Please Don't Tell - Laura Tims Page 0,8

we work in here because I kept spilling the beads. I papered the walls with every birthday card, every stupid drawing. It’s a shrine to the way we used to be.

It was so much better, the way we used to be.

Now there’s also Pop-Tarts wrappers, empty Gatorade bottles, crumbs in the bed. Sometimes I can feel Grace’s younger self in here, being disappointed in me.

I bend to pick up a crumpled paper plate, but my phone buzzes with Preston’s name.

How was the funeral?

mr gordon puked, cassius called adam a prick, I was accidentally nice to adams half brother

Adam has a half brother?

gonna ask u a thing on a topic that is not that. r u like sad? abt adam dying?

I didn’t like him even before you told me what he did.

I thought maybe u should always be sad when someone dies no matter what

Im not sad and Im scared that makes me a bad person but Im always kinda worryin about bein a bad person. idk

I hated him so much I didnt understand how he could not feel it, and it feels kinda like I killed him by hating him that hard even tho u say I left the party before he died. sometimes I feel like I have so much hate inside me and I have to spend all my energy tryin to keep it from gettin out but idk if Im strong enough to do it forever

I’m still typing, losing track of what I’m saying, my hands shaking, when my phone buzzes hard and loud. He’s calling me.

“It was an accident, Joy,” Preston says as soon as I pick up. “People always said how someone was going to fall in.”

I roll across my bed, pull Grace’s old stuffed tiger toward me. I rescued it from the trash after one of her yearly room purges. There’s nothing worse than being something someone used to need. “You’re right.”

“Say it again, slower.”

I need to be better at convincing people I’m okay.

“It’s just a weird coincidence. But for every person who dies, I guess there’s someone who wanted them gone and can’t believe their luck.” One of the tiger’s legs is half-severed. “I just have to pretend to be sad about him at school for a couple days.”

“How’s Grace taking it?”

Maybe I can sew the tiger’s leg. I rotate it and it comes off in my hand.

“It makes me anxious when you don’t answer,” he blurts. “I start thinking I said something annoying and that I should stop talking and that maybe you don’t like me anymore, and I know it’s ridiculous but I can’t help it.”

People are always turning silence into a knife to stab themselves with. “I would never stop liking you, I promise.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Relief, embarrassment.

“I should probably go. I have a thousand years of homework. I’m still failing American History because I hate America and I hate history.” Make another joke, show him I’m fine. “Also tomorrow’s trash pickup day so I gotta go put myself out on the curb.”

“Please don’t say things like that.”

Wrong joke. “Just kidding.”

“You’re the only person at school I feel comfortable around, and you’re a very important friend to me, and I don’t think you should call yourself trash.”

“You always cheer me up every single time you talk to me, did you know that?”

I can feel him smiling.

“Don’t stay up too late tonight, okay?” I tell him before I hang up.

I stare at my history book on the floor. Principal Eastman’s brought me in twice to talk about American History. But I can’t start the homework. It’s not just a sheet of paper, it’s the horrible black hole of my future.

I toss the broken tiger into my closet, go out into the hall, knock three times on Grace’s door.

She doesn’t open it all the way. “What’s up, Joy?”

It’s the way teachers talk to you when you go to them after class and they know you’re gonna ask for an extension. That kind of weary readiness.

“I went to his funeral.” Mom and Dad are watching football downstairs. The noise blares up to us. She still doesn’t let me in.

“How was it?”

“It was okay.”

“Uh-huh.”

Let me in, let me in, let me in.

She tilts the door closed a little more. “I’m doing some school stuff. . . .”

“Yeah.”

“So I kind of need to concentrate.”

“Oh! I’ll leave you alone.”

She hesitates. “You okay?”

“I’m always okay.” Now I need to ask it back. But what if she finally admits that she’s not, and I still have no clue what