Please Don't Tell - Laura Tims Page 0,40
if you’re not sure who you want to be?” he says finally.
“Then think of a person you like.” I brush my thumb against the mole on my thigh. Joy has one in the exact same place. “And become like them.”
ELEVEN
October 19
Joy
YOU DON’T REALIZE HOW MANY HOURS there are in a week until you watch them pass on a baby monitor. I don’t know what I’m expecting. A figure watching me, maybe, some horror-movie jump scare. Somehow the motionless grainy footage of my own locked bedroom window is worse.
No more notes have come. But if the blackmailer was finished with me, why would he have sent that last response? Just to keep me afraid? What’s he waiting for?
Sometimes I wish he’d attack me in school, on my way home after school, anywhere. Then I’d have something to fight.
“If he wants to frame me for Adam’s murder, he should just do it,” I bite out into the phone with Preston one night.
“You’re still not going to the cops, right?” Preston says.
“I’m not going to the cops.”
“Good. Because if we go to the cops, and the blackmailer tells the cops you killed Adam, and they find out about the photos of Eastman, it looks really suspicious that you went ahead and did what the note said.”
Sometimes I just feel like laughing.
School returns to normality as the days pass. Nobody else dies, nobody else is arrested. Ben’s mom comes in with my mom and some other parents, hands out a petition for the town to pay for the quarry to be fenced off. Levi keeps helping me cheat in American History and my grade hits a C+. Cassius skips two days and when he comes back, everyone avoids him. He’s made himself so small it’s like he’s trying to avoid himself.
Saturday morning, I weigh myself on Grace’s scale and the new number alarms me. I’m forcing down half a piece of toast when a chain saw starts whirring outside. I jump up, run to the window. Dad’s in goggles and he’s all hooked up to the tree outside my room, cutting through the branch.
“Did you tell Dad it was rotten?” I ask Mom when she comes out of the bathroom.
“It wasn’t. We checked.” She knots her bathrobe around her waist, pours a cup of coffee. “But we have cottoned on to your escape route.”
As long as it’s gone. “Okay.”
“It’s dangerous. You could hurt yourself.”
“Right.”
“You need to eat more than that.” She gestures at my mostly full plate, then looks at me. “You lost weight. You’re starting to look sick.”
I ignore her and get through one piece of bacon before my phone buzzes. It’s probably Preston needing to analyze the notes more, talk about the blackmailer endlessly, cycle through it again and again so he doesn’t have to face the fact that maybe there’s nothing we can do about this, maybe it’s just something that’s happening to me. I push my plate back. The bacon wants out of my stomach, in there with the fear. The worst part about all this is finding out what I’m capable of getting used to.
But when I look at my phone, it’s not Preston. It’s Levi.
could you come to my house? really need help with something. sorry i didn’t know who else to ask.
The Gordon house. Adam Gordon’s house. The absolute last place I want to go.
“Who’s that?” asks Mom.
Nobody, nobody. I’m not going. But if Levi’s having a crisis . . .
“Could you give me a ride to the Gordon house?” I blurt. If I’m not home, the blackmailer can’t find me.
She frowns. “You’re grounded.”
“Levi—that guy we gave a ride home from the funeral, remember—he’s tutoring me in American History. There’s a test on Monday, he says we should review.”
Mom bundles me into the car so fast that I don’t have time to change my mind.
Halfway up the Gordons’ driveway, Mom says, “This better not be just an excuse to hang out with a boy you have a crush on.”
“If there’s one boy I can promise you I will never have a crush on, it’s him.”
“Good. That’s the right kind of boy to study with.” She stops the car, lets me out. “Stay away from the quarry.”
I walk up to the front door and just stand there, paralyzed. This house. This place. That dark wood, all those windows. Panels of shadowed glass on the door, a crack shaped like a vein running through one of them. It wasn’t there the first night we came. Grace and I went