Free Liar by Justine Larbalestier Page A

the pill every single day of my life.
    Remember the fur I was born with? The light coat of hair all over my body?
    It came back.
    Along with the usual puberty horror, I got hair in all the wrong places.
    No, you don’t understand. In the wrong places.
    Like my face and back and stomach.
    My face .
    Yeah.
    So the pill. It keeps the hair away, as well as my period, and acne, too.
    Without it, I’m a freak.
    Though, according to the kids at school, even with it my freakishness is not well disguised. But there’s no pill for that.
    I blame my family for contaminating me with their weirdness and their tainted hairy genes. The family illness, they call it. If I were from a different family—a normal family—I wouldn’t have it.
    To my grandmother’s credit, she did try to dilute the family disease. Instead of marrying her cousin Hilliard, she left the farm to find a father for her baby. Grandmother was convinced that too much cousin-marrying was responsible for the family illness. She was going to have a child whose father was as unrelated to her as she could find.
    Grandmother went to San Francisco and got pregnant by a black sailor. She said they spent a week together and that he loved to gamble. He was from Marseille, she said. His English wasn’t very good. That was all she could remember. She was relieved that Dad hadn’t inherited the gambling love.
    Or the family illness.
    That was left for me.

    BEFORE
    One time I was walking along Broadway playing dodge the crowd. Which is me testing myself, moving as fast as I can, weaving through them all without accelerating into a run, and without touching anyone or having them touch me. Any time I make contact I have to go back to the beginning of the block.
    It’s a game.
    I’m really good at it. When I play it I don’t think about anything else. Not Zach, not anyone.
    I only ever play it on crowded streets and avenues. Broadway works. But Fifth Avenue’s okay as well. Times Square is the best.
    This time it was Broadway. A Sunday.
    I was weaving, concentrating on the muscles of my body, on the air around me. It was like those few inches of air above my skin were part of me, too. An extra layer. Antennas. Me, stretching into space.
    When I spread like that I can go for miles and miles untouched and clear.
    I could feel everyone as they moved through air, feel them and their clothes and their bags, swinging arms, hands clutching cell phones, sodas, other hands, closed umbrellas for the rain that wouldn’t come even though my nostrils prickled with the smell of it.
    Then there was someone looking at me as I slid past them. Looking straight at me. A stare more direct than my mother’s. Like how the Greats stare.
    I twitched and stopped and turned to look back at the person with the staring eyes.
    Two people walked into me. They swore. I said sorry.
    It was a white boy. Same age as me, I thought. Maybe younger. He was smaller than me, skinny.
    He was standing and staring at me standing and staring.
    Then he took off the way I would. And there was me, too befuddled to follow. How did he do that? How did he see me first?

    AFTER
    I force myself to go to school.
    I regret it almost immediately. The first words I hear as I walk up the front steps: “I heard they were killed with an axe.”
    The school is floating on rumors about what happened to Zach and Erin Moncaster. He’s dead, so she must be, too.
    An axe murderer did it.
    A serial killer.
    Her father’s religious. He caught Erin and Zach together. If Zach went with that Micah girl he’d go with anyone.
    Her boyfriend did it.
    This, despite Zach and Erin not knowing each other. Despite no one knowing if she has a boyfriend. Or a religious father.
    They were both locked in a basement. The serial killer tortured them and then dumped the bodies in Times Square. Or was it Rockefeller Center? Only Erin hasn’t been found yet. And no one at school knows where