Please Don't Tell

by Laura Tims

  “Let’s have a beer,” he says.

  “I gotta drive home.” She opens the door. “Sleep tight.”

  I’m soaked with sweat. My arm is asleep, my chest burning, my legs knotted. He doesn’t get up. I hear him roll over. Then he goes still.

  All I have to do is sneak out while he’s sleeping.

  I start to edge out a couple times and lose it. If he sees me . . . if he sees me. The third time, I almost make it before he shifts. I freeze, not breathing, but he stays asleep.

  I don’t move again until I see the closet door crack open. Then I inch out from under the bed. My heel crinkles a candy wrapper, but he doesn’t wake up. Slowly, I rise. November emerges, too, a quiet silhouette.

  She’s holding a pair of scissors. Where did she find them?

  Our eyes meet.

  She stands over him. The moonlight from the window falls on the ugly ridge of his nose, the zit tucked beneath his lower lip, the stray hairs under his chin. I stare until my eyes water. The movement of his chest up and down seems so flimsy. Like I could press my finger there with the barest pressure and stop it from ever lifting again.

  Do it, I say without speaking. The scissor blades are bright.

  November’s small and shivering. She lifts the scissors. Her arm lowers. She shakes her head, again and again, moves next to me.

  Presses them into my hand.

  I’m nothing, so I can do anything. I could stop him.

  He twitches in bed. I don’t blink, letting my eyes blur so I don’t have to look at the details of his face. This is it. The moment before and after.

  If I were Joy, I could do it.

  My hand trembles.

  But I’m not Joy. And I’m not nothing.

  I’m me. Forever. The worst possible thing I could ever be.

  I bolt, fast and quiet, out his bedroom door, down the stairs, and across the lawn. November’s coming after me, but I’m too quick for her. I half run, half stagger into the woods. I lose myself in the trees, wrenching through bushes, kicking branches, kicking everything, breaking things in the night.

  I don’t know how long it takes November to find me. When she steps out from between the trees, she takes me by the arm, tries to lead me back toward the road. I shove her away.

  “Grace,” she pleads.

  I hate my name so much. I’m not graceful at all.

  “There was nothing about me in there.” My voice flames in the rustling quiet. “I thought if he could do that to me, he at least loved—” I bite off the word with my teeth, shatter it.

  “There was no song,” I whisper. “I was just another girl.”

  “That’s how he gets us.” November’s still holding my arm. Her words break. “It’s so nice, having somebody think you’re special. That you’re worth making art about.”

  Like Cassius did. But Cassius must have been lying, too.

  “You told Joy what he did to you, right?” November asks. “You told.”

  “Obviously,” I rasp. “She’s my sister.”

  “Is she . . . okay?”

  “Of course she’s okay.” I kick at a fallen branch. “Why wouldn’t she be okay?”

  “She cares about you a lot.”

  “I know,” I yell.

  “I just thought she might feel . . .” Her voice trails off. “Guilty.”

  “Why the hell would she feel guilty? It’s not her fault. She didn’t do anything. That’s ridiculous.” I can’t breathe. “Does she think I’m the kind of person who’d blame her? Is that what you think of me?”

  “Grace,” she says softly.

  “Because that’s not how I feel,” I snarl. “I love my sister and everything is fine so just leave. Us. Alone.”

  I turn sharply and start walking toward the road. I can see it through the trees. I don’t need her to drive me back. I don’t need anyone to do anything for me ever again.

  SEVENTEEN

  October 24

  Joy

  “GRACE’S RIGHT. SHE HAS TO BE.” PRESTON stares unseeingly at his bedroom walls. “November knew about Grace, she was at the party, she knew you didn’t remember anything . . . it all fits.”

  I’m flat on my back on his bed, gazing up at the faded glow-in-the-dark star stickers on his ceiling.

  “When I woke up this morning, there was this second between me opening my eyes and me remembering everything, and I felt fine,” I say. “Normal. As if none of this ever happened.”

  “You slept last night? That’s good!”

  I shrug.

  “What are you going to do?” he asks quietly.

  I curl up, pressing my knees into my eyelids so hard that my head throbs. It’s nothing compared to the pain November must’ve felt, every single time we passed Adam in the halls and all she did was sneer.

  “Are you going to confront her?” Preston asks.

  I flatten out again, the pulse behind my eyelids fading. “Why didn’t she tell me? I would have hated him right with her. I would’ve—dome something . . .”

  “If she’d told, nothing would have happened to Grace.”

  I jolt upright.

  “No. Don’t blame her for that. That was my fault. Nobody else’s.

  “The thing about guilt is that it stops you from fixing anything. It makes you avoid the person you hurt because you can’t face them, and then you hate yourself because you need to face them.”

  I know you love her, Grace whispered to me last night before I left her room. But you have to stop believing the best of everybody.

  “We don’t know that it’s her yet, for sure,” I manage. “And even if it is, I don’t care. She’s my best friend, other than you. If she’s mad at me, I want her to be able to tell me. If I did something wrong, I wanna fix it. I’ll talk to her after school tomorrow.”

  “Joy—if she’s been blackmailing you—”

  He’s looking at me in a way I don’t like at all, like I’m about to break. “What if she’s dangerous? What if she is the one who killed Adam?”

  “She’s not dangerous to us. He deserved it.”

  “That’s an intense thing to say,” he says slowly.

  Preston will never understand in the same way we do.

  “He fucked up everything. I’m never going to be sad that he’s gone.”

  I yank his sheets over my face until I stop crying.

  “I don’t know how to stop bad things from happening to people I love,” I grit out to the rough fabric.

  He grunts deep in his throat, and lies down beside me, gathering me into his arms. All my muscles ball up but I let it happen.

  “I don’t want bad things to happen to you either,” he says, his heartbeat drumming into my back.

  “Nothing bad’s happened to me. It’s Grace and November.”

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he says, stiffly. “But you’ve been through hell, too.”

  “It’s not about me.”

  “You’re allowed to be affected by this.”

  He’s wrong but I don’t say it. “I would be so fucked without you.”

  “I would be ten times more fucked without you.”

  He presses his forehead into my hair, and we stay like that in silence for a few minutes. Then my phone buzzes, hard and loud. I draw back, slip it from my pocket.

  A long text from Levi.

  so i’ve been shanghaied into gathering signatures downtown for the quarry fence petition. apparently i’m usefully pitiful as adam’s half bro or something. but i’m sure i’d get way more signatures if there was a cute girl next to me. god that was stupid. anyway wanna meet me at the end of barlett street in an hour?

  “Who’s that?” Preston’s sitting up.

  “It’s nothing.” I try to hide my phone under the sheet, but he steals it from me. He reads the text and his eyes widen. “Does Grace know you’re hanging out with Adam’s half brother?”

  “He’s leaving for Indiana eventually anyway. She doesn’t need to know.” My stomach twists with guilt.
“He helps me not think. He drowns stuff out.”

  Preston is silent for a minute.

  “He’s not part of it,” I try to explain. “When I’m with him, I can pretend it’s not happening.”

  “Joy, tomorrow you have to ask one of your best friends if she’s been blackmailing you.”

  I dig my fingernails into my wrist. It’s not working as much it used to.

  “So maybe you deserve to do something that takes your mind off it for now.” He meets my eyes. “It’s not wrong of you to feel okay for five minutes.”

  It’s almost the same thing November said. That must mean some part of her still cares about me.

  “Preston?” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  I don’t know the right words. There’s something so special and strange about being loved by somebody who isn’t related to you, someone who has no obligation.

  But the right words don’t exist, so I just rest my forehead against his.

  And then I leave, because everybody has something they use to cope.

  The clouds are back by the time I meet Levi on Bartlett Street. They’re darker than they were the day we went to the movies, more threatening. This time it’s really going to rain.

  “I already have fourteen signatures,” he says excitedly when I walk up to him.

  “Couldn’t your dad have the quarry fenced off?” I say it in my most normal voice.

  “The quarry’s not actually on his property. It belongs to the town,” he says. “He’s the one who asked me to get signatures. And he was sober when he asked.”

  We walk together down the sidewalk. I breathe in his presence, use it to block out my thoughts.

  “It feels like something I can do for Adam,” he admits.

  I wait by mailboxes while he rings doorbells. Some people aren’t home, and some people pretend not to be. But some nod while Levi talks, and then they sign his sheet of paper.

  We turn down another street. “It’s gonna rain,” I say, to try to get my mind off November.

  “That’s what the weatherman wants you to think. But I’m an optimist.”

  “The sky’s crazy dark.”

  “Very,” he corrects. “The sky’s very dark. Or super dark. Or extremely dark.”

  I’m still thinking about November. “What?”

  “I just don’t like that word,” he says tensely.

  I blink. I guess it’s not impossible to annoy him.

  “Sorry.” He shifts his clipboard to his other arm. “I still haven’t told you why I haven’t gone back to Indiana yet, have I?”

  “You don’t have to,” I blurt.

  “I want you to know things about me.” His voice thins. He sucks in a sharp, fast breath and spits out, “It’s just not super easy to tell someone your mom’s in a mental hospital.”

  A mental hospital. Like November.

  “The shitty thing about schizophrenia,” he continues, even faster, “is that it’s manageable with medication, but the illness itself convinces you you don’t need it. So I should have made sure she was taking it.”

  I locate my voice. “You’re not responsible for that.”

  “Yeah.” But I can tell he doesn’t believe me. “She’s doing really well, though. I call her every Friday.”

  “That’s great!” I sound so fake. I crush a dead leaf beneath my foot.

  We’ve walked by two houses without knocking on any doors. He’s clutching his clipboard tight against his chest like a shield.

  “It’s just that if you tell someone that the police found your mom naked under an overpass because she thought somebody was poisoning her laundry detergent, that’ll always be the only thing they think of when it comes to her.”

  “My friend went to a mental hospital for a while. But she never told me. I found out through someone else. Maybe she thought I’d look down on her.”

  He nods rigidly.

  “But I would never do that.” I stop at the end of the sidewalk. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. And if my friend has some sort of mental problem, that doesn’t change the fact that I know she’s a good person. I’m sure your mom is a good person, too.”

  Just then the sky splits open. Rain drenches us instantly, soaking the pavement. Levi yelps and drags me forward. We take refuge under somebody’s gazebo, the rain pounding over the edge of the wooden roof. Levi pants, wipes his forehead, looks at me.

  “Everything good that’s happened since I’ve come here has been because of you, you know that?”

  A shiver runs through me that has nothing to do with the rain.

  “When I got here, I was pissed. Pissed at Adam for dying, pissed at my mom. Do you know what it’s like to be pissed at people you love for things they can’t help?”

  Am I pissed at November?

  If she did it, there had to be a reason. Something I did to deserve it.

  Maybe she blames me for what happened to Grace, too.

  “But with you, I get to feel like—this charming guy, this funny guy . . .” He stares at the blurry silhouettes of the rain-drenched houses across the street. “I like who I am in the context of you.”

  That’s not something you say to a convenience friend. There’s way too much warmth in his eyes.

  He moves closer. “Sorry I’m so awkward. I bet I’d top the list of awkward people you know.”

  Numbly I say, “No. Preston’s at the top.”

  “Second place isn’t so bad.” His face gets nearer by degrees. I can see the curve of his lips and his cheekbones and his dark eyes.

  He looks nothing like his half brother. Whose murder I’m being blackmailed for.

  I’ve been lying to him about every single thing from day one. Using him as a replacement for booze and not sleeping or eating. I told myself he wasn’t a part of this, but he is.

  What am I doing?

  I yank back, my legs bumping into the wet side of the gazebo. Rain soaks the back of my head. “I can’t do this.”

  Shame sprouts all over his face. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I just came at you out of nowhere.”

  Guilt strangles me. I’ve been using him.

  “I didn’t think you were serious . . . about all the flirting.”

  I’ll never be able to tell Levi what his half brother did to my sister.

  “I wasn’t. Mostly. Kind of.” He groans. “Can I fix this?”

  “We’re temporary, right? Convenience friends,” I stammer. “You’re supposed to go back to Indiana and then we never talk again.”

  “You weren’t ever going to talk to me again?” He looks so sad.

  I should have stayed away from him.

  “You weren’t supposed to be part of my real life,” I try to explain. “Like a—a distraction.”

  “A distraction?” He steps back. Water from his hair runs into his eyes.

  I’m making it worse. “I have to go.”

  “Don’t. You’ll get soaked.”

  He reaches out, but I’m already slipping away into the rain.

  People shouldn’t have to go to school when every particle of them is made of anxiety, when they haven’t slept and the halls are a minefield of people they can’t face. But if I said that to my parents, they’d tell me to stop being dramatic.

  I’m just not going to think about him ever again. Easy.

  Back to the avoiding game. The next day, I avoid Levi by skipping American History. I avoid November by eating lunch in the bathroom. Time passes fast when you’re running from everyone.

  But time stops to a dead halt after the final bell. When I’m gearing up to go find November and tell her everything, I open my locker and a note falls out to the floor.

  Joy Morris—

  Four years ago, Adam Gordon sexually assaulted November Roseby. I want you to tell the whole school.

  Some may not believe you, but enough will. Don’t you think everyone deserves to know what he was capable of?

  I grip the note until the edges tear. Then I let out a choked laugh, so loud that Mr.
Fennis sticks his head into the hallway and shushes me. I ignore him, balling the note in my fist.

  Grace was wrong. November isn’t the blackmailer.

  My laugh turns to a shuddering exhale. I lean hard against my locker.

  The blackmailer isn’t somebody I love. I don’t have to believe that somebody I love could do this to me.

  I don’t care if this goes on forever. I deserve that. But November’s not mad at me and that’s all that matters.

  I find her alone in the empty computer lab, earbuds slung around her neck, editing the layout of next week’s newspaper. It takes her a second to notice me. She turns, but I’m talking even before I reach her.

  “I’ve been a shitty friend, Nov,” I blurt. “And it’s probably shitty of me to do this now. But Grace told me everything. I’m sorry. I know you didn’t want me to know.”

  She sits in total silence for a long time, shock unfolding on her face.

  “If you ever need . . . to talk, or anything . . .” I cringe. “November?”

  She unwinds the earbuds from her neck, places them on the keyboard.

  “I should have told you,” she says definitively.

  “It’s okay.”

  “No one’s ever looked up to me before like you. I didn’t want to ruin it.” She smiles, but it wavers.

  My throat closes. “I met Adam my freshman year. I was so used to my dad acting like I was this idiot, and then Adam told me I was smart. It was stupid.”

  I will never, ever be sad he’s dead.

  “I thought people would think I was lying. So I didn’t say anything. But feelings have to go somewhere, you know? They follow the path of least resistance. Some people turn it on others, I turned it on myself.”

  She sets her jaw, exhales, and pushes back her sleeve. Scars, underneath the rubber bands. Thin neat lines of them.

  “Don’t look at me like that. It’s fine now,” she says quickly. “Every time I get the urge to self-harm, I put a rubber band on my wrist. I just wanted to see some physical evidence that something was wrong. Nobody could see something was wrong.”

  Crying would definitely be one of the top ten useless things to do right now.

  “My dad noticed eventually. You would have thought I’d done it just to piss him off, the way he reacted.” Her voice darkens. “He called it a suicide attempt, had me sent to this mental health place. He was doing it as a punishment, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”