The Almost Truth - Hardcover

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Eileen Cook spent most of her teen years wishing she were someone else or somewhere else, which is great training for a writer. She is the author of The Almost Truth, Unraveling Isobel, The Education of Hailey Kendrick, Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood, and What Would Emma Do? as well as the Fourth Grade Fairy series. She lives in Vancouver with her husband and dogs. Visit her at EileenCook.com.

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The Almost Truth

chapter one

You know it isn’t going to be a good day when you have to choose between food and proper hygiene.

“Can you take the milk off the bill?” I asked the cashier. My cell phone began to ring. I dug around in my bag for it.

“You don’t want it anymore?” The cashier tapped her impossibly long fingernails on the register with one eyebrow raised.

“That’s right. I don’t want the milk,” I repeated. This wasn’t true. I wanted the milk. Eating dry cereal for a week was going to suck. Not to mention having so little dairy in my diet that I would likely end up with a raging case of osteoarthritis when I was old. But until my mom got paid on Friday, there were limited funds in the house, and there’s no way I was going without deodorant. I finally found my phone buried at the very bottom of my bag and yanked it out.

“Sadie, it’s Brendan.” I didn’t need him to tell me his name. Brendan has this habit of yelling into his cell as if it were a tin can on a string.

“Hey,” I said. I looked at the new total on the register. Shit. “Can you take the toothpaste off too?” We’d have to squeeze a few more days out of the old tube. Now in addition to having brittle bones, I could be toothless. My future was looking brighter and brighter all the time.

The woman in line behind me gave an exasperated sigh. Screw her. She was probably one of those people who always makes you wait while they count out the exact change from their Coach wallet. I turned around. Great, it was Rebecca Samson and her mom. Their cart was piled high with groceries, including that expensive cheese made by yaks that costs something like twenty dollars for an ounce.

“Gosh, Sadie, do you need to borrow a couple dollars?” Rebecca asked, fighting to keep a smirk off her face. Her mom might have also been trying to smirk, but her face was so Botoxed she was incapable of expression.

“Hey! Is that Blow Job Becky I hear? What are you doing hanging with the cheerleader from hell?” Brendan bellowed. His voice carried out of my phone like he was on speaker. Rebecca’s face froze as hard as her mother’s.

“The total’s twenty-two fifteen. How does that work for you?” The cashier tapped her fingernails again.

“Hang on, I’m at the store,” I said to Brendan. I plunked my phone down on the conveyor belt and pulled some cash out of my bag. I made sure to spread the two twenty-dollar bills out in a fan shape so they could be clearly seen by the cashier and Blow Job Becky, too.

The cashier snapped her gum when she saw the money. No doubt she wondered why I had nickeled and dimed my bill when I had forty bucks. She handed over my change. I palmed the ten-dollar bill she gave me and, with my thumbnail, pulled a folded five-dollar bill from under my watchband. I made a show of counting the bills. “I’m sorry. I think you didn’t give me enough change.” I held out the two fives, a couple ones, and eighty-five cents.

The cashier screwed up her face. “I swore I gave you a ten. Sorry.” She pulled another five out of the drawer and handed it to me.

“No problem.” I tucked the money into my bag and took the groceries from her. An extra five bucks was going to come in handy. I could use it to buy milk, but I had more immediate needs than staving off osteoarthritis. I smiled at Rebecca and her Botoxed mom and stepped outside. As soon as the automatic doors closed behind me, it felt like I was slapped in the face with the hot, wet air. It might sound good in theory, but summer sort of sucks unless you can spend it sitting by the ocean with a fruity drink. Spending it in a parking lot with your T-shirt damp and sticking to you isn’t that much fun.

“Sorry about that, you caught me in the middle of something,” I said into the phone. I leaned against the warm cinder-block wall. A small kid was standing near me, staring at the pony ride next to the row of gum-ball machines. I tried to ignore him, but he looked like someone had shot his puppy. I sighed and handed him a quarter. He broke into a smile and climbed up on the mechanical horse, leaned forward, and fed the machine the coin. Ah, when joy could be purchased for less than a buck.

“Are you still running that wrong change con for five bucks?” Brendan said. “I keep telling you to up the ante. If you cashed in a hundred-dollar bill, you could easily clear twenty bucks.”

“Twenty bucks is more likely to get noticed,” I pointed out. “Not to mention if I start flashing hundred-dollar bills around town, that’s going to seem weird.”

“So you’re doing the small con just to be careful? Are you trying to tell me it has nothing to do with the fact that if the short is less than five dollars, then the cashier doesn’t have to pay it out of their own pocket?”

I dragged my sneaker on the cement. “Being a cashier at the Save-on-Food Mart is punishment enough. She doesn’t need to cover me.”

Brendan laughed. “Your ethics are getting in the way of the big score, but hey, it’s your choice. What are you up to tonight? I was thinking we could go over to Seattle and grab dinner.”

I snorted, knowing full well Brendan’s idea of grabbing dinner. “You buying or is the restaurant?” I asked.

“Now why in the world would I pay?” Brendan wasn’t teasing. He actually was incapable of understanding why he should have to pay for anything when he was clever enough to steal it without getting caught.

“While stealing a meal with you sounds like an attractive option, I’m going to have to say no.”

“For a con artist you have a highly overinflated sense of morals,” Brendan said. “Especially when dinner is on the line. We could go for Japanese if you want.”

“Don’t call me that. Besides, you hate Japanese.”

“Yet another good reason I shouldn’t have to pay for it.”

I rolled my eyes. If you wanted to get technical about it, I was a con artist. I’d learned the tricks of the trade from my dad. Then I taught what I knew to Brendan, who happened to have some sort of freakish natural ability in the area. He was like a con genius savant. However, unlike Brendan, who just loved getting away with something, I preferred to see it as a means to an end, an end that was finally coming to a close. “I can’t go to dinner, I’ve got stuff to do tonight.”

“Like what?”

Most people would take a polite brush-off and move on. Brendan was not most people. “I have stuff to get ready for school.”

“You’re not going away to college for months. C’mon, a night in the city would be fun.”

I knew down to the exact day (sixty-four, counting today) how soon I would be leaving Bowton Island for college. If I were better at math, I would be counting down the hours in my head. “I want to do some packing,” I said. The truth was, it wouldn’t take me that long to pack. My bedroom was the size of a closet. Even if I took the time to fold each item of my clothing into a tiny origami crane, there’d be no need to start now. The problem was spending time with Brendan felt weird lately. We’d known each other since we...