Please Don't Tell Part 10

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 m.u.f.fles herself with the blanket. "She's sick of having me around. I'm sick of having me around."

"n.o.body'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."

SEVEN.

October 12 IT TURNS OUT THAT WHEN YOU DON'T sleep at night, you sleep in cla.s.s. And it turns out that when your princ.i.p.al is under house arrest, there's n.o.body for your teachers to complain to. Even if you do it all week.

Time slides by without me getting involved. The men's choir puts on a memorial performance for Adam. Savannah doesn't come back. Ca.s.sius isn't in school, either. Grace acts like she never said anything. Levi pokes me awake in American History long enough to copy his quiz answers, but he doesn't ask again about the photos, and I don't explain. I spend the weekend half-conscious on Preston's bed while he brainstorms ways to safely ask Ca.s.sius if he's, you know, blackmailing me and also possibly a murderer.

When you don't sleep, things stop being real and you don't have to worry about them as much. Until Sunday night, when there's a new note taped to the outside of my nailed-shut window and I have to go out in the dark and climb the tree to get it.

To Joy Morris-

Good job.

I go back to my room and kick my bedside table so hard that the drawer splinters.

"Joy?" Grace's voice comes suddenly from the hallway. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Just stubbed my toe!" I holler back, crumpling the note.

I've got four minibottles left from Dad's sample package. I drink two, until my throat's numb, and my head is- f.u.c.k this.

I grab a piece of paper and a black Sharpie and scrawl: LEAVE ME ALONE. YOU DON'T HAVE ANY PROOF. I tear out the nails with Dad's hammer, grunting, yanking until I can open the window wide enough to trap the note beneath the frame. Then I pull up my chair, lay my kitchen knife on my lap-the big cleaver, Mom's been asking where it went-and wait.

Could Ca.s.sius really balance on that branch? He lives down the street and around the corner. I could go there right now, knock on his door, bring my knife, make him tell me the truth.

When you don't sleep, you think about these things.

Mom calls me for dinner and I claim a stomachache. Grace is in her bedroom, Dad in the exercise room, Mom in her office. We spend the night in our individual holes. Pres hasn't been sleeping well, either, so I don't text him about the new note.

I wonder how Savannah's been sleeping.

I tilt back in my chair, and Levi's sweatshirt slides to the ground. I forgot it was there. I almost forgot about him. Why hasn't he gone back to Indiana yet?

To distract myself, I open Facebook, search his name. His profile's public. He already has more friends from Stanwick than I do. His smile's so bright in his picture. It isn't fair for one person to have so much sunlight.

My window's still dark and empty.

I google his full name and the Indiana town listed on his profile. Apparently he was on the tennis team in eighth grade. He volunteered at an animal shelter. I skim the second page of results, the third. The first link on this page is a blog, captioned: dear adam. Shivering, I click it.

so you're gone now. i guess that means you'll never read any of these.

when i got the call, i remembered this blog right away. it's been three years since I posted. i don't know what i thought it would accomplish. i'm the only one who knows about it.

I shouldn't be doing this. It's a personal blog. He probably didn't think anyone would find it.

I open the archives, clicking the very first post, from years ago. Middle school?

this is for my creative writing cla.s.s! we're supposed to write a bunch of letters to somebody we look up to. mr hendrick probably meant famous people, but i decided to write to my half brother. he's going to be a famous musician someday, so maybe that counts. also, he's impossible to get in touch with, so he's like a famous person that way, too.

The posts continue, around one every month. He kept it up way after he pa.s.sed in the creative writing a.s.signment.

adam, do you remember that baseball cap you gave me for christmas when I was 9? this is dorky, but i still have it. it's too small for me now but I wear it anyway.

it's kind of nice having you for a half brother. you don't talk to me, so I get to make you up.

The baseball cap in his sweatshirt pocket is still in my closet. If Adam had ever read these when he was alive, he would have laughed. Levi deserves to be related to someone better.

But Grace does, too.

i had this stupid daydream the other day about what would happen if you replied to my emails and we actually talked. i think it would be nice.

I feel so weird reading this. Stop. I'm gonna stop.

There's so many of them, rambling, raw. All this yearning for someone who never really existed. Adam'll live on in his head as some wonderful person, a missed relationship. It's the kind of thing people regret on their deathbeds.

I want Levi to know. I grit my teeth and dig my nails into my wrist.

But of course he can't.

I read until the words blur, until everything inside and outside the house is quiet and the sky outside my window starts getting a little bit lighter.

The next morning, I wake up slumped in my chair, laptop battery dead, my mouth dusty, someone knocking on my door.

"Joy, I need you to come downstairs right now."

Mom's voice is razor thin. Am I late for school? I check my clock. I don't have to leave for another half hour. I hide the knife under a corner of my carpet and close my laptop. In the daylight, it feels a lot slimier that I read Levi's blog.

Mom's footsteps retreat. My note's still on the windowsill. The blackmailer didn't come back. Maybe his last note was the end and I'll never have to know who he is.

Downstairs, Officer Roseby is in our living room.

"Sorry for coming so early. Was hoping to catch Joy before school started," he says, clearly not sorry at all. A cop in uniform looks larger than life, like he should be in a video game, not in my house where my sister's sleeping. He's pale in the morning light, his blond hair sc.r.a.ped back over his scalp. "I'm asking around about the night Adam Gordon pa.s.sed away."

I'm awake down to my toes.

"I thought that was an accident," Dad says. His socks are mismatched, and Mom's shirt is misb.u.t.toned.

"The department believes so. But his father asked if I'd talk to a few kids who were at the party. Sort of as a favor. Just to be sure. We ought to know how much of a factor drugs and alcohol were."

I'm shaking. If he was here because I'm a suspect, he'd say so, right? If he searches my room-the notes, the knife . . . What if Grace comes downstairs?

"Joy was grounded that night." Mom side-eyes me. "She didn't go to this party."

"It's not like your daughter doesn't have a history of rule breaking, ma'am."

I'm on his bad-kids list. If I called the cops on the blackmailer, he wouldn't believe anything I said. I think of him finding out what happened to Grace, asking skeptical questions in our living room.

"Did you speak to Adam at his birthday party?" he asks me.

"No," I say before I realize I just accidentally confirmed I was there.

Mom stares at me, silently filling the room with poison.

Roseby looks at our walls. Grace took down all the pictures of her, like she untags every photo of herself on Facebook. "What about your sister? Was she there?"

"No, and she's asleep. She doesn't want to talk to you."

"Watch yourself, young lady. Especially after I was kind enough to let you go with a warning this past July."

I'm boiling over.

"I have my own teenage daughter. You have to watch them round the clock," he says to Dad, then turns back to me. "Were you involved in any drugs at this party?"

"Since this is just a 'favor' for Mr. Gordon, Joy doesn't really have to keep answering your questions. And I'm afraid we're late for work." Mom's a dragon. I want to hold on to her. The urge is so strong I'm amazed to discover how much of me is still a kid.

"Of course," he says ironically. "Thank you for your time."

The minute he leaves, Mom breathes fire.

"Really, Joy? I can't believe you snuck out again after we picked you up from the police station this summer."

My eyes sting. I mash my toe into the carpet.

"Especially to go to a party near that quarry," Dad agrees. "What happened to the Gordon boy could've happened to you."

"You're grounded on weekends for the next three weeks." Mom grits her teeth. "I thought you were trying."

"I am trying." Don't cry.

"If you were, you wouldn't be failing American History," she says like she's explaining basic math. "You wouldn't have detention every other week and police wouldn't be in our house."

Go through my room, then. Find the notes. Tell me what to do.

"Do you ever consider the possibility that stuff is going on in my life that makes it hard to focus on school?" I say.

"It's just homework, Joy." Dad sighs. "It shouldn't be that hard."

I can't explain how homework zaps me with a panic that gets bigger and bigger until it feels like I have to either put it away or stab myself.

"If anything's going on, you can tell us. You know that," says Mom.

"You're just as smart as Grace," Dad says quietly. "You ought to be able to do as well as her."

I hate how furious I am. "I'm not as smart as Grace. We're not good at the same s.h.i.t, so quit holding us to the same standard."

"Language," Dad snaps. "Go to your room until it's time for school."

"Do you realize what a ridiculous punishment that is?" I'm barreling down the tracks. "I spend all my time in my room. What is the point of sending me there?"

"Just . . . go get dressed," says Mom. "Perhaps tonight we can have a mature conversation about this."

I storm upstairs, slam my door. Grace is probably awake and hiding. She hides from fights and that's why I have to be the fighter.

I open the window, s.n.a.t.c.h my untouched note back from the mangled sill. I'll burn all the notes tonight. Outside, the tree branch bobs infuriatingly in the morning sun. I unfold it, and my heart slices in half. Beneath what I wrote, you don't have proof, there's something printed in blocky, unrecognizable handwriting.