Beautiful Lies Read Online Free PDF

is one of the few things my sister and I don’t have in common.
    After almost twenty minutes of sitting in near silence, listening to the sound of blood rushing behind my ears, trying to calm myself without any success, I know I have to do
something.
I can’t sit here all night, waiting.
    What I really want to do is call Robin. If he’s around, maybe there’s a chance he saw my sister at the fair and tried to talk to her. It seems unlikely, and he wouldn’t have gotten very far with her if they did run into each other. But I can’t call him. Robin is the only person I know who has never owned a cell phone. At least, he always claimed he didn’t have one. No cell, no house line, no way whatsoever for anybody to get in touch with him unless he reached out first.
    I sit, staring at my phone, trying to will it to ring.
    It does. The sound makes me jump. I look at the screen to see who’s calling, but it only says UNKNOWN NUMBER. It could be him. It
must
be him. It rings four times before I answer.
    “Hello?” I ask tentatively.
    Silence on the other end.
    “Hello?” I repeat. “Who is this?”
    “Hi.” It’s him. There’s no background noise. Even though he’s only said one word, I can sense that he sounds tired, ormaybe sad. Where is he? What is he doing tonight? Who is he with?
    “Robin,” I say. “Where are you?” He tends to come and go as he pleases, showing up out of nowhere sometimes.
    “I’m here,” he says. “I’m talking to you.”
    “You have to tell me something,” I continue. “It’s important. Promise you’ll tell me the truth, okay?”
    Another pause. “Sure.”
    “Were you at Hollick Park tonight? There’s a fair. You must have seen it.” He lives on the opposite side of town, but everybody knows about the autumn festival.
    I can
hear
him smiling. I can picture exactly what he looks like in my mind. “Nope,” he says, “I’ve been here all night.”
    “Where are you?”
    “It’s not important.”
    “Robin,” I say, “it
is
important. Why did you call me, anyway?”
    “I don’t know,” he says. “I just felt like it, okay?”
    “You haven’t been around lately. What have you been doing?”
    He ignores the question. “I’ve gotta go. Sorry. Listen, though—you know where to find me if you need anything, right?”
    I stare at his portrait, which is so lifelike that it almost seems like he’s right here in the room with me.
    There’s a pause in our conversation that seems to stretch forever. I can hear his thick breath. He’s smoking a cigarette.I imagine the room he might be in, all alone in his cheap apartment on the east end of town.
    I squeeze my eyes shut in frustration. He is always like this, so nebulous. So difficult to pin down. “Right,” I say weakly. “Fine. Thanks a lot.”
    I don’t wait long for him to respond. After a few seconds, I take the phone away from my ear, press end, and toss it onto the bed.
    Minutes pass, and he doesn’t call back. But I continue to stare at his half-finished portrait near the window, trying to imagine what he’s doing at this moment. I lay in bed, on top of my sheets, listening to my heart beating in my chest. I can feel my eyes moving in their sockets. My sweat dampens my clothing, and I get so chilly that I can’t stand it anymore, so I finally get up and change into a pair of pajamas. Around two in the morning, I cross the room and climb into my sister’s bed. I lay there for what feels like forever, until I can’t hold my eyes open any longer. Downstairs, I hear Linda the cat meowing in the kitchen, all by herself, afraid of the dark night.

Chapter Three
    We were four the first time. We had a baby pool in our backyard. I was in the pool, playing with a plastic teacup set. My sister went inside to use the bathroom. My mother let her go in all by herself. The bathroom was right inside the back door, next to the kitchen.
    My mother had dark red hair that she used to wear in a messy ponytail. She’d sit in