Joel and I used to put that kind of confession in our Secret Agents game. You can confess to the police about a crime you committed, for one: You can show up at the police station downtown and sign some papers admitting you’re guilty, that you did whatever the police say you did. I’m starting to have an idea.Ĭonfession is a word that can mean a couple of different things. But no one can figure out what actually happened to him, either.Įxcept me, I guess. “He can’t have just disappeared,” everyone in town keeps saying. There one minute, gone the next-like a miracle, but not the good kind. It sounds like Joel just up and vanished, poof, from a patch of woods in the middle of Kentucky. Disappeared isn’t the right word, but no one in town can come up with a better one. Joel disappeared from the woods behind my house sometime late Friday night, or maybe early Saturday morning. Which is too bad, I guess, because the more I think about it, the more sure I am that even before Joel disappeared-even before any of this-I’ve been lying by omission all over the place. They feel like something you just let happen instead of something you actively do.īut Father Jacob says lies of omission are still lies. These lies feel like a different category, if you ask me. I didn’t even realize I was lying as I did it-not at first, anyway.

SOMETIME IN THE LAST DAY OR SO, EVER SINCE JOEL GALLAGHER disappeared, I became a liar. As Aubrey, their friend Mari, and sister Teagan search along the river, Aubrey has to fess up to who they really are, all the things they never said, and the word that bully Rudy Thomas used that set all this into motion. The raft was supposed to be just another part of their running away game.Īubrey doesn’t know where Joel is, but they might know how to find him.For the last two weeks of the school year, when sixth grade became too much, Aubrey and Joel have been building a raft in the woods.Aubrey can’t say much, but since lies of omission are still lies, here’s what they know for sure: The whole town is looking for him, and Aubrey was the last person to see Joel. But lately, even their shared weirdness seems weird. In the woods of a small Kentucky town, Aubrey sets off on a journey about growing up, self-discovery, and acceptance while searching for their missing best friend-perfect for fans of King and the Dragonflies and Three Times Lucky.Īubrey and Joel are like two tomato vines that grew along the same crooked fence: weird, yet the same kind of weird.

The best liars in riverview