I followed Lex out of the school and toward her car, scrutinizing her every movement for some clue of what she was thinking. She didn’t say anything, just dug into her purse and popped a couple of mints into her mouth from the tin she always carried. We climbed into the car, where the air was as stifling as the silence. Lex let go of a big sigh and melted back into her seat, eyes closed, and stayed that way for a long time. I sat tensely beside her, waiting for her to do . . . something.
Then, with no warning, she sat up, cranked the AC, put on her sunglasses, and said, “What a bitch. Want some ice cream?”
• • •
Lex didn’t say another word about what had happened. I had to assume that meant she hadn’t taken Singh’s concerns to heart. She took me for that ice cream, and we drove back to Hidden Hills with the windows down and the radio cranked up, arriving home in time to watch Sabine shoot her twin sister for poisoning her husband. Lex wasn’t much of an actress; she wore every feeling right on her sleeve. If Dr. Singh had ignited doubts about me inside of her, I felt sure I would have seen it.
But when Patrick came over after work that night—which was unusual for him, since he usually spent weeknights in L.A.—she immediately said to him:
“Will you take a look at my car? It’s making that weird knocking sound again.”
“Sure,” he said, and followed her out to the garage.
I hadn’t noticed any knocking sound.
The back of my neck got hot. They were talking about me; they had to be. Had Lex fooled me? Was she telling Patrick right now that she wasn’t sure I was Danny? I turned and saw that Nicholas had also watched them go. Our eyes met briefly, and he looked back down at his laptop. He hadn’t asked me why I’d left school early. Either he didn’t care or he’d heard from someone else.
Mia flung herself into the seat beside Nicholas and hung her head on his shoulder. “I’m bored. Will you play with me?”
“I’ve got to finish this paper,” he said, carefully edging his shoulder out from under her cheek.
“I’ll play with you,” I said. I couldn’t just sit there staring at the door to the garage, driving myself crazy wondering what was happening behind it. And I felt bad for the kid; she was so often overlooked by the rest of them.
Mia’s eyes lit up. “Really?”
I smiled. It took only the smallest thing to make her happy. “Sure. Want to go swimming?”
“Yeah!” she said. “I’m going to go put on my suit!”
“Mia, Mom doesn’t want you . . .” Nicholas sighed and let the sentence drift away as Mia bolted from the room. “Mom hates it when she swims in the brace. The hinges tear up the towels, and she tracks water everywhere.”
“Well, Mom’s not here,” I said. Jessica’s car was already gone when we left for school this morning, and she still hadn’t come home. It was cruel to let a kid grow up with a swimming pool in their backyard they weren’t allowed to use, and if the cops were going to show up and haul me away from here any minute, I could think of worse things to do with my remaining time than swimming with Mia.
She changed into a ruffly purple swimsuit, and I put on the trunks that had been part of the haul Lex got for me when I first arrived. After glimpsing my bare chest in the mirror in Danny’s bathroom, scarred and maybe a little too developed for a sixteen-year-old, I also pulled on a T-shirt.
Nicholas stopped me on my way out to the pool.
“You’ve got to keep a really close eye on her, okay?” he said.
“I will,” I said.
“Seriously,” he said. “She doesn’t swim very well.”
“Got it,” I said. I didn’t swim too well either, but the pool wasn’t that deep.
Mia ran across the patio and leapt into the pool with a screech. She came up spluttering, and I immediately jumped in after her, catching her under the arms and making a motorboat sound as I pulled her to the shallower water, where she could stand on her toes. My eyes burned from hitting the water with them still open.
“You okay?” I asked.
She nodded and wrapped her wet arms around my neck. “Can we play Washing Machine?”
“We can if you teach me how.”
Mia taught me Washing Machine and Sharks and Minnows and obliterated me in a half a dozen underwater handstand contests. She graciously promised she’d help me get better, for which I thanked her. I stayed within an arm’s length of her, because whenever she struggled, her braced right leg lagging behind the left one, she reached out for me. She was trusting that I’d be there, and the idea of her reaching for help and not finding any made me sick to my stomach. Each time her little hands closed around me, I felt this warm, tight feeling in my throat that I didn’t want to look at too closely.
I looked back toward the house. The light in the garage was still on, and, just like he had been for most of the past hour, Nicholas was still standing in a window, watching us.
• • •
It was starting to get dark by the time Mia’s fingers got pruney enough for her to decide it was time to get out of the pool. I’d been covered in gooseflesh for a while but hadn’t had the heart to bail on her.
I ran into Patrick at the foot of the stairs as I was headed up to my room to change. The light in the garage had gone out only a few minutes earlier.
“Hey, if that school counselor bothers you again,” he said, “you call me, okay? What she did today was unacceptable.”
“Okay,” I said, instantly relieved. That’s what they’d been talking about. How Singh had overstepped her bounds, not how I was a con artist posing as their brother.
“I don’t think she’ll cause problems again though,” he added. He must have laid some lawyerly smack down already, or would be soon. “You have plans this weekend?”
I shook my head.
“Want to go to the Dodgers game with me? The firm has a box.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. It seemed like a very brotherly thing, going to a baseball game together. I thought of Danny’s room with his baseball posters and the signed ball in the plastic case. Danny loved baseball. I loved baseball. “That would be great.”
“Don’t tell Lex,” Patrick said, leaning close to me, “but I was thinking I might also give you a driving lesson. What do you think?”
“Yeah,” I said. Finally, something I wouldn’t have to pretend about. I couldn’t drive worth a damn. “Can we take the Jag?”
Patrick laughed. “Sure. But only because your dad won’t be out for another year.”
“Cool,” I said. Being rich was fun.
“Okay, go change,” Patrick said. “You must be freezing.”
I remembered that I was. I headed up the stairs, but stopped on the landing when I heard raised voices to my left. My first thought was Jessica; she was the only Tate I’d ever heard yell. But the voices were coming from Lex’s room.
“. . . like some stupid child,” Nicholas said as backed out of the room.
“Then grow the fuck up, Nicky!” Lex replied from inside.
“Bitch!” Nicholas turned to stalk away but froze when he saw me.
“And don’t you—” Lex appeared in the doorway and stopped in her tracks. The scowl instantly disappeared from her expression, and her voice was soft and sweet when she said, “Hey, Danny. Are you hungry?”
Nicholas gave her a look that was part incredulity, part disgust, and then he brushed past me on his way to his own bedroom. The click of the lock was audible in the silent hallway.
• • •
The next day at lunch I sat with Ren again. We talked about art class and A Life of Love, Lex’s favorite soap, which Ren also happened to be a fan of. Nicholas watched me from his table across the courtyard, and Dr. Singh watched me from a window. Neither tried to speak to me.
This is when the old me would have run.
The new me was starting to have too much to lose.
• • •
“Want to come over to my house later?” Ren asked when the bell rang at
the end of our lunch period.
I blinked. “Why?”
I’d blurted the word out without thinking and was afraid she might be offended, but Ren just laughed.
“Sorry, did you have other plans?” she asked. Although the mockery was gentle, it was still mockery. Pretty ballsy when you’re talking to a poor, delicate kidnapping victim. “Plus, I don’t totally hate your company.”
“I, uh . . .” I swallowed.
“It’s cool. You don’t have to if you don’t want. Or I could make up a good reason if that helps? Like how I’m really terrible at art, and I’m afraid our stupid class is going to sink my GPA if I can’t learn how to make a bowl of fruit vaguely resemble a bowl of fruit. Actually, that’s not even made up. That’s totally true.”
Ren was not scary. Ren could not expose me. But she made me nervous anyway, in an odd way I couldn’t explain.
When I didn’t answer, she waved a hand. “You’re obviously not into it. No worries.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said quickly. “I’ll come.”
This was the whole point of becoming Danny Tate, wasn’t it? To have the friends and family and opportunities I could never have as myself? Surely that list was supposed to include a pretty girl.
When the final bell rang at the end of the day, Nicholas wasn’t waiting for me at the doors to the student parking lot like usual. He’d barely spoken to me since the day before, but it was hard to believe he’d just leave me to find my own way home. If nothing else, he had to know Lex would kill him for it. He had history last period, so I checked with his teacher, who was packing up to leave when I poked my head into the classroom.
“He was called to the guidance office,” she said. “Check there.”
My stomach dropped. “Okay. Thanks.”
I walked quickly toward the front office. Dr. Singh wasn’t allowed to speak to me, so she was going to interview my relatives instead? She wouldn’t dare say the same thing to Nicholas about my real identity that she’d said to Lex, would she? I walked faster. This was bad. I’d deeply pissed Nicholas off during that lunch at the diner when I’d said that stupid thing about him being my best friend, and he’d never been completely sure about me in the first place, so there was no telling what he might say to Singh.
I reached the front office just as Nicholas emerged with Dr. Singh. The woman nodded to me—“Danny”—and disappeared back inside the office.
“Ready?” Nicholas said as if nothing had happened.
“What were you talking to her for?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing,” I said. I’d decided earlier that day that I was going to try harder with Nicholas, be extra nice to him and win him back to my side, but I couldn’t stop the heat rising in my voice. “You’ve been there since the middle of last period. Did she ask about me?”
“Not everything’s about you,” he said. “Are you ready to go home?”
“I just want to know what you were doing in there.” I knew I was losing it but I couldn’t stop. “You know how upset Lex was—”
“Look, this isn’t really any of your business,” he said. “It has nothing to do with you.”
“Just tell me what the fuck she said!” I burst.
For one stunned moment Nicholas just stared at me.
“No,” he finally said, slowly. “I don’t think I will. Now, let’s go, okay?”
I took a deep breath. Shoved everything back down inside. Acting out right now would only make things worse. I shook my head. “I don’t need a ride.”
“What? Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m going to a classmate’s house,” I said.
“Who, that girl you sat with at lunch?” he asked.
“Yeah.” He was looking at me with such confusion that I added, “She needs some help with an assignment.”
He laughed. “You’re helping someone with homework? You just started school again. You’re not even doing homework yet.”
I didn’t understand why he hated me so much. So Danny and Nicholas hadn’t gotten along great as kids, but I was still his loving brother, miraculously returned to him. Shouldn’t that have made up for any childhood issues he had with me?
Unless the real problem was that he suspected I wasn’t his brother at all.
“It’s an art assignment,” I said. “I’m good at art. Besides, she’s new here too.”
Nicholas looked at me closely. “Danny, you’re not new here.”
I swallowed. “You know what I mean. Anyway, tell Lex I’ll be home in a couple of hours.” I started to walk toward the library, where Ren and I had arranged to meet.
“You haven’t talked to her about this yet?” Nicholas called after me. “She’s not going to like it—”
“Just tell her, okay?” I said as I turned the corner and Nicholas disappeared from view. I would start being extra nice to him tomorrow.
• • •
A few minutes later I was climbing into Ren’s car. I surreptitiously scoped it out; any place where a person spent a lot of time could tell you a surprising amount about them if you knew how to look. Like Nicholas’s BMW: It was gray and pristine and he always kept it cold. Ren’s car was chaos. It was messy but not dirty, a blue Mercedes convertible from the ’70s or ’80s that had the right hood ornament to fit into the student parking lot but whose sharp, boxy lines refused to conform. It smelled of old leather and the cucumber hand lotion that lay on the passenger’s seat along with some crumpled papers, a half-empty water bottle, a phone charger, a candy bar wrapper, and a tube of lip gloss. Ren scooped all of this up without apology and tossed it into the backseat with the other teenage detritus that littered the leather seats. Some aggressive, upbeat girl rock blared from the speaker when she turned the car on, and she turned the music down but not off as she drove us to her house in Calabasas. I filed every detail away to analyze later, because despite a couple of days of careful study, I still hadn’t figured Ren out.
Her home was an ultramodern place of glass and steel that wasn’t quite as big or grand as the Tate house, but that was grading it against a brutal curve. It still would have held a dozen copies of the house I grew up in. She parked her car in the driveway and led me in through a side door that connected to the kitchen. She grabbed a couple of sodas from the fridge and handed me one.
“When did you move here?” I asked.
“Six weeks ago,” she said. “It’s my aunt and uncle’s place. My parents are working on this skyscraper in Dubai for the next year, so I’m staying here until they get back.”
“You didn’t want to go with them?” I asked.
She screwed up her face. “Hell no. I mean, I love my parents, but no way was I going to change my entire life to be with them. Transferring schools junior year is bad enough. My aunt and uncle are cool. They’re not around a lot, and they basically let me do whatever I want.”
“Hey, cuz!”
Ren and I both jumped and turned to look at the guy who had come into the kitchen behind us. He was maybe four or five years older than me and wearing a wrinkled shirt and battered flip-flops that went well with his shaggy hair and vacant expression. Naturally, he reeked of pot.
Ren sighed. “This is my cousin, Kai.”
Kai nodded at me. “Hey.”
“This is Danny,” Ren said.
Kai looked at me blankly, and then his expression slowly—painfully slowly—shifted into realization.
“Oh,” he said. “Shit.”
Ren punched him in the arm. “God, Kai!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “That’s the usual reaction. ”
“Cool,” Kai said. “So, hey, how’s your sister doing? She still hot?”
I blinked. Ren looked like she was considering punching him somewhere other than the arm.
“You know my sister?” I asked.
“Sexy Lexi? Hell yeah!” he said. “We were pretty tight in high school. Me and Patrick, too. He used to get me the best weed.”
I wa
sn’t sure how to respond to that. I didn’t know what to say about Patrick procuring him drugs, and I definitely wasn’t going to confirm that Lex was, indeed, still hot. So I just said: “Cool.”
“Yeah, dude,” Kai said. He opened the refrigerator and started to gather food in his arms: turkey and cheese slices, a gallon of orange juice, anything he could lay his hands on.
“You’re not supposed to raid the big house fridge, dude,” Ren said.
“Yeah, whatever,” Kai said. “So Lex is good? I always worried about her. I tried to look out for her when I could, but she was—oh, but hey, don’t worry! I never hooked up with her or anything. Not that I would have minded, because damn was she—”
“Jesus, Kai,” Ren said. “That’s his sister!”
Kai started to giggle. “Oh, right! Sorry! That’s some seriously ironic shit.” He opened the door to the pantry and added a box of cookies to the haul in his arms. “I gotta go.”
He drifted out of the kitchen, and Ren shook her head after him.
“How tragic is that?” she said. She turned to me. “Want to go upstairs?”
“Sure,” I said and followed her into the hallway.
“I know he’s family and all,” she said as we climbed to the second story, “but he’s an idiot. Like his parents won’t notice the fridge is empty when they get home. I’m always telling him, just take a little at a time. It’s all about plausible deniability!”
I smiled. She would make a decent scammer.
“He lives here?” I asked.
“Technically, he lives in the pool house,” she said. “He’s supposed to pay rent and buy his own groceries and everything, but as you can see, not so much. He pretty much just gets high and plays video games all day.”
Most of the kids I had gone to school with in my past life were probably living similar existences, albeit in less grand locations. I probably would be too if things had been different. “Not a bad life,” I said.
“Could be worse, I guess,” she said as she opened the door to her bedroom.
I hadn’t been in many girls’ bedrooms. I was suddenly very aware of that fact as I stepped inside. I was interested in what other clues I could gather here about Ren, but I instantly saw that this room wouldn’t be much help. Even if she hadn’t told me earlier than this was her aunt and uncle’s house, I would have been able to tell from a glance that this was actually a guest room. It had that sterile, unlived-in feeling that Danny’s room had, and it was decorated in somber creams and navies while its occupant was currently wearing yellow and electric blue. But scattered over the top of this sedate and antiseptic base was evidence of the same Ren who drove that chaotic Mercedes. Colorful clothing thrown over the backs of chairs, books piled up on a dresser since there was no bookcase, the bottle of that green nail polish on the bedside table. Artifacts of a girl in motion. One who didn’t much care what people thought. A confident girl who didn’t mind showing her room to a near-stranger, even when it was kind of a mess. There was more evidence of Ren imprinted on this room that wasn’t really hers than I’d ever leave on the room that wasn’t really mine back in the Tate house.