“Are you going to puke?” Spencer asked. He was standing next to her, holding his bike upright with one hand and carefully balancing himself by holding onto the pole high over her head.

“Huh?”

“You look like you’re going to hurl,” he said in a low voice. “Should we get off?”

The man Scarlett was pressed up against on the other side looked down warily.

“I’m fine,” she said. “It was just warm in there today. Must be dehydrated…”

…from all the kissing I was doing. Shut up, brain!

“What’s wrong with you today?” he asked, unsatisfied. “It wasn’t just the heat. You seemed…I don’t know. Like something was up.”

When she was little, Spencer told her that he could see pictures of her thoughts in her eyes. Obviously, she had figured out this wasn’t possible, but there was still something in her that believed that he could get at her thoughts if he wanted to.

He was doing it now. He was looking her in the eye and seeing the truth there.

“Is there something going on?” he asked.

“Going on?” she repeated. “Going on with what?”

This was idiotic. She knew what Spencer meant, and he knew that she knew. This was her moment to come clean. So what if Eric had asked her to keep quiet? There was no need to keep things from Spencer.

Scarlett opened her mouth to tell him, but something strange flashed across his expression—something so fast and so subtle that anyone else would have missed it. But Scarlett saw it. He wasn’t going to like her answer.

“I got my period,” she blurted out, much to the continuing delight of the man pushed up next to her. “It’s catastrophic.”

“Oh,” Spencer said. “Why didn’t you say so? That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

He didn’t look convinced.

“You would tell me if there was something else, right?”

“Of course!” she said.

This was the first time she had ever really lied to Spencer. It was upsettingly easy. He turned back to the Manhattan Storage ad that he’d been staring at before this doomed conversation started. He had asked, and he had taken her at the word. Which made her the worst sister, ever.

Then again, she thought, she hadn’t really lied—she’d just switched topics. It wasn’t like Spencer told her every little tiny detail. She didn’t want to know every tiny detail. She had once seen an open box of condoms poking out from under a pile of his clothes, for example. She never whipped them out and said, “What, or who, have you been doing with these?” He told her the stuff that mattered to him. She had known about his major crushes, his biggest frustrations. The gory details weren’t important. He had to have left out some pretty big things along the way.

But he had never lied. If she had asked him something, he would have told her, no matter what it was. She knew that for a fact. If she had wanted, for some insane reason, to hear the gory details…he probably would have given them to her. Or, at least, he would have told her as much as he thought a younger sister could hear without her head exploding. He would not have looked her in the face and denied something.