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.

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 all it took to kill you.

We were just kids. We didn’t mean to do anything wrong. We were just kids. Over and over again. A steady mantra until I tricked myself into believing it was true. You could do anything if you put your mind to it. At least I could.

Cabin Naomi strong—after

Were they setting me up? But I hadn’t done anything wrong. Not anything worse than what they’d done. Blakely had way more reason to keep quiet than me. Than anyone, really.

I listened to her. So did the others. Because you listened to Blakely.

I’d known at the beginning of the summer that it would be the last time we’d all be together. We’d be off to college the following year and moving on to the next phase of our lives. But it wasn’t supposed to end like that. It was supposed to be the best summer of our lives.

The images. What we’d done. The part we played. 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.

You couldn’t stay stuck in trauma forever. That’s what my mom made me promise when she died: “Don’t you dare use this as a reason to throw your life away, Thera. You hear me?”

I was the last one to say yes when Blakely asked if we could have an emergency meeting at her house in Atlanta this weekend.

I didn’t trust this. I didn’t trust any of this.

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

But unlike the movie, it wasn’t last summer they were referring to on the card. It was that summer.

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

who I was back then. And who I was, well, that was someone I hated. That girl. So desperate and insecure.

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.

The best way to live your life was to learn to love yourself—really, truly love yourself—and accept yourself exactly as you were.

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

Or be playing us. That was always a possibility too. I didn’t know these girls anymore.

Just the mention of that summer was enough to make me feel dirty. Dirtier than any picture I’d ever posed in.

maybe it was because Camp Pendleton wasn’t the real world and things happened there that didn’t happen any other place.

The magic of Pendleton happened almost the moment I stepped foot on campus. For six weeks, we all transformed from the bullied, geeky kids we were in our hometowns to regular teenagers.

I was one of the periphery kids.

because important people are surrounded by people. We all knew they came with an entourage.

I had a house where parents are never home, and when you’re a teenager, that’s about as valuable as you can get. So, the kids at school used me when they wanted a place to party or hang out.

But here? At camp? I got to experience what it was like to really be popular. Really, truly popular. And I loved every minute of it.

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.

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.

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

The other thing about being a senior at camp was that it was no longer inappropriate to hook up with the CITs, and there were always rumors of seniors hooking up with actual counselors too. Guess we could add that to the list of might-be-true rumors we were trying to figure out.

We never got any further. That wasn’t happening this year. I wasn’t going home a virgin.

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.

“We go through this every single year before camp. This is all part of it.” She wasn’t wrong. That’s what I did. Every year, no matter what. Total meltdown mode in the week leading up to it. But this time, it was different. This time I had a secret. One I could never share,

Mom kept me away from my family as much as possible. We didn’t even go there on the holidays. She said they were a bad influence on me.

And she wasn’t wrong. They were weird. And angry and violent, especially when they’d been drinking.

She was only seventeen when I was born, so we’d practically grown up together. She’s always worked so hard to give me the life she never had.

She pointed out the obvious, but her rational questions didn’t touch my irrational fear. If I could talk any sense into my anxiety, I wouldn’t have any.

She was determined to give me everything she’d never had.

Something was off this year.

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.

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

“His girlfriend is beautiful!”

“She’s Chubby Bunny. The real Chubby Bunny!”

Thinking about my mom sent a surge of anger through me all over again. None of what she said mattered anymore, because she was a liar.

Everyone was so boy crazy this summer, and it was starting to get annoying.

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.

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

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

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.