Free Oddballs by William Sleator Page A

family was poor; she could not afford to dress any other way. But we didn’t associate with her only out of pity; we were entertained by the outrageous things she said.
    Leah claimed she had a serious and physically intimate relationship with a wealthy and titled English athlete—scholar named Neville Asquith-Smythe. She was always telling us how handsome and well built Neville was. He was a brilliant college philosophy major. Leah often attended classes with him at the university, and she went on at length about his explanations of Hegel and Kant. But she was never able to produce Neville. When I mentioned him to a friend of my parents who was a philosophy professor, he said there was no English philosophy major at the university.
    Leah bragged a lot about her older sister Ze’eva (she never neglected to pronounce the apostrophe), who had been three years ahead of us in high school, was recognized by all as the most brilliant and beautiful student in her class, and now lived on a kibbutz in Israel and fought in the Israeli army. Beginning to be suspicious, I asked Vera Greenberg, who had been in that class, about Leah’s sister. She said nobody named Ze’eva Moses had been in her class, or in any classes for several years before or after hers, and proved it by showing me her yearbooks.
    On the few occasions when Bart and Nicole and I invited Leah to do something with us on a Friday evening, she always refused. Leah said she was a member of an advanced folk-dancing group that practiced on Fridays and often performed in public. She couldn’t miss a single rehearsal. The director of the group, she told us, was an exceptionally attractive man in his twenties named Russell Davidson, who was independently wealthy because his family owned the Davidson Brothers chemical company. Russ, as Leah called him, was married, but he was always making passes at her anyway when he picked her up in his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Of course, he never picked her up in his Rolls-Royce at school, or anyplace else where we might actually lay eyes on it.
    Nicole, whose opinions about people I always trusted, said that Leah was a pathological liar. But she wouldn’t let Bart confront her with our proof. She pointed out that to do so would have been cruel and—even worse—embarrassing. It might have been different if Leah’s stories were destructive to others; in fact, the only person they hurt was Leah herself.
    But once, after we’d been hearing about folk dancing and Russ and his Rolls-Royce for several months, Bart couldn’t resist saying, “Gee, this Friday folk-dancing thing sounds like fun. You think we could ever come, too?”
    â€œI doubt it,” Leah said with predictable haste. “It is a very exclusive and professional group. They’re extremely selective about who they allow to participate; they have to be.”
    Privately, the three of us wondered what Leah really did on Friday evenings. If she didn’t stay at home alone, we figured she was probably forced by her elderly parents to attend religious services or visit even more elderly relatives.
    But two weeks after Bart had asked Leah if we could go to folk dancing, Leah phoned me on Friday afternoon to say that Russ had generously granted her permission to invite three of her more mature and sophisticated friends that night—just this once, of course—and she felt Bart and Nicole and I were the only ones who would prove acceptable.
    I was very surprised that Leah had invited us; she had never suggested introducing us to her nonexistent boyfriend or showed us photographs of her imaginary sister. Why would Leah volunteer to expose her lies and humiliate herself in this case? I told her I’d think about it, hung up, and called Nicole and Bart, who were both at Nicole’s house.
    Nicole’s interpretation was that Leah probably knew we were going to a party that night to which she had not been invited.