Please Don't Tell - Laura Tims Page 0,72

We’ll go to his birthday party together—”

“No!”

She’s shouting. We both look toward the door, but Mom and Dad are downstairs.

“I’m sorry,” Joy whispers. Her cheekbones are sharper, the bags under her eyes deeper. “I don’t want you there. I don’t trust myself to protect you anymore.”

“I trust you,” I say.

I do trust her. I know she’ll be able to do what I want, even if I haven’t told her what that is. We’re twins. She has to know.

She rests her head in her hands. We’ve always drawn from the same energy source. When she’s strong, I’m weak. When I’m strong . . . “I don’t feel old enough for this,” she says quietly.

We’re old enough for boys to take us upstairs. We’re old enough for their fathers to look at us and say nice.

“It’ll work,” I say. It won’t work. He’ll laugh in our faces.

And that will make Joy mad.

“This’ll fix things for you?” she asks. “You won’t be mad at me anymore?”

I get up from my desk, sit down next to her, and hug her. It’s dangerous, hugging her with my skin so thin. It feels like she’s going to poke holes through me. Bleed me dry. I tense up. She tenses, too. Our barriers are too high to allow for whatever is supposed to pass between people during a hug.

I let her go. She looks like she’s about to cry. I don’t feel anything. And the best part about not feeling anything is not feeling guilt.

School starts. It feels like the first September in our whole lives that Mom doesn’t drop Joy and me off together. No—there was fifth grade, when Joy had the flu and missed the first two days of school. In the halls without her, I felt defenseless. I wonder if she feels the same way now.

I make her promise not to do anything to him. I want to be there when she snaps. I picture it: she’ll break his nose, knock him down, kick him in the face. And I’ll see that the person haunting me is nothing more than one more bully for my sister to protect me from.

And then I’ll be fine. I’ll go back to school, I’ll get back on track, I’ll go to college, and everything will go back to the way it was before this summer. I’ll be worth something again.

A month slides by. Joy gets thinner. I get thinner and fatter and thinner and fatter again. My weight is the only way I keep track of time now.

The day of his birthday, he has thirty-seven well-wishers on his Facebook wall by the time I wake up. I spend hours getting ready. I put on makeup so thick it cracks. Makeup is important. If you do it the same way every day, people will start thinking it’s how you look. But you can never slip up or they’ll realize the truth.

Joy is late coming home. Mom and Dad are at work. I’m alone on my bed, watching the sky change from blue to gray. The shadows in my room lengthen. Where is she?

Finally the door downstairs opens. I hear her drop her bag, clatter up the stairs. She looks terrible when she comes in. Like a drowning person.

“Sorry,” she says. “I was at Preston’s.”

When is she going to learn that she doesn’t need anyone besides me?

“It’s fine,” I tell her. “Go get your outfit together.”

But she doesn’t move from my doorway.

She looked the exact same way on our thirteenth birthday. We’d been planning to get ice cream and go to the movies with Mom and Dad, like we did every year. But she got invited to some water park. She wanted to go, she’d said. She just really really wanted to go.

But she came with me, in the end. In the end, she always does what’s right for me.

“I can’t do this,” she chokes. “I can’t confront him, I can’t blackmail him with evidence we don’t even have. I’m afraid, Grace.”

I force calm into my voice. “He won’t do anything. Not at his birthday party. There will be people around.”

“I’m not afraid of him.”

Of course she’s not. She’s stronger than him. She would have fought him off.

“I’ll be okay,” I say. “I keep telling you, I feel fine. This is mostly for you. You’re the one who kept saying you needed to do something.”

“I know.” She wraps a hank of hair around her fist hard.“You’re . . . you’re strong, Grace. I always thought I was the . .