E. Lockhart - The Boyfriend Quartet

by e. lockhart

THE RUBY OLIVER NOVELS

The Boyfriend List

The Boy Book

The Treasure Map of Boys

Real Live Boyfriends

We Were Liars

Fly on the Wall

Dramarama

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

How to Be Bad(written with Sarah Mlynowski and Lauren Myracle)

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

The Boyfriend List copyright 2005 by E. Lockhart
The Boy Book copyright 2006 by E. Lockhart
The Treasure Map of Boys copyright 2009 by E. Lockhart
Real Live Boyfriends copyright 2010 by E. Lockhart
Cover illustration copyright 2014 by Delacorte Press

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Childrens Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

This eOmni edition is comprised of The Boyfriend List, The Boy Book, The Treasure Map of Boys, and Real Live Boyfriends, originally published in hardcover by Delacorte Press in 2005, 2006, 2009 and 2010, respectively.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

randomhouseteens.com

eBook ISBN 9780553512076

A Delacorte Press eBook Edition

v3.1

A beautiful and distinguished family.

A private island.

A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate,

political boy.

A group of four friendsthe Liarswhose

friendship turns destructive.

A revolution. An accident. A secret.

Lies upon lies.

True love.

The truth.

We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from National Book Award finalist and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.

Read it.

And if anyone asks you how it ends,

just LIE.

WELCOME TO THE beautiful Sinclair family.

No one is a criminal.

No one is an addict.

No one is a failure.

The Sinclairs are athletic, tall, and handsome. We are old-money Democrats. Our smiles are wide, our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive.

It doesnt matter if divorce shreds the muscles of our hearts so that they will hardly beat without a struggle. It doesnt matter if trust-fund money is running out; if credit card bills go unpaid on the kitchen counter. It doesnt matter if theres a cluster of pill bottles on the bedside table.

It doesnt matter if one of us is desperately, desperately in love.

So much

in love

that equally desperate measures

must be taken.

We are Sinclairs.

No one is needy.

No one is wrong.

We live, at least in the summertime, on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts.

Perhaps that is all you need to know.

MY FULL NAME is Cadence Sinclair Eastman.

I live in Burlington, Vermont, with Mummy and three dogs.

I am nearly eighteen.

I own a well-used library card and not much else, though it is true I live in a grand house full of expensive, useless objects.

I used to be blond, but now my hair is black.

I used to be strong, but now I am weak.

I used to be pretty, but now I look sick.

It is true I suffer migraines since my accident.

It is true I do not suffer fools.

I like a twist of meaning. You see? Suffer migraines. Do not suffer fools. The word means almost the same as it did in the previous sentence, but not quite.

Suffer.

You could say it means endure, but thats not exactly right.

MY STORY STARTS before the accident. June of the summer I was fifteen, my father ran off with some woman he loved more than us.

Dad was a middling-successful professor of military history. Back then I adored him. He wore tweed jackets. He was gaunt. He drank milky tea. He was fond of board games and let me win, fond of boats and taught me to kayak, fond of bicycles, books, and art museums.

He was never fond of dogs, and it was a sign of how much he loved my mother that he let our golden retrievers sleep on the sofas and walked them three miles every morning. He was never fond of my grandparents, either, and it was a sign of how much he loved both me and Mummy that he spent every summer in Windemere House on Beechwood Island, writing articles on wars fought long ago and putting on a smile for the relatives at every meal.

That June, summer fifteen, Dad announced he was leaving and departed two days later. He told my mother he wasnt a Sinclair, and couldnt try to be one, any longer. He couldnt smile, couldnt lie, couldnt be part of that beautiful family in those beautiful houses.

Couldnt. Couldnt. Wouldnt.

He had hired moving vans already. Hed rented a house, too. My father put a last suitcase into the backseat of the Mercedes (he was leaving Mummy with only the Saab), and started the engine.

Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,

then from my eyes,

my ears,

my mouth.

It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps to the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.

Mummy snapped. She said to get hold of myself.

Be normal, now, she said. Right now, she said.

Because you are. Because you can be.

Dont cause a scene, she told me. Breathe and sit up.

I did what she asked.

She was all I had left.

Mummy and I tilted our square chins high as Dad drove down the hill. Then we went indoors and trashed the gifts hed given us: jewelry, clothes, books, anything. In the days that followed, we got rid of the couch and armchairs my parents had bought together. Tossed the wedding china, the silver, the photographs.

We purchased new furniture. Hired a decorator. Placed an order for Tiffany silverware. Spent a day walking through art galleries and bought paintings to cover the empty spaces on our walls.

We asked Granddads lawyers to secure Mummys assets.

Then we packed our bags and went to Beechwood Island.

PENNY, CARRIE, AND Bess are the daughters of Tipper and Harris Sinclair. Harris came into his money at twenty-one after Harvard and grew the fortune doing business I never bothered to understand. He inherited houses and land. He made intelligent decisions about the stock market. He married Tipper and kept her in the kitchen and the garden. He put her on display in pearls and on sailboats. She seemed to enjoy it.