Chapter 18
Sitting back in the booth, I shake my head at him, my mouth open in amazement. “Kieran Lanier, you are so my hero right now. I was totally about to pee myself and you were, like, Zen Master of the Universe or something.”
“Not really. I almost lost it a few times there. And you were pretty smooth yourself.”
I lean forward so I can whisper to him. “And our new friend ‘Danny’ isn’t from anywhere near Wrigley Field. If he tried to blend in, he’d get run out of the park for being a Mets or a Yankees fan as soon as he opened his mouth.”
“Which means what, exactly?”
“It means you need to start watching more sports.” I roll my eyes. “And it means Danny Boy’s definitely from New York.”
“Knowledge that doesn’t get us closer to finding out how what he’s doing here, does it?” Kieran’s face falls, and a horrible thought occurs to me as I glance toward the kitchen. As if I’ve willed it to happen, Frank backs through the door and walks over to our table with a steaming plate of cheese fries he barely sets down before he rushes behind the counter, apparently not in the mood to be Mr. Friendly anymore.
“What if we tipped him off that we know who he is?” I whisper. “Something in his face…he knows I know he was lying about being from Chicago.”
“Doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll think we know who he is. It just means we can tell he doesn’t know anything about Chicago. I don’t know much about Chicago, either, obviously, so that wouldn’t be too unusual for someone who wasn’t from around here.”
I’m about to open my mouth and say something that ends up lost to history, because Frank/Danny reemerges from the kitchen, sliding behind Dewayne at the cash register before heading to the far end of the restaurant. And in the instant he scoots behind Dewayne, I think I catch him giving me A Look.
Frank shoots me what on his face would be considered a glare, his eyes narrowing until they’re almost shut, his lips curled up into the kind of sneer I’ve guys at school get when they’re itching to fight in the parking lot after a football game. The Look passes so quickly my eyes can’t be sure they’ve seen what they’ve seen, but my heart beating in my throat confirms I probably have. I swallow my heart back down into my chest and don’t tell Kieran, partially because I don’t want to scare him with something I’m not one-hundred percent sure I’ve seen and partially because when I turn to him, I find he’s pushed the plate of cheese fries over next to my soda and has his head down on his algebra book. He snoozes while I munch on fries and drink soda, staring out the plate glass at a couple window shopping in front of my mom’s store. Behind the counter, Dewayne loses his footing slightly and drops a stack of plastic cups, their clatter against the tile near enough to us to wake Kieran up.
“Sorry, guys,” Dewayne apologizes when he stands.
“No problem,” Kieran says, just as Frank passes the table. “Need some help there, boss?” he offers, stopping next to Kieran, but Dewayne waves him off with a “Nah. I got it,” and Frank heads back to the kitchen without once again making eye contact with me.
“Okay—now that we know he’s here, we need to figure out what we’re going to do,” I say, keeping my voice down.
“You think we should tell my not-parents?”
“You have any other ideas?” I ask, ignoring his insistence on no longer claiming Jim and Carlie.
Kieran twists around to look at the kitchen doors, whipping back towards me when Frank steps out to fill a soda cup. Once Frank is at the other end of the restaurant again and out of earshot, Kieran gives his response: “No.”
“No, what?” I blurt out, confused. “No, you don’t have any other ideas or no, we shouldn’t tell your parents?
Kieran sits back in the booth against the cracked orange Formica. “They’ll just move us away somewhere. If we tell them, they won’t think Titusville’s safe anymore and we’ll run.” He shifts his eyes from me to watch a car passing by on River Avenue. “We left New York to start over after my adoption. We left Asheville because they were afraid Morgan had figured out where we were. If my not-parents find out anything at all, I’m gone.”
“Things are different this time,” I point out, my heart bounding into my throat again when he says I’m gone. “Now you’re aware of everything. Before, you thought you were just moving to a new place, and, I guess you were probably too little to realize you were leaving New York…”
My voice fades away as I feel like I’m babbling, and Kieran shakes his head. “Exactly. Things are different this time. This time, I know what’s up, and I’m not leaving. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life running when one of these guys figures out where I am. My whole life is already nothing but fear, Zip. Being afraid I might fall asleep at the wrong time. Being afraid I might accidentally hurt myself. Other people deciding what’s best for me. I’m sick of being scared, and I’m sick of my life being determined by people who aren’t me. I want to stay here and finish high school.” He pauses, leaning in to take my hand from the edge of the history textbook so he can lace his fingers together with mine. “I want to stay here with you.”
Flattered as I am, flattery will get him nowhere if he ends up kidnapped and forced into a life of crime or dragged off to a lab where mad doctors will probe his brain. Or something even worse. “Don’t stay if you think you’re going to get hurt,” I whisper. “I don’t want you to.”
And there goes the grin that turns me inside out. “You wouldn’t miss me a little?”
“I’d miss you a lot, but I’d rather miss you and know that you’re out there somewhere and you’re okay. Besides, I thought you told Jim and Carlie you were leaving after the school year was over.” I smirk at him, knowing he probably wasn’t serious about the threat Kayla told me he made on our birthday.
Kieran squeezes my hand while shoveling in some cheese fries. “I was pretty pissed off when I said that, but don’t worry—you’re not going to get the chance to miss me. I’m staying. I’m staying for you, and I’m staying for me. For once in my life, I’m going to do what I want.”
“And what about our friend ‘Danny’?” I ask. “What about Morgan Levert? What if he already knows you’re here?”
Kieran lets go of me and wolfs down a few more fries as he considers my question. “Danny Boy’s been around for six weeks and hasn’t done anything yet. So if he and Morgan are going to come get me for some reason, then they can go ahead and try. I mean, what can we really do until they make a move, right? It’s not like the cops are going to arrest someone for something they’re just thinking about doing.”
As much as I don’t like what he’s saying, I realize waiting is all we can do. Just like any good Boogey Man, Morgan Levert is still kind of an imaginary creature and will stay that way until he decides, if he decides, to show up. In the meantime, Kieran and I can make sure he’s never alone and we’ll keep an eye on the other Boogey Man we had no idea we were supposed to be afraid of.
But Danny/Frank makes sure we can’t keep an eye on him. When we arrive at the Diner right after school the next day and assume our places in our favorite booth, Dewayne comes over to wait on us rather than Frank Dozier. “What can I get you guys?” he says, pulling a pencil from behind his ear and freeing a graying strand of dark hair from his ponytail as he does.
“Where’s Danny?” Kieran asks.
“Didn’t show. He was supposed to be here first thing this morning to help me open, and I never heard a word. Called the number he put on his application—out of service.”
“Weird,” I say to Dewayne, but my eyes are fixed on Kieran. His jaw clenches, and I can tell he’s trying hard not to show too much emotion over the disappearance of the waiter we barely knew.
“Yeah. I even called out to the Dubrows’ to check on him, you know, thinking maybe something was wrong,” Dewayne continues, shaking his head. “Old Man Dubrow told me they ain’t seen hide nor hair of Danny in years.”
I’m surprised to learn a real Danny Dubrow
exists—I guess Frank Dozier did his homework and assumed a legitimate identity instead of making one up.
“I never knew the Dubrows that well,” I say, trying to keep my voice level and make normal small talk. “All the kids were a lot older than me, I think.”
“Seems I remember a Danny Dubrow from around your mom’s time.” Dewayne nods. “Maybe a few years after. Thought that when I first hired him, but so many kids come in and out of here, gets hard to keep ‘em all straight after all these years. Anyway, whoever he is, he’s gone now. Screwed me pretty good, too. I’m doing everything around here today but cooking and dishes ‘cause none of my other guys were able to come in on such short notice.”
I glance over at Kieran once more, and he’s rubbing his lips together, trying not to let his expression give anything away.
“So, what can I get you?” Dewayne asks again, because he doesn’t have our order memorized. I ask for my usual diet soda and cheese fries, while Kieran squeaks out a request for a regular soda. Once Dewayne walks away, Kieran exhales as if he’s been holding his breath for the last few minutes. “I guess we tipped Frank off like you thought,” he says, and for the first time in my life, I wish I hadn’t been right about something.
“Yeah. Now what?”
Kieran crosses his arms over his chest, shoulders hitching towards his ears. “Maybe he’s gone. Maybe he figured we’d tell somebody he was here and he got out while he still could.”
“Maybe.”
Staring out the window at the second gray day in a row, I get a glimpse of my mother moving around inside her store, but at this distance, she’s only a sort of blurry, colorful miniature. I wish I could tell her everything, ask her for advice, listen to her rattle off a few quips about my predicament that would make it seem less bizarre than it is, but I can’t. I promised the Laniers the night of my birthday, after Kieran slipped the charm bracelet on my wrist, that I wouldn’t get anyone else involved, not even my family, since we weren’t sure what kind of threat we might be dealing with from Kieran’s birth father. It’s hurt, carrying this secret around with me, but then Mom goes into some meltdown over how we should do my hair and makeup for Prom, and she makes me forget for a while. But right now, nothing could force either Kieran or me forget about Frank Dozier.
“So you think he might be hiding out here somewhere?” Kieran asks.
I wrack my brain, trying to come up with a place Frank might be if he’s still in the area. “Hard to say. I mean, there’s a couple of abandoned houses out by the Buckley plant, but I think the county cops check them a lot to keep the tweakers out. So he’s camping somewhere, or he could’ve made friends with some meth heads and he’s shacking up with them.”
“Or he’s really gone,” Kieran says as he relaxes his shoulders, his voice full of hope and doubt all at the same time.
“I guess we should keep our guard up for a while until we’re sure,” I note, no idea what would count as being “sure,” much less any idea as to what counts as “keeping our guard up.” Looking out the plate glass window once more, I catch another glimpse of my mother—clearer this time, since she’s working on a display in the store’s front window. I study her as she arranges a lavender and aqua tie-dyed scarf around the neck of a blank-faced bald mannequin wearing a matching aqua sundress. Mom wouldn’t be able to see me because I’m too far away and at this angle, my face would be half hidden by the edge of the window and the diner wall. But for some reason, just watching her, just knowing she’s nearby, makes me feel better.
“I heard about this sleeping thing he has. Kid gets it a lot, don’t he?”
I’m pulled out of my thoughts by Dewayne, who places my drink in front of me and sets Kieran’s soda closer to the edge of the table, as Kieran’s gone face down on the fake wood plastic table top, his arms folded underneath his forehead like a pillow.
“Yeah. He does.” I smile, and Dewayne heads back to the kitchen as I reach out to run a hand through Kieran’s hair, wondering if he might be dreaming right now about how this is all going to end.