Please Don't Tell Part 24

"If you were going to do something, you would have done it before now." I say it with only the top layer of oxygen in my lungs. Barely aware that I'm saying it.

"You're right. I should have, ages ago." She forces her arms down by her sides. "If I had . . ."

If she had.

But that's the thing. People don't. They let things go, and nothing changes.

n.o.body changes. Ever.

"Tonight," she says huskily. "I'll do something tonight. I'll make him pay. We'll make him pay. Come with me."

"What are you planning?"

"Don't tell Joy," she says. "We're going to break into his house."

When you're nothing, when you're emptied out, you can do anything. There's nothing inside you that tells you to stop. The jungle inside me has been cleared away. There's a kind of power in saying yes just because it doesn't matter.

I wait until everybody else is asleep before I leave my house. November picks me up at the end of the street. We don't talk on the way there. Sometimes I glance at her profile, sharp and thin. Ca.s.sius would have a hard time painting her.

Thinking about Ca.s.sius stings.

"Adam won't be here tonight," November says, clutching the wheel. "He's going to a party. I saw on Facebook. We'll hit up his room, find something he's hiding, something to blackmail him with. Some way to run him out of town. There's got to be something. You can't be that f.u.c.ked up and not have something to hide."

I just nod. We park halfway down the road and wait in the trees until Mr. Gordon stumbles out of the house. The nearest liquor store is on the other side of town. He doesn't bother locking the door behind him.

"He'll be gone for a while," November whispers. "We're safe."

Safe.

His house doesn't look solid. It's a shape on a hill. A slice of the night. No lights in any of the windows. November creeps ahead of me, her shoulder blades protruding under her tank top.

Inside: moonlight on the floor, on the dusty portraits of Adam's grandfather, haunting us. In the kitchen, report card on the fridge-mediocre grades. He's nearly failing math. So much for his brilliance.

There are pictures of him above the dining table. An eight-year-old at Christmas. I shut off everything in my head.

"What are we really doing here?" I ask in the dark.

"We're finding some way to get back at him, I told you." She's furious, quaking, frantic.

I don't think I'll ever feel real again, I realize evenly. Which is good. I don't want to know what real feels like.

We find the bathroom, open the medicine cabinet. Antidepressants prescribed to Mr. Gordon. Caffeine pills, ibuprofen. Some hot-cold packs.

"Can you handle going in his room?" she asks me in the hallway.

"I'm honestly not, like, traumatized." It's a funny feeling, listening to your own voice like it's detached from you. Have I always sounded like this?

She gives me a painful look before we go upstairs.

His room . . .

I stand in the doorway while she sifts through shadows, purposeful now. She tosses aside rumpled Jimi Hendrix T-s.h.i.+rts, empty ramen packets, a crushed box of Marlboro Lights. She yanks open a dresser drawer full of beer cans and slams it shut again. A hidden s...o...b..x looks promising, but it holds only two withered flowers, a colorful gla.s.s pipe, and a packet of weed.

I don't look at his bed.

Shadows in the dark, that's all this is. Blurry shapes. No detail.

I don't know why I was ever afraid of the dark. The dark is keeping me safe.

I hover over November's shoulder while she opens his laptop, clicking through old school a.s.signments, f.u.c.kmrtilandre.docx and stupids.h.i.+teuropething.docx. On his desktop, there's a picture of the Beatles.

"There's nothing personal here," she says, her voice wound tight. "No diary, nothing . . ."

No secret confessions or apologies, no private unsent letters.

No songs about me.

She finds a folder labeled PRIVATE. It's full of p.o.r.n. My stomach revolts. She deletes it, empties the trash, and opens Facebook. Reads chatlogs with girls whose names I don't know. November writes them down. There's a message, also unanswered, from someone named Levi Pham: hey man. you might not remember i exist, but we're related or something like that so i thought i'd say whatsup. hope this doesn't sound dumb.

"We could change his Facebook status to a confession," November mutters. "But people would think it was a prank."

She checks his email: 873 unread messages, mostly spam. One from me, from a week after that night in the middle school field. I got his email address from the school directory.

Adam! Hi. Just wanted to let you know that everything worked out okay. Officer Roseby let us go. I'd text but I don't have your number. And I don't think we're friends on Facebook. Anyway I'd love to come to your house next week! It was really sweet of you to ask. Is it okay if I bring my sister? See you then x.x.xGrace A different girl agonized over those x's. Deleting one. Putting it back.

We weren't even friends on Facebook.

"He didn't deserve a second of your time, Grace." November's voice is wet with pity. None of it affects me. I reach over her shoulder and delete the email.

She stares at the screen. "I thought there'd be something here that'd prove what a sick freak he is. Something we could use to show everybody what he's really like."

I wonder if Joy's asleep.

"It's just ordinary-guy s.h.i.+t here, but he's not an ordinary guy." November shuts off the computer. "I have to believe that."

Suddenly, light pours in from the window, blinding me. Headlights, lightning on the wall. Illuminating the details on the bed. The creases in the blanket. The blotchy stain on the moss-green pillow.

The door downstairs clicks open.

My veins ice over.

"It's his dad, not him," November says, fast and calm. "He'll go to his room in a second, pa.s.s out, and we'll sneak away."

Giggling. A girl, not a man. The stumble-crash of someone knocking over a chair in the dark. And: "Let's go upstairs, my dad's not home. I'll show you my bed. Tempur-Pedic."

Footsteps on the stairs-where do I hide-there's nowhere- November leaps for the closet, and I dive under the bed just as the door opens.

"Adam, your room is so gross." A girl, laughing.

I'm in a world of trash and dust and dirty clothes. I worm backward into the shadows as shoes take up my vision. Oxfords and sequined flats. The flats come off and a girl's bare feet knock aside a pair of jeans.

"Come check out the bed." His voice. "It's so comfortable."

I orchestrate my movements. Put my arm under my chest so it doesn't stick out. Fold my knees against each other. Take up as little s.p.a.ce as possible. Disappear.

"Is it?" the girl says teasingly. A tank top floats to the ground by her bare feet, tiny lace flowers around the neckline.

I could burst out and race down the stairs. I could grab their ankles, trip them, jump over their bodies, leave November in the closet. I could close my eyes and never open them again. Force my own heart to stop beating.

My body is keeping me here. If I wasn't attached to it, I could slip away. Be part of the dark. Be a shape that doesn't mean anything until the lights turn on.

They crash onto the bed so heavily. The bottom sags until it almost touches my nose, fabric poking through wooden slats. A spider's body is caught in a loose thread. There's a whorl in one of the boards shaped like the flower on Ca.s.sius's wrist.

If she starts saying no-if she starts trying to escape-I'll roll out, I'll grab something, a lamp . . .

"You're so beautiful." His low voice. "I'm going to write a song about you."

I'm alive. My heart is beating. I'm breathing. But the air around me stops moving. Something crucial in the atmosphere is dying. The heat is unbearable. I cover my ears but I can still hear them.

The bed creaks up and down for a long time. Heavy breathing. The spider's body dislodges and drifts to the floor next to my face. Its legs are curled up, like it was trying to hide from whatever killed it. But it still took up too much s.p.a.ce.

"You should really clean this place." The girl is getting up, gathering her clothes.

"It's not that messy." He sounds lazy. Satisfied. Something vicious happens to my stomach. I bite the edge of my tongue until it bleeds. I list all the terrible ways I'll punish myself if I vomit.

"Let's have a beer," he says.

"I gotta drive home." She opens the door. "Sleep tight."

I'm soaked with sweat. My arm is asleep, my chest burning, my legs knotted. He doesn't get up. I hear him roll over. Then he goes still.

All I have to do is sneak out while he's sleeping.

I start to edge out a couple times and lose it. If he sees me . . . if he sees me. The third time, I almost make it before he s.h.i.+fts. I freeze, not breathing, but he stays asleep.

I don't move again until I see the closet door crack open. Then I inch out from under the bed. My heel crinkles a candy wrapper, but he doesn't wake up. Slowly, I rise. November emerges, too, a quiet silhouette.

She's holding a pair of scissors. Where did she find them?

Our eyes meet.

She stands over him. The moonlight from the window falls on the ugly ridge of his nose, the zit tucked beneath his lower lip, the stray hairs under his chin. I stare until my eyes water. The movement of his chest up and down seems so flimsy. Like I could press my finger there with the barest pressure and stop it from ever lifting again.

Do it, I say without speaking. The scissor blades are bright.

November's small and s.h.i.+vering. She lifts the scissors. Her arm lowers. She shakes her head, again and again, moves next to me.

Presses them into my hand.

I'm nothing, so I can do anything. I could stop him.

He twitches in bed. I don't blink, letting my eyes blur so I don't have to look at the details of his face. This is it. The moment before and after.

If I were Joy, I could do it.

My hand trembles.

But I'm not Joy. And I'm not nothing.

I'm me. Forever. The worst possible thing I could ever be.

I bolt, fast and quiet, out his bedroom door, down the stairs, and across the lawn. November's coming after me, but I'm too quick for her. I half run, half stagger into the woods. I lose myself in the trees, wrenching through bushes, kicking branches, kicking everything, breaking things in the night.

I don't know how long it takes November to find me. When she steps out from between the trees, she takes me by the arm, tries to lead me back toward the road. I shove her away.

"Grace," she pleads.

I hate my name so much. I'm not graceful at all.

"There was nothing about me in there." My voice flames in the rustling quiet. "I thought if he could do that to me, he at least loved-" I bite off the word with my teeth, shatter it.

"There was no song," I whisper. "I was just another girl."

"That's how he gets us." November's still holding my arm. Her words break. "It's so nice, having somebody think you're special. That you're worth making art about."

Like Ca.s.sius did. But Ca.s.sius must have been lying, too.

"You told Joy what he did to you, right?" November asks. "You told."

"Obviously," I rasp. "She's my sister."

"Is she . . . okay?"

"Of course she's okay." I kick at a fallen branch. "Why wouldn't she be okay?"

"She cares about you a lot."

"I know," I yell.

"I just thought she might feel . . ." Her voice trails off. "Guilty."

"Why the h.e.l.l would she feel guilty? It's not her fault. She didn't do anything. That's ridiculous." I can't breathe. "Does she think I'm the kind of person who'd blame her? Is that what you think of me?"

"Grace," she says softly.

"Because that's not how I feel," I snarl. "I love my sister and everything is fine so just leave. Us. Alone."

I turn sharply and start walking toward the road. I can see it through the trees. I don't need her to drive me back. I don't need anyone to do anything for me ever again.