We Were Liars

by E. Lockhart

  Cadence, Liberty, Bonnie, Taft, and Will.

  And the three princesses, the mothers, they crumbled in rage and despair. They drank and shopped, starved and scrubbed and obsessed. They clung to one another in grief, forgave each other, and wept. The fathers raged, too, though they were far away; and the king, he descended into a delicate madness from which his old self only sometimes emerged.

  The children, they were crazy and sad. They were racked with guilt for being alive, racked with pain in their heads and fear of ghosts, racked with nightmares and strange compulsions, punishments for being alive when the others were dead.

  The princesses, the fathers, the king, and the children, they crumbled like eggshells, powdery and beautiful—for they were always beautiful. It seemed

  as if

  as if

  this tragedy marked the end of the family.

  And perhaps it did.

  But perhaps it did not.

  They made a beautiful family. Still.

  And they knew it. In fact, the mark of tragedy became, with time, a mark of glamour. A mark of mystery, and a source of fascination for those who viewed the family from afar.

  “The eldest children died in a fire,” they say, the villagers of Burlington, the neighbors in Cambridge, the private-school parents of lower Manhattan and the senior citizens of Boston. “The island caught fire,” they say. “Remember some summers ago?”

  The three beautiful daughters became more beautiful still in the eyes of their beholders.

  And this fact was not lost upon them. Nor upon their father, even in his decline.

  Yet the remaining children,

  Cadence, Liberty, Bonnie, Taft, and Will,

  they know that tragedy is not glamorous.

  They know it doesn’t play out in life as it does on a stage or between the pages of a book. It is neither a punishment meted out nor a lesson conferred. Its horrors are not attributable to one single person.

  Tragedy is ugly and tangled, stupid and confusing.

  That is what the children know.

  And they know that the stories

  about their family

  are both true and untrue.

  There are endless variations.

  And people will continue to tell them.

  My full name is Cadence Sinclair Eastman.

  I live in Burlington, Vermont, with Mummy and three dogs.

  I am nearly eighteen.

  I own a well-used library card, an envelope full of dried beach roses, a book of fairy tales, and a handful of lovely purple rocks. Not much else.

  I am

  the perpetrator

  of a foolish, deluded crime

  that became

  a tragedy.

  Yes, it’s true that I fell in love with someone and that he died, along with the two other people I loved best in this world. That has been the main thing to know about me,

  the only thing about me for a very long time,

  although I did not know it myself.

  But there must be more to know.

  There will be more.

  My full name is Cadence Sinclair Eastman.

  I suffer migraines. I do not suffer fools.

  I like a twist of meaning.

  I endure.

  The End

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks most of all to Beverly Horowitz and Elizabeth Kaplan for their support of this novel in countless ways. To Sarah Mlynowski (twice), Justine Larbalestier, Lauren Myracle, Scott Westerfeld, and Robin Wasserman for commenting on early drafts—I have never shown a manuscript to so many people and been in such dire need of each person’s insights.

  Thanks to Libba Bray, Gayle Forman, Dan Poblacki, Sunita Apte, and Ayun Halliday, plus Robin, Sara,h and Bob for keeping me company and talking shop while I wrote this book. Gratitude to Donna Bray, Louisa Thompson, Eddie Gamarra, John Green, Melissa Sarver, and Arielle Datz. At Random House: Angela Carlino, Rebecca Gudelis, Lisa McClatchy, Colleen Fellingham, Alison Kolani, Rachel Feld, Adrienne Weintraub, Lisa Nadel, Judith Haut, Paul Samuelson, Dominique Cimina.

  Thanks especially to my family, who are nothing like the Sinclairs.

  About the Author

  E. LOCKHART is the author of four books about Ruby Oliver: The Boyfriend List, The Boy Book, The Treasure Map of Boys, and Real Live Boyfriends. She also wrote Fly on the Wall, Dramarama, and How to Be Bad (the last with Sarah Mlynowski and Lauren Myracle). Her novel The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks was a Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book, a finalist for the National Book Award, and winner of a Cybils Award for Best Young Adult Novel.