Please Don't Tell - Laura Tims Page 0,6

lower and the men work until there’s a mound of clean earth.

But there’s no magic text from Grace announcing she’s okay. Nothing teleports me back to the beginning of the summer. I’m still here. He’s still here.

He is going to follow me out.

“Joy?”

I turn. Levi’s still here, too. I realize we’re alone next to the grave. Everyone must’ve left.

He touches my wrist, and I yank back.

“Sorry,” he says immediately. “Um.”

I look away. Half the graves nearby have fresh flowers. Daisies. Grace’s favorite.

“You must’ve cared a lot about him.”

If dead people can make someone pay ten dollars for a bunch of flowers at the grocery store and drive here to drop them off, what else can they do?

“I hated him,” I say.

“Oh.” Sadness fits him worse than that vest.

“He—” The truth claws my throat. I choke on it. “Never mind. Fuck. I’m sorry. Shit. I don’t mean to swear so much.”

“It’s fucking fine.” He smiles a little bit. Even though the sun’s setting, the graveyard lightens.

But his smile disappears when he glances at the grave again. It’s clear he wishes Adam weren’t dead. Which means he and I are fundamentally incompatible human beings.

I start to say bye, but instead, suddenly, I’m gulping. I can’t control anything that comes out of my mouth, but I can control what comes out of my eyes. I’m not going to cry over Adam’s grave. I take a deep breath. And then tears leak out anyway.

“Whoa, hey. It’s okay.”

Strangers say that like they know what’s okay and what’s not.

“Death is hard.” He lifts his hands: I’m not going to hurt you. “Even if you didn’t like him. Sometimes that makes it harder.”

I don’t want him to take responsibility for my sadness. But he’s making me feel a little better. What doorway did he find into my head, and how can I find the same one into Grace’s?

“How’d you get here if you don’t drive?” I ask.

“Came with my, um. My dad.” A cold breeze speckles his bare arms with goose bumps. He tugs a baseball cap out of his pocket, puts it on. It’s bent, threads sprouting from the brim. It messes up his hair. “Looks like I’ll be hoofing it.”

I love that he says hoofing it.

“Lemme give you a ride.” I text Mom. “You deserve a favor, helping out Mr. Gordon like that.”

“Ah, yeah. I forgot it’s not that obvious. Perils of being mixed race. My mom’s Vietnamese. He’s the aforementioned dad I won’t be riding back with.”

Levi is—Adam’s brother?

“It doesn’t feel obvious to me, either. Trust me.”

I’ve been standing here talking to him like a friend.

“I haven’t seen him since I was nine.”

Nausea rolls over me.

“I swear our left pinkies are both crooked. Or they were when we were little. Meant to check if his still was.” He stares at the grave for the hundredth time. “I forgot to look.”

I betrayed Grace by smiling at him.

“Why’d you hate him?” he asks tentatively. “I had this idea of him in my head. I’m wondering how right I was.”

Breathe.

Before I realize it, I’m walking away, hurrying toward the graveyard gate, abandoning Levi. He catches up to me by the curb. He smells like cinnamon and summer wheat. No more breathing, not while he’s in a hundred-mile radius.

“Sorry if I said something wrong.”

I look at him. There’s no Adam in his angular ears, or in the earring I just noticed, a thin silver hoop. No Adam in his freckles, few but dark: three in a line from the edge of his left eye to his cheekbone, one underneath the right edge of his mouth, a faint one on the tip of his nose.

His Adam parts are hidden, which makes them more dangerous.

“I don’t mind walking home.” He backs away. “I’ll see you around. Nice to meet you, Joy.”

The Gordons’ house is a half-hour trek, and he might not be used to walking, if he’s not from Stanwick. The wind shoves his T-shirt against his shoulder blades. Some boys are so skinny it makes my chest hurt.

“Wait.” The word tastes like guilt. “My mom’ll be here any minute.”

In the car, Mom’s knuckles whiten more on the steering wheel with every hundred feet. She and Grace get those lines on their foreheads when they’re holding something in.

“How was it?” she asks warily.

“It was a funeral, Mom. It was sad.”

“Horrible accident, what happened.” Dad twists in the front seat to face Levi, who’s beside me in the back. “You a friend of Joy’s from school?”

“Nah.” Levi presses against the window.