I could never tell, when I was younger, what the difference between lying and telling stories was. My mother had always scolded me for telling stories, whenever I convinced the neighbor’s kids that my basement was haunted, and that the ghost thirsted for blood, and that’s what I had associated it as: stories, not lies, or even “fibs”.

If you would have asked my father, I was constantly telling stories. An active imagination and an everlasting feeling of boredom clearly did not mix well, as any chance I would get, my ‘stories’ would spill straight from my mouth, from convincing one my of teachers that my mother was pregnant, to saying that I saw little Jessy-what’s-her-name spill water in her library book. I can’t say it was always a bad intention that led me to do all of this, but more that I had wanted a piece of the spotlight, too.

Kindergarten was scarier than anyone had told me it would be, and that sense carried on into the rest of elementary school. I didn’t go to preschool with anyone at this school, so I hadn’t known anyone previously like everyone else seemed to. I guess that old ‘Jubilee’ daycare was the hip place to be when you’re learning to read, but I had spent my time some old Methodist church basement, converted into an office space on 13th street. The only girl I ever spoke to there was this little girl named Angie, who always wore little pink dresses. She had these buggy eyes too, but at the time I thought they were dreamy.
But since I spent all of my time surrounded by adults, mainly my parents and their friends, I didn’t know how to talk with kids. I figured I would just say George Bush all the timelike my parents did, but no one knew who I was talking about. Hell, I  didn’t know who I was talking about. I thought it was just one of those things you said back and forth and made angry faces for. I didn’t know.

So in order to gain some popularity, I began to lie. Oh, I was the fastest runner at my old preschool. And my parents are so rich that we have two garages in our house. Just wave after wave of, honestly, crap. But these little chickadees just ate that trash up, asking me questions about my billionaire parents and how many Gamecubes I had in my house.

But, everyone just found out that I was lying anyway, but I didn’t really face any relapse for it. Everyone lied in kindergarten, and in that sense I was not unique at all. I didn’t lie for a long time after that (I was so embarrassed), but everyone just acted as though nothing had happened; it was normal. But after a long time, I started lying again, but not for the same reason as before.

Now it was to get out of trouble.
There were kids who were afraid to lie to their parents, but it came as second nature to me. I could tell my mom that kids on the bus were peddling crack in the backseat and she would have looked at me as if I were the most dutiful nine-year-old she’d ever seen, and would believe me in an instant, but it was never like that.

As I said, I lied to get out of trouble. So there would be times that I forgot to do certain worksheets after school, or I called some kid a rude name, or I put a worm in Aubrey Meyer’s hood that one time, and I would basically say “Well, they started it!” except I would make up some slightly valiant reason, like: “Well she was picking on so-and-so, and I was too scared to stand up for them, so I put a worm in their hood.” Most of the time this didn’t work at school, but it always worked at home so that I would only get a disapproving look rather than the wrath of my sprightly mother.

I think the time that stands out to me the most is when there was this girl on my bus, this horrible whale of a thing that just called people names and took their snacks when they weren’t looking. She always got away with it, too. So this one time, she was doing that thing that little kids always do, where whenever the windows are moist they would write something along the lines of “HELP”, and in a spark of divine inspiration, I said:
“I don’t think they have a big enough forklift for that.”

As it turns out, her weight was a seemingly sensitive topic, so while all the kids around me on the bus thought I was a hero for finally slaying the chubby, hoarder dragon, the principal and that girls parents didn’t feel the same way -- I got detention for the first time in my life. It was the scariest thing, because while I didn’t really care about the detention itself, I had to get a parent signature to show that one of my parents had seen that I needed to spend an hour with the principal in her office. I thought about getting my dad to sign another piece of paper and then copying in down onto the detention slip, but I was already so deep in s*** that I didn’t want to test it. So I went and told my mom at the very last second before school started that next Monday and told her, and while I didn’t specifically lie in this instance, I still forgot to mention that I was the aggressor this time. I just told my mom that whale-girl had always been mean to my friends, so I saw my chance for revenge and took it. She gave me the most disappointed look I had ever seen, and I’d never sweated more in my entire life, until she cracked a guilty smile and signed my sheet, trying to look angry still, and said: “Don’t do it again or I’ll tear your ass apart.”

But then she laughed again so I didn’t pay attention to the death threat I had just received.

But the lies didn’t stop when I was a kid, although (as it always has) the purpose for lying has taken a dramatic shift. When I was in fourth grade, I met this new kid “AJ”. We were pretty good friends, although, ironically, I was the good egg one out of the two of us. There was almost never a moment when we weren’t at each others house, even though most of the time it was at mine, thank god, because he had Kool-Aid stains on the carpet and that was completely unacceptable. But this one time, I was showing him my cool gameboy, and while I didn’t notice it at the time, he took a very great deal of interest in it. So much interest, in fact, that he freaking stole it out from under my nose. I thought for weeks that I had magically lost it, or maybe left it outside and someone neighbor kid took it. It was in this little Nintendo backpack that I still have, and all of my Metroid games, plus a 20 dollar bill, were inside. That bag was my life, and I had just gotten to the boss monster in Metroid Fusion. That’s the worst thing you can ever do to a kid who doesn’t have many friends, take away his video games. But then one day, outside during recess, guess where I found them?

AJ had them.

The little cerulean case of my gameboy, shining off in the summer sun like a forgotten gem, after weeks of searching, there it was. In the hands of my best friend. I’d never been so angry before, and screaming, I lunged out to him, snatched my gameboy out of his hands and flew my fist directly into his chest. I got in trouble for that one too, had to stand by a lamp post all recess.

As an act of revenge, I kept a few GameCube discs that he left me borrow, even after he gave me my gameboy back and moved away to Colorado. Sometimes, even now, he’ll call my house and ask for them (the nerve of that kid), but I always say “Oh, I mailed them to you -- should be coming in any time now.”

I don’t think I’m a bad person for lying, a little petty maybe, but I am nowhere near villain status, like, come on.
I think I’ve just used something to my advantage, after all, I was just a kid when I did most of it. But herein lies, the question, is anything that I just told you true or was it just another innocent lie? I guess you’d have to figure that one out for yourself, because someone who lies can still tell truth, but the trick is differentiating truth from lies.