Page 4 of Count My Lies

I accepted the job on the spot, handing over a forged cosmetology license that I’d Venmoed some guy online fifty bucks for. Lena glanced at it, distracted by a ringing phone, then told me I could start the following day.

It’s a good job, mindless, easy, and most of the clients leave at least twenty percent, sometimes thirty, at the end of their service. Between that and the social security checks my mom collects, we have enough for our rent, our bills, but it’s not nearly enough to keep me from wishing for something better—somethingmore—or from dreading the sound of my alarm clock each morning, its blaring chimes grating.

“And how is she?” my mother asks, referring to Dolly—as in Parton. An homage to the Queen of Country herself. I make up names for my regulars, the ones I see week after week, women I’ve come to know through their too-loud phone conversations or idle chitchat. Dolly Parton is really Laura Hoffman, but they share the same big blonde hair and oversized chest. Laura even has a slight Southern twang, although she grew up in Texas, not Tennessee like Dolly. She’s a Dallas transplant, having moved to New York after she met her husband while he was on an oil expedition—or whatever tycoons do when they travel for business.

“Her stepdaughter wants the Lamborghini,” I say. Laura’shusband—very old and very wealthy—died two years ago. She’s been in litigation with his children since, fighting over every last cent the old coot had to his name. Which was quite a bit. Laura updates me on the developments when she comes in every week. She lives in a penthouse in Manhattan—on the Upper East Side, where else—but she has a son from a previous marriage in Brooklyn Heights, a few streets over from Rose & Honey, so she drops in on the days she meets him for lunch. Heads turn sharply when she walks in, a blinding contrast to our typical bougie Brooklynite clientele.

“But,” I continue, “Laura says she’d rather sell the car for parts than see that spoiled twat riding in it. Her words, not mine.”

“Where do you park a Lamborghini in Manhattan?” my mother asks. She sounds genuinely curious.

I shrug. “She said something about a private garage? Neither one of them evendrives. Laura says Cassie doesn’t have a license. Instead of a car on her sixteenth birthday, she got a driver.”

My mother snorts, rolling her eyes. Her tolerance for wealthy women is lower than mine. I like Laura, though, how she opens the window to her soap-opera life, offering me a glimpse inside. She also treats me like a human being rather than an inanimate object who happens to know how to file nails, which is more than I can say about most of my clients.

“But she found out her son’s expecting his second baby, so she was in a good mood. She tipped double.” Laura usually hands me a fifty on the way out—one of my only cash tippers—but today it was a Benjamin, crisp, green, newly printed. I started to protest, but she waved me off with an exaggerated wink.

This isn’t the whole truth, though. She likely gave me the extra money because at the start of her manicure, I had mentioned that I’dspilled coffee all over my MacBook, frying the hard drive and subsequently erasing the last fifty pages of the novel I told her I’ve been working on. Her hand, nails still wet, flew to her mouth.Oh no, Sloane!

Obviously, there is no MacBook, no novel. But the lie was as much for me as it was for Laura. I wish there was a half-written manuscript on a laptop, that I spent evenings hunched over a keyboard instead of days hunched over women’s feet. Christ, anyone would. I had no idea she’d double her tip. If I had, I wouldn’t have said it. I swear.

It’s just that the truth is so uninteresting. Amending it, changing the details, adding in color, is something I started when I was a kid, a bad habit—like biting your nails or picking at scabs—that I never grew out of. In fact, I grew into it, the lies rolling off my tongue more and more naturally, almost reflexively, until it became instinctive, part of who I am. It almost doesn’t occur to me to tell the truth anymore. Why would I? When you tell the truth—at least, if the truth is boring, which it almost always is—people begin to fidget, their eyes glazing as their attention wanes. Eventually, they realize, snapping to with a sheepishOh, I’m sorry, what were you saying?, trying to feign interest.

I hate that look. The fake, vacant way they smile at you. I always have. It makes me feel unimportant, like a crumpled piece of paper, tossed on the floor instead of in the wastebasket. I used to get it all the time when I was younger. My mom and I moved around a lot, hopping from town to town, apartment to apartment, school to school, as she changed jobs, one after the next. I was always new, always standing at the front of a classroom, palms sweaty, as the teacher instructed me to introduce myself. I’d start haltingly, staring at my shoes, saying that I was born in Florida, that I’d moved from whatever Podunk town we’d just come from, and I’d look up to see that no one was even paying attention. The girls were passing notes and whispering, theboys kicking each other across the aisle. The teacher would shush the class, but even she was distracted, writing on the chalkboard or handing out worksheets. I stared longingly at the girls, wishing I was the one being whispered to. But my pants were too short, sneakers too scuffed, shirt too faded to catch the eye of anyone. It was a shitty feeling, the invisibility. Every time, I wished we didn’t have to move, but I understood why.

My mother was hardworking, scrupulous to a fault, but when her arthritis flared up, she was housebound, unable to work, spending the day with her hands and feet submerged in water as hot as she could stand. When I got home from school, I’d climb into bed with her and rub her joints with castor oil and Tiger Balm, turn on one of her favorite movies to distract her from the pain. Eventually, her employer would begin to complain about her absences, giving her a warning, then another, until she came home with a final paycheck.

We’d move when the landlord started banging on the door, shoving late notices through our mail slot. We would find a new town, twenty miles in whatever direction, another shabby apartment that didn’t run background checks, and I’d start a new school. Rinse and repeat. I got used to it, though, expected it every few months.

It was just the two of us, making our way in the world. I never met my father, didn’t even know who he was other than a brief fling in my mom’s early twenties. Her parents—my grandparents—had died a few years after I was born, and her sister was older, living hours away. We were fine on our own. We had to be.

In fifth grade, when my mother and I moved to Whispering Pines, Georgia, a tiny suburb on the outskirts of Macon, I told myself things would be different this time. On the first day, when the recess bell rang midmorning, I followed the class out to the blacktop where agroup of pigtailed girls circled around me. “Where are you from?” one of them asked. You could tell she was cool by the number of neon-colored rubber bracelets looped around her wrist, hot pink and lime green, bouncing when she walked. She had bangs, and when I got home that night, I gave myself bangs, too, standing on a chair in front of the bathroom mirror, kitchen shears in hand.

“California,” I said. I didn’t know where it came from. We hadn’t moved from California; we’d only driven an hour north, not even crossing state lines, just one county to the next. By the grace of god, the teacher hadn’t asked me to the front of the class that morning, hadn’t mentioned me at all. I was a blank canvas, a tabula rasa.

As I watched the girls’ faces light up, something inside of me swelled. I knew I’d said the right thing. The girl with the bracelets beamed at me. “Are you famous?” she asked excitedly.

I shook my head no, but when I saw her disappointment, I quickly added, “But my dad is. He’s in the movies.”

Their gasps were audible. And just like that, I was special. It was so easy.

That day, so unlike all my previous first days, everyone fought to sit next to me at lunch. I told them about the beach and the palm trees, describing in detail what it was like to wade into the breaking waves, the colors of the seashells I found on the shore. One summer, I’d won a sandcastle-building contest, I said. Of course, I’d never seen the Pacific. I’d been to Daytona a few times, which aided in my descriptions, along with scenes from my favorite Disney movie,Lilo and Stitch, and my second-favorite movie,Flipper. After lunch we played handball, and the girl with the bracelets—her name was Bianca—asked me to be on her team. I was elated.

When they asked to meet my dad, I told them he was on set, filminga new movie. Itcouldbe true, I reasoned with myself. It’s why the lies never seemed so bad. I had no idea where he was or what he did. How did I know hewasn’tan actor?

I knew I should stop, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted so desperately for people to like me, and it was the only way I could think of. It was no more complicated than that: I wished I was more interesting, so I pretended to be. Sloanie, Sloanie, the big fat phony.

But the irony is that the more elaborate my lies became, the further I had to keep people away. I could never invite anyone over. They’d want to know where my puppy was, the one I said we’d adopted over the summer. His name was Pickles, I told my classmates, and he was the runt of the litter, black with white spots. They’d want to see the princess bed I’d described, the one with the sparkly canopy and unicorn sheets. They’d want to meet my dad, the movie star, and swim in our backyard pool with the waterslide. Of course they did. It was why we were friends. And it was also why we could never be friends. Not real ones, at least.

Then, another lie occurred to me, one that would solve all my problems. I came to class one Monday with a long face and whispered into Bianca’s ear that there’d been a fire at our house over the weekend. Everything had been lapped up in the flames, our home with the backyard pool burned to the ground. My canopy bed was gone. So was our dog.

I told her we had to move into an apartment across town, but that it was only temporary, until they rebuilt our house. Maybe she wanted to come over after school one day? The apartment wasn’t as nice as our house, I said, but there was a park across the street we could go to, and I’d saved some of my Barbies before I ran out. Bianca nodded, wide-eyed.

By recess, everyone had heard. My teacher, Miss Newberry, pulled me aside at lunch and asked me what happened. I repeated the story I told Bianca, about how my mom had left the stove on, the fire alarm sounding in the middle of the night. She touched my arm, her eyes soft and sympathetic, and told me if there was anything I needed to let her know. And that I didn’t have to turn in any homework assignments that week. I was pleased as punch.

The next day, Miss Newberry announced to the class that the school would be hosting a fundraiser for me and my family, to help us during this difficult time. It would be a bake sale, and she would be sending a sign-up sheet home for everyone’s parents. I smiled shyly, overjoyed by the special attention. But, unsurprisingly, the fundraising never happened. One of my classmates’ moms called mine that night, asking for our new address to organize a meal train for us. I was coloring on the floor of our living room when I heard my mom say, “What fire?” into the receiver, and I knew I was toast.

That Thursday, I sat with my mother in front of the principal, my legs dangling over the chair as he droned on, lecturing me about the consequences of the lie. My mother was mortified, to say the very least.

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