There Will Be Lies Read Online Free

protection is so deep inside her, like oil rubbed into wood.
    At the corner, our cab pulls up. Then she reaches out and turns my face towards her as the car idles by the sidewalk.
OK, honey, I’ll see you at eight
,
sharp
, she says.
The judge will want to wrap it up. It’s Ricardo: he likes to get to his cabin at weekends
.
    OK
, I say.
    And you’ll go straight to the library?
    Yes, Mom
.
    She kisses my forehead.
My little princess
, she says.
I love you …
    … all the way to Cape Cod and back
, I finish.
    She smiles, and more or less shoves me into the cab. She tells the cab driver to take me to the library, then starts to walk towards the courthouse. I love you too, I think. I don’t know why it gets harder to say that as you get older, but it does.
    I do love my mom, though, even if we’re really different. I mean, everything: our personalities, our hair colour – she’s a redhead – our physique, our eyes. It’s like we’re not even related at all. Plus she is officially the most nervous person in the world and I’m, as she puts it, reckless. So when I was younger, I thought for sure, because of all the fairy tales and kids’ stories she used to tell me, that I was really a princess, put here with my mom by accident, that my real mother was a queen who lived far away in a beautiful castle.
    Now I figure that every kid thinks this kind of thing. Me and my mom, we may be different, but she looks out for me. She keeps me safe. She teaches me. And yeah, sometimes I feel stifled, but that’s life, isn’t it?
    The driver pulls away. After two blocks he stops.
    He turns to me.
Here you are
, he says.
    I can tell from his expression that he thinks it’s weird, me usinga cab to go, like, half a mile. I mean, people don’t walk here, but people dressed in Walmart clothes like Mom don’t blow ten dollars on a pointless cab ride either. I shrug at him, like, what do you want me to say? It’s like he’s never had a mother. I count out the money Mom gave me and hand it to him, then get out.
    The library is just in front of me. If you’re imagining something with columns, like on TV, then stop. Pretty much everything in Scottsdale and most all of Phoenix is just flat, single-storey: bungalows, malls, offices. Every building, including the library, just looks like an unbranded Rite Aid, for real. The only variation, I guess, comes from a few fake adobe things, made to look like old Mexican houses.
    Fake, because Scottsdale is new. Really new – since the silicon boom in the Eighties, mostly. A whole patch of desert just turned into city, in a decade. Mom says, the thing about the silicon boom is that before that, there were all these kids in Phoenix with no future and a meth habit.
    Now there are still kids with no future and a meth habit, but because of the companies making computer chips, now they have people to steal from.
    Then, she will wink and say,
hey, it keeps me gainfully employed
.

Chapter
5
    I go in and the AC settles around me like a cocoon of coolness. I have a tingly feeling that I get when there are books all around me. The library! I know it’s geeky but I love it. Just sitting between the shelves of books, reading – it’s the safest feeling.
    Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved the place. Mom used to bring me here, ever since we moved to Scottsdale, would read me stories from the kids’ section, mostly fairy tales. I’d sit on her knee – she’d be cross-legged on the floor – and she’d tell me about princesses and curses and old crones making magic spells, and little girls who could outwit wolves.
    It was like a doorway into another world. Just, you know, a doorway that smelled a bit like old ladies. Now, still, I love coming here to read, while Mom’s working. I’m safe here, inside, with the books – she knows where I am, and so neither of us has to worry. And anyway, I can just pick up a book and be anywhere I want, even if we don’t ever physically leave Phoenix.
    Although