Please Don't Tell - Laura Tims Page 0,4

responsibility?”

She shrugs.

Two funeral home employees clean up while Abe Gordon continues to sing about the quarry where the grandson he never met died. It used to be a love song, now it’s a dirge. Sweat laminates my shirt to my back. I want to take off my skin.

There’s whispers throughout the crowd. No one knows what’s happening now. But then Cassius approaches the mic, his black eye puffed purple. The overhead lights wash out the paler parts of him. From here, it’s like someone splattered him with paint.

“What’s he doing?” November mumbles.

“I was Adam’s best friend. . . .” he starts.

Cassius is the school artist. Adam was the school musician. The sweet-voiced daydreamer and the smirking asshole. I grip the minibottle in my pocket.

“And I’m here to tell you he was a fucking prick.”

An audible gasp sounds. A new kind of silence washes over the room. My throat seals shut.

I should have been the one brave enough to say it.

Cassius stares helplessly around the room. His eyes hit mine, and I fold into the bench. Then he drops the mic, tucks in his shoulders, and walks out fast, chased by glares and whispers.

“Someone’s gotta go after him.” November squeezes my shoulder, and then she’s gone. I guess funerals mean taking responsibility for the sadness of people you barely know.

Everyone waits for some family member to grab the wheel, but Mr. Gordon was all Adam had. So after another awkward moment, people start rising. Slowly, a queue forms. Final good-byes. I stand behind everybody else.

The line moves joltingly, like an execution, a pause for each person to leap off the cliff at the end. Tears. Murmurs. Propped between pews is a photo collage of Adam through the years: A toddler with the ghost of his face mashes a toy keyboard. An eight-year-old reaches through reindeer wrapping paper for the fretboard of a guitar. Was this kid-version of Adam always capable of what he did? If something changed, what and when? Did he notice?

I step up to the casket and see that each hard, crisp tendril of his hair is arranged specifically on the pillow, arms bent over his chest, mouth locked, hidden stitches disappearing into his temple. There’s no rush of memories from my missing night. If something had changed in me to make me capable of murder, I’d notice, right?

People look at bodies to understand how they’re just empty houses, and then they’re not scared anymore, right?

I hate him. I hate him so much I wish I’d killed him—

No! I dig my fingernails into my palms. I don’t want to be scary. Or to wish for that.

But I am. And I do.

The funeral home bathroom is all fake elegance—fake marble sinks, plastic craft-store flowers in a plastic vase, a plastic doily underneath. But there’s nothing realer than a toilet, or the things people write on the wall above one. Sharpie underneath the door hinge: I still have your sweater. This is grief, dirty and cold. It’s hiding in a bathroom and doing your shameful things where no one else can see. Mostly it’s the word carved in tiny letters above the coat hook: please.

Please don’t let me be a girl who looks at a dead person and wishes she’d killed him. Let me be what someone peering in would see, a girl crying, too tall maybe, hair too wild, but nobody’s nightmare.

Grace used to hide in the bathroom in kindergarten, as soon as Mom dropped us off. She’d come out only if I promised to hold her hand.

I take out my bottle, drop it. It clatters like the world’s ending, but doesn’t break. I swallow the contents. Breathe. It’s my head, I’m in control of it, and Adam’s dead, dead, dead.

Through the wall, there’s the dry rasp of someone throwing up in the men’s room. Then a thud, a ceramic clonk, and a softly whispered “fuck.”

I know what it is to swear hopelessly to yourself in a bathroom. So I gather myself and go next door.

I’ve never been in a men’s room. It’s the same as the girls’, minus the fake flowers, plus a urinal. A man’s legs stick out under the door to the only stall.

I step forward.

The stranger from earlier is looping Mr. Gordon’s arm over his shoulders. He’s shed his vest, his orange shirt flecked with puke. He braces himself against the tiles, face dimming with that kind of desperation people get when they have to lift something way too heavy for them.

“Can I help?” It comes