Free My Fake Boyfriend is Better Than Yours by Kristina Springer Page B

after our sleepover and come clean, right? She’s the one who lied first.
    No, my best friend is some kind of compulsive liar. That’s all there is to it. She can’t help herself. Maybe she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. Maybe she’s delusional. She obviously needs help and nobody sees it but me. The sleepover wasn’t enough to get Sienna to stopthe lying. I’m not sure what is. She said she was going to IM Antonio as soon as she got home today.
    It’s Saturday afternoon, and Sienna’s mom picked her up from my house over an hour ago. Something needs to happen soon, and I’m not aware of any twelve-step programs for girls with fake boyfriends. Sea and I have been best friends since kindergarten, so if anyone is going to get her to kick the lying habit, it’s going to have to be me. Like that time with the maple tree—I’m going up to get her.
    I make sure Mom is busy and not going to bother me for a while. I shut my bedroom door and launch a Web browser. My home page, Google, pops up, and I type in the search phrase “why best friends lie.” There are about fifty million hits. Apparently I’m not the first person to have a best friend with a lying problem.
    I click on link after link after link. It’s amazing the things people lie about. A lot of it seems to be people making themselves sound better than they are. Like this on the Dear Tara advice site:
    Â 
    Dear Tara,
    My friends and I don’t know what to do. We have this other “friend” who we think is a complete liar. She says that the Jonas Brothers are her cousins yet she can’t get us tickets toany of their concerts. She says she has this great big ginormous house with a huge pool, monster TV, and a Wii with every game ever released in the American market yet she can’t have people over to visit. Now she says she’s going to be in the next Kate Hudson movie and it will be filming this summer on a beautiful beach on the French Riviera and her parents are flying her there after school lets out. What do you want to bet it will be rated R so we can’t see it? We tell her that we know she’s lying but she insists that she’s telling the truth. It’s so annoying! What should we do?
    Signed,
    Annoyed in Denver, CO
    Â 
    And Tara’s response:
    Â 
    Dear Annoyed,
    Wow, I can see how frustrating this is for you guys. It sounds like your “friend” really wants you to like her. You must be a great group of kids to hang around. Maybe you should cut this “friend” a bit of a break. It sounds like she’s feeling inferior around youguys and she’s making things up to get you to like her. Would you like her if she wasn’t really a cousin of the Jonas Brothers? And she didn’t have the pool or the Wii? No movie to shoot in the summer? If the answer is yes, then let her know that you like her for who she is. If she feels like who she is
is
okay, then she’ll stop trying to be somebody else.
    â€”Tara
    Huh. Interesting. I can see Tara’s point in this situation, but I’m not sure that it applies to Sea and me. She sure doesn’t feel inferior to me; we’ve been best friends for way too long for something like that to pop up now. And she’s not making
lots
of stuff up. She’s just making up one specific person. Her “boyfriend.” But I won’t completely rule it out. I’m going to take all advice into consideration.
    I read for the next two hours, taking notes and trying to absorb absolutely everything I can about liars. It’s scary how many people have this problem. There are families that break up over lies and people who can’t keep jobs because no one can trust them. It seems like once liars get comfortable lying they do it forever. Well, I can’t let that happen to Sea. I need to save hernow before she embraces this lying life too tightly and there’s no turning back.
    I