Please Don't Tell (16 page)

He'll never meet her. “Joy's Grace?”

“You know. Grace in the context of Joy.”

“Grace is just Grace. There's no secret version.”

“Maybe it's different with twins.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe you're too used to being in the context of each other,” he says. “Most people get the chance to try out lots of different versions of themselves, depending on who they're with, then settle on the version they like best. That's probably why people get married and shit. So they can go on being in the context of that person forever.”

“But then that's a lie, isn't it?” I say quietly. “Believing in the way somebody else sees you instead of the way you actually are.”

“I don't think there's one real version of a person and everything else is fake,” he says. “People have lots of parts.”

“I think I just met Philosophical Levi. He was unexpected.”

“Not as unexpected as Exposer of Evildoers Joy, let me tell you.”

I flinch.

“It's okay. That police officer was a dick. People deserved to know.” He gently nudges my shoulder. “Sorry. Not talking about it.”

But it's too late. The blackmailer's back in my head. I've stolen too much time here. “I . . . told my sister I'd help her with her project tonight.”

“You're gonna go have giggly sister talk about the date you had with this cute dude. Don't try to hide it.”

I smile painfully.

“Do me a favor, would you? Just, like . . . enjoy hanging out with her tonight. It's special, getting to have time with your family. I always thought I'd have time with Adam someday.” He shrugs so casually it hurts.

But he's wrong. I'll always be with Grace. It's him I won't have much time with. He's going to go back to Indiana and forget about his temporary Stanwick friend, and I'll never have to tell Grace that I spent any time with Adam's half brother.

I figured out how to keep her secrets. Now I'm learning how to keep mine.

When I get home, Mom and Dad are in the living room, watching TV. I wait, but neither of them says anything
about the fact that I'm home so late. Either they've forgotten to be suspicious of me or they've given up completely.

“Did any mail come for me today?” I ask.

“None.” Mom doesn't look away from the TV. “Leftovers in the kitchen for you.”

I ignore the plastic-wrapped spaghetti on the counter and go straight to Grace's door.

Come on, Grace. Open your door so I won't have to. Sense me standing here.
I reach for the knob, and an invisible monster folds each of my fingers back until the snapping is deafening. But I twist it with my mangled hand.

Grace would never lie in bed with her laptop like I do, marinating in crumbs. She's sitting at her desk. She's organized all her books by color since the last time I was in here. It's hermetically clean, vacuum sealed.

“Are you busy?” I ask.

The profile of her face is lit up blue by the computer screen. “I have a lot of work to do.”

Does she even realize how much she sounds like Mom?

I sit on the edge of her quilt, the blue-and-green-patterned one she's had forever. It's the only thing in her room left from our childhood, since the lamp broke. She put everything else in boxes or threw them away.

“I don't want to keep secrets from you,” I say.

She closes her laptop. “You've never kept a secret from me in your life. You can't even stop yourself from telling me what you got me for Christmas.”

“Would you be mad if I was keeping one?”

“I would never be mad at you about anything.”

“You're allowed to be mad at me, Grace.”

She bends her legs underneath her, balancing on top of her desk chair in a position that looks uncomfortable. “Where are you going with this?”

I have to tell her about the blackmail. She's my sister and she deserves to know. She's my sister and she would never stop loving me.

I don't want to do this without her anymore.

“This is going to sound ridiculous,” I manage, and then I steel myself and let it all spill out. The notes, the photos of Principal Eastman, the security video of Officer Roseby . . .

It does sound ridiculous. It's so ridiculous I'm not even afraid.

“And I should have told you sooner,” I finish. “I should have told you the second it started. I was scared you'd think . . .”

She's so quiet.

“That the blackmailer is telling the truth,” I stammer. “That I really did . . . kill him, and I just don't remember. Even if Preston says I left the party before then. What if I came back?”

“Do you think you did it?” she asks.

I have no idea what her thoughts are, behind that face that looks just like mine. “I've been trying not to ask myself that. If I'm capable of it, I don't want to know. But
what if I am, Grace? I wanted to.”

It burns a hole in my chest.

“How do you do something like that and live with yourself?” I whisper. “The worst possible thing.”

“Him dying was not the worst possible thing.”

“That wasn't . . .” I flush.

“I'm sorry.” She pulls her hair over her face. “This is so crazy. I can't believe you didn't tell me.”

“I didn't want to make you worry.”

“You should have come to me.” She softens. “You should always come to me. There's no way you killed him. Just because you said you wished he was dead. People say things they don't mean. Okay?”

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.”

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.

“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.