by Laura Tims
“What way?” I ask.
“Well.” His voice is scratchy, too, but not because he’s sick. “I’m related to the guy who raped one of your best friends.”
“That’s not why . . .” But I can’t finish my sentence.
“It is.” He won’t meet my eyes. “That’s why you hated Adam. That’s why you didn’t want to be around me at first. And that day it rained, that’s why you pushed me away, right?”
There’s none of his usual humor. Just guilt.
“I didn’t want you to lose your version of him,” I say weakly.
“Fuck that version. When I read that editorial . . .” He stops halfway to my door. “My first thought was, what’s going to happen if my dad sees it? I’m an asshole.”
“You’re not—”
“Don’t.” His back knots up. “I assumed Adam was this—perfect person.”
I wince away from the self-loathing in his voice.
He twists his earring hard. Then he exhales and forces a smile. “Now I get it. He was never worth knowing, so I don’t have to spend my whole life being sad I didn’t get the chance. I’m glad I never cried about him.”
I blink hard a few times.
“I’ll go now,” he says. “I get that you probably won’t want to be near me, considering genetics.”
“Genetics don’t mean anything.” I sit up. “Just because you’re related to him doesn’t mean you’re like him. Don’t go, okay?”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to make things up to me.” He swallows. “My mom called this morning. She’s been discharged. I’m flying back to Indiana in a couple days.”
There’s a long silence. “That’s great,” I croak, but I’m a jerk for not saying it immediately.
“I was always just here temporarily,” he says helplessly.
“Right. Yeah. Of course.”
“That’s all I had to say.” He smiles sadly. “Feel better.” He turns, and I hear him going down the stairs.
If I don’t follow him, I’ll never see him again.
I’m not ready to let go.
I run to the kitchen. It’s clean, empty. No sign of Grace. But even if she saw Levi, she wouldn’t guess the truth. There’s no Adam in him.
He’s reaching for the door.
“I don’t want you to be temporary,” I blurt.
“Are you, like . . . mad?” he says in a small voice. “That I’m leaving?”
“Did you think I’d be a jerk about it and not be happy that your mom’s okay?” Which is exactly what I’m being. “Did you think I’d flip out? Because, okay, I am flipping out, but that’s only because I’m upset that you thought I’d do that, so this is a self-fulfilled prophecy—”
“Other people, they can hide their reactions,” he cuts in. “Not you. I knew if you said, ‘That’s great, Levi! I’m so happy for you!’ or any nice thing that a friend would say, that’d be the end of it, that’d be how you really felt.”
“I swear, I am happy for you, Levi.” I’m a terrible friend.
He runs his hand through his hair. “I didn’t want that to be your reaction. I wanted you to be pissed that I was leaving.”
“What? Why did you want me to be pissed?”
“Joy? Who’s that?”
I turn and Grace is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, a cereal-flecked bowl in her hand, one of the heavy clay ones. All my excuses dissolve on my tongue. I realize with sudden absolute clarity that none of them would matter to her.
She clears her throat. “Sorry . . .”
She doesn’t recognize him. How could she? She doesn’t know.
“You must be Grace.” Levi smiles.
She’s makeupless. Her shirt’s stained. She didn’t know I had someone over. But she can’t run back upstairs, she’s invested in this interaction now. Thirty seconds of halfhearted chat and she’ll leave. Please don’t mention Adam, Levi.
“This is my American History tutor,” I make myself say.
“Joy always talks about you.” His happiness is genuine.
She gives a tiny smile. Then she edges past us, rinses out her bowl in the sink, and fishes a bag of microwave popcorn from the cupboard. She opens the microwave and sticks the popcorn in. It’s all very choreographed. She keeps the bowl tucked under her arm like a talisman.
Two minutes and fifty seconds on the microwave. The timer to a nuclear holocaust.
“I like your shirt,” Levi offers.
There are so many unlit fuses in the room.
“Are you a freshman?” She stays on the other side of the kitchen, away from him. “I haven’t seen you around.”
“Junior. I’m visiting from Indiana.”
“I always forget about Indiana,” she says, relatively normally. “All the I states.”
She doesn’t suspect.
“How many even are there?” agrees Levi. “Idaho . . .”
This is fine.
“Iowa,” she says.
The popcorn’s going off like gunfire.
“Anyway,” Levi says. “I don’t know if you knew Adam Gordon, but I’m his half brother. I came up for the funeral and ended up staying a while. Joy was the first person in town I met—at the funeral, actually—and she’s been . . . great . . .”
His voice trails off as horror and confusion are unfolding in Grace’s expression, like awful flowers.
It’s okay. It’ll be fine. I’ll send Levi away. I’ll explain everything—
It takes only a second. Her arm whips up and there’s a crash. The kitchen floor turns into a minefield of clay shards and Levi’s half collapsed against the stove, one hand clapped to his forehead, bright neon electric glowing red blood pouring out between his fingers.
“Grace!” I scream.
“What the fuck, Joy?” She cries. “What the fuck?”
This is not the Grace I fell asleep next to last night.
This is a Grace I’ve never met.
I reach for Levi, peel his hand back from his face. There’s a thin gash bisecting his eyebrow, blood pouring out of it. The rest of him is milk pale. He pulls his hand from my grasp and looks wonderingly at the blood on it.
“At the funeral?” Grace is snarling. “Like, hey, let me show you around? Did you take him to the Ice Cream Palace? I know you took him into our house! Where I live!”
I can’t hold both her and Levi together at the same time. Both of them are bleeding bright terrible colors.
I finally got her mad at me. I didn’t know this is what it would look like.
“You have a right to be angry—” I whisper.
“You should be angry. But you’re not. Not enough.” Her bangs stick to her forehead with sweat. She’s not making sense. “You never were. You didn’t have to be.”
Levi staggers upright, half his face streaked crimson.
My sister did this.
She lied to me. She’s not okay.
“You need help.” I straighten as calmly as I can manage. My voice breaks anyway. “We’ll get you help, Grace.”
“All I needed was for you to be on my side,” she throws at me.
I grope for Levi’s wrist, clutch it tight. He stares transfixed at my sister, then at me. His forehead’s still bleeding. “Are you—” he starts.
“Go outside just for a second, okay? Stay on the porch. I’ll handle this.”
“Now I’m something to be handled.” Grace’s eyes glint with tears.
Holding a tea towel to his forehead, Levi opens the front door with his free hand and disappears through it.
I’m alone in my bloodstained shattered kitchen with my bloodstained shattered sister.
She starts shaking.
“Oh my God.” She’s paralyzed with sudden guilt. “I didn’t mean—I was scared—I don’t know what—”
I want to hold her, but I don’t know if it would help or make it worse.
“It was like—” She chokes. “You think every trace of a person is gone from the world—and then part of him is standing in
your kitchen—”
“There’s no part of Adam in Levi,” I say quickly, my heart pounding.
“How do you know?”
“Trust me.” But she doesn’t. She doesn’t trust me anymore. My chest throbs. “Things still aren’t okay with us, are they?”
She shies back like a cat. “This is about you, not me. This is about you betraying me.”
“It’s okay to need help, Grace.” Calm, calm. I know what path she needs to take now. “Therapy helped November—”
“I don’t need that,” she snarls. “I’m not that kind of person.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of—”
“Not me.” She backs away. “I’m different.”
“Grace—”
But she’s already sprinting up the stairs.
Levi reassures me on the porch as I examine his cut. “My forehead’s fine. Head scratches bleed a lot, is all.”
He’s right. It’s barely bleeding anymore. It doesn’t make me feel better.
“What happened?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I lie. Now that she’s not in front of me, I’m shaking as hard as she was. Fights never catch up to me until they’re over.
“Tell her not to feel bad, okay?” He twists the bloody towel in his hand. “I get it. It’s not her fault. My mom’s been there.”
“She’s not crazy!” I snap before remembering he doesn’t like the c-word.
But isn’t that what I told her when I said she needs professional help? Now I understand why he doesn’t like that word. It makes something sound so much worse than it is.
He looks at me with a little bit of pity. “We don’t have to talk about it right now.”
“I know that wasn’t what you were expecting.”
“I’m sure she’s a good person.” He nudges me, echoing what I said.
We sit in silence for awhile in the cold breeze, recovering. There’s a pit in my stomach at the thought of going upstairs and talking to Grace.
“Look,” he says. “This isn’t the best time, I get that. And I understand if you have to be with her. But everything between us has been about our siblings since the day we met. Tomorrow’s my last real day here. That Halloween fair is happening. There’s no school, it’s a teacher conference day. Let’s go together. Let’s talk about something other than them.”
I’m supposed to be centering my life around her again.
But Levi is going away forever.
“If you’re up to it, that is.” He flushes. “You were sick. You are sick. And I mean, if I’m feeling up to it, with my excellent new battle scar and all.”
One last moment of stolen time. Then he’ll leave and I’ll go back to being hers alone.
“Okay,” I say, ignoring the wave of guilt.
He smiles uncertainly beneath the blood on his face, like he’s not sure it’s right, either. “Meet you at the ticket booth at noon.”
When Mom and Dad get home, the house fills with normal sounds. Pots clattering, cooking noises. Grace’s door hasn’t opened yet. I’ve been waiting for her to go downstairs first.
I cleaned up, but maybe I missed a broken shard, a spot of blood. Maybe Mom will come upstairs and ask what happened and I won’t have to start this conversation.
But she doesn’t.
So I get out of bed.
It’s Grace’s choice to tell them about Adam, but I still have to tell them she needs help. If they refuse to see it for themselves, I’ll make them look.
Before I can do anything, my phone buzzes.
[email protected]
All my blood leaves my body.
What does Cassius want? He said it was over.
To Joy Morris—
There’s one last thing that I need you to do.
I don’t bother scrolling down. Preston was right. I shouldn’t have let him get away with it.
I open Facebook, find Cassius’s cell number, and call it.
He answers on the third ring.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I don’t realize how furious I am until I speak.
“Who is this?”
“I was going to forget about it, Cassius. I was going to chalk it all up to some kind of temporary insanity after what went on with your sister. God knows I understand that feeling. I even felt bad for you. But do you seriously think you can pull this shit when you already told me I didn’t kill him? What part of your brain made you think that would work?”
“Is this Joy?” His voice is tinny, terrified.
“I’m not playing this game anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” he stammers.
“Everything you said in your email—”
“What email?”
“What do you mean what email?” I bark.
“I never sent you any email. I don’t even know your email address.”
Why is he lying? There’s no one else it could have been.
“This is . . . about Adam?” He gets very quiet. “You mean . . . you remember what happened that night?”
There’s something in his voice.
Nausea chews at my stomach. “Remember what?”
“You blacked out,” Cassius whispers. “By the time we got you back in your bed, you didn’t remember any of it. You were so drunk.”
“Who is we?”
“I have to go, Joy.”
“Don’t hang up—”
“I don’t want anything to do with this anymore!” he cries. “I started over. This is my new life. Leave me alone.”
The line goes dead. Cassius’s name vanishes from my screen, and the email pops back up. My eyes finally settle on the rest of it.
To Joy Morris—
There’s one last thing that I need you to do.
Either you tell Levi that you killed his half brother, or I’ll send him, and the police, this video.
Attached file: adamsbirthdayparty.mp4
TWENTY
September 30
Grace
GETTING DRESSED IS HARD. MY FINGERS won’t move. I maneuver into my sweatshirt with my wrists, elbows. Yank on shorts. I never washed off my makeup.
Don’t be scared. Be something else. Empty isn’t working.
I can’t hold on to the handlebars of my bike, so I abandon it in the dew-wet grass of our lawn, dropping it softly so Mom and Dad won’t hear. I don’t need it. We walked the last time, too.
She wasn’t supposed to go alone. I was supposed to be there, a safety net in the background. Joy, don’t do anything without me. Don’t go anywhere without me. It’s not safe for either of us to ever be alone.
Only two cars pass me on the way there, the headlights slicing through the darkness.
As I get closer, I hear the bass down the deserted road, past all the trees. Fast, like the people are dancing to my heartbeat.
There’s a bonfire in the yard, barely controlled, but nobody’s watching it. This is the kind of party I thought we’d find that night. The kind of party where everyone is hungry, but it’s okay, because everyone is overflowing with themselves. When people take, there’s enough to go around. There’s still soemthing left behind.
I slip inside like I did at Cassius’s party, like a ghost. The furniture’s shoved to the side. A rotating black box spits blobs of colored light at the walls. I wind through laughter and screams. Underneath it all, there’s the quiet hungry growl of the quarry. Nobody else hears it.
There’s a hundred people packed together, one body with a million limbs. The house drinks me into the walls. An elbow knocks the breath out of my chest. Light moves dizzyingly over faces mashing together in front of me. I try to disappear, but there’s too many hands and everyone is so starving and there’s not enough left of me to feed anyone. Find Joy.
And there he is, detached from everyone, in the center of the mass, the hungriest of all, staggering to the beat. In the darkness his shape is feral. Flashes of red light illuminate every drop of sweat, his mindless, drunken grin.
H
e’ll look. He’ll see me. He’ll take what’s left. The fear knocks all my walls down at once and I feel everything. Everything.
I run. I fight through a jungle of people, and then a jungle of trees. There’s no moon, no stars. I lose myself in the dark. Branches snag me, trip me, cut me. I fall. My knees bleed more than when Joy shaved hers. I’m on my stomach in the dirt and dead leaves, just like when November and I broke into his house. I’ll always be running, running in circles. I’m in a cage made of my own bones and skin.
Some part of me sits back and watches me sob. Get over it.
I was wrong about being empty. I was always full. I just couldn’t see it.
People turn off the light when they don’t want to know what’s in the dark. Everyone’s afraid of the dark. They should be afraid of the light.
Pine needles scratch my cheek. Slowly the cold of the earth soaks into me, the truth with it. Tricking my sister into hurting my rapist was never going to help me. There was never an easy fix, a secret shortcut to being okay. I’ve always been screwed up, and now I’m screwing up Joy, too.
I stay, I don’t know how long, until I stop making noises. Then I realize the house isn’t making noises anymore, either.
I leave the woods.
The sky’s a different kind of blue now. The cars that were in the driveway are gone. I was in the woods for hours.
I left Joy alone for hours.
The house is full of beer bottles, pizza boxes, spilled liquids, but no people. In the silence, my heartbeat is deafening. Did Joy go home? Did she find him first?
“Grace, is that you?”
Cassius is stumbling toward me in the dark, hitting the edge of the dining room table. One of his eyes is bloodshot and swollen. His phone sticks out of his shirt pocket. He stops far away from me and stretches out a hand, like he’s reaching over some impossible distance.
“Where’s Joy?” I ask, my voice too loud.
“I . . . don’t know.”
“I asked you to find her.”
He sways, still drunk. His cheeks are crisp with dried tears. “Grace—I’m sorry—my head is always in the wrong place and if I’d been thinking right that night, it never would have . . .”
I’m so tired of having to reassure people that what happened to me wasn’t their fault.
“Cassius, shut up. Tell me when you last saw my sister.”