“You said you wanted to get to know the real me,” I finally said. “Did you mean it?”
“Yeah,” she said softly, and when I looked up at her, that look in her eyes was gone, and I was a real person again.
“It’s hard for me,” I said. “To be honest with people.”
“Makes sense,” she said. It was true, too, just not for the reasons she thought. It wasn’t because I was some traumatized kidnapping victim, but because I had learned to be a con artist at the feet of my mother and the parade of losers she brought into our house. Saying just what I had to to keep someone from raising their voice or raising their hand. Being whatever they wanted me to be in that moment. Increasingly, saying and being nothing at all, because nothing made them happy. Ren bumped my knee with hers. “But hey, no rush. We’ve got time.”
Except we didn’t.
“I had—” I swallowed and tried again. “There was . . . this bat.”
She cocked her head at me in confusion.
“When I was in Canada,” I said. “I’d never had any pets, and I didn’t really have any friends or even a stuffed animal, but there was a hole in the screen over the window in the room where I slept, and there was a little silver-winged bat that would crawl in and sleep between the window and the screen during the day. And I . . .”
“What?” she asked.
“God, I don’t even know why I’m telling you this story. It’s stupid.”
“It isn’t.”
“Well, I . . . I sort of made that bat my friend,” I said. “I called him Grey Wing because of this comic book I once read, and I’d make myself wake up before the sun every morning so that I could wait for him to come back after hunting all night. Sometimes I felt like . . . as long as he came back, I could keep going, you know?”
She nodded.
“I was so scared that someday he wouldn’t, so I waited,” I said. The words had taken control now, and I watched as though outside of myself as I told her this story. This ridiculous but entirely true story. Something that was completely me and no one else and which I had never told another soul. I wasn’t even sure why I’d started, except that I wanted to tell her something true before I was gone from here and she discovered how much of me had been lies. “I would talk to him. I’d ask him how his night had been and imagine the story he was telling me in response about flying through the night, hunting moths, hiding from owls. Then I’d tell him about my day. I’d tell him everything that was bothering me, things I never told anyone else. That bat . . . he knew me better than anyone else in my life ever has. Maybe better than anyone ever will.”
“What happened to him?” she asked.
I tried to shrug. “One morning he didn’t come back.”
“Danny . . . ,” she said.
I couldn’t stand the sound of that name in her mouth. Not after the truth. I stood up.
“I have to go,” I said.
She got up too. “Are you sure? Want me to drive you home?”
I shook my head. “I’ll be okay.”
She frowned. “Okay.”
I looked at her for a second, thinking about what I should say, what I should do, what someone other than me would say or do right now.
And then I thought, fuck it. I was already gone. No reason not to do exactly what I wanted.
I pulled her to me and kissed her. My bottom two fingers curled into the top of her pajama bottoms, which were cool and fuzzy-soft, and my top two fingers curled into her flesh, which was sleep-warm and smooth. She was startled, but she didn’t pull away, and, slowly, she raised one hand to touch my jaw with her fingertips.
I’d never kissed anyone like that before.
She pushed me back, not entirely, just enough for me to see the worry in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I don’t want to go,” I said.
“Then don’t,” she said. “You’re really freaking me out here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, backing away from her. “I have to leave.”
“Danny, wait,” she said.
But I couldn’t say any of the things I wanted to, and I couldn’t stand to hear her call me that name again. I started to walk away.
“I’m sorry,” I said over my shoulder, and then I turned a corner and she was gone.
• • •
That should have been the end of it. I should have disappeared after that. But I didn’t. If I had, I wouldn’t be here telling you this story, would I?
• • •
I called a cab to take me to the airport. With the stack of cash I’d been building up over the weeks, I bought a ticket to Toronto on the first flight in the morning and then sat in a chair under a flickering fluorescent light to wait.
For a long time I just stared blankly out of a window, watching lights coming and going outside. Then, slowly, the numbness started to ebb. I began to think. The question got louder and louder in my head until I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
Did I really need to leave?
Did anything have to change just because I knew the truth now?
As fucked up as it was, the Tates and I had the perfect symbiotic relationship. They needed me to deflect suspicion away from them, and I needed them to live something resembling a real life. If I left, it meant living on the run again, alone and on edge. If I stayed, knowing what I knew now, I’d actually be more secure than before. Lex and Patrick knew I wasn’t Danny, which meant I no longer had to fear exposing myself. I would not only have a roof over my head, and a damn nice one at that, but I would have a new kind of freedom. And I’d have Mia, and Ren, which was already a lot more than I’d ever had before.
Over the loudspeaker, a voice announced that my flight to Toronto was starting its preboarding.
As much of a sham as continuing to live as Danny Tate would be, if I was honest with myself, which I sometimes was, it was still better than any of the alternatives. The Tates and I would all be better off if we kept living with our lies.
I stood, looking down at my ticket. To my left, the line was forming to board the plane. To my right, the airport exit. I took a deep breath, then another, and then I threw my ticket into the trash, walked out of the terminal, and caught a cab back to Hidden Hills.
• • •
Slipping under the covers of Danny’s bed after sneaking back into the house as the sun rose made me feel like some kind of grave robber, and it was hard to sleep.
But when I woke up, I smelled pancakes and Lex smiled at me when I entered the kitchen and handed me a plate and it didn’t feel that different.
• • •
Nicholas drove me to school as usual, and as usual we didn’t speak. We went our separate ways as soon as we were inside. Him toward the library, where I knew he met Asher before classes. Me to Mrs. Deckard’s classroom, where Ren had French first period.
She arrived a minute or two before the bell was due to ring. I saw her footsteps slow down as she spotted me waiting for her at the other end of the hall, but there was also a tentative kind of smile on her face.
“Hey,” I said when she reached me.
“Hey, you’re here,” she replied. “I thought maybe I wouldn’t see you today.”
We hugged the wall, staying out of the traffic of kids heading toward their first class.
“Yeah, I was being crazy last night,” I said. “Things just kind of . . . got to me, all at once, and I lost it a little bit. I’m sorry.”
“Are you feeling better now?” she asked.
I nodded, even though it wasn’t entirely true.
She frowned. “Are you getting help, Danny? I think you need to be talking to someone. Someone qualified, I mean.”
I kept my face perfectly still even though it felt like my heart was now somewhere in the vicinity of my stomach. I’d scared her. She thought I was crazy. She didn’t want me talking to her anymore.
“I . . . yeah, maybe you’re right,” I said.
“What you’ve been through, it?
??s too much for anyone to go through alone,” she said. “I want to be here for you, but last night . . . You know you can always talk to me, but . . .”
You scared me. I can’t handle this. I don’t want this.
“I get it,” I said, backing away from her.
She caught the bottom of my shirt between her fingers and pulled me closer, lowering her voice. “Wait. I like you and I think you like me, too. But . . .” She sighed. “I just don’t think you’re ready—”
The bell rang above us.
“I’ve got to get to class,” I said, pulling away from her. I didn’t need to hear the rest. I’d heard it enough times from enough people to get the gist.
I don’t want you.
She tried to grab my wrist. “Danny—”
“See you later,” I said, and joined the flow of students in the hallway.
Normally, that’s when I would have disappeared. Become another face in the crowd, one so unremarkable that it just melted away.
But now I was Danny Tate, and the crowd parted around me like the Red Sea before Moses, faces turning toward me, people saying my name, offering me fist bumps and invitations and all the attention I’d soaked up just one day before. Now that I knew Danny had died at the hands of one of the people who was supposed to love him the most, that he was probably nothing more than bones now, it all felt suddenly gross and ghoulish. I spotted a restroom up ahead and ducked into it, closing a stall door behind me and locking it. I sat cross-legged on top of the toilet seat and held my head in my hands, taking deep breaths.
I ignored the squeak of the door opening until a voice said, “Danny?”
Fuck.
There was a knock at the stall door. “Hey, man, it’s just me. Asher.”
I reluctantly stood and unlocked the stall. “Hi.”
The door to the restroom started to open.
“Out of order, try the next one!” Asher said, pushing a wide-eyed freshman back into the hall. He closed the door behind the kid and jammed the stop into the crack at the bottom of the door so no one else could enter. Then he turned to me. “You didn’t hear me saying your name in the hall just now?”
“No, sorry,” I said.
“I guess a lot of people were trying to talk to you all at once,” he said with a knowing look.
“Did you want something?” I asked. Asher had barely spoken to me since Nicholas started giving me the silent treatment, so I didn’t see why he’d bother now unless he was here on some mission from his boyfriend, which I had less than zero interest in.
“You don’t look so hot, man,” he said. “Are you feeling okay? Do you want me to get Nicholas?”
I laughed. “Nicholas doesn’t give a shit if I’m feeling okay.”
“I know it may seem that way, but you’re wrong,” he said. “He’s really struggling right now, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t—”
Whatever Asher was selling, I wasn’t buying.
“Look, thanks for the concern, but I’m fine,” I said. “I should get going.”
I kicked the stop out from under the door and got out of there.
• • •
Just a few minutes into second period, an office assistant came to get me out of class. She told me to bring my stuff. I glanced over at Nicholas. His frown of confusion was the same as mine.
When I approached the office, I spotted Lex waiting for me in the hall. My steps slowed. In the early morning bustle of getting everyone ready for work and school, I’d managed to avoid saying much to her and Patrick. I wasn’t sure how to now that I knew the truth.
When she looked up from her phone and saw me, she beckoned me toward her.
“Come on,” she said. “We’re leaving.”
She hooked her arm into mine and led me outside. I was caught.
“Why?” I asked. The bright glare of the sun hurt my eyes. She was acting normal, but I knew now how little that meant, and my mind jumped to worst-case scenarios. The FBI wanted to see me again right then. Lex and Patrick were tired of this game and had decided to turn me over. They knew I knew and were going to make me disappear the same way Danny had.
“You tell me,” she said as she slid into the driver’s seat of her car, which she’d left idling by the curb.
If I started running, now, how far could I get before she caught me?
The passenger’s window came rolling down, and Lex peered at me from behind the steering wheel.
“What are you doing?” she said. “Get in the car.”
If I did get away, how far could I get?
“Danny!” She laughed. “Get in the car!”
It’s not like I had a real choice. I opened the passenger’s door and climbed inside. Lex started to drive.
“Nicholas’s mystery boyfriend called me,” she said as we pulled out of the CHS parking lot. “Seems like a nice kid. He said it looked like you could use a personal day.”
I was relieved, and annoyed. “I told him I was fine.”
“Well then I sprang you for nothing,” she said with a shrug. “But at least you can keep me company today. It gets so boring when you guys are all at school. We’ll have fun.”
“Okay,” I said. I’d have to figure out how to be around Lex at some point anyway, and at least this way I wouldn’t have to figure out where to sit at lunch today.
She turned and smiled at me, and it turned out that Lex was ten times the liar I was, because if I didn’t know better, I would have sworn it was real.
• • •
She took me to lunch, where we talked about my school and Mia’s upcoming surgery to have her brace removed and a hundred little mundanities. Truthfully, once I relaxed a little, it wasn’t that different from before. We were both still lying. The only difference was I now knew it, just like she always had. Well, that and the sour, queasy feeling I got in my gut whenever she gave me one of her loving smiles or asked with apparent interest how I was doing, not because she actually gave a shit about me, but because it was her job to manage the impostor and make sure nothing went wrong with the scheme. I couldn’t believe what an idiot I was for not seeing it before. Me, of all people.
We returned home to find Jessica’s car—the now repaired SUV she’d crashed the night I should have realized the truth—parked in the driveway, that mysterious orange dust lining the treads of the tires. We didn’t see her, though, and Lex and I ended up in the rec room, sprawled out on the couch, watching her soaps on the big screen.
“Wait, Savannah is with Gage now?” I asked as the two characters kissed passionately.
Lex nodded and popped back a couple of chocolate covered coffee beans from the package she’d grabbed from the kitchen on our way down. Then she passed it to me. “Yeah, his girlfriend—”
“Cordelia?”
“Right. She died in the same plane crash that killed Savannah’s fiancé, so they bonded.”
“Cordelia’s dead?” I asked around a mouthful of coffee beans. “I liked her!”
“Well, they think she’s dead,” Lex said, “but no way they’d kill off such a big character. I’m guessing she’s still alive.”
After the next commercial break the camera zoomed in on Cordelia waking up in the home of the strange mountain man who’d saved her from the wreckage of the plane crash. I laughed, and Lex whooped and turned to me for a high five.
For a second I’d forgotten. And when I remembered, it stung all over again.
It must have shown on my face, because she said, “Hey, you okay?”
“Yeah, I just . . .” I swallowed. “This is nice.”
“Oh, sweetie,” she said. She scooted over until we were right beside each other and wrapped me up in her arms. I let her hold me. Part of me hated her, but it still felt nice. It still, somehow, made me feel better, even though I knew it was a lie.
It had to be a lie. Lex was just that good an actress. I couldn’t let myself start to believe that maybe she’d really come to care about me outside of the con, the way I’d really start
ed to care about her.
That would be incredibly stupid.
“Lex,” I said.
“Hmm?” I felt her response more than heard it, the hum of her voice against me.
“Can we watch one of the home movies?” I asked. “From before everything got so messed up?”
I wanted to see her again with Danny. Maybe it was different from the way she was with me. Maybe it would show me that some of whatever this was between us was real.
She pulled away and looked at me. “Yeah. Sure, we can do that.”
“Thanks,” I said.
She got up and went to the credenza where the DVDs were kept. She read the labels on the spines before grabbing one and putting it into the player, then sat down beside me again as the movie started. The date at the bottom of the screen said it was 2009. On the screen Robert Tate was filming his wife, who had baby Mia, dressed in a pink bathing suit with little blue dolphins printed on it, held in her arms. Jessica kept trying to hide her face from the camera, telling Robert to go film the kids. Instead, he zoomed in close, until her face—ocean blue eyes, her cheeks pink from the sun, an American sweetheart face—took up the entire frame. Jessica batted him away, and Mia started to cry. Jessica gave Robert an exasperated look, and retreated to the cabin of the boat with the baby.
Robert turned the camera on himself and made a grimace. An I’m-in-trouble face. Then he turned the camera toward the kids who were swimming off the back of the boat.
“Oh, I remember this. It was the Fourth of July,” Lex said. “It was so hot it felt like we would die if we got out of the water for even a second.”
Danny climbed back onto the boat. He ran, dripping, up the stairs to the wheelhouse and climbed over the barrier until he was standing on a tiny perch, only his grip on a metal railing holding him there. A teenaged Lex yelled at him to be careful. He grinned and let go, cannonballing into the water below. My eyes went back and forth between the video and Lex as she watched it.