Please Don't Tell

by Laura Tims

  “That picture you saw in my bag, I found it in the copier,” I lie on the way to the nurse’s office. “I thought it was Photoshopped.”

  He nods, accepting it with an easy relief.

  “Thanks for saving that dude from me. He was in imminent danger of some Levisceration.” His jokes are half nonsense. He walks faster than me. When I speed up, he does, too.

  “That makes the second bully I’ve seen you knock down,” he adds. “Is there a belt you put notches on?”

  “You’re sweating.”

  “Sorry.”

  He’s this nervous because I read his blog?

  “Here’s the nurse’s office.” He stops. “You can tell because the door says Nurse’s Office. See you—”

  “I want to talk to you about what I read,” I blurt.

  “Is this about you hating him?” he asks.

  The truth is not an option. I’m silent.

  “Okay. Let me buy you something cheap and greasy after school, and we can talk. Or not greasy. Not greasy is fine, too. Or not cheap. Also fine.” He shuts up and mouths the word idiot underneath his tissues.

  “There’s this place, the Ice Cream Palace, at the shopping center, but in the fall they serve pizza, too,” I say. His nervousness drowns out mine. “I have detention after school, but I can meet you there at four.”

  “Four. Okay. Four.”

  He disappears inside the nurse’s office.

  The versions of people that live in everyone’s heads are powerful. Adam doesn’t deserve to be remembered like that. It pisses me off. And if I’m pissed off, if I’m thinking about Levi and his blog and his stupid baseball cap, it’s five seconds to not think about other things.

  After detention, Levi’s late to the Ice Cream Palace. I wait for him on the bench outside. It’s cold. Behind the window, there’s light and laughter, a kid dropping his pepperoni on the floor, his brother tossing it out for him, replacing it with one of his own. When you have a sibling, you take care of them without thinking. As long as you can do that right, you’re worth something. You’re made for them.

  I’m supposed to made be for Grace, and the blackmailer’s distracting me from her. I need to focus on her. I need to figure this out, end it, figure her out, sleep again, eat again. . . . Sometimes it feels like I’m not a person anymore, just a collection of different types of fear.

  Pounding footsteps. Levi hurtles around the corner. His heel hooks on the curb and he crashes into the prickly leafless bush next to my bench. I leap up, but he stands by himself, blushing violently behind his freckles. With the split lip, he looks spectacularly beaten up.

  “That bush is made of nails,” he says. “I’m suing this establishment for putting a hazardous nail bush by their door.”

  He’s still making the panicky jokes. If it were last year, if I were the old me—I think I’d laugh. “Why were you running?”

  “Because I was late,” he says, like it’s the silliest question ever.

  We buy our sodas and slices, pepperoni for me and vegetarian for him. It’s a coincidence that he heads toward me and Grace’s booth. The one with the chip on the corner, the jagged hole in the upholstery that I picked at one year when I was ten. I steer him to the other side of the restaurant, as far away from our booth as possible.

  We sit in silence. I have no idea how to do this.

  He shreds a napkin. “How’d you find that stupid blog?”

  “I googled you.” My face burns. “Kind of in depth.”

  “Did you find my discography and my bestselling romance series under a pen name, too?” he says, then groans. “I make awful jokes when I’m nervous—it’s annoying. Sorry.”

  “You were calm in the bathroom when I was freaking out.”

  “Bathrooms have a deeply calming effect on me. It’s like Superman and kryptonite, but the opposite and also not.” He inhales. “Sorry. Again. You know how when other people freak out, you stop freaking out?”

  Like how Pres and I keep trading off who’s panicking more about the blackmailer.

  “About Adam,” I say.

  “Can we just,” he says, “just for a minute, I mean, not yet. Tell me things about you first.”

  Our pizza congeals in front of us. “About me?”

  “You read my weird stupid secret ancient letters to my half brother who I barely knew, which means you know way too much about me, and I don’t know anything about you. You have strong arms and were upset in a bathroom once. That’s it.”

  “There’s nothing to know.” I’m currently being blackmailed by someone who wants to frame me for his half brother’s death, I fucked up with my sister, I hurt everyone I love.

  “You look like there’s stuff to know.”

  “My name’s Joy. . . .” I shrug. “My sister’s name’s Grace, she’s smart as fuck, she’s out this semester for an independent project—”

  “I want to know about you, not your sister. It’s cute that you immediately start talking about her, though. You guys must be close.”

  I’m not going to cry.

  Things to tell him? I haven’t cleaned my room in two months. My dad thinks his alcohol sampler got lost in the mail.

  Sometimes you don’t understand how broken you are until you put all the pieces together, cutting your fingers on them, realizing that enough shards have disappeared so that you’ll never fit together like you used to.

  “I’m a mess,” I say lightly.

  “What kind of mess?” There’s a yearning in him like there was when he asked about Adam—not the same, but similar.

  I drain my grape soda and crush the can.

  “It’s scary, the idea of a stranger knowing stuff about you,” he supplies.

  “That’s probably how you feel about me reading your blog.” I wince. “Sorry.”

  “Most people would pretend they never read it.”

  I can tell he’s wishing that’s what I’d done, and asking why I didn’t.

  He points at our plates. “Maybe you’re not eating because you’re just as nervous as me—I don’t know why you would be, you’re way cooler than me—but I’ve heard your stomach growl like three times, and food generally helps with that.”

  What does he mean, cooler than him? I pick up my slice. It’s like chewing glue.

  “Are you doing okay?” he finally asks. “After your panic attack?”

  The hardest thing is kindness when you know you don’t deserve it. I want to deserve it. I want it so bad.

  “You’re trying to find out stuff about Adam, right?”

  “I gotta say, I’m scared to ask.” He wipes his hands on his lap. “Coming from a girl who hated him. But I’ll take anything at this point. The trouble with asking people who liked him is that I don’t want to make them sad.”

  He’s so hopeful.

  I can’t kill Levi’s Adam.

  “I wanted to give you this back.” I unzip my backpack, pull out his sweatshirt and baseball cap. I’m not prepared for how much his face lights up.

  “That’s where it went! I thought I lost it! The baseball cap, I mean, not the sweatshirt, I don’t care about that. I forgot I left it in the pocket.” He takes it, runs his thumb over the brim like how I touch Grace’s old stuffed animals. “Adam gave it to me last time I came here. I think he was weirded out by me. One time I went with him to his friend’s birthday party and he wouldn’t tell anyone we were related. My mom and Mr. Gordon never married, it was the first time I stayed with them.”

  He looks down at the baseball cap again. “But this one time, Mr. Gordon—uh, my dad—was drunk, yelling at nothing, scaring the crap out of me. Adam took me down to the quarry until I stopped crying. It’s cool, an older sibling, like someone’s assigned to you. It’s nice. How old’s your sister?”

  “We’re twins,” I whisper.

  “Oh, cool.” He shifts. “Well, I think I hit my daily quota of embarrassing stuff to say to cute girls I barely know. I left out wetting the bed at summer camp and everyone calling me
Pee-vi. We’ll save that for our next date. Oops. I just told you. Spoilers.”

  He’s weird and nice and quick and he’s trying to put me at ease. He should be talking to somebody else.

  “I should probably ask why you hated him,” he says. “But I’m not sure if I want to know.”

  “We just . . . didn’t get along,” I rasp.

  “That’s not so bad, then. Although I don’t get it. You’re pretty cool.”

  He looks shyly down at the table.

  “Can I have your number?” he adds. “The homework for American History, I’ll text the answers to you. That way you won’t have to copy before class.”

  Right. That’s all it is. I write my number on a napkin, slide it to him. He puts it in his bag along with his baseball cap.

  “By the way.” He fiddles with the backpack zipper. “I don’t think you’re a mess. You do good things for other people.”

  “Don’t think that about me.” I let it slip out.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not true.” My face burns.

  “When I think good things about other people, I try to say them out loud. People never know how liked they are, you know?”

  “You don’t worry about sounding weird?”

  “I operate under the assumption that I always sound weird. It’s the only way I ever have the courage to say anything.”

  “What if it’s something you can’t fuck up, though?” I insist. “Something you have to say right.”

  “I don’t think there’s a right way to say anything. If you know that, it takes the pressure off.”

  He’s wrong. I just haven’t found the right words for Grace. I’m not smart enough.

  “Man,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Talking with you is like . . . confusing. I always feel like you’re asking me about something specific but you’re not telling me what.”

  “Always,” I repeat. “We haven’t talked all that much.”

  “True. This is a personal failing of mine.”

  “There are lots of people at Stanwick for you to talk to.”

  “There are,” he says. “None of them are you.”

  I’m sitting here doing this despite the blackmail. But he’s a force field that pushes all those things into the background. Right now, they seem unreal.

  “Sorry. That was such a bad line. I do the ironic flirt thing. It’s annoying,” he says. I realize how many times he’s told me he’s annoying. “It’s just that I don’t have anybody here. It’s hard to make friends when everyone’s sad. You’re the closest one I’ve got and I’m trying to impress you by saying funny things and then weird semi-advice things and also creepy compliments and none of them are working very well.”

  He talks so much. “You want to be my friend?”

  “It’s very first grade. Will you be my friend, let’s do finger paints, et cetera.”

  “Just don’t hit on me. That’s never ever going to work.” I swallow. “Not with you or anybody else. Not for me.”

  “You are mysterious as hell,” he says. “And that’s not the only reason to talk to a girl.”

  “I can be your stand-in friend,” I mumble. “Convenience friend. Until you meet someone better.”

  “I hate that thing you just said,” he says softly.

  I used to be so easy. Everything I said was easy. “Apparently I will also be your issues friend.”

  “Everyone’s got issues.”

  “Not my issues.” It’s an obnoxious thing to say. But normal people have normal issues. Normal people worry about sounding weird or that they’re annoying. If I start to think for real about my issues, I can’t breathe and then I have to stay up another night until my head’s too foggy to think, or drink until the world blurs.

  “It’s okay, you know?” he says. “It’s okay.”

  But I’m not distracted anymore. The blackmailer feels real again. I have to check the baby monitor and see if there are any new notes and . . . Breathe. “I have to go.”

  “Gotcha. I’ll just sit here and wince thinking about all the annoying shit I just said.”

  “You’re not annoying,” I tell him, and leave before he can smile at me again.

  TEN

  July 20

  Grace

  I NEVER REALIZED CASSIUS LIVED SO CLOSE. It only takes me a few minutes to walk to his house. It’s an unassuming blue one, tucked behind the hedge that the old neighbors used to trim early on Monday mornings, waking up the whole neighborhood. The new mailbox is brilliantly painted. Clouds and winding vines and birds of every hue. I never noticed before.

  Joy doesn’t know I’m here. Today I’m taking a path she didn’t forge for me.

  I’m on the porch, about to knock, when Cassius opens the front door.

  “You were watching from the window?” I ask.

  “Nah.” There’s a dab of paint in the middle of a moon-shaped patch of lighter skin on his forehead. “I just felt you here.”

  He leads me inside. It’s clean, but not spotless like our house. Not a neurotic clean. Taylor Swift blasts from upstairs.

  “My sister,” he explains. “I work downstairs.”

  There’s no car in the driveway. I’m at a boy’s house with no parents around. A trial run for when I go to Adam’s.

  The basement isn’t like any other basement in the world. The walls are covered with paper, big thick endless sheets from the rolls you can buy at craft stores, and they’re full of sky. People and animals move from cloud to cloud.

  And all the people are naked.

  “I like painting the human figure,” Cassius says openly, no creepiness to it, as he ties a paint-splattered apron around his waist and sets up an easel. “Not for school paintings. Adam would give me too much crap. But for paintings nobody sees. No one else comes down here.”

  Just me.

  I step closer to the wall. The bodies aren’t like any naked bodies I’ve seen before. A lot of them are fat, but it’s not an ugly fat, exaggerated for a joke. They’re graceful. Comfortable.

  Did Cassius want to paint me naked?

  “I don’t think I can—” I burst out at the same second he goes, “You’ll keep your clothes on, obviously—”

  We both stare at each other and giggle.

  “How do you want me to be?” I ask.

  “Yourself.”

  I sit on the ratty tan couch, being myself.

  “Hmm.” He traces a line on his blank paper with the wrong end of his brush. “The way you sit, you ball up . . . People are easier to paint when they’re looser. Broad strokes, not all congested like a highway. I’m not that good yet.”

  I stretch the nerves out of my legs. How would Joy sit? I sling my arm over the back of the couch, kick up one leg.

  “You’re good at art,” I say to distract him from how ridiculous I look.

  “I’m not that good yet. But I will be.”

  I’m not that brave yet. But I will be.

  He outlines the pattern of me over his paper once more before he starts his pencil sketch. The silence grows between us, but it doesn’t fill with bad things. I can look at him when he’s looking at the paper. I can see why Joy thinks he’s so beautiful. He’s a good combination of hard and soft: the clean edge of his jaw, his warm eyes, his gentle mouth. It’s too bad he can’t model for himself.

  Joy would be so jealous. My stomach twists.

  “Joy likes art,” I blurt. “When our family took a trip to D.C., it took her like three hours to leave the art museum.”

  That was because she got lost and we had to look for her, but I don’t say that.

  “That’s nice.” He looks up. Catches me staring. Cringe.

  “She’s really great,” I plow on. “You could paint her in loose swishy strokes, no problem. She’s not congested.”

  “It’s just hard with the clothes bunched up,” he says, concentrating.

  I try to smooth out the hem of my shirt.

  “Oh, shoot.” He sits b
ack. “Now the lines are all new.”

  “Sorry!” I whip my hand away. “I knew I’d screw you up.”

  “I’ll start over. It usually takes a couple tries. I always make mistakes the first time.”

  A couple tries. But I only get one shot with Adam. What if I want to take my clothes off in front of him? I don’t want to make mistakes.

  I don’t want to hate my body forever.

  A ridiculous thought: Could I take off my clothes in front of Cassius?

  A trial run. No romance, no expectation. Even Joy couldn’t do that.

  Maybe I don’t have to just be as brave as her. Maybe I could be braver.

  “Cassius?” I say. Ridiculous. Ridiculous.

  “Hm?”

  A normal girl wouldn’t do it.

  But an interesting girl would.

  “Do you think I could . . . I think I could try the nude modeling thing, if you want.”

  He puts down his pencil. He probably thinks I’m an exhibitionist.

  “I mean, it’s okay if you don’t want to, that’s understandable, I’m not some beautiful model—” I stammer.

  “Grace.” His face shines. “If you’d be comfortable with that, I would love to paint you that way.”

  Is this actually going to happen?

  “I don’t mean to sound like a creep. I just suck so much at clothes.” He scratches his cheek with the other end of his paintbrush, embarrassed. “Nudity is not that big of a deal to me . . . it’s how we were born. Everyone is naked all the time under their clothes. Plus, people look softer that way. It’s harder to be intimidated by them.”

  This is the girl I’ll be: a girl who gets drunk, gets high, models nude, dates musicians.

  “Can you maybe turn around while I take them off?” I whisper.

  “Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “You positive?”

  “Yes. I want to do this.”

  He covers his eyes and turns around, bumping into his easel.

  Clothes are strange. They’re flimsy, but they shield you from so much. I’m wearing a yellow T-shirt with a faded rose print. I’ve taken it off in my room so many times. Just shucked it over my shoulders. I try to mimic that motion now. It’s difficult in a different way.