Liar, Liar

1. A GOOD LIE FURTHERS YOUR AGENDA

By midmorning Monday, I had Katie Knowles believing that I suffer from a terrible disease. One that modern medicine doesn’t recognize, can’t identify and is powerless to treat.

I told her that I have chronic, degenerative, relapsing-remitting inflammobetigoitis. Which doesn’t exist. I culled symptoms of mono, plantar warts, shingles, borderline personality disorder and a bladder infection, as well as listing a bunch of side effects from some TV ads for drugs.

Even for me, this was a whopper.

But I had to come down with whatchamacallit so that I wouldn’t have to team up with Katie for the working-with-a-partner project in social studies this semester.

Cannot. Deal. With. Katie.

She’s some sort of mechanized humanoid, made up of spare computer parts, all the leafy green vegetables that no one ever eats and thesaurus pages. We’re only in eighth grade, but everyone knows she’s already picked out her first three college choices, her probable major and potential minor and the focus of her eventual graduate studies. To Katie, middle school is a waste of time, so she takes more classes than she needs to and does extra credit the way the rest of us drink water. She’s probably got enough credits already to graduate from high school.

The Friday before, we’d been assigned to be each other’s partner for our social studies independent study project: a ten-page paper and an oral presentation in which we would “illuminate some aspect of our government relevant to today’s young citizen.”

Thanks, Mr. Crosby, way to narrow the scope.

We wouldn’t have class for the next week so that we could go to the library or the computer lab to work on our projects. This was going to teach us about independence and self-determination. Or something like that; I wasn’t really listening.

I really dig Mr. Crosby; he’s pretty laid-back except when he starts talking about what he calls “government pork,” and then he gets all wild and upset. I must have irked him somehow to get assigned to Katie. My best friend, JonPaul, and our buddy Jay D., who are the biggest troublemakers this side of a prison riot, were project partners, and even the Bang Girls (I call them that because they’re BFFs who have identical haircuts with the exact same fringe hitting their eyeballs in a weird way that makes my eyes water if I look at them too long) had been paired. Before I could ask Crosby what I’d done to set him off, he’d announced, “Once partners are assigned, there will be no switching.”

I am not a guy who gives in easily, so I spent the weekend thinking of ways to convince Crosby to change his mind, and avoiding Katie, even though she’d been calling, emailing, IM-ing and texting. It was only third period on Monday morning and already she’d left a couple of notes at my locker and had tracked me in the hall between classes.

“Kevin.”

I flinched. Katie has one of those bossy yet whiny voices that make you want to stab pencils in your eardrums to make the noise stop. I turned and broke out a killer smile. I can always tell when it’s time to crank up the charisma.

“Hey, Katie, I meant to—” I started, but she cut me off before I could come up with plausible and inoffensive reasons why I’d ignored her all weekend.

“It doesn’t really matter.” She flipped open her notebook and handed me a sheaf of papers. “I utilized the time by getting started on the initial research. You can see that I brainstormed about a dozen ideas we could examine that I believe to be unique and ripe for exploration. Why don’t you take the packet home, read everything over, and then let me know by this time tomorrow, if not sooner, what you’ve decided? I’m okay with any choice you make, and we should, after all, be democratic about how this partnership functions, because of, you know, the class subject and all.”

“Uh … yeah, right. I see that you, wow, you typed up—what’s an abstract, again?”

“A brief summary and succinct explanation, the theoretical ideal, if you will, behind the project topic.” She tapped her foot impatiently, probably wondering why I hadn’t been writing abstracts since nursery school.

“Sure, that was what I was going to guess. You did an … abstract thingie … for all twelve ideas?”

“Of course”—she pushed her glasses a little higher on her nose—“because that kind of organization and attention to detail will enable us to make the best possible choice among our options. Besides, I’m sure I can put the seemingly superfluous work to good use in the form of extra-credit projects later in the year.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Like I said, why don’t you take this home and—”

I cut her off. “No, I don’t need to do that; let’s pick number, um, seven. Yeah, that looks like a great idea.”

“The analysis of data collected during the most recent national census about the underserved population and how they interact with and regard the government services structure, especially pertaining to the link between educational grants and future acts of public service?”

I really should have read her summaries, but it was too late. The analysis of the something census and how the something interacts with something as it pertains to something it was.

She beamed when I nodded, and I knew that I’d somehow chosen right even though I didn’t know what the peewadden she was talking about, and I was sure, if I’d tried, really hard and for a very long time, I could not have come up with a more butt-numbing topic.

JonPaul and Jay D. came over, grinning.

“We got a beauteous subject, Kev; Crosby laughed at first, but then he signed off on it.”

“What are you doing?”

“Exploring the possibility of a link between the World Series and voter turnout in presidential elections,” Jay D. said proudly.

“You know, like, if an AL team wins, does that mean more Democrats will show up at the polls, or,” JonPaul explained, “will Republican voting habits change if the NL team wins?”

“That’s not about the government, you moron. And it doesn’t even make sense.”

“It has to do with the executive branch; we’re golden,” JonPaul said.

“You’re just jealous because we’re going to spend a week cutting and pasting World Series highlights into a PowerPoint presentation,” Jay D. said, smirking. “What’re you doing?”

I studied the floor and mumbled, “The analysis of how something about the census something interacts with the something and pertains to something.”

They snorted, punched my arm and left me with Katie, who had been rereading her notes and probably hadn’t even noticed JonPaul and Jay D.

“You don’t look so good, Kevin.”

“I …” I would rather die than work with you on this monkey butt of a project, is what I wanted to say. But I heard myself saying, “Look, Katie, it’s probably not fair that you got stuck with me, because I have … some medical issues that might prevent me from, er, living up to my part of the project. It’s just too soon to tell—we’re waiting on test results and some studies in Germany that have to be concluded.”

“Really?” She looked intrigued, which was new, because Katie usually walks around with this distracted expression on her face, like she’s busy figuring the square root of the prime number closest to the gross national product. “I’m fascinated by medical mysteries.”

“Well, that’s what this is, all right. No one can figure out what’s going on. We’ve been to an endocrinologist, a cardiologist, a neurologist, an osteopath, a Reiki practitioner, an energy healer, a physical therapist and a physiatrist, because they”—I paused meaningfully—“specialize in chronic pain management.”

She gasped. I’d had no idea until that very moment what a great audience Katie Knowles was.

Note to self: Katie is smarter than a NASA computer, but wuh-hay too trusting for her own good. Excellent.

I was feeling pretty lucky right then that JonPaul is a total hypochondriac who’s always worried that he’s coming down with something rare and dangerous. I could rattle off the names of all those different kinds of doctors like I was a fourth-year medical student because we spend a lot of time entering his alleged physical ailments in medical website search engines.

Katie leaned forward, and I whispered the many problems I’d been suffering, which had led to the diagnosis of chronic, degenerative, relapsing-remitting inflammobetigoitis. “It started with night sweats, which caused the dehydration. Then I developed mood swings, hair loss and cotton mouth. And, of course, there’s the sensitivity to light, rapid heartbeat, dizziness, dry skin, loss of appetite and frequent thirst, which were worrisome. But all that wasn’t nearly as bad as the muscle aches, migraines, gastric reflux, bleeding gums and mild to moderate confusion when fatigued.”

I figured all this was icky enough to make Katie want to keep her distance but not so bad that she’d wonder why I wasn’t in the hospital. Or quarantined.

She looked horrified. “Oh, you poor brave thing.”

I nodded sadly and tried to look brave. Brave and wan.

“I’d, well, you know, I’d wondered about you. That maybe something was amiss,” Katie said sympathetically.

Oh, you had, had you? But before I could blow my cover by sputtering something defensive, Katie saved me. Boy, did she save me.

“Look: I can handle the project for both of us.”

I opened my mouth to pretend to talk her out of her selfless offer, but she raised her hand to shush me. “You were lucky to get paired up with me, because I don’t know anyone else in class able to cope with this much responsibility on their own.”

I could tell that Katie was actually relieved that she wouldn’t have to work with anyone else, and I silently congratulated myself on my gift of saying the right thing to the right person. Without knowing it, I must have sensed that she’d rather work alone. Even if it was because her partner was chronically ill and that meant she’d have to share credit.

I’m a very intuitive guy.

“Are you even strong enough to be in school?” She peered anxiously over her glasses.

“Uh-huh. My medical team says that keeping things as normal as possible—while avoiding stress—is the best treatment.”

“That makes sense.” After looking behind her, she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Does anyone else know about your condition?”

“No. I haven’t felt … comfortable enough to share this. But there’s something about you; you’re a really good listener, and a person feels like he can confide in you.”

She squeezed my hand, clearly believing that my random symptoms weren’t contagious. “Don’t worry; I won’t say a word. You just concentrate on getting better. I’ll do the legwork and you can help with the revisions and fact-checking, okay?”

“That sounds amazing, Katie, thanks.”

With a conspiratorial wink, she headed off to her next class.

Suh-weet! I’d essentially be proofreading—checking for errors and making suggestions about work that had already been done on behalf of “our team.”

Look, I just wanted to get assigned to a different partner. Is it my fault that Katie volunteered to do the whole dang project? I think not.

Once again, my lie had created a win-win situation—I didn’t have to work with Katie, and Katie didn’t have to work with anyone.

And what was wrong with that?