The Group Project Alibi
A free B2-level English story for language learners, readable online in 7 languages, with an option to listen via the free Storyteller app.
Milo tells three different groupmates three different excuses for his unfinished project, not realizing they are all in the same chat.
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Milo had told his group exactly three different excuses for why his section of the project wasn't finished. The trouble was that he had told them to three different people, who all happened to be in the same group chat.
To Astrid, he had explained that his laptop had crashed and taken the whole file with it. To Percy, he had claimed his grandmother was visiting unexpectedly and he couldn't focus. To their teacher, somewhat more ambitiously, he had said he'd been dealing with a family emergency that he would rather not discuss in detail.
Each excuse, on its own, was plausible enough. The problem, which Milo hadn't considered, was timing.
"Wait," Astrid typed in the group chat, "I thought your grandmother was visiting, not your laptop."
"Different day," Milo typed back quickly, already sensing where this was going.
"Also," Percy added, "didn't you tell Ms. Okafor it was a family emergency? Is your grandmother the emergency, or is this a whole separate thing?"
Milo stared at his phone, aware that he had officially run out of ways to make three unrelated lies sound consistent. He considered a fourth excuse to explain the inconsistency in the first three. Then he realized that this was exactly the kind of decision that had gotten him into trouble in the first place.
"Okay," he typed. "None of that happened. I just haven't started my section, and I panicked."
There was a long pause in the chat.
"That's honestly more believable than the laptop thing," Astrid replied.
"I respect the honesty," Percy added, "but you now have eighteen hours to write four pages, so I hope panic is motivating."
Milo spent that night writing faster than he had ever written anything in his life. He was fueled mostly by the humiliation of being caught in a lie so complicated it had needed a shared timeline to fall apart. He finished with forty minutes to spare and sent it to the group with a single message: "Never doing that again. Any of it."
"Sure you won't," Percy replied, followed by a laughing emoji that felt entirely deserved.
