The Darkest Lie Read Free Page A

worse, on an almost daily basis, but he doesn’t have to know that.
    The warning bell rings, and students begin drifting to their desks. The psych teacher strides into the room, wearing a blazer over his Captain America T-shirt. I face the front, ready to put the conversation behind me.
    â€œOkay, class. Settle down.” Mr. Willoughby perches on the edge of his desk, next to a gilded picture frame. “That means you, Mr. Brinson. You and Mr. Taylor can discuss football plays after class. And no need to check your eye makeup, Miss Stevens. This is high school, not a fashion show.”
    Raleigh blushes and twirls a lock of hair around her finger, looking up at him through her eyelashes.
    My stomach rolls. Ew, ew, ew. Raleigh probably thinks she’s being cute. I’m sure she doesn’t see any harm in flirting with the psych teacher. I mean, he’s nice-enough looking, and he dresses youngish in comic book T-shirts.
    But he’s not young. And it’s not cute. In fact, Mr. Willoughby is a widower, and we all know he’s never gotten over his wife’s death. She’s been buried over twenty years, and he still doesn’t date.
    After the scandal with my mother, I don’t know why anyone—much less one of my old friends—would think it’s appropriate to trifle with a teacher. I guess that’s why Raleigh isn’t my friend anymore.
    â€œI’m so pleased to welcome you to a year of examining the human psyche,” the teacher says. “Which means, first and foremost, we’ll be studying ourselves. To that end, please pass forward your summer assignments, the self-examination journals.”
    I jerk. Wait—what? NO. No, no, no. This wasn’t part of the plan. We’re not supposed to turn in our journals.
    All around me, students pull out their black-and-white notebooks. Unfazed. As if this were any other homework. Even Sam has one, so whenever he moved to town, it was recently enough to complete the assignment.
    The girl in front of me holds out her hand for my notebook. I stare as if it’s a severed, floating appendage. Then, the hand drops and actually touches my speckled cover.
    I snatch the journal off my desk. “Sorry! There’s been a misunderstanding.”
    My misunderstanding, at least. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have taken the assignment to heart. I wouldn’t have bared my soul and drawn my mother in all the ways I remembered her. Heaped on the snow in a tangle of limbs the first—and only—time she went skiing. The sunset-red hair bouncing on her shoulders after her monthly visit to the salon. Rolling her eyes but not saying a word when Gram taught the six-year-old me how to play poker.
    My classmate’s brows crease, and the journals pile up behind me.
    â€œIs there a problem, girls?” Mr. Willoughby approaches us.
    â€œYou said no one would look at our journals,” I say, my voice low and raspy. I don’t talk in class, as a rule, and it’s like my voice is punishing me for speaking up so early in the year. “You said to fill the pages with whatever we wanted and not to worry because no one would ever see them.”
    He frowns. “I’m not going to read the entries, Miss Brooks. But I do need to flip through the pages to make sure the work was done. Why else would I ask you to bring the notebooks to class?”
    Why, indeed. The explanation I gave myself—that flashing the speckled covers would be sufficient to earn us credit—seems stupid now.
    â€œI promise I did the work, Mr. Willoughby,” I say. “But I can’t let you flip through the pages.”
    â€œWhy not? Don’t you trust me?”
    â€œIt’s not that. What I put in my journal—they’re not words.”
    The room is silent for two heartbeats. And then the whispers begin. I can’t make out the words, but I can guess only too well what they’re