If the Witness Lied by Caroline B. Cooney

Author:Caroline B. Cooney [Cooney, Caroline B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-89106-9
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2009-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

THE WIDE GRASSY EXPANSE BETWEEN McDONALD’S AND THE HIGH school feels so familiar to Smithy. She can’t remember ever being at Saybrook High. Probably it feels familiar because schools are often brick and grass is often green. Then she realizes: it’s not the school—it’s the running. It’s her theme song. Things get bad? Run. Things get worse? Run again.

Her little brother is about to be damaged, and is Smith Fountain providing damage control? No. She’s on the run again.

Smithy is falling apart. Her skin is gone, her joints dissolve. She’ll be a pile of legs and arms, her separated heart beating by itself on the grass.

The high school kids hurry because they have a schedule—places to go and papers to write. And what is Smithy’s schedule? Does she plan to hide out in a bathroom in the school building? For how long? And then what?

When her cell phone rings, she’s filled with fear, as if this will be some sort of retribution. And it is: it’s Kate. Smithy has more or less kicked dirt in Kate’s face. After all Kate did for her—all Kate’s parents did for her!—Smithy can’t even be bothered to tell her roommate what’s up.

She answers because she has to, and out spill words she cannot control. “Hi, Kate. Don’t be mad. I’m sorry about all this. I was rotten. Oh, Kate, things are worse. I thought they were perfect. I thought coming home would be perfect. It was my father’s birthday and I was thinking of candles and cake icing, and even though I was late, I didn’t think I was too late. But Kate, something’s happening. I don’t even know what. I can’t even ask Jack or Madison. I don’t even know them anymore.”

* * *

A boarding school has few secrets.

Smithy is wrong that her background is a secret. She doesn’t face questions only because every other freshman is also new; they’re all away from home for the first time, learning to be roommates and to act independently; learning to live in the middle of a perpetual slumber party and yet study far more than they would back home.

Roommates are knit together. It hurts Kate that Smithy did not confide. Yet Smithy hid less than she thought. Kate knows about the photograph on the cell phone and the larger one in its silver frame under the stack of sweaters. She knows that this Aunt Cheryl has not once phoned, written or visited. She knows that the distant grandparents never fail to phone and write, and that Smithy always lies and claims to be busy. She knows that the few times Smithy initiates calls to her brother Jack or her sister, Madison, they have nothing to say to each other, and yet they’re not angry; they’re just unable to talk. They can stay afloat when they are apart, and the thought of coming together makes them sink.

Kate has no parallel.

The only time she and her roommate do not get along is when Kate dresses for church. Smithy has taken the stance that if there were a God, he wouldn’t have let these things happen.

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