Read Online No One Needs to Know by Amanda Grace - Free Book Online Page B

else to say.
    The box is silent, and I start to feel stupid. I shouldn’t have invited her. I don’t even know why I—
    “Come on up. It’ll take me a few minutes to get ready.”
    And then there’s a buzz, and the door next to us clicks, and we’re in.
    I just invited Olivia Reynolds to go to the zoo with me and Carolyn, and I have no idea why.
    “Your car is much nicer than ours,” Carolyn says from the back seat four hours later. I can’t believe she’s awake after so much running around, but maybe it’s all the sugar. Olivia bought her soda and cotton candy, and she promptly consumed them both.
    “Plus, ours makes funny noises,” Carolyn adds.
    I try not to cringe, instead pretending that I’m completely deaf. Oblivious. I mean, there were many reasons I asked Olivia if she could drive us to the zoo, and the funny noises topped the list.
    “Um, thanks,” Olivia says. “My dad let me pick it out.”
    “Awesome.” Carolyn’s voice is full of awe. “I would have picked something red.”
    “Yeah?” Olivia asks, glancing into the rearview mirror to meet my sister’s eyes. At some point today, the two clicked. I’m almost envious. It’s easy between them. Olivia doesn’t have to do much to make Carolyn happy. She doesn’t have to solve all the problems to make her forget that she still had that fading black eye. “My brother’s car is red.”
    “You guys both have your own cars?”
    “Mhmm.”
    I purse my lips and stare out the windshield, as if I can’t even hear their conversation, as if I’m not thinking that Olivia has figured out how pathetically poor we are. I didn’t miss the way she watched me as I moved my mom’s car over to the guest parking space, with it coughing and hiccupping like it was on its last dying breath.
    Hell, maybe it is. Maybe I’ll get back in and it won’t even start.
    “That’s so cool,” Carolyn says. “I hope I get my own car someday.”
    “I’m sure you will.” Olivia clicks on a blinker, turning and heading downhill toward their condo. “When I was a kid I used to want a motorcycle, just because my brother wanted one too. We’d smash cans on the top of our bike wheels so they’d grind against the tire and make sounds like a motorcycle.”
    “I don’t have a bike, either,” Carolyn says.
    I squeeze my eyes shut and try not to notice the way the air went from happy and warm to dead cold.
    “It got stolen,” I say, opening my eyes again and glancing over at Olivia, trying to gauge her reaction.
    Trying to gauge her pity level, really.
    “Oh.” She grips the steering wheel tighter but says nothing.
    “It was too small, anyway,” I add. “She’d had the same bike since, like, first grade.”
    “We have some of my older ones in our storage unit,” Olivia offers. “There’s one that will probably fit her. And it’s red.”
    “It’s fine,” I say, my face warming. This is exactly what I don’t want. From her. From Liam. From anyone. “You don’t need to give us anything.”
    Carolyn’s silent in the back seat, but I swear I can feel her hot gaze on the back of my neck. She wants a bike more than anything. She’s had it on her Christmas list for two years.
    “See, the thing is … ” Olivia reaches over and taps the down button on her window, then sticks her hand out, letting it wave up and down in the wind. “My dad’s been bugging the crap out of me to empty out the storage room for, like, months. If you take the bike, it would be one less thing I have to haul to Goodwill.”
    And then my seat kind of shakes as Carolyn grabs it. “Say yes, say yes, say yes.”
    I want to hang on to my protests, to deny Olivia the ability to give me anything, but faced with Carolyn’s enthusiasm, my resistance dies away.
    “Um, okay. Sure.”
    Olivia flashes me a smile, like she just single-handedly convinced General Lee to surrender in the Civil War. “Cool. Thanks for doing me a solid.”
    Right. She knows it’s her who’s granting the