Please Don't Tell (11 page)

I NEVER REALIZED CASSIUS LIVED SO CLOSE
. It only takes me a few minutes to walk to his house. It's an unassuming blue one, tucked behind the hedge that the old neighbors used to trim early on Monday mornings, waking up the whole neighborhood. The new mailbox is brilliantly painted. Clouds and winding vines and birds of every hue. I never noticed before.

Joy doesn't know I'm here. Today I'm taking a path she didn't forge for me.

I'm on the porch, about to knock, when Cassius opens the front door.

“You were watching from the window?” I ask.

“Nah.” There's a dab of paint in the middle of a moon-shaped patch of lighter skin on his forehead. “I just felt you here.”

He leads me inside. It's clean, but not spotless like our house. Not a neurotic clean. Taylor Swift blasts from upstairs.

“My sister,” he explains. “I work downstairs.”

There's no car in the driveway. I'm at a boy's house with no parents around. A trial run for when I go to Adam's.

The basement isn't like any other basement in the world. The walls are covered with paper, big thick endless sheets from the rolls you can buy at craft stores, and they're full of sky. People and animals move from cloud to cloud.

And all the people are naked.

“I like painting the human figure,” Cassius says openly, no creepiness to it, as he ties a paint-splattered apron around his waist and sets up an easel. “Not for school paintings. Adam would give me too much crap. But for paintings nobody sees. No one else comes down here.”

Just me.

I step closer to the wall. The bodies aren't like any naked bodies I've seen before. A lot of them are fat, but it's not an ugly fat, exaggerated for a joke. They're graceful. Comfortable.

Did Cassius want to paint me naked?

“I don't think I can—” I burst out at the same second he goes, “You'll keep your clothes on, obviously—”

We both stare at each other and giggle.

“How do you want me to be?” I ask.

“Yourself.”

I sit on the ratty tan couch, being myself.

“Hmm.” He traces a line on his blank paper with the
wrong end of his brush. “The way you sit, you ball up . . . People are easier to paint when they're looser. Broad strokes, not all congested like a highway. I'm not that good yet.”

I stretch the nerves out of my legs. How would Joy sit? I sling my arm over the back of the couch, kick up one leg.

“You're good at art,” I say to distract him from how ridiculous I look.

“I'm not that good yet. But I will be.”

I'm not that brave yet. But I will be.

He outlines the pattern of me over his paper once more before he starts his pencil sketch. The silence grows between us, but it doesn't fill with bad things. I can look at him when he's looking at the paper. I can see why Joy thinks he's so beautiful. He's a good combination of hard and soft: the clean edge of his jaw, his warm eyes, his gentle mouth. It's too bad he can't model for himself.

Joy would be so jealous. My stomach twists.

“Joy likes art,” I blurt. “When our family took a trip to D.C., it took her like three hours to leave the art museum.”

That was because she got lost and we had to look for her, but I don't say that.

“That's nice.” He looks up. Catches me staring. Cringe.

“She's really great,” I plow on. “You could paint her in loose swishy strokes, no problem. She's not congested.”

“It's just hard with the clothes bunched up,” he says, concentrating.

I try to smooth out the hem of my shirt.

“Oh, shoot.” He sits back. “Now the lines are all new.”

“Sorry!” I whip my hand away. “I knew I'd screw you up.”

“I'll start over. It usually takes a couple tries. I always make mistakes the first time.”

A couple tries. But I only get one shot with Adam. What if I want to take my clothes off in front of him? I don't want to make mistakes.

I don't want to hate my body forever.

A ridiculous thought: Could I take off my clothes in front of Cassius?

A trial run. No romance, no expectation. Even Joy couldn't do that.

Maybe I don't have to just be as brave as her. Maybe I could be braver.

“Cassius?” I say. Ridiculous. Ridiculous.

“Hm?”

A normal girl wouldn't do it.

But an interesting girl would.

“Do you think I could . . . I think I could try the nude modeling thing, if you want.”

He puts down his pencil. He probably thinks I'm an exhibitionist.

“I mean, it's okay if you don't want to, that's understandable, I'm not some beautiful model—” I stammer.

“Grace.” His face shines. “If you'd be comfortable with that, I would love to paint you that way.”

Is this actually going to happen?

“I don't mean to sound like a creep. I just suck so much at clothes.” He scratches his cheek with the other end of
his paintbrush, embarrassed. “Nudity is not that big of a deal to me . . . it's how we were born. Everyone is naked all the time under their clothes. Plus, people look softer that way. It's harder to be intimidated by them.”

This is the girl I'll be: a girl who gets drunk, gets high, models nude, dates musicians.

“Can you maybe turn around while I take them off?” I whisper.

“Are you sure you're okay with this?”

“Yeah . . .”

“You positive?”

“Yes. I want to do this.”

He covers his eyes and turns around, bumping into his easel.

Clothes are strange. They're flimsy, but they shield you from so much. I'm wearing a yellow T-shirt with a faded rose print. I've taken it off in my room so many times. Just shucked it over my shoulders. I try to mimic that motion now. It's difficult in a different way.

My bra is an ugly white. There's a tiny ingrown hair next to my belly button. Gross.

“Let me know when you're ready,” Cassius says gently.

You have to do things that scare you to become someone new. Someone capable of doing those things.

I reach behind me, unhook my bra, and unzip my shorts before I can change my mind, balling them up so he can't see how big they are. I lie on my back. People look best on their backs. I cross my legs. Suck in my stomach. Fold an
arm over my breasts. Make sure everything is smoothed out and arranged.

Will I be able to do this with Adam? Keep track of how he's seeing me, every angle?

“Ready,” I croak.

Cassius turns around. I can't look at him. I look at the ceiling instead. He probably sees the ripples my heartbeat makes on my skin. How all my blood is trying to escape.

I wait for him to give me a rating. Good or bad. Acceptable or not. But he doesn't. I hear the scrape of him pulling a stool to his easel, sitting down, and then the scratching of pencil on canvas.

I'm doing this!

I work on relaxing my muscles, one by one, as he paints. Arms. Shoulders. After a while, my stomach aches from how hard I'm sucking it in. I let it go, a bit at a time. Does he notice? He's completely focused. I think I trust him not to notice more than I want him to.

“Have you ever done this yourself?” I say, tiny.

“Done what?” He's barely here. He's not judging my body, he's just taking it in. I relax a little more.

“Modeled, like . . . nude.”

“My skin's too hard to draw,” he mumbles. “I don't want people making me into some dalmatian.”

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to giggle or not. I do. It doesn't feel wrong. He smiles. None of this feels wrong.

This would be a romance cliché. The artist and the
model. But I'm not in love with the artist, I'm in love with the musician.

“Have you ever been in love before?” I ask. I'm naked. It's not like things could get any weirder between us.

Cassius misses a stroke, frowns at his mistake. When he's spacing out he's so relaxed, but startle him and he tucks himself in right away.

“You ask a lot more questions without clothes on,” he points out.

I'm bolder without clothes on. This is the new Grace Morris. A girl with no shell.

“Who do you think is hotter, me or Joy?” It slips out. I should take it back. I don't, even though I know the answer. We're twins, but there's too much of me. Girls are supposed to be sleek like glass slippers.

“I don't get questions like that,” he says, after a long time. “To me, bodies are . . . I guess when you're an artist, and you have to break things down into shapes, see how they fit together, how harmonious and functional it all is . . . all bodies are beautiful. Not in . . . a sexual way. They just work.”

He's trying to say nicely that I'm not hot.

“People talk about themselves and their bodies like they're separate,” he keeps going. “But people are their bodies just like they are their brains. I can't think someone is a beautiful person without thinking their body is beautiful.”

His dreamy tone slips and so does his gaze, to the
bottom of the paper. “I think you're beautiful, Grace.”

I feel like he's holding me, but he's not touching me. I'm definitely not ready for someone to actually touch me naked.

“It's hard to like yourself,” he murmurs.

I take a deep breath. “I never liked myself before, but I think you just have to make yourself into something you can like.”

He paints for another few minutes. Talking to Cassius means giving him time to think.

“What if you're not sure who you want to be?” he says finally.

“Then think of a person you like.” I brush my thumb against the mole on my thigh. Joy has one in the exact same place. “And become like them.”

YOU DON
'
T REALIZE HOW MANY HOURS
there are in a week until you watch them pass on a baby monitor. I don't know what I'm expecting. A figure watching me, maybe, some horror-movie jump scare. Somehow the motionless grainy footage of my own locked bedroom window is worse.

No more notes have come. But if the blackmailer was finished with me, why would he have sent that last response? Just to keep me afraid? What's he waiting for?

Sometimes I wish he'd attack me in school, on my way home after school, anywhere. Then I'd have something to fight.

“If he wants to frame me for Adam's murder, he should just do it,” I bite out into the phone with Preston one night.

“You're still not going to the cops, right?” Preston says.

“I'm not going to the cops.”

“Good. Because if we go to the cops, and the blackmailer tells the cops you killed Adam, and they find out about the photos of Eastman, it looks really suspicious that you went ahead and did what the note said.”

Sometimes I just feel like laughing.

School returns to normality as the days pass. Nobody else dies, nobody else is arrested. Ben's mom comes in with my mom and some other parents, hands out a petition for the town to pay for the quarry to be fenced off. Levi keeps helping me cheat in American History and my grade hits a C+. Cassius skips two days and when he comes back, everyone avoids him. He's made himself so small it's like he's trying to avoid himself.

Saturday morning, I weigh myself on Grace's scale and the new number alarms me. I'm forcing down half a piece of toast when a chain saw starts whirring outside. I jump up, run to the window. Dad's in goggles and he's all hooked up to the tree outside my room, cutting through the branch.

“Did you tell Dad it was rotten?” I ask Mom when she comes out of the bathroom.

“It wasn't. We checked.” She knots her bathrobe around her waist, pours a cup of coffee. “But we have cottoned on to your escape route.”

As long as it's gone. “Okay.”

“It's dangerous. You could hurt yourself.”

“Right.”

“You need to eat more than that.” She gestures at my mostly full plate, then looks at me. “You lost weight. You're starting to look sick.”

I ignore her and get through one piece of bacon before my phone buzzes. It's probably Preston needing to analyze the notes more, talk about the blackmailer endlessly, cycle through it again and again so he doesn't have to face the fact that maybe there's nothing we can do about this, maybe it's just something that's happening to me. I push my plate back. The bacon wants out of my stomach, in there with the fear. The worst part about all this is finding out what I'm capable of getting used to.

But when I look at my phone, it's not Preston. It's Levi.

could you come to my house? really need help with something. sorry i didn't know who else to ask.

The Gordon house. Adam Gordon's house. The absolute last place I want to go.

“Who's that?” asks Mom.

Nobody, nobody. I'm not going. But if Levi's having a crisis . . .

“Could you give me a ride to the Gordon house?” I blurt.
If I'm not home, the blackmailer can't find me.

She frowns. “You're grounded.”

“Levi—that guy we gave a ride home from the funeral, remember—he's tutoring me in American History. There's a test on Monday, he says we should review.”

Mom bundles me into the car so fast that I don't have time to change my mind.

Halfway up the Gordons' driveway, Mom says, “This better not be just an excuse to hang out with a boy you have a crush on.”

“If there's one boy I can promise you I will never have a crush on, it's him.”

“Good. That's the right kind of boy to study with.” She stops the car, lets me out. “Stay away from the quarry.”

I walk up to the front door and just stand there, paralyzed. This house. This place. That dark wood, all those windows. Panels of shadowed glass on the door, a crack shaped like a vein running through one of them. It wasn't there the first night we came. Grace and I went through that doorway together, and maybe the ghosts of who we used to be are still in there.

That night, Grace greeted Adam brightly, all brand-new confidence, walking in ahead of me. I'd wondered if that was what it was like to be the one trailing behind. If the only way one of us could be big was if the other one was small.

I remember thinking, drunkenly, I should check on her and Adam.

And then thinking that I didn't want to, that she could take care of herself, this once.

I dig my nails into my palms, but pain doesn't work when you're numb. I shouldn't have come here. I turn, but Mom's gone. I could walk back along the road . . .

But Levi asked for my help and he doesn't have anyone else.

I climb the steps. It's just a doorknob. How many doorknobs have I touched in my life? My reflection stares back at me, distorted.

“Joy, are you up front?” Levi's voice floats over. I grab it, breathe through it like a gas mask. “I'm down by the back porch.”

I circle the house too fast, edging the slash of a shadow it throws on the ground. The porch is built into the hill that goes down toward the trees, toward the quarry. Levi's halfway up the steps, knees grass-stained, trying to haul a dead-drunk Mr. Gordon up the rest of the way.

“Thank you,” he pants when he sees me.

“I haven't done anything yet.”

“You came.”

Mr. Gordon's evil-smelling, barely conscious. His sweatpants look like they haven't been changed in a week. We hoist him up the steps like we did at the funeral. I've got his feet. One's shoeless and rank. The shoe is on the lawn. I wonder if my shoes are still somewhere in the middle-school field, mangled by the lawn mower.

Levi wrangles open the door with his elbow. I suck in the alcohol fumes, focus on them, blot out the fact that I'm inside,
inside
, the house. It's ugly dark, the shades drawn.

I can't break. I'm carrying a man up a staircase.

If I thought being in this house would jog my memory,
I was wrong. The only memories it's bringing up are—
Don't think about it
.

I'm getting good at not thinking. The key's not giving your brain any fuel or rest, and drowning it in alcohol the rest of the time. Mr. Gordon and I know that.

Adam's bedroom door—
breathe
—is blocked by a bedside table, several boxes. Was it Levi or Mr. Gordon who did that? Are they trying to keep something in or out?

We move a few more steps down the hall to the end. Mr. Gordon's room was designed to let in as much light as possible, a window covering nearly half the left wall, but it's blocked by a heavy curtain. “On three,” Levi grunts. We swing Mr. Gordon onto the four-poster bed. He rolls over and starts snoring instantly, a rattily choking sound.

I am so terrifyingly dizzy for a second.
Don't pass out, don't do that to Levi, don't give him another body to deal with.

I take a deep breath, let it out slowly. Okay. I'm okay.

Levi stares at his dad's motionless figure. Something builds in him until finally he rips a throw pillow off the edge of the bed and buries his face in it. I want to say something, but the words, the perfect words, they don't come. The fog in my head doesn't help. But he drops the pillow after a few seconds, and his expression is clean and normal.

“Screw my lack of musical talent, I'm going to write a one-hit wonder, too, and make a million dollars so I can pay you a million dollars for helping me drag my dad around,” he says.

“I don't mind,” I say. “Sometimes I lift my dad's weights.”

“And sometimes you lift my dad.” Levi arranges the blankets, sets out a glass of water, throws the curtain open. “Whenever you need a workout, just come over here. Dad lifting. It'll be an Olympic event.”

Don't joke back. It's his tragedy to make light of, not mine.

“Sorry. You know when stuff's so real it stops feeling real? And then it gets funny?” He turns and smiles anxiously. “It was like, I got him all the way back up from the quarry and then I couldn't do the stairs and I sat down and freaked out. And I had your number.”

“Should we maybe tell somebody about . . . him? This?” I say over the snoring.

“There's nobody. Adam's mom lives in Europe. He was an only child. No real extended family—just Adam. And my mom's family hates him.”

We watch the rise and fall of Mr. Gordon's chest. I think we're both kind of expecting it to stop.

“I need to get out of the house,” Levi says suddenly. “Sorry. I don't have my license, and Mr. Go— Dad's house is all the way up here, and you're still the only person I really know here. Sorry.”

I forgot how big of a difference there is between school friends and friends you actually hang out with. “My mom gave me a ride here, but we can go for a walk.”

“Down to the quarry?”

It's just an old quarry, it's not haunted, it's fine. I nod.

Downstairs, the portraits of Adam's grandpa, the framed signatures and album covers and memorabilia—they're all gone, nail holes and dustless patches left on the wall. A million empty pizza boxes are stacked in one corner, next to mountains of half-crushed beer cans.

“I didn't know where the recycling was.” Levi waves hopelessly at the mess. “Nobody ever cleaned up after the birthday party.”

He was here alone, piling up pizza boxes and trash with his dad passed out upstairs.

“Were you the one who cleared off the walls?” I ask.

“Yeah. The first night I was here, Dad—I'm sorry, I can't—Mr. Gordon kept apologizing to the portraits of his father. Said he was sorry he let his family die out. It was all very,
I have disappointed my ancestors.
”

Jesus. “You're still here, though.”

He stops in the dining room. “The last time I saw Mr. Gordon, when I was a kid, he stuck Adam's guitar in my hands and put on a karaoke version of my grandfather's album. The minute I opened my mouth to sing, any interest he might've had in me fell off his face.”

“Doesn't he like having you here, since he hasn't seen you in so long?”

“Most of the time I don't think he realizes I'm here. Pretty sure he thinks I'm some kind of hired help.”

“That's awful,” I stammer.

He pushes open the door, steps into the light. “It's okay. I'm dumping this on you.”

“It's not okay. I'm really bad at . . . saying the right thing.”

There's a burned-out circle of old firewood on the lawn. I remember there was a fire the night of Adam's birthday party. Kennedy and Sarah danced next to it. Blurry memories. Dreams maybe. I don't know.

I follow Levi down the hill, away from the house, into the trees. One step. Two steps. Walking isn't hard. Moving forward isn't hard. More memories: sticks snapping, branches cutting me. Did I go into the woods the night of his birthday party, or am I thinking of the night in July I got drunk for the first time with Grace?

“So, okay. I'm about to be Advice Levi, and I'm sorry, he's annoying.” Levi picks past a cluster of bushes like the ones I peed behind while Grace stood watch. “When it comes to other people's problems, the only thing you can do is listen and be nice. Whatever advice you have, that's secondary. You can't fix anything, but being nice counts for more than people think.”

“Advice Levi's not so bad,” I tell him.

We step out of the trees. I haven't been to the quarry in daylight since I was young. The rock drops off sharply, the edge sanded down by years of wind and rain. It's so big. A chasm. The bottom is rough with loose boulders. It looks like a giant dragged a mace through the earth.

Levi walks to the edge and the wind lifts, like it's trying to push him over, like when Grace almost fell.

“Levi. Don't get any closer.”

“No worries.”

He didn't gel his hair today. The breeze swooshes it along his forehead. I stand beside him and we both look down at the same time. The craggy bottom's maybe a forty-foot drop. One of the rocks is stained rust brown. If I was responsible for that stain, there's no way I wouldn't remember, no matter how drunk I was.

Vicious things are in my head. I hope Grace's face was the last thing he thought of. I hope it hurt.

“He died there,” Levi says, pointing. “Right there.”

It's so weird, how differently two people can feel about the exact same thing.

“Can I tell you a stupid story?” he asks.

“Yeah.”
Talk so I don't have to hear myself think.

“The first night after the funeral, I couldn't sleep. I had this feeling like Adam was down here and wanted to tell me something.” He twists his earring. “I was hoping he'd tell me at the funeral, but he looked so fake, all made up. You were the only real thing there.”

“Is that a compliment?” It feels like one.

“I guess it is.”

“Okay. Sorry. Keep going.”

“So I got up and I came down here in the dark. But I didn't feel him here. Dunno why I thought I would.”

That's because he's not haunting the quarry. He's haunting Grace's dreams and I haven't been doing anything about it. You can't kill a ghost.

“The quarry itself, though,” he says. “That gave me a weird feeling.”

“It's a thing about heights,” I venture. “One time when we were kids, my sister and I hiked this mountain with our parents. We had this dare to see how close we could get to the edge. It was the only time she was braver than me about something.”

“It's like an impulse,” he agrees. “Like . . . a suicidal impulse.”

“She's not
suicidal
. Jesus.”