Pants on Fire
Despite my desire to do so on that particular March morning, I resisted the urge to make out with the boy I was crushing on in the schoolyard. Despite the fact that I never had dinner with Katy Perry or spent two months in Kiev, I told my fourth-grade class that I had.
The words flowed effortlessly from my lips to my teeth. I was twenty-third in line for Monaco's throne with a single swish of my tongue. The girls sitting next to me on the swings would ask, "Really?" with wide eyes and a childlike innocence in their blinks. As they whispered in my ear, I nodded my head in agreement. It was so amazing that they didn't even think twice about it.
I lied solely for the sheer joy of it all. A narcotic was involved. I was no longer just a wistful bystander, my breath obscuring the window that separated me from the women I admired because of my fabrications. I was now the captain of the ship. A lie was a bullet, and the barrier was shattered; no longer could I only see, but touch. After all, I was the one who received a valentine from Jason, not the other students.
I was no longer just the tomboyish band geek who memorized her multiplication tables in a matter of minutes. They uttered my name and I appeared in the middle of their lunch table. For a brief moment, I became the pivot around which their universe revolved.
I was a skilled liar, not to mention a religious one. To escape the drudgery of my daily routine I marched into my alcazar, strode up the steps of my concepts, and sat atop the throne of deception. I was convinced that if I removed my phony robe, I would revert to my lower social class. Aristocracy that once admired and respected me would now throw me out of my palatial home. In order to redraw the lines of my new circle, I would have to strip naked and say, "Here's the real me, take a look!" They would return their compliments, sit at the table with six seats instead of eight, giggle in class when I asked a question. My fake diadem had been adjusted, so I continued to sing the praises of a Broadway production I had never seen.
However, one long-sought-after day, while lounging in a lavender bedroom, I finally began processing the floating conversations that had been circulating around me. One girl, whose hair was always perfectly curled, casually mentioned that her parents couldn't afford their annual summer vacation. Nobody laughed when I drew in a sigh of anticipation. Nobody gave each other a critical glare in the shadows. As a result, another girl retrieved her vanilla frosting spoon from her cheek and revealed that she and her family were also unable to travel. My fabricated tales of soaking up the Moroccan sun while floating in a crystal pool quickly came to naught.
They still gave her handfuls of chocolate-coated sunflower seeds the following Monday on the school bus. She wasn't shunned or relegated to a forgotten corner table for lunch. Instead of engrossed in my own thoughts, I sat and listened for an hour. The girls talked casually about their soccer game from the day before, in which they failed to score a single goal. They heard about their parent's layoff, which they didn't yet comprehend. No matter how trite or uninteresting their story was, they all seemed to be accepting and uncritical of one another as they conversed. I then started talking, admitting that I wasn't related to Britney Spears at the outset of our conversation.