Heidi Lansing is an eleven-year-old girl whose sixteen-year-old brother, Donald, has Autism, ADHD, and poor vision. Donald is a Bully Magnet who is targeted by Matt and Daryl, neighborhood boys who beat and harass him. Meanwhile, Heidi's best friend has moved away, and her new friends are very concerned with popularity and fitting in. Heidi is torn between wanting to stand up for her brother, and wanting to avoid becoming a target herself.
No One Needed to Know contains examples of:
- Alpha Bitch: Jackie is the most popular girl in class. She also spearheads the harassment campaign against Heidi, and is the only one of the bullies who doesn't eventually feel remorse.
- Character Tics: Donald's top lip never closes completely, and he's always fluttering his hands or fingers around.
- Commonality Connection: Heidi starts going out with Russell, the younger brother of Donald's friend Alex, because he knows what it's like to have a special needs brother and isn't going to be cruel or clueless, like the other boys. The book ends with Donald, Alex, Russell, and Heidi all on the playground together, fighting off an imaginary alien invasion.
- Graceful in Their Element: Donald struggles with fine motor tasks like unlocking a door or carrying a tray of food, but he turns out to be a surprisingly good bowler. He beats all the other kids in his special ed program.
- Kiddie Kid: Heidi thinks that Donald acts more like nine or ten than sixteen. He still likes make-believe games involving pirates, superheroes, and aliens, which Heidi is already starting to outgrow.
- Passing Notes in Class: After Cathy tells everyone in school about Donald, Heidi's former friends start passing her notes insulting both her and Donald. She gets so many cruel notes that when Kirk Mannings passes her a note asking her to the movies, her first thought is that it's a trick and one of the popular girls put him up to it.
- Picked Last: Heidi is great at sports - in fact, the popular kids started hanging out with her in the first place because she started girls-only dodgeball games. But after all her classmates turn on her, Heidi is picked last in soccer for the first time in her life. Heidi plays harder than she ever has so everyone will regret rejecting her, but she tries so hard to avoid passing the ball that it interferes with her playing abilities.
- Playing Sick: After hours of mockery from her classmates, Heidi tells the teacher she doesn't feel well. She doesn't get to go home because she doesn't have a fever, but she does get to spend an hour "resting" in the nurse's office. Rather than tell her parents about the bullying, she pretends to be sick at home and gets the rest of the week off.
- Poster-Gallery Bedroom: Donald's room is covered in baseball pennants and posters of sports stars. During Heidi's short-lived attempt to teach Donald to act normal, she has him take them all down and tells him to hang up posters of rock musicians and swimsuit models instead. The next morning, she sees that Donald has hung all his old posters back the way they were.
- Self-Harm: Peter, a boy in Donald's program, has a left hand covered in scars from biting it.
- Title Drop: "I hadn't told any of them things about my home life because no one needed to know. It wasn't their business."
- Toilet Paper Prank: Heidi's former friends cover her house in wet toilet paper and leave a note that says "YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE." She and her family spend most of the next day cleaning it up. The next Monday, bullies ruin her crafts project, a model of a Native American longhouse, by covering it in shreds of white paper. Stacy laughs that it looks just like her real house.
