When we climbed in the car to go home, Nicos said, “I’m not sitting next to her,” and took the seat behind Dad. Then Nicos put his headphones on and stared out of the window moodily, but that’s what he does when he’s happy as well, so it’s nothing new. Kat sat in the middle, but she wouldn’t let my leg touch hers—she kept shoving it away with her hand. If I ever had to create a villain for a story, I swear it would be a big sister. I sat behind Mom and imagined Kat and Nicos’s car seats eating them and that was fun for a while, but it still hurt.
After a few minutes, Mom turned to Kat and Nicos and pointed a finger in the air. “Be nice to your sister, you two. Enough of the cold-shoulder stuff.”
Nicos grunted. Kat gave me an evil look. I thought of a whole load of things I’d like to do for revenge, like…shave Kat’s precious eyebrows off when she was asleep and hide Nicos’s phone in the freezer…but I won’t go into those now. I’d never do them anyway.
“Tut. Ignore them. You did the right thing, Lex.” Mom smiled and rubbed my knee. “You shouldn’t lie. You’re a good girl.”
I liked it when she called me a good girl, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
I should lie. I shouldn’t lie—who am I supposed to believe? It’s so confusing. From the minute we’re born, adults tell us we should never, ever lie. At disaster moments, they sit us down and say in a serious voice, “I want you to tell me who cut your sister’s bangs off/tracked chocolate cake into the carpet/threw the hamster in the kiddie pool, and you won’t get in trouble if you just tell the truth.”
But
1. that’s not true,
2. parents lie all the time, and
3. my parents are worse than anyone I know.
I glared at the back of my parents’ heads, and all the nonsense they told us came flooding back to me.
Most parents say if you frown, the wind will change and your face’ll stay like that forever. They say if you don’t hurry up, they’ll leave without you, but they never do. On long car trips, they promise you’re almost there when you’re still miles away, and they create this whole fantasy about tooth fairies collecting teeth from under your pillow.
But my parents? Well.
For a start, they told us robins were Santa’s mini messengers and the one in our yard was watching our every move. If we whined, broke our toys, or if we didn’t go to bed on time, the robin would fly to the North Pole to tell Santa, and we wouldn’t get any presents. I didn’t trust robins for years after that. To get me to eat calamari, Mom said it was fried rings of jellified marshmallow when it’s actually squid. She said if I didn’t learn Greek, our ancestors would haunt me, and that every time I got out of bed after lights out, a puppy died because of me.
As for my dad, he should win awards for the things he comes up with. He said you couldn’t buy batteries for my flashing, wailing toy car when it clearly had a battery compartment, and when the ice cream truck starts playing music, it means it’s only got salty ice cream left. He told us that if we said Dad too many times on weekends, we’d disturb the peace and we’d get taken to prison, and worst of all, he said that our belly buttons were connected to our butts by a long hose in our gut, and if we untied our belly buttons, our butts would fall off.
See what I mean?
Even Yiayia, my grandma, who’s very religious, says things that are suspicious. She points to her crucifixes and religious icons, which are all over her house, and tells us God is watching and if we’re bad, he’ll be angry and we’ll go to hell. Now, I love Yiayia, but does God really care if I take the only whole ice pop in the freezer and leave the broken ones for everyone else? And does hell even exist?
Whatever the answer is, lying is normal around here. Not that you can ever talk about it. You can’t ask why they’re allowed to lie and we’re not. There are plenty of words for lies—I looked it up in the thesaurus once and wrote them down in my notebook. Some of them are funny, like:
• bunkum
• baloney
• hooey
• eyewash
• hogwash
• flapdoodle
• piffle
• pish posh
• poppycock
• flimflam
But lying—well, that’s a bad word. You get in trouble if you say someone’s a liar, even if it’s a kid, so you definitely don’t want to say it about an adult. And there are all these layers and categories when it comes to lies. Fibbing is a nicer word, but means the same thing as lying, as far as I can tell. Then there are white lies and black lies, lies you need to tell so people don’t get offended, and lies that stop people from panicking. It’s all so confusing.
Outside the car window, all kinds of people were crossing roads, walking down the street, and waiting for buses. I gazed at them wondering, When you get older, do you know the truth about lying or are you still just as clueless?
I smacked my forehead on to the cold shaky passenger car window and closed my eyes. It was way too complicated to understand on one car trip. There were no rules around lying—not that I knew of, anyway. No two people gave you the same advice about whether you should lie or whether you shouldn’t. And no heavenly voice in the sky thundered, “Alexandra Efthimiou, for the biggest lie ever, you are now eternally DOOMED!”
Which is why, when it came to the moment I had to choose between telling the truth and telling the biggest lie I’ve ever told in my life—one that caused more trouble than I could have imagined and split my entire family apart—I had no idea what to do.
There should be some kind of handbook.
That’s all I have to say.