The Secret Six

Chapter 1: The Truth Will Set You Free

“Truth is the breath of life to human society. It is the food of the immortal spirit. Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid.” ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Chapter 1

I once heard somewhere that “honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.” And if that was true, than I was pretty fucking wise.But it seemed that as the years seemed to age me, and I seemed to develop more and more of a tendency to spill the truth, the more and more of a bitch people seemed to think I was. It seemed as if nowadays, society flocks towards lies the ways moths are attracted to light. The littlest amount of truth could kill a man’s confidence in an instant, and it seemed that those who told the truth were dwindling day by day.

I was one of the few who no matter what, always told the truth. Whether it was painful or not to hear was none of my concern, and to this day, I’ve had no regrets as to whatever I’ve said. Why should the truth be bottled up when it deserved to be let loose? Simply because society seemed to develop a sort of reverse evolutionary chain, and they were getting dumber and dumber by day, wasn’t any of my concern. The only thing that fazed me truly was whether or not my programs showed up on my DVR, and that was that: the truth. And it didn’t make me a bitch to say it.

Now I suppose I could be a tad harsh, but I’d rather be a bit of a crank than be condemned to a life of white lies. People today seemed to think that no matter how many tiny lies you told, it wouldn’t seem to matter. It was like the scale of the lie outweighed the quantity. I believed quite the opposite; sparing people’s emotions was the simplest form of cowardice, and I wouldn’t tolerate it. Perhaps it was my low tolerance for bullshit that got me in a lot of trouble, but I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just because I offended a few people and hurt some feelings. Why should I give a damn whether or not I hurt Stacey Jacobson because I told her she looked fat in her prom dress after she explicitly asked me? Maybe if she hadn’t packed away three Twinkies the night before her dress fitting, she wouldn’t have had to hear the rotten truth that she looked like a cow who’d found its way into a Lord and Taylor.

Okay, so I guess that was kind of harsh. But guess what? It was true. And it was absolutely right what they said about the truth setting you free: not only did I feel fine, but I was as free as a fucking bird. For example, if I didn’t want to do something, I simply shot it down and forgot about it. The truth was a wonderful thing that others needed to embrace instead of run from like the bubonic plague.

I couldn’t imagine that the human race was always so obsessed with lying to spare others feelings—I liked to believe that there was a time when we weren’t so shallow that we’d take it as a dire insult when someone told us the absolute truth now and again. Was society so pathetic that we needed to feed our confidence with lies? Were we really incapable of understanding and accepting who we really were, so much so that the only source of comfort came in the form of a little fib? The answer was: hell yes.

And it made me sick.

So sick, in fact, that I didn’t mind to keep it to myself. I didn’t have any sort of problem with voicing my opinions to my parents and those around me. My own parents liked to tune me out now and again to try and cope with the fact that their daughter was an apparent “bitch” in the eyes of everyone that set foot within the proximity of my declarations. I, personally, could see no harm nor foul in how I behaved. I’d convinced myself that I was simply too ahead of the times and that others couldn’t keep up with me, and that maybe one day they would, but it would only be when I’d stopped being called to the principal’s office to be demanded to stop commenting on the cheerleader’s lack of agility, grace, and coordination. I mean, it wasn’t my fault that they looked like a group of handicapped Neanderthals jumping up and down on a field.