It Wasn't Me Read online

  She looks around, and I’d love to say I look back eager and ready to open up, but after my last attempt at the listening-but-not-talking face I’ve decided to opt for a blank stare.

  “And to get us started, I have another idea.” Ms. Lewiston rustles around in her big leather purse and pulls out a glorious yellow-and-red bag we all know and love.

  “Starburst!” Molly says, and I will say that she sounds happier than I have ever, and I mean ever, heard her. She quickly turns the color of the pink Starbursts (for the experts among us, that would be strawberry). “But no food’s allowed in the library!”

  “Special dispensation from Ms. Cody,” Lewiston says, ripping open the bag. The delectable smell of high-fructose corn syrup and red dye number 40 wafts over us. “These are gluten-, dairy-, and nut-free, and they can’t spill or make too much of a mess. We just have to throw out the wrappers.”

  Jax rolls around on the beanbag until he’s on his knees, begging. “Don’t tease! What do we gotta do to get those?”

  Unless I’m mistaken, and I rarely am, everyone—even Andre, who has leaned forward a whole two inches—wants to know the answer to this.

  “You’re going to have to earn them,” Ms. Lewiston says. “You’re going to have to talk.”

  Jax leans back like he’s been gut punched and yells in mock horror, “No!”

  “Yes! But don’t worry. I’m starting out with an easy one.” Ms. Lewiston fishes around in the bag and closes her hand around one. “No peeking on the color,” she says sternly to Molly, who leans over.

  Molly moves up from strawberry to the full cherry-Starburst deep red, but she leans back.

  “Okay, here’s the first question. Tell us one time when you lied. It can be recent, it can be when you were a little kid, doesn’t matter.”

  Silence.

  “Does it matter if we got caught?” Jax asks.

  Ms. Lewiston shakes her head.

  “How will you know we’re not lying now? What if I lie to you about my lie, and that’s my telling you about a lie? What then?” Jax continues.

  Ms. Lewiston gives him that look that certain excellent adults have mastered; a look that says, basically:

  I like you.

  However, I’m on to whatever shenanigans you’re trying to pull.

  I don’t want to go all Genghis Khan on your butt.

  But I will.

  Jax nods thoughtfully, like she made a fascinating statement about climate change or the Boston Celtics. “Right. Never mind,” he says.

  I look around. This is interesting. On one hand, greed and avarice. On the other, self-preservation. I sort of wish I had some Starburst to eat while watching this play out.

  But Molly raises her hand.

  Somewhere, a Russian judge is giving her top points for guts.

  “When I was six, I stole a Hershey bar from Seven-Eleven. I didn’t get caught, but when I got home, my babysitter saw it and asked when I got it. I told her someone gave it to me, but she didn’t believe me. She asked again and again and finally told me she had seen me take it and was waiting for me to tell the truth. She made me bring it back to the store and apologize.” She falls silent.

  “That sounds really embarrassing,” Alice says, her voice, as always, a little too loud.

  Molly looks up, her face ready to be mad and You Are an Idiot–like, but Alice looks sympathetic. Or maybe Molly’s just distracted again by the nail sticking out of Alice’s hand. She nods. “Yeah. It was. I begged my babysitter not to tell my parents. I swore I’d never do it again.”

  With a theatrical whoosh, Ms. Lewiston pulls her hand out of the bag.

  “Light pink! The best,” Molly breathes.

  “Did your babysitter tell?” Alice asks.

  All our eyes are drawn to the unwrapping, but I’m curious too.

  Molly looks up and locks eyes with Alice for a second, then looks away. “No. She never told them,” she says. And something in her voice makes me wonder.

  Ms. Lewiston smiles. “Thanks, Molly. For being brave enough—or hungry enough—to go first. Who’s next?”

  “Me!” Jax waves a hand in the air. “Also if you find yourself with a red one—”

  “No special orders, Jax,” Ms. Lewiston says. “But go for it. You’ve got the floor.”

  Jax leans back in the beanbag, which rustles and crinkles so loudly we can barely hear him. He speaks up to the ceiling.

  “This summer I was messing around, and I made a slingshot out of a perfect piece of wood. I was testing it out, but by accident I flung a rock right at our neighbor’s window, and it shattered.”

  He falls silent for a second, then keeps going.

  “Well, he was out of town, which I knew, because we were taking care of his dog. And nobody had seen it. So I just…never told. When he came home from vacation and his window was broken, he was pretty freaked out and wound up calling and getting an alarm system installed, because he thought maybe someone had been planning to break in.”

  We’re all silent. There’s no fake toughness in Jax’s voice, and Ms. Lewiston leans forward and hands him a yellow Starburst.

  “You weren’t expecting that, I’m sure,” she says. “What did that feel like?”

  “Bad,” Jax says. “But by the time I knew he’d gotten the alarm and everything, I couldn’t really see the point of telling the truth. What’s he gonna do? Cancel and tell them to come uninstall it all? Naw…it was too late.”

  “Well, I guess it depends. Too late for him not to get an alarm system, maybe. Though I will say often those alarm companies charge a monthly fee, so it might still be worth it for him to cancel. But there’s also another potential goal that it’s not too late for.”

  Jax shrugs. “Yeah? What?”

  “Well, do you like your neighbor? Did you feel bad about his window?” Ms. Lewiston asks.

  Jax shrugs again. “I mean, I guess. Yeah.” He pauses. “Yeah, he’s actually a really cool old dude.”

  “So the other goal might simply be to say you’re sorry. To tell him it was an accident and you didn’t mean any harm.”

  “What’s the point of that? It’ll get me in trouble, and the window’s already been fixed and now he’s got an alarm system. Nothing’s going to be better because I got yelled at,” Jax says.

  But Ms. Lewiston smiles. “Point might be not to feel bad. That’s enough of a reason, right?”

  Before Jax can say anything more, she looks around. “Anyone else ready?”

  Alice puts her hand up. “When I was in third grade, I saw Jennifer Malone had new Hello Kitty markers, and I really, really, REALLY wanted them. So during snack I took them and put them in my winter boots in my cubby. Later that day Jennifer couldn’t find them, and we had to search the whole classroom. I pretended to help look, and when Mrs. Coates asked me if I had seen them, I said of course not, but I guess I’m not a very good liar, because she immediately made me go out in the hall and tell her where I put them. So I told her Jennifer had stolen the markers from me first, and I was stealing them back. Then I had to go to the principal’s office.”

  There’s a meditative silence as we all ponder this brave but ultimately doomed tactic.

  “I remember that, actually,” Erik says. “We had to stay in from second recess, and we had reserved the foursquare court. That was you? Why did you take them in the first place? There were, like, a million markers in Mrs. Coates’s classroom.”

  Molly and Alice both look at Erik like he’s got a jockstrap on his head.

  “Hello Kitty markers are different,” Molly says in her You Are Too Stupid to Live voice. “But I still wouldn’t have stolen them.”

  “Unless they were made of chocolate,” Erik mutters, and if I’m not mistaken, Andre snickers a little at that one.

  �
��Anyway, I had to apologize to Jennifer, so I made her a whole foldout card—I was really into origami at the time—and she was cool about it. We actually were pretty good friends for the rest of that year; though when she invited me over for a sleepover, she made me promise not to steal anything.” She’s silent for a second. “So that was awkward.”

  Ms. Lewiston tosses her an orange Starburst.

  “So we have people lying because they don’t want to get in trouble, and lying because they wanted something they couldn’t have without taking it. What are some other reasons people lie? Andre? Erik?” She turns toward me. “Theo? What about you?”

  I think about what I might say. I lie fairly often, I guess. Not like pathological-level lying, but I’d say it’s one of my better skills. I can lie about forgetting homework: “I swear I did it. I can see it sitting on my dining room table where I left it. Can I hand it in tomorrow?”

  I lie about cookies: “Mom. Why would I lie about this? I only had two. I swear.”

  And, if needed, I lie about how I’m feeling. Because after months of watching your mom bite the inside of her lip and turn away and stare out the window (a window, I might add, that looks out at absolutely nothing), you learn to say “Fine, Mom. I’m fine.” And sound like you mean it.

  None of these are lies I feel like talking about. Still, I raise my hand.

  “Theo! What you got?” Ms. Lewiston rustles her hand in the bag intentionally, like a signal.

  If she keeps it up, we’ll be drooling on command, Pavlov’s dog–style.

  “I told my younger cousins that a sand fairy left them magical seashells, but it was actually me,” I say.

  Ms. Lewiston looks disappointed. “I don’t think that’s really the same thing, Theo,” she says, and even though her voice is chill, I get a little of the prickly hot-sweaty-embarrassed feeling.

  “No? Seems like a lie to me. Seems like looking into the big bright eyes of a six-year-old and pinkie-swearing that, yes, a fairy magically came up out of the sea to leave them a gift is a big. Fat. LIE.”

  “Do you think telling made-up stories that feed the imagination is the same as lying?” Ms. Lewiston asks.

  I want to sound funny, but when I speak, my voice is almost trembling. I stand up, suddenly too frustrated to sit still.

  “Well, if you make a kid believe something and that something is NOT TRUE, then I think that’s pretty much the definition of lying to someone’s face. And let’s be clear…the next time they went to the beach, when I wasn’t around, no magical fairy was going to be there.”

  “You don’t know that.” This is Alice, of course.

  I’m almost glad she’s volunteered to be her weird self right at this moment. It gives my frustration a target to point at.

  “Yes, Alice, I do know. Because—spoiler alert!—fairies aren’t real!” I’m being rude, and I don’t even care. Usually Alice is someone I wouldn’t be nasty to, since it’s kind of like kicking a kitten, all wide eyes and confusion. But right now it doesn’t matter. She’s in front of me, practically volunteering.

  She shakes her head. “Yah. Duh. But maybe it wasn’t a lie. Maybe it was the beginning of magic. Maybe someone else—a parent or another older cousin or someone—hid a shell next time. Or maybe there was no shell, so one of them was disappointed, but the other one made up a story about how the sand fairy got waylaid by an evil octopus and couldn’t deliver the shell. But then she went back to her fairy friends, and they worked together on a magical net that would capture the evil octopus.”

  We all contemplate this, and I take a few deep breaths until I don’t feel like punching a wall.

  “That’s actually a wicked cool story,” Erik says. “But probably the evil octopus could rip the net.”

  “Maybe,” Alice says. “But either way, it works. My point is, you started the story, but someone else might pick it up. Stories sometimes have a life of their own.”

  Erik nods vigorously, because I’m sure he spends all his free time making up fairy stories, once he finishes bench-pressing nerds with his jock friends. I want to slap him, and I force myself to take a deep breath. I’m usually not a violent person.

  I don’t say anything. Because the fact is, my dad was the king of making up stories like the sand fairy. He’d take any everyday thing and spin such a web of hilarity that we’d hang on every word. When I was little, I used to sit in the bathtub, waterlogged and pruney, while he perched on the toilet and told story after story about the creatures who lived in my toes, or the bath mermaids who needed shampoo to surf. And my mom would lean against the doorframe and listen and laugh, and everything seemed as safe and happy and right as the world could possibly seem.

  And this summer, when it was the first time I was together with all my cousins without him, I tried to tell a story the way he would. But the words felt thick and stupid in my mouth. And Daniel, my youngest cousin, looked up at me, disappointed, before asking, “Where’s Uncle Tomo? He tells better stories!” And all the others shushed him, like maybe I hadn’t noticed that my dad wasn’t there.

  By the time we’re done discussing Alice’s random octopus story, I’m fine. I mean, it’s not like I spend time reliving the misery of my perfectly nice parents getting a perfectly normal divorce.

  I roll my eyes and sit back down, propping my Chuck Taylors on one of the stools. (Rule Violation #4, obviously. They’re bum drums, not footstools, according to Ms. Davis. The sound you hear is the sound of every student here trying not to gag.)

  “Yeah. Alice, it sounds like you should meet my cousins. They’d love you,” I say, and I’m relieved my voice sounds like it should, not like a mildly hysterical toddler hyena, which was my fear.

  “I think this is a really interesting discussion, because it leads into something else: Is it ever okay to lie to make someone feel better?” Ms. Lewiston asks.

  “Yes, and can I have my Starburst?” I ask, relieved that the conversation is moving away from me.

  But Ms. Lewiston shakes her head. “Yours is on probation. That wasn’t really a lie.” She holds up her hand to stop what is about to be my impassioned protest.

  “Don’t mess with a messer, Theo. The goal here is to open up. To be brave and a little vulnerable. To say something that you’re not totally sure how other people will react to. Think about it. We’ll come back to you.”

  She looks at my face and smiles.

  I don’t smile back. I look at her and, remembering her confession on the floor yesterday, think about lorikeets, those horrible screechy parrots that I once fed at a zoo.

  Before I can say anything, though, Erik interrupts. “I think it’s totally okay to lie sometimes. I mean, you have to. Like, for politeness or whatever.”

  “We call that a social contract,” Ms. Lewiston says. “Right. But when? How can you tell if you’re lying to be nice or to save your own skin?”

  Erik opens his mouth, then closes it again. After a second, Ms. Lewiston turns. “Andre? What about you?”

  Andre looks a little taken aback, but within a second he’s managed his half-lidded mellow look again. “Yeah, I mean, it’s a slippery slope, I guess,” he says. “You tell someone their music sounds dope, and that’s just being nice. But then they want to jam with you, or they ask you to listen to their demo tape, or whatever, and you’re stuck.” He looks down. “I mean, nobody wants to hurt someone’s feelings. Or make enemies. But sometimes if you lie, it snowballs.”

  I stare at him, my head cocked. That’s probably the most I’ve ever heard him say.

  “So even a well-intentioned lie can backfire, right?” Ms. Lewiston says. “Can anyone think of a time they lied and it was the right choice? They’re glad they did it?”

  I think about my mom asking me if I could bear it if we sold our house, the one with my loft bed and the giant beech tree in the backyard. I knew it was stupid to ke
ep such a huge place for the two of us. And I knew that if I said no, that I couldn’t bear it, we’d find a way to stay. But I lied. I told her I’d think about it. And I cried like a freaking baby into my pillow all night. And most of the next night. And then I practiced the Jedi stuff I used to be totally into and kept my voice level and relaxed and told her it was fine, that it was just a house. And I’m glad I did.

  My eyes meet Molly’s, and I almost gasp at how…wrecked…she looks. Whatever lie she’s thinking about, it’s a big one.

  We keep talking about lies, which is sort of depressing. But Ms. Lewiston keeps flinging Starbursts at us, so it’s livelier than it sounds. Making it even more exciting is that her aim is pretty terrible, and at one point she sends an orange one flying all the way over Andre’s head, past Biography, and into Historical Fiction. Mayhem ensues as we all scramble for it, and in the scuffle, the nail falls out of Alice’s hand.

  After that Ms. Lewiston announces it’s time for us to return to the classroom for lunch.

  When we get there, she claps her hands. “While you eat, you’re going to read a story about some kids, not that different from you all, who participated in a Restorative Justice Circle. Then when you’re done, I’ll be putting you into pairs and you’ll act out some of what you think is happening. Sound good?”

  I think this sounds like literally the worst idea in the entire history of bad ideas, but I don’t say anything. Molly sighs so loudly they can hear it in New Hampshire, and her This Is So Stupid I Want to Stab Someone face pretty much says it all. Meanwhile, Erik’s pulling dead skin off a scab on his elbow, Alice is reapplying the fake nail, and Andre appears to be communing with something outside the window.

  It’s going to be a long afternoon.

  Ms. Lewiston looks around and smiles like that was exactly the response she was hoping for. Once she finishes handing out the story, she heads back to Erik, giving him an old-school tape player and headphones. Erik takes it and puts it on his desk without ever looking up.