If You Tell a Lie

by Lucinda Berry

That’s how long it took him to slip his fingers down my pants and change my life forever.

um okay? ??

My mom always warned me to keep my legs closed and watch out for the predators.

She never told me they were at home.

That’s all it took to kill you.

How’d she get our contact information if none of us were supposed to be in touch?

the fact that you all agreed not to talk ever again tells me that y'all were definitely in the wrong lol

But I hadn’t done anything wrong. Not anything worse than what they’d done.

Unless they’d gotten together and were trying to make me take the fall for what happened. But why would they do that? And why now? After all this time?

These were my oldest and dearest friends. I was being silly.

betrayal never comes from your enemies

I listened to her. So did the others. Because you listened to Blakely. You didn’t question her. She’d always been the natural leader of our group, and that night wasn’t any different.

its giving Allison dilaurentis

My mom was supposed to live. She wasn’t supposed to die. What about all our prayers?

All my therapists asked what I was feeling in that moment with her, and I never told them the truth.

ALL your therapists?????

The day you lose your heart. Part of your soul. You’re supposed to have something profound to say about that. Except I didn’t.

I understood it was a crime scene. A brutal massacre on campus, and he didn’t need to tell me to close my eyes. I’d already squeezed them shut and buried my face in his chest, wishing he could protect me from the images. But it was too late. I’d already seen too much.

I kept waiting for the phone to ring or a police officer to knock at my front door and take me down to the station, but nobody ever called. Nobody ever came. I watched the story from afar, and eventually, I stopped worrying about it. I didn’t have any other choice if I wanted to go on with my life. You couldn’t stay stuck in trauma forever.

It’d been hard in the beginning, but they’d been dead to me for years now.

Was she still the same person? Was I? Were any of us?

Were we finally going to tell someone what we’d done? Make things right after all this time?

Nobody knew what really happened that summer except us. Our very small circle—me, Thera, Blakely, and Meg. Cabin Naomi.

I liked when they were scared of me.

I only sent one thing besides my response. The link to the article in the Post-Tribune because Regina Crosby was the first name I googled after I got the cryptic message. The first hit told me everything I needed to know: Regina Crosby paroled after twenty-five years behind bars for the brutal murder of her husband and attempted murder of her two children It was no coincidence that we got our cards exactly six weeks after Regina got paroled.

Nobody did. They’d never even asked us about it afterward. There wasn’t a single soul outside our group that thought we had anything to do with what happened to Regina and her family.

I was popular here, and being popular just might be the greatest feeling in the world.

Besides, she was just jealous. She knew she would’ve done the same thing if the shoe had been on the other foot, because that’s what you did. For whatever reason, you’ll sell your soul to the popular kids in high school.

I got to experience what it was like to really be popular. Really, truly popular. And I loved every minute of it. I loved being queen. I spent all year watching and studying Samantha—the queen bee at my school—so I’d know what to do once I got here and it was my turn. Boys tripped over themselves trying to get her attention, and even the teachers stumbled over their words when they talked to her. It was like she was some kind of drug, and I wanted to be that intoxicating. I wanted to strip men of their words. Have women hate me, which really just meant they were dying of jealousy.

That’s the way it worked when an entire wing of the recreation center had been donated by my daddy.

“Except I’m serious. I think he’s way too old.” I shook my head. “The older, the better.” My daddy said older men were only interested in one thing—sex. That’s why he kept them away from me, but that was the reason I loved camp the most—he didn’t have any control over me when I was here.

But this time, it was different. This time I had a secret. One I could never share, and that was easy to do when you basically lived in your room, like I did at home. It’d be almost impossible to do with my best friends. They’d probably take one look at me and know something was different.

But none of that mattered last night when my social anxiety and my secret were screaming violently at me.

But everything was different this year. I knew it would be. Just having the secret already made everything feel weird, so there was no way I was telling them. Except it wasn’t just my secret. Something was off this year.

Blakely was totally obsessed with the new tennis instructor, so that was what she’d got everyone else focused on too.

Blakely told us she’d decided that it was going to be Mr. Crosby. Except that’s not what she called him. She called him by his first name, Jared. She’d set her eyes on him, and that was the thing about Blakely. There was no stopping her when she got laser focused on something.

Blakely got it into her head that one of us needed to take a lesson with Mr. Crosby so that she could use it as a way to get him to notice her and flirt with him.

Piss Blakely off and she might ignore you for days. Nobody wanted that.

If that’s what she was trying to avoid, then she was doing a terrible job, because Mr. Crosby looked as uncomfortable as Grace whenever Blakely came by.

I don't blame him one bit lol

She wasn’t very good at flirting, but I wasn’t, either, so I didn’t know why I was being so judgmental.

Just as Blakely and Thera were about to pass by him again, a perfectly made-up woman carrying a Kroger grocery bag breezed past them and rushed over to Mr. Crosby. She was stunning and totally out of place on the tennis court in her heels and full makeup. He noticed her right away and quickly whispered something to Grace before hurrying over to meet the woman. He put his arm around her waist and walked her over to the other side of the court. She set her things down and wrapped herself around him, giving him a big kiss. Like a huge tongue-in-mouth kiss right in front of everyone. All anyone could do was stare.

lol

Thera’s mouth was open in shock, and Blakely looked crushed. But only for a second. She quickly wiped the disappointment off her face, and her eyes narrowed to slits, her face pointed and calculated.

My insides seethed with anger.

oh grace

I’d never looked at myself the same way in the mirror again.

:( grace is the only one I actually like and feel sympathy for so far

That’s why I loved Camp Pendleton, even with all the drama over my body. We were the geeks, the nerds, and the freaks back home. But here we were just regular teenagers. It also happened to be the only place I ever lost weight, because I didn’t eat.

At the beginning of middle school, when I ballooned into massive proportions, she went and gained twenty pounds just to show me she meant it.

this is both really sweet and really alarming at the same time.

At least Thera and Meg were interested in the boys our age. Blakely’s obsession with Mr. Crosby was over the top. She was being so stupid about it too. Making all of us take lessons with him. Thera had hers today, and it was a good thing because we found out he was married. The woman kissing him on the tennis court that day wasn’t just his girlfriend—she was his wife.

Meg agreed with me, but finding out Mr. Crosby was married hadn’t deterred Blakely at all. Instead of Blakely giving up her mission to lose her virginity to Mr. Crosby, she’d doubled down.

There were lines you just didn’t cross. This was one of them. Cheaters destroyed families. Ruined everyone’s life. Just ask my mom.

It wasn’t just that he was married. Blakely’s attention on Mr. Crosby made me nervous in all these other ways too. Really uncomfortable ones that made me feel funny. It had since the first day. He was hot, but he was a grown man. Like a full-on grown man, with hair all over his chest and everything. I’d seen it poking out from underneath his polo shirt, and I didn’t like it. If you asked me, Clint was way cuter than him anyway.

“I want to be with a real man.” Desire filled her face. “I want it to mean something. How much more could that mean?” “But he’s married,” Thera said again. Like she’d been saying all afternoon. “Exactly! Did you see his wife? She’s absolutely gorgeous. If I can steal a man like that away from her?” She grinned. Chef’s-kissed the air. Then collapsed into giggles.

Jesus Christ.

All the boys paying attention to Meg was totally bugging Blakely too. Blakely couldn’t stand when the attention wasn’t on her.

See, that’s the thing about rich people. They live their life without consequences.

is she wrong tho??

I didn’t belong there. Neither did my husband. But that’s what they didn’t know. They thought I was one of them.

I wanted them to hurt and bleed and suffer like the rest of us.