She's the Liar

by Alison Cherry

  So maybe it’s not that I’m surprised a person can reinvent herself. Maybe I’m just surprised that Abby could.

  Or Abbi, now, I guess.

  But no matter how she spells her name, she’s still my little sister. When I look at her, a tiny part of me will always see the expression on her face when kids at recess chanted “Crybaby!” at her. I’ll always remember the tearful conversation between her and Mom when her grades started dropping because she stopped participating in class, the way she refused to try out for choir even though she has a really good voice.

  I have to step up and do something before she hurtles straight into disaster again.

  When Abby gets out of social studies at the end of the next day, I’m standing outside the classroom waiting for her. (I told my math teacher I needed to leave early to do something for the Committee, and he let me go with no questions asked.) My sister is chatting animatedly with another girl, but when she sees me, her smile flattens. “You go ahead,” I hear her say, and then she takes a deep breath before marching up to me. Normally I’m happy that people need to steel themselves before confronting me, but this time it hurts a little.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks.

  “Hello to you too,” I say. “We need to talk.”

  She sticks her chin out. “I’m not dropping out of the race, if that’s what you—”

  “That’s not what I’m going to say,” I interrupt. “Come on. Follow me.”

  And to my surprise, she does.

  We don’t talk as I lead her to the Student Center. There are a few girls hanging out on the couches, but the Student Government Office is pretty soundproof, and their voices go quiet when I shut the door. I’m drawn to my normal seat, where I feel powerful and safe, but I don’t want to scare Abby off, so I perch on the edge of the table instead.

  “The debate with all the sixth-grade candidates is next Wednesday—” I start.

  Abby rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I know.”

  “—and I want to make sure you’re prepared.”

  My sister opens her mouth, but the argument dies in her throat when she registers what I’ve said. “Why do you care? I know you don’t want me to win.”

  It’s true, but I just say, “I want you to have a fair chance.”

  Abby snorts. “Since when do you care about fairness?”

  Why is she making it so difficult to help her? “You don’t want people to think you’re getting special privileges because you’re related to me, do you?” I say—riling her up will make her want to prove herself. “Don’t you want to show everyone you can hold your own?”

  As I hoped, her cheeks get pinker. “I can hold my own just fine. I don’t need your help. I know you’re trying to—”

  I cut her off. “Show me that you’re ready, and I’ll back off and leave you alone.”

  She side-eyes me. “How?”

  “Easy. I’ll sit over there, and you’ll stand here, and I’ll give you a question, and you’ll answer it.” She still has that suspicious look on her face, so I say, “God, Abby, I’m not trying to trick you. Just do it, okay? If you really are prepared, it won’t be a big deal, and you can go tell everyone how annoying I am.”

  “Fine,” she says.

  I sit down behind the table in Lily’s usual chair, and Abby plants herself on the spot I indicated. Once she’s there, she looks a little less sure of herself. I sit quietly and watch her for a minute, and after a few seconds, her hand flies up to her hair, and she starts twisting it around her fingers like she always used to do at home when she was nervous. She notices herself doing it, forces her hand down, and glowers at me.

  “So are you going to ask me a question or what?” she asks.

  “Abby,” I say, “why are you more qualified to be the sixth-grade representative than Samantha, Kylee, or Angelina?” It’s a no-brainer question, one she must’ve been thinking about a lot.

  “Um. I. Um.” Abby starts to curl into herself and tuck her hands into her pockets, but she immediately realizes what she’s doing and pulls them out. One hand flies up to her braid again, then drops, and I can see how hard she’s working to keep it at her side. She arranges her shoulders into this stiff, tilted position and sticks her chin out in a way she probably thinks looks cool and confident. Mostly she looks like a nutcracker someone has dropped on the floor one too many times.

  “Well,” she starts again, and then she does this extremely weird laugh, high and manic. “Well. I’ve, um, I’ve been up against … I’ve been in front of the Committee lots of times already, asking for stuff, for petitions, for me and for other people, like a proxy? So I … I think … Other people don’t have the experience with the Committee that I have, unless they’ve petitioned for stuff every week, which I don’t think they have.” She laughs again and tosses her braid over her shoulder in this bizarre, affected way, like she’s trying to copy a dance move from a music video. Since the braid is meant to be on the side of her head, it bounces right back.

  It would be so easy to just let her fail—then all of this would go away. The play would stay canceled, and Abby wouldn’t get in the way of how I run my Committee. But the whole point was to save her from humiliation, to make sure she continues to have lots of opportunities here, and letting her get up onstage at the debate and do this would mean humiliation of the highest degree.

  “Stop,” I say, and she deflates. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m answering the question,” Abby says, but her voice is small.

  “Okay, first of all, why are you standing like that?”

  “This is how she stands,” my sister says, and then her eyes widen like she wishes she could cram the words back into her mouth. “I. This is how I—”

  “Who’s she?” I say. “Who stands like that?”

  “Abbi does,” she mumbles.

  “Who? Are you talking about yourself in the third person?”

  “No, it’s … Abbi, with an i,” she says a little louder. “That’s who I am now. Here. At Brookside.” Mottled red creeps up from under the collar of her shirt and pools in her cheeks.

  And suddenly I understand. My sister didn’t just change the spelling of her name. She’s playing a character. That’s why everything is different: her voice, her stance, her clothes, the way she laughs, the activities she’s joining. She’s not trying to be a reinvented version of herself, like I am—she’s trying to be someone else entirely. And whoever that person is, she can’t handle this debate any better than my regular sister can.

  “So you’re her all the time now?” I ask. “Even when you’re in class? Or with your friends?” She nods. “Doesn’t that get exhausting?”

  Her shoulders droop. “Honestly? Yeah. I’ve been so tired lately.”

  “Then why are you doing it? Why bother?”

  She stares at me like it’s obvious. “You know why.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  She squirms. “Because … it’s just … it’s easier. I mean, Abbi has friends. Like, lots of them. People really like her. And she’s brave. There are a lot of things I can’t do, but she can do all of them. Or almost all of them.”

  “Yeah, no,” I say. “It’s not ‘Abbi’ who can do those things. It’s you.”

  “It’s not,” she says. “People don’t even know me. And if they did, they wouldn’t …” She starts winding her braid around her finger again. “It’s just that she can’t do this one thing, making stuff up on the spot. She couldn’t do it during Freeze at rehearsal, and she can’t do it now, and—”

  “Okay, seriously you’ve got to stop with this ‘she’ thing,” I say.

  “But—”

  “No. You own your failures, you own your successes. There isn’t anyone else.”

  “Fine.” Abby drops her gaze to her shoes. “I can’t do this one thing, then. Are you happy now?”

  “I think you probably can do it, though,” I say. “You just don’t know how yet. Fortunately you’ve got a sister who does, because
she’s done this before, twice.”

  She crosses her arms over her chest. “You can’t magically give me the ability to improvise.”

  “This isn’t about improvising. It’s about preparation and practice.”

  Abby looks up, and a tiny spark of hope ignites in her eyes. If she managed to get a part in the play, preparation and practice are things she knows all about. “But how am I supposed to prepare answers when I don’t know what the questions are going to be?”

  “I can tell you what they were last year and the year before. And even if there’s a new question you don’t expect, there are always ways to steer the conversation back to something you want to talk about.”

  “Huh,” she says. It looks like she honestly hasn’t thought of this before.

  I pull a notebook out of my backpack. “Come here. We’re going to make you some talking points.”

  My sister slinks over and slides into the chair next to mine, feet tucked around the legs the way she used to sit at the dinner table. “I really don’t get why you’re doing this.”

  “Everyone knows we’re related,” I say. “It reflects badly on me if you’re unprepared. And people probably assume I’m helping you anyway. Might as well actually do it, right?”

  She nods like she accepts that, and we get to work.

  For the next half hour, Abby and I talk through the questions Vice Principal Rosenberg has asked in the past. What makes you most qualified to be the sixth-grade representative? Why is it important for students to govern themselves? How do you think the Committee can serve students most effectively? What’s one thing you’d like to accomplish if you were elected? My sister has good ideas, but she’s hesitant to speak up at first, since a lot of her answers have to do with saving the play and making sure I run the Committee more fairly. She seems afraid that I might use the information she’s giving me against her, but when I remind her that I don’t have control over how the sixth graders vote, she seems to relax.

  To be honest, I probably could control how the sixth graders vote. But as fun as it would be, I don’t have time to gently steer one hundred and twenty girls toward the outcome I want by next week.

  When the talking points are done, I tear out the page and hand it to her. “Memorize these,” I say. “Practice saying them over and over until you can do it in your sleep. You can bring pretty much any question Vice Principal Rosenberg asks you back around to these points. If you don’t think you can remember them, you can write them on notecards and—”

  “Of course I can remember them,” Abby says, scowling at me. “I memorized every song in Cinderella in like two days.”

  Being angry is good for her confidence, so I don’t argue. “Okay. Now get up, and we’ll work on your delivery.”

  Abby returns to her spot on the floor, shoulders back in that weird tilt and nutcracker chin on full display. “No,” I say, frustrated. “Just stand like yourself.”

  “This is like myself,” Abby insists. After weeks of playing this character every waking minute, it seems like she’s literally forgotten how to be regular Abby.

  I stalk over to her, take her by the upper arms, and shake her gently until her spine and neck and shoulders relax and her arms flop by her sides. I push her shoulders back, tilt her chin up a normal amount, and survey my work. She looks supported but not wooden, confident but not bizarre. “Perfect,” I say. “Can you remember how this feels?”

  “It feels … weird.” She wiggles her shoulders. “I really look normal right now? I feel like I have crazy monkey arms.”

  “You don’t have crazy monkey arms, whatever that means.” I snap a photo of her with my phone and hold it up. “See? Totally normal.”

  She peers at it. “Oh,” she says. “Huh.”

  “Okay, let’s try again.” I sit back down. “Abby, why are you uniquely qualified to represent the sixth grade on the Committee?”

  My sister holds her posture, but her hand flies up to flip her braid, and that same manic laugh tumbles out of her mouth. “No,” I say before she can even get a word out.

  She rolls her eyes. “What now? I’m standing like you told me to.”

  “Stop with the Abbi affectations. All of them. No laughing, no playing with your hair. It looks ridiculous, and you don’t need to fill the silence while you think about what you’re going to say. If you need to get your thoughts together, just be quiet and take a deep breath. It’ll probably feel like it takes forever, but it’ll only be a few seconds. It’ll also give you more time to think if you repeat the question back to the moderator. Like, if she were to ask you, ‘Why are you wearing a blue sweater?’ you’d say, ‘I’m wearing a blue sweater because blue is my favorite color.’ Got it?”

  “Yeah, okay.” Abby sighs. “I don’t know if I can do this without being her.”

  And I sympathize. I really do. I remember all too well how pretending to be someone else can help you deal with problems in your life without having to confront them head-on. When I used to go to Josh’s house to play D&D and got to be Capriana the Rogue, it was the only time I actually felt strong and brave. The whole week of awkward interactions at school would fall away, and for a few glorious hours, everything felt possible. But now I don’t need to be Capriana. I’m just a stronger version of myself, and I still hold everyone at this school in the palm of my hand.

  “You’re a good actress,” I tell my sister. “You’ve been playing this Abbi-with-an-i character since you got here, and I guess that’s worked out pretty well so far. But Abbi’s not right for this debate, so you need to play a different character. Try pretending to be a version of yourself who’s really good at debating, okay? Play Abby-with-a-y, but in an alternate universe where you’re not afraid.”

  My sister closes her eyes and stands very still; she seems to be searching for something deep inside herself. Finally she opens her eyes and nods. “Okay,” she says. “Ask me again.”

  “Abby, what makes you uniquely qualified to represent the sixth grade?”

  I can see an Abbi laugh bubbling up in her throat, but my sister takes control and swallows it down. She breathes deeply in and out, like I said. She glances at the paper in her hand. And when she speaks, she sounds like herself in the best possible way.

  “I’m uniquely qualified to represent the sixth grade because I’ve already had a lot of experience interacting with the Committee,” she says. “I went to my first Petition Day on the second day of school, and because it went so well, a lot of people have asked me to present petitions for them as a proxy. I’ve been to every Petition Day since, and I’ve never had a petition rejected, and I’ve learned a lot about how the Committee works. Now I’m ready to take the next step and become a voting member. I want to help my fellow students get the things they need from the other side.” When she’s done, she breaks into a genuine smile of delighted surprise.

  “Good,” I say. “That was perfect. Practice doing all your answers exactly like that, and you won’t have any trouble.”

  “Okay. Yeah. I will.” Abby looks down at the paper in her hands, then back up at me, a little shyer now. “Thank you. You didn’t have to help me.”

  And suddenly I feel shy and awkward too. It’s not something I’ve felt in a long time, and it catches me off guard. I lean down and fiddle with the laces of my boot so I don’t have to meet her eyes.

  “Don’t get used to it,” I say. “This was a one-time thing. If you win and you keep trying to take me down, it’s going to be war between us.”

  When I look up again, she’s smiling. “That’s more like it,” she says. “I was wondering what you’d done with my sister.”

  For the next week, nobody talks about anything but the debate. The other Committee girls are totally obsessed; they spend every moment trying to guess who the sixth graders will choose. I guess it makes sense—we’re going to be spending a ton of time with whoever wins—but I’m so anxious that their chatter grates on my nerves. Nobody dares to say anything bad about Abby in front of me
, but it seems like Angelina is everyone’s favorite because her posters are so funny. I drop hints in meetings and at dinner that I think Samantha seems like a strong candidate too, and everyone around me nods, obviously taking note. With any luck, that unofficial endorsement will get around to the sixth graders and Sam and Angelina will knock my sister out of the race.

  Every time I walk into a classroom building or the Student Center or the gym or the dining hall, my eyeballs are assaulted by brightly colored, glitter-splashed posters screaming, VOTE FOR KYLEE and SAM IS YOUR FAM and ANGELINA HAS SUPERPOWERS (NOT REALLY BUT VOTE FOR HER ANYWAY). My sister’s grinning face stares back at me from wall after wall: VOTE FOR ABBI, THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE.

  I can only hope the people won’t listen.

  I spend practically every lunch period in the library. It’s mostly because Ms. Stamos has declared it a “campaign-free zone,” but if I’m honest with myself, it’s also because I know Jenna has study hall right before lunch. On the day after I email her to say we’ve found the money to send her club to Cape Canaveral—at the expense of the play, the dance team, and the soccer team, but she doesn’t have to know that—I manage to time things exactly right and run into her. She beams at me and says, “Sydney, thank you so, so much for approving our petition. We can’t wait to go. You’ve totally made our year.”

  I tell her I’m glad I could help and that I hope it’s fun, and she says, “You’re seriously the best.” Her shoulder bumps mine as she turns to go, and she laughs and puts her hand on my arm and says, “Oh, sorry,” like I’m just another regular girl, maybe even the kind of person she could be friends with.

  For the rest of that day, nothing can touch me.

  But even that can’t stop time from moving forward. Way before I’m ready, it’s debate day, and I’m sitting in the front row of the auditorium flanked by Maya, Lily, and Gianna. They’re all wriggling with excitement, and my stomach wriggles right along with them. I can’t stop picturing Abby backstage, winding her braid around her finger and taking quick, shallow breaths. Has she been practicing enough? Has she changed her mind about wanting to go through with this? Is the next hour going to be a horrifying, drawn-out repeat of the third-grade talent show?