Please Don't Tell - Laura Tims Page 0,7
Is he doing it because he wants to get away from me, or because he knows I want to get away from him? “I don’t know how long I’ll be staying, though, so I’m enrolled at school here. Starting tomorrow.”
How does he not know how long he’ll be staying?
“You just moved here?” Dad’s shirt says Just Do It! in awful red letters.
“I flew here from Indiana for the funeral, and I’ll be staying with my . . . dad.” He picks at his battered baseball cap. It’s a little too small. “Adam was my half brother.”
“Oh.” Mom fills the car with pity like steam.
Dad fires off an instant “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Don’t be. It’s no big deal.” He rotates the hoop in his earlobe. “I mean, it’s a big deal, just for everyone else, since I never knew Adam. I mean, it’s still a big deal to me, but other people . . . never mind.”
He mutters something that sounds like idiot.
“Stay away from that quarry,” says Mom suddenly. “It’s dangerous how kids hang out there, just because of the song. Your father and I and some other parents are starting a petition to have the town fence it off.”
Yeah. Seal it away.
We arrive at the house. It slants on the hill, like a claw that popped out of the earth, glass and wood. The lawn’s blisteringly green. The night Grace and I came here together, the first night, the night, I tore off my shoes after the long walk and buried my toes in the grass. She kept hers on. Told me to hurry up, please, she didn’t want to make him wait.
The night of his birthday party, I kept my shoes on. That’s all I remember.
Levi gets out, thanks us for the ride, traipses up the steps. It takes him a while to open the door, like he’s not used to the lock. It’s hard to leave anyone here to this dark slash of a house, the quarry lurking past the trees.
But he’s enemy territory.
Mom and Dad fidget on the way back. They’re like twins, too, blond and tall, doing everything in tandem, always putting on ChapStick. I have no idea who they are.
“I know you’ll run upstairs to your computer the minute we get home, so your father and I wanted to ask you something.” Mom stops too hard at a red light. My head jerks. “Is something going on with Grace?”
They used to ask her about me. I’d hear them in the living room—Is something going on with Joy?
She’s fine, she’d say. Because she was on my side. Because my job was to protect her and bring her out of her shell and their job was to get in the way.
I shove my toe into the front of my sneaker. “What d’you mean?”
“It’s this independent project thing she’s doing with her teachers,” says Mom. “It’s an amazing opportunity, and of course we want to support her academically.”
“But we’re starting to wonder if it’s a good idea for her to be out of school for the whole semester,” Dad adds. “Even if the principal okayed it and the teachers are working with her from home. She’s in her room a lot these days.”
They’re worried about her grades.
“I hang out in my room a lot.”
“But you and Grace have different . . . approaches,” says Mom.
“Maybe she’s depressed or something,” I bite out.
“What would she be depressed about?” asks Dad, surprised.
“I don’t think she’s depressed,” says Mom, like someone would say I don’t think she’s a purple giraffe. “Moody, maybe. I was exactly the same at her age.”
“Does this have anything to do with that night this summer?” Dad wants to know.
I bend my toenail backward against the front of my sneaker until something cracks. But he’s not talking about the night, he’s talking about the night they picked us up at the police station. I forgot how many things went wrong over the summer.
“No. I’m sure she’s fine.”
Silence again. I stare out the window at the town, at the patches of trees, the small neat houses, the cracks in the sidewalk I’ve memorized.
They’re not going to question me. We’re twins. I know Grace better than anybody else. If something were wrong, I would know.
But I do know, and I promised to stay silent.
My bedroom’s built from fossils of me and Grace. Scattered plastic horses from our horse phase at age nine. Beads jammed between the floorboards from our jewelry-making phase at twelve, when she insisted