Lies, Lats, and Literature Class

You had Pumping Iron sprawled on your desk like a sacred text while the Canyon High freshmen trickled into Mrs. Hanson’s English Literature class, each one a fidgeting, hormonal catastrophe. Glossy black-and-white photos of muscle-bound gods glared back at you from the pages, but it was the image of Mr. Universe Franco Columbu, hanging upside down from a chin-up bar like a meaty bat, that you kept flipping to. The photo was blurry and distant—just obscure enough that only a true disciple of the iron church could identify Columbu.

Next to you sat Liz Murphy. Just last year, she was the gangly volleyball phenom from Earl Warren Junior High—the one the boys nicknamed “Giraffe,” “Horse,” or “Armadillo,” depending on the angle of cruelty. But over the summer, Liz had staged a Cinderella comeback. A Caribbean cruise had transformed her: her freckles softened into a copper glow, her limbs filled out like poetry, and her hair—now longer and looser—carried the faint scent of strawberries and ginger.

You turned to her and said, “Hey, wanna see a picture of a bodybuilder at the beach?”

She gave you a skeptical smile and leaned in.

“See that guy hanging upside down?” you said, pointing at the photograph.

“Holy smokes, he’s huge,” she said, staring wide-eyed.

“That’s me,” you replied.

She squinted, confused. “What?”

“That’s me. Can’t you tell?”

Her disbelief cracked just enough for hope to sneak in. “Oh my God… that’s you?”

You nodded with solemn authority. “Yep.”

And just like that, you slipped into your own fiction. You told her how you’d been visiting your grandparents in Los Angeles, hanging out with your bodybuilding pals at the beach, when someone snapped the photo. The lie came easy. Too easy. Her awe washed over you like warm sun, and for a few precious seconds, you felt seen. Not as the skinny kid you were—but as the chiseled hero you wanted to be.

But then came the stomach-drop. The gnawing guilt. What kind of person, even at fourteen, spins a story so absurd just to taste a few seconds of admiration? You didn’t know. But if you had to trace it back—to find the origin of the myth-making—you might start in the treehouse of your childhood, the one where humiliation planted its flag and never truly left.