Please Don't Tell (7 page)

Fantasy: I fall into the quarry. Adam comes down here in the middle of the night. Finds my broken body. Writes a song about me.

Suddenly Joy's shouting my name. I blink. The darkness retracts. She's up, a blur, yanking my arm. We both trip backward into the dirt.

November's up, too, shepherding us away from the edge. “From now on we stay over here by the trees.”

“Oh my God. You almost fell.” Joy clamps my elbow. “You were right on the edge.”

“I didn't think I was that close,” I mumble.

“But I got you. I saved you. Remember that time when
we were little and I made you climb that tree outside my window? You fell and I didn't grab you and you sprained your ankle? But I grabbed you this time. Right out of the air.
Whoosh!
”

“How long do you think it would take to hit the bottom?” I ask.

“A million years. Don't ask me that.” She stumbles, collapses drunkenly against my side. “Grace. I love you sooo much. Did you know that? You are just. Sooo perfect. Oh my God.”

My sister is an idiot and I love her.

She fumbles with my hands, examining them in the dark. Splaying them out on the blanket. “You have to stop biting your nails.”

“I hate the quarry,” November says suddenly. I forgot about her.

Joy abandons my fingers. “Because Adam lives up there?”

“No. He never comes down here.”

How does she know that? She catches me staring.

“Guys,” Joy says. “Guys. I'm so drunk. I'm hallucinating that Cassius just showed up.”

I follow her pointing finger. Cassius Somerset is hanging back in the tree shadows, the strange patterns on his skin silver in the moonlight. Did he come down from Adam's house? Is Adam here, too? But no one else is moving in the trees.

“Hey, friends,” he says. Even though none of us are his friends.

“Holy shit.” Joy finger-combs her hair. Her hand gets tangled in the mess. “Hi. Hello. Did you hear us?”

He flinches at her drunk shouting. “I was leaving Adam's. I heard a scream.”

“That was me! Wow! You should definitely hang out with us for a while, probably. We have whiskey. Can he drink your whiskey, Nov?”

“Cassius, I would be utterly delighted if you would come and drink my whiskey so there's less for this fool.” November sighs.

He just stands there in the shadows, hands in his pockets.

Joy's wobbling. “Okay. I have to pee. Grace. Come with me.”

She grabs my arm, not November's. She drags me away into the woods. Trees close over our heads and the night fills with crunching as she splinters every branch.

“Do you think we're far enough away where he won't hear any splashing?” she whisper-yells after a minute.

“Try to pee quietly?”

“How am I supposed to control the volume of my piss hitting the ground, Grace?” And then she's giggling frantically in dark, fumbling. I wait, facing the other way. Grinning in the dark.

“I need your help,” she slurs as soon as she's done. “Cassius . . . is . . . beautiful and perfect, and I . . . am . . . drunk, and I love him, and I love you.”

“Do you even know him?” I ask.

“I know that he's beautiful and perfect.” Joy hiccups. “Help.”

She's asking for
my
advice. “Just . . . be nice.”

“Nice,” she repeats. “Right.”

We struggle back through the trees to our blanket. Cassius and November are sitting slightly apart. Talking quietly. They stop when they see us.

“Hello,” Joy declares. About to be nice.

Instead, she vomits absolutely everywhere.

November springs up, businesslike, seizing her arm. Stabilizing her. I should be doing it, but I'm frozen. I didn't expect this. Neither did Joy, because she's looking openmouthed at the puke on her shirt like someone else put it there.

“All righty then,” November says wearily. “It has been a night. Nice talking to you for the first time, Cassius.”

Joy moans. Her face glows pale. “I don't wanna go yet. Cassius came all this way. He walked
forever
.”

“Everyone walks everywhere here,” November mutters.

Cassius folds his knees to his chest, pulls his sweatshirt sleeves over the patchy skin on his hands. Trying to make himself smaller. I can tell because I do the same thing. Joy takes up a lot of space. It's hard to fit when she's around.

“I'm at least taking you to my car to change. I have clean gym clothes in the back.” November disappears with my sister into the woods. And I'm alone with the guy Joy has sex dreams about.

He doesn't seem like the kind of guy anyone would have
sex dreams about. He seems like the kind of guy people should be tucking into bed.

“You and November never talked before?” I'm not usually the one to break a silence.

“Not really . . . we were just talking about—it's funny—we were just talking about how we both resented how everyone thought we'd be friends, since there aren't a whole lot of black kids at Stanwick. So we avoided each other. But it turns out she's cool . . .”

Everything he says trails off at the ends. Like periods are too harsh for him. If Joy's words fly out of her, and I have to pry mine out, his drift from him like summer clouds. He stares dreamily at the moon, tapping the bottle of whiskey with his pinkie. His fingernails are curved and delicate.

Awkwardness stacks up, bricks of it. Does he expect me to say something? But he's not looking at me. He's lost in his own thoughts. It's hard not to feel soft toward somebody when you watch him watch the sky.

After a while, the silence stops being awkward.

“The quarry creeps me out,” he says eventually. “It's supposed to be this romantic place . . . but it's just evidence of people screwing up the earth for their own gain.”

It always catches me off guard when someone says something out loud that I was thinking. I always assume nobody else has the thoughts I have.

“I don't like that you can't see the bottom at night,” I say.

“Me neither.”

And suddenly I realize I'm talking casually with Cassius Somerset. Something Joy can't do.

“It feels like, um,” I try. “Like it's pulling at me.”

“Same.” He nods, and that's it. He's not always unspooling the contents of his brain like Joy does, filling so much space with the things in her mind that there's no room for the things in mine.

“This is our first time drinking,” I confess.

He smiles, not in a mean way.

“We're doing this, uh. Summer of misdeeds. She's trying to break me out of my shell or something. It's silly.”

“It's not silly . . . it sounds like fun.”

“It feels like everyone else is always already in on this stuff.” The words unstick from me easily for once. Maybe it's the whiskey. “I don't even know how to talk about drinking or smoking or, like, which words are normal to use.”

He plays with the edge of the blanket. “Me neither, really . . . I don't know if those teen parties in the movies with red Solo cups even exist. Sometimes Adam and I steal his dad's beer and drink in the basement and play Mario Kart. That's about it.”

I should ask about Adam while this new passage between my brain and my mouth stays open.

“I'm sorry about my sister,” I blurt instead. “She's . . . a lot.”

“It's okay . . .” He rubs a heart-shaped splotch of lighter
skin next to his temple. “Loud people just kind of make me feel like I'm disappearing.”

Yes.

That.

“You're not hard to talk to, though. Usually I have a harder time with strangers,” he explains. “And don't worry, I understand sisters being a pain. Mine's a freshman next year, and she picked the worst kids in middle school to hang out with, and I don't want her coming to high school and getting in trouble and making everyone think I'm like that.”

“Joy's a mess, and that doesn't make anyone look down on me.”

“No, I mean . . . at a school like this, it's like a black kid represents every black kid. If Savannah does something bad, I might as well have done it.” He shrugs. “I just think she needs consequences.”

“Joy gets away with things, too.”

“Adam also does stupid stuff. But he does it to cope.”

“Cope?” Something in my chest yanks. “Cope with what?”

“His dad wants Adam to be a famous musician like his grandfather.”

“Pressure sucks,” I burst out. “It's like you can't screw up. Because all that matters is that you do the one thing you're supposed to be good at. Even if you're scared, or miserable, or hate the way you look . . .”

“Do you hate the way you look?”

“No,” I say too quickly.

“I do. I hate the way I look. This skin thing. I hate it.”

“But it's beautiful,” I say without weighing it first. “You're like a work of art.”

He lifts his chin from his knees and looks at me for a long time. “A work of art?”

“It's like people don't only look good when they look like a magazine.” I'm drunker than I thought. “People can be aesthetically beautiful in the way sunsets and leaves and things are.”

“Nobody has ever said anything like that to me in my entire life,” he says.

Could I have this effect on Adam, if I told him he's beautiful?

“You are really not like your sister,” he adds quietly.

“I know. I'm sorry.”

“I'm glad.”

Nobody's ever said anything like that to me, either.

Do people tell Joy to be like me as often as they tell me to be like her?

“Sometimes I think we were meant to be a whole person, and we would have been okay that way, but we got split up and now we'll never be . . . right. Technically, I mean medically, I guess we were supposed to be one person.”

“Can I paint you?” he asks suddenly.

“Are you joking? Why would you want to paint me?”

“I like painting interesting people.”

“You should paint Joy.”

“I want to paint you.”

He gives me a special look, like he's already painting in his mind.

If I spend more time alone with him, maybe I can get him to be interested in Joy. And maybe I can ask him more about Adam.

“Okay,” I say. “You can paint me.”

THE COPS DRAG PRINCIPAL EASTMAN OUT
of school by 10:00 a.m.

Or he e
scapes through the fire door, or he breaks a window in his office. Depends who you listen to. But everyone agrees that Savannah ran out five minutes into advisory. They didn't even have time to call her to the office.

I did this to her. A freshman girl, and I ruined her life.

I'm the person who hurts people, the girl who destroys other girls. The failed knight. If nobody'll exile me, I'll exile myself. I hide from Levi for the rest of the day. I don't look for Preston. I spend detention writing apology letters I won't send and shredding them into thin piles of paper. After school, I make the ten-minute bike ride to Preston's house.

The Bell house is a healthy kind of messy, the furniture and nineties wallpaper in different floral shades. Preston's
first step, first birthday, first ice-cream cone, it's all documented on the walls. He says he hates constantly looking at his past.

There's a zillion notes on his bedroom door:
Do not enter. Do not touch my things. Do not clean.

“Pres, I'm coming in.”

“Don't,” he replies, muffled.

“I'm not mad at you for putting the photos in everyone's lockers. But we need to talk.”

A long silence.

“Someone told me that Savannah girl is taking the rest of the semester off,” he says.

“It's not your fault,” I say desperately. “You just didn't want anything to happen to me.”

He opens the door, slouching more than usual. His curls corkscrew like he just whipped a blanket off his head. His shades are shut as always, the dim light deepening the circles under his eyes.

“Last night, all of it felt like something from Sherlock Holmes. It didn't feel real. But now I'm panicking. And I think I wrecked someone's life because I was scared about someone wrecking yours.”

Which one of us is gonna be the strong one?

“I'm the one who got the envelope. I'm the one who showed it to you.” I try to smile.

He hugs me. Pres
hates
hugs. It's stiff, uncomfortable, and it's the best hug I've ever had.

“It's Adam and this blackmailer person,” he says. “Not you.”

It'd be so much easier if that were true.

“Have you heard anything else from the blackmailer?” he asks.

“No. I watched the window all night.”

“You can't sleep there.”

“I'm gonna stay awake in case he comes back.”

“You can't stay awake forever.”

“What if he comes through my window, goes to Grace's room?” The knife under my pillow won't be enough. “I stay awake or I tell the cops.”

“No cops.” He's agonized. “Please.”

“Maybe now that Eastman's arrested, it's done with.”

“We have to talk to Cassius. Tonight or tomorrow.”

“I can't believe Cassius would do that to his sister. And if I ask him about it, and it wasn't him, what if he realizes the photos were because of me?”

Outside, a car gravels into the driveway. Pres shrinks back into his room. “I can't talk to Mom when I'm—she can always tell.”

“I'll distract her.”

“Text me if you get another envelope.”

“I bet I won't,” I say for him. “I bet it's over.”

I hope it is. But I'm getting a sharper knife and setting my alarm for every ten minutes tonight.

I shut his door and head downstairs, tripping over Ms. Bell's shoes and scarves, scattered like she sheds accessories on her way to her room every night.

“Hello, Joy. Visiting Pres?” Ms. Bell is wearing a simple
blouse and a high-waisted skirt. No bright lipstick, no ten-cent craft store flowers in her ponytail. “Long day. Staff meetings about . . . those photos.”

She beckons me to the kitchen, which is cluttered with spices and mismatched plates, and fills a bright purple mug with water. She sticks it in the microwave, finds a box of hibiscus tea. I bite my tongue. There's no way to wish someone else was your mom without feeling guilty.

“How's Pres? He good?” she asks.

“Fine,” I say all quick. “Doing homework.”

“Every single student comes to me with their feelings except my son.” She takes out a sleeve of Thin Mints, shakes out three, rolls the rest to me. “I doubt there's anyone who's not feelin' a bit shaken right now. Adam's death, now this. Whoever it was ought to have just reported those photographs to the police.”

I crumble the edge of a cookie in my fingers. “Maybe they wanted to humiliate Eastman.”

“That's exactly what that man deserves, but not the girl. I have a meeting with her family tomorrow. Don't imagine she'll be comin' back to school right away.”

There was a movie Grace and me watched once, about a man who accidentally killed anybody who got near him thanks to a lab experiment. He spent the whole movie running around oblivious, everyone within a mile falling over dead. If he'd just stayed still, they would have been fine.

“Good men are hard to find.” She dunks a tea bag in her mug, splashes the counter. “Sometimes I think
about findin' a father figure for Pres, and sometimes I think, screw it. The last one he had was no great shakes. I ask you, what does it tell a small boy when his own father doesn't want him?”

Everyone in school trusts Ms. Bell because she talks to us like we're people, not kids. She sucks in a deep breath and pushes it out again. “Sorry. Something like today makes you so mad, you start getting mad about everything else in the world there is to be mad about. How are you doing, Joy?”

I want to bury my face in her shoulder. But all I say is “I'm okay.”

She nods sadly. “Were you at Adam Gordon's birthday party?”

It doesn't feel safe to say yes or no, but she keeps talking so I don't have to answer.

“You know, I'm holding a group counseling meeting next week, for everybody who went. You're welcome to join.”

Preston said the blackmailer was probably at the party. If I locked eyes with him at this meeting, would he stutter, slip up?

“Do you remember the first time you came over here? Pres made me hide all the pictures of him.” Ms. Bell listens so much that when it's her turn to talk, she never stops. “You picked him up a Diet Pepsi, and the can sat on his dresser for weeks. When I tossed it, he moped all day. He'd saved it because you gave it to him.”

I've dragged Pres into this mess with me.

“A forty-year-old woman can't smack a bully when he's a teenager, can she? And she shouldn't want to. And I officially do not condone violence, but thanks for sticking up for Pres the other day. You're a good girl.”

I push my knee into the table leg until it throbs.

My phone buzzes and I pull it out of my back pocket. It's Mom.

When R U coming home? Could use U to help with Grace.

My blood freezes. What does that mean? I bolt up. “I have to go.”

“If you need a ride—”

But I'm already out the door, not thinking, biking home, twice as fast as I did to Preston's. They've never needed help with her. Grace never needs help. Did the blackmailer break in through my window, did he hurt her—

When I get home, aching, sweating, Mom's on the porch, her head in her hands. She attempted to hide that she was crying with makeup, but it didn't work.

“What's wrong with Grace? Where's Dad?” I pant.

“Your father's at work.” She fixes a smile on her face. “I tried to talk to her about maybe going back to school. I'm not used to fighting with her.”

Only with me.

“You girls talk about everything.” She holds open the door for me, an apology in her eyes.

I nod and go inside. Everything's meticulously clean in
Grace's room, except her desk lamp, which I painted for her at arts and crafts camp when we were ten. It's one of the only sentimental things she's kept. Now it's cracked in two.

“The fight wasn't a big deal. Honestly,” she says, curled in bed, before I even open my mouth. “It's just the way she looks at me. Like she's searching for someone else. Some other version, smarter, prettier . . .”

“That's not true.”

“Don't lie.” She muffles herself with the blanket. “She's sick of having me around.
I'm
sick of having me around.”

“Nobody's sick of you. They're scared you're a hermit now. A really brilliant hermit.”

Long silence. Our conversations used to tie us together like ropes. Now they're shimmering threads, always about to break if I move too fast.

“I'm sorry the lamp fell,” she says.

Longer silence.

“You could come back, now that he's gone,” I say cautiously.

“I know I won't see him again,” she says to the underside of the blanket. “And I know that the whole reason I started the independent project was so I wouldn't have to see him.”

She's talking to me for real. Finally.

“I was supposed to stop dreaming about him.” Semicasually. “But he keeps coming back.”

“I saw his body at the funeral,” I tell her. “He's gone. Even though I know that doesn't cancel out . . .”

The absence of a word hangs in the air. What am I allowed to call what happened?

She peeks out from under the blanket. “Just because someone's dead doesn't make them gone.”