“I...I’m not sure, dear. Honestly, you’re the first truth teller we’ve had in the family since before my time.”
“What about Aunt Ava?”
“Oh, she wasn’t a truth teller. She was more of an empath. She’d feel the guilt people experienced when they lied.”
“Great. So first I’m the family freak with no gift, and now I’m going to be the freak that hears voices.”
The basement door opened behind me and I spun around to see Chloe coming up. “Oh, please,” she said, and levered herself up on to the counter. “You really think anyone in this family is going to judge you because your gift is unusual?”
“Yeah, well, it’s not like I can actually do anything with it anyways. What good does it do to know that someone’s lying?” I gave her the evil eye. “You could have at least warned me I was going to get into it with Tonya.”
“You know my visions don’t work that way, Phoebs. Besides, it’s not like I want to see everything you’re going to do. I’m just glad you’re not planning on having sex anytime soon.” She shuddered and made a gagging sound. And that was the perfect example of why I could hate her so much.
“Shut up,” I snapped, turning back to Nanna. “So, what now? I’m supposed to listen to this voice and do what?”
“It not that simple, dear,” Nanna said, finally recovered from her shock. “Let me do a bit of thinking on it. We need to know how to approach this and we need to move quickly. Controlling your gift is essential.”
Chloe snorted and I spun back to her. She had a smirk on her face.
“Is that a problem?” I asked while every nerve inside of me itched to yank her long brown hair.
“For the rest of us, no. For you, yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you have much control.” Chloe slid off the counter and bent her arms back to rest along the edge.
“Oh, you have no idea how much control I’m exerting right now.”
She rolled her eyes. “Phoebs, I love you, but when have you ever kept your mouth shut?”
“I can keep a frickin’ secret.” Hadn’t I kept my mouth shut about Charlie Schmidt being her first kiss way back in fourth grade? I didn’t tell anyone, well except Tonya and maybe Bianca a couple years ago.
“I’m not talking secrets,” she said. “I’m talking about your opinions. You spew words without thinking and that’s why I didn’t tell you about the fight with Tonya. I enjoy seeing you dig your own grave.”
“Chloe, that’s enough,” Nanna interrupted. “Today isn’t a day for fighting. Your mother would hate to think of you fighting on her birthday.”
“I’m sorry, Nanna.” Chloe swept to her side and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “I’m going back to the cemetery to get Lily. She’s almost ready to come home.”
“Why don’t you take Phoebe with you? She hasn’t been yet.”
As much as I relished the idea of escaping Nanna, a visit to my mother’s grave wasn’t going to happen. Especially not with the two of them pressuring me.
“No thanks.” I pushed away from the table and walked to the stairs leading down to my room.
“Why are you such a bitch?” Chloe asked as I started down the steps.
“Chloe!” Nanna’s voice clearly audible over the whack I heard her give Chloe’s arm.
I glanced back and looked from Chloe to Nanna. “Maybe I just don’t like living in the past, especially one I can’t remember.”
“That’s not fair. Mom loved you,” Chloe said. “You know that.”
“Maybe, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s dead and everyone expects me to be just like her.”
“Phoebe Lynn, that is not true.” Nanna stood gingerly, leaning heavily on the table.
“Really? Tell me that you don’t think of her when you look at me. Tell me you don’t wish I was her.”
The slow exhale of Nanna’s breath filled the room. “I’m not going to dignify that with an answer, young lady. I loved your mother and I love you. You’re the Truth Teller, Phoebe, and unless you accept the truth within your own heart, you’ll never be able to use your gift.”
Chapter 3
Christmas sucked. Okay, so maybe not all of Christmas, but the whole ‘we’re a happy family’ thing did. I’d managed to avoid most of the relatives as they’d descended on our home by claiming an excessive amount of homework that didn’t exist, but total escape was never possible. The gift of prophecy was the most common one among my cousins, so hiding out rarely worked for long.
“Phoebe?” Lily’s soft voice followed a knock on my door.
“Come in,” I called from my bed where I was stretched out on my stomach with a worn copy of The Hunger Games. Reading really wasn’t my thing, though occasionally I liked to surprise myself. “What’s up?” I asked as she glided into my room.
How she could be related to Chloe and me always amazed me. As loud and out there as Chloe and I were sometimes, Lily was quiet and serene. Not that she didn’t speak her mind. She just didn’t ever seem to feel the need to do it in public or for everyone to hear.
“How are you doing?” She sat on the edge of the bed and curled her fingers into the bright green duvet.
“Fine, why?”
“I...” She shifted restlessly and her fingers clenched the blanket.
Crap. She wanted to heal me. I scooted up into a sitting position as far from her as I could get without falling off the bed.
“I know you and Tonya haven’t been talking and Chloe mentioned Nathan-”
“Chloe should have kept her mouth shut,” I snapped. “Nathan is nothing to me. Besides that was almost a year ago.”
“And Tonya?” Lily was still tense, barely moving except for the constant wringing of her hands.
I shrugged. “Who knows? She’s the one who lied to me.”
“Would you call her? For me?” Her eyes turned pleading and I would swear tears gathered in them.
“Why?”
“You don’t understand what it’s like to be a healer and know that the person in pain doesn’t want your help.” Her voice trembled, making me feel guilty all over again. “If you don’t want to talk to her then at least let me-”
“Forget it, Lils. You always say you’ll just do a little bit, and then you’re digging for more.”
Her shoulders sagged and I wanted to wrap her delicate frame in my arms. I would have too, if I hadn’t learned from experience that Lily’s gift wasn’t just in her hands. Her healing energy radiated out of every pore.
“But I’ll call her,” I conceded.
“Thank you.” She smiled and the heavy air around her vanished, or at least lifted a bit.
“How’s Dylan?” I asked, trying to deflect her concern. Even though Lily’s boyfriend was an honorary member of the family, I hadn’t seen him since school let out for vacation which, considering his crappy attitude lately, wasn’t a bad thing.
“His parents took him up to Colorado to go skiing. He’s supposed to be home in time for Nadine’s New Year’s party.”
I nodded absently, not really interested in Dylan. I didn’t know of anything else to talk to her about. We’d never been close and, unlike Chloe, she never told me what went on in her head. That she’d asked me to talk to Tonya made me wonder just how bad she had it. I’d always assumed that she had the best gift. She made people feel better and if she didn’t want to, then she didn’t touch them. Now I wondered if there was more to it than she’d told us.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
She nodded solemnly and for a moment seemed about to say something, but instead bobbed her head again and made a quick exit from my room.
I thought about my agreement to talk to Tonya. I’d avoided calling her, not because I was angry, but because she was hiding something from me. And that’s what Lily knew was really wrong with me. I rolled off the bed, grabbed my cell phone from my desk, and sank into my computer chair. I pulled up Tonya’s number and, while waiting for her to answer, booted up my laptop, knowing that conv
ersations with Tonya could go on forever.
“Hello,” Tonya answered curtly. Guess all was not forgiven.
“Hey, what’s up?” I rolled my eyes at my own lameness. The silence on the other end told me pretending nothing had happened wasn’t going to work. “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you a liar. I didn’t mean it.”
“Then why would you even say it?” The defensiveness was still there and even though the voice in my head hadn’t surfaced since our fight, I didn’t doubt the truth of it. Her reaction had proven I was right, but I wasn’t going to call her out on it again. Better just to shift the focus. Poor Nathan was about to become my fall guy.
“I didn’t want to talk about Nathan anymore, especially in front of Bianca and Owen. So, I just said it. I swear I didn’t mean it.”
“What’s up with that, anyways? I thought you were over him.”
The change in topic signaled the end of our fight. That was one of the things I loved most about Tonya; she got over things quickly. The only problem now was I had to ‘fess up to the note.
“I was- am. He was dumping her.”
“In a freakin’ note? That’s as lame as a text. What a prick.”
My back straightened and as pathetic as it was I rose to his defense. “Any other girl, yeah, but this was Vivian.”
“True. Still, that was pretty low. Man, I can still see her face when you grabbed it. Then in Bio, she looked like she was gonna kill you.” We laughed at the memory.
“So, how was your mom?” I wasn’t trying to catch her lying again, though even as the words left my mouth I wondered if that’s what she’d think.
“Bitch,” she said, her voice trembling with humor. “Okay, so I wasn’t going to see my mom.”
“So...? Spill.”
“Don’t freak or anything, but I’ve been seeing this guy from San Diego.” This time she couldn’t hold in her giggle.
“What!? How...? What!?” I sputtered.
“We met online over the summer, and right before school started we got together.”
“Girl, are you crazy? What if he’d been a perv or something?”
“Whatever. I’m not stupid, Phoebs. I met him at the mall the first time and we just talked.”
“The first time? You’ve seen him more than once?”
“We’ve been dating. He’s not a perv. He is so awesome.”
I contained my groan. Tonya didn’t have the greatest track record with guys and with her grandmother raising her, she got away with a lot more than I ever would. I pulled up Google on my computer. “What’s his name?”
“Trevor Sanders and oh my God, he is so hot.” She went on about him for another five minutes and I let my fingers fly across the keyboard, switching search engines, trying to find out anything about this guy. An inactive Twitter account and a private Facebook page were the only results I could find, not even an old MySpace page. But considering my lack of tech skills, missing something would have been pretty easy.
“We’ve been seeing each other on the weekends,” she said.
“So he’s why you’ve been ditching me lately. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”
“Yeah, well, sorry, but I wanted to be really sure about him, you know? I knew you’d flip, which you did, but if you met him, you would so get why I did. He’s been driving up here every day over the break.” She sighed and I resisted the urge to gag. I loved romance and all that crap, but not when I was in this kind of funk. The whole thing with Nathan and the note had only made me crabbier.
“What does Gran think about him?” Gran was the ultimate test. She’d kicked a few of Tonya’s monthly flavors to the curb.
“She doesn’t know about him yet. I wanted to see if I’d like him first, now I’m worried that she won’t and you know what she’s like,” she said.
Yeah, she’d called out every loser Tonya or her mother brought home, not that it had helped Shondra James from getting involved with a local drug dealer. She was sitting in prison, while Gran tried to keep Tonya from suffering a similar fate.
“Besides, I want you to meet him before she does. You’re going to Nadine’s party, right?” The begging in her voice was obvious.
Nadine was a friend of Chloe’s and probably the most likable of them all, other than Bianca, and she always included Lily and me, even though we rarely took her up on it. Of course, she always invited everyone to everything.
“I wasn’t planning on it, but if it means I get to meet this guy then yeah, I suppose I’ll be there.”
“Thank you! Thank you! I’ll owe you major.”
“I’ll just add it to your bill. Hey, want to go shopping tomorrow?” I asked. “Bianca and I were going to go to Town Square.”
“Is Karin going?”
I’d purposely left off mentioning Karin. Tonya couldn’t stand her, mainly because Karin was one of those ultra, annoyingly nice people.
“Yes, but if it’s the four of us, you’ll hardly notice her.”
“What? She’s not bringing her lap dog with her?”
“No, Owen isn’t coming. And he’s not her lap dog.” Okay, I had to defend him. Owen was one of those guys that couldn’t catch a break, way too laid back and never seeming to notice things going on around him, even though he pretended really well. Like how he’d seen everything that happened between Tonya and me, but he hadn’t realized until a couple days ago that we’d had a fight.
“He may not be yet, but Karin would love it if he was.”
“Yeah, well, he’s not coming. So am I picking you up, or not?”
“Yes, but you better keep that thing away from me.”
We spent another twenty minutes catching up and I’d just hung up when there was another knock on my door. Before I could even call out to see who was there, the door swung open and Chloe sauntered in.
“Finally,” she said and flopped onto my bed face first. She lifted her upper body and rested her chin on her hands. “Lily’s been cowering in her room this past week, trying to stay as far away from you as possible. I don’t know why she bothered. If I was her I’d have just done it while you were sleeping.”
Her words did make me feel a little guilty, but I squashed the feeling before Lily could pick up on it and appear beside Chloe.
“Maybe that’s why I like Lily better than you.” I swirled my chair around in circles and her angry face flashed by me again and again.
“Now who’s the liar? You spend less time with Lily than with me.”
“That’s because Lily doesn’t barge into my room uninvited, nor does she know where I’m going before I’m actually there.”
“Whatev’,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Did you come here for a reason other than to annoy me?” I asked. The spinning chair slowed to a stop and I lifted my feet to rest them on the corner of the bed, enjoying the completely annoyed expression crinkling her face.
“Nanna said you haven’t ‘heard’ the voice again,” she said.
“Nope. So, either our family members are really honest or it was a fluke.”
“Maybe we should test it.” She flipped over onto her back, preventing me from seeing her whole face.
“Why do you care if it works or not?” My suspicion was obvious in my tone.
“Because I know you, Phoebs. You’ll start obsessing and get all upset and then Lily will be moaning about how she just needs to touch you for a second and then everything will be fine. And to top it off, you’d start doing stupid things and I can’t block them out.”
God, I hated when she was right.
“So just how am I supposed to test this? I can’t just ask a person if they’re lying to me, just look at what happened with Tonya.”
“You can ask me some questions and I’ll answer. Sometimes I’ll tell the truth and sometimes I’ll lie.” She tipped her head up so I could see her eyes. “Do it for Lily. You know how upset she gets when you’re stressed or unhappy, which considering your natural personality is pretty much all
the time.”
I reached over, grabbed one of the pillows off the floor, and tossed it at her. She swatted it away before it even came near her face.
“You really thought I wouldn’t see that one coming?” she asked.
“Fine, go ahead. Test me.” There wasn’t any point in fighting it. She obviously already knew I would do it, otherwise she wouldn’t have wasted her time.
“Okay, so ask me some questions. Ones you don’t know the answer to.”
I sighed in resignation. “What did you do this morning?”
That was the first in a string of questions I asked and it proved just as useless as the next twenty. Not once did I hear or feel anything telling me she was lying, no matter how ridiculous her responses got.
“I give up,” I said. Dropping my feet to the floor, I braced my elbows on my knees and let my head drop to my hands. I was tired and irritated. The whole thing was pointless.
Chloe huffed, scooting off the bed. “I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“My vision showed you doing it. Using your gift.” Her words brought my head popping up in time to see her eyes narrowed slightly as she turned to the door and I wondered what she was thinking. I stared at her back as she headed into the hall.
“So you’re wrong again. Does that bother you?”
She glanced back and smiled. “Not at all,” she said and then left.
My stomach cramped. Liar.
I kept my mouth shut. Every impulse inside of me throbbed with the desire to scream the word at her departing back, but I didn’t. Having Chloe know she’d been right wasn’t something I wanted her holding over my head. It was better to savor my knowledge that I’d actually caught her in a lie she didn’t want me to know. So instead, I rose from my chair and swung the door shut, enclosing myself in my sanctuary.
What was it about that lie that had made it get called out? She’d lied about a bunch of stuff over the past half-hour, yet the one thing she really didn’t want me to know about was the only thing that called to me. I spun in a circle and let myself drop to the bed. Flinging my arms out to the side, I squeezed my eyes closed and for once in my life prayed that I didn’t really have this stupid gift. That it was all in my head.
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