2. Liar
Chapter Two
LIAR
I ’m a liar.
My best friend, only friend if you count people you don’t always lie to, says I’m a pathological liar, because I’m so convincing, but I’ve studied the topic extensively, and I’m more of an extremely talented compulsive liar.
I can’t believe my lies, because every day reality stabs me in the leg.
Literally, two inch long needle right there in my thigh that says, ‘you’re going to die.
’ Ever since the twenty-first anniversary of my mother’s death from the hereditary diseases she passed to me, that jab has been extra intense.
‘You’re going to die, just like she did.
’ Or ‘You stole six months of life. Take your pills and steal one more.’ I have a lot of fun talking with my needles.
Sorry. I should introduce myself properly.
I’m Sunshine Ray Wilson, twenty-two and excited to start fall semester in Alabama’s finest private university.
My dad worked in the research labs here, where he met my mom.
You could say I was a test tube baby, only because they conceived me on some table full of iffy chemicals, not because I was planned.
Nope. I was my mother’s death sentence, but like the lunatic she was, she decided that love was fate and I was the greatest gift her life had ever given her.
Just as an aside, she was an even bigger liar than I am.
I got my talents from her, but at least I don’t lie to myself.
I messed it up at the end there. That was too pessimistic and world-weary. I’m not jaded. Life’s too short for that kind of negativity.
I was standing on the front porch of the cute little yellow bungalow I lived in with my Aunt.
She’s a doctor who specializes in pain medication, developing the very best, so I can operate with excellent motor function in spite of the drugs.
I am the heaviest user I know, but I still don’t take as much as I could.
There’s not enough to completely cut the pain, and like I said, life’s too short to pass it in a drooling haze.
While I was standing there, taking in the crisp beautiful fall morning, bright sunshine lighting up my yellow Camaro, the world was so beautiful that I wanted to dance. Well, life’s too short not to dance when you feel like it.
The song in my head was ‘Twistin’ the Night Away’, a song I used to dance to with my dad. He died seven years ago. He was a surgeon when he wasn’t a researcher of rare genetic diseases, but first of all, he was my dad, the best dad in the world, and I’m not even lying.
I was getting groovy on my porch when I saw him.
The guy down by the road was blond, blue-eyed, and sculpted like the Greeks did it.
His eyes met mine and then he smiled and I tripped on my own feet and fell over sideways.
When I popped back up, he wasn’t looking at me, just carrying the stack of boxes up the walk towards the house two doors down that had been empty for a few months.
I should say hi. I should bake him cookies.
I should ask him to stab my needle into my leg in the morning after an all-night hayride.
Were they called hayrides? I didn’t really have conversations about sex.
Why wouldn’t I be jumping on every sexy beast to ride through town?
Because I’d have to find someone who thought that bruising and dislocations were sexy.
I was what you called, ‘delicate’. Also, ew.
Life’s too short to add STI’s to my long list of medical issues.
Also, as old-fashioned as it was, I really wanted an afterlife in heaven with my dad and my mom.
It’s old-fashioned as in ageless because people need hope when life is a bowl of hopeless.
Sometimes I really feel that hope, but other times, it’s harder to think things will ever be better, but then the sun shines and a beautiful boy walks down the road and everything seems possible.
Maybe I would bake him cookies and invite him to church.
We could have a sweet romance with a church wedding followed quickly by a nice church funeral.
My heart skipped a beat at the thought. No, that was just my faulty valves seizing up.
But the sun was shining and someone somewhere was falling in love. Just not me.