Read Online Holly in Love by Caroline B. Cooney - Free Book Online

what I like to see!” yelled Christopher after me. “A girl in the grips of true passionate love. Running all the way to see Jamie!”
    “Christopher!” I screamed back at him. “You shut up!” Our backyard is adjacent to the campus, and the Psych building is only a few blocks west. I lurched and leaped through the treacherous paths students had tramped into the old, crusty snow. I put Jonathan, dates, younger men, older men, and hot weather campuses out of my mind and concentrated on my fibbing skills.

Nine
    W HEN I GOT THERE , panting and gasping for breath, Jamie had already gone in for testing. I flung myself into a chair and began the winter clothes stripping process. Actually, I don’t wear nearly as many clothes as I’d like, because people tease me if I wear, for example, three scarves. I do wear two pairs of socks, though. Nobody can see those. I just look as if I have fat feet.
    “Holly Carroll?” said the tester in a dry, middle-aged voice.
    For one awful minute I thought it was Jonathan, but it was merely the voice that was cloned. The tester was plain and ordinary. “Yes, sir,” I said.
    “This way, please.”
    The lie detector test was fun. After they attached little electrodes to various places on my body, they showed me three small objects: a key, a nickel, and a paper clip. “You’re going to steal one of these,” said the college boy who seemed to be running things. He looked much younger than Jonathan. Perhaps Jonathan had lied about his age and was really thirty-six. Making Jonathan thirty-six made me feel much better. “When we leave you alone in here,” the boy went on, “take one of the objects and put it in your shoe. Place the other two back in the box and close the lid. That way we, your testers, cannot tell which object you stole. Then we’re going to come back to ask a long series of questions. The first set will be things like, What is the capital of the United States? and, Are you eleven feet tall? You’ll lie to some and tell the truth to others, and we’ll see what your pattern looks like.”
    He showed me a needle gently coasting over some graph paper.
    “Next, we begin the real questioning,” he said. He seemed totally bored. I wondered if I was a boring subject, or if the experiment bored him, or if it was just the proper tone of voice to take when dealing with potential thieves. “We’ll be asking all sorts of questions, in an attempt to discover which of these three objects—the key, the nickel, or the paper clip—you actually stole. Keep in mind the fifty dollars, now, and remember that it is to your advantage to lie successfully, just as if you were a criminal risking prison. Right?”
    “Right,” I said, feeling rather excited.
    When I was alone in the room, I settled on the paper clip to steal. My mother is always accusing me of stealing paper clips from her desk anyhow, so I thought perhaps my subconscious would not regard this as a theft and my heart would be totally relaxed when they asked me about stealing the paper clip.
    Oh, you’re such a crafty little kid, I said to myself. Even if you can’t speak in complete sentences around twenty-one-year-old men in Corvettes.
    “Did you steal the nickel?” said the tester.
    “Yes,” I lied cheerfully, picturing my fifty dollars.
    “Do you have the key in your shoe?” he said.
    “No,” I said truthfully.
    “Sit still,” he said irritably, totally unaffected by my lovely, shiny brown hair. Except for my parents and Jonathan, nobody ever had been impressed by that hair. Perhaps they all had vision problems. I decided not to worry about old Jonathan. As for Hope’s teasing, that would be nothing new. I’d lived with that since the beginning of time. Or at least, it felt like the beginning of time.
    “Did you steal the nickel?” said the tester again.
    “Yes,” I lied again. I decided against buying miniatures. I wanted a new pair of gold earrings. Heart shapes on hoops, like Lydia