The lie

On Wednesday mornings, Margo and I would go to the 'Bibliotheque Pour Tous', the two-room Catholic library were she volunteered as a cashier.

By the time I entered the sixth grade, I had read the entire children section of the library and requested access to the adult room. Margo discussed the matter with my mother and it was agreed that I would only borrow from the literature section. Romance would give me the wrong ideas about marriage and Margo believed that people who read mystery novels were doomed to meet an untimely death.

My first adult book was a biography of Edith Piaf that my mother read first, pinning together the pages of any inappropriate sections with her sewing pins. I un-pinned and re-pinned those sections in the privacy of our family bathroom, learning about Piaf's early childhood in a brothel, the untimely death of her baby brother and her affairs with married men.

As it turned out, there was a lot I learned from the shelves of the Catholic library. My mother had better things to do than pin book pages. Margo put her faith in the good judgement of the acquisition librarians. I was free to roam.

In the winter of eighth grade I stumbled upon sex. I was nestled in one of Margo's armchairs, reading from a coming of age novel, when the main character let a much older man take her clothes off and touch her 'down there'. Uh-oh. And with Margo banging dinner pots ten feet from me. I raced through the next pages and stuck the book in my schoolbag to re-read it later.

When Margo asked me about the book, I lied.

"It's boring, you wouldn't like it."

"The back-cover sounded good."

"It's not your kind of story."

It was the first time I remembered lying to her.