I looked into the fridge to find we were out of jam. Once again. The bottle looked pretty clean – almost as if it had been licked clean, actually.
I sighed.
It was pretty hard raising a hungry kid of sixteen, a hungry girl of twenty and their even hungrier dog. I’m sure my mother would agree.
I hooked the leash on Kai’s collar and we went out for a walk to visit my neighbour-classmate-and probably the only friend I had – Roderick Wayne.
*
Roderick Wayne. Or rather, the Boy who Cried Wolf, as he was more popularly known. Wayne lived two blocks over, was blond, tall, seventeen, and probably the biggest liar ever born on this planet. We went to the same school, and he was the closest thing I had to a best friend. Most of the guys at school didn’t even know Wayne’s real name; they just called him the Boy who Cried Wolf. Some others knew him as Eric Summers, and some others “knew” him as a Russian immigrant on the run from “Them”. I’m pretty sure they believed him, too.
Wayne lived in a tiny two-room apartment with his younger sister. All the times I had been there I never saw his father or his mother around. I just came to believe he had no parents to look over him, and he was the only one who cared for his sister.
“My father is a test pilot for the Air Force. He’s out on his missions, and is never home. My mother died when I was three… Father takes care of me now. When he’s out on his missions, though, I am the only one in the house.”
“My father left us when I was just a kid. Mom works at the supermarket in Tucson, but we couldn’t get a house there, so we live here. She visits every Sunday, though.”
“I have no parents. My uncle lives down the street, and he’s the one who got us the house. I guess it’s hard, but hey, I get to live alone, don’t I?”
The lies were endless. Everybody who asked about it got a different story. I was the only one who knew better, but even I knew better than to ask too many questions.
See, none of us is born a Gandhi – we all lie to get our ways. We all lie to our parents, to our friends and to ourselves. But we lie once in a while. We lie when there is no other choice. Wayne lied because he was good at it. He lied, because he had another chance to lie. He lied, because we expected him to lie.
I asked him about it once. We were on the schoolhouse roof and bunking classes.
“Wayne, I know you better than anybody else, right?”
It was one of those rare moments when Wayne was actually in a thoughtful mood, and had somehow forgotten how to be The Boy.
“Sure thing, Austin”
“Then tell me something, alright? Tell me about your lies. I wanna know why, Wayne. Why do you do that?”
He laughed. “Why do I lie? I’ll tell you why, Oz. It’s because lying helps me to get over the truth. It’s because when I lie about something, I can actually pretend things aren’t what they really are, and for a moment or two, I can actually forget this joke that somebody up there decided to play on me.”
“You mean you lie to escape the truth? That’s just cowardly, Wayne. You’re not a coward.”
He was still smiling, but there was something bitter about the smile now.
“My father is an alcoholic drunk, who comes home once every week to beat me and my sister and take all the money he can find in the house. Instead of trying to run away from that, now I just wait for him to come home and then give him the money I get from the part-time jobs I do. It isn’t much, but it keeps me and my sister from being beaten. It keeps us safe, and lets me have just enough left over to feed the two of us. Instead of telling you all this, I just tell you he’s a worker in a different city. What do I get out of that? I don’t have to take your pity. And maybe for just one moment, I can pretend I’m actually just a normal kid with a normal life, whose father works in a different city than the one he lives in.”
I lie to escape your pity. I lie to escape my life. Is that cowardly, Austin?”
I didn’t have an answer to that. Thankfully, I didn’t have to answer that. We were still just sixteen.
*