Ace of Lies

Ace of Lies

(A modern adaptation of The Boy Who Cried Wolf)

1

I adopted the nickname Ace when I was ten years old. My legal name always carried a weight I refused to bear. I loved the ability to change myself at a moment’s notice. I watched my parents and peers remain in the same tired doldrum day after day. I knew, early on, that wouldn’t be my fate. I learned if I added a flourish here and an embellishment there my audience hung on my every word. Little dramatics never hurt anyone, right?

At twelve years old I told my English teacher my mother had died unexpectedly the night before, and the police were looking for my father to question him. I did not do this to get out of taking a test or to avoid a punishment. I was simply bored by the lack of attention I was being given at that particular moment. In case you’re confused, my mom was perfectly fine, and my dad was not on the lam, as they say.

Lying came easy and I fed off the reactions I would get. I never thought twice about the long-term effects. If I was caught in one of my tall tales, I simply came up with another one to explain the first and so on and so forth. The more fantastic the explanation the more friends I would amass by the time the story made its rounds. One boy would tell his friend, that friend would tell his sister, his sister would tell her mom, etc... If anyone dared to call me out on my stories, I would meticulously destroy their character. Lies and truth; I’d intermingle the details. People wanted to believe in me which made it easy to turn them against the one who dared to doubt me in the first place.

As the years came and went, I created more fantastical ways my parents suffered. The reactions from peers and parents alike were immensely gratifying. If one of my classmates stated his father needed surgery, I would state that I’d been taking my dad to radiation treatments for a rare tumor. I’d build an entire story with quirky doctors who refused to give up and I was right there holding my dad’s hand.

Making the kids believe me was easy when we were younger. As I reached high school many of my stories had made their way in and out of people’s mouths enough times that I was a living legend. I found myself surrounded by superficial friends who enjoyed the drama I produced but wanted nothing more to do with me.

2

As I stumbled through the door of my house one icy winter night, having come from a party, the warm air inside surrounded me. I clumsily slammed the door shut. Oops…  I knew my mom would be pissed if I woke either of my parents. She was always trying to change me. Always telling me I needed to quit telling tales and grow up. She said the real world wouldn’t be as forgiving as she and my dad were.

“Stop lying, Aesop!” Mom would screech, refusing to call me by my nickname. “What must the other parents think of us?” She would moan on. Obviously, over the years some of my stories had made their way back to my mom and my dad. Sometimes, strangers would show up with casseroles and words of wisdom. Other times reporters would knock on the door asking for a statement. In the beginning, my dad would say I was just being a kid and to let me enjoy my tall tales. As my lies became bigger and more upsetting, he simply began to ignore me.

Now, as I stood in the kitchen, suddenly aware of the silence inside my house, something didn’t feel quite right. Ignoring my intuition, I stumbled to the fridge and opened it to get myself a bottle of water. Still a little drunk, I fumbled and cursed as my clumsy fingers slipped off the door handle three times before I successfully yanked it open. The refrigerator cast its light across the tile, and I was instantly frozen in fear. My mother’s eyes stared up from the floor, directly into mine, wide and glazed. It felt like she was silently begging me to help her. I couldn’t look away and it was the only thing I wanted to do, more than anything I had ever wanted in my life. I just wanted to stop seeing my mother’s ashen face frozen in terror. I don’t know how long I stood there. It could have been minutes or hours. When I was finally able to move, I croaked out a moan and crumpled to the floor. Sobbing, I crawled on my hands and knees towards my mother’s lifeless body. Her neck was bent at a ninety-degree angle, and I could see a dark red coloration along it. I reached for the cordless phone that sat in a cradle on the small decorative table I always begged Mom to throw out. I dialed, lifted the phone to my ear and waited for the voice on the other line to ask me what my emergency was.

3

It has been one week since that night, and no one knows where my dad is. I told the cops repeatedly where I had been that evening and how I found my mom. I had an airtight alibi, since I was at a party surrounded by several people at my school. However, no one the police officers interviewed seemed to remember for sure if they saw me. When asked who I hung out with or sat with I couldn’t give them a name of any single person I had spent any quality time around. Plenty of girls’ asses I grabbed, plenty of guys hands I slapped, plenty of beer bongs I’d chugged but not one conversation amongst any of my peers.

I guess that’s how I find myself sitting here staring at my school’s website, scrolling through comment after comment from my classmates saying they always knew I’d do something “like this.” Each one states disdainfully how I lied about this or that. It seems they all have a story about my tall tales and how much they hated me all these years, how they felt sorry for me to have needed to lie so much, how they never believed a word I uttered. Each post has its individual gripe but the one sentence I have seen more times than I can count is, “Aesop Shepherd has always been the boy who cried wolf.”