The Last Time I Lied: A Novel

Vivian, the daughter of an important senator, was the “queen bee” of Camp Nightingale. When Emma arrives, Vivian is 16 years old and has spent many summers at the camp. To the 13-year-old Emma, Vivian’s dead sister, talk of therapy, and experience with boys make her “an exotic creature” (66). Emma idolizes the older girl, who tells Emma to think of her like a “big sister.” Vivian is “bold” and “unfiltered,” never shying away from saying what is on her mind.

However, while Vivian is charismatic, she is also commonly known as a “bitch.” Through her favorite game, Two Truths and a Lie, she perfects the art of hiding, twisting, and masking the truth. She can be cruel and dismissive even with girls she claims are her friends. Becca, for example, was Vivian’s best friend until Vivian’s sister, Katherine, died. Vivian then abandoned Becca, whom she calls a “nobody,” to spend all her time with Natalie and Allison. She is also often critical of Natalie and Allison, making judgmental comments on the girls’ bodies and eating habits.

Emma’s infatuation with Vivian allows her to overlook the older girl’s faults. Vivian’s attention is “as warm and welcome as the sun” (72), and Emma repeatedly forgives and excuses her lies and malice. Even after Vivian lets Emma believe she had sex with Theo out of spite, Emma feels like she is the one who treated Vivian badly for encouraging her to leave the cabin and locking the door behind her.

Vivian’s cruelty and tendency toward lies and deception run deeper than anyone realizes. Instead of befriending Natalie and Allison out of a desire to maintain a connection to her dead sister, Vivian suspected they were responsible for Katherine’s death. She “spent a year researching and planning” (368), and when the girls finally confessed that they had dared Katherine to walk on the frozen reservoir in Central Park, she put her plan into action. She led the girls to the place where Peaceful Valley Asylum was hidden in the lake and “did to them what they had done to [her] sister” (369). When she appears at Emma’s gallery show, she tells her that Vivian died that same night, suggesting that she has adopted a new identity and turned deception into “a lifestyle.”

Theo is Franny’s eldest son. When Emma first arrives at Camp Nightingale, he is 19 years old and “the most handsome man [she’s] ever seen” (157). She immediately develops a crush on him, which deepens when Vivian urges her to spy on him in the shower through a crack in the latrine wall. Despite their age difference, she even tries to kiss Theo during an outing into town. When Emma sees Vivian having sex in the shower, she believes the man is Theo and is devastated, accusing Vivian of seducing him to hurt Emma. When Emma reveals Vivian’s supposed relationship with Theo to the detective, her accusation comes from a place of childish hurt and jealousy, not out of true suspicion that he harmed the girls.

As an adult, Theo is just as handsome. He has become a pediatrician and recently spent a year in Africa working with Doctors Without Borders. He reveals himself to be gracious and forgiving, harboring no hard feelings toward Emma for her teenage accusation. As romantic tension bubbles between them, he even suggests that they try to “start over” and leave the past behind them. Like Emma, he suffered a great deal in the aftermath of the girls’ disappearance. He dropped out of school and experienced suicidal ideation. After a near-fatal car accident, he spent time in a treatment center for drug and alcohol addiction. At the same time, Emma was also receiving treatment for trauma-induced mental health conditions. On the one hand, these shared struggles bring the two closer together; however, they also heighten Emma’s guilt.

Nevertheless, Emma comes to suspect Theo again following Miranda, Sasha, and Krystal’s disappearance. When Theo appears after Emma discovers the girls trapped in the root cellar, she immediately thinks he had a hand in their disappearance as well as that of Emma’s former cabinmates. However, in the end, Theo not only proves innocent but also again demonstrates his immense capacity for forgiveness. He decides to take another year-long tour with Doctors Without Borders but invites Emma to have dinner with him when he returns, suggesting the possibility of a budding romantic relationship.

Franny is the matriarch of the Harris-White family. Now in her late seventies, Franny “wears her age well” but is secretly dying of ovarian cancer (16). Her grandfather was a lumber baron who bought 4,000 acres of land in the Adirondack mountains. The land became home to the Harris-White family’s private retreat, and when Franny’s parents passed away, she transformed the retreat into Camp Nightingale. At 21, Franny married a much older man who tragically drowned in Lake Midnight even though he was a champion swimmer. Franny never remarried but adopted the first of her sons, Theo, when she was 40 and the second, Chet, when she was 50.

Franny prizes Camp Nightingale. She loves the wilderness and sharing the camp experience with new generations of girls. She is kind and approachable, always insisting that the campers call her “Franny” instead of “Mrs. Harris-White.” She admits that the girls’ disappearance and the ensuing closure of Camp Nightingale “troubled” her deeply, and she wants “one last glorious summer” so that she can die peacefully (217). Although Emma is often suspicious of Franny, especially after reading about a supposed “secret” in Vivian’s diary, the older woman is invariably generous and forgiving. Some of her actions, such as installing the camera outside Emma’s cabin, may be misguided, but they come from a place of genuine care and concern.