Claudia and the Little Liar Read online

  I couldn’t let her get away with this, though. She’d maneuvered me into a terrible position.

  Mrs. Braddock took off her coat and hung it up. “Claudia, can I talk to you privately in the kitchen?” she requested.

  My heart fluttered with anxiety. Did this mean she didn’t believe me? That she believed Haley? It would be so embarrassing if she did. Embarrassing and unfair and depressing.

  Mrs. Braddock would call the other BSC clients. None of them would want me again as a sitter. They might even stop using the BSC altogether. All because of Haley’s lie …

  Mrs. Braddock pulled out a chair for herself and I did the same. My heart was pounding. Why did we have to talk privately?

  “First, let me say that I don’t believe Haley’s story for a minute,” she began.

  What a relief! My heart slowed to normal.

  “Her father and I don’t know what’s going on with her,” Mrs. Braddock continued. “Maybe it’s some surge of preadolescent rebellion, although she seems pretty young for that. We’re completely bewildered, frankly. But it does seem — for whatever reason — that she behaves her worst when you’re around. We have no idea why.”

  “I don’t either,” I said. “She and I used to get along great.”

  “I know you did. And I know that you’re a good-hearted and trustworthy sitter. But my husband and I were discussing this on the way home, and we think it might be best if we use another sitter for the time being.”

  I knew she was trying to be as nice as she possibly could. Still, her words hurt.

  For whatever reason, the Braddocks didn’t want me to sit for their kids anymore. I was being pushed away. Fired. Rejected.

  In my logical mind, I could understand their reasoning. I even knew I wasn’t being blamed for Haley’s lies.

  But inside, it just felt so wrong. Not only that, if I didn’t see Haley anymore, I’d never straighten out the problem between us. What had happened to the person Haley used to be?

  As I pushed back the kitchen chair and stood up, a scary thought came to me: What if that Haley was gone forever?

  The moment Mary Anne walked into our Friday BSC meeting, I knew her sitting job at the Braddocks’ hadn’t gone well. “What happened?” I asked.

  She was the last to arrive. Everyone else was waiting to hear her report.

  Mary Anne sat on the edge of my bed and sighed. “Well, Haley firmly believes that we’re all out to get her,” she began. “She barely spoke to me the whole time I was there.”

  “Why was she angry at you?” I asked.

  “I told you, it’s all of us, though she’s angriest at you because she thinks it’s your fault that she’s grounded again.”

  “It’s her own fault!” I cried, once again feeling the injustice of it all.

  “We know that,” Kristy said. “But she obviously doesn’t.”

  “You’re not her only target, Claudia,” Mary Anne added. “She told me a couple of lies while I was there. When I wanted to make a call, she said the phone wasn’t working because her parents couldn’t afford to pay the bill and probably wouldn’t be able to pay me either. Then, the next minute, I heard her chatting away to Vanessa.”

  “She didn’t want you to use the phone so she could use it first,” Abby surmised, shaking her head in grim amazement at Haley’s nerve.

  “Right,” Mary Anne agreed. “And later she blamed Matt for spilling some milk on the floor when she was the one who’d just left it there after it spilled.”

  “The girl is totally out of control,” Kristy commented.

  “She sure is,” Jessi agreed. “Today Becca told me she’s saying we send weekly reports to the teachers of the kids we sit for.”

  “She really said that?!” Stacey cried in disbelief.

  Jessi nodded. “She’s saying we tell the teachers if they’ve copied a report from the encyclopedia or another book. She’s told kids that we let their teachers know if they say something insulting about him or her.”

  “That is too weird,” Abby remarked.

  “You know,” I said, “it’s as if all this lying began with that Great Brain report.”

  “Mrs. Braddock said she’d lied about homework before that,” Stacey reminded me.

  “That’s true,” I agreed. “But Haley wasn’t lying to us — or about us — before then. I wish I could somehow get back to that moment and change something.”

  “There’s nothing you could have done differently,” Abby pointed out.

  “Maybe not, but it might give me a better idea of what was going on in Haley’s head at the time.”

  “Well, you can’t go back,” Kristy said.

  “Wait, maybe you can,” said Mary Anne. “When I was in counseling, we did something called role-playing.”

  Awhile ago, Mary Anne was having difficulty understanding some of her feelings. So she saw a psychologist. Now she knows all this great stuff about emotions and dealing with them.

  “When you role-play you act out different parts and replay a moment from your life,” Mary Anne explained. “I wonder how the Braddocks would feel if we did that with Haley.”

  Kristy picked up the phone. “Let’s find out,” she suggested as she dialed the Braddocks’ number. Mrs. Braddock picked up. (Which was probably a good thing. If Haley had received a call from Kristy asking to speak to Mrs. Braddock, you can imagine what she would have told the kids at school.)

  Kristy gave the phone to Mary Anne and let her explain the plan. Mary Anne listened, nodding, while Mrs. Braddock spoke. “Great,” Mary Anne said. “We’ll be there tomorrow.”

  When she hung up, her eyes were bright with excitement. “Okay, we’re on for tomorrow at twelve-thirty. We’re going to meet with Mr. and Mrs. Braddock first. Then Haley will come home from basketball practice and we’ll do it.”

  “I sure hope it works,” Kristy said. “I’d hate to have to drop the Braddocks from our client list.”

  “They might drop us first,” I added. “I’ve already been dropped.”

  Kristy nodded, looking worried. “If Haley’s lies spread, a lot of our customers could start dropping us.”

  A week or so ago we’d have told her not to worry so much. But now we were quiet. Who knew how much further it would go if we weren’t able to stop Haley?

  The phone rang then. Mrs. Rodowsky wanted a sitter for the next night. After Stacey took that job, Mrs. Newton called needing a sitter. We were busy with client calls right up until six o’clock. We even took a 6:05 call from Mr. Brooke, who always phones either right before or after our meetings and drives us crazy.

  Soon my room was empty except for Stacey, who’d stayed behind to hang out before going home. “This role-playing thing makes me nervous,” she said, flopping down onto my bed. “What if Haley doesn’t go for it?”

  “We won’t be any worse off than we are now,” I said as I sat in my director’s chair.

  “True.”

  “It makes me uneasy too,” I admitted. I hate confrontations. Usually I’ll do anything to avoid one.

  “Not to change the subject from Haley …” Stacey began.

  “Oh, please do.”

  Stacey smiled. “Okay. I’m going into Manhattan on Sunday to see Dad and Ethan. I was thinking it might be fun if you and Josh came with me. The four of us could do something together during the day.” I sighed. “What’s the problem? Don’t you want to? I know Josh is intimidated by Ethan because of their age difference. Is that it?”

  “No,” I told her. “But the problem is Josh.”

  Stacey sat cross-legged on the bed. “What? I thought everything was great between the two of you.”

  “Josh is great. But I don’t know how great everything is between us.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Suddenly I felt embarrassed. Stacey is my best friend and I tell her everything. Somehow, though, this was hard to talk about.

  “What?” she asked again.

  “Like I said, it’s nothing against Josh,”
I began. “I mean, he’s adorable, he’s sweet, he’s funny. He’s even a great kisser. The problem is with me, really.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t want to kiss him,” I blurted out. “It’s strange, I know. I just never feel the desire to kiss him and when I think he’s going to kiss me, I duck out of it. Though, come to think of it, he hasn’t even tried to kiss me in awhile.”

  “What’s awhile?”

  “A week or so,” I figured, thinking back. “We get along great. It’s just this kissing thing. Do you think it’s a problem?”

  “Sort of,” Stacey said. “It sounds to me like your romance is turning into a friendship.”

  Stacey is so smart sometimes. That was exactly what was happening, though I hadn’t realized it until she’d said it. Josh and I had started as friends. We’d had a romance, but it was returning to what it had been in the beginning — a friendship.

  “That’s it!” I cried. “You’ve figured it out.” Then I slumped lower in the chair. “How am I going to tell this to Josh?”

  “Tell him just what you told me,” Stacey suggested.

  “Yeah,” I said glumly. “The old ‘let’s just be friends’ talk. You know guys always take that as a brush-off. Girls do too, I suppose. It sounds like a put-down.”

  “But it’s not,” Stacey replied. “You don’t mean it that way. You really believe that you two were meant to be friends, not boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  “I know. I think a friend is just as important as a boyfriend. It might even be more important because friends usually last a lot longer than most boyfriends. It just sounds so awful to the person who has to hear it.”

  “I know,” Stacey admitted. “And it isn’t easy to stay friends with a guy after you’ve dated him. Robert and I weren’t really friends again for a long time after we broke up.”

  “You’re friends now, though,” I said hopefully.

  “True, but it wasn’t easy.”

  As we talked, I realized I wasn’t one bit upset at the thought of losing Josh as a boyfriend. The idea of losing him as a friend panicked me, though. “If it means losing his friendship, then I’d rather not say anything to him,” I told Stacey.

  “You can’t do that. For one thing, you’ll be miserable. For another, it’s not exactly fair to him, or honest. When are you going to tell him?”

  “We’re going to the movies tonight.”

  “So tell him tonight.”

  “I can’t,” I wailed. It was too hard. I just couldn’t.

  “You have to. It’s the truth.”

  “I know.”

  But I really, really wished I didn’t have to do what I was about to do.

  “Hi, Claudia. You look nice,” Josh said that evening when he arrived at my house.

  My mother came into the hall and greeted him. “Hello, Josh. It’s good to see you.”

  Josh shifted from foot to foot. “Thank you. It’s good to see you too.”

  “You’re going to a seven o’clock show?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Don’t worry, I can be home by ten. Easy,” I assured Mom. I didn’t want to say what I was thinking — that I might be home by eight, depending on whether I had my talk with Josh before or after the movie.

  Mr. Rocker drove us out to Washington Mall and dropped us off in the parking lot. I checked my watch. “We’re a little early,” I said. “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Do you want to get something to eat?”

  I wasn’t hungry, but it was something to kill time. “Sure. How about Friendly’s?”

  He agreed and we set off. I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t have much to say. I’d decided to talk to Josh after the movie. I figured that by then his father would be on his way to pick us up and — in case the talk didn’t go well — at least we’d be heading home instead of stuck at the mall together for hours.

  Again and again, I mentally rehearsed what I would say to Josh, changing this part, taking out another, adding something new.

  What surprised me, though, was Josh. He didn’t seem to have anything to say either.

  We walked into Friendly’s and slid into a booth. We both ordered french fries and sodas. “Claudia, we have to talk,” Josh said after the waitress left.

  “Yes, we do,” I agreed eagerly. Relief flooded me. He thought we had to talk too. He was aware that something was wrong. It wasn’t only me.

  “You go first,” we both said at the same time, which made us laugh.

  “No, you,” I insisted.

  “Okay.” Josh took a deep breath. “Things between us are getting … strange.” He spoke slowly, picking each word carefully. “Sometimes I feel more like your younger brother than your boyfriend.”

  Unbelievable! He was saying just what I felt. I did think of him more as a younger brother than a boyfriend. It explained why I didn’t want to kiss him.

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  He frowned. “You do? … I mean … is that how you think of me?”

  “Sometimes,” I blurted out. “I mean, I think you’re great. I couldn’t care about you or like you more than I do. But I think of you as a brother … or a friend.”

  “A friend,” he repeated.

  “Does that hurt your feelings?”

  He sat back in the booth and looked at me with troubled eyes. It seemed like a very long time before he spoke again.

  “I was going to say that it did hurt my feelings…. I had the idea that it should upset me. Only, it doesn’t.”

  “Really?”

  “I think I feel the same way about you,” he said.

  To my surprise, his words hurt my feelings. It was like a blow to my pride. But the pain lasted for only a second. Then the hurt was replaced by a quiet happiness. This wasn’t going to be so terrible after all.

  “I guess this means we’re breaking up,” he said sadly.

  “As boyfriend and girlfriend we are, but not as friends,” I replied. “Do you think that’s possible?”

  He pressed his fingers together and seemed to consider the question. As I waited for his answer, I remembered that I was no longer friends with my old boyfriend Mark. And that so few people I knew were able to remain friends after breaking up. Still, I liked to think that Josh and I weren’t like other people. Our relationship went pretty deep.

  “We won’t know until we try,” he answered at last.

  That was good enough for me. Smiling, I reached across the table and took hold of his hand. “I think we can. It’s worth it to me to try.”

  He smiled back at me. “Me too.”

  The waitress arrived with our food. It tasted a lot better than it would have if I’d had to sit there and eat it while I worried about talking to Josh.

  I felt light and free and happy. Josh obviously felt better too. The quiet between us lifted.

  We went to the movie soon after. Josh didn’t hold my hand, and I didn’t worry about it too much. We were friends now. We could relax.

  When the movie ended, an unhappy thought came to me. Now that Josh and I were friends, how would we see each other? Could we just call each other like we used to and arrange to do things together? I wasn’t sure.

  But — as often happened — Josh was thinking the same thing. “Why don’t we go out on a friendship date this Sunday afternoon,” he suggested. “It will show that we really can be friends.”

  “We talked about kite flying tomorrow,” I reminded him.

  “I don’t know,” he replied thoughtfully. “Tomorrow might be a little too soon.”

  Josh’s dad met us and drove us home. As Josh always did, he walked me to the door of my house.

  “Well,” he said uneasily. “This is our last night as boyfriend and girlfriend. But I’ll see you Sunday as pals.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “See you Sunday.”

  I leaned in for one last good-night kiss. In a second, I saw he’d extended his hand. I quickly stuck out my hand.
He changed his mind too, and leaned in for a kiss.

  We both laughed uncomfortably. This change wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Well, good night,” I said.

  “ ’Night,” Josh replied, walking backward down the front path. He tripped slightly but kept going.

  Oh, well … at least it was a start.

  “This is totally dumb and I’m not doing it!” Haley folded her arms and turned away from us.

  Somehow I wasn’t surprised by Haley’s reaction to our role-playing plan. I gazed around the Braddocks’ living room at Stacey, Mary Anne, and Mr. and Mrs. Braddock, hoping that one of them had a clue as to what to do next. Luckily, Mrs. Braddock took charge. “Haley, do you want to be grounded for more time or less time?” she asked.

  “Less, of course,” Haley grumbled, not looking at her mother.

  “If you do this, we’ll cut time from your punishment,” Mrs. Braddock told her calmly. “If you refuse, we’ll add more time.”

  Haley faced her angrily. “In other words, you’re making me do this.”

  “No, it’s your choice,” Mr. Braddock said.

  “Some choice,” Haley muttered. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “All right,” Mary Anne jumped in. “Why don’t we start with Haley playing the part of herself and Claudia being herself? Stacey, you be Mrs. Braddock.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Haley muttered.

  Stacey began. “Make sure Haley doesn’t watch TV until her homework is done,” she said as she stood by the front door.

  “All right,” I agreed.

  Stacey opened and shut the front door, pretending to leave. Then I turned toward Haley. “Better get your homework done, Haley.”

  Haley’s hand flew to her hips. “That is not how you said it,” she objected. “It was more like, ‘Haley! Do your homework. Now!’ Then I asked, ‘Claudia, may I call Vanessa for a brief check on our homework?’ You said, ‘No, you may not. I want to chat with Vanessa. You do your work!’ ”

  “Haley!” I cried. “That is just not true.”

  “You can’t play both parts,” Mary Anne told Haley. “Let’s try it again.”

  We did it again. This time Haley didn’t stop me. She presented herself as speaking to Vanessa for the briefest second.