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Authors: Chris Lynch

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BOOK: Little Blue Lies
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“I hope so, O, I sure do. And I am confident, once you start making your way through this game, once you start connecting all the dots, once you appreciate all the things that a man's just got to do in certain situations, which I know you are going to click on—”

“As your shadow.”

“As my shadow, exactly. Once all that starts falling in, once you see the world up close and for real, how the gears work and how guys like you and I
work
them . . . Well, I just know you are going to
get it
. You are going to get it, get it all, and get it like nobody's business. I just know it.”

He is visibly excited. There is something primal about
what I'm seeing, elemental with the tide coming up to meet him and his mad pleasure barely contained.

He truly believes that that is going to happen. That I am going to be that man.

And, to my horror, I believe him too.

“And it all starts tomorrow morning,” I shout, standing tall on my rock.

“Yes,” he says, still squatting, still as always a bit more timid than I am about such stuff.

“I'll see you later, Dad,” I say.

He's shouting something as I dive off the rock, in the direction of the open ocean.

Twelve

My suit, my bespoke gunmetal
gray, summer-weight fine wool suit fits me better than my actual flesh does. I am a shark, I'm a blade, I am any number of beautiful streamlined lethal things, and I honestly feel like I can do what needs to be done, whatever needs to be done, in this suit. I look in the full-length mirror hanging on the inside of my closet door, and I'm stunned and intimidated by the transformation. I would buy anything from this guy in the mirror. I would do anything this guy told me to do, yes, including dropping to my knees and blowing him.

Power.

I could also quite happily shoot him.

I sit at the breakfast table with Mom and Dad for the first time this summer. Dad and I are, obviously, on the same schedule now, but Mom is here for reasons known only to herself. She usually likes to ease slowly into the day, a brief kitchen cameo before taking coffee and laptop back to bed. But here she is, staring at me with a mix of puzzlement and sadness that is making me heartsick, for her.

Dad just looks up at me occasionally over his
Journal
and juice, keeping words to a minimum, for fear, I believe, of sideswiping whatever momentum I have for getting to that first day at the office. It's unspoken, but there is still enough of the same wiring in both of us that I believe we are both humming on this same wave—that somehow something irrevocable happens if we just get me across that threshold of day one of Shadow.

I would bet anything we're right about that. I believe there are
crossover
points, and this is one.

Looking at Mom, I would bet she would make that same bet.

She looks like she's at a wake. I feel like I am at a wake. Except, even at a wake people talk, a little.

The atmosphere is so spooky still that two of the three of us jump when my phone beeps a new message alert.

Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me outside at seven thirty.

I check the time on the phone. Seven thirty-three.

“Excuse me,” I say, nearly tipping my chair over backward as I fly for the door. I burst outside.

“Holy mother,” I say.

“Holy mother right back atcha,” she says.

Junie Blue is sitting there, parked right in front of my house, in the 1963 cobalt-blue Corvette that has been sitting
in marquee position in the front lot of the classic-car dealer for the last three months. I have lusted secretly for this car every single day but feared if I spoke up, someone would buy it for me.

“Junie . . . wow.”

“O . . . wow. I heard, through the grapevine—cough! LeonaMaxie—that you were walking the green mile in your monkey suit, but I didn't believe it.”

I look down at my sharp-suited self.

“I only half-believe it myself.”

“Even half is probably too much.”

“I knew you wouldn't leave without me,” I say. I knew nothing of the kind, so it must be the suit talking.

“Well, wrong again. I did leave without you, O. I got away, to the edge of town and beyond.”

“But you came back. This is good. This is good. You'll give it another—”

“Wrong.”

“Then what are you back for?”

She unfurls the most kill-me-dead-run-me-over-then-back-over-me-again-for-good-measure victorious Creamsicle smile the world could possibly stand.

“For you. For you. I came for you. Know why?”

I'm just conversing politely now, because why should I care why? “Why?”

“Because you need me. This is
me
rescuing
you
. From the horrors of what you were about to do. Me, saving you. And y'know, it feels kinda nice.”

She guns and guns the great growly 'Vette engine.

“I can't really linger, O, so if you're coming . . .”

There is no rational debate to be had here—no emotional one, either for that matter. But I freeze up. This is huge and drastic and wild and way outside anything I even contemplated before, and without a doubt the exact opposite of what I was just about to do with myself this odd fine morning. I actually start lurching in the direction of the house.

“What are you doing?”

“Um, I don't know. I'll have to get . . . stuff.”

She reaches across and throws the door open. “All the
stuff
you're ever gonna need is in here already.”

And that has the effect of paralyzing me even further. I am stuck, like a frozen dopesicle, on the step.

“For the love of God, go!” Mom's wonderful, weird, warm voice groans at me from the front-room screen. “I will carry you to the car myself if I have to.”

And that snaps it.

I run, jump into that fine automobile, driven by that fine woman, and we peel away, me waving crazily back at my mother, who is curdling the whole neighborhood with a cowboy howl I never knew she had.

•  •  •

We could not have gotten to open road faster if we'd taken a helicopter. The car loves the highway, and purrs to tell us so.

“So,” I say, “where'd you get the money for this?”

“Walkin' . . . the . . . dogs,” she drawls, the three words taking thirty minutes to come out.

I take my tie off and let it trail like our flag out the window.

“You know what is the one great thing that makes us right, Sweet Junie Blue Lies?”

“What is that one great thing, Lyin' O'Brien?”

“At least we lie to each other honestly.”

She nods, considers, changes lanes without signaling.

“We would,” she says, “if we ever lied.”

I set the necktie free in the world that's now behind us.

“Ah. True,” I say.

“True,” she says.

True.

CHRIS LYNCH
is the Printz Honor–winning author of several highly acclaimed young adult novels, including
Inexcusable
, which was a National Book Award Finalist and the recipient of six starred reviews. He is also the author of the Printz Honor Book
Freewill
,
Gold Dust
,
Gypsy Davey
,
Iceman
, and
Shadow Boxer
, all ALA Best Books for Young Adults, as well as
Pieces
,
Kill Switch
,
Angry Young Man
,
Hothouse
,
Extreme Elvin
,
Whitechurch
, and
All the Old Haunts
. Chris teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He divides his time between Boston and Scotland.

Simon & Schuster • New York

authors.simonandschuster.com/Chris-Lynch

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ALSO BY CHRIS LYNCH

Pieces

Kill Switch

Angry Young Man

Inexcusable

Shadow Boxer

Iceman

Gypsy Davey

Freewill

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2014 by Chris Lynch

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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.

Jacket design and illustration by Krista Vossen

Interior design by Hilary Zarycky

The text for this book is set in Berling.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lynch, Chris, 1962–

Little blue lies / Chris Lynch. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: Oliver, known as “O,” and his suddenly ex-girlfriend Junie are are known for telling little lies, but one of Junie's lies about not winning the lottery could get her into trouble with a local mob boss.

ISBN 978-1-4424-4008-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4424-4010-4 (eBook)

[1. Honesty—Fiction. 2. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction.

3. Organized crime—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.L979739Lit 2014

[Fic]—dc23

2012041877

BOOK: Little Blue Lies
13.4Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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