The first lie he ever told was when he was eight. He stole a felt tip blue pen from the boy sitting next to him in class and he denied his involvement earnestly when their homeroom teacher questioned the entire class, all the while the pen’s cap burned against his calf.
The second lie, albeit not entirely a lie but withheld truth, was when the kids at school proclaimed his mother was a prostitute, and rather than defend or deny this falsehood, he allowed it to manifest and engulf the person they perceived him to be.
He became more adept at telling lies as he grew older, and the thrill he experienced when creating a separate image of himself — by willingly retaining information, by allowing rumors to spread and by never correcting misconceptions, — bordered on the insatiable. He was old enough to know that the less he revealed about himself, the more they reveled in the mysteries surrounding him, and he became dependent on the attention harbored by these lies.
The twenty-seventh lie he told was that he drank his coffee black (no sugar) when meeting Willem for the second time, before a social studies class, to impress him when in fact he did not drink coffee at all. They’d sat at a table in the corner, Willem going through a play script for one of his classes, distracted, to which he was grateful as he took his first sip and nearly spit it out in Willem’s face. The taste was bitter and alien against his tongue, and not a second later, he’d become fidgety and restless, imagining bolts of caffeine violating his cells and pumping his veins with unsolicited energy.
The fifty-second lie ejected his lips without permission, when he’d kissed Willem fervently and Willem kissed him back, their tongues delving in and out of each other’s mouths. He pulled back and told Willem what a bad kisser he was, afraid of kissing him again, afraid of losing him, but all the while his thoughts thrummed, like an incantation: kiss me again, kiss me again, kiss me again, Willem, Willem, Willem. But Willem had smiled and said he didn’t feel “it” either. And that was that.
The seventy-third lie he’d told was to himself, when Jude and Willem invited him to dinner and disclosed that they’d been dating for a number of months, and he’d said he was happy for them but still exaggerated his disbelief. He told himself he was happy for them, he told himself Jude and Willem were meant to be, and he told himself he had stopped being envious of Jude at least a decade ago.