Please Don't Tell - Laura Tims Page 0,88

anymore. Muscle and flesh sprouts, crawling over bone until Adam is smirking at me.

“You and I are the same. We go for what we want,” he says.

The pellet pops his eye and splatters the shelf with gore.

But there’s another head beside him, turning. “You and your sister, you’re both repressed fucking freaks, you know that?”

This time I shoot him in the jaw. His teeth splinter and a long strip of his pink gums gleams through his shredded skin. There’s a wall full of sneering Adam heads now. I hit one in the skull. Chunks of brain slap to the ground. He won’t stop talking. He won’t go away.

“Joy. Joy!”

Levi drags me away as the man at the booth shouts after us. He pulls me into a run until I break away, panting. We’re outside the fair now, standing in the wide rest of the field.

He steadies me. “You wouldn’t stop shooting. Are you okay?”

“Did I win?” I murmur.

“I don’t know.” His face is ashen. Then he sniffs and his face changes. “Is . . . is that alcohol?”

This isn’t supposed to be what makes him hate me.

“Are you drunk?” he asks, stunned.

“No,” I say. “I’ve been drunk for real. This isn’t that.”

“You brought alcohol with you today?” He steps back. “You went to the bathroom to drink. You came back different.”

“You said . . . at the funeral.” The funeral for his half brother who I killed. “You said everyone has something they use . . . to cope.”

“That was before I lived with an alcoholic.”

I flinch.

“I’m sorry.” He closes his eyes briefly. “It’s okay—”

“Don’t ever apologize to me, Levi. Don’t ever.”

“You’re tired. You’re sick,” he recites. “Let’s leave.”

“I want to go somewhere first.”

“I’m taking you home—”

“I need to go somewhere with you.”

I finally know exactly where I’m supposed to tell him.

It’s a long, cold walk. But he doesn’t ask where we’re going, and he doesn’t turn back. He just squeezes my fingers so hard I lose circulation.

The graveyard is as sunny as the day he was buried. The ground’s wet from a brief rain last night, the dirt over his grave spongy. The headstone shines. The flowers are fresh.

Levi rubs the toe of his sneaker against the granite. “Why are we here?”

I killed your half brother.

Say it.

“You know what the stupid thing is?” he mumbles to himself, gazing at the grave. “I’m pissed at him for not living up to my expectations. And that’s ridiculous. People don’t ever live up to dreams. People are real and dreams aren’t.”

Something seizes in my body. I turn and throw up beside the grave, horribly, unexpectedly.

“Oh, God, Joy, you’re really sick.” He sweeps my hair back while I retch. “It’s okay,” he says over and over again. “I’ll take you home.”

I scrape words together, put them in a line. “It’s my turn to tell you something.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything.”

Acid in my mouth, I say, “I killed Adam.”

“What?” He blinks. “No you didn’t.”

“Yes I did. I killed him.”

He’s still for a minute. “This is a messed up joke,” he says at last, in the saddest voice in the world. “I really pissed you off with that stuff I said back there.”

“I was at Adam’s birthday party,” I say numbly. “I pushed him into the quarry. Because I hated him.”

Everything I did for the blackmailer was all to avoid saying this one simple truth.

He covers his eyes. “My mom says things, too . . . when she gets like this.”

“I did it.”

“I know you don’t mean this. I’m not going to be mad at you.”

“Levi.” I bend down and peel his hand away from his eyes. I hold it tightly. “I killed him. It was me.”

“Please stop talking.” He presses a palm to my forehead, feeling for a fever. I push his hand away, find my phone, find the video, skip to the moment that matters.

“I’m taking you home,” he says, but the video’s already playing.

You can see in someone’s face when they care about you. It makes their eyes softer, their mouth more gentle. You notice when it’s gone. Sometimes you can pinpoint the exact moment it disappears.

He starts breathing fast. Too fast. His chest rises and falls in a shallow rhythm. “It’s fake. That video’s fake. It’s blurry, it’s dark, you can’t see shit.”

“You can see my hair.”

He doesn’t respond. He’s trembling even though he’s wearing three layers, his lips bluish-white. He wavers and collapses, grabbing Adam’s headstone for support. “I—you—”

I reach for his wrist. His skin’s ice-cold.

“Please tell me—this