Please Don't Tell by Laura Tims Page B

tingle again. “That is some creepy disgusting child porn shit.”
    â€œNo, no, no.” He scratches convulsively at the zit on his chin. “You have to do it. Joy, please. You can’t go to jail.”
    I shake my head. “It isn’t so easy just to frame someone for murder, you know? Maybe the cops could investigate. Like look at fingerprints and crime stuff. And then, if it was me, they could tell me.”
    â€œJoy!”
    â€œAnd if it was, maybe I do deserve to go to jail,” I mumble. “That’s where they put people so they can’t hurt anyone.”
    â€œStop it. Grace needs you.”
    â€œShe barely talks to me lately.” I touch the rip on the side of my quilt. It’s been there since fifth grade, since Grace and I made sock monkeys and her scissors snagged in the fabric. She cried over it, she felt so bad. “We’re not the way we used to be.”
    He makes a weird noise that isn’t a word.
    â€œAnd my parents think I’m a failure anyway. I’m not going to college, Pres. I’m basically fucked after highschool. Prison wouldn’t be so bad.” I’m dizzy. “They’d feed me and—I’d know what the rest of my life would look like.”
    â€œForget about Grace, then.” His chin’s bleeding. “I need you.”
    â€œPres, it’s okay.”
    â€œIt is not okay.” He’s half yelling. I flinch. Downstairs, the treadmill noise stops. “I rely on . . . before I met you, it was horrible. I don’t need much. I just need one person. It’s stupid.”
    â€œIt is not stupid.”
    â€œIt’s stupid how I am. If something happened to you, I don’t think anyone else in the world would want anything to do with me.”
    My heart splits wide open. “You’d find a new person.”
    â€œI don’t want to.”
    Suddenly Grace opens my door, a microwave popcorn bag in her hand. “Hey.”
    Pres shoves the photos under his thigh. They trade panicky nods. They’ve always been alarmed by each other.
    â€œMom called and wanted me to tell you she and Dad are both going to be home in like fifteen,” she says carefully.
    If she moved the blanket just a little bit, she’d see the envelope.
    â€œOkay,” I say. And then a moment of awkward silence.
    â€œWhose sweatshirt is that?” she asks, accusatorily, pointing to my chair across the room.
    I turn and see Levi’s sweatshirt, the baseball cap jutting out of the pocket.
    â€œNobody’s.”
    â€œIs that a guy’s sweatshirt?”
    â€œIt’s mine.”
    She looks around my room for a second, all the pictures of us, all her old drawings. She crumples her nose, goes back out into the hall, and closes her door.
    â€œIf your parents are coming home, I should go,” says Pres thickly.
    â€œI promise I’ll think about what to do,” I whisper.
    He takes the photos from under his thigh, shoves them back into the envelope so quickly I barely see him do it.
    â€œYou okay?” I ask.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œPreston—”
    â€œI’m going to go now.”
    â€œWait,” I say, but he’s already halfway across my room, climbing out into the night.
    I spend the night awake, facing the window, a knife under my pillow, remembering every night I slept in Grace’s room so she wouldn’t be afraid of the dark.
    â€œThe tree branch outside my window is rotten,” I tell Mom in the car to school the next morning. “The big branch. The one on the tree that Grace fell off when she was a kid and sprained her ankle. It’s dead. Can Dad saw it off?”
    â€œI don’t know what all this is about trees, Joy.”
    I leave the car without saying good-bye.
    The photos are in my bag. I’m not—I can’t—do this. I’ll take them to the police station after school. Or talk to Savannah myself.
    Those are the good-person