Vera Finch had been allergic to lies since she was four years old, which was also when she had sneezed gold glitter onto the family cat, who had never forgiven her, and who sparkled faintly for the rest of its life.
The allergy was consistent, involuntary, and (as her mother frequently explained to teachers, relatives, and one very embarrassed school inspector) not something Vera did on purpose. She simply could not help it. A lie entered the room and Vera's nose knew, the way some people's knees know when rain is coming, and the sneeze arrived whether she wanted it to or not.
The glitter was always there. This was the part no doctor had been able to explain, and most had stopped trying. It emerged in colours that appeared to correspond (though Vera could not quite pin down the system) to the nature of the lie. Small social untruths produced pale gold, fine as dust. Large deliberate falsehoods produced something altogether more dramatic: thick, multicoloured, the kind that gets into carpets and resurfaces at Christmas.
The school inspector incident was what had led to the letter home. The letter home was what had led to the meeting. The meeting was what had led to Vera sitting outside the headteacher's office, which was itself a small lie (it was called the headteacher's office but it was really a cupboard with pretensions), waiting to be told, she suspected, that she needed to control herself better.
She is not doing it on purpose. She is not trying to embarrass anyone. She simply cannot be in the same room as something untrue without her nose knowing.
Please stop asking her to "try harder not to." This is like asking someone to try harder not to be short.
The glitter is biodegradable. We had it tested.
The headteacher, Mr. Brody, was a man who chose his words carefully, which Vera had always appreciated, because it meant that when she sat across from him she could get through a whole conversation without ruining his furniture. He had a very clean desk. He was clearly aware of how he'd kept it clean.
"The inspector was upset," he said.
"Yes," said Vera.
"He had glitter in his briefcase."
"Yes. I'm sorry about that."
Mr. Brody looked at her for a moment. "You're not sorry about the sneezing itself," he said. This was not a question.
"No," said Vera. "Not really. He said something that wasn't true."
"He said we had excellent pastoral care."
"Yes."
A long pause. The desk gleamed. Mr. Brody appeared to be weighing something. "He's not wrong that we try," he said finally.
Vera waited, her nose perfectly still.
"He's wrong that we always succeed," said Mr. Brody.
Still nothing from the nose. Vera relaxed very slightly.
"Right," she said.
"Right," said Mr. Brody. He straightened a pen on his desk. "I'd like you to stop sitting alone at lunch."
Vera frowned. "I don't sit alone because I want to."
"I know. I'm working on it." He looked at her directly. "Is that a lie?"
"No," said Vera, a little surprised. "You mean it."
"Good," said Mr. Brody. He stood, which meant the meeting was over. "You may go."
The girl who sat next to her at lunch on the Monday after, because Mr. Brody had (it turned out) meant what he said, was named Bea, and she sat down with her tray and said, "I've been told to be your friend," which was so truthful it made Vera blink.
"That's honest," Vera said.
"I also actually want to," said Bea. "But I thought I should say the full thing."
The nose remained entirely quiet. Vera felt her shoulders drop about two inches from where she usually kept them.
"I'm going to sneeze a lot around you," Vera warned. "Not at you. Just near you. If people around you are lying."
Bea considered this. "Are people around me lying a lot?"
"Constantly," said Vera. "Most people are. They don't mean badly by it, usually. It's just that they say things that aren't quite true because the true thing is harder to say." She looked at her tray. "It makes school quite dusty."
Bea looked around the cafeteria (the loud tables, the quiet corners, the teachers pretending not to watch). "Does it ever make you feel bad? Knowing?"
Vera thought about this properly, the way she'd learned to, because people deserved proper thought. "Sometimes. When people are lying to themselves. That's the saddest kind." She picked up her fork. "The small lies for kindness are all right. My nose knows the difference, I think. Or, it's gentler, anyway. Less glitter."
"What's the worst kind?"
"The ones people have told so many times they've stopped knowing they're doing it," said Vera. "Those ones always produce the most. Because there's so much of it, built up."
The nose was never wrong.
This was, at times, a very lonely thing to live with.
And also, occasionally, the most useful.
They ate lunch. Bea told Vera about her dog, which had eaten an entire birthday cake and then acted, convincingly, as though it had not. This produced no glitter whatsoever, because Bea believed every word.
When the bell rang, Vera sneezed twice (something near the door, something near the lockers, nothing serious, pale gold, barely a dusting) and wiped her nose and picked up her bag.
"See you tomorrow?" said Bea.
"Yes," said Vera.
No glitter. A warm, completely unspectacular truth.
She went to her next class. The corridor was, as always, lightly shimmering. The school smelled of chalk and floor cleaner and, underneath both, the faint persistent scent of everything people hadn't quite managed to say exactly right.
It was, Vera thought, not so bad as it sounded. You got used to the glitter. And every so often, in the middle of all the ordinary untruths that people moved through like weather, someone said something so completely, simply true that the air went still and the nose went quiet and you remembered why it was worth being in rooms with people at all.
She had stopped trying to keep count of those moments. There were more than you'd think.