Please Don't Tell Part 13

"Are you okay?" she asks.

November's smart. She could help me.

"Joy?"

The bell shrieks and the cla.s.srooms hemorrhage people. The moment's pa.s.sed. I gotta stay the girl that she knows, carefree, no darkness. What would the old Joy do?

"I'm always okay."

It's quiz day in American History, the scary hush of test taking, pencils on paper. I don't know a single answer.

"Here," Levi whispers and slides his test to the side, double-checking that Cat Olsen's back blocks Mr. Fennis's view. I copy his answers quickly. I'm not sure why he's still helping me-he thinks I put those photos in everyone's lockers.

Adam had failed American History his junior year and they were making him retake it. He sat in the back and burned up the room and that's why I was failing. There are flowers on top of his old desk, like a shrine. A few of his friends sit around it. Levi stares at it when he thinks n.o.body's looking. The longing in his eyes hurts me.

I need to give Levi his sweats.h.i.+rt and baseball cap, need an excuse for why those photos were in my backpack, need a way to tell him Adam was bad without explaining why.

Mr. Fennis collects the tests, shuffling them like n.o.body's died or been arrested recently. Except for the desk and the memorial in the relaxation garden-a photo of Adam, flowers-his death is disappearing. Everyone's sucking their sadness back inside so they can do their homework.

I have other things to do. I set up a baby monitor by my window, the one that Mom and Dad had when Grace and I were babies. Next time the blackmailer comes, he can smile for the f.u.c.king camera.

After the quiz, Mr. Fennis starts lecturing. He calls on me. I shrug, he moves on. Cat murmurs something exasperated to Levi. He glances up, catches me looking. s.h.i.+t.

He tears off an edge of notebook paper, writes something, tosses it onto my desk. I expect him to ask for his stuff back, but instead it says: i'd still really like to talk to you about what i saw in your bag.

also i hope you're doing okay.

I gotta explain or he'll tell somebody. I write: ok. we can talk after school.

I grip my pencil hard. I'm sick of being alone with the truth.

and I found your blog, with your letters to adam, maybe we should talk about that, too.

This is so stupid. Adam's dead, there's no point, I have the blackmailer to deal with.

I skim it across his desk anyway. He unfolds it and all at once, his sunlight vanishes. He shoves it in his bag without writing anything back, and doesn't look at me again.

The bell rings. As everyone pushes back their chairs, I reach for his arm, but he bursts out into the hallway fast.

He's freaked out that I internet stalked him. Of course he is. Why did I write that?

In the hall, there's only five minutes to get from one cla.s.s to the next-go to your locker, switch out your books, go to the bathroom, get a drink, sprint to the other side of school to sit down before the bell rings again-and there's no spare second to find Levi's spiky-haired head. But Pres's orange curls bob up. I weave toward him, grab his shoulder.

"It's not Ca.s.sius," I whisper quickly. "Nov vouched for him."

"I-".

"I'm not scared of him. I don't feel it."

"Let's-"

"If we keep focusing on him, we'll never figure out who it is for real-"

"Okay!" he bellows. Two freshman girls snort. He drops his voice again. "Okay. We can think of others. I made a list of everyone I saw at the party. We'll start there."

"I think the blackmailer might've sent Roseby to my house," I say quietly. "He showed up there yesterday, and then there was this new note-"

"I thought you said you put up the baby monitor!"

"I put it up right after."

"Oh, G.o.d." He nearly walks into a locker. "Why didn't you tell me earlier?"

Before I can think of an excuse, noise interrupts us. There's a crowd by the plastic art display case. Something crashes and someone yells, "Get off!" I shoulder to the front, Pres behind me, just in time to see a flushed, heaving Ben bang his fist off Levi's mouth. His lip bursts in a crimson spray.

"Don't," Pres hisses, but I leap forward anyway and wrench Ben off.

"None of you give a s.h.i.+t that Adam's murderer goes to our school!" Ben jerks away and opens the art display case, tearing out Ca.s.sius's paintings, one after another. He rounds on Levi.

"You-you're supposed to be his half brother. You're p.i.s.sed at me for not wanting his murderer's art on the walls? What the h.e.l.l?"

Levi stops gathering the paintings.

"Break it up!" It's our regular security guard, with Officer Roseby. Sometimes Roseby hangs out by the water fountain when there's been a drug scare or a threat, side-eyeing people who take too long in the bathroom. Most everyone scatters, including Pres. Ben scowls, wincing when it hurts his swollen eye. Levi must have gotten in at least one punch before I showed up.

"You two couldn't think of a better way to behave, with all that's going on?" growls Roseby.

"That pathetic loser started it," Ben growls back.

"A pathetic loser who can kick your a.s.s," Levi points out politely, cupping his hand under his chin to catch the blood.

"Look in a mirror, a.s.shole."

"Joy," Roseby grunts. I tense, but he's barely looking at me. He gestures at Levi. "Take this boy to the nurse's office. And you, Stockholm, you look s.h.i.+pshape enough to get to cla.s.s. In light of the recent tragedy, I'm going to let this slide."

More like in light of the fact that we don't have a princ.i.p.al anymore. And our vice princ.i.p.al has no clue what to do. The security guard nods helplessly. Ben glares, but flees. Levi still doesn't look at me.

Someone stumbles into me. It's Ca.s.sius. He stares at the torn paintings, despair fogging his face, before kneeling and gently gathering the undamaged ones. He clutches them to his chest.

No, he didn't murder anybody.

"And how are you involved here, Mr. Somerset?" Roseby's voice gets sharper.

"He wasn't," says Levi. "Someone was vandalizing his work."

Roseby ignores him. "Seems like you're at the center of everything that goes wrong at this school lately."

It's like Ca.s.sius thinks that if he stays hunched, predators won't see him. When was the last time I heard him speak?

"Because it makes total sense that he'd throw his own paintings on the floor," Levi says, frowning.

"What are you doing here, Dad?" Nov's finally found us. Her voice is glacial as she steps between her father and Ca.s.sius.

"Stay out of this, Annabella."

I always forget November's not her real name.

"Sorry, Jacob, I don't really want to," she says. "A police officer's job is to protect people, yeah? That's who needs it, right in front of you. He's being hara.s.sed. Yet you still see him as the criminal. I wonder why that is?"

"You're making a scene."

"Sometimes scenes need to get made."

"Go get in the car, young lady," he grits out, pointing down the hallway toward the doors. "You're coming home early."

"You can't talk to me like some little kid who doesn't know anything." She snaps a new rubber band on her wrist, her hand shaking. "I know lots of things." She pauses, then mumbles, "Like the real reason we moved here from the city."

Officer Roseby's face gets ugly. "We will have this discussion at home." He grabs her arm, hauls her away. She rolls her eyes over her shoulder at me, but it doesn't make me feel better.

"You're an incredible artist," Levi tells Ca.s.sius, all friendly.

"Thank you . . ." Ca.s.sius takes one step away from me, then another.

"You were Adam's best friend, right?"

There's so much hunger in the way he says it. Tell him, Ca.s.sius, tell him what he didn't hear you say at the funeral. But Ca.s.sius just collects his paintings and rushes away down the hall.

Levi wipes his mouth, streaking red across his cheek. "My social skills in action," he says uneasily.

"He was your half brother. You have a right to . . ."

To know.

"I don't have a right to anything." He touches his cut lip. "The people here, the ones who knew him, they have a right."

I find tissues in my bag, press them to his lip. He grimaces, his gaze fixing somewhere on my feet. He hasn't mentioned my internet stalking yet. I'm aching to shake the truth about Adam into him.

"That picture you saw in my bag, I found it in the copier," I lie on the way to the nurse's office. "I thought it was Photoshopped."

He nods, accepting it with an easy relief.

"Thanks for saving that dude from me. He was in imminent danger of some Levisceration." His jokes are half nonsense. He walks faster than me. When I speed up, he does, too.

"That makes the second bully I've seen you knock down," he adds. "Is there a belt you put notches on?"

"You're sweating."

"Sorry."

He's this nervous because I read his blog?

"Here's the nurse's office." He stops. "You can tell because the door says Nurse's Office. See you-"

"I want to talk to you about what I read," I blurt.

"Is this about you hating him?" he asks.

The truth is not an option. I'm silent.

"Okay. Let me buy you something cheap and greasy after school, and we can talk. Or not greasy. Not greasy is fine, too. Or not cheap. Also fine." He shuts up and mouths the word idiot underneath his tissues.

"There's this place, the Ice Cream Palace, at the shopping center, but in the fall they serve pizza, too," I say. His nervousness drowns out mine. "I have detention after school, but I can meet you there at four."

"Four. Okay. Four."

He disappears inside the nurse's office.

The versions of people that live in everyone's heads are powerful. Adam doesn't deserve to be remembered like that. It p.i.s.ses me off. And if I'm p.i.s.sed off, if I'm thinking about Levi and his blog and his stupid baseball cap, it's five seconds to not think about other things.

After detention, Levi's late to the Ice Cream Palace. I wait for him on the bench outside. It's cold. Behind the window, there's light and laughter, a kid dropping his pepperoni on the floor, his brother tossing it out for him, replacing it with one of his own. When you have a sibling, you take care of them without thinking. As long as you can do that right, you're worth something. You're made for them.

I'm supposed to made be for Grace, and the blackmailer's distracting me from her. I need to focus on her. I need to figure this out, end it, figure her out, sleep again, eat again. . . . Sometimes it feels like I'm not a person anymore, just a collection of different types of fear.

Pounding footsteps. Levi hurtles around the corner. His heel hooks on the curb and he crashes into the p.r.i.c.kly leafless bush next to my bench. I leap up, but he stands by himself, blus.h.i.+ng violently behind his freckles. With the split lip, he looks spectacularly beaten up.

"That bush is made of nails," he says. "I'm suing this establishment for putting a hazardous nail bush by their door."

He's still making the panicky jokes. If it were last year, if I were the old me-I think I'd laugh. "Why were you running?"

"Because I was late," he says, like it's the silliest question ever.

We buy our sodas and slices, pepperoni for me and vegetarian for him. It's a coincidence that he heads toward me and Grace's booth. The one with the chip on the corner, the jagged hole in the upholstery that I picked at one year when I was ten. I steer him to the other side of the restaurant, as far away from our booth as possible.

We sit in silence. I have no idea how to do this.

He shreds a napkin. "How'd you find that stupid blog?"

"I googled you." My face burns. "Kind of in depth."

"Did you find my discography and my bestselling romance series under a pen name, too?" he says, then groans. "I make awful jokes when I'm nervous-it's annoying. Sorry."

"You were calm in the bathroom when I was freaking out."

"Bathrooms have a deeply calming effect on me. It's like Superman and kryptonite, but the opposite and also not." He inhales. "Sorry. Again. You know how when other people freak out, you stop freaking out?"

Like how Pres and I keep trading off who's panicking more about the blackmailer.

"About Adam," I say.