Listen for the Lie

by Amy Tintera

thanks to my least favorite podcaster, murder is the very first thing that pops up when you google “Lucy Chase.”

Let this be a lesson to all the men out there who can’t handle conflict—man up and dump your girlfriend, or you might end up living with a suspected murderer indefinitely.

sake. Men are such babies. They’re too scared to actually break up with you, so they just get mean or fade away until you get mad and dump them.

Mom asks me constantly, in a million different ways, whether I murdered Savvy. Maybe she thinks that if she asks enough, I’ll eventually let it slip that I did indeed bash my friend’s brains in. I have to admire her persistence.

There is nothing my mother wants more than for me to confess to killing Savvy. Not just because she thinks it’s the right thing to do, but because she would excel as the mother of a murderer.

What a weird family!

High school friendships don’t always transfer to adulthood,

People believe men. Especially men who look like that.

A mess!

We do a book club sometimes, but not today. We just did a book last week.” “Which one?” “Oh, I don’t know. I never read them. Who has the patience for reading anymore?”

Make Today So Awesome That Yesterday Gets Jealous.

“I should have controlled my temper,” I said softly. I should have just cried. Taken the hits and crawled away to show my scars. I should have been a better victim. The truth doesn’t matter if you fight back.

“Hello,” I say. He says nothing. He just stares. I’ve always admired the way kids unabashedly stare at you. They don’t care whether you’re uncomfortable. Kids have zero fucks to give about your feelings.

Everything I’ve been shoving into the deep recesses of my mind for five years come back to life to haunt me.

There’s no dumping a friend once you’ve committed a felony together.”

Men don’t protect us, not really. They only protect themselves, or each other. The only thing men ever protected me from was happiness.”

people hate that quality in a young woman, don’t they? They don’t know what to do with a girl who isn’t looking for their approval. They feel like they have to bring her down a peg.

look up at me adoringly. In the end, life is just sweatpants and children who resent you and all your choices.

“I’m not trying to prove you killed Savannah,” Ben says. “I’m trying to find out who killed her.” “That’s the same thing to a lot of people.”

I didn’t like college. I’m supposed to take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans just so I can sit in a lecture hall while a bored professor recites everything I just read in the wildly overpriced textbook? No thanks.”

You can’t make people accept that they have a problem, you know? They have to come to it themselves.

People don’t believe women who fight back. When a man lashes out, people say he’s lost control of his temper or made a terrible mistake. When a woman does it, she’s a psychopath.

It’s too bad common sense isn’t genetic.

sometimes you have to do the best with the information

better to be interesting than likable.”

She died trying to protect me. She saved me. We were a team, me and Savvy, right up until the end.

some people will never believe you, no matter how hard you explain yourself. Trust me, there’s no pleasing people. If they’re determined to think the worst of you, they will.”