If You Tell a Lie

by Lucinda Berry

Seven seconds. That’s how long it took him to slip his fingers down my pants and change my life forever. Seven seconds. That’s all it took to change your life forever too. My mom always warned me to keep my legs closed and watch out for the predators. But she told me they were out there. She never told me they were at home. Seven seconds. That’s how long it took me to forget and exactly how long it took for me to remember when they told me what you’d done. Seven seconds. That’s all it took to kill you.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID THAT SUMMER AND I’M GOING TO MAKE YOU PAY.

Our very small circle—me, Thera, Blakely, and Meg. Cabin Naomi. Nine consecutive summers together.

I shot my inner child a long time ago, along with the white horse she was waiting for someone to come riding in on to save her.

Regina Crosby paroled after twenty-five years behind bars for the brutal murder of her husband and attempted murder of her two children

I’d never forgotten what I caught her doing in there when we were eleven. She might be fooling everyone else, but she wasn’t fooling me.

I was always watching them. Studying. Observing. Taking notes. They didn’t know I was always watching. It’s because rich kids are just like their rich parents.

It wasn’t that she’d stabbed her husband 117 times.

Because the truth? If a group of teenage girls had done what we did? I might’ve wanted to hurt us too.

nothing Blakely ever did with Mr. Crosby made sense.

Privileged white girls. I told him that’s all the camp was full of. That his brown skin would stand out among their whiteness, but he didn’t listen to me. He liked to pretend racism didn’t exist. I was the one that pointed out the way they followed us around at Nordstrom’s like we were going to steal something.

“You’re the white person in this relationship, remember?”

Do you know how freeing it was to live in a world where you didn’t give a fuck what people thought about you? Especially as a woman? There’s no better feeling on the planet. At least I haven’t found one yet.

Do you know how much work it takes to pretend like you’re fine every day? To be the sunshine when you’re really the darkness?

Real estate agents were the fanciest of used-car salesmen, even the best ones.