Family of Liars

by E. Lockhart

and then she’d realize that she cared, and then she’d stay.” Penny wrings her hands. “I hoped that, anyway. Or maybe I wanted to hurt her.” “Sounds like you.”

Guys like him go to prison or run the country, and in neither case do they become anything more than rapists who fancy themselves rogues.

When the guests are all served and my parents are gently drunk, I walk to the far end of the porch and sit in the hammock with a dish of fresh-mint and hot fudge.

I want to escape the tyranny of this family’s expectations and make instead some new life, some city life. I want to stop carrying obsessive thoughts of stories I hear on the news and instead to reach out, understand, see with my own eyes. But even more, I want to be in this family, messed up as it is. I want to be my father’s daughter, to solve my sisters’ problems, to be the one who receives my mother’s black pearls, to be Rosemary’s favorite. To be a Sinclair, and to have the security and good standing that all our hard work and dirty money and unearned privilege and intelligence has bought us.