Please Don't Tell

by Laura Tims

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  “After what happened to Grace, I didn’t . . .” She shuts her eyes. “I didn’t want you to think it was my fault.”

  “It wasn’t,” I say urgently. “I wouldn’t have.”

  “If I’d told you, she never would’ve gotten close to him.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.” I keep my voice steady. “It was mine.”

  Her eyes change. “Joy—”

  “I thought if I could get Adam to go out with her, she’d love me like she used to,” I croak. “I didn’t know why we were growing apart. So it was my way of bringing us together. Of helping her.”

  I’m chained to this truth, and I’m responsible for every single thing it destroys.

  “No.” She grabs my wrist. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  I pull back. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “It,” she says, and stops. “It’d be pretty hypocritical to argue with you, wouldn’t it?”

  I don’t trust myself to say anything.

  “I think that it was Adam’s fault,” she says. “And maybe if we keep reminding each other of that, eventually it’ll work its way down to a place we can believe it.”

  I wipe my nose. “I still look up to you, Nov.”

  “I don’t think I want you to anymore,” she says after a minute. “I think I’d rather just be your friend.”

  I reach into my pocket for the blackmailer’s newest note, to show her. I’ll never do it, not this time. I don’t care what happens to me. But Nov deserves to know what’s been going on.

  I’m about to hand it to her when I see it—the headline of her editorial.

  “Why I Didn’t Tell When Adam Gordon Raped Me”

  I lurch back.

  “You know what I’ve learned?” She sounds so calm. “Secrets fester inside people. Things that stay in the dark rot. You can’t fix anything until you know what it looks like. And I’m not going to keep quiet anymore to keep life simple for other people.”

  “You’re going to publish this?”

  “Eastman was the one who always proofread the paper before it went to print. I can print whatever I want.”

  I guess the blackmailer is going to get what he wants anyway.

  I swallow. “Aren’t you scared people will be . . . ?”

  “I’ve been planning on doing something like this ever since what happened to Grace.” She stares at the computer screen. “That’s why I went to his birthday party. I was going to confront him in front of all his friends. But I barely got through the front door before I ran.”

  “You don’t have to. He’s gone.” I keep saying that, and every time it feels like a lie. “He’s not going to do anything to anyone ever again.”

  “Maybe he already did. Maybe there’s another girl here who thinks she’s alone in this,” she says. “If so, I want to talk to her.”

  How could I tell her about the blackmail now, when she’s in the middle of doing something so brave?

  Maybe there’s a difference between keeping a secret for your own sake, and keeping a secret for someone else’s. I’ll tell her someday. When everything is calmer. In the meantime, I have Preston to help me through it.

  And my sister.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I repeat, just in case. “To get back at him, I mean. Revenge won’t help.”

  Even Adam dying didn’t help Grace.

  “He’s not important enough to me for that,” she says. “Yeah, I was angry. It’s impossible not to imagine doing really sick things when you’re angry, things that make you question who you are.”

  I know about those things.

  “Maybe if I did want revenge, it wouldn’t look so different from what I’m doing now. But reasons are important. And I’m not doing this because I want to ruin his reputation or whatever. I’m doing it because I feel like telling the fucking truth for once. Even if it hurts some people to hear it.”

  Like Levi. A jolt runs through me. He’ll finally hear the truth about Adam. But will he believe it?

  “It’s hard to find out somebody you loved isn’t who you thought.” She smiles at me sadly. “But it’s better than believing a lie forever.”

  “I should be happy,” I murmur. “I wanted Levi to know.”

  “He’ll be fine. He’s got you to sit next to in movie theaters now.”

  I shake my head slowly. “I fucked up with him. Really badly.”

  “Girl,” she says. “Repair shit. Don’t abandon ship.”

  She turns back to the computer, saves the file to her desktop, and sends it to the printer.

  Maybe it’s impossible to be honest without somebody getting hurt. But I think I’m getting better at figuring out when it’s not worth it, and when it is.

  EIGHTEEN

  August 24

  Grace

  “MAYBE HE’LL JUST LEAVE,” JOY WHISPERS. “Transfer schools or something, I don’t know.”

  She opens my window to let the stale air out. The breeze blows my curtains so far into the room they almost brush my forehead. Now all she talks about are the ways Adam could disappear.

  “Maybe he’ll move across the country and we’ll never see him at school again,” she says.

  I haven’t told her yet that I’m not coming back to school. I haven’t told her about breaking into Adam’s house, either. If I’m silent, she’ll fill the empty space with words. She’s afraid of my silence.

  “He’ll graduate early,” she says to the window. “He’ll do one of those year-abroad programs.”

  I pull the blanket up to my neck and go still until she thinks I’m asleep.

  Then, hours later, when she’s asleep in her own room, I leave. Walking at night means the dreams can’t find me. That he can’t find me. Joy’s always so proud of herself for climbing out her window, but it’s just as easy to use the front door.

  It rained earlier, and my heels catch in puddles on the side of the road. This late, I can walk as far as I want and nobody will see me.

  I wonder if November has the dreams. She hasn’t talked to me since our night at his house. Which is fine. I don’t have anything else to say to her.

  One foot in front of the other. Mindless movement, for the rest of my life. That’s all I want. Like a zombie.

  Music thumps halfway down the street. It’s coming from Cassius’s house, where he once painted a girl who looked like me. I step closer. I’m a shadow watching normal people, all their details brightly lit up, making them garish, frightening. They spill onto the lawn and lounge against the porch.

  I dart through his front door. I want to see the finished painting.

  I half slip in a spilled drink as I wander through the throngs. His parents aren’t home. I don’t see Cassius anywhere. Somebody says something to me, but I trickle away like water. I recognize a few people, sophomores, juniors, but they’re as distant in memory as characters from cartoons Joy and I watched when we were ten.

  Did Cassius invite his musician best friend to this end-of-summer party?

  Someone bumps into me, and I stumble into the basement door. It’s closed. He probably didn’t want all these drunk people messing with his precious art.

  I open the door and slip into the dark.

  Nobody notices anything I do, these days.

  I turn on a light. It’s too bright, so I turn it off again, using my phone flashlight instead. His paintings on the walls have changed. Some of the clouds are more ominous now, darker, pouring rain over the naked people floating beneath them.

  It doesn’t take me long to find what I’m looking for. The painting is finished. It’s set up on an easel right in the middle of the room, like it’s the one he’s most proud of.

  There are plants growing out of her. Vines and flowers. Most just buds, some blossoming, some barely poking out of her skin. She’s gazing straight up and there’s a look in her eyes like she sees something beautiful in the distance, just out of reach.

  I grab the painting and try to tear i
t, but it’s canvas, and I’m not strong enough. I try to punch through it instead, hitting it so the paint flakes and cracks, and then I throw it to the floor and grind my heel into it.

  “Grace?”

  That name belongs to the girl in the ruined painting. She can keep it.

  “Grace, what are you doing here?” It’s Cassius, standing on the stairs. He turns on the light. Suddenly everything in the room is too sharp. Like knives.

  “My painting,” he says, shocked.

  “I’m sorry, I—” I choke on my apology, on his sadness and confusion. I shove past him, run up the stairs, back into the real world. I have to get away. I can’t look at him and see an old version of myself reflected in his eyes.

  I head for the front door, but Cat and my old friends are standing in front of it. I don’t want to hear them call my name. I don’t want to know if they’d bother to say it or not.

  I cross the living room to the kitchen and stare out the open window, my heart pounding. The backyard is much smaller than the front, and fenced in. Someone’s arranged a circle of old tires for people to sit on. Two girls, a guy, and—

  Him.

  “Let me try,” one of the girls says, reaching for the guitar balanced on his lap. “I took lessons.”

  “Yeah, uh, no,” he slurs. “This thing cost like two grand. My hands only.”

  To them, he’s normal. Person shaped.

  He lights a cigarette. “Anyone got a joint?”

  “We can roll one upstairs,” says a girl.

  The guitar slides to the grass as he stands, wobbling a little. He hasn’t changed like me. He looks exactly the same.

  The girls climb the porch first and I watch him study the length of their shorts, almost clinically, before following.

  I wander onto the back lawn, gulping lungfuls of night breeze.

  His guitar’s in the wet grass. The wood’s pretty, swirly, expensive, like coffin wood. I pick up a cup on the ground and sniff it. Whatever type of alcohol it is, it’s not mixed with anything. I dump it all over his guitar.

  That’s almost the end of it, except that he left his cigarette lighter.

  I look around. Nobody at the kitchen window. In one of the upper bedrooms, a light comes on and several outlines crowd together. He’s taller than the others. He talks with his hands.

  I’m so tired.

  I bend down and pick up the lighter, flick it on, and stare at the flame for a moment before I touch it to the guitar. The fire catches so quickly that I stagger back. Immediately, the wood warps black, flashing in the gold and orange glow.

  I drop the lighter, then wind back through the house, curving away from drunken limbs. Once I’m outside, I walk in the coldest puddles.

  “Grace, wait!”

  It’s meant to be a shout, but Cassius’s voice is too soft. I don’t get very far before he’s behind me in the road, still in his sweatshirt even though it’s a summer night, all the patterns on his skin hidden.

  I force myself to calm down. He’s not going to do anything to me. It’s Cassius.

  Unless he was scheming with his best friend this whole time. Maybe that’s why he wanted to paint me. Maybe they laughed about it together. Nightmares swirl together in my head.

  “I thought I saw you leaving. . . .” he says uncertainly, his hands in his pockets. “Can I walk you home?”

  Boys always think silence means yes.

  We walk in the road. No cars this late. If they do come, maybe I won’t dodge fast enough. How easy is it to die? Sometimes it seems really easy, and then sometimes it seems unreasonably hard.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t like the painting.” He’s looking at the stars, shoulders hunched sadly.

  “I don’t know why I did that,” I burst out. “I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  None of this is okay.

  “Were you at that party to see Adam?” he asks. My stomach turns, but he keeps talking, oblivious. “He’s the one who put it together. I told him my parents would be gone for the weekend. He wanted to practice throwing a bigger party, since his birthday party’s coming up, I mean. I didn’t really expect it to be so big.”

  My skin feels like paper, like it’s not holding me together very well at all.

  “I was gonna try not to bring up that night,” he says after a minute. “Adam said everything went fine, that I shouldn’t be weird about it, but I feel weird about it.”

  One step in front of the other. Listen to the gravel beneath my feet. I am a collection of small practiced movements.

  “I hope . . . I, um,” he starts. “I hope . . .”

  “Do you love him?” I ask. “Like in a best friend way?”

  He looks confused. “Who?”

  “Adam. Do you care about him, as a person?”

  “Um,” he says. “Yeah, for sure. He’s the reason I have friends at this school. I know he can be a jerk—sorry—but I owe him.”

  “Did he ask you to ask me if you could paint me?”

  He stops in the road. “You mean as some wingman thing? No. Painting someone is . . . very personal for me. It’s a thing I want to do with some people, and not other people, and I don’t know why, but I definitely wouldn’t do it for him.”

  The problem with good liars is that you can’t tell that they are. The only safe people are the ones who lie badly to your face. At least then you can tell.

  “Have you guys talked?” he asks.

  “No.” The word burns.

  “Joy and I haven’t talked.” He nudges a bottle cap aside with his foot. Joy would have kicked it. “I was worried you were mad that I hadn’t called her. Adam said I wasn’t supposed to.”

  I shrug. I have nothing to give him.

  “Is it okay if I tell you something that I probably wouldn’t tell you if I wasn’t drunk?”

  He’s going to tell me no matter what. Sweat collects along his hairline. I hadn’t even noticed he was drunk.

  “I tend to keep everything to myself until it spills out all at once, and this is one of those times, and I’m sorry for that. But I haven’t stopped thinking about that night we talked at the quarry. Haven’t stopped thinking about . . . you.”

  I look straight ahead, toward my house at the end of the street.

  He pulls the neck of his sweatshirt up over his mouth so his words are muffled, like a little boy’s. “I really like you, Grace. I feel like we’re the same.”

  The moon’s a flat silver disk. If I stare at it long enough, it blurs into a blob of light. I close my eyes and the shape of it glows on the inside of my eyelids. “You slept with my sister.”

  He winces. “Adam kept telling me to do it, and then she was so . . . she was really into it, and . . .”

  “Did you sleep with her because she looks like me or because she’s hotter than me?”

  I have become a horrible person.

  He takes a scared breath. “I slept with her because I knew you wanted me to like her. I wanted to try. Adam kept talking about twins, how hot it would be to hook up with twins, and it was gross, and I should have said something to him, but I didn’t. I wanted . . .”

  He clears his throat. “I wanted the four of us to fit together. But I didn’t fit with Joy. I fit with you.”

  Maybe the girl that he painted would have fit with him. But this girl doesn’t fit with anyone. Even the parts of me that used to interlock with Joy are closed up now.

  “So you knew.” My voice sounds so dead. “You both planned it. The sex.”

  He flinches at the way I say it. “No! No. He pulled me aside, said there was this energy, that I needed to live in the moment. Break out of my shell.”

  I close my eyes again. I want to see how long I can walk without seeing anything.

  “It didn’t mean anything to me,” he says a little desperately. “It was a mistake. So I was thinking, maybe it didn’t mean anything to you that you slept with him, either.”

  The longer I walk with my eyes closed, the
more it feels like floating. I veer away from his voice. The darkness behind my eyes yellows and there’s a rumbling noise in the distance.

  “Car!” I hear him cry, but I don’t move. The car can move. The whole world can move, if it wants, and I’ll stay still.

  A honk, long and blaring. A hand yanks me hard to the side. I open my eyes.

  “Are you drunk?” he pants, terrified.

  “Just tired.”

  He doesn’t say anything the rest of the way home. His silence is painful. He misses that girl he talked to at the quarry.

  I don’t. This smooth nothingness is much better.

  “Is that your bedroom window there?” he asks timidly when we reach my house. All the shades are still drawn. Nobody noticed I was gone. “Did you sneak out by climbing down that tree?”

  “That’s my sister’s room. She’s the one who does that.”

  It’s a chance for him to say something about her. Offer to call her, give me a message to pass along. But he doesn’t.

  It’s not important. I don’t think Joy thinks he’s beautiful anymore.

  I don’t say good night. I just walk up the front steps and leave him behind. I can feel him watching me, there on the sidewalk, his shoulders tucked in, trying and failing to disappear.

  August fades away. I become nocturnal. The later I stay up, the less I have to sleep, and the less I sleep, the less I dream. I get up early once, to meet with Principal Eastman. He agrees to my independent project as quickly as my teachers do. I keep forgetting what I tell them I’m going to be working on.

  I start scheduling normality. Two days a week I’ll have dinner with Mom and Dad and Joy. Once a day I’ll come downstairs and ask Dad how his new exercise routine is going. I give them just enough evidence that everything is fine. They accept it. It makes them feel good.

  This week’s big normal event is grocery shopping with Joy. Traumatized people don’t go grocery shopping. If you can get a cart and select cereal, you’re fine. You’re alive. Everyone here is ordinary. A man talking into his phone, a college girl checking the ingredients on a bag of trail mix. I want to crack them all open like eggs.