My Life with the Liars Read online

  dedication

  To all the Curious little girls,

  Especially Emma, Maria, and CC:

  May you stay that way.

  contents

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  IT IS JUST LIKE FATHER PROPHET said it would be. The dark is everywhere, inky black above and below and to either side, squishing me back into the seat where the strap across my shoulder holds me, trapped. The man who is driving said I couldn’t turn on the light. He said it would make it too hard for him to see the road. But I’m sure he was lying. The Outside is full of Liars and Darkness. That’s what Father Prophet said.

  “So, if you don’t feel comfortable calling me ‘Dad’ yet, we can stick to my name for now,” the man says. I don’t want to look at him, but I do. Maybe the Darkness makes my head turn. There’s gray fur on his jaw and his chin, which bounces up and down with his words. “My name is Louis.” The fur is darker than the brown-gray of his hair.

  Why would I call him Dad if his name is Louis?

  I don’t say anything. I won’t. The Darkness can’t make me. Curiosity is evil and conniving, but I won’t let her find me. Not even here.

  The car goes left. The lights in the front of us swing onto a new road. I turn and watch the white walls of the compound of the Children Inside the Light disappear from the window in the back. Left turn, I tell myself. Big tree with dark green leaves across from the turn. Cactus with two shrugging shoulders on the other side.

  I have to know where I’m going. I have to be able to get back.

  I pull my legs up to hug them, resting my chin on my knees. The road moves beneath the wheels hurling us down the street, farther and farther from safety. I’m not stupid and I remember all of the lists of vocabulary words we had to study for Outside Studies, so I know what this thing is.

  Automobile (n.): a passenger vehicle designed for operation on ordinary roads and typically having four wheels and a gasoline internal combustion engine

  But I didn’t know they felt this fast. I bite the edges of my lips until they bleed to keep my voice inside my mouth, to keep myself from screaming every time the machine careens around a turn or sails over a bump in the road.

  “You doing OK, Zylynn?” the man asks.

  I won’t answer. I don’t know how he knows my name.

  He is an Agent of Darkness.

  Back Inside, Father Prophet will be in the kids’ building. They’ll swarm around him, casting shadows all over his white clothes and pale skin, clamoring to get close, to be the one on his lap or sitting with their hands touching his huge calves through his white pants.

  “We lost another,” he will say. Will he cry?

  Some of the kids will.

  This is how it happened last week or month or something, when we lost Jaycia. “We lost another,” Father Prophet had said. He didn’t cry, but he almost looked like he would, like the Darkness had climbed into his soul and tried to sneak out of his eyes even though the ceilings and walls of the Girls’ Dorm and the Boys’ Dorm are always covered with bright, buzzing lightbulbs.

  “We lost Jaycia,” Father Prophet had said. He was holding my hand. I am always near him. “She lost her way.”

  For a minute, I thought of Jaycia. She was only a bit older than me, also twelve, also almost to her Rite of Passage. She was short with hair so light that if you held it off her head, you could see right through it. She would laugh when the Caretakers caught her doing something wrong. She was always doing something wrong. Not Abominations, not things that would get her cast out into the Darkness. Only Mistakes, like brushing her teeth for an extra thirty seconds or sneaking into the shower before I got a chance. I liked how she laughed. She slept in the bed next to me. I liked how she whispered at night, telling me about things I could barely imagine: bicycles, books, balloons. Things that only exist in the Darkness.

  I think she was my friend, if I understand the word right.

  Jaycia was lucky. She started in the Darkness, but she got rescued into the Light. I was luckier. I was born into the Light without the Darkness ever touching me.

  Now neither of us is lucky.

  “You know what she must do, right?” Father asked that day.

  We nodded.

  “She must keep her words to herself.” He reminded us even though we knew. “She must leave as little of her voice out there in Darkness. She must focus all her efforts on returning here, where it is safe. If she tries hard enough to return, if she forces the Darkness out by thinking of us always, if she rejects all the temptations of Curiosity, if she keeps her soul in the Light, we’ll see her again. If she tries hard enough before her thirteenth birthday, she’ll return and she’ll be able to live in the Light with us forever. But”—Father Prophet lowered his voice—“if we don’t see her again, she has chosen Darkness and we must forget her.”

  Most of the other kids have forgotten her. She’s stuck in Darkness forever now.

  I won’t be like Jaycia.

  In the morning, there will be ten full days before my thirteenth birthday, before my ceremony. Ten days to get back and I know how to do it. I will think only of the Inside and Father Prophet and Mother God and Light, Light, Light. I will protect myself from the Liar. I will not listen to him or talk to him. I will keep my soul safe. If I have to, I’ll yell at him, scream at him, hit him, hide, run away.

  I will cast the Darkness so far away. I will be safe again in ten days, safe again in time.

  It’s only after minutes and hours that the car stops moving.

  The man opens his door and gets out. “Come on, Zylynn,” he says.

  I sit and suck in the black air. With nothing but instinct, I try to feel behind me; I try to sense how far away Father Prophet and Inside and Light and everything I know are. I create a million invisible strings that wave around from my shoulders and back trying to find the white walls that kept the Darkness out, the dogs that barked at the gate, the other girls, Father Prophet, the Caretakers, Thesmerelda, the other women, anyone, anything that I left behind. The strings don’t hit the Light. They sense nothing.

  I strain to keep my heavy eyelids as far up into my head as they will go. I won’t fall asleep in the Darkness, not when it’s this black and scary.

  The man walks away from the automobile. I watch him through the window as he crosses in front of it, his arms swinging in his red shirt with each step.

  Whoever heard of a red shirt?

  He keeps walking.

  He’s walking away. He’s disappearing. He’s going to leave me here. Then it will be just me and the Darkness for hours or days or more until Father comes to get me. I won’t be able to eat or breathe or learn. I will die. My heart quickens, my blood rushes close to panic.

  With a whoosh the door next to me opens. His face is right next to mine. I jump. I jump more than I need to so he won’t see that I’m relieved he’s still here. I shouldn’t be relieved. “Come on, Zylynn. You’re safe now. I promise.”
/>   His voice is so soft. It sounds like a nice voice.

  But I know that it’s not.

  The first step into the house, he turns on a light. It scratches my eyes the way the lights do when I first wake up in the morning and the pain feels good. I follow him through a small, colorful room and into a kitchen. He turns on another light. I follow him through the kitchen to a hallway to a set of stairs. He turns on another light.

  I am surprised.

  I thought an Outsider would never let me see any light.

  Inside, the kids will go to bed. The Caretakers will watch them and check off on the calendar when they drink their tea and wash their faces and brush their teeth and drink more tea and say goodnight. The kids, all in their matching large white T-shirts, will climb into their triple bunks and crawl under their white sheets and listen to the humming of the lights on the walls and the ceiling and watch the red on the inside of their eyes until they fall asleep.

  Some of them might think about me in the Darkness.

  Some of them might not.

  Some of them will forget in a couple of days. Forget me.

  It will all happen without me. Real life will happen without me.

  There’s only one bed in this room where I am now, in Darkness. The walls are white with pink stripes running up and down them. They’re covered in what looks like wrapping paper, like the parcels Father Prophet gives us on our birthdays or on the Day of the Ultimate Feast.

  The Agent of Darkness hands me a pile of pink cloth made of the softest furry fabric my fingers have ever felt. It lays in my palms and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. I look at the pink. Then, by accident, I look at him. His eyes are green and sharp.

  “Get some rest,” he says. “We’ll work out everything in the morning.”

  In my head I say, I’ll run away in the morning if Father hasn’t gotten me yet.

  “I’ll do whatever I can to make you comfortable.”

  In my head I say, I know you’re lying. I will never believe you.

  The man crosses over the gold carpet and pauses at the doorway. He’s looking at me. “Good night, Zylynn.”

  Then—just when I’m wondering how an evil Liar can have such a nice, soft voice—he turns out the light and closes the door so it’s dark, dark, dark in the room.

  I hold my breath and rush over to the switch on the wall. My heart is shaking in my chest. What if the light switch doesn’t work? What if he’s going to leave me in this blackness all night long? I flip it and the light comes back on. Thank you, thank you. I lean against the door, catching my breath.

  I can’t survive too long in the dark, that’s what Father Prophet taught us.

  So I can’t run away now. The outdoor air is as black as the bruise on my left thigh. Father said the dark could hurt us, sting us, burn us, suffocate us. Father said nothing good happens in the dark.

  I will run in the morning. If I’m still here. Maybe I won’t be here. Father said if we wanted it enough, the Light would always find us. Until we turn thirteen.

  I want you to come and rescue me, Father. I want it more than anything.

  I look at the light trickling into the room. There’s not enough. Just one measly lightbulb for a whole room. At home we had one hundred lightbulbs or six hundred lightbulbs or something in the dorms. But this little light is better than the black out the window. It’s enough that the air turns smooth in my throat. Enough that my skin doesn’t burn.

  I stand in the center of the carpet where the light is brightest, right below the fixture on the ceiling. I look up at it until my eyes water, and I say the Evening Prayer.

  Mother God,

  Keeper of Light

  Everything I have is yours; I choose to have nothing of my own.

  I choose to be nothing but an Agent of your Light.

  May the Darkness never find me.

  I believe.

  I say the prayer because it’s evil to go to sleep without saying it. I say it because it’s what I’ve said every day of my life. I say it because I want to please Mother God. But I stumble on the last line.

  The Darkness has found me.

  At home, where we sleep, there are lots of beds, thirty or one hundred. We can count, but we never did and now I can’t remember exactly. There are bars of light on the ceiling and the walls. The beds are all white. The undersides of the beds are white. The room glows.

  “Bright like a womb,” says Father Prophet. “Bright like a child. Bright to keep you safe.”

  All the beds are filled with the Children Inside the Light every night . All the bright-white beds in the other dorm are filled with all the little boys. All the bright-white beds where I sleep are filled with all the little girls.

  Except when they aren’t.

  Two

  I AM SCREAMING WITH NO SOUND. I have been screaming with no sound for minutes or hours or days.

  My eyes open.

  There is light from the bulb on the ceiling, but it’s not bright. Father Prophet has not come.

  I don’t know if it’s time for waking because Brother Zascays, the Caretaker in the morning, will not come and wake us. I am not an “us.” I am all alone. I have never been alone in a room before.

  My feet touch the floor and it mashes beneath them. I know what this is because I go to school and I take Outside Studies and I can read and I have learned all about the World of Darkness so that I can be prepared if they ever come for me. I dig the word out of my brain from the lists of vocabulary we learned in school.

  Carpet (n.): a heavy fabric commonly of wool or nylon, for covering floors

  I’ve never felt a carpet on my toes. It’s not white. It’s gold. It feels the same softness of the pink fabric and the Outsider’s voice. I never thought the Outside would be soft, even a tricky, lying soft.

  I am an evil, dirty girl for liking softness. I am an evil, dirty girl when I touch the pink fabric on the bed and when I wish my ears could hug and squish the Outsider’s voice within them. Am I an evil, dirty girl if I walk on this carpet? There’s no other way to walk.

  There’s no way not to hear the Liar’s voice either.

  I don’t know if it is evil, but I do it anyway. I walk to the wall to look at the pink stripes. I try to hate the way the carpet sighs against the bottom of my feet. I do try. I swear.

  The pink stripes please my eyes but I try to hate them too.

  Maybe I’m not in Darkness. Maybe everything is OK. Maybe this whole room is Father Prophet’s birthday gift for me, for my big thirteenth birthday, ten days early. I try to rip some of the paper away but it’s stuck, not like the wrapping paper from my twelfth birthday, and I realize it’s also probably a trick and a lie like Father Prophet said everything would be because this is Outside.

  On the other wall, there’s a window. I pull the curtain away and only see my face. It is still night. Still pitch-black outdoors without a hint of Mother God. I can’t let that dark hit my skin. I can’t run yet.

  My face stares back from the black glass.

  My green eyes stick so far out of their sockets it’s like they’re trying to escape. My cheekbones punch out of my pale skin and I think it might rip to let them through. My nose is huge now that my face has no fat. My yellow hair was just chopped yesterday or last month or something and it’s clumpy, sticking to my scalp in one-square-inch pieces. I haven’t seen myself in a long time, weeks or months or a year. I’m surprised at how old I look. How tired I look. How skinny I look.

  But Father Prophet always liked my face. My Lightness, he called it.

  I press my huge nose against the dark glass. The glass is black. Maybe this window is a lie too. Maybe it’s not a window at all, but black glass glued against the pink-and-white wall. My breath shows up beneath my nose, a white fog painting lines against the blackness.

  I like that I can create the white on the black. I do that until the glass turns a dark blue and trees and birds and the fastest automobile, the one from last night, start to app
ear. It is not a lie. It is a window. I know now.

  At home we will start waking up soon. Or they will, without me. Because I’m not there. It’s hard to remember.

  The Caretakers will rouse the oldest girls first and we will crawl out of our tippy-top bunks, careful not to hit our heads on the ceiling. We’ll grab towels from the hooks next to the pillows and take the bars of soap from the little ledges. We will leave all of the clothes we were wearing on the beds we sleep in and march, single file, out the swinging back door. The doors are made of screens and plywood. The floor is made of plywood too, and it’s always covered in bits of sand.

  The packed sand and dirt will be hot on the soles of our feet as we bounce across it to the bathroom behind the bunk. The first three of us will dash into the showers while the other girls line up behind. The Caretakers will go back into the bunks to rouse the medium girls, then finally the littlest girls who sleep closest to the floor.

  We will each stand alone in a shower stall for three minutes until the buzzer goes off and the next girl comes in. The shower stall has no ceiling and no lightbulbs but the sun spills in and makes it bright enough. It’s white: white walls, clear curtain.

  The water will be sharp and cold. When it first hits our shoulders, it will feel like relief, but by the time it reaches our butts we’ll be shivering. We’ll each sandwich the white bar of soap between our palms to soften it, then we’ll work it through our hair and around our faces and down each side of our bodies, gripping it tightly. When we hear a clunk of one bar of soap falling, we’ll all feel a little sad. Because as soon as the soap falls, it gets sandy. And then that girl will have to live with sandy soap scratching her skin for a month until New Soap Day. And we’ll be scared because we won’t know what she did to make Mother God angry.

  By the end of the month, we will all fail. All of the soaps will be sandy.

  When the buzzer buzzes, we’ll sprint into the toilet stalls to do our business. Some of the little girls will be crying in the back of the line, their bladders full to their throats. Some of them will have accidents. Little kids are the worst at obeying Father Prophet.

  We’ll line up, wrapped in towels, until everyone is through the shower and toilet. When we walk back across the hot sand, it’ll almost feel good on our cold and wrinkly feet. We’ll go back to the bunks and pull the clothes we left there onto our tacky skin, make sure the beds are neat, and line up again for breakfast.