Big Little Lies

by Liane Moriarty

If she packaged the perfect Facebook life, maybe she would start to believe it herself. Or she could even post, Mad as hell!! Ziggy the only one in the class not invited to a birthday party!! Grrrrr. And everyone would write comforting things, like, WTF? and Awwww. Poor little Ziggy! She could shrink her fears down into innocuous little status updates that drifted away on the news feeds of her friends.

It was like a memory of summers lost forever, as if she lived in a gray, brooding, postapocalyptic world.

It reminded her of trying to be friends with an ex-boyfriend. That studied casualness of your interactions. The fragility of your feelings, the awareness that the little quirks of your personality were no longer so adorable; they might even be just plain annoying.

(she was obviously too quick to anger, often too quick to judge, overly interested in clothes, spent far too much money on shoes, thought she was cute and funny when perhaps she was just annoying and tacky)

Those beautiful rooms were just like Perry’s constant Facebook posts: stylized representations of their life.

It was interesting how you could say things when you were walking that you might not otherwise have said with the pressure of eye contact across a table.

This was the thing with the murky world of the Internet. You swam along through cyberspace, merrily picking up this and that, and next thing you knew you’d stumbled upon something unsavory and ugly.