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I knew. It seemed to hold possibilities right there where it lay.
    I made a silent promise to myself—I would come back when no one was here, and I would read those words. Maybe at that moment I knew what a thief must feel, a jewel thief. The way his heart would quicken with need and envy and want when he gazed down at the promise of diamonds and rubies. The way he knew he would soon hold them in his hands, pretending they were his even if they could never be.

Chapter Five
    D uring the spring and summer of that year, and all of the years previous, too, I had a secret, and that secret was that I lied a lot. It felt like a lot—I did it more than truly necessary, anyway. Sometimes there was no good reason for it. At school, I would lie about what I did on the weekend. If I stayed home and read I would say I went into the city or visited my cousins, when I don’t even really have cousins, or none that we actually ever visited. I would say I went to Hair Apparent to get my hair cut when I trimmed it myself with Mom’s kitchen scissors (probably a lie people saw right through), or that I had a salad when all I ate was fries. I told people I wanted to be a photographer, when I didn’t know what I really wanted to be, and I didn’t say that I’d never been on an airplane. I’d say I went to Hawaii once or to California, because everyone had been to California. I never admitted to liking horror movies, when I actually loved them. The gory ones. The true crime books too, where some clean-cut suburban type, someoneyou’d never expect, kills someone in their own garage.
    I lied partly out of insecurity, I knew that. I read all about insecurity in my books. Insecurity was a colorless sense of not being good enough that could sit upon your spirit the same as a filmy layer of dirt on a window; something you might not know was even there until the sun tried to shine through. Insecurity, too, was probably part of why I preferred to be alone, and why I was not always brave enough to show who I was, but it was more than that, the lying. I also did it to make people more comfortable. I’d say I was nervous for the AP U.S. History test when I wasn’t, or that something cost less than it did if a person was poor, or that I was bad at sports too when there were some I was honestly pretty good at.
    I guess for me, lying evened things out. Smoothed the rocky spaces between people. It could settle a million possible tiny upsets before they actually happened, though I have to say, the thought of speaking the truth all of the time seemed like it would be the greatest thing in the world. The greatest. I couldn’t even imagine how great that would be and how freeing. But I didn’t think that would ever happen, because speaking your own truth on a fairly consistent basis seemed like one of the hardest jobs a human being could take on. A giant and endless wall to get over and one of those walls that are spiked with cut glass at the top. People were often in the greatest crisis just because they couldn’t speak the truth— I don’t love you. I’m gay. I don’t want to go to that college. I don’t really want to be friends with you. I hate the way things are. With lying, you walked a wide circle around it all. It kept things simple and running smoothly, even if that meant you held hard to your own secrets.
    I didn’t know if other people did this too, the way I did. Lying wasn’t exactly something you told the truth about.
    So that’s what I did when Mom asked me to show Haydenaround town while she went with Juliet to buy maternity clothes. I lied. I moaned and protested when the thought actually made me happy. Really happy. Too happy. I think I even said, “Can’t you guys take him later?” when right at that moment I was figuring out in my head what to show him. I guess when you lied, you were trying to be a better person than the creep you actually thought you were.
    I waited for Hayden to be ready. I sang, “It’s a Big Dog,”