Please Don't Tell - Laura Tims Page 0,35
it doesn’t make me feel better.
“You’re an incredible artist,” Levi tells Cassius, all friendly.
“Thank you . . .” Cassius takes one step away from me, then another.
“You were Adam’s best friend, right?”
There’s so much hunger in the way he says it. Tell him, Cassius, tell him what he didn’t hear you say at the funeral. But Cassius just collects his paintings and rushes away down the hall.
Levi wipes his mouth, streaking red across his cheek. “My social skills in action,” he says uneasily.
“He was your half brother. You have a right to . . .”
To know.
“I don’t have a right to anything.” He touches his cut lip. “The people here, the ones who knew him, they have a right.”
I find tissues in my bag, press them to his lip. He grimaces, his gaze fixing somewhere on my feet. He hasn’t mentioned my internet stalking yet. I’m aching to shake the truth about Adam into him.
“That picture you saw in my bag, I found it in the copier,” I lie on the way to the nurse’s office. “I thought it was Photoshopped.”
He nods, accepting it with an easy relief.
“Thanks for saving that dude from me. He was in imminent danger of some Levisceration.” His jokes are half nonsense. He walks faster than me. When I speed up, he does, too.
“That makes the second bully I’ve seen you knock down,” he adds. “Is there a belt you put notches on?”
“You’re sweating.”
“Sorry.”
He’s this nervous because I read his blog?
“Here’s the nurse’s office.” He stops. “You can tell because the door says Nurse’s Office. See you—”
“I want to talk to you about what I read,” I blurt.
“Is this about you hating him?” he asks.
The truth is not an option. I’m silent.
“Okay. Let me buy you something cheap and greasy after school, and we can talk. Or not greasy. Not greasy is fine, too. Or not cheap. Also fine.” He shuts up and mouths the word idiot underneath his tissues.
“There’s this place, the Ice Cream Palace, at the shopping center, but in the fall they serve pizza, too,” I say. His nervousness drowns out mine. “I have detention after school, but I can meet you there at four.”
“Four. Okay. Four.”
He disappears inside the nurse’s office.
The versions of people that live in everyone’s heads are powerful. Adam doesn’t deserve to be remembered like that. It pisses me off. And if I’m pissed off, if I’m thinking about Levi and his blog and his stupid baseball cap, it’s five seconds to not think about other things.
After detention, Levi’s late to the Ice Cream Palace. I wait for him on the bench outside. It’s cold. Behind the window, there’s light and laughter, a kid dropping his pepperoni on the floor, his brother tossing it out for him, replacing it with one of his own. When you have a sibling, you take care of them without thinking. As long as you can do that right, you’re worth something. You’re made for them.
I’m supposed to made be for Grace, and the blackmailer’s distracting me from her. I need to focus on her. I need to figure this out, end it, figure her out, sleep again, eat again. . . . Sometimes it feels like I’m not a person anymore, just a collection of different types of fear.
Pounding footsteps. Levi hurtles around the corner. His heel hooks on the curb and he crashes into the prickly leafless bush next to my bench. I leap up, but he stands by himself, blushing violently behind his freckles. With the split lip, he looks spectacularly beaten up.
“That bush is made of nails,” he says. “I’m suing this establishment for putting a hazardous nail bush by their door.”
He’s still making the panicky jokes. If it were last year, if I were the old me—I think I’d laugh. “Why were you running?”
“Because I was late,” he says, like it’s the silliest question ever.
We buy our sodas and slices, pepperoni for me and vegetarian for him. It’s a coincidence that he heads toward me and Grace’s booth. The one with the chip on the corner, the jagged hole in the upholstery that I picked at one year when I was ten. I steer him to the other side of the restaurant, as far away from our booth as possible.
We sit in silence. I have no idea how to do this.
He shreds a napkin. “How’d you find that stupid blog?”
“I googled you.” My face burns. “Kind of in depth.”
“Did you find my discography and my bestselling romance series