Liar. Part 1

LIAR.

Justine Larbalestier.

For my father, John Bern.

PART ONE.

Telling the Truth.

PROMISE.

I was born with a light covering of fur.

After three days it had all fallen off, but the damage was done. My mother stopped trusting my father because it was a family condition he had not told her about. One of many omissions and lies.

My father is a liar and so am I.

But I'm going to stop. I have to stop.

I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies, no omissions.

That's my promise.

This time I truly mean it.

AFTER.

When Zach isn't in school Tuesday morning I am worried. He said he'd call me Monday night. But didn't. Friday night was the last time I saw him. That isn't usual.

Zachary Rubin is my boyfriend. He isn't the best boyfriend in the world, but he usually does what he says he will.

If he was going to skip school he'd have taken me with him. We could've gone running in the park. Or ridden around on the subway all day laughing at the crazies, which is mostly everyone.

Once we walked from the Staten Island Ferry all the way up to Inwood, right next to the big hospital and the bridge that leads to the Bronx. It took us all day. We'd get sidetracked, checking things out, looking around. Enjoying the novelty of walking instead of running.

Broadway was our path north through the island. Zach said it used to be an Indian trail, which made it the oldest street in Manhattan. That's why it twists and turns, sometimes on the diagonal, sometimes straight like an avenue.

Me and Zach had an argument about what the water under the bridge to the Bronx was called. Was it the Hudson or the East River? Or did they meet in the middle under the bridge? Whatever it was called, the water was gray brown and nasty-looking. So it could've been either one.

That was our best day together.

I hope Zach isn't doing anything that cool without me. I'll kill him if he is.

I eat lunch on my own. A cold steak sandwich. The bread is gray and wet, soggy with meat juice. I eat the steak and throw the rest away.

In cla.s.s I stare at the window, watch the reflection of my cla.s.smates superimposed in mottled gla.s.s over gray steel bars. I think about what Zach looks like when he smiles at me.

AFTER.

The second day Zach isn't at school, I wear a mask. I keep it on for three days. I forge a note from my dad to say I have a gruesome rash and the doctor told me to keep it covered. I carry the note with me from cla.s.s to cla.s.s. They all buy it.

My dad brought the mask back from Venice. It's black leather painted with silver and unfurls at each corner like a fern. The silver is real.

Under it, my skin itches.

They tell us Zach is dead during third period on Thursday.

Princ.i.p.al Paul Jones comes into our cla.s.sroom. He isn't smiling. There are murmurs. I hear Zach's name. I look away.

"I have bad news," the princ.i.p.al says unnecessarily. I can smell the bad news all over him.

Now we all look at him. Everyone is quiet. His eyes are slightly red. I wonder if he is going to all the cla.s.ses or just us seniors. Surely we would be first. Zach is a senior.

I can hear the minute hand of the clock over the whiteboard. It doesn't tick, it clicks. Click, click, click, click. No ticks. No tocks.

There is a fly in the room. The fan slices through the air. A murky sliver of sunlight cuts across the front of the cla.s.sroom right where the princ.i.p.al is standing. It makes visible the dust in the air, the lines around his eyes, across his forehead, at the corners of his mouth.

Sarah Was.h.i.+ngton s.h.i.+fts in her chair and its legs squeak painfully loud across the wooden floor. I turn, stare at her. Everyone else does, too. She looks away.

"Zachary Rubin is no longer missing. His body has been found." Princ.i.p.al Paul's lips move into something between a grimace and a snarl.

A sound moves around the cla.s.sroom. It takes me a moment to realize that half the girls are crying. A few of the boys, too. Sarah Was.h.i.+ngton is rocking back and forth, her eyes enormous.

Mine are dry. I take off the mask.

BEFORE.

The first two days of my freshman year I was a boy.

It started in the first cla.s.s of my first day of high school. English. The teacher, Indira Gupta, reprimanded me for not paying attention. She called me Mr. Wilkins. No one calls anyone Mr. or Ms. or anything like that at our school. Gupta was p.i.s.sed. I stopped staring out the window, turned to look at her, wondering if there was another Wilkins in the room.

"Yes, you, Mr. Micah Wilkins. When I am talking I expect your full and undivided attention. To me, not to the traffic outside."

No one giggled or said, "She's a girl."

I'd been mistaken for a boy before. Not often, but enough that I wasn't completely surprised. I have nappy hair. I wear it natural and short, cut close to my scalp. That way I don't have to bother with relaxing or straightening or combing it out. My chest is flat and my hips narrow. I don't wear makeup or jewelry. None of them-neither students nor teachers-had ever seen me before.

"Is that clear?" Gupta said, still glaring at me.

I nodded, and mumbled in as low a voice as I could, "Yes, ma'am." They were the first words I spoke at my new school. This time I wanted to keep a low profile, be invisible, not be the one everyone pointed at when I walked along the corridor: "See that one? That's Micah. She's a liar. No, seriously, she lies about everything." I'd never lied about everything. Just about my parents (Somali pirates, professional gamblers, drug dealers, spies), where I was from (Liechtenstein, Aruba, Australia, Zimbabwe), what I'd done (grifted, won bravery medals, been kidnapped). Stuff like that.

I'd never lied about what I was before.

Why not be a boy? A quiet sullen boy is hardly weird at all. A boy who runs, doesn't shop, isn't interested in clothes or shows on TV. A boy like that is normal. What could be more invisible than a normal boy?

I would be a better boy than I'd ever been a girl.

At lunch I sat at the same table as three boys I'd seen in cla.s.s: Tayshawn Williams, Will Daniels, and Zachary Rubin. I'd love to say that one look at Zach and I knew but that would be a lie and I'm not doing that anymore. Remember? He was just another guy, an olive-skinned white boy, looking pale and weedy compared to Tayshawn, whose skin is darker than my dad's.

They nodded. I nodded. They already knew each other. Their conversation was littered with names they all knew, places, teams.

I ate my meatb.a.l.l.s and tomato sauce and decided that after school I'd run all the way to Central Park. I'd keep my sweats.h.i.+rt on. It was baggy.

"You play ball?" Tayshawn asked me.

I nodded because it was safer than asking which kind. Boys always knew stuff like that.

"We got a pickup going after," he said.

I grunted as boyishly as I could. It came out lower than I'd expected, like a wolf had moved into my throat.

"You in?" Zach asked, punching me lightly on the shoulder.

"Sure," I said. "Where?"

"There." He jerked his thumb in the direction of the park next to the school. The one with a gravel basketball court and a stunted baseball diamond, and a merry-go-round too close to be much use when a game was in progress. I'd run past it dozens of times. There was pretty much always a game going on.

The bell rang. Tayshawn stood up and slapped my back. "See you later."

I grinned at how easy it was.

Being a boy was fast becoming my favorite lie.

SCHOOL HISTORY.

All the white kids sit together. All the white kids with money, I mean.

Our high school is small and progressive and costs money. Not expensive like the uptown schools, but it's not free. Except for the scholars.h.i.+p kids who mostly aren't white. They're here tuition free, only having to pay for their books. They mostly don't go on field trips.

Most of the white kids don't believe in G.o.d; most of us black kids do.

I'm undecided, stuck somewhere in between, same way I am with everything: half black, half white; half girl, half boy; coasting on half a scholars.h.i.+p.

I'm half of everything.

AFTER.

We are all sent to counseling. There are individual sessions and group ones. The group session is first. It's a nightmare.

Jill w.a.n.g (yes, really) makes us move the desks and arrange the chairs in a large circle. I've been forced to see w.a.n.g before. She is achingly sincere. She believes most everything you tell her. Even my lies.

We sit in the chairs with no desks to hide behind. I wish I were in the library studying.

Brandon Duncan stares at the b.o.o.bs I barely have.

Sarah Was.h.i.+ngton turns to look at me, too. Her gaze rests somewhere below my eyes, but not so low as Brandon's. "Why do you lie all the time?" she asks softly.

"Why do you?" I say, though I've never known her to lie. I say it quiet as her, staring right back, fierce as I can, pus.h.i.+ng my gaze through the pores of her dark skin. I imagine I can feel the blood moving in her veins, the sound of breath in her lungs, the movement of the synapses in her brain. She is all buzzes and clicks. "Everyone lies."

"We're here to talk about what's happened, about how we feel," the counselor says. "Is there anything you want to share about-"

"Don't say his name!" Sarah shouts.

Now everyone is staring at her. Her heart pumps faster, pus.h.i.+ng the blood through her veins.

"I won't," Jill w.a.n.g says. "Not if you don't want me to."

Counselors always say stuff like that. I've seen lots of counselors. Psychologists, shrinks, therapists. They're all the same. They're supposed to stop me lying, yet they believe everything I tell them.

"We don't," Sarah mumbles.

"I haven't met most of you before. Tell me about yourselves. Let's go around the circle. Say the first word you can think of to describe yourself." Jill w.a.n.g nods at me.

"Fierce," I say.

Sarah s.h.i.+vers.

"Cool," Brandon says. Several people laugh.

"Hot," Tayshawn says. He's the most popular guy in school so there's laughter. But I'm pretty sure he doesn't mean it that way. Not s.e.xy hot. More like p.r.i.c.kly hot. Like he needs to loosen his collar. Mine itches at me. The heat is up too high. The steam pipes clank and groan, shouting their own words.

Each student says a word. None of them is right.

The door is behind me, less than six feet away. I imagine vaulting out of the circle, over Sarah in her chair, glaring at her own knees. I can run away.

I will run away.

"Gray," Sarah says, closing the circle of words. A tear eases down her cheek to match it, clings to her chin for less than a second before falling onto the wool cloth of her pants and disappearing.

"Does anyone want to talk about . . ." Jill pauses, swallowing Zach's name. "I hear he was very popular."

"You should ask Micah," Brandon says. "She was his girlfriend."

There's laughter. They are all staring at me now, everyone except Sarah. Her head is bowed further, her breaths shallow as she tries to stop crying. She is close to losing control. I hope she will.

"Very funny," Tayshawn says, glaring at Brandon. I can see he doesn't believe it. Tayshawn is Zach's best friend. Has been since the third grade.

I want to kill Brandon. I know why he told them: to make trouble. That's what Brandon does. But how did he know?