Liar Read Free Page A

away from school, from people I know. When I turn the corner onto West Broadway I take off.
    I run all the way to Central Park and once I get there I run harder and faster, lifting knees high, pumping arms hard. I run distance at a sprint. I pass even the fastest joggers. No one is as fast and fevered as me. I’m going to run all the poison and whispers and grief out of my veins.
    I don’t go home until I’m run into the ground and taking another step would kill me.

    FAMILY HISTORY
    You probably think I’m weird with the mask and the sort-of-but-not-really boyfriend who’s dead and all the lies.
    Past lies, I mean. I haven’t lied to you and I won’t. Saying that Zach was my boyfriend when he was mostly Sarah’s is not a lie. He was mine. Like Brandon said—after hours.
    You want to know why I used to lie?
    Let me tell you about my family:
    My parents are still together. Living in the same house. When they aren’t arguing, they’re doting. I can never decide which is worse.
    My dad’s name is Isaiah Wilkins. He’s black like me. My mom is Maude Bourgault, or was, she’s Maude Wilkins now. She’s white. Though Dad doesn’t believe it. Dad can see the black in anyone even when it isn’t there. He tells the world the way he wishes, not the way it is. Dad says Mom’s hair is near as nappy as his own and doubts that her full lips came from anywhere white. Mom laughs. How would she know? She’s adopted and hated her family. She ran away.
    I’ve never met my mother’s family. Just Dad’s.
    Dad’s dad was black, but his mom is white. Grandmother’s our whole family. She and Great-Aunt Dorothy, and, when he was alive, Great-Uncle Hilliard. The oldest ones left are Grandmother and Great-Aunt. I call them the Greats.
    To say the Wilkins are reclusive would be to understate it. They take keeping to your own a long way past crazy. They stay on their farm. All two hundred acres of it. They are self-sufficient. They don’t understand why everyone doesn’t do the same thing. Grandmother has never been down to the city.
    The Wilkins came to New York State more than a century ago: all the way from Poland or Russia or the Ukraine. One of those. They’re from the Carpathian Mountains. Where they lived for generations, going into town as seldom as possible, living far from other families. Mountain people: long-lived, rail-thin, cranky, and taciturn.
    They brought that mountain chill all the way to America, to upstate New York, where they live and breed, getting older and crankier and skinnier.
    That’s my family. All of them much weirder than me.

    BEFORE
    At the end of the second day of my freshman year, Sarah Washington found me out.
    Nothing dramatic. I didn’t slip up and go into the girls’ room.
    I laughed. Sarah heard me.
    â€œYou’re not a boy,” she said.
    We were in the hall. Brandon Duncan slipped—I am not making this up—on a banana peel. I laughed. Lots of people laughed. But Sarah was walking past me. She heard me laugh, she turned.
    â€œYou’re not a boy,” she said again.
    â€œHuh?” I repeated, continuing toward the exit.
    â€œBoys don’t laugh like that,” she said, walking beside me, her voice rising.
    â€œHe what?” Tayshawn said, sliding across to join us, standing in front of me, blocking my escape. “We played hoops yesterday. He—” He was staring at me now, moving in close. I was forced toward the wall. “She?—shoots like a boy. You are a girl, aren’t you? Look at her cheeks. No fluff.”
    â€œI’m only fourteen,” I squeaked, my voice betraying me.
    Now Lucy O’Hara was staring. Will Daniels, too. And Zach. All of them crowded around me.
    â€œYou’re a girl,” Sarah said. “Admit it.”
    â€œI’m a boy,” I declared, wanting to push through them, to run.
    â€œLet’s pull off her