She pushed the clothes off the back of the desk chair so I could sit there and then lowered herself cross-legged onto the bed.
“So,” she said. “How’s it going?”
“Okay,” I said.
And then I just stared at her with no idea what to say next, while she just smiled at me. This should have been easy. She was the one person I didn’t have to be careful around, who I could just be myself with, because she’d never known Danny Tate. But being around her turned me into this empty, blank person. Someone dull and mute and fumbling. Was it just nerves? Was this what normal people felt when talking to a pretty girl they actually liked and didn’t just want something from?
“Should we make fun of Kai some more?” she finally said. “That’s endless fodder for conversation. Like, lately he’s been making these halfhearted attempts at becoming a professional surfer, which I’m sure you find shocking—”
“Sorry,” I said. “I know I’m not easy to talk to.”
“It’s not just you,” she said. “My mouth has no filter, which has always been a problem for me, and I don’t want to say something stupid to you, so I’m really overthinking things over here.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not as fragile as people think.”
She cocked her head at me. “You do seem weirdly well-adjusted, considering.”
I kind of nodded, kind of shrugged. Why had I come here? I couldn’t talk to this girl, not like this, without a crowd to perform for. I often chose not to talk to people, but it wasn’t because I couldn’t. I could always summon the right personality for any situation; it was what had gotten me this far. Why couldn’t I talk to her?
Then I realized.
I couldn’t talk to Ren because I didn’t know who she wanted me to be. She didn’t seem to want me to be anyone but whoever I was, and I wasn’t anyone, not really. I’d spent a lifetime becoming a mirror that just reflected back the person others wanted to see, but she didn’t want anything. So I was nothing.
“Sorry,” I said with rising panic. This was stupid. She was just a girl, I shouldn’t be this scared, but I suddenly felt like I was treading into something dangerous. “I just . . . maybe I should go . . .”
“You’re not going to help me with my drawing?” She reached into her school bag and fished out her sketch pad. “Look, it’s seriously messed up, and I can’t figure out how to fix it. Any ideas?”
She stood and laid the drawing out on the desk where I was sitting, and we both looked at it. It was recognizably a bowl of fruit, but only just. Like someone had passed the drawing through a fun house mirror.
“Oh,” I said. This drawing I understood. This I knew how to fix. The hot, frantic rushing of blood in my veins started to slow. “Yeah. It’s the proportions. See this apple?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s too small. See how thin it is compared to the orange?”
“But that’s because it’s farther away,” she said. “I was trying to show perspective.”
“You’ve got the right idea,” I said, “but you’ve taken it too far. Do you have any scratch paper?”
She found some blank paper and a couple of pencils and pulled an armchair up to the desk beside me. I quickly sketched a copy of her drawing but with the fruit in better proportion to each other.
“See?” I said.
She leaned over my paper. I could smell her shampoo as her hair fell over her shoulder, a sharp, sweet smell like nothing that existed in nature, and tried to focus on the drawing instead. “Yeah, but how do you do that?”
I’d never had to explain this before, and I struggled. “You just . . . look at the lines of whatever’s in front of you and then copy them,” I said.
She laughed. “No kidding, but how do you make sure it’s right? I can’t translate what I see onto the paper just by looking.”
“You’ve got to . . .” I looked around the room and spotted a vase containing a small, tasteful arrangement of flowers on her bedside table. “Hand me that, would you?”
She grabbed the vase, and I put it on the far end of the desk.
“Okay, so let’s start with the lily on the far left,” I said. “For me, at least, I can’t look at the whole thing at once. There’s too much going on to deal with. So, I break it down. Just look at that one outside petal. Got it?”
Ren frowned in the direction of the flower. “Yeah.”
“Now break it down further,” I said. “Just look at the very tip of the petal.”
“Okay.”
“Now look just at the line where the tip of the petal meets the air. Don’t look at the whole petal. Just that line.”
Together, working line by line, petal by petal, we drew the flower.
“This is hard,” she said as we worked. “How do you concentrate on such a small piece?”
I shrugged. “Practice, I guess. Use your hands if you have to.”
“Huh?”
“Like . . .” I turned to her and put my hands on either side of her eyes like blinders.
She looked right at me, her eyes closer than I expected them to be. I was suddenly very aware of the places where the skin of my fingers met the skin of her face.
A thought pushed itself to the front of my mind. You could kiss her. That was something people did, normal people.
I dropped my hands and turned back to my drawing.
“I’m going to feel really silly doing this in class,” she said, peering at the vase with her hands cupped around her eyes. “Have you always liked to draw?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I smoothed out a line with the side of my thumb. All I was thinking about was that line, my entire attention focused on it.
“What do you like about it?” she asked. “Maybe it’s just because I’m bad at it, but I don’t get the appeal.”
I shrugged. “I always liked to study things and see how they worked. With drawing I could use that to actually create something.”
“That’s kind of profound,” she said as she erased a line she wasn’t happy with.
I snorted. “I guess. I’ve always liked drawing people the best. I used to draw my mom when she—”
I stopped.
“Yikes,” Ren said. “Did we wade into painful territory?”
“No, I . . . it’s okay.” I hadn’t been thinking Jessica, of course. I’d been thinking about my mother. How I used to sit on the floor and stare at her as she sat in her chair, chain-smoking and arguing with the TV, studying each line and curve of her face. Like understanding the shapes could help me understand her and why she hated me so much. I had a whole notebook full of drawings of her face, which she’d found and thrown out, yelling at me for wasting paper.
I didn’t mean to tell Ren that. I never told anyone anything true about me. It was rule number one, and for good reason.
“I’d better go,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” I said. “My sister’s going to be pissed.”
Her eyes narrowed a little bit as she looked at me. I couldn’t decipher the expression. It could have been confusion or disappointment or annoyance or a dozen other things. For someone who seemed like such an open book, sometimes I couldn’t read her at all.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll take you home.”
• • •
Lex was pissed.
“I don’t know what you were thinking,” she said as she ushered me into the kitchen. “You couldn’t have even called me first? Who was that?”
“Just a girl I go to school with,” I said. “She’s new.”
Lex looked down at the floor, and when she looked up at me again she was wearing a faint smile. “Well . . . I’m glad you’re making friends.”
But I wasn’t sure I’d be able to talk to Ren again. I was still shaken from what had happened, the way I’d slipped out of Danny’s skin and into my own without even realizing it. I couldn’t let that happen again, ever. I felt the precariousness of my position here in a way I hadn’t before, not even th
e night I thought Jessica had seen through me.
I went to find Nicholas. I had to fix whatever had gone wrong between us, and I had to do it now. Making sure he believed I was really his brother was the only thing I could think of that would make me feel safe again.
I searched the house but found no sign of him. I knew he had to be here, though, because his car was in the garage, and, as I’d learned, people in California don’t walk anywhere.
“Hey,” I said when I found Mia in the rec room, watching a movie about a talking horse. “Have you seen Nicholas?”
She shook her head. “Sometimes he likes to hide in one of the chairs out by the pool though. Don’t tell him I told you.”
“I won’t. Thanks.”
I stepped out onto the back patio and scanned the pool area for Nicholas. I wasn’t sure how he could hide in one of the lounge chairs until I noticed that one on the far side of the pool was angled away from the house so that only the back was visible. Then, in the faint glow from the underwater lights, I saw a blue trail of smoke rising from the chair. Either it was on fire, or I’d found him.
I walked out to the chair, and Nicholas looked up at me.
“Shit,” he said.
“To be fair, it’s not the best hiding place ever,” I said.
He took a drag off the cigarette between his fingers. “No one’s ever found me here before.”
“They must not look very hard,” I said. True to my word, as I occasionally was, I didn’t give up Mia.
He didn’t respond to that, just blew a lungful of smoke toward the stars.
“Mind if I sit?” I asked.
He didn’t look at me. “Whatever.”
I sank into the cool grass beside the lounge chair. Nicholas went back to smoking and contemplating the sky.
“Sorry I was a jerk this afternoon,” I said.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m actually surprised you didn’t go off on me sooner.”
“Yeah, I guess I’ve been a little more stressed out about going back to school than I realized.”
He laughed quietly to himself, some private joke I didn’t understand. I ignored it and moved forward with my extra nice strategy.
“I know this has probably been a lot harder on you than anyone’s realized,” I said. “I feel bad, you know. Everyone’s worried about me, but this happened to all of us. I just want you to know that I’m sorry for disrupting your life again, and I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me. I know it hasn’t been easy for you, but you’ve been great anyway.”
Nicholas looked at me, and I could see in his eyes that there was a war going on inside of him. “I haven’t been great, and you don’t have to apologize,” he said softly.
“But I want to,” I said. “I want to be as good a brother to you as you’ve been to me. I don’t want there to be anything bad between us. Not anymore. Not ever again. I’m sorry, for everything.”
I’d rerun our conversation in the diner a dozen times in my mind. It was clear to me that I’d gone too far in trying to bond with him when I said that thing about him being my best friend. The divide between Nicholas and Danny must have been wider than what I’d assumed from the childish squabbles and distance I’d seen in home movies. This was my attempt to undo that damage, but in a vague enough way not to cause more problems if I was wrong.
As I sat there, waiting for his response, I realized my problem with Nicholas was similar to the one I was having with Ren. I couldn’t get a handle on how he’d seen Danny, so I never knew what act to put on for him. If I could just figure that out, I was sure I could put his suspicions to rest once and for all.
Nicholas’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. He was taking a long time to speak, and I was growing increasingly tense. He scrubbed his free hand through his hair and sighed.
“That sounds pretty good,” he said.
“So we can try to put the past behind us? Start over?”
He nodded. “Yeah. We can try.”
I smiled and lay back in the grass. Nicholas handed me a cushion from the lounge chair to prop under my head, and we looked up at the stars in reasonably comfortable silence.
“So, did Lex freak?” he asked after a minute.
“Totally. I think she would keep me on an actual leash if she could.”
One corner of his mouth turned up. “Like a little kid in the mall.”
“Exactly.”
“Who’s the girl?”
“Her name’s Ren,” I said. “She’s in my art class.”
He took another drag off his cigarette. “She’s kind of cute.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “Really. It’s not.”
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
“I was just helping her with an art assignment,” I said, but then I remembered the way she looked at me when I put my hands on her face, the warmth of her skin.
“Sure,” Nicholas said. “Okay.”
We sat there together while he finished his cigarette and started a second. I asked about his classes, and he asked about mine. He told me about a trip to Barcelona he and Asher were planning for the summer. It wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it was still the longest conversation we’d ever had. The night was cool and quiet around us, and even the sharp smell of the smoke seemed oddly pleasant in its familiarity.
“We’d better get inside,” Nicholas finally said. “I’ve got like four hours of homework to do.”
“I don’t have any,” I said, “but Lex will buy that leash if I’m out of her sight too long.”
He smiled, and we stood. He put his cigarette out on the bottom of his shoe and stuck the two butts into the pack, which he shoved in his pocket.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said.
“I don’t, usually. Just every once in a while. The family would flip out if they knew.” He looked up at me with something fragile in his expression. “Don’t tell anyone, okay? I’ll owe you one.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I can keep a secret.”
“Please, Danny.”
“What, you don’t trust me?”
Nicholas’s expression hardened. “Come on. That’s not funny.”
My skin went cold. I was missing something. Something important.
“Nicky, wait,” I said, trying to catch his arm as he stalked away from me. I only managed to brush his sleeve, but he still turned back to look at me. He stared at me like I was a total stranger, and I just stood there as he backed away from me and then disappeared into the house.
• • •
That night I got out of bed after everyone else had gone to sleep. It had been my worst day since I came here, from letting some of the old me slip through the cracks when talking to Ren to making another misstep I didn’t understand with Nicholas, and there was only one solution I could think of. I needed to learn more—a lot more—about Danny Tate.
There was a reason I hadn’t bothered with this before: It hadn’t mattered. I could see what most of the Tates wanted from me. Lex wanted a little boy to take care of. Patrick wanted someone to teach things to. Mia wanted a playmate. All I needed to do was be those things for them and they’d be happy.
But unless I could figure out what Nicholas expected me to be, I would keep screwing up with him. That wasn’t a risk I could take.
After everyone else went to bed, I snuck down to the basement rec room, to the projector and movie screen where Mia had been watching her horse film earlier. Lex had already shown me several home movies to try to jog my memory, but I’d spent most of that time concentrating on the rest of the family, learning everything I could about them so I would understand who they wanted me to be, who’d they’d seen Danny as. This was the first time I was going to watch for Danny alone, to try to understand who he’d actually been.
The home movies were kept in a cabinet against the wall. I grabbed one labeled CHRISTMAS 2008/KLOSTERS 2009 and put it in the DVD player. I sank into the giant leather sofa acros
s from the screen to watch and turned the volume down low even though the nearest human was two stories away.
The video started with a blur and the focusing of the lens, and then it showed the formal living room upstairs with a giant Christmas tree decorated all in gold and silver in the corner. Underneath was a pile of presents that spilled out from under the tree and across the floor, the room overflowing with ribbon and bows and sparkly paper. Jessica sat in an armchair in her pajamas and a silk robe, massively pregnant, with Nicholas cross-legged at her feet.
“Smile, Mom!” Patrick said from behind the camera.
She grinned and waved, a much different woman from the one I (barely) knew. Nicholas made a funny face at the camera, and Jessica mussed his hair.
It was like a Christmas card, a snapshot of a perfect family. My heart gave a painful lurch inside my chest even though I knew just how little the snapshot captured the full story of the Tates.
The camera swung to the right, and there was Danny. This was shot in 2008, so he was eight years old. In a couple of years he’d be gone. He was sitting by the edge of the present pile, towheaded and dressed in the same matching pajama set Nicholas was wearing, only his were blue instead of green. He had ripped the wrapping paper off the corner of a box and was snooping at what was beneath.