They’re sitting around a large, rectangular, standard issue, classroom table, doing work, and chatting. Well, one girl was chatting chatting chatting. Nonstop. She’s telling the story about an accident her mom was involved in. A serious one. I mean, seriously, this girl went on and on and on about how one car crashed into the rear of another car, which caused that car to crash into the next car’s rear-end, and it just continued. A domino effect. Collide collide collide. Somewhere in this story one of those car flipped, “like five times,” she said. Flip flip flip.

Someone asked if her mom was okay and the girl just kept chatting, stating that her mom was fine. That she had just a little bump. On her forehead. Right there, right above her left eyebrow. One kid, a boy who seemed to be deep in thought, stopped her mid-sentence. Looked at her with contemplation. His lips gently pinched, and his eyes narrowed. Squinted, full of doubt. He casually claimed that she was lying. And she responded that she was not.

“I mean, really?” he began. “That many cars crashed into one another, and one kept flipping? It’d be all over the news,” he pressed.

The girl went on to say that yes indeed it did happen, and that she didn’t know why it wasn’t on the news. But the boy challenged her, brought up an old story from a previous time.

“Last year you told me your brother’s super strong tooth, the one that could chomp through anything, took a bite out of a brick building. That the whole thing fell down.” Crumbled to the ground. Crumble crumble crumble.

She went on and on, saying it was all true, that it all really happened, but the boy just looked at her, and he had only one more thing to say.

“Liar,” he told her.

“Liar,” someone else added.