
Pete barely glanced at the paper. “There’s no digging deep on Clark. Trust me. I've known the guy basically forever—”
“Please.” Chloe cut him off, rolling her eyes. “Don’t try to pull the ‘best friend seniority’ card on me. We’ve all been hanging out together for years now—”
“Yeah. But I’ve still known him a lot longer. Since Clark and I were, like, six years old.”
“So?”
“So, I'm just telling you. Trying to give him the third degree is a waste of time.”
Chloe looked away from Pete. She turned her instruction sheet back around, dejected. The words that had seemed to offer a golden ticket into all Clark Kent’s deepest, darkest secrets did not seem so shiny or promising anymore. She put the paper back into her folder and shut it.
“Don’t the lies ever get to you, Pete?”
Pete faced the front of the classroom. “What lies?”
Chloe crossed her arms on her desk, leaning forward. Her tone went a little sharp with frustration. “Oh, come on. They could not be more obvious.”
Mr. Brown had finished walking around with the hat and was standing at the chalkboard. He paused in the middle of sloppily scribbling some definitions down for the students to copy, shooting Chloe a disapproving look.
She attempted an apologetic smile. Other students were glancing back at her too. She briefly met their curious stares, including Clark’s, before leaning in toward Pete and lowering her voice to a whisper. “I mean, I’ve never met such an honest person—who cannot make up a convincing lie to save their life—who insists on lying so much. And over the stupidest stuff. Like, how he misses the bus and still somehow beats us to school.”
“I don’t know,” Pete hissed under his breath, sounding a little annoyed, a little defensive. Like she was forcing him to confront something he didn’t want to think about. “He says his parents give him a ride sometimes. I believe him.”
“Have you ever actually seen them, Pete? Seen the Kent truck in line with the SUVs and mini vans at the side door?”
“Maybe they’re not pulling up to the door.”
“Or maybe I’m on to something, and he’s lying to cover up some Wall of Weird worthy—”
“Would you stop?” Pete snapped. “I don’t need to see proof to believe Clark. You know why? ‘Cos he’s my best friend. I thought he was one of yours too.”
It was pointed, accusatory, and it stung.
Chloe flinched, cringing back into her seat. “He is. Of course he is. I just—”
Pete’s face softened a little. “I know. You’re a reporter. I mean, you run The Torch. You kind of have to be on the hunt for stories and answers all the time.”
“Yeah, exactly, and Clark is…” She struggled to find the word she was looking for.
“Half boy scout, half Mr. Unreliable And Strange?”
She laughed, nodding.
“I get it. But just because he’s a private guy doesn’t mean he’s keeping something big or bad from us. Not everybody wants to be an open book about everything.”
“I guess,” Chloe admitted reluctantly. Knowing Pete was right didn’t make his advice any easier to swallow. What she thought, but did not say, was: Yeah, but just because he’s a private guy doesn’t mean he isn’t keeping something big from us either.
In general, Clark seemed like someone who appreciated simplicity and straightforwardness. In every other area of his life, he always chose to be honest. He never wanted to do anything he’d have to hide. She’d never heard of him cheating on a test, even when it would have been undetectable and easy. He never participated in practical jokes at other kids’ expense. He only helped gangly, awkward Tyler Hall clean the shaving cream out of his locker afterward. Clark didn’t even like to gossip about people. When Chloe shared her suspicions about the latest probable meteor freak landing Smallvillians in the hospital, Clark tried to give them the benefit of the doubt.
It just… didn’t add up. For him to be so honest, yet lie so much. About little things that didn’t even seem to matter.
She had to know. Why was he lying? Why did he feel like he had to lie, to Chloe especially?
She jotted down questions in her English notebook for the remainder of class. She was concentrating so hard, her pen flying across the page so fast, that when the bell finally rang, it startled her. She jumped half out of her seat.
“Whoa.” Pete smiled, amused. “You good?”
“I’m good. Just preparing for my interview with the mysterious Clark Kent.”
“Good luck. Go easy on him.”
“No promises.” Chloe lifted her bag over her shoulder, gathering her books. When she looked up, Pete was still smiling at her. There was something in the way he was watching her. A glimmer in his brown eyes that made her tuck an unruly piece of her short, blond hair behind her ear, suddenly self-conscious. “What?”
He turned away quickly. “Nothing. Uh…. See you at lunch.” He grabbed his stuff and walked out of the room, keeping his back to her.
Chloe got up. As she approached the front of the room, she lingered another second, searching for Clark. She couldn’t wait to start asking questions.
Her shoulders drooped.
His chair was empty. He was already gone.