Please Don't Tell - Laura Tims Page 0,73

. You handled all this fine from the beginning. I thought you just wouldn’t tell me, but you’ve always been fine. You don’t need me.”

She gives me this hopeless look and it kills me. She’s wrong. I need her tonight. But I can’t tell her—it sounds manipulative. I’m hoping you’ll snap and beat the shit out of him. Maybe even kill him. I want to watch.

It is manipulative. I’m manipulating her.

“I’m scaring myself,” she cries. “I’ve only been able to avoid him at school because I keep thinking, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what’s coming. That I’m going to hurt him, that I’m going to . . .”

She gasps and covers her face with one arm.

“I think if I talk to him face-to-face I’ll kill him,” she says into her sleeve. “I think I’ll really try to. I can feel it, this tingling when he’s around, like this pressure gauge inside me going up, and if it gets full . . . I don’t want to know what happens if it gets full. I don’t want to know what I’m capable of.”

There’s something battering on my shields. Guilt.

You wanted to point her at him like a weapon and set her off. You didn’t think about what it would do to her.

But there’s so much else behind that guilt. So many awful things churning in the dark. If I turn on the light, if I let it in . . .

“I don’t like myself anymore, Grace,” she says in a wispy voice. “I always thought everything I did was for you. And that’s a good way to like yourself, to think you’re doing everything for someone else. But you don’t need me to do anything to him. You’re setting up this plan, going to all this trouble, because you care about me. Because you think I need it.”

Don’t feel it. If I feel the guilt, I’m lost.

“You’re looking out for me.” She lets go of her hair. “You always do . . . I want to hurt him to make myself feel better, that’s all. I think that’s what I wanted all along. I never thought our plan would work. I just wanted a chance, a reason to blow up at him. For my own sake. I couldn’t let you be okay.”

I’m going to break. If I tell her the truth, if I tell her not to go to the party and beg her to know that she’s not selfish, that she’s beautiful and good . . .

She thinks I’m a better person than I am. A perfect person. I can’t destroy her version of me. That girl deserves to live. Joy deserves that sister. And maybe somewhere there’s a version of the universe where that sister does the right thing. I wish her well. I hope she’s happy.

“You’re right,” I say out loud. “All of this was for you. I don’t need it.”

She nods. Her eyes are red. I battle a wave of sickness.

“You need this,” I say. “I want you to be okay, Joy. That’s why we’re still going to go to the party. You have to get this out of your system before it messes you up.”

She wraps her arms around herself. “I’m already messed up.”

“You won’t be if you get this chance.” I have to step carefully. Weigh everything I say. “If you talk to him . . . You need to see that he’s just a pathetic person. That he doesn’t matter. Then you can get on with your life.”

“What if I attack him? What if I really kill him?”

“So what?” I mutter.

She stares at me.

I backtrack. “You won’t. I know you. Everybody has those thoughts. It’s natural. People say it: I’ll kill him. But nobody actually does it. Not normal people, and you’re a normal person, Joy.”

“I don’t feel normal.”

“That’s okay,” I insist. “I know you and I know that you are. We’ll go ahead with our plan. We’ll confront him, get out your anger, and then we’ll leave. You’ll feel better. You won’t hurt him.”

She will.

“I think I would hate myself forever if I did.” She shivers. “Knowing how selfish it was.”

Nobody realizes how much emotions cloud you until they’re gone. Being empty makes you clear-eyed. You can see other people for what they are. Their emotions, how they’re like arrows, pinging them down a little path that they aren’t even aware of. If you can see someone’s path, you can alter it. Cheat the maze, set up new corners, a new path,