Listen for the Lie

by Amy Tintera

Except this is a “sorry I didn’t tell you I’m the prime suspect in my friend’s murder” chicken.

(A side effect of being accused of murder is that you spend a lot of time thinking about it. You get used to it.)

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.

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.

Dad’s so good at that Texas thing where you act polite to people’s face and then talk shit behind their back.

I guess it’s mostly women who do it. But sometimes you meet a girl who is just, like, your soulmate. Not in a romantic way, but in a friend way. Which can almost be more intense. You could tell that Savvy and Lucy were in one of those intense friend-soulmate relationships.

I drop my phone back in my purse and look up at Matt. Ex-husband in front of me, ex-boyfriend texting me to pick up my shit. I am positively on fire.

I’m like the football jock who never gets over peaking in high school, except I’m the tragic murder version.

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

And 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.

In the end, life is just sweatpants and children who resent you and all your choices. But no one wants to hear that.

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.

He drove you to the brink of your sanity and then blamed you for doing what you had to do to survive. All of this is his fault.”

“The only person who ever protected me was Savvy.”