No One Needs to Know (13 page)

The water laps at the posts as I climb down into the boat, then reach up and hold a hand out.

Zoey accepts my hand, her fingers gripping mine, hot, as she steps down into the boat. “Thank you,” she says.

Neither of us sits right away, her fingers still curling around mine. She’s standing close, our knees almost touching, and I stare right into her eyes.

They look more blue than brown, a trick of the moonlight and the water.

The moment breaks when the boat shifts a bit, rocking enough that I have to let go of her hand and reach out to grab the dock to keep us from tipping.

“You can sit toward the front, if you want,” I say, pointing to a couple of seat cushions.

“I thought maybe I’d help row,” she says. “I let Liam play the gentleman earlier, but it looks kind of fun.”

“Oh. Sure.”

I don’t even know if it’ll work very well, each of us rowing one side, but I figure we can give it a shot. We sit side by side on the middle bench, facing forward so we can see where we’re going, and take hold of the oars, which are secured to the side through the little rings. I untie the boat, then lean over and push us off the dock.

We drift in silence for a moment, the only sounds the water lapping against the side of the boat. The moon hangs low overhead, providing a beam of light across the lake that looks like a yellow brick road. Maybe we should follow it. Maybe it will lead us to the Emerald City, where our every wish can be granted.

“Okay, so we need to row in unison or we’ll just go in circles,” I say. “Ready?”

“Aye, aye, captain.”

“On three. One, two … three.” I dig my oar in, then push forward.

Zoey’s elbow knocks into me and the boat hardly moves.

I snort as I realize she just rowed backward. “Have you ever done this before?”

“Rowed?”

I nod.

“Uh, yes?”

I smile. “You’re not a very good liar.”

“Okay … no?”

I pull my oar far enough in that I can rest it on my knees, then reach over to stop her disorganized movement.

I rest my hand over hers, and she stills. “It’s super easy once you get going, but there’s a certain way to do it that is most effective and also cuts down on splashing.”

“Okay,” she says.

My hand is still resting on hers. I have the urge to glance back, just to see if Liam is watching us. But we’re on the opposite side of the dock, and, sitting down like this, the wood blocks both his view and ours.

“It’s sort of an egg-shaped stroke. Turn the oar a bit as you put it back into the water. You want it at an angle or else you kind of slap the surface and it makes a big splash.”

With one hand on hers where she grips the oar, and my other hand directly on the wood, I twist the oar until it’s at the right angle, showing her what I mean as I talk.

“Okay,” she says. “Like this?”

I leave my hand resting on hers as she rows forward. Just as it’s about to hit the water, I use my hand to guide her in twisting the oar juts a bit.

“Cool. I think I got it.”

Reluctantly, I let go of her hand and pick up my own oar again. “Okay then. Ready?”

“Yes.”

“On three. One … two … three.”

We pull back on the oars, lift up to dip them back into the water, and then push forward. Again and again, until the boat is finally moving steadily across the lake, into the darkness and away from the fire. The lights from the cabin die away and the darkness soon envelops us.

We don’t speak as we row, our sides and shoulders and elbows bumping periodically.

When we reach the middle of the lake, I stop. Zoey rows one more time, then pauses as well.

The one extra stroke on the left side causes the boat to turn a bit, and we sit in silence as the boat gradually drifts until we’re facing back the way we came. The cabin is dimly lit, but in front of it the fire glows orange, the dancing flames reflecting on the water, glimmering.

“It’s pretty,” Zoey says, in a sort of breathless whisper.

“
You’re
pretty,” I say, without thinking.

The words are out and they just hang there, awkwardly.

“I mean, I don’t know why I said that,” I add hastily.

“Well, don’t try to unsay it,” she says in a teasing voice. “It’s probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

I train my eyes on the fire in the distance, wondering if Zoey can see the flush in my cheeks.

“I’m glad I came here,” Zoey says, a heartbeat later.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It makes me think I’m not stupid for believing life will be better if I can somehow get me and Carolyn out of Hilltop. There’s a whole world outside that neighborhood, you know? I just need to figure out how to make it so that she doesn’t have to go back to that school.”

Her words fall heavily on my ears. The sad wistfulness of it, but beyond that, the honesty. It’s at odds with her usually hard looks, and it brings back a memory.

“You were different before, weren’t you? Freshman year? We had a class together. You were more … ”

“Preppy?” she asks. “Cheerful?”

“Yeah.”

Zoey nods. I wish I could make out her expression in the darkness.

“Why’d you let it all change you so much?”

She snorts, an ugly bitter sound. “I know you’re not stupid, Olivia.”

“I mean, I get that people have said some pretty shitty things about you, but—”

“But what?”

“But why’d you do it?” I blurt.

She sneers, and I want to close my eyes against the sight of it. “
Do it
? Are we in third grade? Your friend has no problem saying it—why can’t you?”

“Why’d you sleep with Zach? Everyone knew he was dating Ava.”

The sneer turns even harder, and though I can’t see every detail, when she looks over at me, her eyes meeting mine, there’s enough fury that I half expect her to shove me out of the boat and row away.

“I didn’t even know he was her boyfriend,” she says. “I’d only been at Annie Wright for, like, a week, and obviously he didn’t go there. I had no reason to connect him with Ava.”

The water laps against the boat and I strain to hear her quiet voice.

“I really thought Annie Wright was my chance,” she says. “We all had uniforms and I thought I could fit in, you know? Be one of the cool kids for once. So I heard about the party, and I wore my best clothes, and I went. God, I was so nervous. You have no idea.”

“Why?”

“Because you and Ava were so cool, you know? I thought I could make a good impression.”

I chew on my lip, staring down at where my paddle is making small ripples as the boat bobs along. “So what went wrong?”

“You guys weren’t there at first. I was nervous, so I had a couple of drinks, and this guy starts talking to me. Like really noticing me and flirting with me, and it was the most empowering, intoxicating feeling. I’d felt like nobody ever saw me, but this guy, who was so well dressed and so cute, noticed me.”

“Ava’s boyfriend,” I mutter.

“Yeah. If I’d known, I would’ve blown him off. But he was so smooth, you know? Made me feel like I was so one of a kind, so special. And so he tells me there’s a ping-pong table in the garage, but then the next thing I know, we’re in some random bedroom completely making out. I hardly even noticed when he took my shirt off.”

“And then Ava—”

“Ava was looking for him, and she found him. With me, in my bra and jeans. And she blamed me for everything. Because, of course, her boyfriend was perfect, and I was the slut who went after him. That’s all she could see.”

Somewhere out on the lake, a fish jumps. The splash is all I can hear.

“You know what’s truly fucked up?” she says.

“Everything?”

“All I wanted was for her, for you, for half the school to like me. The whole summer leading up to the start of school, I’d had this image in my head. I was going to be someone else inside that school. I was going to fit in and make friends, and somehow that was going to make everything better. Annie Wright was going to be my path out of the shitty life I had. I was so certain of it.”

She sighs. “It’s never been easy. But I thought if I could pull it off, things would get
easier
. And I did the one thing to ensure that it never would. I was stupid. I fell for a pretty smile and a few compliments.”

Her words are heavy, and I’m almost certain I can hear them falling into the water around us, creating ripples. Just like that party.

“I’ve spent the last three years just trying to get through. I thought she’d get tired of it. She has a new boyfriend now. But she hates me so much she just keeps bringing it up—telling people about how I’m such a slut, that I sleep with everyone, saying they shouldn’t let their boyfriends anywhere near me.”

And I’d believed it all. I never doubted Ava’s claim that Zoey had known who Zach was, that she’d gone after him even though Ava was his girlfriend.

“I’m sorry.”

“Then prove it, Olivia,” Zoey says. “Tell Ava she’s wrong. See if she apologizes, and then show me where your loyalty is.”

“She’s her own person. I can’t make her do anything,” I mumble.

“If she won’t stop running my name through the mud, but you still call her a friend, then you’re not who I thought you were.”

“Maybe if you’d just told her you didn’t know, that he was the one pursuing—”

“Yeah, she’d totally believe me, wouldn’t she?”

I want to say she’s wrong. I want to argue it. I want it to be simple.

I find her hand in the darkness and squeeze it. She intertwines her fingers with mine, and we sit there in silence, watching Liam’s shadow as he gets up and walks away from the campfire. Zoey leans against me, resting her temple on my shoulder.

“Everything got really screwed up,” she says, her voice hardly more than a whisper. “People started writing stuff on my locker, and whispering stuff, and asking me if I was going to steal their boyfriends, too. I don’t even know how I would’ve handled it if there were guys at school thinking I was a sure thing. I guess I should be grateful for that.”

“I remember some of that.”

“I deleted my Facebook page because I kept getting all these mean messages.”

“People can be bitches,” I say, and she laughs softly at my horrible attempt at a joke.

“I got really depressed for a while. Like, really bad.”

“You didn’t—”

“No, I would never kill myself. Carolyn needs me. I knew I’d claw my way out of it somehow.”

“I never even questioned it,” I say. “I had no idea.”

“It’s not like I walk around telling everyone this stuff. No one at school cares about me. I’m the poor little scholarship student.”

I squeeze her shoulder and relish the feeling of her curled into me, the weight of her head on my shoulder. It feels … right. Comfortable. Like I’ve waited my whole life to just be sitting here in the darkness with her, listening to her secrets.

I turn and kiss the top of her head. “You can trust me, you know that, right?” I say, my lips still against her hair.

“I told you the truth, didn’t I?”

I turn back to the shore and rest my cheek against the top of her head.

“Yeah. You did.”

ZOEY

I awake the next morning to the sounds of pots and pans banging around on the other side of the wall.

The kitchen.

Liam’s arm is heavy around my waist, but we’re both still fully clothed. By the time I got back last night with Olivia, he was asleep or passed out or something—his snoring didn’t stop when I slid under the covers. It still took me a while to fall asleep because I kept half expecting him to wake up and want to hook up, but he was out cold.

I don’t know what might happen tonight, but I’m sort of hoping it’ll be the same. Before anything gets more serious … more physical, I need some time to figure out how I really feel about him.

All night, my head kept spinning and spinning and spinning as I thought about how Olivia had acted in the boat. As I thought about the way she’d wrapped her arm around me and just … listened.

I’m afraid to get up and go into the kitchen and have it be weird, but I’m more afraid to go in there and have it be like our conversation last night never happened.

I slide out of bed, the floor cold on my bare feet, feeling both nervous and strangely at peace. I leave the bedroom behind, pausing at the big mirror on the wall in the living room. I quickly smooth out my hair, tucking it behind my ear, and wiping away the smudged eye liner under my eyes.

Then I walk into the kitchen, where Olivia is pouring batter onto a flat grill. She beams when she looks up at me. “Hey. So, you can choose between Mickey with one-and-a-half ears, or a smiley face pancake that looks like a guy who got hit in the head a few too many times.” She nods at the platter next to the grill.