We Were Liars

by E. Lockhart

He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. I could have looked at him forever.

So many stars, it seemed like a celebration, a grand, illicit party the galaxy was holding after the humans had been put to bed.

“Can I hold your hand?” he asked. I put mine in his. “The universe is seeming really huge right now,” he told me. “I need something to hold on to.” “I’m here.”

Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.

“Be a little kinder than you have to.” We are all silenced by that. It seems impossible to argue with. Then Johnny says, “Never eat anything bigger than your ass.” “You ate something bigger than your ass?” I ask. He nods, solemn. “Okay, Gat,” says Mirren. “What’s yours?” “Don’t have one.” “Come on.” “Okay, maybe.” Gat looks down at his fingernails. “Do not accept an evil you can change.”

If you want to live where people are not afraid of mice, you must give up living in palaces.

“Do you still miss Gran?” I ask him as we head toward New Clairmont. “Because I miss her. We never talk about her.” “A part of me died,” he says. “And it was the best part.”

I wish I had her life.

LIFE FEELS BEAUTIFUL that day. The four of us Liars, we have always been. We always will be. No matter what happens as we go to college, grow old, build lives for ourselves; no matter if Gat and I are together or not. No matter where we go, we will always be able to line up on the roof of Cuddledown and gaze at the sea. This island is ours. Here, in some way, we are young forever.

“Don’t you see I would rather be hurt by Gat than be closed off from him?” I say, sitting up. “I’d a million times rather live and risk and have it all end badly than stay in the box I’ve been in for the past two years. It’s a tiny box, Mirren. Me and Mummy. Me and my pills. Me and my pain. I don’t want to live there anymore.”

“Why do you hate yourself?” And before I know it, Gat is lying on the bed next to me. His cold fingers wrap around my hot ones, and his face is close to mine. He kisses me. “Because I want things I can’t have,” he whispers.

I do not really want to be separate from them. Ever.

In Charmed Life, that book I gave Gat, there are parallel universes in which different events have happened to the same people. An alternate choice has been made, or an accident has turned out differently. Everyone has duplicates of themselves in these other worlds. Different selves with different lives, different luck.

His warm lips were on mine, our hands were still together, there, at the door to the house. For a moment, the two of us were alone on the planet, with all the vastness of the sky and the future and the past spreading out around us.

Gat was my love, my first and only. How could I let him go? He was a person who couldn’t fake a smile but smiled often. He wrapped my wrists in white gauze and believed wounds needed attention. He wrote on his hands and asked me my thoughts. His mind was restless, relentless. He didn’t believe in God anymore and yet he still wished that God would help him. And now he was mine and I said we should not let our love be threatened.

“Be a little kinder than you have to, Cady, and things will be all right.”

It is good to be loved, even though it will not last. It is good to know that once upon a time, there was Gat and me.

Left: Be a little. Right: Kinder.