Liar - Vicki Rubini

The town is deserted – you can make the forty minute trip down to the mall in just fifteen minutes right now. Everyone, everyone, is gone. Tahoe, Southern France, the Hamptons, the Italian Riviera. And here is Mary, as lifeless as the brown baked California hills. Her summer time adventures consist of going to the dentist for a crown, and, well…oh yeah, going to the dentist again to have the temporary removed and the permanent inserted. These are Godiva days. No, not the chocolate kind. The kind that the town is so quiet you could walk through it naked and no one would see you.

Actually, that might be a good idea.

Well, not exactly. She doesn’t have a bikini body – in fact, she really doesn’t want to look at it herself. But it would be so fun to have some kind of adventure other than smacking flies. There had to be more to life than this. When school starts again, everyone will be talking – or bragging, she wasn’t sure – what they did that summer. The water skiing, the wine tasting, the cruises – how could a trip to Kohls compete?

She needs a story. Desperately. She was too young to live the life of a mealworm. What should she do?

She only has a week left. She put down her copy of Oliver Twist and ponders. She can read it later – the story is entertaining only when the Artful Dodger and Fagin come in. Oliver is too good – he never really does much, just shuffles around London letting the clever people create his life. Nobody wants to read about a halo guy.

The Artful Dodger! That was it! If she doesn’t have the guts to live adventure, she will lie about it – great big fat lies, lies so juicy she will see herself in a new exciting light. People will take notice of her. They will all mutter to themselves, aghast at what little Mary Smith has been up to. Mary will be the talk of the dorms.

She needs to rehearse the story carefully, being far more proficient at blending in than this pilchering business. How do thieves do it? Maybe she should pick up her book again and get some ideas.

No, that was her whole problem. She kept reading about adventure, not living it. Things had to change. If she could imagine the lives of characters in a book so well that she was virtually addicted to literature, then she could certainly create a story for her own life. It might begin like this:

“What did you do this summer, Mary?”

“Well, I drove down to Tijuana. There was some amazing silver and turquoise jewelry there.”

“You? You drove down to Tijuana?Alone?”

“Yeah, why not? I know how to drive!”

“You went across the border to Tijuana? Mary Smith?”

“Yeah, quit asking me that. I saw some bracelets I had to have, then I found a great Zuni necklace, heavy and dripping with stones.”

“How much was it?”

“Six hundred dollars for all of it.”

“Six hundred dollars? I thought you were still making car payments!”

“I am. I negotiated him down to $75.”

“You, Mary Smith, hassled the price from $600 to $75? You can’t even ask for extra cheese on a burger without twitching! Have you started pot?”

“Of course not. So let me tell my story. Suddenly his kid screamed from the back of a trailer. The guy went to check on his kid and left me standing there with the necklace. I started thinking about those car payments. You’re right – I really don’t have the money for this stuff. But I drove all the way down to Tijuana to get something heavy and exotic. I couldn’t possibly leave empty handed. The guy doesn’t come out. No one is around. He can’t be a poor guy, having a trailer. So I kept the stuff on, got in my car, and drove home.”

“I can’t believe it! Where’s the necklace?”

Now Mary was stuck. This was getting difficult. She’d better read up on it. If Dickens couldn’t tell her how to do it, maybe Huckleberry Finn could. Or rather Mark Twain. How come some people could imagine characters so well they felt more real than living people like her? Please God, please let her just, for once in her life, have a summer to remember.