The First True Lie: A Novel by Marina Mander Read Free Book Online

to myself while the others stood by speechless in admiration; suddenly I felt six inches taller.
    But now I can’t react at all; I have to be careful not to draw attention to myself. I speed up. Assface pretends not to see me and yet I pass so close to him that I can count one by one his moles, like pistachios in his nasty mortadella face. I speed up and I’m past him. Almost home.
    Mama’s still sleeping, buried between the pillows.
    Seeing her like that in the big bed, she seems smaller. Still the same expression, it’s just that her face is darker. When I touch her, she seems colder. But it’s cold outside too. I put a coat over her, and two coins fall out of one of the pockets.
    If people are happy, they don’t die like this, just by chance.
    Maybe they die in an accident, but not in their sleep.
    Maybe Mama died of heart problems, because no one could love her enough, not even me. Maybe I wasn’t able to make her stay in my life, to make her live for me, at least. Maybe I’m not worth much at all, not for her, not for anyone.
    I take off my shoes with this new idea spinning in my head. I hurl one shoe here, another one there. Blue is scared. He makes his tail big so that it looks like that contraption for getting rid of spiderwebs. One shoe ends up under the sofa. I’ve got all kinds of titicaca in my socks. I have to accept my responsibilities.
    What are my responsibilities?
    Keep my room clean, check to make sure the cat is okay, change his litter, study, don’t say “fucking shit” all the time, be sure the gas is off if I’ve used the oven. Do what I need to do so there isn’t food between my teeth.
    Don’t be an extra bump in the road when the going gets tough.
    Understand that grown-ups have grown-up problems.
    Adults have no idea how many strategies kids have to come up with to be what they are. Sometimes they tell you to stop acting like a child, other times that it doesn’t matter because you’re just a child…but what a beautiful child! What a little man! I think about the little hanger-men who hold up the clothes in the wardrobe that smells like mothballs. Because I close myself in there I might become a little hanger-man myself, with bony shoulders and a question-mark head. Who knows.
    In any case, even adults don’t always know what they’re saying.
    “I’m drawing a blank.”
    Or:
    “Funeral for the deceased.”
    Who else would it be for?
    I go into my room to look for my slippers, the ones with the moose antlers on them that Mama gave me for Christmas. Blue’s chewed on them, so now one horn is leaking yellow cotton wool, like the stuff they put up your nose when it’s bleeding. Like when I got hit in the face with a soccer ball and they took me to the emergency room. Mama thought it was a concussion and was more upset than I was, but the doctor told her it was nothing.
    As I slipper across the room, Blue tries to grab what’s left of the antler. On TV, the chef is still there, surrounded by dressed-up women being all over-the-top—I zap them. In the kitchen, the table and the floor are covered with dry food; I forgot to put the box away and Blue has scattered them everywhere. The sink is full of dirty dishes. On the windowsill there’s a plant Mama calls a succulent, a gift from someone or other, made up of two kinds of spiny cucumbers, one tall and one short. It survives even without water, like us. We’re succulents too, shut up in the apartment. If you touch it, it stings in self-defense.
    The apartment like this makes me sick.
    It’s not like when you’re alone for a day and you do what you want and what you usually can’t. Now I can do everything and I don’t feel like doing anything. I’m so free my head spins just thinking about it. I’m free and I’m a prisoner at the same time, like hamsters who spin their wheels and stay in the same place. They spin and spin and don’t go anywhere.
    If I stop for a moment, the blank notebook comes back into my head and I