Said the Liar - A. Swift (romantic books to read TXT) 📗

in to people, watch for it in conversations. Everyone wants something. Everyone's after something. Everyone.

            Every. Single. Person.

            I know I'm cynical about it. Here's a scenario, someone asks you how you are one morning. Do they really want to know? Nine out of ten times the answer is no. They want you to give the scripted answer and move on. Keep role playing. Tv commercials are just trying to manipulate you into spending money on a product. Nobody whines about that. Politicians lie on a mass scale. Sure, a few people might catch them, but seriously, that's the exception, not the rule. Liars. Everywhere. Nobody could be trusted to be honest, not really.

            Our society is just a bunch of people trying to extort stuff from eachother. Why shouldn't I join in that? I had an edge that nobody else did. My little mutation or superpower, whatever you wanted to call it, was an advantage.

            That's partially why I started to learn sleight of hand stuff. It advanced pretty quickly to pickpocketing. I got really good. It helped that whenever I got caught I could just explain that I'd found their wallet and was returning it.

            It got too easy, though. Weird, right? I could get all the money I wanted, and because of that I didn't want to. Call it my conscience, or maybe just call it simple boredom. A game gets a little less fun when you always win without any competition. I started channeling my efforts into more entertaining activities, like the card Ruses.

            Anyway, once I found that out that everyone was dishonest I knew I was headed somewhere dangerous. So what happened? Well, in short, I started looking for anyone I could find who was actually honest. I tried to find people to hang around who weren't trying to take things from me. It turned out to be an impossible quest. Some people are better than others, but for the most part it's a sad, deceptive world. It's a rare, lonely individual who really does their best to be honest. Not spout everything you're thinking all the time honest, but the type of person who doesn't have hidden motives, and who doesn't immediately lie to cover their own butt when a situation makes them look bad. They take credit for their mistakes and then just move on.

            I wanted to find someone like that.

            It kind of doesn't make sense then, huh? Why I hang out at the warehouse? Let me explain. My ability to tell a 'lie' isn't solely the words I pick when telling one. It's about posture, eye contact, facial muscles moving, the lilt in my voice. I don't get exactly how it works, but I know that it's more than it seems. It's not some magical ability, there's real science to it. Something I do makes everyone assume I'm an honest and infallible human being. Only when I'm talking aloud, though. It has to be spoken. Writing isn't the same at all. I know it works over the phone because I've done it. The limits I'm still hazy on, but so far I've never had to really push to get someone to believe me. It's pretty simple. Years of practice have made me proficient.

            I've gotten pretty good at picking out what makes a good lie. All the little details. When someone is being honest, and I mean really truthful and sincere, they act differently. To sum up, I can tell when other people are lying or telling the truth as well. I mentioned before that I can almost feel it. I can.

            And another thing.

            People are bad at lying. I don't know why I'm super special or talented, maybe my brain has some weird kind of cortex that got supercharged for some reason. I don't know. I don't particularly care. All I care about is the fact that it works. When people talk around me.... whether I want to or not, I can tell if they're being truthful or otherwise. It's kind of amazing. It's also kind of terrible. It's downright sad, really. It's also the reason why I can't even stand to watch tv most of the time, or listen to the radio, or see a movie, because my lie detecting radar just goes off constantly like a little twinge in my brain.

            When you notice the lies people tell inevitably notice how many there are. Little things, maybe, but some big things, too.

            "I love you, honey."

"I didn't cheat."

            "Everything's going to be okay."

            It's misery, okay? Sometimes I just can't stand it. I just can't sit around and listen to the madness. I thought it was bad when I told lies to get a new helicopter toy. No. Not even close. Think about being in a restaurant and you overhear a conversation going on at the table behind you.

            "I promise I'm not seeing anyone else." A man says to his fiance' after she asks him if he dumped his old girlfriend.

            Imagine sitting there, knowing that he's full of it. I said it's maddening, and it truly is. It still bothers me. The worst part isn't even that people try to lie to everyone else almost all the time, it's that people actually believe the lies being told!

            Don't get me wrong, I hate being lied to. But at least I can tell when someone's putting me on. I don't understand how so many can go around and not even comprehend the amount of deceit. More than sad, it's downright frightening. If someone, like me, could see the ins and outs of the barrage of lies, then it would be so easy to manipulate everyone and get whatever you wanted. Nobody could even do anything about it. That was a scary thought.

            I was getting off on a tangent.

            The warehouse. The reason I started hanging there was because..in a weird way, the people there, the other teenagers, they're dodgy and selfish and messed up and everything, but so am I. They lie to me, but they know it's a lie, and they don't even try to lie well. Strangely, it feels like they're being honest because they're not even trying to pass off their thinly veiled lies as actual fact. I think they know that nobody believes them, they expect it. People there are blunt and most of the time they don't feel the need to hide anything from the others, because we're all in the same boat, one way or another. Not much point in fooling the other people there because either nobody cares or you'll get nothing much from it. So somebody believes that you really are the kid of some rich people, or that you were dating six girls at once. You're not going to impress anybody.

            So, even though some of the kids there scare me, and I know that they're doing illegal things, I feel like they respect me. They see me as I really am, just some punk teenager who sulks by the edges of the warehouse and doesn't smoke or drink or take drugs like some of the others. Regular and unimpressive, a bit of a stuck up dude because I don't want to get a tattoo or be the one to buy the cans of spray paint. They may not exactly revere me, but I really do think they respect me in some way.

            If that makes sense.

            I'm not just trying to bag on them other kids at the warehouse-believe me, I know I've got my share of problems. A big share. So when I hang at the warehouse, I have company and I feel a little less alone. Maybe this is how I choose to 'atone for my mistakes', or try to stave off my disgust for humanity. Whatever. I'm not super social but I do sometimes want to have someplace to go where I can just chill for a while. The warehouse is just a convenient place to do that most of the time.

            At any rate, I wanted to be there for the rally just in case I could stop some of the raiders from doing something super dangerous or stupid. Whatever else I've done wrong, I didn't want to see anyone really hurt or hauled off to prison. I might think that a lot of people are really dumb, but that doesn't mean that I'm sadistic. I make judgments, but nobody should let anybody else do something potentially fatal. I might be overreacting a bit, but there were crimes like putting graffiti on a stop sign, and there were crimes that could really land your backside in a cell. If everyone started drinking after the haul and then started their drive back to the mansion or whatever, they could get seriously injured in a crash.

            I couldn't care much less what the Devious crew does in their own time on their own space, but now things were too close to home. If anything bad happened it would affect my life in a big way. I go to the warehouse a few times a week, it's part of my routine.

            Whether or not I could help, to even have the option I would need to be there. Tomorrow was Saturday, and I had it off of work. I worked as a janitor part time for my high school. It's pretty easy, and very low-stress. Actually it's not so bad and the pay is decent. It's cleaning toilets and floors, but it is a job. Moving on.

            My brain was like a spring that was pushed down, just waiting to pop. At least, that's how it felt that night when I went to bed. I felt like I had a good reason to be stressed. Apex was inviting a ton of people tomorrow and I'd seen parties turn really really wild really really fast. Most of the time all I had to worry about was Ruse trying something or one of the others getting into a fist fight that might accidentally involve me. No biggie. I've taken a punch before, it's not so bad after a bit. For some others it might be difficult to explain the bruise on your cheek, but not for me.

            Edge really was a good nickname for me. I was only fifteen years old, still several months from sixteen, and here I was wondering if it would be my fault if a bunch of kids my age got arrested or if some of them would get shot. I was losing sleep over other people and their choices. Pretty stupid. How was it my job to take care of everyone?

            It wasn't. Then why did I feel like it was? Why did I hate feeling like it was?

            Maybe I didn't care what happened to the warehouse gang. No, that wasn't right. I didn't WANT to care about the warehouse gang. Again, I sure as heck didn't care what happened to Devious's crew, but they were a different entity altogether.

            It was time to sleep. Eventually I managed to drop off despite the turmoil in my thoughts.

            The next morning I woke up pretty late. It was eleven forty when I crawled out of bed, and I still felt tired. Feeling tired made me feel irritable. Seeing that my room was in a pretty bad state didn't help, either. There were old clothes on the floor, loose papers all across my desk, spare decks of cards, a few loose coins, and a few dead flies on my windowsill. I needed to vacuum, too, but I didn't do anything to clean up besides throw a few clothing items into the closet and shut the door. Not exactly a deep clean, but it helped some. I'm not a major pig when it comes to my bedroom, but I'm not a neat freak either.

            Unlike a lot of other kids I didn't have any posters on my walls. I don't idolize