Please Don't Tell - Laura Tims Page 0,23
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