Fourteen-year-old Kevin Spencer is an excellent liar. He’s proud of this skill because he sees the need to lie as a universal inevitability, necessary for the greater good and making life easier and happier for everyone. The secret to his success at lying is that he tells people exactly what they want to hear. He tells his parents that school’s going great, he agrees with whatever opinion his friends have already expressed, and he convinces his teachers he understands the math or reading comprehension skills they’re trying to teach him. Kevin is such a skilled liar that he’s never been caught in a lie—until his life goes “from zero to crap in a week” after he gets carried away with his lies (4).

Kevin’s 8th grade social studies teacher just assigned a class project in which students must work with a partner to research and present a topic related to government. Mr. Crosby has assigned Kevin to work with Katie Knowles, an ambitious overachiever whom Kevin can’t stand. They end up choosing a topic Kevin finds so boring he doesn’t even try to remember it: an analysis of census data for underserved populations, especially relating to educational grants and future public service.