Please Don't Tell - Laura Tims Page 0,89

is a joke.” He won’t breathe normally. “Tell me—that video’s not real. Lie about it—I don’t care.”

“You need to breathe slower.”

“Lie,” he pleads. “I don’t need—to know the truth—about anyone—anymore.”

“I’ll never stop being sorry,” I whisper.

He curls up on Adam’s grave.

Let him get angry. Let him call the cops. Anything other than this.

“Go away,” he gasps. “Please.”

“I can’t leave you here—”

“All this time, you . . .” His teeth chatter. “I even—oh, God—how did you keep that inside? Every time we talked—and you never showed it . . .”

And then he’s crying for real, yell crying, the kind where you’re just making a lot of noise and breathing hard. He folds in on himself to try to get away from the person doing this to him.

Me.

“Look at me, finally crying at his grave.” Hysterical laughter bubbles up between his sobs.

Sorry is my least favorite word. It’s so insulting.

“Please just go.” He leans against the headstone. “Please just go.”

So I do.

Mom asks how the date went, what happened to my elbow, is everything okay. I ask if my sister’s coming downstairs for dinner.

“She went out a while ago,” Dad says from the kitchen. “She said she was going to work at the library.”

The library closed two hours ago.

“Why do you let her skip dinner every night?” I ask.

“Grace is independent,” Mom says. “You know her.”

“Grace needs to see a therapist.”

In the kitchen, something falls and breaks. Dad sticks his head in. “What?”

“What?” Mom echoes.

“Why don’t you notice anything?” I feel very far away. “All you have to do is look.”

“What are you talking about?” Dad asks, bewildered.

“She never comes out of her room. She works out too much. She doesn’t eat right. She needs to talk to someone. Maybe go on medication.”

“Medication?” Dad frowns.

“It’s normal to withdraw a little when you’re her age,” Mom says soothingly. “Everyone goes through it. I did, too.”

“She’s not you.” My chest pulses. “Everyone does not go through what she’s going through.”

“Why don’t you talk to her? I’m sure she’d tell you more than she’d tell her nosy parents,” says Dad.

I see it now. They’ve always made us each other’s responsibility so we wouldn’t have to be theirs.

They want her to be fine so badly. Bad enough to look the other way.

“I’m going to find her,” I tell them.

“You say that like she’s missing,” Mom says, annoyed.

“I’m just going to look,” I tell her.

From now on, I’m always going to look.

She doesn’t answer her phone. But I know where she is.

The sun starts setting when I’m halfway to the quarry. The sky is the dusk blue of late evening, just a hint of orange left. I’m cold, I think, but I don’t really notice. I walk fast. I don’t know how long I have before Levi tells the police and they come for me.

The houses on our street glow with pumpkin lanterns and laughter, trick-or-treaters darting from house to house. I remember having to hold my sister’s hand, take her candy for her. She never trusted strangers.

The trick-or-treaters thin out when I hit Adam’s road. His house is the only one at the end of this street, up the hill. The trees are different at night. Evil shapes. When we came here together, that night, she held my hand, even though it was the night she decided to be brave.

I push through the woods.

Now that I’ve seen the video, I remember bits and pieces of the birthday party. My own nausea. Fury, thicker. Stumbling over branches. Him behind me. Telling myself, over and over again, not to run.

They haven’t started fencing off the quarry yet. It’s still exposed, a raw scar, the rim of the world with the moon shining into it.

And my sister is standing at the edge.

She’s not wearing a sweatshirt. Her T-shirt’s thin against her back. She’s looking at the sky.

People are wrong about twins. I’ve never had any private window into her head. But everyone wanted me to. They loved the idea of it. After a while, I convinced myself I did.

“Grace,” I say, my voice rasping in the silence.

She jumps a little, turning around. The tears on her face are silver in the moonlight. “You found me.”

“I looked,” I say.

“Are you mad at me?” she whispers.

“No.”

“You’re lying.” Her voice cracks. “How could you not be mad at me?”

She’s not wearing shoes, either. Her sneakers are several feet away. She’s hugging herself and she looks so fragile and she’s standing really, really close to the edge. Closer than I thought. Closer than