Family of Liars

by E. Lockhart

Johnny haunts me, I think, because he can’t rest without answers. He keeps asking about our family, the Sinclair family, because he’s trying to understand this island, the people on it, and why we act the way we do. Our history.

I have been a liar all my life, you see. It’s not uncommon in our family.

She loved people and was good at loving them.

It’s hard to believe I was ever quite so blindly patriotic, and that my highly educated parents were.

All my sisters, their bones were beautiful.

Here in the Sinclair family, we keep a stiff upper lip. We make the best of things. We look to the future.

We girls have never been taught to grieve, to rage, or even to share our thoughts. Instead, we have become excellent at silence; at small, kind gestures; at sailing; at sandwich-making. We talk eagerly about literature and make every guest feel welcome. We never speak about medical issues. We show our love not with honesty or affection, but with loyalty.

We worked at our looks and worked at our clothes, always making sure the work never showed.

“Come on,” she said. “Don’t think about it.” But I wanted to think about it.

They hadn’t come to see how I was feeling. They had come to tell me to stop feeling that way.

Now that I am grown, I think don’t take no for an answer is a lesson we teach boys who would be better off learning that no means no.

My jaw. The loss of Rosemary. Neither one could hurt me, if I took that medicine every four hours.

but I also wanted to be seen and heard and recognized, truly, by another person.

It is ugly money.

That’s ugly money, too. Just in different ways. The history there includes exploited workers, broken contracts, and child labor overseas—along with journalistic integrity and belief in the freedom of the press.

But my insides are made of seawater, warped wood, and rusty nails.

“Some were extremely cute,” she told me once. “But they were too stupid to love.”

“We need you” means my sisters love me, they rely on me, they admire me.

We don’t speak about it, but none of us ever swims alone.

Uncle Chris,”

I cave immediately. These are the sisters I have left.

She is a ghost climbing out of the sea, returning to the spot where no one loved her quite enough to keep her safe. Though we did love her. We always loved her.

Now I’m sorry for every time I ever said no to her. But isn’t that how people always feel when someone dies? It’s a cliché. You wish. You’re sorry.

They are here on our island, these boys. Transforming it. Possibly desecrating it.

The Harris Sinclair I know is always alert, always decisive. His tennis serve is brutal, his opinions likewise. But his nightstand seems vulnerable. It speaks of discomfort and fatigue.

Ever since my parents got divorced, there’s no end of stuff I just totally ignore.

You start digging in adults’ lives and things get ugly so fast, you don’t want to eat your breakfast anymore.

“I think I would know if I loved somebody,” I say.

have never been kissed before. It’s like diving into cold water, like eating a raspberry, like listening to a flute, and it’s like none of those things.

I don’t know what people do after suddenly kissing in the moonlight.

It’s stupid, it’s silly—but tears prick my eyes as I start the boat and pull away from the dock. I’ve been stood up.

I want to be the kind of girl a guy would remember to meet. The kind of girl that boys will wait hours for.

I shouldn’t care. I don’t even know him.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. I don’t even know him.

Honestly, it hadn’t really occurred to me that anyone slept with anyone in the middle of the day.

I want to find someone to love and wait in line with on a cold night to see pieces of strange theater.

I walk a path of my parents’ making. I walk it the same way I walk the wooden walkways they’ve made that stretch across Beechwood. I do not see how to step off.

If I exit the walkways into the bushes, under the trees, or onto the sand—it doesn’t matter. I am still on their island.

PFEFF ACTS AS if we never quarreled, and I act as if I never cared.

I don’t want to be thinking about him, and the way his neck felt under my hand when he kissed me, and the way his lips were surprisingly soft.

I don’t like Pfeff, but I want to kiss him again. I want to feel clever and impressive,

I hate him, but I also wish he’d just come close to me, lean in and touch my hair.

“you’ve made it pretty clear that you think I’m a butthead.” I shrug. I do think that. But I still find him magical, and funny. I still want to touch him any time he’s this close to me.

And just like that, I hate him all the way again.

Does he really have to make every single person adore him?

We never talk about any of it. We just pretend it’s not there.”

I am overwhelmed, suddenly, with the idea that my position in the family is conditional.

“Most rules are arbitrary, but we still need them. Otherwise, we’d have anarchy.”