Gary Paulsen: Liar, Liar

This book is dedicated

with gratitude and respect

to Barbara Perris,

my longtime copy editor,

fiercely protective of my writing,

the elements of style and grammar,

and getting the details right .

I’m the best liar you’ll ever meet.

I should be good; I’ve had a lot of practice. I’m only fourteen, but I’ve known for as long as I can remember that there will be times when I’m going to have to tell a lie. It’s a universal rule, a cosmic inevitability.

If you ask me, people who say honesty is the best policy are just terrible liars.

I’m good because I make it easy for people to believe me.

See, people only listen for what they want to hear, so I only tell them that.

I tell my parents what they expect—school went well and I had a good day; yes, I did my homework; dinner was great; I’d love to drive 116 miles to go to a flea market and look for antique cookie jars and old political memorabilia with you and Dad this weekend; and no, I don’t have any dirty dishes under my bed.

I tell my friends versions of what they’ve already said to me—yeah, the new girl is hot; Coach is psychotic to have us run suicides in gym; I’m not gonna read the whole book either; the Cubs don’t have decent relief pitching but will probably clinch the division this year anyway.

I tell my teachers what they want me to say—yes, I understand the equation and how you solve it; I missed the foreshadowing until you pointed it out, but now it’s as clear as day; I really do have to use the bathroom and I don’t just want to walk around the halls during class wasting my time; no, I didn’t see who lobbed that apple across the cafeteria, nearly taking out the lunch lady’s eye (by the way, that apple missed her by a mile; everyone knows Neil Walker throws like a girl).

If you look at it from the right point of view, lying is just good manners.

Lying is my second language, a habit, a way of life. It’s gotten so that it’s easier for me to lie than to tell the truth, because lying is all about common sense. Not to mention self-preservation.

I don’t think I’m good enough to beat a lie detector test, but most of the time I’ve pretty much got everyone I know right where I want them.

Lying makes my life and—let’s face it—everyone else’s, too, so much better. So really, I lie for the greater good. I’ve come to believe that it’s almost my duty. Like I’m some kind of superhero who uses his power for society. I like to think I’m doing my bit to make the world a better place—one lie at a time.

I’m not bragging or being conceited. I’m just making what they call objective observations.

Another observation is that I’ve never gotten in trouble for lying. Because I’m that good. I have a knack for knowing what needs to be said and done.

And if a little is good, then a lot is better, right?

I used to think like that. Before my life went from zero to crap in a week.

By midmorning Monday, I had Katie Knowles believing that I suffer from a terrible disease. One that modern medicine doesn’t recognize, can’t identify and is powerless to treat.

I told her that I have chronic, degenerative, relapsing-remitting inflammobetigoitis. Which doesn’t exist. I culled symptoms of mono, plantar warts, shingles, borderline personality disorder and a bladder infection, as well as listing a bunch of side effects from some TV ads for drugs.

Even for me, this was a whopper.

But I had to come down with whatchamacallit so that I wouldn’t have to team up with Katie for the working-with-a-partner project in social studies this semester.

Cannot. Deal. With. Katie.

She’s some sort of mechanized humanoid, made up of spare computer parts, all the leafy green vegetables that no one ever eats and thesaurus pages. We’re only in eighth grade, but everyone knows she’s already picked out her first three college choices, her probable major and potential minor and the focus of her eventual graduate studies. To Katie, middle school is a waste of time, so she takes more classes than she needs to and does extra credit the way the rest of us drink water. She’s probably got enough credits already to graduate from high school.

The Friday before, we’d been assigned to be each other’s partner for our social studies independent study project: a ten-page paper and an oral presentation in which we would “illuminate some aspect of our government relevant to today’s young citizen.”

Thanks, Mr. Crosby, way to narrow the scope.

We wouldn’t have class for the next week so that we could go to the library or the computer lab to work on our projects. This was going to teach us about independence and self-determination. Or something like that; I wasn’t really listening.

I really dig Mr. Crosby; he’s pretty laid-back except when he starts talking about what he calls “government pork,” and then he gets all wild and upset. I must have irked him somehow to get assigned to Katie. My best friend, JonPaul, and our buddy Jay D., who are the biggest troublemakers this side of a prison riot, were project partners, and even the Bang Girls (I call them that because they’re BFFs who have identical haircuts with the exact same fringe hitting their eyeballs in a weird way that makes my eyes water if I look at them too long) had been paired. Before I could ask Crosby what I’d done to set him off, he’d announced, “Once partners are assigned, there will be no switching.”

I am not a guy who gives in easily, so I spent the weekend thinking of ways to convince Crosby to change his mind, and avoiding Katie, even though she’d been calling, emailing, IM-ing and texting. It was only third period on Monday morning and already she’d left a couple of notes at my locker and had tracked me in the hall between classes.

“Kevin.”

I flinched. Katie has one of those bossy yet whiny voices that make you want to stab pencils in your eardrums to make the noise stop. I turned and broke out a killer smile. I can always tell when it’s time to crank up the charisma.

“Hey, Katie, I meant to—” I started, but she cut me off before I could come up with plausible and inoffensive reasons why I’d ignored her all weekend.

“It doesn’t really matter.” She flipped open her notebook and handed me a sheaf of papers. “I utilized the time by getting started on the initial research. You can see that I brainstormed about a dozen ideas we could examine that I believe to be unique and ripe for exploration. Why don’t you take the packet home, read everything over, and then let me know by this time tomorrow, if not sooner, what you’ve decided? I’m okay with any choice you make, and we should, after all, be democratic about how this partnership functions, because of, you know, the class subject and all.”

“Uh … yeah, right. I see that you, wow, you typed up—what’s an abstract, again?”

“A brief summary and succinct explanation, the theoretical ideal, if you will, behind the project topic.” She tapped her foot impatiently, probably wondering why I hadn’t been writing abstracts since nursery school.

“Sure, that was what I was going to guess. You did an … abstract thingie … for all twelve ideas?”

“Of course”—she pushed her glasses a little higher on her nose—“because that kind of organization and attention to detail will enable us to make the best possible choice among our options. Besides, I’m sure I can put the seemingly superfluous work to good use in the form of extra-credit projects later in the year.”