1,000 Lies Told At 40,000 Feet High

“I’m Chace by the way.”

“Avery.” Avery is not my real name, although it is one of my favorites, one that I use more often than other names. My name is actually Piper, Piper Scarlett Evan, but I rarely tell the people that I meet on airplanes my real name.

“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you Avery,” said Chace as he smiled.

I looked out the window beside me and cursed softly as I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Umm, are you okay?” Chace asked me.
“Err, yes, no, not really. I just really really hate flying,” I said wincing a little. It was a lie of course, just like my name and anything else that I’ll tell Chace during this flight. If there is one thing that I am sure about, it is that I am not afraid of flying.

“Oh,” said Chace. He was silent for a moment. “So why are you going up to Sydney?”
“Are you genuinely interested in the reason why or are you just asking me in an attempt to distract me from the plane taking off so that you don’t have to sit next to a girl having a panic attack for the next hour?” I replied with my eyes still closed as I wrung my fingers, a trick that I had picked up after watching an old lady with a fear of flying once.

Chace laughed from beside me.
“A bit of both. But I am interested in why someone who so obviously hates flying is on a plane. What’s the occasion?” I took a deep breath and gave myself a moment to think. Who was I going to be today? What was my story? Perhaps I was visiting a childhood friend? No, that’s not particularly exciting. Maybe my parents had just died in a horrific car accident and I was going to live with my Aunt. Then again, maybe not, last time I told that story -in flawless detail with fake tears- I made a woman cry for twenty minutes. Perhaps something a little more cheerful.

“My older brother is getting married this weekend and I’m going to the wedding.” I said finally. I haven’t ever told anyone, not my friends of my family, about the stories that I make up about myself to tell other passengers. I think most people would tell me that I was crazy and that what I was doing was wrong. But it’s not as if I am hurting anyone, I’m not some psychotic serial killer. I just make myself more memorable. My father has lost interest in who I really am and in a way it has made me doubt myself. I feel as if I’m not good enough, but maybe, if I pretend to be someone else then people will like me.

“Wow, congratulations to your brother. Is he much older than you?” Chace asked. I nodded my head and smiled.
“Yeah, he’s twenty nine and I’m seventeen. I was a ‘surprise’ for my parents,” I replied making air quotation marks around the word surprise, “But my brother and I are really close so I don’t notice the age gap quite as much.”

“I have a little brother who’s 15, there’s not so much of an age gap between us. We hated each other when we were kids but now we’ve grown a little closer,” Chace said as he laughed. I couldn’t help but laugh with him. I glanced around the plane and my eyes landed on the view from outside the window. What I saw made me laugh even more.

“It worked,” I stated.
“Sorry?”
“Look out the widow, all I can see is blue skies and fluffy white clouds. And I didn’t even notice us taking off. Thanks,” I said smiling.
“No problem,” said Chace as he yet again flashed me his beautiful smile. Did this man ever stop smiling?

“So why are you going up to Sydney?” I asked after a moment of silence. Chace sighed and leaned his head back on the seat as he closed his eyes for a second.
“It’s complicated,” he finally replied.
“Is that code for ‘it’s personal and I don’t really want to tell some random stranger that I just met on the plane’ or is it code for ‘it’s a long story and I just cannot be bothered to explain it to you right now’?” I asked, “Because if it’s the second, well, we still have another 45 minutes left of this flight.” Chace laughed and shook his head.

“Okay then, but don’t blame me if I bore you to sleep. When my dad was growing up he went to a school called ‘Harper Grammar School’. It was a really big private school and according to him, the best school in Melbourne. So when it became time for me to go to high school, my parents wanted me to go there no matter what.
Recently though, the company that my Dad worked for merged with another company. As a result, we all had to move up to Sydney. The only problem was that it meant that I would have to change school. And as I already said, according to my Dad, Harper is the only school that exists. So now, all my family has moved to Sydney and I’m staying in Melbourne until I finish school. They have dormitories at Harper that students can board in so I am staying there. My family only just moved so we haven’t worked it all out yet, but I think that I will come up to Sydney once a fortnight for the weekend to visit my family.”

I was silent for a moment as I tried to get my head around what Chace had just said.
“What about your brother?” I asked confused.
“Hmm, that’s a whole other story. My parents have, well, lower expectations of my brother. He acts out a lot and doesn’t care about school all that much so my parents had no problem with sending him to another school in Sydney,” Chace answered with a small frown.

“Oh,” I said pathetically, unsure of how I was supposed to answer. It was silent for a moment.
“Tell me more about your brother’s wedding,” said Chace. I smiled, and continued to create Avery’s story.