The Story of Emily, Part 2.

As so many sayings go, telling one lie often sparks another. Then another, and another, until the lies snowball out of control, and become all the teller of those tales know.

Emily simply started with a fib that she had no need of telling. When her mother asked why she seemed so tired, that morning, she responded that she was feeling sick. Not ill enough to stay home from school that day, she assured her. The truth had been that she’d stayed up late, reading by the glow of her night-light (she was afraid of the dark). Her mother had nodded, and believed her. What reason was there not to?

It was, as the term went, ‘a little white lie’…but one that she hadn’t needed to tell. She wouldn’t have been punished, for staying up late, and she’d had nothing to gain.

Still, that one, needless lie began opening doors to other ones. Emily was simply testing waters, seeing how far she could go while still being believed. When she did feel sick and didn’t want to go to school, she told her father she was being bullied by other students. When she tripped and scraped her knee, she told her teacher she’d been pushed. When she misplaced things, she told her siblings they’d been stolen.

Any loving parent would rush to their daughter’s aid, when they think she’s being targeted.

For the first time in her memory, quiet, invisible Emily was being listened to. People weren’t overlooking her so much, anymore. Her father gave up a few of his club meetings; she was accustomed to groups of adults coming over, on the weekends, but now that time was being set aside for her, instead.

She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed her parents’ attention until she began to fear losing it. It was then that she pushed too far.

Emily came home with a bruise on her cheek. She’d been playing on the swings, after school, and landed poorly when she’d jumped off, at the highest point she could go. She told her now-attentive father that her teacher had held her after class, and struck her across the face.

She didn’t know why she told the lie. By now, they simply slipped out.

The teacher lost her job, and Emily was wracked with guilt. It was too late to tell the truth.

But she tried, anyway.

No one believed her.

When she tried to explain that she’d lied, that she was sorry, that she hadn’t meant for her teacher to be fired…they shook their heads, and anxiously told her she didn’t have to feel responsible. They wouldn’t let anything else happen to her. They would keep her safe from whoever was trying to hurt their little girl.

For, by that time, the police were involved. There was a warrant on an innocent woman. The parents suspected her daughter’s violent, vengeful teacher of being the one to break into their home and leave tokens in Emily’s room. Assignments, art projects, a class photo. Who else – what else – would torment their daughter, so? What, aside from her own guilt?