Telling a Lie - Darcy Vebber

Everyone wore sunglasses under the bright blue Arizona sky. At nine am it was eighty five. By noon, when they were safely finished and in the gym drinking lemonade, it would be one hundred. Under their gowns they wore next to nothing - t shirts, shorts, a thin dress, no underwear.

Bobby, Sam and Lisa sat in the front row with the others with the special gold tassels. Honors, honored, leaning back in the folding chairs with their legs stuck out onto the dry grass, flip flops showing under the hems of the black paper gowns. Taking it easy. That was the message of their posture. Never broke a sweat. Watching impassively as the girl at the podium spoke.

The valedictorian was a skinny, nervous white girl, pale, with straight black hair she pulled on, between words. She had the highest grade point average. Also she worked with animals and wanted to be a vet. The future, she was sure, was theirs for the taking.

"Nothing lends itself to irony like a graduation speech," Bobby said.

Sam was sitting in the middle. He shook his head. "C'mon, she's a nice girl."

"Every girl is a nice girl to you," said Lisa. She put her arms out, trying to get some air into the gown.

"Every girl is nice to you," Bobby said.

The kids around them were used to them by now. They either leaned in, trying to be a part of the group, or they looked away, certain Sam, Lisa and Bobby were going to get some kind of comeuppance someday. They think they're so smart.

Well, they were. That was why they were there. Honored. Highest this, most points on that, society of scholars.

"Tomorrow morning when we wake up …" the girl on the podium said anxiously. "We will begin to discover …."

Why do you spend so much time looking back? Sam asked Lisa once. It was the end of something, summer or a vacation or even just a good day. It doesn't help. He was in one of his tender moods; (early on she would mistake them for something more.) You get stuck, you don't see what's coming.

The heat of the sun came right through the cardboard hat and made her feel slightly nauseous. It had been ten days since the fight or whatever it was with Bobby. The longest they had gone without speaking since they met, since the night they met at the cast party for Our Town and they talked for five hours. Do you know? he asked when he called her the next day. We talked for five hours? She felt bad. Terrible even. But. She lifted her hair from the back of her neck and felt the sun there, about to burn her own pale skin. The hair was wet, sweaty. In the car she had said to him, if I could change the way I feel, I would. Maybe. Maybe, she thought. Maybe not.

The girl on the podium was on to the world and the ways they were needed to change it.