“Don’t mind him,” Asher said when he was gone. “He’s been moodier than usual lately. I don’t think he’s figured out how to deal with all of this yet, but he’s really happy you’re home.”
“He hides it pretty well,” I said.
“No kidding,” Asher said. “But, honestly, he cried like a baby when you were found. You know Nicky. The more that’s going on, the quieter and snippier he gets.”
“Then he must be overjoyed that I’m back.”
Asher laughed. “It’s a compliment, trust me.” He glanced around us and said, “Dude, everyone is staring at you. How weird is that?”
I rubbed a hand across my forehead. “Pretty weird.”
“Do you want them to stop?” he asked.
“That would be great, but—”
Asher stood up. He was well over six feet tall and almost half as wide. So when he bellowed, “Mind your own fucking business!” people took notice. All the heads that had been swiveled in our direction snapped back around instantly.
It was effective, if less subtle than I might have hoped.
“Um, thanks,” I said.
He smiled. “You bet.”
• • •
Lex was all over me when I got home. She ushered me into the kitchen where, to my surprise, Patrick was waiting, drinking a cup of coffee.
“So how did it go?” she asked. “Was it overwhelming? I knew it was too soon for this.”
“Let him get a word out, Lexi,” Patrick said.
“It was fine,” I said. Patrick moved his briefcase off the stool beside him and I sat down. Lex started to clean. “I mostly just sat there and listened.”
“How did people treat you?” she asked.
“A lot of stares, but no one really—”
“They were staring at you?” She threw the decorative dish towel she was trying to use to wipe down the kitchen counter into the sink. “You’re not going back.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’ll be okay.”
But Lex was shaking her head. “No. No. I don’t like this.”
“Lex—” Patrick started.
“No, Patrick! It’s too much! I can’t do this!”
Patrick stood and caught her hands as she tried to bat him away. “Look, he’s fine! You’re overreacting.”
Lex got her hands free and shoved him. “Don’t tell me how to react! You have no idea—”
“Lex!”
Her mouth snapped closed, and then, to my astonishment, she started to cry. Granted, Lex cried at almost everything, but this seemed particularly irrational. Did she really feel so protective of me now that the mere mention of some teenagers looking at me could unravel her like this?
She crumpled against Patrick’s chest, hiding her face there, and he turned to me as he put his arms around her. “Give us a minute, would you?”
Gladly. I vacated the room, and a half an hour later Patrick came to find me. I was with Mia at her art table in the rec room, sketching a picture of an elephant for her in purple crayon while she colored in a world map for a school assignment.
“Can you give him really big ears?” Mia asked. “Like Dumbo, but even bigger?”
“You bet,” I said, tracing the outline of a giant ear. From the corner of my eye, I saw Patrick enter. When I looked up, he beckoned to me. “I’ll be right back.”
“Hey,” Patrick said in a low voice. “I just wanted to make sure you’re all right after what just happened upstairs.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Is Lex okay?”
He nodded. “Yeah, yeah, she’s just . . . It’s hard for her, you know. She wishes she could shield you from everything, and this is an emotional time for everyone. Mostly she’s just embarrassed that she melted down like that.”
“She doesn’t need to be,” I said. It was sweet, really. A little unhinged, but sweet.
“Well, she’s gone up to her room to get some rest,” he said. “She probably won’t be back down tonight, so I’m going to stay over. She’ll be good as new tomorrow.”
I nodded. It was only five in the afternoon, but spending most of the day in one’s bedroom must have seemed normal to Lex, given the fact that her mother practically lived in hers. Patrick squeezed my shoulder on his way out, and I returned to Mia and the elephant.
• • •
When I next saw Lex, the following morning at breakfast, she was back to her old self. Smiling and a little overbearing and pretending the previous day hadn’t even happened.
“Scrambled eggs?” she asked when I walked into the kitchen.
“Sure,” I said, and she turned back to the pan she was already stirring. The truth was I didn’t care much for breakfast—my stomach didn’t usually wake up until several hours after the rest of me did—but if I didn’t eat something, she would fuss. And, well, it was nice to be taken care of.
On instinct I hugged her, wrapping my arms around her waist from behind. She froze. She’d hugged me several times, but this was the first time I’d ever hugged her. I didn’t even know why I’d done it and was about to pull away when her hand came to rest over my arm.
“Thanks,” I said. I let her go, pulling my arms back, her hand lingering on my skin as I did.
She cleared her throat. “You’re welcome,” she said without turning around.
I sat down at the breakfast table feeling bewildered with myself and trying to stamp out the warm, queasy sensation deep in the pit of my stomach.
• • •
Nicholas’s phone rang as he was driving us to school. The car’s touchscreen read “Asher.” Nicholas hit the button that hung up the phone.
“What?” he said when he saw me looking at him. “I’m going to see him in like an hour.”
The phone immediately began to ring again. Asher. Nicholas frowned and pressed a different button.
“Hey, don’t hang up on me.” Asher’s voice crackled through the car. “This is important.”
“What is it?” Nicholas asked.
“I just got a text from Vanessa Reyes, you know, the cheerleader who’s been going out with Ben Peznick for a hot minute so now she thinks she’s queen of the social universe?”
“Okay?” Nicholas said.
“There’s—am I on speaker?” Asher asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well take me off, would you?”
Nicholas grabbed his cell phone out of the cup holder in the center console, pressed a few buttons, and lifted it to his ear. “Okay, so? . . . Shit. Was there— . . . Okay. Okay, see you in a little bit.”
“What is it?” I asked as Nicholas hung up the phone. It had to be about me.
“Someone took a video of you yesterday during lunch and put it on YouTube,” he said. “Apparently it’s spreading everywhere and people are talking. You may get some extra stares today.”
Great.
“I can take you home if you want,” he said.
I shook my head. So the whole school would know who I was now. That wasn’t so different from yesterday, when only most of them had known.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“You sure?”
I nodded.
What neither of us had anticipated was the half a dozen news vans parked outside the school.
“Jesus Christ,” Nicholas said, pulling off the road to idle on the shoulder across the street so we could survey the scene.
“What are they doing here?” I asked. I didn’t have to fake the wild edge to my voice. I was already counting the number of people who would be able to recognize a photo or video of me, who could testify that I sure as shit wasn’t some California kid named Daniel Tate. It wasn’t many, but I could see this life slipping away from me before my eyes, could feel the cold bite of the handcuffs around my wrists.
Nicholas shrugged. “We were getting a lot of calls from the press, interview requests and stuff. It started with this stupid article that came out last month, but then it went crazy when you came back. Lex finally canceled the landline at the house, but if they�
��ve gotten wind you’re back at school because of that YouTube thing . . .”
“Dammit,” I said. “Why didn’t Lex or Patrick tell me this was going on?”
“They were trying to protect you.”
“Well that’s just great,” I said. “Now what?”
“I should take you home. That’s what Lex would want.”
I wanted to say yes. I wanted him to take me back to Hidden Hills, where I’d be invisible and safe, wrapped up in its guarded gates.
But then that would be my life. Locked in that house. Like the closet in the bedroom I’d grown up in, where I’d spent so many hours hiding in the dark, hands jammed over my ears, trying to escape whatever was going on outside. I couldn’t do that again. I wouldn’t.
“No,” I said. “I’m going in.”
Getting inside wasn’t a problem. There was a separate parking lot and entrance for students that was well away from the main entrance where the reporters were camped out. Nicholas and I waited in the car until Asher came out to meet us, and I walked into the school flanked by Asher’s bulk and Nicholas’s lethal glare. Heads turned, whispers were exchanged behind hands, but no one approached. The stares still made me itch, but at least the expression in many of the eyes was now one of sympathy instead of naked curiosity. In the movies, people always say they don’t want to be pitied when something bad happens to them, but I’m here to tell you that’s bullshit. Pity can be very nice. It feels a lot like concern or even affection. I could live with pity.
But it didn’t last. When first period began, Principal Clemmons came on over the loudspeaker to address what the whole school was already buzzing about.
“One of our students has had their privacy breached in an inexcusable fashion,” he said. “Until further notice all students will turn over their cell phones and other devices to their first-period teacher to be collected again after the final bell. CHS is a place for learning, not the distractions of texting and social media.”
Mr. Vaughn had a box ready to go. He walked up and down the rows of seats, collecting phones and tablets. I stared down at my desk. I could feel people looking at me, knowing this was because of me, resenting me for it. The silent indignation became audible grumbles when I tried to hand Vaughn my phone and he told me to keep it.
“Cool it, guys,” Vaughn said. “Let’s talk Jane Eyre.”
• • •
Reporters showed up every day for the rest of the week. A couple even tried to get inside. But the school stepped up security, and they lost interest. None of them got my picture and the original video of me put up on YouTube was distant and blurry, so I thought I was safe.
Finding the press camped outside of Calabasas High had been a harsh but necessary wake-up call. I’d gotten too comfortable. Whatever Patrick was doing to keep me from having to go and tell my stories to the cops wouldn’t last forever, and I needed to be ready. I started to go over the story in my head whenever I had a quiet moment, embellishing and fine-tuning it based on what I was learning, trying to prepare myself.
It was sunny overcast the day it happened. I was walking beside my bike, because the chain had come off and I didn’t know how to fix it. I was taking it home to my father big brother because he would know. Dad Patrick knew everything.
A white van turned the corner and pulled up beside me. I was too naive to be scared. The door slid open and hands emerged from the darkness. Ten seconds and I was gone, with no one having seen a thing. A kidnapping can happen that quickly and that invisibly, even on a sunny cloudy street in a safe gated neighborhood.
Hopefully, I would be ready.
• • •
On Tuesday someone came to the door of my art class with a note for me. Everyone stared at me while I read it. It was from Nicholas; he was going to be late to lunch. Luckily, I’d been living on the streets on my own for years, so I was pretty confident in my ability to make it to the cafeteria without his assistance. I was less sure, though, of what I’d do when I got there.
After class I headed toward the cafeteria and spotted Dr. Singh at the other end of the hallway, headed right for me.
“Danny,” she said with a nod as she passed me. I was relieved that she hadn’t wanted to talk to me, but then I turned and watched her enter Ms. Scofield’s classroom.
She was checking up on me.
Dammit.
People were not forgetting about me as quickly as I’d thought they would. I guess I should have said good-bye to that naive hope when I got everyone’s phones confiscated for the foreseeable future. Now Singh was asking my teachers about me, and everywhere I went the looks and whispers and abruptly halted conversations followed. I was not blending in, and that was the one thing I’d always been able to do, the one ability I’d depended on more than any other.
I bought a sandwich and a piece of pizza because dammit I could and hurried outside. The table Nicholas and I usually sat at was empty; I had hoped Asher would be there already. I noticed the movie girl at her usual table, eating alone once more. I wondered again how in the hell she managed to look like she didn’t care—if it was for real or just a front so convincing even I couldn’t see through it. I could feel eyes lingering on me already and imagined how much worse it would get if I sat at my usual table eating by myself, and suddenly I was bombarded with memories of all the meals I’d ever eaten alone, sitting on the floor with a microwave dinner watching Frosty the Snowman as a kid or scarfing a package of chips and a candy bar on a bus stop bench. I kept walking past the empty table, out of the courtyard, and around the side of one of the buildings. I sat down with my back against the bricks and looked out over the empty athletic fields.
I instantly felt better. And worse at the same time. The whole point of being Danny Tate was the chance for a new life, a real one, not just a repeat of my shitty old one.
Something had to change.
• • •
The next day I told Nicholas I didn’t need him to escort me to my classes anymore. I could tell he hated it, and it was only drawing more attention to me. He agreed.
I beat him and Asher to lunch again, and this time I walked up to the table where the movie girl was sitting alone. I’d been thinking about this all morning. This was how I was going to change things.
“Mind if I sit?” I asked when she looked up from her book. I was new Danny. Cool, collected, above it.
“Oh sure, if you can find some space,” she said, gesturing to the empty table. “I’m Ren.”
“Danny.”
“Yeah,” she said with a half smile. “I’d picked up on that.”
“Right.”
We were silent for a long time. Maybe this was a terrible mistake.
“So, if you don’t mind my asking,” she finally said, “why are you sitting with me?”
It was a good question. This was how I was going to change things, but why had I picked her? She always sat alone, which made her a low risk target, and I’d talked to her once before, but it was more than that. Most people I could figure out with one look, but she was hard to read. She was either an actor like me, or she was something else entirely that I didn’t understand. She was interesting to me.
I lifted one shoulder in a weak shrug. “My brother’s not here yet. I thought we could keep each other company.”
She smiled, but I couldn’t tell if it was from gratitude or amusement or embarrassment.
“Okay,” she said, folding down the page in her book and setting it aside. “How do you like Scofield’s class?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You?”
“I hate it. I’m hopeless at drawing,” she said. “I never would have signed up, but it was one of the only classes with any space left when I transferred.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“Last month,” she said. “Hence my wild popularity. I probably could have scored a seat at one of the lower-tier tables by now, but I’d rather let the people come to me.”
“How’s that working out so far?�
�
“Not bad. I mean, I did just reel in the school’s biggest celebrity.” I grimaced, and she smiled. “Sorry, maybe that wasn’t funny.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It was kind of funny.”
She leaned toward me. “Seriously, how surreal is your life right now?”
There was warmth and sympathy in the question but not the least bit of hesitation. I’d picked well; she might be the one person at Calabasas who didn’t have any previous connection to Danny and didn’t seem fazed by my notoriety.
But, at the same time, she was completely focused on me. I had the sudden strange feeling that she was seeing me and not the cloud of Danny Tate around me. Her gaze was so direct that the feel of her felty brown eyes on mine was almost disconcerting.
“I . . . uh.” I cleared my throat. “It’s pretty surreal. I’m like this thing now—”
“Instead of a real person?”
I blinked. “Yeah.”
She saw my surprise and explained, “The way people talk about you. It’s like you’re a character on TV or something to them. It’s freaky.”
“What do they say about me?” I asked.
She shook her head. “You don’t want to know that.”
“Actually, I kind of do,” I said. It had become clear to me since I’d gotten here just how many of these kids had known Danny. This might not be the tiny community I came from where everyone went to school together their entire lives, but it was almost as insular. If they weren’t buying my act, I needed to know it.
“Well, okay, but it’s not very nice,” she said. I nodded at her to continue. “The general conversation is that you were kidnapped as a little kid and, like, brainwashed and sold into slavery or something until you staged a daring, Jason Bourne–esque escape. And now you’re this delicate creature who might snap at any moment and either kill us all or turn feral and start living in a hut in the woods somewhere like the Unabomber. Just bullshit like that.”
But no mention of me being an impostor. I had to believe that a girl who would compare me to the Unabomber ten seconds after meeting me wouldn’t be too tactful to leave that part out if people were saying it.
“That’s actually pretty accurate,” I said. “Except for the hut in the woods part.”
Here Lies Daniel Tate Page 10