Please Don't Tell

by Laura Tims

She smiles at me anxiously.

  I breathe.

  “You wouldn’t do that,” she repeats. “You’re not capable of that. I don’t care if you don’t know. I know. I know you better than anybody. I know you better than you do.”

  The last piece of doubt lodged in my heart starts to dissolve. Maybe Levi’s right, and Grace’s version of Joy isn’t a complete imposter. Maybe I could be her again. It’d be so much easier than finding out who my own version of myself is, and not liking her.

  “I can’t stand that you’ve been dealing with all this on your own.” She peers at me, eyebrows knotted. “Are you okay?”

  “I told Preston.”

  “You told Preston and not me?”

  “Like I said, I was scared you’d be mad—”

  “I’m never going to get mad at you, okay? You could stab me and I wouldn’t get mad at you. You’re my twin.” She sits back down. “Does Preston have any ideas about who the blackmailer might be?”

  There’s a jealous tilt to the way she says Preston.

  “He doesn’t think Adam’s death was an accident. He thinks the blackmailer is the real murderer. And he thinks it must be someone at our school, somebody who was at the birthday party and someone who knows what—”

  I stop.

  “What he did,” she finishes for me, eyes fixed on the carpet.

  “Nobody knows about that, though.” It’s amazing, all the ways you can talk about something without naming it.

  Then she says something weird.

  “How much would you say you know about November?”

  I blink. “A lot.”

  “But how much do you know about her past?”

  I don’t understand where this is going, but this is the most Grace has talked to me in ages. I run through a checklist of all the things I know about Nov. “Her mom died before she and her dad moved here from the city.”

  “But what about after that? Do you know why she was out of school her sophomore year?”

  “That was before I met her.” When she was Annabella.

  Grace taps the side of her knee in a steady rhythm. “Did she go to Adam’s birthday party?”

  “Well . . . yeah. But she didn’t stay.”

  “She’s always hated Principal Eastman,” she murmurs. “And her dad.”

  “Grace.” I hold up my hands. “Stop. I get that you’re trying to help. But Nov isn’t blackmailing me.”

  A long silence.

  “You idealize people, did you know that?” she says.

  I don’t say anything.

  “You put them on these pedestals, so high up you can’t see any of their flaws. But I can see them. November’s always given me a weird vibe.”

  A snake rears its head in me and says you’re jealous. But I cut off its head before it slithers out of my mouth.

  “The way November acts around you, that’s not who she really is,” she says. “She puts on this act around you—”

  “Besides the other one billion reasons you’re wrong, Nov would never murder someone.”

  “Do you really know what she’s capable of?” Her eyes are faraway. I always forget how analytical she is. “What the blackmailer is doing, it’s just like November. She likes to shame people. Put up signs, call people out, make a scene. Remember how she put up all those posters about Principal Eastman’s dress code being sexist?”

  “That’s different,” I say desperately. “How would she have even found those photos of Eastman?”

  “She’s the head of the school newspaper. She’s always digging around, looking for things to publish. Maybe she searched his desk. I don’t know.”

  It does sound like something she would do. I shake my head, feeling sick. “The video of her dad, though. There’s no way.”

  “You know how much she hates her dad. You really don’t think this is something she’d do to get revenge on him?” she says. “Like, how would anyone besides her even get ahold of that video?”

  Today she told me she was grateful to the person who showed the video.

  What if that was her way of thanking me?

  All it takes is you seeing their cracks.

  Before I got the first note I’d told her I couldn’t remember anything from Adam’s birthday party—

  What the fuck am I thinking?

  “November’s not the blackmailer,” I say, hard. “If she wanted help exposing the principal and her dad, she would have asked me, not threatened me.”

  “Maybe you were the only person she trusted to help her, but she didn’t want you to know that it was her doing it.” Grace is lost in thought. “What if she tries to hide that she’s unstable by acting like nothing gets to her, but in reality, she’s losing it—”

  “Shut up!”

  She flinches.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I want to drown myself. “It’s just that this is screwed up. There’s nothing wrong with Nov.”

  Her eyes are big and sad. “Joy, November was out of school her sophomore year because she was in a mental health facility.”

  I shake my head. “She would have told me.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “How do you know that and I don’t?”

  “I’ve been keeping stuff from you, too.” A spot of blood appears at the edge of her thumb where she’s been picking it. “I wanted to put everything about this summer behind me. That’s why I never told you . . . that November knows about what happened to me. She’s known for ages. I told her.”

  “You told her about Adam? Why?” I whisper. “You don’t even like her.”

  “Because—” She hides her bloody thumb in her fist. “Adam raped her, too.”

  SIXTEEN

  August 18

  Grace

  SUMMER’S NEVER FELT LIKE THIS BEFORE. The sun’s too bright. My skin’s thinner than normal—I can see all my veins when I go outside. I hate looking at them. Joy keeps asking why I’m wearing long sleeves. She asks a lot of things.

  One day, she’s sleeping late when the bell rings. Mom and Dad aren’t home. When I open the door, November’s standing there, her hair swept back, her forehead creased.

  I’d forgotten she existed.

  “Is Joy home?” she asks.

  “She’s sleeping.” I keep the door half closed between us, but my eyes burn from the light anyway.

  “She hasn’t answered my texts in ages.”

  Her forehead creases more.

  “Sorry.” I don’t have the energy to fight her for my sister.

  “I heard you guys hung out at Adam Gordon’s house,” she says fake-casually.

  My skin feels like it’s being stretched out.

  “I told her not to go anywhere with him.” Not so casually. “You don’t know if . . . she went off anywhere with him . . . did she?”

  Her voice shivers apart.

  I want her to go away. I hate her. We were fine before she came along. Before her, Joy didn’t need to prove anything to anyone.

  “I just need to know what happened.” All her cool sunglassy calm is gone. She’s fragile, cringing.

  Go away.

  “Like I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if anything did,” she explains, her calm returning in a strange way.

  It’s hard to think with the sun in my eyes, but slowly I begin to understand why she hates him so much.

  It should feel different, this realization. I should feel sad, angry, something. All I am is cold, cold, cold.

  “He did it to you, too,” I say numbly.

  Her face doesn’t change, but it’s like something happens to the air. It gets harder to breathe. She wraps her arms around herself.

  I need to do something to help her. What’s wrong with me?

  “So . . . you’re saying . . .” Her voice is hoarse and low. “Joy won’t text me because . . .”

  She thinks it happened to Joy. It never would have happened to Joy. Joy would have fought him off, like I should have.

  I hadn’t turned into her after all
.

  I was always me.

  I point to myself. Pick the victim out of a lineup. If I press my finger against my collarbone I can feel how thin my skin is.

  She recoils. There are tears in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say . . . I didn’t want Joy to think . . .” Her words are tangled. She’s so affected by this. Everyone else is so affected. “I am so, so . . . What can I do? Tell me how I can help.”

  Everyone else feels it so much more than me.

  “It’s okay. I’m fine. Just don’t tell.”

  “I should’ve told. Then this wouldn’t have happened.”

  Why is everyone else allowed to make their sadness so big?

  Does November think she and I are the same now?

  We’re not.

  “I thought no one would believe me.” She’s stammering now. There’s sweat on her narrow shoulders. “My dad didn’t know what was wrong with me. He sent me to a mental health facility for a year.”

  “I have to go,” I say mechanically.

  “Please don’t tell Joy.”

  Joy was the one who wanted a special bond with November. Now I’m the one with it.

  I wish she’d never moved here.

  “I’m . . .” She’s shaking. “I’m going to kill him. I’m really going to . . .”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Fuck him, fuck him. I’m going to do something to him. I’m going to hurt him.” She spits the words like weapons.

  Joy said that, too. But neither of them are actually going to do it. They talk like their rage can change things, but tonight he’s going to eat dinner, go to sleep, and he won’t feel a breath of this.

  “If you were going to do something, you would have done it before now.” I say it with only the top layer of oxygen in my lungs. Barely aware that I’m saying it.

  “You’re right. I should have, ages ago.” She forces her arms down by her sides. “If I had . . .”

  If she had.

  But that’s the thing. People don’t. They let things go, and nothing changes.

  Nobody changes. Ever.

  “Tonight,” she says huskily. “I’ll do something tonight. I’ll make him pay. We’ll make him pay. Come with me.”

  “What are you planning?”

  “Don’t tell Joy,” she says. “We’re going to break into his house.”

  When you’re nothing, when you’re emptied out, you can do anything. There’s nothing inside you that tells you to stop. The jungle inside me has been cleared away. There’s a kind of power in saying yes just because it doesn’t matter.

  I wait until everybody else is asleep before I leave my house. November picks me up at the end of the street. We don’t talk on the way there. Sometimes I glance at her profile, sharp and thin. Cassius would have a hard time painting her.

  Thinking about Cassius stings.

  “Adam won’t be here tonight,” November says, clutching the wheel. “He’s going to a party. I saw on Facebook. We’ll hit up his room, find something he’s hiding, something to blackmail him with. Some way to run him out of town. There’s got to be something. You can’t be that fucked up and not have something to hide.”

  I just nod. We park halfway down the road and wait in the trees until Mr. Gordon stumbles out of the house. The nearest liquor store is on the other side of town. He doesn’t bother locking the door behind him.

  “He’ll be gone for a while,” November whispers. “We’re safe.”

  Safe.

  His house doesn’t look solid. It’s a shape on a hill. A slice of the night. No lights in any of the windows. November creeps ahead of me, her shoulder blades protruding under her tank top.

  Inside: moonlight on the floor, on the dusty portraits of Adam’s grandfather, haunting us. In the kitchen, report card on the fridge—mediocre grades. He’s nearly failing math. So much for his brilliance.

  There are pictures of him above the dining table. An eight-year-old at Christmas. I shut off everything in my head.

  “What are we really doing here?” I ask in the dark.

  “We’re finding some way to get back at him, I told you.” She’s furious, quaking, frantic.

  I don’t think I’ll ever feel real again, I realize evenly. Which is good. I don’t want to know what real feels like.

  We find the bathroom, open the medicine cabinet. Antidepressants prescribed to Mr. Gordon. Caffeine pills, ibuprofen. Some hot-cold packs.

  “Can you handle going in his room?” she asks me in the hallway.

  “I’m honestly not, like, traumatized.” It’s a funny feeling, listening to your own voice like it’s detached from you. Have I always sounded like this?

  She gives me a painful look before we go upstairs.

  His room . . .

  I stand in the doorway while she sifts through shadows, purposeful now. She tosses aside rumpled Jimi Hendrix T-shirts, empty ramen packets, a crushed box of Marlboro Lights. She yanks open a dresser drawer full of beer cans and slams it shut again. A hidden shoebox looks promising, but it holds only two withered flowers, a colorful glass pipe, and a packet of weed.

  I don’t look at his bed.

  Shadows in the dark, that’s all this is. Blurry shapes. No detail.

  I don’t know why I was ever afraid of the dark. The dark is keeping me safe.

  I hover over November’s shoulder while she opens his laptop, clicking through old school assignments, FUCKmrtilandre.docx and stupidshiteuropething.docx. On his desktop, there’s a picture of the Beatles.

  “There’s nothing personal here,” she says, her voice wound tight. “No diary, nothing . . .”

  No secret confessions or apologies, no private unsent letters.

  No songs about me.

  She finds a folder labeled PRIVATE. It’s full of porn. My stomach revolts. She deletes it, empties the trash, and opens Facebook. Reads chatlogs with girls whose names I don’t know. November writes them down. There’s a message, also unanswered, from someone named Levi Pham:

  hey man. you might not remember i exist, but we’re related or something like that so i thought i’d say whatsup. hope this doesn’t sound dumb.

  “We could change his Facebook status to a confession,” November mutters. “But people would think it was a prank.”

  She checks his email: 873 unread messages, mostly spam. One from me, from a week after that night in the middle school field. I got his email address from the school directory.

  Adam! Hi. Just wanted to let you know that everything worked out okay. Officer Roseby let us go. I’d text but I don’t have your number. And I don’t think we’re friends on Facebook. Anyway I’d love to come to your house next week! It was really sweet of you to ask. Is it okay if I bring my sister? See you then xxxGrace

  A different girl agonized over those x’s. Deleting one. Putting it back.

  We weren’t even friends on Facebook.

  “He didn’t deserve a second of your time, Grace.” November’s voice is wet with pity. None of it affects me. I reach over her shoulder and delete the email.

  She stares at the screen. “I thought there’d be something here that’d prove what a sick freak he is. Something we could use to show everybody what he’s really like.”

  I wonder if Joy’s asleep.

  “It’s just ordinary-guy shit here, but he’s not an ordinary guy.” November shuts off the computer. “I have to believe that.”

  Suddenly, light pours in from the window, blinding me. Headlights, lightning on the wall. Illuminating the details on the bed. The creases in the blanket. The blotchy stain on the moss-green pillow.

  The door downstairs clicks open.

  My veins ice over.

  “It’s his dad, not him,” November says, fast and calm. “He’ll go to his room in a second, pass out, and we’ll sneak away.”

  Giggling. A girl, not a man. The stumble-crash of someone knocking over a chair in the dark. And: “Let’s go upstairs, my dad’s not home. I’ll show you my
bed. Tempur-Pedic.”

  Footsteps on the stairs—where do I hide—there’s nowhere—

  November leaps for the closet, and I dive under the bed just as the door opens.

  “Adam, your room is so gross.” A girl, laughing.

  I’m in a world of trash and dust and dirty clothes. I worm backward into the shadows as shoes take up my vision. Oxfords and sequined flats. The flats come off and a girl’s bare feet knock aside a pair of jeans.

  “Come check out the bed.” His voice. “It’s so comfortable.”

  I orchestrate my movements. Put my arm under my chest so it doesn’t stick out. Fold my knees against each other. Take up as little space as possible. Disappear.

  “Is it?” the girl says teasingly. A tank top floats to the ground by her bare feet, tiny lace flowers around the neckline.

  I could burst out and race down the stairs. I could grab their ankles, trip them, jump over their bodies, leave November in the closet. I could close my eyes and never open them again. Force my own heart to stop beating.

  My body is keeping me here. If I wasn’t attached to it, I could slip away. Be part of the dark. Be a shape that doesn’t mean anything until the lights turn on.

  They crash onto the bed so heavily. The bottom sags until it almost touches my nose, fabric poking through wooden slats. A spider’s body is caught in a loose thread. There’s a whorl in one of the boards shaped like the flower on Cassius’s wrist.

  If she starts saying no—if she starts trying to escape—I’ll roll out, I’ll grab something, a lamp . . .

  “You’re so beautiful.” His low voice. “I’m going to write a song about you.”

  I’m alive. My heart is beating. I’m breathing. But the air around me stops moving. Something crucial in the atmosphere is dying. The heat is unbearable. I cover my ears but I can still hear them.

  The bed creaks up and down for a long time. Heavy breathing. The spider’s body dislodges and drifts to the floor next to my face. Its legs are curled up, like it was trying to hide from whatever killed it. But it still took up too much space.

  “You should really clean this place.” The girl is getting up, gathering her clothes.

  “It’s not that messy.” He sounds lazy. Satisfied. Something vicious happens to my stomach. I bite the edge of my tongue until it bleeds. I list all the terrible ways I’ll punish myself if I vomit.