There is a cheerful girl that is in several of the same classes as me, and her name is Anne. She smiles whenever there is an opportunity for her to smile, and she loves to talk.

During social studies period, she was talking. About her friend. She happened to be explaining in a loud voice about her cousin.

“My cousin loves faking injuries! Last year she didn’t go to school because she said her foot had been run over by a car, but she had stayed home the entire time! And now she’s pretending that she fell out of her rocking chair and now she’s wearing crutches and everything, and she doesn’t even have a rocking chair!”

“What?” said the social studies teacher, forgetting to be grouchy at us for talking. “You need to tell the PE teacher.”

“Okay, sure.”

That afternoon, I was walking around when I met someone in another class of mine. She was walking around with a crutch.

Absentmindedly, I asked her, “Are you Anne’s cousin?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

I stared at her. She stared back. “You blinked first,” she said, after eyeballing me for quite a while. I rolled my eyes.

“Okay, don’t be surprised or anything, but your cousin says you faked that injury. She says you don’t have a rocking chair.”

I wish I didn’t say it. The whole day she followed me, pointing out people who had been to her house, forcing them to say if she had a rocking chair or not. They all answered yes.

The next day, Anne was absent.

The day after that, she came to school, and the social studies teacher growled, “Where were you yesterday?”

“I fell off of the seawall in Galveston and blacked out, and I didn’t even know I did until my friends told me.”

In science, Anne’s cousin told me as the bell rung, “She didn’t even go to Galveston!”