The Truth About White Lies Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by Olivia A. Cole

  Cover art copyright © 2022 by Mojo Wang. Cover design by Karina Granda.

  Cover copyright © 2022 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  Hachette Book Group

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  First Edition: March 2022

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Cole, Olivia A., author.

  Title: The truth about white lies / Olivia A. Cole.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2022 | Audience: Ages 14 & up. | Summary: “An unflinching story about Shania, a white girl who, after moving to a gentrifying city, reckons with her role in racism there, the historical and present day effects of white supremacy, and the danger in silence” —Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021010569 | ISBN 9780759554122 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780759554115 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Racism—Fiction. | White supremacy movements—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.C6429 Tr 2022 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010569

  ISBNs: 978-0-7595-5412-2 (hardcover), 978-0-7595-5411-5 (ebook)

  E3-20220128-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  By Olivia A. Cole

  For Jess and Starkisha

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  “The opposite of love’s indifference.” —The Lumineers

  “In maintaining the pretense of its invisibility, Whiteness maintains the pretense of its inevitability, and its innocence.” —Dr. Eve L. Ewing

  Dear Reader,

  This story contains discussions of racism and white supremacy in subtle and not-so-subtle terms. There are no outright racial slurs in this book, but their absence may not make its contents less painful. In addition, there are discussions of fatphobia and Islamophobia. Please read with caution.

  PROLOGUE

  February

  With her grandmother’s heart and arms too weak to lift the soil, Shania had come to help bury the dog.

  “I think under the sycamore is best,” Gram said. “Or maybe by the willow. What do you think?”

  Shania surveyed the wide green yard, the chipping white fence that contained it. There were only the two trees, as scrubby and stunted as the rest of her hometown of Morrisville, and Simon had spent enough hours under them, it was true. But like his person, Simon’s true love had been the shade of the garden, and Shania’s eyes fell on the neat rows at the center of the yard. This was where he had often settled his smooth, spotted body while Gram tended the vegetables.

  “What about by the tomatoes?” Shania asked. “Is that bad for the garden, to put a dead dog in it? He took so many naps there. Maybe right next to it?”

  And if Shania hadn’t been thinking of one kind of grief, she may not have missed the other—the cloud that passed over her grandmother’s face as she considered the garden, the only thing Gram really called her own. Medicine and doctors’ bills took the rest, Gram’s efforts to fix the heart in her chest that didn’t quite know how to be a heart without some help. Gram looked at the tomatoes, and Shania might have seen the remembering, but she was picking up the shovel, testing it against stiff earth.

  “Why not?” her grandmother said softly. “Nothing helps growth like death.”

  Shania dug while her grandmother watched, both shivering a little in the wind. The sycamore shuddered. At their feet was the bundle of yellow blanket, Simon inside, once a beagle but now just another seed. The wind shifted the fringe of the blanket he had claimed as his own. “Chenille!” Gram had always exclaimed, but she never took it from him. Now it was going in the ground.

  “I don’t think I can keep it up,” her grandmother said, but Shania kept digging.

  “I’ll help you,” Shania said. “Anything you can’t do, you can teach me, and I’ll do it.”

  Shania was busy with the soil, the sharp tooth of the shovel, thinking about how this garden in the middle of Morrisville sometimes felt like the only place with life. Gram saw the whole town as an oasis she would never abandon, and Shania felt a duty to love it a little out of loyalty, but the way the garden looked in February was the way Morrisville felt to her year-round. School was school—her handful of half-friends, theater kids who didn’t mind that she sat silent most of the time. They needed an audience, and Shania needed to watch—at least at first. But first impressions always turned into expectations, especially in Morrisville, where you were cast as the role you auditioned for. In first grade, Shania had been a swaying daisy in the background of the Alice in Wonderland musical, and a swaying daisy she had remained. In Morrisville, a daisy could never become Alice. At least in her grandmother’s garden, Shania was where a daisy belonged.

  “There’s something I always wanted to tell you,” Gram said, and Shania looked. At some point while she’d been digging, Gram had crouched down next to the still form that had been Simon. “Something I think you need to know.”

  Shania thought it was about her father—a feeling Gram had always had, an omen on Shania’s parents’ wedding night that predicted his eventual departure with a rich woman eighteen years his senior, floating out of Morrisville the way Shania’s mother always wished she herself would. Shania went back to digging. The shovel sounded like a hatchet.

  “If it’s about Dad,” Shania said, “I don’t really need to know, okay? He’s a liar.”

  And if Shania hadn’t been so focused on the cracking in her heart, she might have noticed the way G
ram’s hand had risen to cover her own.

  “We all are, sweet pea,” Gram said. A few strands of silver hair had escaped from her hat and fluttered as the breeze picked up.

  “We’re all what?” Shania said.

  “Liars.”

  At the moment Shania’s shovel cut through pale roots, her grandmother slumped over in the garden, lips fluttering. Her hat rolled on its brim and came to a rest beneath the tomatoes. Gram and the beagle were two bright, still things under a dishwater sky, and Shania’s scream rose into it, startling the crows, sending them spinning toward the sun, as her mother sprinted from the house.

  By the time the ambulance took her grandmother away—Shania’s mother in the back, her eyes dry and grim—the birds had settled back onto their branches. Shania had nothing else to do but put the dog in the hole she’d dug and smooth soil over the top like gauze over a wound.

  CHAPTER 1

  September

  After the drab blue and gray of the bus’s interior—the color of a public bathroom, the same lingering smell—the blood on the concrete seems impossibly red. Comic book red. A deep, important scarlet. Shania doesn’t notice until it’s already on her shoes.

  “Shit,” she whispers, staring down, trying to convince herself it’s paint. She looks up and scans the brick wall beyond the sidewalk. Graffiti, but none of it red. None of it new. She assumes graffiti artists use spray paint, not a bucket that might be tipped. She glances around, but there’s no one near enough to see, and certainly no one she knows. She’s still learning the names of all this new city’s parts, and this is South Blue Rock, or as most people call it, SoBR.

  At night SoBR’s streets swarm with bar hoppers, cars with Lyft signs in the windshields. At eight o’clock in the morning, however, just Paulie’s and Goddess are open: doughnuts and cold-pressed organic juice. SoBR has only been a trendy part of town for a few years. Graffiti is starting to peel in places, men with no homes fade in and out of sight like specters, and across the street two thin white women wearing leggings leave Goddess clutching cups of juice and laughing nasally laughs. Shania had applied to Goddess before Paulie’s but didn’t know what wheatgrass was. She knew what doughnuts were. Mr. Ahmed hired her immediately.

  She steps inside Paulie’s, where Mr. Ahmed himself stands behind the counter. He’s tall and narrow as a phone pole, with only a slight paunch at his waist to indicate he owns the oldest doughnut shop in Blue Rock. When the door closes behind her, Shania is sealed into the yeasty aroma that only old-fashioned bakeries can emit. She has to swallow then, as she does every time she walks in. The smell is like her grandmother’s house, and as happens often since the funeral, the memories are so loud in her head they threaten to scream.

  “You’ve come for your riches,” calls Mr. Ahmed, not taking his eyes off the TV hanging in the corner.

  “My minimum-wage treasure, please,” Shania says, but he ignores her, gesturing instead at the TV in outrage.

  “A new Dunking Donuts,” he enunciates. “By the airport. Bastards!”

  “But the airport is like eight miles from here,” Shania says.

  He narrows his eyes at her.

  “You think people will not drive eight miles for this? Their cheap coffee? We must have a special now. We will call it Commuter Coupon. You come Monday through Thursday, and then Friday you get free coffee. Eh?”

  He opens his arms wide, a demand for feedback.

  “That’s pretty good,” Shania says. “Maybe let them choose whether they get a free coffee or a free doughnut. People like doughnuts on Fridays.”

  “They do?”

  “Yeah, sure. The weekend. You know? I don’t know.”

  “Yes,” he says solemnly. “TGIF.”

  “Right.”

  “Everything is good, working at night?”

  “Yeah, it’s good, Mr. Ahmed. Thanks for working with my school schedule.”

  He nods, rubbing his short beard.

  “You work late. You are a young woman. You have someone taking you home at night?”

  “I take the bus,” she says. “It’s no big deal.”

  “Your parents are happy with this?” he asks. She thinks he doesn’t really mean happy; he means okay. It’s not okay, but she lies.

  “Sure,” she says. “SoBR is really busy at night. It’s not like anything’s going to happen with all those people around.”

  “Yes, yes, but this neighborhood… it is changing. Can cause bumps.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know. Like an earthquake.” He places his hands palm down, side by side, then rubs the sides of them against each other. His fingers overlap, then move apart, then overlap again. “When the plates in the earth shift, everything shakes. There is shaking here sometimes. Watch where you put your feet.”

  Outside, check in hand, she feels the temporary surge of “having.” A few feet away, two more white women, one carrying a rolled-up yoga mat, prepare to cross the street. The one carrying the mat wears a shirt that reads NAMA-STAY IN BED. She discusses her imminent juice order, and Shania’s eyes flit toward Goddess. The woman is pretty, and Shania considers spending six dollars of her newly acquired money on the bright-green juice, just to have something in common with her. But then she sees the woman’s teeth: impossibly white, all obeying the rules of geometry, a mouthful of blank dominoes. Shania’s tongue finds her top-right canine, which sticks out slightly like a bent spoke on a bicycle. It’s her reminder: Every penny is already claimed. She imagines fixing her teeth will somehow fix all her other problems. But right now she needs to catch the bus.

  The Blue Rock Transit Authority app tells her she has four minutes as she trots down the street toward the corner, eyeing the cracked soil on either edge of the sidewalk. Here and there is bindweed, which perhaps someone encouraged to grow, not recognizing a weed when they saw one. The roots, she knows, are nests of pallid snakes beneath the ground—the same plants are outside the dumpy apartment she and her mother now call home, their own roots dug out of Morrisville after her grandmother’s death. First her parents’ divorce and then Gram’s funeral—Shania doesn’t blame her mother for fleeing.

  This new state is concave and humid, but it’s green—at least, once you get to the edges of Blue Rock. Gram never visited this city (or any city) and would’ve preferred, if they’d had to leave Morrisville, that they live in the country as she did. “Closer to God,” she always said, and even crocheted it on a pillow. But the countryside doesn’t have the most expensive high school in the region, and that’s why Shania and her mother are really here—a parting gift from her father, financed by “the woman,” as Shania’s mother calls her: If the woman wants to try to buy us off by paying for your school, we’ll let her. But we won’t make it cheap.

  Shania pulls out her student ID as she walks. In it, her face smiles out uncertainly, the pastel pink and blue in her hair still fresh from when she had it done over the summer, her eyes the same cerulean. They’d spelled her name wrong: SHANIA GESTER. It’s Hester. But she’s grateful that they at least hadn’t spelled it with an F. The hair had been a “new school” gift from her mother when they decided she’d be going to Bard Academy for Excellence—a bribe for leaving Morrisville. Her life there has faded like the colors in her hair, and she’s glad of the latter, at least. She realized quickly that Bard isn’t the kind of school for unicorn hair. At the edge of SoBR, Bard is something like a hidden fortress in Lord of the Rings, surrounded by (urban) wildlife, populated by the children of the oldest, wealthiest families in Blue Rock. Highlights are always Legolas-blonde at Bard, one of their many codes.

  Her phone vibrates—a text from Hallie, the one person from Morrisville who has tried to keep in touch.

  Miss you! Guess who just found out she’s on the event planning committee? PROM SHALL BE MINE.

  Shania smiles. Hallie is a theater kid but also a big activity girl. Whoever gave her the reins would realize very soon that they may have created a monster. Shania replies with a long
string of hearts and a Cinderella GIF. It feels a little strange texting her—like Gram’s death turned Morrisville into a cemetery. Texting Hallie is like communing with the dead.

  At the bus stop she almost steps in blood again. The sun has moved just in these few minutes and falls differently on the puddle now. It coats the pavement ahead of her in a wet, crimson splash, an undefined shape like a red cloud or a puff of smoke.

  And there she is, appearing as she so often does. Her grandmother—the blood is hers for the instant Shania lets her mind wander. It’s a strange thing, because Gram’s death wasn’t the bloody kind. It was the slow kind, the kind with tubes and shrugging doctors. So perhaps, Shania thinks, the blood on the pavement feels like her own—as if the ripping of her grandmother from her life left a gaping hole, as red and raw as fresh meat.

  “Breakfast,” a voice says, and Shania jerks. It comes from a man leaning in the corner of the bus shelter, his dingy gray shirt hanging off his body like a shroud. Shania hadn’t even noticed him.

  “What?” she says.

  He clears his throat.

  “Puts you off your breakfast.” His gums are the bright pink of a kitten’s tongue.

  “Yeah,” Shania mutters, looking again at the blood. Her mind reels back from the day in the garden, from the following days in the Morrisville hospital. Now a stab of different unease aches between her ribs, her mind beginning to run away with itself. The man’s proximity, the rasp of his voice, the hole in his shoe with the sock exposed like fuzzy organs through a wound. He, too, is staring at the blood.

  “Called the police,” he says. “By the time they came, the thing was gone. Should’ve called animal control. Maybe they could’ve helped it.”

  “Helped what?”

  “The cat,” he says, blinking at her. “Somebody knifed it up. Started down there.” He points, and Shania follows his finger with her eyes, back the way she had come. She sees the blood now, a trail down the concrete that she hadn’t noticed.

  “In front of the hat shop,” he says. “That’s where it happened.”