Holly in Love by Caroline B. Cooney Read Free Book Online Page A

Jamie’s jokes, however amusing, were worth that.
    I tried to come up with one boy— any boy—in the entire school over whom I could really flip. But everyone I could name had so many drawbacks. Perfection, I thought—is that an unreasonable thing to ask? Should I allow some ice-hockey jock to date me?
    I laughed at myself and turned back to the dollhouse. What an ego I had! I could at least wait to be asked before I decided to turn these hordes of men down.
    I needed money for Christmas.
    What I really craved was an after-school job, but with eleven hundred college men in a small town, most of whom are desperate for extra income, after school jobs are nonexistent.
    Which is why I signed up for the psychology department experiment.
    The college is always sending sign-up sheets over to the high school science classes. They need volunteers over sixteen for everything under the sun. (Or snow, as the case may be.) They want you to save your urine for six days while you’re following a special diet; they need samples of your blood; they want to scan your brain while you sleep; they expect you to answer one hundred questions dealing with your perceptions of right and wrong.
    I did one of their diet things once because the only way they could get anybody to follow it was to pay each volunteer ten dollars. Frankly, when it was over I would rather not have had the ten dollars.
    But this was different. The psych department was going to test whether lie detectors really worked, and anybody who beat the lie detector would get fifty dollars! There’s an incentive we can all respond to. Naturally I went right over to sign up. Apparently the chance to win fifty dollars (not to mention the intrigue of being hooked up to a lie detector) was pretty appealing. The sheet had only twenty slots and nineteen of them were taken. I scribbled my name in the last slot, and it was only after I’d signed in that I saw Jamie Winter’s name above mine.
    Naturally Hope Martin, who was also willing to lie to get fifty dollars, was standing behind me and noticed. “So that’s why you’re signing up,” she said. “You’d get so much more satisfaction out of dating an older man.”
    “I am not dating Jamie Winter,” I said through clenched teeth. “I am not even seeing Jamie Winter.”
    “You’re trying hard enough,” said Hope.
    “Hope,” I said, deleting all the words my father would not want me to say, “dry up and blow away.”
    She laughed. “Holly, for your own good, look at what you’re doing. You don’t want to bother getting out and meeting new people. You’re too lazy to socialize with the rest of us. Therefore, you settle for a kid who poses no difficulties for you, and you—”
    It was either walk away or kick her in the shins, and because I did not wish to be grounded any longer than necessary I chose walking away. I will not lose my temper, I told myself. I don’t care about Hope Martin’s opinions. I signed up to try for fifty dollars for Christmas money. I am not trying to get to know Jamie Winter better. Nor am I a lazy clod who won’t socialize with acceptable people and settles for kids!
    I stomped home, crushing Hope with every crackle of ice.
    “You?” said Christopher, laughing heartily. “Beat a lie detector?”
    “I might.”
    “Not a chance. You’re like Abraham Lincoln. You’d walk five miles to return the odd penny.”
    “I told Dad I was going to play Monopoly when I was really going to a movie.”
    “That’s true,” said Christopher, “but it was a fluke. You were riddled with guilt doing that. Mom and Dad would have seen it if they hadn’t been watching the news when you told them about the Monopoly game. Look at the way you enjoy being grounded.”
    Enjoy being grounded. Showed what he knew.
    All week I thought about the best way to tell lies. I didn’t know how a lie detector worked, so it was hard to come up with a plan to beat it. Instead, I planned the spending of the fifty