Fashion
The Lying Game
How bad could it be?
Sometimes my friend and I play a game.
New York. June. Eighty degrees.
We’re speaking in conspiratorial tones at a two-top table in the back corner of the Odeon, the Jay McInerney restaurant.
Martini, burger, Cosmopolitan, Caesar salad split two ways.
“Let’s go downtown,” my friend says.
“Babe,” I respond, “we are downtown. This is TriBeCa.”
My friend laughs. I know what kind of downtown she is talking about. She is talking about the smattering of dives where everyone is holding a Red Stripe and the music is loud and bad. Where the girls — the ones who are not us — are wearing low-rise jeans, Mom’s Tom Ford Guccis. They’re hitting the vape pen, and it tastes like battery acid and celery and wet dog and grape.
These girls keep getting younger and younger, until they are all born in the 2000s. My friend and I were born in the ’90s. One day we realized we were wading through the marshes that are the back half of our 20s.
On the night I meet him, I am newly crowned 27. I am wearing a white linen vest, blue skirt, black bra. I am stationary in the flesh, to quote Grace Paley. Sometimes when I look in the mirror I think: I am built like a gun. What I am really trying to say is that I may have a few things figured out, but I still love our game.
My friend and I decide: Pick a man out of the crowd and tell him a lie. It cannot be a mean lie. It cannot be a lie that will hurt anyone. But it can be crazy. It can be a little offensive.
