The Truth About Keeping Secrets(57)

‘Right. Are you … going with anyone?’

I nodded. ‘The kid from my support group who I told you about. Leo. He goes to Collins, but –’

‘Listen. Miles broke up with me.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah, me too. It was pretty messy. Though I’m not sure you’re all that sorry, because this happened, like, seventeen days ago, and you’d think if you cared you would have, I don’t know, mentioned it.’

‘How was I supposed to know if you didn’t tell me?’

‘Well, that was the thing. I wanted to. But you don’t come to lunch any more, and you always rush out of English, and I tried seeing if you were here a few times, but you were never in – or you were, and were pretending like you weren’t, so –’

‘Liv.’ I ground my molars. ‘Did you just come here to – I don’t know. Be passive-aggressive?’

Olivia wrapped her arms over her stomach and fixed her eyes on her feet. ‘No. I wanted to ask you to do something that will probably cause me to re-evaluate our relationship, based on your answer.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Skip Spring Fling. I can’t go, because I’m sure as heck not going by myself, and I don’t want to see Miles there, and I thought we could just stay in and catch each other up, or whatever, because I honestly have no idea what’s going on with you right now, and we can, I don’t know. Just watch YouTube and order pizza and … act … normal.’

‘Act normal,’ I repeated.

‘Yeah,’ Olivia said.

‘You know I can’t.’ Act normal. Call off the dance. It really didn’t even matter which one I was talking about.

Her face didn’t change. She didn’t even flinch. ‘Why do I know you can’t?’

‘Because you’re just asking me now,’ I said, ‘and we already made plans. It’s in three days. It wouldn’t be fair to Leo, or –’

‘To June, right? It wouldn’t be fair to June?’

I frowned. ‘Yeah, I guess, I – is that why you’re mad? Are you seriously mad about this? What am I supposed to do? It would be rude of me to –’

‘We both know you’re not worried about being rude. God. Sydney Whitaker worried about being rude. That’s new. I’m really not an idiot, even though you think I am, for some reason, even though I’ve gotten consistently higher grades than you since we were eight –’

‘I don’t think you’re an idiot.’

‘It’s about June. It’s all about her, isn’t it? It’s all about her, and you’re willing to go to some dance you and I both know you don’t want to go to just so you can buzz around her like some desperate little fly.’

I didn’t let her know how much that hurt. ‘I already said yes.’

Olivia looked up at me, her eyes huge and imploring, bright even in the dark. ‘You seriously don’t get it. You don’t get that I would do anything for you. And I ask you to do one thing for me and you, you just can’t, and I get that you love her or whatever and she helps you and makes you feel something and OK, that’s fine, but it’s this one thing. One thing. I need you to say sorry, June, but my best friend of, like, eleven years, needs me for literally three hours of my existence –’

‘June needs me too,’ I said.

Olivia shook her head. ‘She doesn’t.’

‘How would you know? You don’t know anything about her.’

‘Neither do you.’

My cheeks went red hot, but I wasn’t embarrassed; I was angry. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘June’s on another level. It’s obvious. And –’ she rolled her eyes – ‘you’ve been riding your bike again. She dumped you.’

‘That’s not what happened –’

‘Holy crap. You’re totally delusional! About everything! You are actually delusional about everything.’

‘Are you done?’

‘I get it. I get that you went through something awful and you’re still really struggling – like, obviously, you’re still really struggling. But you’re still going around like – like someone killed him. You still think that.’

My stomach dropped. ‘What?’

Olivia took a step towards me. ‘No one killed your dad. It was an accident, Sydney. It was an accident. People die in car accidents all the freaking time. It’s, like, in the top ten leading causes of death. I know at the beginning, I was maybe, like, not telling you that up front, or maybe I was playing along, but now I realize that was probably the worst thing I could have done because maybe I was enabling you, or something …’

The corners of my vision went black and splotchy. ‘So you were just making fun of me, right? From the beginning.’

‘God, I wasn’t making fun of you, but –’

‘But you saw everything. The messages, you – you threw the book in the fire. You know someone broke in. I told you everything.’

‘Yeah, all right, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’re not exactly the most liked individual in the junior class. It’s just some persistent asshole messing with you. And I can see how you would think this is all some huge conspiracy against you, because, let’s face it, you’re not thinking straight –’