Pulling the wool over a friend's eyes

Some imp in my brain’s backside bounced this memory up front. When I was 16, I played organ for my boyfriend’s brother’s wedding—the first wedding I ever played for. (Future topic alert: Wedding stories.) Because the wedding was held rather far away, I stayed overnight with the bride and bridesmaids the night before the wedding (boyfriend and his family stayed with the groom), and thus I was away from my friends for a sufficient length of time that my subsequent Big Fat Lie had a plausible framework on which to build. The weekend following the wedding, my friend “Mabel” and I sat together on the band bus headed home from yet another parade. Must have been bored. Somehow I launched the Big Fat Lie: my boyfriend and I had secretly gotten married at the same time as his brother. You have to know that I am (usually) a lousy liar. And when I was 16, I couldn’t do it at all. Poker face I was not. I kept laughing, which really should have tipped her off. It didn’t, which only made me laugh more. Whatever the implausible story I wove, I thought no more about it once I got home. When one tells a Big Fat Lie, one can’t always think of all possible repercussions, especially not when one is as unpracticed in lying as I was. I do know that I was envious because Mabel was to leave the next morning along with five other friends/classmates on a canoe trip of the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, and I was not included. I do know that the size of the party was limited, and I was not included! I was not included. Ah, a motive? But I could never have foreseen that my Big Fat Lie would be replayed, discussed, mulled over, chewed on during the entire week of evenings with nothing to do but swat mosquitoes and nurse sore muscles. Did I mention that the leader of this expedition was our school district’s superintendent? And it’s only now that I’m wondering if the Big Fat Lie was confined only to Mabel and our friend Laura, or if the others on the trip got wind of it in the great wilderness. I believe that, upon their return, Mabel and Laura did stop to take a shower before driving over to grill me. And yes, I ’fessed up immediately. Mabel’s and Laura’s discussions on this topic appeared to have played out this way: Mabel insisted it was true and Laura insisted it couldn’t be, but by the end of that long isolation in the wild, Laura was close to believing it as well. My reputation for being truthful no doubt was a big factor in this playlet, but still, it’s sobering to ponder what happens to people’s thought processes and emotions when there’s scant information and no way to verify any of it. When hearing any breaking news story, I suspend all judgment, because time and again, I’ve learned that truth takes time, and a lot of work, to surface. Many theories are propounded in the absence of solid fact, and most often they are wrong. I’ve never told a Big Fat Lie again. Sometimes I still tell little white lies.