It’s always nice to have a scapegoat. You know, someone you can blame if you don’t want to do something or didn’t do something the way someone wanted you to. I’ve always been a terrible liar, and even little white lies about who’s to blame for a certain situation never came easy to me, but now that I work at The Evening Sun, I can have a scapegoat for any situation without even trying.

In high school, my mother was always the scapegoat, and she was perfectly willing to fill that role. If I didn’t want to go to a party in the middle of someone’s corn field in November or if I really didn’t want to go to the movies with that creepy, but very nice, kid from homeroom, I would always just blame my mom. “That sucks,” I would say. “I really wanted to go to that freezing cold corn field and stay for several hours, but Mom said I can’t go.”

When I thought my friends might be catching on, I even had fake telephone conversations with my mother, during which I would plead my case for the benefit of whoever was in the room with me.

Now that I’m a little older, I have much less need for that particular kind of scapegoat. First of all, my friends and I are all now old enough to drink beer inside, but I’ve also discovered that the world won’t end if I tell someone I don’t want to do something.

Having reached that decision several years ago, I didn’t really think I would need to play this particular blame game again, but I was wrong.