Please Don't Tell (24 page)

“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.”

“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.

Both her heels are on the edge now.

“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.”

“Grace—”

“I knew it would be bad for Savannah, okay? And I knew it would probably be bad for November, too.” She lets out a whimper. “But I have to tell the truth, even if it hurts some! You have to warn everyone about what people have done. Or they just keep doing it forever.”

She yanks her fingers hard through her hair.

“Either the person has to die, like Adam,” she keeps going, “or everyone has to find out what they did. Those are the only ways. And I don't want anyone to know what I did.”

“You're not bad—” I can't breathe. “You're not a bad person—”

She covers her ears.

“I knew people were blaming Cassius,” she says. “Officer Roseby started it. I was afraid he'd break. So I had to do something to discredit Officer Roseby before that happened.”

There's still the main question—
why
—but I'm afraid to ask it, afraid it'll upset her more.

“Tell me about the third note,” I say instead.

“I wanted everyone to know what Adam was. But I
didn't want them to know about me,” she says. “I'm sorry I convinced you that November was the blackmailer—I needed you to believe it was someone else. But it made you so sad, and I couldn't tell you it wasn't really her without telling you the truth. I knew if I wrote that last note, you'd realize it wasn't.”

“She told the whole school on her own,” I say. “I never showed her that note.”

“She's stronger than me. Everyone in the whole world is stronger than me.”

“No, they're not. I'm not.”

She opens her eyes suddenly. “Did you tell Levi?”

“Yes,” I manage.

“Does he hate you now?”

It hurts so much to say it. “Yes.”

“Good. Now he won't ever be able to do anything to you.” Her blue eyes are darker in the evening light than they've ever been before.