This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers Read Free Book Online Page B

hastily.
    “You think?”
    “She knows how to take care of herself.”
    “Did you have sex with my sister?”
    “Oh, man, Sloane.”
    “She bought pot from you,” I say, and then I keep pushing it because for some reason, I have to know. It’s important now. “Did she pay you or…?”
    “Yeah, she paid me.” Pause. “And we fooled around. Sorry.”
    I don’t know what to say. I’m not shocked or anything, I just don’t know what to say. It’s something Lily would do. It’s something Cary would do. Lily never had a boyfriend when she lived at home, ever. She said it would be too complicated and she’d spin stories about what would happen if an imaginary significant other found out about what our father did to us. The stories always ended in separation—us being ripped from each other. Never tell. For me, that meant never having anyone because she was sure I’d blurt out our secrets to the first person who was nice to me. For her, it meant nobody was allowed to get too close. There were boys who were friends and make-out sessions she’d spill about if she felt like it, but Lily wasn’t the Popular Girl. Guys didn’t have to have her. She was blond and pretty, but mostly she looked tired all the time.
    “Fooled around as in had sex.”
    “Yeah, that would be—yeah.” Cary’s face turns red. “Wow. Seriously, Sloane. If I just made shit awkward between us, I’m sorry.”
    “It’s okay. It doesn’t make things awkward.”
    “Good.”
    But then I change my mind. Maybe it’s not okay. He fooled around with my sister and sold her drugs and he never looked at me twice before. I don’t know why but that bothers me.
    “She made it,” Cary decides in a voice that tells me he’s thinking about being with her, touching her. I feel nauseous. “We were hanging out the night before she left and I knew she’d make it then. I know it now. She’s a fighter.”
    I freeze. There are so many things wrong with what just came out of his mouth.
    He was hanging out with her the night before she left.
    He knew she was leaving.
    “You saw her before she left?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Did she say where she was going?”
    He stops as the question settles in.
    “No,” he says.
    I bite my tongue for a full minute. I should leave it at this because it’s only going to feel worse if I don’t. I should, but I can’t.
    “Did she say why she was going?”
    I know the answer to this, but I want to know if Cary knows. I want to know if whenever they fooled around, she told him about what it was really like in our house.
    “No,” he says again, softer this time. “Shit, Sloane. I thought you knew. The way you two were … I would’ve never…”
    “It doesn’t make a difference now,” I say.
    “No,” he says. “I guess not.”
    In the gym, I stare at the doors. My pulse keeps time with each thud, beating hard, filling me with the kind of anger I never thought I could be capable of. I study the desks and step forward. I kick one lightly and then I kick it again, harder. The feel of my shoe against the desk’s metal leg is satisfying and sends a little electric jolt through me so I kick it again and again and again until my heart is louder than the thudding. I make a mountain of desks shift just enough that one of them tumbles onto its side. A loud crash fills the gym and breaks me out of my trance. The anger disappears—I don’t know where it goes—and I realize what I’ve done.
    I rush at the desk and pull it upright, like the doors are seconds away from bursting open, but they’re not. The sound causes a fit outside, though. It makes the dead frantic. Next thing I know, everyone runs into the gym because everyone heard. Cary, Harrison, Rhys, Grace, and Trace. They all ask the same questions.
    What’s going on, what was that, are they inside, did they get in.
    I tell them I don’t know what happened, the barricade just moved.
    They believe me.

 
    A whole day passes where barely anyone speaks.
    Trace