Please Don't Tell Part 2

I nod and walk with him.

Grace and I were seven the last time we came to the graveyard. It was after some nameless great-uncle had a heart attack in front of Antiques Roadshow. I stole a daisy from someone else's grave, put it in Grace's hair, and cried when Mom s.n.a.t.c.hed it back.

Now it's a summer graveyard with winter air. We surround the fresh pit, everyone silent. Adam'll lie here forever, neutralized. He won't follow me out.

The minister tells some nice lies about Adam, and then several men lift the casket and lower it into the open hole. I'll make sure they don't f.u.c.k it up. This is why the time machine didn't work yesterday-they hadn't buried him yet. Grace'll be fine as soon as he's covered in dirt.

Kennedy cries for real, heaving sobs over the dirt patter. Sarah clings to her back. I'm rigid. No girl should ever cry for him.

Grace never cried.

Then Levi's beside Kennedy, whispering gently to her. She quiets. Does he know her? Or does he just know what to say? If I were like him, I'd've found the right words to tell Grace in the exercise room. I'd've found the right words in the summer.

The shovel noise devolves from artillery fire to heavy rainfall. One foot of dirt. Two. The graveyard empties. The sun dips lower and the men work until there's a mound of clean earth.

But there's no magic text from Grace announcing she's okay. Nothing teleports me back to the beginning of the summer. I'm still here. He's still here.

He is going to follow me out.

"Joy?"

I turn. Levi's still here, too. I realize we're alone next to the grave. Everyone must've left.

He touches my wrist, and I yank back.

"Sorry," he says immediately. "Um."

I look away. Half the graves nearby have fresh flowers. Daisies. Grace's favorite.

"You must've cared a lot about him."

If dead people can make someone pay ten dollars for a bunch of flowers at the grocery store and drive here to drop them off, what else can they do?

"I hated him," I say.

"Oh." Sadness fits him worse than that vest.

"He-" The truth claws my throat. I choke on it. "Never mind. f.u.c.k. I'm sorry. s.h.i.+t. I don't mean to swear so much."

"It's f.u.c.king fine." He smiles a little bit. Even though the sun's setting, the graveyard lightens.

But his smile disappears when he glances at the grave again. It's clear he wishes Adam weren't dead. Which means he and I are fundamentally incompatible human beings.

I start to say bye, but instead, suddenly, I'm gulping. I can't control anything that comes out of my mouth, but I can control what comes out of my eyes. I'm not going to cry over Adam's grave. I take a deep breath. And then tears leak out anyway.

"Whoa, hey. It's okay."

Strangers say that like they know what's okay and what's not.

"Death is hard." He lifts his hands: I'm not going to hurt you. "Even if you didn't like him. Sometimes that makes it harder."

I don't want him to take responsibility for my sadness. But he's making me feel a little better. What doorway did he find into my head, and how can I find the same one into Grace's?

"How'd you get here if you don't drive?" I ask.

"Came with my, um. My dad." A cold breeze speckles his bare arms with goose b.u.mps. He tugs a baseball cap out of his pocket, puts it on. It's bent, threads sprouting from the brim. It messes up his hair. "Looks like I'll be hoofing it."

I love that he says hoofing it.

"Lemme give you a ride." I text Mom. "You deserve a favor, helping out Mr. Gordon like that."

"Ah, yeah. I forgot it's not that obvious. Perils of being mixed race. My mom's Vietnamese. He's the aforementioned dad I won't be riding back with."

Levi is-Adam's brother?

"It doesn't feel obvious to me, either. Trust me."

I've been standing here talking to him like a friend.

"I haven't seen him since I was nine."

Nausea rolls over me.

"I swear our left pinkies are both crooked. Or they were when we were little. Meant to check if his still was." He stares at the grave for the hundredth time. "I forgot to look."

I betrayed Grace by smiling at him.

"Why'd you hate him?" he asks tentatively. "I had this idea of him in my head. I'm wondering how right I was."

Breathe.

Before I realize it, I'm walking away, hurrying toward the graveyard gate, abandoning Levi. He catches up to me by the curb. He smells like cinnamon and summer wheat. No more breathing, not while he's in a hundred-mile radius.

"Sorry if I said something wrong."

I look at him. There's no Adam in his angular ears, or in the earring I just noticed, a thin silver hoop. No Adam in his freckles, few but dark: three in a line from the edge of his left eye to his cheekbone, one underneath the right edge of his mouth, a faint one on the tip of his nose.

His Adam parts are hidden, which makes them more dangerous.

"I don't mind walking home." He backs away. "I'll see you around. Nice to meet you, Joy."

The Gordons' house is a half-hour trek, and he might not be used to walking, if he's not from Stanwick. The wind shoves his T-s.h.i.+rt against his shoulder blades. Some boys are so skinny it makes my chest hurt.

"Wait." The word tastes like guilt. "My mom'll be here any minute."

In the car, Mom's knuckles whiten more on the steering wheel with every hundred feet. She and Grace get those lines on their foreheads when they're holding something in.

"How was it?" she asks warily.

"It was a funeral, Mom. It was sad."

"Horrible accident, what happened." Dad twists in the front seat to face Levi, who's beside me in the back. "You a friend of Joy's from school?"

"Nah." Levi presses against the window. Is he doing it because he wants to get away from me, or because he knows I want to get away from him? "I don't know how long I'll be staying, though, so I'm enrolled at school here. Starting tomorrow."

How does he not know how long he'll be staying?

"You just moved here?" Dad's s.h.i.+rt says Just Do It! in awful red letters.

"I flew here from Indiana for the funeral, and I'll be staying with my . . . dad." He picks at his battered baseball cap. It's a little too small. "Adam was my half brother."

"Oh." Mom fills the car with pity like steam.

Dad fires off an instant "I'm so sorry for your loss."

"Don't be. It's no big deal." He rotates the hoop in his earlobe. "I mean, it's a big deal, just for everyone else, since I never knew Adam. I mean, it's still a big deal to me, but other people . . . never mind."

He mutters something that sounds like idiot.

"Stay away from that quarry," says Mom suddenly. "It's dangerous how kids hang out there, just because of the song. Your father and I and some other parents are starting a pet.i.tion to have the town fence it off."

Yeah. Seal it away.

We arrive at the house. It slants on the hill, like a claw that popped out of the earth, gla.s.s and wood. The lawn's blisteringly green. The night Grace and I came here together, the first night, the night, I tore off my shoes after the long walk and buried my toes in the gra.s.s. She kept hers on. Told me to hurry up, please, she didn't want to make him wait.

The night of his birthday party, I kept my shoes on. That's all I remember.

Levi gets out, thanks us for the ride, traipses up the steps. It takes him a while to open the door, like he's not used to the lock. It's hard to leave anyone here to this dark slash of a house, the quarry lurking past the trees.

But he's enemy territory.

Mom and Dad fidget on the way back. They're like twins, too, blond and tall, doing everything in tandem, always putting on ChapStick. I have no idea who they are.

"I know you'll run upstairs to your computer the minute we get home, so your father and I wanted to ask you something." Mom stops too hard at a red light. My head jerks. "Is something going on with Grace?"

They used to ask her about me. I'd hear them in the living room-Is something going on with Joy?

She's fine, she'd say. Because she was on my side. Because my job was to protect her and bring her out of her sh.e.l.l and their job was to get in the way.

I shove my toe into the front of my sneaker. "What d'you mean?"

"It's this independent project thing she's doing with her teachers," says Mom. "It's an amazing opportunity, and of course we want to support her academically."

"But we're starting to wonder if it's a good idea for her to be out of school for the whole semester," Dad adds. "Even if the princ.i.p.al okayed it and the teachers are working with her from home. She's in her room a lot these days."

They're worried about her grades.

"I hang out in my room a lot."

"But you and Grace have different . . . approaches," says Mom.

"Maybe she's depressed or something," I bite out.

"What would she be depressed about?" asks Dad, surprised.

"I don't think she's depressed," says Mom, like someone would say I don't think she's a purple giraffe. "Moody, maybe. I was exactly the same at her age."

"Does this have anything to do with that night this summer?" Dad wants to know.

I bend my toenail backward against the front of my sneaker until something cracks. But he's not talking about the night, he's talking about the night they picked us up at the police station. I forgot how many things went wrong over the summer.

"No. I'm sure she's fine."

Silence again. I stare out the window at the town, at the patches of trees, the small neat houses, the cracks in the sidewalk I've memorized.

They're not going to question me. We're twins. I know Grace better than anybody else. If something were wrong, I would know.

But I do know, and I promised to stay silent.

My bedroom's built from fossils of me and Grace. Scattered plastic horses from our horse phase at age nine. Beads jammed between the floorboards from our jewelry-making phase at twelve, when she insisted 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, ca.s.sius called adam a p.r.i.c.k, 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?"