No One Needs to Know Read Online Free PDF Page A

mom’s been working as a hotel maid for so long, I don’t think she knows how to be anything else.
    I don’t have a destination, so I just keep walking—past the sprawling Wright Park, where Carolyn spent half her summer playing in the waterpark sprinklers, and then over to a Chevron gas station. Inside the brightly lit store, I fill a hot chocolate, pay for it at the register, and then I’m outside again.
    There’s a bench next to the ice freezer, so I sit down, sipping at the drink, trying to decide what I’m going to do next. I can’t go home. I’ll go nuts inside those four walls, which are more of a cage than anything else could possibly be.
    Stars twinkle to life, but I’m the opposite. I feel like I’m dimming. Day by day, minute by minute, the pages in my book are being written, and they all point to the same ending: stupid, crappy job like my mom; crumbling, shitty house forevermore. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll marry some deadbeat like she did and send my own kid to a gang-riddled, underfunded school.
    I don’t know how to change it, though. I can graduate with honors from Annie Wright, maybe get a little bit of a scholarship for college, but my mom’s wrong. Me leaving won’t help Carolyn, not in time to make a difference. She’s too sweet, too soft, to survive in that school much longer.
    A deep rumbling makes me glance up. I see a dark blue pickup, something from the sixties or the seventies, pulling up to the pumps. It sparkles and gleams under the bright station lights. Two guys climb out of the cab, one of them dressed in a royal blue and gold letterman’s jacket from Stadium High.
    I pretend to be super interested in my hot chocolate, but as they approach the doors, I glance up. The boy in the letterman’s jacket looks over at me, flashing an easy, megawatt smile as he enters the store.
    I’m hot from the inside out. He has pretty, warm blue eyes and messy brown hair, and I can’t help but wonder what it would feel like to run my hands through it.
    I’m still sitting there, nursing my hot chocolate, when the bench creaks and he’s sitting next to me, leaning back and stretching his legs out in front of us. My eyes linger on his DC sneakers and baggy jeans.
    They’re more skater boy than jock, totally at odds with his jacket.
    “What’s up?” he asks, like we’re friends, like it’s a normal thing to do.
    “Um, nothing?”
    “Why are you sitting at a gas station all by your lonesome?”
    I smirk, glancing over at him with amusement. “Is that the sort of thing that works for you?”
    He blinks. “What?”
    “That line,” I say, crossing my arms. “Do girls fall at your feet?”
    Grinning, he says, “Generally, yes.”
    “Interesting.”
    “You’re unimpressed,” he says.
    “Oh no, I’m incredibly impressed.”
    He laughs. “I meant it, though. What are you doing just sitting at a gas station?”
    I lean back on the bench, my shoulder touching his, my legs stretched out like his are, except mine don’t reach the edge of the walkway. “Nothing better to do.”
    “Well, we’re headed to my house to play pool. You can join us.”
    Whoa. This guy is forward. “How do I know you don’t have a dungeon or a torture room?”
    He pretends to ponder my question. “I mean, we only own the penthouse. I guess there could be a dungeon somewhere in the building.”
    “Penthouse?”
    “At Point Ruston? Down by the water?”
    Pretty boy has money.
    “I know it,” I say. I saw a flier, once, blowing in the wind near Annie Wright. Those condos start at five or six hundred thousand dollars, for little one-bedrooms without a water view. The penthouse must be well into the millions. “But I don’t know you.”
    “That’s cool. Just thought I’d offer. You look … ” His voice trails off and his eyes sweep over me. My face heats up as I wait for him to finish his sentence. “Bored.”
    Oh.
    The door behind him swishes open, the same ding-ding that I’ve been listening to for