They nodded. I nodded. They already knew each other.
Their conversation was littered with names they all knew, places, teams.
I ate my meatballs and tomato sauce and decided that after school I’d run all the way to Central Park. I’d keep my sweatshirt 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.
BEFORE
At the end of the second day of my freshman year, Sarah Washington found me out.
Nothing dramatic. I didn’t slip up and go into the girls’ room.
I laughed. Sarah heard me.
“You’re not a boy,” she said.
We were in the hall. Brandon Duncan slipped—I am not making this up—on a banana peel. I laughed. Lots of people laughed. But Sarah was walking past me. She heard me laugh. She turned.
“You’re not a boy,” she said again.
“Huh?” I repeated, continuing toward the exit.
“Boys don’t laugh like that,” she said, walking beside me, her voice rising.
“He what?” Tayshawn said, sliding across to join us, standing in front of me, blocking my escape. “We played hoops yesterday. He—” He was staring at me now, moving in close. I was forced toward the wall. “She?—shoots like a boy. You are a girl, aren’t you? Look at her cheeks. No fluff.”
“I’m only fourteen,” I squeaked, my voice betraying me.
Now Lucy O’Hara was staring. Will Daniels, too. And Zach. All of them crowded around me.
“You’re a girl,” Sarah said. “Admit it.”
“I’m a boy,” I declared, wanting to push through them, to run.
“Let’s pull off her clothes,” Will said, laughing. “Know for sure that way.”
I hugged my school bag to my chest.
“Girl!” Tayshawn shouted, laughing. “Boy would’ve guarded his nuts. Hah! You fooled us good, Micah.” He nudged Will. “A girl beat you, man. A girl!”
Will looked down, saying nothing, and kicked his shoes into the floor.
I fought an urge to cry. I’d loved playing hoops with them. Tayshawn and Zach were so good. Especially Zach. When you play with the boys and they know you’re a girl they either won’t pass to you or treat you as if you’re too fragile to breathe or they’ll try to beat you down. Whatever way it goes it sucks. Playing as a guy had been so great. They’d passed to me, guarded me, blocked my shots, bodychecked me so hard my teeth rattled. But now Will wouldn’t look at me. Zach had already gone.
“Freak,” Lucy said, walking away. Sarah stared at me a second longer before walking after her.
Then there was me, alone, leaning against the wall, bag still clutched tight, as more and more students flooded by. I waited till they were all gone. Looking back, I saw the banana peel, trampled, broken into bits, but still identifiably a banana peel.
BEFORE
The first and second week of my freshman year were bad. Really bad. After Sarah Washington and the banana peel, everyone knew who I was: the girl who pretended to be a boy.
So much for being invisible.
I was called into Principal Paul’s office and forced to explain.
“My English teacher thought I was a boy,” I said. “I thought it would be funny to go along with it.”
He said it most decidedly wasn’t. Then lectured me about the danger of lies and erosion of trust and blah, blah, blah. I tuned him out, promised to be good, and wrote an essay on Why Lying Is Bad.
“So why’s your name Micah then?” Tayshawn asked me. He was the only one who agreed that me pretending to be a boy was funny. He even asked me to play ball with him again. Will was less happy. Zach ignored me. I didn’t go. Though I played H-O-R-S-E with Tayshawn a couple of times.
“It’s a girl’s name, too,” I told him. “Just not as often.”
“It’s as if your parents knew you was going to look like a boy.”
“Well.” I paused, feeling the rush I always get when I begin to spin out a lie. “You can’t tell anyone, okay?”
Tayshawn nodded, bracing himself.
“When I was born they didn’t know if I was a girl or a boy.”
Tayshawn looked confused. “How’d you mean?”
“They couldn’t tell what I was. I was born a hermaphrodite.”
“A what?”
“Half boy and half girl. You can look it up.”
“No way.” His eyes glided down my body, looking for evidence.
I nodded solemnly, figuring out how to play it. “I was a weird-looking baby.” (Which is true. I like to thread my lies with truth.) “My parents totally freaked.” (Also true.) “You won’t tell anyone, right? You promised.” In my experience those words are guaranteed to spread what you’ve said far and wide. I liked the idea of being a hermaphrodite.
“Not anyone. You’re safe.”
Tayshawn never told a soul. I know because days later there still wasn’t a whisper about it. Turned out that he’s good that way. Trustworthy.
I figure the rumor finally spread all over school because I told Lucy when she was hassling me in the locker room. I went for the sympathy card: “You keep calling me a freak. Well, guess what? I am!”
She looked more grossed out than sympathetic.
Or it could have been Brandon Duncan, who overheard me telling Chantal, who wanted to know how I managed to fool everyone on account of she wants to be an actress and thought it would be useful to know. She had me show her how to walk like a boy. I taught her how to spit, too.
Or maybe it was all three of them. Most likely. Hardly anyone’s as tight-lipped as Tayshawn.
However it spread, it reached Principal Paul’s ears, who contacted my parents, who told him it wasn’t true, and there I was in his office again, explaining how I had no idea how the rumor got started and was hurt and upset that anyone would say anything so mean about me. “I’m a girl. Why would I want anyone to think I was some kind of a freak?”
Because I wanted them to pay attention to me.
Something like that.
Mostly it’s the joy of convincing people that something that ain’t so, is. It’s hard to explain. But like I said at the beginning, I’ve quit the lying game now.
But that’s now, back then it was:
“Why did you want everyone to think you were a boy, Micah Wilkins?” Principal Paul looked at me without blinking. I returned the favor.
“You don’t know?” He sounded unsurprised. “Perhaps you will find out when you visit the school counselor.”
I didn’t let him see how much I hated that idea. There have been way too many counselors and shrinks and psychologists in my life. I mean, I know lying is bad, that’s why I’m giving it up, but I’ve never understood why I had to see shrinks about it.
“You’ve been at this school less than two weeks, Micah Wilkins, and already you have a reputation for telling falsehoods and making mischief. My eye is on you.”
I didn’t ask him how that affected him seeing anything else.
My second essay for the principal was on the virtues of honesty. I ran out of things to say on the first page.
HISTORY OF ME
Being a
liar is not an easy business. For starters, you have to keep track of your lies. Remember exactly what you’ve said and who you said it to. Because that first lie always leads to a second.
There’s never ever just one lie.
That’s why it’s best to keep it simple—gives you a better chance of tracking all the threads, keeping them spinning, and hopefully not propagating too many more.
It’s hard work keeping all those lies in the air. Imagine juggling a thousand torches that are all tied together with fine thread. Or running the world’s most complicated machine with cogs on wheels on cogs on wheels on cogs.
Even the best liars, even the ones with the longest memories, the best eye for detail and the big picture, even they get caught eventually. Maybe not in all their lies, but in one or two or more. That’s the way it is.
I hate when that happens. When people figure out that what you were saying wasn’t true and your elaborate construction crumbles.
The lies stop spinning, there’s no lubrication, gears grind on gears. That’s the moment when Sarah stared at me after I laughed, and said, “You’re a girl.”
That moment could have lasted a week. A month. A year.
I was ashamed and angry and hating being caught and already spinning more lies to explain it all away.
But it was also a relief. It’s always a relief.
Because the air is clear, now—at last—I can tell the truth. From this moment on everything will be true. A life lived true with no rotten foundations. Trust. Understanding. Everything shiny and new.
Except I can’t, not ever. Because my truth is so unbelievable— lies will always be easier.
Spin, spin, spin.
I have been through the moment of being found out a hundred times, a thousand times, maybe even a million. I’m only seventeen, but I’ve already seen that look of shock—she lied to me—so many times I have lost count.
It never gets any better.
Yet that’s not the worst danger of being a liar. Oh no. Much worse than discovery, than their sense of betrayal, is when you start to believe your own lies.
When it all blurs together.
You lose track of what’s real and what’s not. You start to feel as if you make the world with your words. Your lies get stranger and weirder and denser, get bigger than words, turn into worlds, become real.
You feel powerful, invincible.
“Oh sure,” you say, completely believing it. “My family’s an old family. Going way way way back. We work curse magic. Me, I can make your hand wither on your arm. I could turn you into a cat.”
Once you start to believe you stop being compulsive and morph into pathological.
It happens a lot after something terrible has happened. The brain cracks, can’t accept the truth, and makes its own. Invents a bigger and better world that explains the bad thing, makes it possible to keep living. When the world you’re seeing doesn’t line up with the world that is—you can wind up doing things—terrible things—without knowing it.
Not good.
Because that’s when they lock you up and there’s no coming back because you’re already locked up: inside your own head. Where you’re tall and strong and fast and magic and the ruler of all you survey.
I have never gone that far.
But there are moments. Tiny ones when I’m not entirely clear whether it happened or I made it up. Those moments scare me much more than getting caught. I’ve been caught. I know what that’s like. I’ve never gone crazy. I don’t want to know what that’s like.
Weaving lies is one thing; having them weave you is another.
That’s why I’m writing this. To keep me from going over the edge. I don’t want to be a liar anymore. I want to tell my stories true.
But I haven’t so far. Not entirely. I’ve tried. I’ve really, really tried. I’ve tried harder than I ever have. But, well, there’s so much and it’s so hard.
I slipped a little. Just a little.
I’ll make it up to you, though.
From now on it’s nothing but the truth.
Truly.
Justine Larbalestier is also the author of Liar and the Magic or Madness trilogy. She battles daily with an annoying procrastination fairy that will not go away, but she hopes that her good-boots fairy will stick around. She divides her time between Sydney, Australia, and New York City. Justine blogs daily at www.justinelarbalestier.com/blog.
In How to Ditch Your Fairy, just about everyone in New Avalon has a personal fairy.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
NOTE TO READERS
CHAPTER 1 : Killer Top
CHAPTER 2 : Rochelle
CHAPTER 3 : Parking Fairy
CHAPTER 4 : New Avalon the Brave
CHAPTER 5 : True Love. Grr!
CHAPTER 6 : Danders Anders
CHAPTER 7 : More Demerits
CHAPTER 8 : Best Dad Ever
CHAPTER 9 : An Intervention
CHAPTER 10 : Statistical Torpor
CHAPTER 11 : Public Service
CHAPTER 12 : Worst Sister Ever
CHAPTER 13 : Steffi
CHAPTER 14 : Doctor Tahn
CHAPTER 15 : Rochelle’s Lucky Day
CHAPTER 16 : Attack of Danders Anders
CHAPTER 17 : Tamsin Burnham- Stone
CHAPTER 18 : Two Fairies
CHAPTER 19 : A Surprise
CHAPTER 20 : A Revelation
CHAPTER 21 : Ruins
CHAPTER 22 : All Over
CHAPTER 23 : Hope
CHAPTER 24 : Metal Box
CHAPTER 25 : The Ultimate Fairy Book
CHAPTER 26 : Bleaching, Starving, and Flensing
CHAPTER 27 ; Swap
CHAPTER 28 : Waverly Burnham- Stone
CHAPTER 29 : A Different Fairy
CHAPTER 30 : Best Fairy Ever
CHAPTER 31 : Impossibilities
CHAPTER 32 : Possibilities
CHAPTER 33 : Less Than Doos
CHAPTER 34 : Love and Hatred
CHAPTER 35 : Crossing the Field
CHAPTER 36 : Luge Hall
CHAPTER 37 : Cold and Ice
CHAPTER 38 : Trying to Nearly Die
CHAPTER 39 : Fairy Free
CHAPTER 40 : Gambling
CHAPTER 41 : Friends Again
CHAPTER 42 : Monkey Knife Fight
CHAPTER 43 : Reckoning
CHAPTER 44 : Fairy Attracting
CHAPTER 45 : True Best Fairy Ever
DEMERITS AND SUSPENSIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROMISE
BEFORE
HISTORY OF ME
How to Ditch Your Fairy Page 22