Family Of Liars
We Were Liars
Genuine Fraud
Again Again
Fly on the Wall
Dramarama
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero
The Boyfriend List
The Boy Book
The Treasure Map of Boys
Real Live Boyfriends
OceanofPDF.com
This is a work of ction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used ctitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2022 by Lockhart Ink
Cover art used under license from Getty Images and Shutterstock.com
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an
imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of
Penguin Random House LLC.
Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-593-48585-9 (hc) — ISBN 978-0-593-48586-6 (lib. bdg.) — ISBN
978-0-593-48587-3 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-593-56853-8 (int’l ed.)
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates
the right to read.
Penguin Random House LLC supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity,
encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture.
Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with
copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part in any
form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin
Random House to publish books for every reader.
ep_prh_6.0_139875643_c0_r0
OceanofPDF.com
OceanofPDF.com
Contents
Cover
Also by E. Lockhart
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Genealogy
Map
Dear Readers
Part One: A Story for Johnny
Chapter 1
Part Two: Four Sisters
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Three: The Black Pearls
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Four: The Boys
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Part Five: Mr. Fox
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Part Six: A Long Boat Ride
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Part Seven: The Bonre
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Part Eight: After
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Acknowledgments
About the Author
OceanofPDF.com
Dear Readers,
This book contains spoilers for the novel
We
Were Liars.
I love you, and I wrote this for you—with
ambition and black coee.
xo
E
OceanofPDF.com
OceanofPDF.com
is dead.
Jonathan Sinclair Dennis, that was his name. He died at
age fteen.
There was a re and I love him and I wronged him and I
miss him. He will never grow taller, never nd a partner,
never train for another race, never go to Italy like he
wanted, never ride the kind of roller coaster that ips you
upside down. Never, never, never. Never anything.
Still, he visits my kitchen on Beechwood Island quite
often.
I see him late at night when I can’t sleep and come
down for a glass of whiskey. He looks just like he always did
at fteen. His blond hair sticks up, tufty. He has a sunburn
across his nose. His nails are bitten down and he’s usually
in board shorts and a hoodie. Sometimes he wears his blue-
checked windbreaker, since the house runs cold.
I let him drink whiskey because he’s dead anyway.
How’s it going to hurt him? But often he wants hot cocoa
instead. The ghost of Johnny likes to sit on the counter,
banging his bare feet against the lower cabinets. He takes
out the old Scrabble tiles and idly makes phrases on the
countertop while we talk.
Never eat anything bigger than
your ass. Don’t take no for an answer. Be a little kinder
than you have to be. Stu like that.
He often asks me for stories about our family. “Tell
about when you were teenagers,” he says tonight. You and
Aunt Penny and Aunt Bess.”
I don’t like talking about that time. What do you want
to know?”
Whatever. Stu you got up to. Hijinks. Here on the
island.”
“It was the same as now. We took the boats out. We
swam. Tennis and ice cream and suppers cooked on the
grill.”
“Did you all get along back then?” He means me and my
sisters, Penny and Bess.
“To a point.”
“Did you ever get in trouble?”
“No,” I say. Then, “Yes.”
What for?”
I shake my head.
“Tell me,” he pushes. What’s the worst thing you did?
Come on, spill it.”
“No!” I laugh.
Yes! Pretty please? The absolute worst thing you ever
did, back then. Tell your poor dead son all the gory details.”
Johnny.”
“Oh, it can’t be that bad,” he says. You have no idea the
things I’ve seen on television. Way worse than anything you
could have done in the 1980s.”
Johnny haunts me, I think, because he can’t rest without
answers. He keeps asking about our family, the Sinclair
family, because he’s trying to understand this island, the
people on it, and why we act the way we do. Our history.
He wants to know why he died.
I owe him this story.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll tell you.”
is Caroline Lennox Taft Sinclair, but people call
me Carrie. I was born in 1970. This is the story of my
seventeenth summer.
That was the year the boys all came to stay on
Beechwood Island. And the year I rst saw a ghost.
I have never told this particular story to anyone, but I
think it is the one that Johnny needs to hear.Did you ever get in trouble? he asks.
Tell me. What’s the
worst thing you did? Come on, spill it…The absolute worst
thing you ever did, back then.
Telling this story will be painful. In fact, I do not know if
I can tell it truthfully, though I’ll try.
I have been a liar all my life, you see.
It’s not uncommon in our family.
OceanofPDF.com
OceanofPDF.com
a blur of wintry Boston mornings, my sisters
and I bundled in boots and itchy wool hats. School days in
uniforms with thick navy cardigans and pleated skirts.
Afternoons in our tall brick town house, doing homework in
front of the replace. If I close my eyes, I can taste sweet
vanilla pound cake and feel my own sticky ngers. Life was
fairy tales before bed, annel pajamas, golden retrievers.
There were four of us girls. In the summers, we went to
Beechwood Island. I remember swimming in the erce
ocean waves with Penny and Bess while our mother and
baby Rosemary sat on the shore. We caught jellysh and
crabs and kept them in a blue bucket. Wind and sunlight,
small quarrels, mermaid games and rock collections.
Tipper, our mother, threw wonderful parties. She did it
because she was lonely. On Beechwood, anyway. We did
have guests, and for some years my father’s brother Dean
and his children were there with us, but my mother thrived
at charity suppers and long lunches with dear friends. She
loved people and was good at loving them. Without many
around on the island, she made her own fun, having parties
even when we hadn’t anybody visiting.
When the four of us were little, my parents would take
us to Edgartown each Fourth of July. Edgartown is a
seafaring village on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, all
white picket fences. We’d get deep-fried clams with tartar
sauce in paper containers and then buy lemonade from a
stand in front of the Old Whaling Church. We’d set up lawn
chairs, then eat as we waited for the parade. Local
businesses had decorated oats. Vintage car collectors
proudly tooted their horns. The island re stations paraded
their oldest engines. A veterans’ band played Sousa
marches and my mother would always sing: “Be kind to
your ne-feathered friends / For a duck could be
somebody’s mother.”
We never stayed for the reworks. Instead, we motored
back to Beechwood and ran up from the family boat dock to
the real party.
Clairmont house’s porch would be decked out in fairy
lights and the large picnic table on the lawn dressed in blue
and white. We’d eat corn on the cob, hamburgers,
watermelon. There would be a cake like an American ag,
with blueberries and raspberries on top. My mother would
have decorated it herself. Same cake, every year.
After supper she’d give us all sparklers. We’d parade
along the wooden walkways of the island—the ones that led
from house to house—and sing at the top of our lungs.
America the Beautiful,” “This Land Is Your Land,” “Be Kind
to Your Fine-Feathered Friends.”
In the dark, we’d head to the Big Beach. The
groundskeeper, Demetrios in those days, would set o
reworks. The family sat on cotton blankets, the adults
holding glasses of clinking ice.
Anyway. It’s hard to believe I was ever quite so blindly
patriotic, and that my highly educated parents were. Still,
the memories stick.

to me that anything was wrong with how I
t into our family until one afternoon when I was fourteen.