I ran to where my dad was digging in the sand, tapped his shoulder, and pointed at the sea. It took my dad a second to figure it out.

My finger. The sea. My finger. The sea.

What did that have to do with—?

And then his eyes shrieked NO! And my eyes replied, YES! (I’m good at eye conversations as well as whale ones.)

“Wait. What are you saying, Lex?” Dad asked, using words this time. (He clearly wasn’t as good at eye conversations as I thought.) “Don’t tell me the keys are in the sea.”

Well, that was confusing. Did he want the truth or didn’t he? I paused for a second, trying to work it out.

“Lexie. Tell me the truth,” he added. Which was good timing, I can tell you.

So I spelled it out in actual words from my actual mouth. “The keys are in the sea, Dad.”

When he heard that, he shouted a religious name, but I don’t think he said it in a holy way. Then he asked, “Why, Lexie? Why are the keys in the sea?”

That seemed obvious to me, but I had to tell him anyway—I’d just realized that he wasn’t that good at working things out for himself. So I said slowly, “Because someone threw them in there, Dad.”

“WHAT? What dummy did that?” Dad yelled.

I knew exactly which dummy had done it, but I wasn’t going to go to heaven if I told on Anastasia, was I? However, I wasn’t going to heaven if I lied to my dad’s face, either.

When adults ask you so bluntly, what are you supposed to say?

“Tell me the truth and you won’t get into trouble,” Dad said. “No one will.” He leaned so close, the dark caves of his nostrils looked like they were going to swallow me up. I had to look away before he ate me with his face.

He put his hot, heavy hand on my shoulder. He was guiding me toward the truth, and it felt safe. As if to prove it, the angels began to sing ah-ahhhhh in the air above my head (or maybe just inside my head). “Who did it, Lexie?”

So I said, “Anastasia.” Because no one would get in trouble if I told the truth. Wasn’t that what Dad said? Isn’t that what all adults say?

Yeah, right.

You should have seen them. Everyone started shouting and throwing their arms around. Greeks have hand gestures for pretty much every situation, including Andreas’s keys are in the sea! Surprisingly.

In the commotion, Nicos didn’t save Elias’s goal. Elias leaped up, screeched, “YESSS!” and pulled his T-shirt up over his face, which wasn’t a pleasant sight because he has a wobbly belly and man boobs. Kat and Kallie were hiding behind a car by then, but I could see them glaring at me like they wanted to throw me in the sea as well.

The adults waded in and fished for the keys in the exact spot I pointed to before the car keys got swept out to Spain or Morocco or whatever’s south of Brighton.

Anastasia got in a heap of trouble.

But—check this out—so did I for telling on her!

As Uncle C pulled the dripping keys out of the water with a roar of victory, and as the adults clapped and cheered, the kids crowded around me to deliver their verdicts.

“Snitch,” Nicos growled, but then he was still annoyed about letting in the goal.

“Big mouth,” Elias said, and I thought, You might want to close YOUR big mouth a little more, blubber belly.

“Fink,” my sister snarled.

“Traitor.”

“Rat.”

Eleni stood by my side. She knows not to get involved in cousin wars, but she came to back me up because she always does. And she always will. No matter what.

Except that’s not what happened.

When Anastasia came storming over to me and said, “Can’t believe what a tattletale you are,” with eyes plotting the kind of revenge that wouldn’t be sending her to heaven, Eleni did something odd. Instead of telling Anastasia to get lost or saying that throwing car keys in the sea was completely dumb, she frowned at me and said, “Lexie, what the heck? You got her in trouble.”

What? Why aren’t you standing up for me? I asked Eleni in whale song. But she didn’t answer.

“I just told the tru—” I began, but Anastasia’s parents yelled, “ANASTASIA! Get over here right now!” and she ran off.

I slumped on the scratchy blanket and gazed at the churning sea. By then, the sky was turning yellow, like a ghostly bowl of custard. Like the fragile fluttering wing of a lemon butterfly. Like a dome of an omelet made from the yolks of a hundred homesick hens. I would have written it all in my notebook if I wasn’t cringing right then with confusion and shame.

Maybe I should have told my dad where the keys were but said I didn’t know who did it. Except that would have been lying, and lying made you unhappy.

But now the truth had made me unhappy too, and everyone else as well.

Eleni sat down next to me, but I couldn’t look at her. It felt like three centuries went by in a minute or two.

“What should I have done?” I murmured eventually.

“Next time, lie,” Eleni said matter-of-factly. She was feeding ants and seeing how much they could carry, which was quite a lot, and then she started counting them, even though they kept moving around and it was impossible. She loves counting things. She didn’t seem to notice that she’d just blatantly betrayed me. “I lie all the time,” she added.

I paused for a second to take that information in.

“You do?”

“Yep.”

I paused again. I couldn’t tell if she was lying. That’s the problem: Once someone tells you that they lie, how do you know if you can believe them?

“Tell me one of your lies, then,” I said.

“I was tired after jumping with that hopper even though I said I was fine.”

“Knew it.”

She grinned and I glared at her. Something had just happened between us, and I was still trying to figure it out. Meanwhile, maybe she was right. Maybe I did need to lie. But it felt so wrong! I didn’t know if I could. I was a good girl. I helped at home, read books without being bribed, and smiled in photos instead of sticking my tongue out. I looked after Eleni, sang the hymns in church, and ate vegetables without smothering them in ketchup. I liked being good. But look where being good got me.

“Fine. Next time I won’t make that mistake,” I mumbled. “Next time I’ll do the right thing and lie.”