THERE WILL BE LIES

Chapters 1-3

I’m going to be hit by a car in about four hours, but I don’t know that yet.

The weird thing is, it’s not the car that’s going to kill me, that’s going to erase me from the world.

It’s something totally different. Something that happens eight days from now and threatens to end everything.

My name is Shelby Jane Cooper – is, was, whatever. I’m seventeen years old when the car crash happens. This is my story.

 8…

 C HA P TE R 1

WHEN I COME INTO the living room, Mom is not even slightly ready, which doesn’t surprise me. She’s got the TV on full blast; it’s so loud, the ground is vibrating. At the same time she’s got the closed captions on: Mom is a believer in total communication. She’s on the couch, in her pyjama jeans, working on one of her cross-stitches. On the screen, it’s news: something about a plane crashing some- where cold looking; torn metal gleaming in snow. I glance at the closed captions.

... with all 336 passengers lost, the black rocks ‘ black box is yet to be discovered . . .

This is how they do it, see: there’s an actual person typing this stuff, and when they make a mistake, like saying black rocks instead of black box, they do that line, I don’t know what it’s called, like a long hyphen, and then they correct it.

It’s actually kind of hypnotic, because you start to picture this person, this totally ordinary person, not a presenter or anything, just sitting there and trying to write down what the anchor is saying and sometimes screwing up. It makes the TV feel human, I guess: I can see why Mom likes it.

 Black rocks? says Mom, and I didn’t even realise she was watching. I mean, the context alone.

Oh yeah: this is the other reason she keeps the closed captions on. She loves to see how other people do it. Mom’s a stenographer at the courthouse. She spends her whole working life transcribing the words of lawyers and witnesses, so for her, the people who do it on the TV are like unseen competitors.

You coming? I ask.

Where?

I mime the swing, the slight pause when the bat strikes the ball, then the follow-through.

Mom checks her watch, ties off her thread, and wipes her hands on her pyjama jeans. Sorry, she says. Got caught up. You finish your essay?

Yes, I say. I have just been typing a three-thousand-word essay on decolonisation for her, with a special emphasis on French Indo- china. That’s when I haven’t been talking to my online friends on the forums, anyway. I love it: I love how I can talk so quickly, I mean, I can talk at the speed I type, which is superfast. Mom doesn’t know I even HAVE online friends, she wouldn’t let me have Facebook, that’s for sure, but she doesn’t know that you can open a private browser window either, and then no one can see your history.

OK, clarification: friends might be a stretch. But, you know, I have people I can talk to about TV shows and books that I love. And they know who I am, they welcome me when I log on. I know they could be anyone, they could be fifty-year-old creeps in their underpants, but I like talking to them. So sue me.

And anyway, it’s good for my typing skills, which helps when it comes to the tasks Mom sets me.

Mom is big on homework but she’s also big on typing and writing in general - it’s that total communication thing again, plus I guess she is a stenographer so it’s 110 per cent obvious why typing would be important to her. So I don’t just have to do the essays, I have to do them in a set time. This decolonisation essay she assigned me yesterday.