by Laura Tims
“You don’t have to keep buying me things.”
“I just want today to be nice.”
“It’s nice.” He cups my forearm tenderly, inspecting my elbow again. “Joy, it’s nice.”
What will he say when I tell him? I deserve his anger. I want to feel it.
He can even call the police. Prison’s where they put people to keep everybody safe.
We walk. I say things and forget them seconds later. We watch a costume-judging contest. We pass a face-painting booth. Everyone’s having so much fun.
“All right,” he says suddenly, stopping so that I almost bump into him. “Okay. Gotta just do it. I wanna tell you something, Joy.”
Tell him now. Don’t make him go through with this.
“I was trying to decide how you’d react, but I don’t know you well enough yet,” he says nervously. “I say a lot of stupid shit but none of the brave shit.”
Stop talking for once.
“You’re brave,” he stammers. “That’s the main thing I know about you. And the main thing I know about me is that I wish I was braver. I think sometimes we fall for the people we wish we were. Not that I’ve fallen for you, what a stupid phrase. But I think I could. I don’t just like who I am in the context of you, I like you.”
No, no, no.
“I don’t want you to be some fantasy of a girl I met once, I want to know you for real. I don’t want you to be an ex-maybe.”
The reality of me is going to break his heart, just like the reality of Adam did.
“It’s probably wimpy of me to tell you this right before I move back to Indiana,” he babbles. Then he stops. “Actually, you know what? I am not a wimp. I’m dealing with the fact that my dead half brother was an asshole, and I told you about my mom—you’re the first person I’ve ever told about my mom—and those were really hard things for me to do. So I’m a badass, as a matter of fact. A super cute and funny badass who you should probably make out with or something.”
I can’t move or breathe or I’ll lose it.
“Oh, God. Okay.” He stares at me, terrified, misinterpreting my silence. “Can you just pretend I didn’t say any of that? Just, uh. Forget it.”
The thing about feelings is that they’re not separated into packets you can open one at a time. They’re tangled. If you pull on one, everything comes apart. Levi’s pulling hard and I’m about to unravel.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I lie.
I don’t wait for him to follow me. I find the Porta-Potties, garish blue. Inside, I reach for my phone to call Preston, but . . .
He believed in me. He thought I wasn’t capable of it. I don’t want to destroy his version of me, either.
Anybody who gets close enough to find out who I am for real is going to hate me.
The people who love me only do because they don’t know the real me yet.
Then I see it, shoved in the corner, one more gross thing abandoned in a Porta-Potty. A bottle of cheap whiskey with two inches of amber liquid left in the bottom. I unscrew it.
People talk about their lowest point like there’s some safe distance separating it from who they really are. But this is me. Without my sister, me at my truest self. Hyperventilating in a Porta-Potty, drinking a stranger’s dregs.
I’m staring myself in the face, and I refuse to look away.
When I come out, I find Levi again and I smile at him. Now that I’m floating, it’ll be easier to put my house of cards back together.
“I’ll pretend you never said it,” I tell him.
He grins like a maniac. “Great! Selective amnesia is a rare talent. Now I can do anything idiotic that I want around you. I’m gonna make a list of other stupid shit I’ve said that I want you to forget. Including everything I’m saying right now. I’ll have the list on your desk by Monday.”
He burns up the silence.
I point at a game where you shoot miniature pumpkins with a pellet gun. “I want to win you something.”
He trails after me, his shoulders lowered.
“The more you hit, the better prize you’ll get,” chants the man at the booth as I hand him my money. I take aim. But it’s not a pumpkin anymore. Muscle and flesh sprouts, crawling over bone until Adam is smirking at me.
“You and I are the same. We go for what we want,” he says.
The pellet pops his eye and splatters the shelf with gore.
But there’s another head beside him, turning. “You and your sister, you’re both repressed fucking freaks, you know that?”
This time I shoot him in the jaw. His teeth splinter and a long strip of his pink gums gleams through his shredded skin. There’s a wall full of sneering Adam heads now. I hit one in the skull. Chunks of brain slap to the ground. He won’t stop talking. He won’t go away.
“Joy. Joy!”
Levi drags me away as the man at the booth shouts after us. He pulls me into a run until I break away, panting. We’re outside the fair now, standing in the wide rest of the field.
He steadies me. “You wouldn’t stop shooting. Are you okay?”
“Did I win?” I murmur.
“I don’t know.” His face is ashen. Then he sniffs and his face changes. “Is . . . is that alcohol?”
This isn’t supposed to be what makes him hate me.
“Are you drunk?” he asks, stunned.
“No,” I say. “I’ve been drunk for real. This isn’t that.”
“You brought alcohol with you today?” He steps back. “You went to the bathroom to drink. You came back different.”
“You said . . . at the funeral.” The funeral for his half brother who I killed. “You said everyone has something they use . . . to cope.”
“That was before I lived with an alcoholic.”
I flinch.
“I’m sorry.” He closes his eyes briefly. “It’s okay—”
“Don’t ever apologize to me, Levi. Don’t ever.”
“You’re tired. You’re sick,” he recites. “Let’s leave.”
“I want to go somewhere first.”
“I’m taking you home—”
“I need to go somewhere with you.”
I finally know exactly where I’m supposed to tell him.
It’s a long, cold walk. But he doesn’t ask where we’re going, and he doesn’t turn back. He just squeezes my fingers so hard I lose circulation.
The graveyard is as sunny as the day he was buried. The ground’s wet from a brief rain last night, the dirt over his grave spongy. The headstone shines. The flowers are fresh.
Levi rubs the toe of his sneaker against the granite. “Why are we here?”
I killed your half brother.
Say it.
“You know what the stupid thing is?” he mumbles to himself, gazing at the grave. “I’m pissed at him for not living up to my expectations. And that’s ridiculous. People don’t ever live up to dreams. People are real and dreams aren’t.”
Something seizes in my body. I turn and throw up beside the grave, horribly, unexpectedly.
“Oh, God, Joy, you’re really sick.” He sweeps my hair back while I retch. “It’s okay,” he says over and over again. “I’ll take you home.”
I scrape words together, put them in a line. “It’s my turn to tell you something.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything.”
Acid in my mouth, I say, “I killed Adam.”
“What?” He blinks. “No you didn’t.”
“Yes I did. I killed him.”
He’s still for a minute. “This is a messed up joke,” he says at last, in the saddest voice in the world. “I really pissed you off with that stuff I said back there.”
“I was at Adam’s birthday party,” I say numbly. “I pushed him into the quarry. Because I hated him.”
Everything I did for the blackmailer was all to avoid saying this one simple truth.
He covers his eyes. “My mom says things, too . . . when she gets like this.”
“I did it.�
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“I know you don’t mean this. I’m not going to be mad at you.”
“Levi.” I bend down and peel his hand away from his eyes. I hold it tightly. “I killed him. It was me.”
“Please stop talking.” He presses a palm to my forehead, feeling for a fever. I push his hand away, find my phone, find the video, skip to the moment that matters.
“I’m taking you home,” he says, but the video’s already playing.
You can see in someone’s face when they care about you. It makes their eyes softer, their mouth more gentle. You notice when it’s gone. Sometimes you can pinpoint the exact moment it disappears.
He starts breathing fast. Too fast. His chest rises and falls in a shallow rhythm. “It’s fake. That video’s fake. It’s blurry, it’s dark, you can’t see shit.”
“You can see my hair.”
He doesn’t respond. He’s trembling even though he’s wearing three layers, his lips bluish-white. He wavers and collapses, grabbing Adam’s headstone for support. “I—you—”
I reach for his wrist. His skin’s ice-cold.
“Please tell me—this is a joke.” He won’t breathe normally. “Tell me—that video’s not real. Lie about it—I don’t care.”
“You need to breathe slower.”
“Lie,” he pleads. “I don’t need—to know the truth—about anyone—anymore.”
“I’ll never stop being sorry,” I whisper.
He curls up on Adam’s grave.
Let him get angry. Let him call the cops. Anything other than this.
“Go away,” he gasps. “Please.”
“I can’t leave you here—”
“All this time, you . . .” His teeth chatter. “I even—oh, God—how did you keep that inside? Every time we talked—and you never showed it . . .”
And then he’s crying for real, yell crying, the kind where you’re just making a lot of noise and breathing hard. He folds in on himself to try to get away from the person doing this to him.
Me.
“Look at me, finally crying at his grave.” Hysterical laughter bubbles up between his sobs.
Sorry is my least favorite word. It’s so insulting.
“Please just go.” He leans against the headstone. “Please just go.”
So I do.
Mom asks how the date went, what happened to my elbow, is everything okay. I ask if my sister’s coming downstairs for dinner.
“She went out a while ago,” Dad says from the kitchen. “She said she was going to work at the library.”
The library closed two hours ago.
“Why do you let her skip dinner every night?” I ask.
“Grace is independent,” Mom says. “You know her.”
“Grace needs to see a therapist.”
In the kitchen, something falls and breaks. Dad sticks his head in. “What?”
“What?” Mom echoes.
“Why don’t you notice anything?” I feel very far away. “All you have to do is look.”
“What are you talking about?” Dad asks, bewildered.
“She never comes out of her room. She works out too much. She doesn’t eat right. She needs to talk to someone. Maybe go on medication.”
“Medication?” Dad frowns.
“It’s normal to withdraw a little when you’re her age,” Mom says soothingly. “Everyone goes through it. I did, too.”
“She’s not you.” My chest pulses. “Everyone does not go through what she’s going through.”
“Why don’t you talk to her? I’m sure she’d tell you more than she’d tell her nosy parents,” says Dad.
I see it now. They’ve always made us each other’s responsibility so we wouldn’t have to be theirs.
They want her to be fine so badly. Bad enough to look the other way.
“I’m going to find her,” I tell them.
“You say that like she’s missing,” Mom says, annoyed.
“I’m just going to look,” I tell her.
From now on, I’m always going to look.
She doesn’t answer her phone. But I know where she is.
The sun starts setting when I’m halfway to the quarry. The sky is the dusk blue of late evening, just a hint of orange left. I’m cold, I think, but I don’t really notice. I walk fast. I don’t know how long I have before Levi tells the police and they come for me.
The houses on our street glow with pumpkin lanterns and laughter, trick-or-treaters darting from house to house. I remember having to hold my sister’s hand, take her candy for her. She never trusted strangers.
The trick-or-treaters thin out when I hit Adam’s road. His house is the only one at the end of this street, up the hill. The trees are different at night. Evil shapes. When we came here together, that night, she held my hand, even though it was the night she decided to be brave.
I push through the woods.
Now that I’ve seen the video, I remember bits and pieces of the birthday party. My own nausea. Fury, thicker. Stumbling over branches. Him behind me. Telling myself, over and over again, not to run.
They haven’t started fencing off the quarry yet. It’s still exposed, a raw scar, the rim of the world with the moon shining into it.
And my sister is standing at the edge.
She’s not wearing a sweatshirt. Her T-shirt’s thin against her back. She’s looking at the sky.
People are wrong about twins. I’ve never had any private window into her head. But everyone wanted me to. They loved the idea of it. After a while, I convinced myself I did.
“Grace,” I say, my voice rasping in the silence.
She jumps a little, turning around. The tears on her face are silver in the moonlight. “You found me.”
“I looked,” I say.
“Are you mad at me?” she whispers.
“No.”
“You’re lying.” Her voice cracks. “How could you not be mad at me?”
She’s not wearing shoes, either. Her sneakers are several feet away. She’s hugging herself and she looks so fragile and she’s standing really, really close to the edge. Closer than I thought. Closer than I want to believe.
The darkness peels back and her closeness sears brighter than everything else, dagger sharp.
“Grace, come over here.” My words are suddenly clear.
“You straightened your hair,” she mumbles. “You look like me.”
“Come here, Grace.”
“You can be the one with straight hair once I’m gone.”
I lunge. I’ve caught her before, I’ll catch her again. But the distance between us is too wide and she jerks back, too close, TOO close, her heels balanced on the edge.
“Don’t.” The word flies out, a warning.
I’m going to burst into tears and it’s not going to help. I don’t know what the words are to make this stop. I’ve never known them, and she’s going to fall because I’m not smart enough to know them.
“Please just leave,” she cries.
I can’t. I’m tied to her more than any other person in this world, and I need to learn how to tie the rope between us in something other than a noose.
“I love you,” I tell her.
She shuts her eyes. “If you do, it’s only because you don’t know me for real.”
“I know you, Grace.”
“You don’t.” Her heel scrapes nothingness and please, please, please, but she doesn’t fall, she just looks at me all shivery in the cold.
“I want to.” My mouth is desert dry. “Tell me.”
“I don’t want you to know who I am.” The wind wraps her hair around her neck. “But I’ll never be able to be someone else. Not ever in my whole life. Even when I tried to be you, it didn’t work.”
“Please come here, please, please.”
“It doesn’t take long to hit the bottom,” she says. “It didn’t take him long.”
Fear leaps everywhere in my stomach.
“It’s so dark in there,” she says quietly.
“I’m not scared, though.”
She’s trembling all over.
I’m crying so hard I can’t speak. “Please. Just don’t. Talk to me. Stay and explain everything. There’s so much I don’t understand. Start from the beginning. How did I get home the night—the night Adam died?”
“Cassius helped me carry you.” Her eyes slide to a point over my shoulder, like she’s watching it happen in the distance.
“And—” Breathe. “He knew all along what happened to Adam.”
“I made him promise not to tell.”
“How—how did you—” I lick my lips. “How did you get those photos of Eastman and Savannah?”
“That part of the email I wrote from Cassius was true.” It’s like she’s in a trance. “He found them in his sister’s room. He came to me. He said I might be able to understand what Savannah was going through, wanted to know how to help her. But there’s no way to help. All you can do is get back at that person. That’s the only way to get the feelings out of you.”
“He gave you the photos?” I stammer.
“I stole them from his house.” She hugs herself. “After the photos went up, he was so upset. He knew it must’ve been me. But he felt so guilty about what Adam did. So he didn’t do anything.”
“So he didn’t have anything to do with the blackmail. You sent those emails.” I already knew, but shock breaks over me in waves anyway.
She looks away from me. “I have to go.”
Keep talking. She can’t fall if I keep her tied to me. “I don’t understand, but I’m not mad, okay? I love you no matter what, okay? Tell me—tell me where you found that video of Officer Roseby.”
“In November’s house.” She answers readily, robotically. “She invited me over one time, when her dad wasn’t home. She wanted to talk to me about Adam. I think she wanted to fix me. I poked around. I wanted to find out more about her. Then I found that video in her dad’s room, hidden away like a secret trophy. And I remembered how he arrested us that night, how awful he made everything. Everyone deserved to know what he’s really like. Just like everyone deserved to know what Eastman is like. People don’t believe all men are like that unless they see it for themselves.”
