Liar by Justine Larbalestier Read Free Book Online Page B

alone.
    â€œWhy won’t you tell the truth?” she asks, glaring at me.
    â€œWhy won’t you?” I ask, even though she is an incorrigible truth teller. I glare right back.
    â€œYou’re not even pretty!” Sarah shouts, pushing off from the desk, past the bed, opening the door. “You look like a boy. An ugly boy! What did he even see in you?”
    She slams the door behind her.
    So she doesn’t hear me say that I have no idea.

    HISTORY OF ME
    â€œDid you take your pill?” is the first thing my parents ask me each morning. Well, mostly my dad.
    It annoys me. It annoys me a lot.
    Especially when Jordan echoes their question. It’s too icky to have your ten-year-old brother ask you that. It doesn’t matter that I don’t take the pill for that reason. It’s still not something he should be thinking about.
    It’s not something I want to think about.
    I hate the whole thing: menstruation, pills, blood.
    So. Much. Blood.
    I don’t take the pill just for my skin, it’s to fix my periods, too.
    They used to be awful. Lie-in-bed-sobbing-with-pain awful and an ocean of blood: instant anemia once a month. The first time I got my period I thought I was going to die. The pain was so bad. The bleeding wouldn’t stop.
    My doctor cured it by making me take a birth control pill every single day. No fake sugar pills—I take the real ones every single day of my life. Now I never get my period. I never have that awful pain. My blood stays in my body, keeping me upright.
    My mom freaked out a bit. She was worried that it wasn’t natural. She thought having your period was what makes you a woman.
    I wish I was a man.
    I asked my doctor to explain how it worked, but what he told me about cycles, and uterine lining, and elevated risk didn’t make any sense, so I asked Yayeko Shoji. She’s a biologist, I figured she would know.
    She did.
    She told me that women used to have so many babies they hardly menstruated at all. But now women have only one or two or no babies, and they have them when they’re already old, which means they have too many periods. All that bleeding puts a strain on their wombs.
    I try to imagine being a woman in the olden days, being pregnant over and over again, having a dozen children. But I can’t imagine being pregnant even once.
    Yayeko says that taking the pill to stop bleeding is more natural than bleeding all the time. She does the same thing. She hasn’t had a period in two years.
    Yayeko talked to my mom, explained it to her, and Mom felt better about it, but she still wasn’t happy. “You are my daughter,” she said. “It is difficult to be happy for you to take these très adult pills.”
    Dad didn’t have to be persuaded; he’s against anyone suffering when they don’t have to. Especially him.
    For the price of remembering to take one little pill every morning of my life I get good skin, no blood, no pain, and, according to Yayeko, less chance of cancer. It’s a fair bargain.
    I really don’t understand why my parents don’t trust me to take a pill every morning. I’m the one it hurts if I forget. I’m the one with incentives. Strong incentives. But, no, every morning it’s the same question: “Did you take your pill?”
    â€œYes, Dad, I took it. Okay? Like I did yesterday and the day before. I’ll take it tomorrow and the day after that and so on, forever.”
    I take the pill and I don’t complain about their nagging. Well, not as often as I could.

    BEFORE
    That first time, after that first kiss, after the icicle fell and I picked up a broken shard, felt it cold and knife-sharp in my fingers—after that—I dropped the ice and ran.
    That’s what I’d been doing before I paused under the bridge to look at the icicles, before Zach Rubin saw me—I’d been running.
    That’s what I liked to do in Central Park: run and