A Fabrication of the Truth Read Free Page A

grandma, then?” She didn’t even have to say who she was talking about.
    “Why don’t you ask him?”
    “Word is that he’s not the most sociable person. So is he?” Caroline asked, brushing her hair out of her face and neatly tucking it behind her ear. She leaned against the locker next to mine. A blue locker, against a blue wall. The school must have thought poorly of its students’ intelligence levels and color-coded all the hallways. Guess what they called that hallway? Caroline’s locker was in the yellow hallway.
    “Sociable, I couldn’t tell you.”
    “No, living with his grandma.”
    “Yeah, for a while. Him and his sister.”
    “Should we invite him to have lunch with us? You two can catch up.”
    “I didn’t know him like that. We only hung out once.”
    “Well, maybe you can pick up where you left off.”
    “Not happening.”
    “Why not?”
    “He won’t be interested.”
    “Why do you always sell yourself short?”
    I shrugged. I didn’t think I sold myself short. I honestly thought because of what happened he wouldn’t want to be near me. I’ve had boyfriends, or more like I’ve dated a few guys. Once we got to what would be the boyfriend/girlfriend stage, I usually broke up with them because keeping up with my lies was just too much for me sometimes.
    “Hey, do you know what he is?”
    “A teenage boy, I do believe.”
    “No, I was talking to Jess and Luiz about his ethnicity. He looks kind of exotic.”
    “He’s not a car. You call cars exotic, not people.”
    “Okay, but seriously, you know what I mean.”
    “I’m going to stop being your friend now.”
    Caroline frowned. “He has the sexiest eyes,” she said, her frown turning upside down.
    “I’m going to class.”
    “But you know,” she said.
    “Yeah. Don’t you have to go drink some prune juice?”
    Caroline put her hands on her hips. “Don’t hold my acting excellence against me. So…”
    “It’s not like some huge secret or something. He’s Filipino and Polish.”
    “I think that equals hot.”
    “He’s not that hot. He’s pretty average looking.” Lies.
    “You’re in denial.”
    “Sure, but yeah, now I’m going to class.” I turned, and there he was again. His locker must have been down the hall from mine. His backpack pulled his long-sleeved t-shirt taut. He had a well-defined chest. Dalton Reyes was no longer the tiny, eleven-year-old kid with whom I’d once spent a day. He was…well, he was kind of taking my breath away.
    “Oh my god, he is staring straight at you,” Caroline said, squeezing my arm.
    What was I to do? I wanted to say something so badly, but that could make a mess of everything. Maybe I could talk to him not in school. We just couldn’t be seen together. No, I just couldn’t talk to him at all. Period. He knew everything about me that nobody else knew. He knew the truth. I watched him walk away, and Caroline shoved me.
    “What’s wrong with you?”
    “Nothing?” I said – which really meant, everything.
     
    It was like when I was seven. I thought everything was wrong with the world, with my life, just because I couldn’t go on the second-grade field trip. Now the circumstances were way different, but everyone dramatizes the most inane things in second grade. My dad never sent in the money with the permission slip, so I had to stay in the school library all day, but I told my fellow classmates a different story. I was in the middle of reading a very advanced chapter book, at least at the fifth-grade level. All was quiet around me, when all of a sudden a squad of adults dressed in dark suits and sunglasses flooded the library, some wearing microphones on their heads, and others with walkie-talkies.
    “A fifth-grade chapter book?” A woman, presumably the leader of the pack, asked me.
    “I’m quite smart,” I said.
    “Exactly why we’re here.”
    “Okay…,” I was pretty confused about everything.
    “There was a reason you weren’t sent on that field