Why is he walking?
What’s wrong with him?
My God, is that person walking?? I HAVE NEVER SEEN SUCH A THING.
I needed to get off the street.
I crossed a heavily trafficked road and found myself in some kind of outdoor mall. At the far end I spotted a movie theater. Perfect. A place where I could sit in the dark for a couple of hours and not be looked at. With a swipe of my new magical plastic, I bought a ticket for the movie starting the soonest and hoped it would be something dumb and loud enough to drown out the voices in my head for a while.
I got in the concession line to buy a Coke, and that’s when I saw her. At first she was just a curtain of black hair two people ahead of me, but when she turned her head and I saw her profile, I recognized her as the girl from Starbucks.
I’m not sure why I suddenly felt so exposed. Like she might recognize me and ruin my escape, which was ridiculous. Normal people don’t recognize someone they saw for five seconds in a coffee shop two weeks before, and even if she did, what did it matter? There was no reason for her presence to make me nervous.
I watched her order a popcorn, soda, and a box of candy. Holding all three was awkward; she had the drink in one hand, the popcorn in another, and the candy gripped in the crook of her elbow. I had pegged her as a shy loner, the type who would go to coffee shops and movies by herself, but then she said something to the cashier that made him laugh out loud, and I had to rethink my assumptions, which was rare.
She moved off to an area near the concession line where there were straws, napkins, and self-serve butter, and I watched her, trying to figure out her deal, while the cashier got my Coke. She had finished up by the time I had my soda, and she stepped toward the ticket taker just in front of me, attempting to get the ticket out of her pocket with all the snacks in her arms. I was so busy watching her struggle that I didn’t see the ripped piece of carpeting in front of me. I tripped and crashed into her from behind. Her popcorn went flying and her box of Sno-Caps hit the floor and somersaulted to a stop under the ticket taker’s stool.
“Jesus, sorry,” I said. Way to stay invisible. There weren’t many people in the theater lobby, but they were all staring at us.
The girl burst out laughing. Not the reaction I’d been expecting.
“At least I held on to the drink!” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Let me buy you another popcorn.”
She smiled. “Thanks.”
We returned to the concession stand, where the kid behind the counter offered to replace her popcorn for free. While he was scooping a new bag, she looked at me, and I looked down at the ground. She was wearing brown sandals and radioactive green polish on her toenails.
I was being weird; I could feel it. I didn’t want to be weird anymore. I summoned the new Danny persona I was creating, one that was friendly and confident and cool, and lifted my chin.
“So, what movie are you seeing?” I asked.
“Oh, The College Try?” she said. “It looks pretty silly, but I just wanted to get out of the house and eat some popcorn. What about you?”
“Same,” I said. My ticket was actually for some action movie sequel. I’m not sure why I lied, other than it being my first instinct in most situations. The cashier handed her the fresh bag of popcorn, and we walked back toward the ticket taker.
“We may be the only people in there,” she said. “Anyway, thanks for the popcorn.”
“I hope it’s everything you wanted it to be,” I said.
She nodded and walked ahead of me. There was a smattering of other people in the theater, and the trailers had started. She took a seat in the center of a row in the middle. I sat a couple of rows behind her and off to the left. I found myself watching her almost as much as the movie. She had a loud laugh, and I tried laughing whenever she did.
It felt kind of nice.
• • •
After the movie was over, I started walking back toward the Tates’ and formulating a plan for getting out of that house on the regular so I wouldn’t lose my mind. The same guard was posted at the Hidden Hills’ gate. When I showed him the credit card with Danny’s name on it as identification so he’d let me inside the closely guarded community, he frowned at me.
“You said you weren’t Daniel Tate,” he said.
I shrugged. “I lied.”
It was getting dark by the time I arrived back at the house. At home, I reminded myself. Jessica’s car was absent from its usual spot in the circular driveway. Lex’s car was inside the open garage. No sign of Patrick’s or Nicholas’s.
I stepped into the house, glad for the blast of cold air against my hot cheeks.
“Hello?” Lex called from the direction of the kitchen. “Danny?”
“It’s me,” I said.
Lex ran into the foyer, her pink flats tapping against the marble, and gathered me up in her arms. I shrank, but she just held on to me harder.
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “Are you okay?”
She pulled away and looked at my face, her eyes moving up and down my body, as if checking me for injuries.
“I’m fine,” I said.
She raised her cell phone to her ear.
“He’s here,” she said. “Yeah . . . I know . . . Thanks.”
She stuck the phone back in her pocket, hugged me again, and then punched me hard in the arm.
“Ow!” I said.
“Daniel Arthur Tate, don’t you ever do that to us again!” she said, and burst into tears.
“I . . . I’m sorry,” I said, bewildered by the emotional whiplash I’d just witnessed.
Lex swiped the tears from her cheeks. “You just can’t leave here without telling anyone, okay? You just can’t.”
Then I got it. It was so obvious in retrospect. Of course she would freak out when her poor kidnapped brother disappeared for a few hours. It was something I would have realized if I’d spent even a second thinking about my decision to get the hell out of the house earlier that day, but I hadn’t. I’d wanted a break, so I’d taken it. I wasn’t used to my actions impacting other people.
“Where’s your phone?” she said. “I called you about a hundred times.”
I pulled the phone out of my back pocket. It wasn’t even on. Had she called the cops? Was that who had been on the phone? The last thing I needed was the authorities on my case when I was still trying to solidify my relationship with the Tates.
This was bad, and it needed a big save. I bit my lower lip and conjured up tears in my eyes. “I’m sorry, Lex. I didn’t mean to scare you. Oh shit, I’m so sorry!”
“Danny—”
“I think I just got overwhelmed,” I said, aiming for a rushing stream of words that would disorient and disarm. “I’m not used to all of this, and all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe, and then the next thing I knew I was walking down the street . . .”
She was just staring at me. I increased the tears and started to breathe more heavily, like I was struggling for air.
“I-I looked up and I didn’t know where I was,” I said. “I was so scared, and confused, and I . . . I . . .”
She sighed and closed for eyes for a moment, like she was steeling herself for something, and then she gave me a hug. “It’s okay, Danny. It’s all going to be okay. We were just so worried, you know? Patrick and Nicholas have been driving around the neighborhood for an hour. I was about to call the police.”
The tension between my shoulders eased. She hadn’t called the cops yet. “I won’t let it happen again. I promise.”
“Damn right you won’t,” she said with a gentle smile, “because I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
Great.
“You hungry?” she asked. “I can make you a sandwich.”
I wasn’t hungry, but I nodded anyway. Lex liked to take care of me.
As I sat at the kitchen island while Lex made me another peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I thought for a moment about Danny Tate. The real one. A boy wh
o left this house and never came back. It might sound weird, but since that first night when I saw his still-folded clothes in the dresser upstairs, I hadn’t thought much about him outside of my own situation, as a person who existed independent of me. I wondered what had happened to him. He was almost certainly dead and probably had been since the day he went missing. If I were a normal person, I would have felt guilty for what I was doing, taking his identity, fooling his family. Ask anyone and they would tell you I was a monster.
But when Lex smiled at me as she slid the sandwich and a glass of milk toward me—like I was still the little boy she’d once known—I wondered why I should feel guilty for making her so happy.
• • •
“I’m telling you, he should be in therapy,” Nicholas said in a low voice that wasn’t quite a whisper. “At the least.”
I froze in the hallway on my way down for breakfast the next morning. They were talking about me.
“We’ve discussed this. We don’t think he’s ready for that,” Patrick replied. After Lex called him and told him I was home safe, he’d decided to spend the night. He’d spent most of the evening teaching me to play backgammon on a set inlaid with ivory and onyx in the basement’s recreation room. Lex disappeared during that time, and I got the feeling he was watching me so she could take a break.
“Are you kidding?” Nicholas said. “You can’t just keep him cooped up in the house. He’ll lose it again. He needs—”
“He’s fine,” Lex said.
“He’s not! How could he be, after what he’s been through?” Nicholas said. “He needs help. What the hell is wrong with you two?”
There was nothing but silence for a moment. I waited, tense, to see how Patrick and Lex would respond. I’d been waiting for the Tates to send me to therapy ever since I’d arrived almost two weeks ago and had been dreading it just as long. I’d worked over my share of mental health professionals, but it was risky, and I had no idea what a real kidnapped child would act like. I was fucked up, but nowhere near the level the real Danny Tate, abducted and abused for years, would have been.
“When he’s ready for help, we’ll get it for him,” Patrick said. “He’s not ready to talk about what he went through yet.”
“They told us not to push him,” Lex added. “He just needs some time to settle in first. Readjust.”
“You’re both crazy,” Nicholas said. “What does Mom say? And what about the cops? Why are you hiding him here?”
“We’re not hiding him; we’re giving him time to get his feet back under him,” Patrick said.
“And Morales is all right with that?” Nicholas said, sounding dubious.
“I’ve taken care of it, okay?” Patrick said. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll ask him again about therapy. After all, Danny knows better than we do what he’s ready for and what he needs. Then will you lay off, Nicky?”
“Maybe.”
A chair moved. I took several quick steps backward, so it would look like I was only just entering the hallway when Patrick stepped out of the kitchen.
“Hey, D!” he said. “How’d you sleep?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Want to play some more backgammon after breakfast?” he asked.
“Sure.”
Lex made me a bagel and poured me a glass of orange juice, and then I followed Patrick downstairs to the backgammon table. As he set the pieces, he asked me if I wanted to watch a baseball game with him that night and told me about the two teams that would be playing. He advised me on backgammon strategy and told me a story about a disastrous family vacation where the car my dad had rented caught on fire, and by the time we’d played a few games, I’d forgotten all about the conversation upstairs.
• • •
It didn’t take much longer for Nicholas to come home one day and say something else I’d been waiting for.
“Everyone’s asking me when Danny’s coming back to school,” he said.
“Danny’s not ready for that yet,” Lex said immediately.
She’d been true to her word since my little walkabout the week before: She’d barely let me out of her sight except to bathe and sleep, and I was only guessing about the second one. I’d decided on the walk home from the movie theater that Danny needed to go back to school, where I could escape Lex’s constant surveillance and catch my breath. I didn’t want to live inside the walls of this house forever. It was a big house, but it felt smaller every day, and if I was going to be Danny Tate, I needed to be Danny Tate. Start living a real life again.
“Actually,” I said, “I think I am.”
Nicholas stared at me. “Really?”
“Yeah,” I said. I’d been planting seeds that week, asking Nicholas questions about school and making sure Lex saw me reading books on history and science I’d found on a bookshelf in Robert’s library. I’d spent late night hours looking at the website for Calabasas High and the Facebook pages of my future classmates to prepare. For a while, I knew, I would be an object of intense curiosity, which would be hard. But it would pass, and then I’d be able to disappear into the press of bodies and noise just the way I always had. “I should be getting back to normal things, don’t you think?”
“Danny, honey, are you sure?” Lex said. “You’ve only just gotten home. There’s no need to rush this.”
“I don’t even know if they’d let you come back,” Nicholas said. “You’ve been out of school for a long time.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m really far behind, and most things won’t make sense to me, but I just want to be there. I need to start acting like a regular person again or I’m going to go crazy.”
“I don’t know . . . ,” Lex said.
I could see she wasn’t moved, so I reached for her hand. “I want to get on with my life, and . . . I want you to get on with yours, too. You shouldn’t have to spend all day here keeping an eye on me. We’ve both missed enough already.”
She frowned at me, but I could see her starting to waver.
“Please?” I said. “I need this.”
She sighed. I had her. “I’ll talk to Patrick about it.”
• • •
Patrick was harder to convince than Lex had been. When he came over that night, I cornered him alone in the kitchen after dinner to talk about it. Lex had already tried and gotten nowhere, but I was determined. He was a stone wall of prevarication and denial. All of my talk of being ready to reenter society and longing for normality had no effect on him the way it had on her.
“Danny, no,” he said. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea. Not yet.”
I took a hard look at him. He was clever and ambitious, working long hours for a prestigious firm in L.A. He’d been spending a lot of time with the family since I’d arrived, but that didn’t seem to be the norm. He was barely on speaking terms with his mother and didn’t seem particularly close with Nicholas or Mia, either. Sentimentality worked with Lex, but it wasn’t the right tack to take with Patrick. He’d require a different strategy.
I took a step closer to him and lowered my voice. “Please, Patrick. I have to get out of this house.”
He looked up at me, and I felt a little rush down my spine. This was going to work.
“I’m so happy to be home—you can’t even imagine how happy—but being cooped up here all day?” I continued. “It’s starting to make this place feel like just another prison, and I can’t handle that.”
His expression shifted, softening ever so slightly.
“That’s why I ran off the other day,” I said. “I feel too isolated here. Too trapped. Please help me.”
And that’s how I got Patrick.
• • •
“He wants to go back to school,” I heard Lex say. Her voice drifted down the stairs from the door to Jessica’s room to where I stood in the shadows on the second floor landing.
“So?”
“So I need you to go enroll him,” Lex said. “I’m not actually his parent, you know.”
There was nothing but silence for a long moment. Then the door slammed closed.
• • •
A week and a half later, I started school at Calabasas High. I’d been surprised to learn that Nicholas went to a public school, but then this wasn’t your typical public school. If my own research and the fact that Nicholas went there hadn’t clued me in to that, the percentage of luxury cars in the parking lot would have.
But what really shocked me? Jessica was the one who was taking me to enroll.
I’d come downstairs that morning expecting to find Lex, full of worried looks and questions about whether I really wanted to do this, ready to take me to Calabasas High School. What I found was exactly that . . . plus Jessica in full makeup and hair and a fine silk blouse, the rich white lady’s equivalent of armor. She even looked sober.
While Lex, Mia, and I ate breakfast, Jessica turned to me with a weak smile and said, “How did you sleep?”
I swallowed a dry mouthful of toast. “Fine, thanks.”
“Are you nervous about today?”
“A little,” I said.
“You know, you don’t have to go,” Lex said. “We could put it off another week or call it off entirely if you’re not comfortable—”
“I’ll be okay,” I said.
“He’s fine, Alexis. Nerves are normal.” Jessica turned to me. “I’m sure it will go well.”
Lex’s lips thinned, and she turned back to her breakfast. Jessica sipped her coffee. It was one of the longest conversations we’d ever had.
Mia leaned across the table and handed me a penny.
“I found it on the playground yesterday,” she said. “It’s for good luck on your first day.”
Eleanor’s mom came to take Mia to school, and Lex called upstairs for Nicholas. When he came down, all four of us left for Calabasas High. I had quite the entourage, walking into the front office of the school with Lex and Jessica on either side of me and Nicholas trailing behind. I was pretty sure he’d been instructed to stay with me, to make sure I was okay and to call Lex if I got in over my head. My own personal, if somewhat reluctant, guard dog. And Lex, no doubt, was there to keep an eye on Jessica.
The office secretaries looked up when a bell chimed above Jessica’s head as we entered. I could tell from their wide eyes that they knew exactly who we were.