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...

Every group of women friends has the one. Either the overweight friend or the ugly friend. Doesn’t matter. We served the same role—making the other girls feel better about themselves. We were in the group to be the target of an insult when it was needed. Or someone to laugh at in an uncomfortable moment. And most importantly—to

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.

She was so sensitive about her mom, though. I probably would have been, too, if I’d known mine, but killing her was the first thing I did after I was born, and making jokes about it was how I coped. I couldn’t help myself.

“Trying to get high school guys to hook up with you is nothing. Zero challenge. They’ll put their little wieners in anything. They don’t care. They’re like the absolute-lowest-hanging fruit. You know what I mean?”

You couldn’t just tell one lie. One lie led to another and another, like an alcoholic who couldn’t have just one drink.

It’s funny how one sentence spoken over your life in fourth grade could change things forever.

the rest of the year, people treated us like the gum on the bottom of their shoe. That kind of treatment turned you into different people. Made you do things you didn’t know you were capable of.