Please Don't Tell - Laura Tims Page 0,59
me.” She softens. “You should always come to me. There’s no way you killed him. Just because you said you wished he was dead. People say things they don’t mean. Okay?”
She smiles at me anxiously.
I breathe.
“You wouldn’t do that,” she repeats. “You’re not capable of that. I don’t care if you don’t know. I know. I know you better than anybody. I know you better than you do.”
The last piece of doubt lodged in my heart starts to dissolve. Maybe Levi’s right, and Grace’s version of Joy isn’t a complete imposter. Maybe I could be her again. It’d be so much easier than finding out who my own version of myself is, and not liking her.
“I can’t stand that you’ve been dealing with all this on your own.” She peers at me, eyebrows knotted. “Are you okay?”
“I told Preston.”
“You told Preston and not me?”
“Like I said, I was scared you’d be mad—”
“I’m never going to get mad at you, okay? You could stab me and I wouldn’t get mad at you. You’re my twin.” She sits back down. “Does Preston have any ideas about who the blackmailer might be?”
There’s a jealous tilt to the way she says Preston.
“He doesn’t think Adam’s death was an accident. He thinks the blackmailer is the real murderer. And he thinks it must be someone at our school, somebody who was at the birthday party and someone who knows what—”
I stop.
“What he did,” she finishes for me, eyes fixed on the carpet.
“Nobody knows about that, though.” It’s amazing, all the ways you can talk about something without naming it.
Then she says something weird.
“How much would you say you know about November?”
I blink. “A lot.”
“But how much do you know about her past?”
I don’t understand where this is going, but this is the most Grace has talked to me in ages. I run through a checklist of all the things I know about Nov. “Her mom died before she and her dad moved here from the city.”
“But what about after that? Do you know why she was out of school her sophomore year?”
“That was before I met her.” When she was Annabella.
Grace taps the side of her knee in a steady rhythm. “Did she go to Adam’s birthday party?”
“Well . . . yeah. But she didn’t stay.”
“She’s always hated Principal Eastman,” she murmurs. “And her dad.”
“Grace.” I hold up my hands. “Stop. I get that you’re trying to help. But Nov isn’t blackmailing me.”
A long silence.
“You idealize people, did you know that?” she says.
I don’t say anything.
“You put them on these pedestals, so high up you can’t see any of their flaws. But I can see them. November’s always given me a weird vibe.”
A snake rears its head in me and says you’re jealous. But I cut off its head before it slithers out of my mouth.
“The way November acts around you, that’s not who she really is,” she says. “She puts on this act around you—”
“Besides the other one billion reasons you’re wrong, Nov would never murder someone.”
“Do you really know what she’s capable of?” Her eyes are faraway. I always forget how analytical she is. “What the blackmailer is doing, it’s just like November. She likes to shame people. Put up signs, call people out, make a scene. Remember how she put up all those posters about Principal Eastman’s dress code being sexist?”
“That’s different,” I say desperately. “How would she have even found those photos of Eastman?”
“She’s the head of the school newspaper. She’s always digging around, looking for things to publish. Maybe she searched his desk. I don’t know.”
It does sound like something she would do. I shake my head, feeling sick. “The video of her dad, though. There’s no way.”
“You know how much she hates her dad. You really don’t think this is something she’d do to get revenge on him?” she says. “Like, how would anyone besides her even get ahold of that video?”
Today she told me she was grateful to the person who showed the video.
What if that was her way of thanking me?
All it takes is you seeing their cracks.
Before I got the first note I’d told her I couldn’t remember anything from Adam’s birthday party—
What the fuck am I thinking?
“November’s not the blackmailer,” I say, hard. “If she wanted help exposing the principal and her dad, she would have asked me, not threatened me.”
“Maybe you were the only person she trusted to help her, but she didn’t want you to know that it was her doing it.” Grace