Carry Your Heart by Audrey Bell Read Free Book Online Page A

is.”
    “She’s blonde from Charleston—the one who faked a pregnancy and went through a lesbian phase with Gabrielle? Oh my god, seriously , what have you been doing for the past year and a half? Don’t tell me you’ve gone in for Teen Mom 2 .”
    “ Hoarders actually. Also, Duck Dynasty .”
    “You cannot abandon The Real World ,” Lottie says sternly. “It’s like the only thing we ever had in common.”
    I laugh at her indignation.
    “Anyways, dreamboat Dawson over there dated her. I saw them in People . Or maybe it was US Weekly . Not the cover or anything, but that’s your kind of magazine, so you should really be up on this stuff. They broke up because he thought she was doing too much yoga.”
    I sneak a look at Hunter and glance back at Lottie.
    “Yoga?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, I guess he doesn’t look like he does any yoga.”
    “Exactly. Apparently, Mackenzie thought yoga was her boyfriend and Hunter just couldn’t handle it. And so, he was like, I can’t handle this anymore, Mackenzie and they broke up. And then apparently, to blow off steam, he went to a strip club and she was heartbroken because she thought they had a real connection . Some also suspected she cheated on him with someone real, not with a an activity like yoga. Maybe a yoga teacher, although this is purely my speculation. But we’ll probably never know the truth. And he probably has diseases because he’s kind of a whore and had a whole thing with Laurel back in the day. But he’s nice to look at.”
    Laurel. Laurel is the kind of girl who can give you a panic attack even if you haven’t seen her for a year and she’s miles and miles away. I never thought I would be jealous of her. But, for the first time I hear her name and I don’t think what a psycho , but what the hell did he see in her?
    “Hello? Come on. I know you care about Mackenzie.”
    I laugh. “I’ll have to catch up on that season.”
    Lottie and I used to spend 30 bucks on candy and tabloids at every airport we went to. We became fluent in our own language of gossip. Whenever she was pissed off at me, she would start defending Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, and my head would start to explode. And whenever I was annoyed with her, I’d tell her I had a lot of respect for Ke$ha.
    Lottie, plate stacked high with salad and salmon, marches past Hunter deliberately towards an empty table.
    “Hey,” he says, looking up—looking at me.
    “Hi.”
    “Want to sit?”
    I’m not so much of a bitch as to leave anyone eating dinner alone by himself in a cafeteria at the age of 21. I went to middle school, after all. I know how fucking miserable cafeteria politics could be, and even if Hunter Dawson was a reality star-dating X-Games champion, I wasn’t going to leave him feeling rejected and bullied over an off-the-cuff comment he’d already apologized for.
    Lottie smiles.
    “This is Lottie Miller.”
    “Hunter Dawson,” he said, taking her hand and shaking it.
    “What’s going on?” she asks.
    He shrugs. “Nothing. Nobody’s here, huh?”
    “Yeah, well. It’s a quite mountain,” Lottie says. “Things will pick up this weekend.”
    “You race?”
    Lottie nods. “Yup.”
    “Ames is your coach?”
    “Yup.”
    He smiles at her drawling yups and the way she sways her head from side to side. “So, I have a question. What the fuck do you girls do on this mountain by yourselves?”
    “ Oh ...we ski. It’s like these long things you attach to your feet and then you go down the mountain. Try not to fall. I think we talked about this in the van,” I say.
    He smiles at me and laughs.
    “No, I just mean…” he smiles. “I used to train in Whistler. There’s a lot of people around, there’s a town. It’s pretty dead out here, you know?”
    “It’s a mountain. It’s for skiing. And snowboarding. What did you have in mind?
    He shrugs. “Honestly? Fucking anything.” He turns to look at me. “Joe!” He shouts across the cafeteria at another