Liar Liar Read online

  ALSO BY GARY PAULSEN

  Alida’s Song • The Amazing Life of Birds • The Beet Fields

  The Boy Who Owned the School

  The Brian Books: The River, Brian’s Winter, Brian’s Return, and

  Brian’s Hunt

  Canyons • Caught by the Sea: My Life on Boats

  The Cookcamp • The Crossing • Danger on Midnight River

  Dogsong • Father Water, Mother Woods • The Glass Café

  Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and

  the Brian Books

  Harris and Me • Hatchet

  The Haymeadow • How Angel Peterson Got His Name

  The Island • Lawn Boy • Lawn Boy Returns

  The Legend of Bass Reeves • Masters of Disaster

  Molly McGinty Has a Really Good Day

  The Monument • Mudshark • My Life in Dog Years

  Nightjohn • The Night the White Deer Died

  Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers

  The Quilt • The Rifle

  Sarny: A Life Remembered • The Schernoff Discoveries

  Soldier’s Heart • The Time Hackers • The Transall Saga

  Tucket’s Travels (The Tucket’s West series, Books

  One through Five)

  The Voyage of the Frog • The White Fox Chronicles

  The Winter Room • Woods Runner

  Picture books, illustrated by Ruth Wright Paulsen

  Canoe Days and Dogteam

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Gary Paulsen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

  www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Paulsen, Gary.

  Liar, liar : the theory, practice, and destructive properties of deception / Gary Paulsen. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Fourteen-year-old Kevin is very good at lying and finds that doing so makes life easier, but when he finds himself in big trouble with his friends, family, and teachers, he must find a way to end his lies forever.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89868-6

  [1. Honesty—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Middle schools— Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Family problems—Fiction. 6. Humorous stories.]

  I. Title. II. Title: Theory, practice, and destructive properties of deception.

  PZ7.P2843Li 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010028356

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated

  with gratitude and respect

  to Barbara Perris,

  my longtime copy editor,

  fiercely protective of my writing,

  the elements of style and grammar,

  and getting the details right.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Chapter 1 - A Good Lie Furthers Your Agenda

  Chapter 2 - A Good Lie Can Support Any Plan

  Chapter 3 - A Good Lie Begins with an Element of the Truth

  Chapter 4 - A Good Lie Can be Used More Than Once

  Chapter 5 - A Good Lie Has an Outcome Advantageous to All Parties

  Chapter 6 - A Good Lie Has Humor and Style

  Chapter 7 - Good Lies Make the World Go Round

  Chapter 8 - A Good Lie Takes on a Life of Its Own

  Chapter 9 - A Good Lie Shows You the Truth

  Chapter 10 - A Good Lie Can Turn on You

  Chapter 11 - A Good Lie Requires a Great Apology

  Chapter 12 - A Good Lie Demands Substantial Amends

  Chapter 13 - A Good Lie Hurts a Little Less When It’s Out in the Open

  Chapter 14 - A Good Lie is an Oxymoron

  About the Author

  I’m the best liar you’ll ever meet.

  I should be good; I’ve had a lot of practice. I’m only fourteen, but I’ve known for as long as I can remember that there will be times when I’m going to have to tell a lie. It’s a universal rule, a cosmic inevitability.

  If you ask me, people who say honesty is the best policy are just terrible liars.

  I’m good because I make it easy for people to believe me.

  See, people only listen for what they want to hear, so I only tell them that.

  I tell my parents what they expect—school went well and I had a good day; yes, I did my homework; dinner was great; I’d love to drive 116 miles to go to a flea market and look for antique cookie jars and old political memorabilia with you and Dad this weekend; and no, I don’t have any dirty dishes under my bed.

  I tell my friends versions of what they’ve already said to me—yeah, the new girl is hot; Coach is psychotic to have us run suicides in gym; I’m not gonna read the whole book either; the Cubs don’t have decent relief pitching but will probably clinch the division this year anyway.

  I tell my teachers what they want me to say—yes, I understand the equation and how you solve it; I missed the foreshadowing until you pointed it out, but now it’s as clear as day; I really do have to use the bathroom and I don’t just want to walk around the halls during class wasting my time; no, I didn’t see who lobbed that apple across the cafeteria, nearly taking out the lunch lady’s eye (by the way, that apple missed her by a mile; everyone knows Neil Walker throws like a girl).

  If you look at it from the right point of view, lying is just good manners.

  Lying is my second language, a habit, a way of life. It’s gotten so that it’s easier for me to lie than to tell the truth, because lying is all about common sense. Not to mention self-preservation.

  I don’t think I’m good enough to beat a lie detector test, but most of the time I’ve pretty much got everyone I know right where I want them.

  Lying makes my life and—let’s face it—everyone else’s, too, so much better. So really, I lie for the greater good. I’ve come to believe that it’s almost my duty. Like I’m some kind of superhero who uses his power for society. I like to think I’m doing my bit to make the world a better place—one lie at a time.

  I’m not bragging or being conceited. I’m just making what they call objective observations.

  Another observation is that I’ve never gotten in trouble for lying. Because I’m that good. I have a knack for knowing what needs to be said and done.

  And if a little is good, then a lot is better, right?

  I used to think like that. Before my life went from zero to crap in a week.

  y 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-wit
h-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 mi
ld 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.