Liar

by Justine Larbalestier

  AFTER

  This is what I thought would happen. This is what could have happened. This is what did happen.

  We go to a track at the local middle school where Yayeko’s daughter is a member of the girls’ basketball team. Yayeko talks to the track team’s coach. He’s thin and lean-muscled like a marathon runner. A silver whistle bounces at his chest when he moves. I don’t know what she says but he agrees to let me race with his sprinters. A hundred-meter sprint.

  They line up, putting their feet in the blocks. They are all smaller than me. Except for one boy who is muscle-heavy and tall for a fourteen-year-old.

  I have never raced before. Never put my feet in blocks. I glance at them, copy what they do. Place my hands precisely on the line just as they do. The muscly boy notices and grins. He thinks he’s about to blast me. I know better.

  When their coach blows his whistle I stumble, but then I find my balance, lift my knees high, pump my elbows. I do everything Zach taught me. The track is springy, the give helps propel me along. I run faster than I ever have before. I pass the other sprinters. Easy. There’s a hum of air past my ears. I turn with the track. The world blurs. It feels so good that I’m long past the finish line before I stop.

  I jog up to Yayeko and the coach. They’re staring at me.

  “Holy shit, girl,” the muscly boy says. He’s staring at me, too. So are all the runners. Their mouths are open. All set to catch flies, Grandmother would say.

  The coach looks at his stopwatch, then at me, then at the stopwatch again. The whistle around his neck bounces with every twitch. “Just over eight and a half seconds,” he says at last. “I must have made a mistake.”

  I have beaten the men’s world record. Crushed it. I grin at Yayeko. She is ashen.

  “We need to do it again,” the coach says.

  I laugh. “Wanna see me run a mile?”

  HISTORY OF ME

  Maybe it was ten seconds?

  I’m dizzy.

  So many lies.

  I thought I’d done better than this.

  What number lie is this? Eight? Nine? Ten? I can’t even figure out how to count them anymore.

  The fabric of my life unravels. Is anything I’ve said true?

  It’s cold in here. Dark, too. No windows.

  My grip slips. The cogs grind. Do I know anything that’s true?

  Actual real genuine true truth.

  Is there anything at all?

  I’m a wolf.

  A wolf. All the way down to the marrow of my bones. Every cell. Every fiber.

  Wolf = me.

  That’s all I’ve got.

  AFTER

  I do know what’s real and what’s not.

  I did run on that track. I did prove what I am. But not the way I said.

  Here’s how it really happened.

  Yayeko does not believe me. Though she pretends she does. Or at least she lets me stay. She introduces me to her daughter, who is fourteen years old and wary. Megan holds a basketball behind her back and stays in the doorway, her hair falling over her eyes. She’s short. Shorter than Yayeko. Point guard.

  “Wanna shoot some outside?” I ask. I noticed a netless hoop on the side of the apartment building on our way here.

  The girl’s still looking down.

  “Answer her, Megan.”

  Megan mumbles.

  Yayeko’s mother arrives, pulling a briefcase on wheels through the door, dressed in a suit, tiny and elegant and frostily polite. I smile. She smiles. She makes me feel oversized and badly designed. We eat Lebanese delivery. After, I wash. Yayeko’s mother dries. As soon as the dishes are done she disappears into her room, as Megan has long since disappeared into her own.

  From Yayeko’s room I hear phone calls. First she calls Mom and Dad. Her side of the conversation is sparse. She must be talking to Dad. He doesn’t want to hear what she has to say. I hear Yayeko straining not to raise her voice. Then the call’s over. I wonder what Dad said. “Keep that monster away from me!” Or worse.

  The next call isn’t short. Nor the one after. No one wants to take me in.

  Yayeko comes back into the kitchen, blinks at me, sits at the table opposite.

  I can’t imagine this working.

  She talks about making the couch into a bed, wonders about whether I should go back to school. I’m all paid up, after all. She prattles on like this and I nod and grunt and think about whether I should go back to the farm.

  Then her tone changes. “There’s nothing wrong with being a girl, Micah. There really isn’t.”

  “This again,” I think, but I don’t say it.

  “You need to accept who you are.”

  She’s right, but not the way she thinks she is.

  “I don’t want to be a boy,” I tell her. “Honest.”

  I don’t know what Yayeko is thinking, not till later. But I can tell you now: while she talks about my denying my femininity, she’s thinking about substituting sugar pills for my real ones, which she does.

  On the third day in her home, I change.

  AFTER

  It’s 5:00 a.m. and I wake out of a dream of forest and deer. I’m flushed and sweating and I know.

  I’ve thrown off the blanket. There’s spotting on the sheets.

  I’m itchy, I’m worse than itchy, it’s like my skin is trying to tear itself from my flesh. Coarse hair has sprouted across my arms, my back, my everywhere. My head throbs, my eyes. Everything blurs. My muscles ache, my bones. My teeth shift, get bigger, move. My jaw is breaking.

  I roll off the couch, land heavily on the floor. The shudder goes through the apartment.

  I hear stirring. Yayeko, her daughter, Megan, her mother. Their breathing hurts my ears. My hands and feet slip on the floor because they’re not hands and feet anymore: paws, claws.

  I’m crouching, my backbone ripples, lengthens. There’s howling. I think it’s me.

  Smells flood me. Human smells: salt, sweat, meat, blood, fear.

  I smell prey.

  Lots of it.

  I’m always hungry after the change.

  HISTORY OF ME

  My first memory is of looking into the eyes of a wolf. They were gigantic and blue. I was small enough that when the wolf looked at me, sniffed at me, and then licked me, it was all I could see. I stared up into those wolf eyes.

  Except it wasn’t a wolf, it was a husky. Owned by the old couple who used to live next door.

  I remember that I liked its smell. I remember that it smelled like home to me. I couldn’t have been more than a baby. Later I asked. My parents told me that the old couple and their dog moved away before Jordan was born. Before I was two. “So cruel,” Mom said. “Keeping such a big dog in so small a space.”

  I wonder if the wolf in that dog could see the wolf in me?

  It accepted me without question. Let me pull its tail, lean against its belly, and fall asleep.

  Wolves don’t lie. Nor do their dog relations. We recognize each other.

  I didn’t feel that at home again until I met Zach.

  But there was no wolf in him.

  AFTER

  I smell blood moving in the veins of the tallest one. I smell it in the other two, hiding behind salt, water, and fear. Their fear smells delicious. It’s the prey smell.

  I move toward them, growling. I am hungry; saliva drips over my teeth, down my jaw. The smaller one backs away. The old one moves with her. Their movements are slow and awkward. Even without kin here, this is an easy hunt. But I wish Hilliard could see me corralling them.

  The tallest one takes a step toward me. She does not smell like fear.

  The young one moves again.

  I leap.

  But the tall one moves between me and my prey. I land on her, pushing her to the floor, my teeth bared.

  The small one and the old one yelp and whine. I swipe a paw and knock the old one over. She lands hard and is quiet. I smell urine. The young one caterwauls as if I’ve already gutted her. I tense to leap a
gain.

  But the tall one is looking up at me, low sounds vibrating in her throat.

  I know those sounds.

  I turn back to the little one. I’m hungry and she’s whining at me to eat her.

  The tallest one reaches up and touches the fur around my neck, she digs her fingers in, pulls my gaze back to her. My saliva drips on her face.

  Her low sounds continue, unwavering and steady and sure. “Micah,” she is saying. Over and over again.

  My name.

  “Micah,” Yayeko says.

  I’m hungry. I’m a wolf.

  “Micah, Micah, Micah, Micah, Micah, Micah, Micah.”

  “Micah’s a wolf,” I want to tell her. But wolves can’t talk.

  Megan is leaning over her grandmother, crying.

  “Micah,” Yayeko says again and again. “Micah.”

  Her words are making me sleepier than I am hungry.

  I rest my snout on my paws, remembering what it’s like to have fingers.

  AFTER

  Yayeko believes me now.

  She wants to talk to people at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at NYU. She studied there and a friend of hers works there. She has another friend in the sports science lab at Fordham. They could chart just how far outside the limits of human I am.

  I’m not sure.

  Wolfishness isn’t my secret. It’s the whole family’s. Grandmother and Great-Aunt would eat anyone who tried to take their blood. They don’t believe in science.

  Or civilization.

  They don’t hold with outsiders. They don’t want anyone to know what they are. Hell, they don’t want to know what they are, or how werewolfism works.

  But I want to know.

  If I do more tests and they prove what we know they will, Yayeko thinks they’ll get funding to study me. It could pay my college fees. I’d be someone’s research project, a paid lab rat.

  If I let them test me.

  If I show them what I am.

  But what kind of life will that be? I’ll be a bigger freak than ever.

  There are scholarships for running. Zach once asked me about it. The only thing stopping me was Dad telling me to hide my wolfishness. But I can tone it down: I can run fast enough for a scholarship, but not so fast I scare them.

  I have choices.

  This one is easy: I can’t betray my family, my real family—the Greats, everyone up on the farm. I don’t want Pete to lose his new home.

  I’ll go to school. A good school with a strong track program and a good biology department. I’ll find out what I am.

  LIE NUMBER TEN

  This one’s more of an omission than a lie. I don’t know how to count it: is it just one omission or many? How many omissions add up to a lie?

  I didn’t mention all the reporters. I didn’t mention what it was like going to school past a throng of press, questions screamed, cameras in my face. My photo in the paper. Tayshawn’s. Sarah’s.

  And Zach’s, of course. Almost every day. His parents started getting love letters from strangers. Truckloads of them. Love letters to a dead boy from people who never knew him. That’s much sicker than anything I did, isn’t it?

  Reporters followed me to and from school.

  People I didn’t know pointed at me and whispered.

  My parents had to get rid of their landline. It’s another reason they were so determined to send me upstate. The reporters never found the farm. No one ever found it.

  And the trial.

  The trial was worst of all.

  You’re wondering why I didn’t tell you about that?

  It was a distraction. Doesn’t add to the real story. Which is me and Zach and my wolfishness.

  Yayeko Shoji understood—understands, I mean.

  That’s why she visits me so often.

  THE TRUTH OF ME

  The apartment is small. One tiny room. The kitchen is along one wall, the bed along another, and a desk and a bookshelf along the third. There’s a view of a park, and no cage disguised as a desk.

  I’m not in the city anymore, but it’s a good school in a good town, and I have a full ride.

  Running, just like Zach said. I never run top speed. Not when anyone’s looking. I don’t have to.

  The hormones I use are more precise than my pills ever were. I inject them once every three months. No more fear of forgetting to take my pill. I visit the Greats, even when everyone is changed, without the faintest itching of my palms. I told Grandmother and Great-Aunt Dorothy about my research. They say they’re proud of me, especially Grandmother, but they wish I would stay on the farm.

  The white boy, Pete, is always pleased to see me. He’s learned how to smile.

  He’s changed. Taller, healthier, there’s flesh over his bones, not just skin.

  I haven’t talked to my parents since the day they abandoned me. My mom writes me letters via the Greats. I don’t write back.

  I refuse their visits. That’s a power left to me.

  I saw Dad once, watching me run. I didn’t show that I saw. He looked older, more gray, and his face more gaunt. I wonder if I did that to him.

  I’m not ready for my parents. I don’t know when I will be. Maybe never.

  Tayshawn and me stay in touch. He made it into MIT. He wants to make robots. Sarah went to Harvard. I haven’t seen her since graduation. She doesn’t write.

  I have friends here. Other runners and a few from my classes. But they don’t know who or what I am.

  So, yeah, I’m still lying, but never to Yayeko, not to the Greats, and not to Pete.

  It’s a start.

  PROMISE FULFILLED

  So I did it. I told you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Like I said I would. Are you proud of me?

  You should be.

  Though I suspect you’re not.

  I suspect you’re muttering to yourself, “Werewolves? Really? She expects me to believe in werewolves?”

  You think my happy ending is too much. Too unlikely. A girl who runs so fast she breaks world records—men’s world records? Without any training. You don’t believe that either, do you?

  You’re insulted I think you’re so gullible that you’ll believe such outrageous lies. You were never fooled. You can read between the lines, pull away the werewolf bullshit, and see what’s left.

  You don’t think it’s the pretty picture Micah the liar painted.

  You think you know what really happened, who I really am, what I really did.

  You think I did it twice. Maybe more. Five times?

  You don’t believe in my teeth and claws. You believe in my hands, in my knife. You don’t think I wrote this from a cozy little apartment—you think it was composed from a cold, padded cell.

  But you’re wrong.

  I didn’t. Not Jordan. Not Zach. And certainly not Yayeko and her daughter and her mom. Yayeko saved me. Why would I kill her?

  Besides I told you often enough: werewolves don’t kill people. You should listen to what I say.

  Everything I told you is true: high school, the farm, the Greats, the wolves, the white boy, my scholarship—everything.

  Most especially Zach.

  I loved him so much. Every fiber, every tooth, every bone. I could never hurt him. Every minute of every day I ache for him.

  That is my life. The beginning and end of it.

  Would I lie to you?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Jill Grinberg believed in this book even when it was a tiny kernel of an idea that I was too scared to write because I didn’t think I was good enough. She thought I was, and pushed when I most needed pushing. Liar was much easier to write knowing I was in such excellent hands. Thanks to everyone at Jill’s agency, Grinberg Literary: Cheryl Pientka, Laura Ross, and Kirsten Wolf. You’re all worth your weight in gold.

  My Australian and U.S. publishers are the best in the universe. Love and thanks to everyone at Allen & Unwin and Bloomsbury, especially my fabulous editors, Melanie Cecka (Bloomsb
ury) and Jodie Webster (Allen & Unwin). This book would not have found its way into your hands without the hard work of the following people: Caroline Abbey, Jackie Aitken, Liz Bray, Beth Eller, Katie Fee, Luke Frost, Anne Hellman, Bruno Herfst, Julia Imogen, Margaret Miller, Kevin Peters, Hilary Reynolds, Deb Shapiro, Chris Sims, Sarah Tran, Erica Wagner, Melissa Weisberg, and too many others to name. Thank you!

  Liar had many first readers: Holly Black, Gwenda Bond, Coe Booth, Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, Alaya Johnson, Maureen Johnson, Jan Larbalestier, Karen Meisner, Maude Perez-Simon, Diana Peterfreund, Carrie Ryan, Robin Wasserman, Scott Westerfeld, Lili Wilkinson, and Doselle Young. Thank you so much for all your comments and continued advice throughout the writing process. You’re all amazing. Thanks, too, for catching so many of the Australianisms!

  Extra big thanks to Karen Joy Fowler for showing me how to fix Part Three.

  This book was written using Scrivener, a brilliant and indispensable piece of writing software by Keith Blount, which allowed me to write Liar as though it were a jigsaw puzzle. Without Scrivener, this book would most likely not exist.

  I had a great deal of help with the research for this book. Any mistakes, of course, are mine. Guarina Lopez’s assistance with research across many areas was indispensable, and I made frequent use of her reference photos. Lisa Herb and Peter Zahler helped enormously with my descriptions of the flora and fauna of upstate New York. The language Micah uses to describe her favorite bird calls was influenced by Peter’s. Coe Booth and Alaya Johnson were my hair advisors. Maud and Luis Pérez-Simon helped me with Micah’s mum’s French. Marvin Ward taught me about running techniques. Rebecca Skloot helped me understand DNA testing. I am aware that cheek swab saliva testing is the most common method these days, but blood is more dramatic. Plus, Micah’s a liar, remember? It probably was a cheek swab saliva test. I mean, if she did the test at all.

  There were many inspirations for this book. The song “Why Do I Lie?” by Luscious Jackson was particularly important. I listened to it many, many times during the writing. So, too, was a long conversation I had with John Green on the subject of lying, which you can find here: http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2006/09/21/john-green-and-the-art-of-lying/. Conversations with Chantal Bourgault over the years about her doctoral research also had a huge impact on this book.