A short story I came up with a while back. It was supposedto be for a competition, based on the theme "lies" but I liked it too much.

Enjoy.

Lies. Funny things aren't they?

I've told lies to cheer people up. I've told lies to hurt them. I've told the same lies to protect people; different ones to expose them.

I remember my first lie. I was around five, I think, and I had broken my sisters favourite doll, but I managed to get away with saying I had dropped it accidentally, instead of admitting that I had twisted her head round and round til it snapped off.

The mother accepted this story without question, I suppose. I never recieved punishment for the crime at any rate and right there my love of lying was born.

It always fascinated me how many shades of the truth there are. From brutal honesty to out-right lie, and all those hues in between, people will pick and choose the colour to suit them. When was the last time you heard brutal honesty? The truth is made more palatable for us by our peers and we return this favour in kind.

Though even now, as I button my shirt back up and slip off through the door down the alley, I wonder which shade I'm going to use today. I am skilled at lying, have it down to an art form; yet all skills and art forms take pratice unless you want them to go rusty or dull.

I settle for a slightly brown shade, no point in lying outright when a simple twist of the truth will do just fine for his slow mind. I would love to believe I choose my partners for their intellectual stimulus, their sparkling conversation or razor sharp wit. They all believe it, just as they swallow the muddy browns, burnt oranges and midnight blacks of my lies. It is my guilty pleasure, lying. I know it will one day be my downfall, but right now the satisfaction of watching their gulible faces as they nod at my explanation, unaware that I do not share all my life with anyone at all, is enough.

There's another lie. There was one, once. From hearing my friends as we gather round for yet another night of drinks and confessions, I think every girl has one. A boy they hold in their heart as a memory of an untainted time, when the world was black and white and boring but so much more interesting at the same time. Before the colour crept in and the drinks and the smoke that seems to herald every girls descent into womanhood. Look into every womans past and I'm sure you will find a boy like that, whether he is still the same as that shining memory or not is beside the point.

I have mine. The one boy who ever knew everything about me, who I saw no need, took no pleasure in lying to. Romeo and Juliet we were not, our romance was never foretold, our stars weren't crossed and in any case, we were too busy being children to wonder about the stars or our future.

The summer I'm thinking of began with many endings. Of my last year at middle school, the parents marriage, my stay in the idyllic cottage of my childhood and my sisters life.

To be honest, my sister never really got over the death of her favourite doll, or at least, that was my interpretation of it. She smiled less and less from then on, til the parents got involved and dragged her to shrinks and hospitals where clever people would tell the parents great, thick, black lies, which made them sigh or laugh and hold my sisters hand more tightly.

In the end they thought she was cured and she told them she was cured and nobody but me seemed to notice the way her lies went from yellow to inky black over the years. Still, I was barely thirteen when I found her asleep in her room, with an empty bottle of sleeping pills and the note and the bright whiteness of her honesty shining all over the room. It hurt to look at her.

The parents took it as well as I could figure they would. I expected the move, had said goodbye in that blankness long ago to the house, my childhood and my sister.

He surprised me when the mother and I moved into the newer, smaller house on the other side of town. He jumped out of the bushes at the end of the garden, retrieved the bright blue ball from my hands and grinned a grin of brilliant white. Star white. I grinned back, astonished to find my smile too was not the muddy brown it was usually coloured, but the same pure white. Maybe that's what it's like to be in love, I was too young to understand.

I called him Lucas, but his mother in a fit of madness had called him Lucifer. Irony reigned as he was the furthest thing from corruption possible. I was grown up, but he...he was still a child and he dragged me back with him. Much to everyones shock, I let it happen. I rode my bike; wrestled with him; made dens and went on adventures, despite the mothers warnings and hints about "growing up and concentrating on my school work". Together we were wild, free and dangerously immature. Every teenager accepts they'll die some day, just not now, yet every child believes that one day will always follow the next without fail. Lucas gave me back that belief, stopped me caring about tomorrow because to him, tomorrow was a certainty.

He saved my life, pulled me back from the blankness that had inhabited me since my sister left. If ever I showed signs of smiling a little too hard, he would poke and then tickle me 'til the smile went back to pure white. He was the only one I ever met who could see lies like I can and we always had competitions to see who could create the brightest coloured ones without laughing. He always won.

Nothing could disturb the balance, although I went to school and he did not, sometimes we swopped places for a while. He claimed schools gave him headaches and made him see too many colours at once, yet I relished that, loved the patterns they made. Nevertheless, the night before a test he would sit up and help me study, tutoring himself at the same time, 'til he was smarter that me at sums and could write an A worthy english essay in his sleep. Whenever I was panicky he would poke and tickle me to start the laughter, knowing that it has magical properties humans will never fully understand.

He left when I turned 16 and found my first boyfriend. I am never clear what happened to him, but when he didn't turn up at my door in the morning as he used to, I knew somewhere inside he was gone forever. The house he had once lived in stood radiating emptiness. When Aaron, my boyfriend, turned up he found me under my bed, staring at the spot where Lucas and I had written our wishlist of names we found pretty...

Julie

Angel

Sarah

Geoff

Kevin...

he whispered to me to get out from there, making me start and scramble up. Then he asked why I had been under the bed at all in the first place and I lied for the first time in two years.

"Lost my shoes, they must be downstairs" It came out a chocolate brown, flowed round poor Aaron and made me smile. I would not forget Lucas. I would be the best liar anywhere, the most colourful, yet the most believable. I gave Aaron a quick peck on the check and smiled a red smile.

"Let's go look yeh?" he took my hand and led me out of the room. As I turned around I could have sworn I saw Lucas on the bed, grinning his pure white smile. For a second, my smile was pure white too. Then I walked after Aaron.

I'm together with Joe now and Kieran and I are meeting up again on Saturday. Some of my friends are shocked at the amount of boyfriends I've had, they never saw the game in it. Lucas would. Part of me hopes that when I finish with Keiran, I'll come home to find Lucas on my bed, or in the bushes and that the house that stands so lonely will once again feel lived in.

I taught him his alphabet. I hope he remembers that L comes after K, that soon I'll be calling for him again, to share those pure white smiles and the bike riding and adventures. To say I'm certain I'm innocent enough for him to come back would be a lie. A filthy, ginormous, black lie.

Sometimes I wish I believed me as much as everyone else does.