Little White Lies

by Brianna Baker, F. Bowman Hastie

Genres: Young Adult; YA Social Themes

Synopsis

Seventeen-year-old honors student Coretta White’s Tumblr, Little White Lies—her witty thoughts on pretty much . . . everything—has gone viral. She’s got hundreds of thousands of followers; she’s even been offered a TV deal. But Coretta has a secret. She hasn’t been writing all her own posts. Stressed from the demands of the sudden attention, she hired an expert ghostwriter, forty-one-year-old Karl Ristoff, to keep the Tumblr going. Now consumed with guilt, she confesses.

Almost instantly, she suffers a public humiliation. The TV deal disappears. Her boyfriend breaks up with her. Then Karl is thrust into the limelight, only to suffer a dramatic fall himself. Together, they vow to find out who is responsible for ruining both of their lives, and why. But in order to exact justice and a wicked revenge, they must first come clean with each other.

Release date: February 9, 2016

Publisher: Soho Teen

Print pages: 272

Sample

What are the takeaways from this early morning rant?
     1. Eat something for breakfast that wasn’t created in a lab.
     2. Loving your parents doesn’t mean they can’t be wrong.
     3. Roll your eyes like no one is watching. But they always are.
     4. Dante de Blasio, call me in five years.
     5. And for God’s sake, make sure that your subway seat isn’t wet before you sit down.

It wasn’t even 8 a.m., and I’d already commented on five
Facebook statuses, eaten a garbage breakfast, and written my very first blog post. All while my parents sat at the table and stared at their iPads. Ah, modern technology, you’ve really let the family unit disconnect from each other. Something every teenager is supremely grateful for.
     Keys, homework, gum, phone, laptop. According to Google Maps, I had six minutes to get to the train, which really meant I had five.
     “Gotta go. See you guys tonight,” I mumbled, halfway to the door.
     My father is not a fan of my “I’m a teen on the go” routine. He watched me fumble with my backpack, smirking. My parents, you see, don’t fumble with anything. They are clean-cut and put together. Everything that they do, they do with purpose. I knew Dad had already been up for two hours, worked out, ironed his new suit, and made breakfast, all while looking like a J.Crew model. Ahem, an old J.Crew model, of course.
     “Coretta, do you have anything you’d like to say before you just march out of the house?” he asked.
     “Umm . . . bye?”
     “Very funny,” my mother chimed in. “When are you coming home? What do you have after school?”
     “I have Spanish club from three to four, and I’m volunteering at SKOOLS 4 ALL from four to six. And yes, I’ll be riding the train with Rachel tonight, so don’t worry.”
     Both my mother and father were aware that “volunteering at SKOOLS 4 ALL” was code for “hanging out with my boyfriend Mike.” It’s not that we weren’t doing volunteer work or anything; it’s just that we were also doing a fair amount of making out basically anywhere we could. Either way, it was going on my college applications. (Not the making-out part.) Call it a draw.
     “I really do have to go, though,” I said.
     My mother really, really isn’t a fan of my “I’m a teen on the go” routine.
     People always tell me I look like her, but I don’t think my eyebrows have the power of judgment that hers do. She’s not J.Crew striking. She could be pulled from a JCPenney catalogue: pretty, poised, and maybe milquetoast. This is misleading. Get my mother into a debate, and you will lose.
     “You know, Coretta, you should wake up earlier if you need more time to get organized in the morning,” she said. She finally lifted her eyes from her iPad.
     Right after she glared at me, she gazed at my dad, all gooey like they were my age. I could tell she thought he looked cute in his new suit. Gross.
     And let’s all take into account that my mother has tried to get me to wake up earlier since I was in preschool. It’s not in the cards.
     “I know, I know, I love you both dearly. I’ll be home at six thirty.”

I’m supposed to hate Mondays, but there is secretly a part of me that loves them. There, I said it. I love going back to school after a weekend away. I love school. I love succeeding. I love excelling. I love being in clubs. I love studying ruthlessly for an exam and showing up knowing I’m going to destroy it. Furthermore, I love being handed back said exam and looking at the “A+” scribbled in red pen next to my name.
     I wouldn’t say I’m the smartest kid at Booker T. Washington High, not even close. But I can’t think of anyone who works harder. For that, I can thank Martin and Felicia White. They instilled in me the satisfaction that comes with earning success. They also taught me that the first thing one should do when one wakes up is brush one’s teeth. Like them, I don’t understand waiting until after you eat. It’s just gross.
     I beelined to my locker as the first bell rang.
     Waiting for me was my girl Rachel Bernstein in her usual uniform. By that I mean she looked like she was wearing an actual school uniform. Rachel had an inexplicable obsession with polos and khaki skirts, all terrible, no matter what the  color or style. You’d think I would’ve given her hell about her clothing choices, but I’ve learned to choose my battles. I won the hair war. Three years ago, with some gentle persuasion from me, Rachel agreed that her Jew-fro could use a little taming. Unlike Dante de Blasio’s, that was a ’fro I could get up in arms about. It was definitely not good for her or her future.
     Rachel and I have been friends since we were born, as much as babies can be friends. Her parents met my parents at a town hall meeting about stop signs during the Dinkins administration. They have our family over for Hanukkah celebrations, and we invite them over for Christmas. We had a Kwanzaa celebration one year, but we were all a little confused and decided to just not do that ever again.
     Uniformed Rachel got right into it: “I thought you were going to be late or something, and I was going to just go to class, but then I thought that maybe you wouldn’t be late. Then I was going to text you, but then I thought I’d just wait.”
     She has a tendency to ramble, especially on a Monday morning. But she was chewing on one of her ringlets of hair. So she was nervous about something.
     “Mondays, right?” I don’t know why I insist on saying contrived phrases in a semi-serious way.
     “So . . . are you going to talk about this post, or what?”
     “Post of . . .”
     “Oh, come on, the Little White Lies Tumblr! I mean, you didn’t tell me you were starting a blog! Then I thought that maybe you were doing it for college applications.”
     Wait, how did she know about Little White Lies? I’d just posted that.
     I must have been frowning because she smiled. “Coretta, it’s really, really good. What made you write that?”
     I shrugged. “My parents were getting on my nerves. I don’t know, it’s probably stupid.” Let’s be very clear, I did not think the Little White Lies post was stupid in any way. But I also didn’t really know what to say about it. I honestly didn’t think anyone would read it. I’d just needed to vent.
     “Stupid? Are you kidding me? It’s amazing. It’s funny. And dare I say . . . poignant?”
     Coming from anyone else, this would sound like bullshit. But Rachel has a tendency to attempt to soften blows. In eighth grade, I made a papier-mâché art project that went a bit off the rails: an ode to the underappreciated earthworm. It ended up looking like male genitalia. When I voiced my concerns to her, she said I was crazy. “Of course it looks like an earthworm!” Yet for some middle school idiots, I was
Coretta Cock-Ring for the rest of the year.
     I managed to smile back. “Well, thanks, girl.”
     “Coretta, you already have five hundred followers on your Tumblr. I’ve been writing a fashion blog for two years, and I have thirty-seven.” (As you might imagine, her “fashion” blog is a topic of conversation I prefer to avoid.) She pulled out her phone and started scrolling through the list. “Oh, and I sent it to Mike.”
     Another trait of Rachel’s: she has a tendency to overshare, especially with things that aren’t hers to share. She is one of those wonderful people born without a filter. I think this is the main reason she’s never had a boyfriend. (Not that I’ve shared that with her. I do have a filter.)
     As if on cue, my boyfriend turned the corner with his harem of cheerleaders and crew of jocks.
     Here I must offer another contrived phrase in a semiserious way: Mike Cornelius is tall, dark, and handsome. There’s no better way to put it. He’s the kind of guy who would be cast as a vampire in a teen movie. And as much as I’m against Barbie and the message she sends to young children, Mike would be the prototype for a Ken doll. A black Ken doll.
     Whenever Mike walked around with that group, I couldn’t help but wonder if any of them were aware of how ridiculous the whole “we play sports, and we cheer for them; thusly we walk together” routine was. I wanted to believe that he knew. Like me, Mike comes from a family that prizes academics over athletics. But Mike’s family could also probably afford to buy the Brooklyn Nets. And while I’m not into jocks per se, I do like the look of a letterman’s jacket.
     What I really love about Mike is that he’s a not-so-secret nerd.

I’d always known who Mike Cornelius was, but we met at a SKOOLS 4 ALL fundraiser over the summer. Mike was running all of the techy-related things, coordinating the donations on several laptops at once. SKOOLS 4 ALL was a brand-new nonprofit aimed at providing education for children in impoverished African countries, launched with a lot of hype, so Mike had a pretty important job for a seventeen-year- old. He got it because 1) he has the skills and 2) his parents are on the board of Pulse TV, the TV network owned and operated by Karin and Anders Skool—or as they are universally known on Page Six, the Skool Twins.
     Pulse TV is kind of a CNN meets MTV (minus the music) for young people. News and pop culture and social issues. When they started, they were cool because they didn’t try very hard to brand themselves. Sort of like what VICE could be if they were less annoying and had a conscience. Pulse broadcast a lot about the Skool twins themselves, how they were helping with some inner city cause or raising money for some sort of positive global initiative. Hence, SKOOLS 4 ALL. From Pulse TV I learned that ninety-nine percent of all schools in Ethiopia don’t even have books. Seriously. A school with no books. WTF?
     And the Skools are a pretty interesting pair, to say the least. The Internet says they’re twenty-eight, but they could be anywhere from twenty to thirty-five. (I’m not good at ages.) Both are tall and thin, with alabaster hair and skin. High-fashion good looks—you know, from one angle you aren’t sure which one is the boy or the girl.

“Babe, this post you wrote about de Blasio is incredible,” Mike said to me. “You’re so right. I don’t even remember how I found it.” He had an unfortunate tendency to forget all interactions with Rachel. He also seemed to have forgotten she was standing right in front of him. “You never told me you were a writer!”
     Before I could respond, he planted a kiss on me. A public display of affection, or PDA as the kids were calling it, was really out of the ol’ box for Mike Cornelius. Little White Lies had really affected him that much? I almost felt like I should plant a kiss on Rachel. For once her oversharing had paid off.
     “Maybe now you won’t need to call Dante de Blasio in five years,” he added with a crooked smirk.
     “Are you jealous of Dante, Mike? I just put that in there because you know what they say, sex sells.”
     He planted one more kiss on me and peeled out like it was choreographed.
Rachel rolled her eyes.
     I stood there, blushing, flattered, unable to do anything but giggle like an idiot.

The rest of the day became a blur of compliments and updates from kids around school. By the final bell, Little White Lies had over a thousand followers. Don’t get me wrong; I knew I had a lot to say, and that I could be entertaining when forced . . . but entertaining to a thousand people, almost all of whom were total strangers?
     When I went to sleep, the number was up to 1,342.