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“I don’t know,” Clark shrugged helplessly. “It’s just kind of… weird sometimes.”
For a moment Alice was going to say something vague and general about people being strange, then duck back into the algebra in front of them. Then she stopped herself. The only way to connect with people was to share your thoughts with them. And she really had a feeling that Clark was someone she could connect with.
“I think,” she began slowly, “it’s really so… fascinating how people’s minds and emotions work. I really love just sitting back and watching how the whole dynamic of a group of people goes back and forth, how the body language changes, how the same comment, in the same tone, is taken differently depending on who says it, how two people can perceive the same event so differently.” Alice sighed and finally looked up to see Clark watching her intently with those beautiful green eyes. “It’s when I actually have to interact with people that things become frustrating, sometimes.”
“Yeah,” Clark agreed, a little surprised to find someone who’d had the same thoughts he had. “Like, I walk into the Talon, and everyone’s happy and talking to each other and having a good time, and then I go up to Chloe and Lana and the whole mood changes. I mean, it’s not necessarily like they aren’t happy to see me, but there’s just this whole different vibe. Like I’ve… upset the balance or something.”
“You know, I hate it when people say that guys and girls can’t just be friends,” Alice continued, pushing her algebra book aside, “because I think they can. Even if everyone’s, you know, straight. But for some certain guys and girls, it’s a lot harder to be just friends, instead of, friends with potential. And the problem,” she frowned, “is that you can never tell which kind of friend someone is, until everything gets awkward.”
“Exactly!” Clark exclaimed excitedly. “See, the thing is…” He trailed off suddenly and looked at Alice with uncertainty.
“What?” she asked, brow furrowing.
He smiled a little sheepishly. “I just forgot what it’s like, explaining the whole thing to someone,” Clark told her. “The last new person around here I talked to about it was Lex, and that was a couple years ago.”
“The backstory’s gotten a lot longer, huh?”
“Yeah,” he admitted reluctantly.
When he paused, Alice leaned back in her chair. “Well, it’s okay, Clark, you don’t have to explain anything to me.” She reached for her calculator. “I don’t mean to pry or anything.”
“No, no, I don’t mind,” Clark assured her, a little too quickly.
He saw her blue eyes light up with relief that she hadn’t offended him in any way. “Good,” she replied cheekily, “because it’s really hard being the new girl in a place where everyone has known everything about each other for years.”
Something flashed across Clark’s face, but it was gone too fast for Alice to identify it. His smile was a little forced as he cleared his throat and started again. “Yeah, well, you see, the thing is… I had this… crush on Lana for the longest time. All through junior high, into high school. But she had this long-term boyfriend and…”
“So you didn’t think you ought to do anything about it,” Alice suggested tentatively.
“Right, exactly, I didn’t think it would be right,” Clark confirmed, “and…”
“And you didn’t think it would work,” Alice finished with a rueful smile. “Been there, done that.”
“Really?” Clark had a hard time picturing Alice pining away for anyone. Or rather, he had a hard time picturing a guy not immediately dropping his current commitments the minute she showed interest in him.
“Yeah…” The memory seemed painful for her, but after a moment she added, “I had this friend in Gotham—Michael—that I was just completely an idiot about.” She laughed a little bit, embarrassed. Clark smiled encouragingly. “But, um, he had this girlfriend, and they were really tight. But then she moved away and they broke up, and the field was wide open for me, you know…” Clark nodded. He knew. “But I just couldn’t move in on him. I don’t know why.” She shook her head, her dark curls catching the light in the loft. “It’s like there were two Michaels, you know? One was real, and he was funny and sweet and also sometimes irritating and confusing, and one was sort of… this image I’d created, you know, this perfect human being who was so good-looking and just all-around wonderful.”
“And the one you had a crush on was the fake one, right?” Clark guessed, resting his chin on his palm. Algebra was definitely taking a backseat tonight.
“Well, it’s not hard to fall for someone who’s perfect because you made him that way,” Alice said sardonically. “I liked the real Michael, too, but… only as a friend.” She sighed and leaned back in her chair, defeated. “Of course, every time I saw Michael, both versions kind of went to war in my mind.”
Clark just stared at her for a moment. “That is exactly how it was with Lana. Still is, kind of,” he added, frowning. “The real one, the friend, is winning out a lot more these days. But the other one…” He thought about the time just last week when he’d seen Lana at her locker in her fuzzy pink sweater, fixing her hair in the little mirror on the inside of the door, and he’d practically had a flashback to freshman year, when everywhere she went she seemed to be surrounded by a heavenly glow. The moment had been short, but intense. “It still lingers.”
Alice nodded, thinking back herself. After a short silence she returned to the present and prompted, “And then there’s Chloe.”
Clark let out a big sigh at that. “Yeah, Chloe.”
“She was telling me about this awful history she has with guys,” Alice commented. “There was one who could bud off this evil twin or something, and a homicidal guy who made things float, and some guy who froze everything he touched…” She raised her eyebrows. “Not exactly your usual advice-column problems.”
“Well, this is Smallville,” Clark pointed out. “Around here the odds are pretty high that if someone seems perfect for you, there’s something freaky about them.”
For a moment, green eyes met blue across the table, then Alice looked away and back with a laugh. “She reminds me a lot of another friend of mine, Jake. He and I had been great pals since junior high, and he’s really… spunky like Chloe.”
Clark laughed. “Never call Chloe spunky, at least to her face,” he told Alice. “Just a bit of advice.”
“Okay, thanks,” she chuckled in return. “But, not that we had meteor mutants in Gotham really, but—Jake always managed to fall for the girl who had multiple personalities or who was really a lesbian or who was orchestrating a massive cheating scheme for the whole badminton team.” Clark raised an eyebrow at that. “And every time I tried to help him—to tell him, ‘Hey, I saw your girlfriend at the movies last night, making out with another girl,’ he acted like I was only telling him because I was jealous.”
“That is so Chloe,” Clark replied eagerly. “I mean, I really care about her, and… there was kind of this time when we were almost dating…” He saw the questioning expression on Alice’s face. “Near the end of freshman year, we were sort of a… proto-couple. We went to the Spring Formal together. But then there was this massive tornado, and I had to go and help some people, and…”
“And she felt like you’d abandoned her,” Alice supplied.
“Yeah.” Clark hadn’t realized how, okay, angry the whole thing had made him. “I mean, yeah, I left Chloe in the school gym with everyone else to go find Lana. But it wasn’t because I cared about Lana more than Chloe. It was because Chloe was already safe, and I knew Lana was out on the road somewhere. And,” he added forcefully, “it turned out that Lana’s truck got picked up by the tornado, with her in it, and the truck was completely totaled. She was okay in the end, but it’s not like she wasn’t in trouble.” Now that he’d gotten onto the subject, he couldn’t seem to stop. “And my dad actually went missing after the tornado—he was in this old church crypt with a motor home covering the entrance—so I was pretty distracted trying to find him, and all of a sudden, while we were out looking for my dad, Chloe pops up in my face with this, ‘Let’s just be friends’ thing.” Alice winced and nodded. “Totally her idea. I mean, I had a few other things on my mind at the time. And ever since then, anytime I say something like, ‘Hey, don’t you think it’s weird that your new crush’s doctor, whom he hated, just got killed in a grisly, unnatural accident,’ she just acts like I’m lying because I don’t want her to be happy with anyone else.”
“Oh, Jake did the exact same thing,” Alice assured him. “I mean, well, there wasn’t a tornado involved or anything, but… friends told me he had this huge crush on me. Which, I don’t know…” She shrugged. “I mean, if Jake and I were trapped on a post-apocalyptic island, and it was up to us to preserve the species…” Clark nodded. He understood this scenario. “It’s not like it would be difficult. But—he’s more of a friend. We dated for, like, two days, because I thought maybe once I had—permission to think of him as more than a friend, maybe the rest would fall into place.”
“It didn’t?” Clark questioned.
“It didn’t have a chance to,” Alice corrected. “There was this fire at our high school, and instead of staying with him I rushed off to get a couple other friends whom I knew no one else would find, and the next thing you know, I’m getting the ‘Let’s just be friends’ line, and I’m thinking, ‘Sure, fine, whatever, excuse me, my dress is on fire.’” Clark laughed at that. “I just felt kind of blindsided, you know? Like, I was just supposed to stand there while he spun in little circles around me, trying to figure out what he wanted.” Alice sighed. “Then of course I realized that was exactly how I was treating Michael. But, you know what?” she added angrily. “I didn’t get all mad at Jake and tell him that he was messing up my life because he was uncertain. I mean, we’re teenagers, we’re supposed to be uncertain about stuff. I certainly never accused him of lying to me or leading me on or anything.” Alice shook her head. “Sorry, I used to get that a lot from people.”
“The whole, ‘I get the feeling you’re keeping a secret from me,’ thing?” Clark asked.
“Yes!”
“Happens to me all the time, too,” he admitted.
“Yeah. Look, I know I haven’t been here very long,” Alice began carefully, “but I’ve already heard at least three different people talking about secrets and lies and honesty and trust and what to base a relationship on. Do you—do you think people here are kind of obsessed with that?”
“Absolutely.” The word came out with more certainty than Clark knew he possessed.
“I mean, everybody’s got secrets,” Alice went on, tapping her pencil against her algebra book absently. “Everybody has things they don’t want other people to know. And I just can’t stand it when someone makes a big deal out of that.” Clark considered the possibility that Alice could somehow read his mind, because she was definitely speaking aloud many of the thoughts he’d had—thoughts he’d had and not told anyone about, not even his parents. But he quickly turned back to catch the rest of her statement. “I mean, yeah, there’s some secrets that hurt people by being kept, but I think the vast majority of them probably help people by being kept, or at least they don’t really matter either way. Or they shouldn’t, except some people get really mad when they finally learn them—not because of the secret itself, but just because you had one at all.” She frowned. “Sorry, I guess I’m being kind of vague.”
“No, no, I understand completely,” Clark assured her. “Like about a year ago, I told Pete—“ He broke off suddenly. “Um, well…” He scrambled to find a reasonable lie, but the longer he took the less reasonable it would seem.
“It’s okay, Clark,” Alice told him with a smile. “You don’t have to tell me exactly what it was. I’m sure it could have been a lot of things.”
“Um, I guess,” Clark agreed hesitantly. “Well, the thing I told Pete was… really big.” That was an understatement. “Like, something only my parents and I knew about.”
He could see the guesses floating past Alice’s eyes, but she just nodded. “Okay.”
“And I’ve known Pete forever, but I just… I could never tell him before, I mean, my parents and I just didn’t want anyone to know, but then circumstances kind of forced me to tell him,” Clark continued awkwardly. He knew he was taking a risk, giving Alice an open invitation to press him for more information—but if he was going to be friends with her, he felt like he had to believe she’d resist the temptation. “And the thing is—he was really mad. For a while, anyway. And he was kind of immature about it too, hinting at it to other people and stuff.”
“Thus completely proving why you hadn’t told him in the first place,” Alice concluded.
Clark nodded. “I mean, now he’s cool with it and he understands that he can’t tell anyone else and we’re still friends, but…” He shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess being angry that you’ve been lied to, especially for a long time, is a normal human reaction.” He almost tripped over the word human.
“Well, sure it is,” Alice agreed firmly. “It’s normal to be angry—at first. But if, months and years later, you can never see past that, if you can never understand why someone lied to you at all, if you just keep throwing it back in their face every time you’re mad at them for something else…” She trailed off, paused, frowned. “Like, um… well, I’d rather not say exactly what it was, if that’s okay, Clark?” she asked tentatively.
“Yeah, sure,” he agreed with a shrug. Far be it from him of all people to pry.
Her pleased smile lit up the dim loft for a moment. “Well, anyway, a couple years ago my mom told me something… actually it was something about my birth parents,” she admitted, “something that meant all the other stuff she’d ever told me—and other people—about them was a lie.” Alice’s jaw tightened a little bit, and she swallowed hard. “And I was really mad. Really mad. I was thinking, what else has she lied about, what else has she kept from me…” Clark nodded his understanding. It sounded incredibly familiar. “But then I realized that all the important stuff was still true,” Alice continued. “It sounds kind of cheesy I guess, but—she still loved me, she still worked hard and sacrificed a lot for me without expecting anything in return really. That was what was really important—not something that happened seventeen years ago with people I’ll never meet.”
“Could it be said,” Clark began tentatively, “that the lie she told you earlier was meant to… protect you in some way? Maybe, until you were old enough to understand the truth better?”
Alice smiled and nodded. “That’s it exactly,” she confirmed. “I mean, if you get right down to it, knowing the truth right from the start wouldn’t have changed anything—except that probably I would have worried more about stuff and just felt worse about myself. And who needs more of that, right?” Clark nodded, a half-smile on his face. “I don’t know—you like to think that someone you really care about, especially someone you’ve known a long time, is going to tell you major things about themselves. But on the other hand—if you’re only friends with someone so you can learn their big secret—well, you’re not really a great friend, are you? I mean,” she pressed on eagerly, “you become friends with someone for, you know, certain reasons, because of stuff you have in common and attitudes that you share, and unless their big secret is that they’re a con artist who’s just pretending to be your friend for some reason, most secrets they keep shouldn’t really change the fundamental qualities that first attracted you to them. As a friend, I mean.” She paused and frowned. “I’m rambling here, aren’t I? Sorry.”
“No!” Clark insisted. “I feel exactly the same. Okay, so this big thing that Pete knows about me—like I said, no one else knows.” He felt a little silly talking about it like that, but as long as Alice kept nodding encouragingly, it really made things much more expedient. “But the other people I’ve known for a while—well, I guess sometimes it’s kind of obvious that there’s something I’m not telling them. And I can see why that would make them mad...” Clark trailed off, suddenly unsure of the point he wanted to make.
“Wait, let me guess,” Alice cut in. “Even though you’ve made it equally obvious that you don’t want to tell them, they still get in your face about it all the time. I swear, Michael must have thought there was a ‘magic number,’ where if he said, ‘You know you can tell me anything’ or ‘It’s important that we be honest with each other’ X number of times, I would suddenly reach my quota and confess everything to him.”
“Yes, yes, absolutely,” Clark agreed whole-heartedly. “Every once in a while Chloe or Lana or even Lex gets to digging around, and it just really bugs me—I guess that’s an understatement,” he admitted. “But I always think, isn’t... this enough? I mean, I don’t feel like ‘being a good friend’ requires me to list every single event or discovery that’s ever happened to me in my life, you know? If I never spent time with someone, and we never had a good time together, and we didn’t seem to have anything in common, and I never helped them out when they needed it—I could see how they would think I wasn’t a great friend. But, I feel like I try to do all those things, as often as I can, because I want to and I enjoy them...” He sighed and decided to just say what was on his mind, no matter how it might sound. “I just think sometimes they ought to cut me a little slack, you know?”
“Clark,” Alice whispered intently, leaning across the table. Startled, Clark mimicked her action, listening carefully for anything amiss around them. “I think your secret must be...” He raised his eyebrows. “...that you can read my mind.”