Read Online The First True Lie: A Novel by Marina Mander - Free Book Online

she wants to go and eat hamburgers right away. She makes such a racket that no one wonders why I’m so quiet.
    “Do you want to come with us?”
    “No, I can’t. My mother’s waiting for me. Actually, she asked if you could give me a ride since she didn’t know what time she’d be done at the doctor’s.”
    “Do you want us to call her?”
    “No, when she’s at the doctor’s she turns her phone off.”
    I feel like a genius. A genius who has just fallen from the eighth floor and landed without a scratch because they were moving mattresses below, like one of those crazy news stories that pop up in the papers every so often, when reality is stranger than fantasy.
    “CHILD FALLS FROM WINDOW, LANDS ON GUIDE DOG, NEARLY PULLS BLIND MAN UNDER TRAM: NO ONE HURT.” Grandma loves that kind of thing.
    Or else I’m like cats with their nine lives; they leap off the balcony to catch a pigeon and miraculously survive.
    We get in their car and five minutes later we’re in front of my building. Elisabetta says to me, “Too bad for you, you can’t come eat with us.”
    I stick my tongue out at her.
    Davide says, “See you tomorrow.”
    His mother: “Bye, dear.”
    And then she says some dirty word to a guy complaining because we’re double-parked.
    They wait for me to go in the front door. I don’t turn to wave good-bye.
    When I hear the car leaving, I think maybe I’ve gone too far. Someone goes to the movies and then comes home, and at home there’s still Mama—dead in her bed.
    It’s not possible.
    It doesn’t make sense.
    It’s just a story I made up to frighten myself.
    I like to read. I read without stumbling over the words, even when I have to read out loud, even when Grandma would make me get up on the chair and Mama would scold her.
    “For heaven’s sake, we’re not at the circus.”
    I would stand there in my pajamas barefoot, like a parrot clutching his perch, and recite Manzoni—“He has passed. As stark and still”—and I really was still, until the end of the poem.
    Words are wonderful because there are so many.
    Best of all I like difficult words and long ones, like
antidisestablishmentarianism
.
    Or funny ones, like
topsy-turvy
. There are lots of ways to talk about a huge confusion, but
topsy-turvy
is my favorite. So on the walls of the first-grade classrooms, along with the words
airplane
in the shape of an airplane and
banana
in the shape of a banana, they could hang a photo of me and Mama as
topsy
and
turvy,
the one where we look just like each other, like two peas in a pod, held together tight-tight in our shell.
    Words are useful for working out what others are really saying, the ones who think you can’t understand.
    Words in a row make stories.
    You put things in a row and make a story out of it. Stories put things in their places. Then you’re more relaxed. The stories you invent are your personal lullabies. Even when they’re horrible, they don’t scare you anymore because you’re the one who invented them.
    That’s what this is too.
    This story is only a secret I told myself to see if I’m able to keep a really secret secret.
    Now I open the door and smell meatballs in the hall.
    Meatballs and mashed potatoes, my favorite, the meal Mama makes me when she has to ask me to forgive her for something big.
    She’s still there.
    Usually she helps me do my homework. Or she checks it afterward. Or else she listens while I recite something in English. It seems like English is very important. English is useful for songs, and for PlayStation too. If you know English, you understand certain things better.
    Tomorrow I have a test at school.
    No matter what, I
have
to study.
    I have to study, study, study.
    If you don’t study, friend, you’re screwed. If you don’t get at least a “Good” on this test you’re in big trouble. They’ll put a big black mark next to your name and call a parent meeting.
    “Do you get it, friend? Dear Mama will have to go and talk to the assfaces who