lie to me → s.d.

.13 | foggy memories

          The other kids used to call Theodora a show off when she was in school. History class was the most dreaded subject of the day if you were in the same hour as Know-It-All Thatcher, because she either answered every question the teacher even thought about asking, or she was ignored because quite frankly, she knew the material better than the professors. She went to parent-teacher conferences alone, because her mother was tied up with budget cuts and chemo, and it was almost laughable, the sight of a trio of university-trained adults asking a thirteen-year-old if she was managing to cheat on every test and quiz she ever took. The answer was always the same; why would she cheat if she already knew all the answers?

          She carried a backpack much too big for her little frame, nearly tearing at the bottom from the weight of the books she read at lunch, at recess, hell - even under her desk during mathematics. They weren't hers, she admitted when her school counselor asked. They were from the library. She asked her why the Boston library would loan such violent, inexpedient tales of pirates and outlaws to a child. She told her a friend got them for her.

          Which friend, she had asked?

          He doesn't go here, she had said. He was eleven years older and visited her in the nighttime.

          The police were called after that, and Theodora started to find lying kept her out of the trouble telling the honest truth would wiggle her into.

          It didn't always work.

          "No," Theodora lied, calling down over the slope of her shoulder, "it's not that steep."

          The icy cliffs and unforgiving stone walls of east Scotland were brutal, forcing a cutthroat wind down through its valleys and chasms and straight through the thick jackets of the thieves picking their way upwards. Around their waists were ropes, and attached to the other ends were grappling hooks that had seen far better days than these. The glacial, choppy waters some thousand feet below them waited hungrily, impatiently, like animals staring up at food being dangled before their muzzles.

          Scampering up the edifice-like cliffside at twice the brothers' speed, she looked like some kind of lizard hopping this way and that to the next half-inch to grab hold of. The tips of her bare fingers, coated in a white, chalky powder, were numb to the touch and there were moments she wasn't sure if she had even properly secured a grip on a ledge before pushing herself up. Just in their line of sight on the ocean's surface, Sully's Grumman G-21 plane bounced with the rhythm of the waves.

          From somewhere below her, Nathan's voice called out. "Oh, no, she says. It's not steep at all, she says."

          "Maybe you just need more practice," said Theodora. Near the top of the cliffside, she tucked the grappling hook's rope into its place on her waist, then wiggled her hips like a cat, and sprang upwards. She grabbed a handful of earth and dead grass, angled over the edge, and hauled herself up to flat ground. "Because I'm already at the top!"

          The words had barely escaped her lips, nearly a tint of blue from the cold, when a ground-shaking thunder rocked the ground beneath her feet. Her heart skipped at least three beats, panicking inside the confines of her ribcage, and her head whipped around to locate the source of the sound. In the far, far distance, over the top of a few yellowed hills, dark smoke ascended into the air like a celebration was underway.

          "Theo!" called Sam. "You all good?"

          She took a breath, then nodded her head as if they could have seen her. "I'm not sure," she hollered. Securing her hook around the gnarled, twisting body of a diseased tree near the cliff, she tossed the rest of her rope over the side for them to grab. She dug her heels into the earth, holding it secure, when a heavy weight attached itself to the end and started to climb up. "Looks like an explosion up the way a bit."