Tall Tales

When I was younger I was a liar. I was always desperate to stay out of trouble, and lying got me out of it. No-one ever expected the soft little kid with the 90 average to lie, and I used that to my fullest advantage. It became a game, finding out how much I could get away with; how little work I could get away with doing, how many deadlines I could extend or escape entirely. I lied to teachers, I lied to friends, I lied to myself. I lied about stupid things, I lied about important things that were actually stupid things but I was too young to know it at the time. The content was insignificant; what mattered was the reaction, the sympathy, the approval.

The first time a teacher confronted me with my lying was in my final year of high school. I had missed the first rehearsal for the school play; I hadn't seen it on the schedule. I told the teacher-director that another teacher had kept me for punishment of some infraction or another. She was new to the school, had never taught me and was unfamiliar with me. She spoke to the teacher I had named as my tormentor, and the truth emerged. Other teachers were involved, culminating in a meeting involving her, my advisor and myself. They asked why. Here was my moment, my Waterloo. I told them I had been under a lot of pressure, that I felt my life was out of control, that I didn't know why I had said it. I told them my parents were breaking up. I started to cry.

The best lies have a kernel of truth at their heart. That's one of the first things you figure out. I suppose the worst thing of all was that I had done it without thinking, that nothing was sacred in my quest to wriggle away from trouble. The tears I shed were tears of anger, of fear, of humiliation - and, yes, on some level, for the dissolution of a marriage which had happened years earlier but which had never been explained to me.

The subject was dropped. They never brought it up again.

Everyone lies to teachers, though. Everyone hates their teachers, even the grade-grubbing ass-kissers. They hate teachers most of all, for forcing such indignity upon them, for making them so reviled and tormented by their younger peers. How quickly teachers forget the special brand of contempt the young reserve for their teachers, how they struggle to befriend their squalling, backstabbing, broods who want nothing more than to escape the ignorant grasp of authority. "You don't understand me," they rage, and they are correct; there is no understanding institutionalized contrariness.

I lied to friends, not realizing that people talk to one another, that friends are friends with other people and that nothing said remains in a vacuum. Was it a sign of their friendship that they never confronted me, or a sign of their contempt? I never asked.

Sometimes I wonder about the people I involved in my lies. If I saw them again, could I apologize? And what would be more demeaning, the apology or the revelation that there was no reason to apologize; that my presumption all those years ago, that I myself was so insignificant that I had had no effect whatsoever upon them in their vulnerable, formative years?

I have never been good with apologies.