Read From the Kitchen of Half Truth for Free Online Page A

to be able to look back on her life with clarity so she may remember her time on this earth—good parts and bad parts—exactly as it was. No lies, no confusion, just pure lucidity and perfect understanding. What could bring her a greater sense of peace than that?
    ***
    The cottage is filled with a sweet, sugary scent. My mother has been making cupcakes, and twelve of them are lined up on the kitchen work surface, each decorated with pink icing and colored sprinkles.
    â€œThis one’s for you,” she says, pointing at a cake that’s twice as big as the others, “and I’m going to top it with all of your favorite decorations.”
    I look at the bowl of rainbow-colored jelly sweets sitting near the cakes and secretly tally up the number of calories that will be contained in this well-meant gift, not to mention the amount of additives and colorings. I never eat sweets these days, not after researching what’s in them.
    â€œFantastic,” I say with a smile. “And the other eleven are for…?”
    â€œI’m taking those to the local cancer hospice.” She shakes her head mournfully. “Those poor people,” she sighs, as if she’s not one of them.
    ***
    I always find it strange walking into “my” room. It’s like revisiting my childhood in a feverish dream where everything is distorted and the wrong way around. All my childhood things are here—my pink flowery duvet, my framed photo of two little bunnies eating dandelions, my music box, my little plastic handheld mirror—but this was never actually my bedroom. It wasn’t here in this cottage where I bounced on the bed or played with my toys or read my books; and yet here is the bed I bounced on, the toys I played with, and the books I read. My mother keeps it like a shrine to me, albeit a shrine that has been relocated from Tottenham to Cambridge. My school certificates and prizes are lined up on one shelf; my first science set sits on another. She has even kept all my old exercise books in a box at the bottom of the wardrobe. Feeling nostalgic, I delve in and pull one out—English Literature, Year 9, Mr. Hamble—and flick through the pages, recalling the pains I took to write in such small, neat letters. Everything is beautifully presented, with the dates in the margin and the headings underlined, but the pages are half blank.
    I read the assignment title at the top of one page: “Write your own myth of 500 words explaining how penguins lost the ability to fly.”
    In immaculate handwriting I have written: “I object to this assignment on the basis that it is fundamentally flawed. The Natural History Museum has told me there is no evolutionary evidence that penguins could ever fly.”
    Mr. Hamble has written “See Me” in big red letters at the bottom of the page.
    After my disgrace in Red Class, I hated English, all those silly stories and poems that were full of fictional characters and unrealistic scenarios. I greatly objected to being forced to read fiction and told Mr. Hamble it would certainly rot my mind.
    â€œIt’s completely unrealistic,” I told him, “that Romeo would think Juliet was dead and then kill himself, and then that she would wake up, see Romeo was dead, and kill herself. What are the chances of that actually happening? I don’t think that has ever happened to anyone. Ever.”
    At parents’ evening Mr. Hamble told my mother that I was “a strange girl with an extremely underdeveloped imagination” and that I might benefit from some extra exposure to stories of a fictional nature. Huh! If only he knew!
    On the shelf next to my science kit, my old reading books are lined up neatly and hemmed in by two wooden bookends made to resemble caterpillars. I scan through the titles: Who Am I?—A Journey Around the Human Body ; 101 Interesting Facts You Probably Didn’t Know; A Beginner’s Guide to Keeping