Please Don't Tell Part 15

"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 s.h.i.+rt.

"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 Ca.s.sius?

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.

"Ca.s.sius?" 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 s.h.i.+nes. "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, embarra.s.sed. "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, b.u.mping into his easel.

Clothes are strange. They're flimsy, but they s.h.i.+eld you from so much. I'm wearing a yellow T-s.h.i.+rt 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 b.u.t.ton. Gross.

"Let me know when you're ready," Ca.s.sius 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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.

Ca.s.sius 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 cliche. 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.

Ca.s.sius misses a stroke, frowns at his mistake. When he's s.p.a.cing 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 sh.e.l.l.

"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 gla.s.s 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 s.e.xual 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 Ca.s.sius 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."

ELEVEN.

October 19 Joy YOU DON'T REALIZE HOW MANY HOURS there are in a week until you watch them pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s. n.o.body else dies, n.o.body else is arrested. Ben's mom comes in with my mom and some other parents, hands out a pet.i.tion 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+. Ca.s.sius 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.

Sat.u.r.day 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 a.n.a.lyze 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.

n.o.body, n.o.body. 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 gla.s.s 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.