“No peeking, Danny!” said a voice from somewhere off camera. It sounded like Lex.
“Hey, that’s mine!” Nicholas cried.
“I was just looking!” Danny said. “Don’t be such a baby.”
Danny’s father entered the room, carrying a tray filled with steaming mugs. I hadn’t met Robert Tate in person yet, only spoken to him on the phone. No one seemed to be in any hurry to take me to the state penitentiary in Lompoc where he was doing his time, which was just fine by me.
The family drank hot chocolate and started to open the massive pile of presents. Nicholas carefully peeled the tape and paper off his boxes and examined each gift closely, while Danny tore into his in his frenzy to get to the gift beneath. He took one look at the remote controlled car Jessica had given him before putting it aside in favor of the mystery of the next wrapped box. Pretty typical kid behavior, which was only remarkable in how different it was from Nicholas’s. Patrick had Lex sit beside him and unwrap his gifts so he could keep filming, which took a while since Lex kept coming and going from the room. Robert gave Jessica a diamond bracelet he said he’d seen her eyeing in a store window in New York the month before. She stumbled over her thank-you, and when he leaned in to kiss her, she turned her head toward one of the speaking children, and his lips hit her cheek.
It was all here. Everything there was to know about these people, if I could just watch closely enough.
I closed my eyes for a moment and imagined myself in Danny’s place, felt the crinkle of the wrapping paper under my hands, the sweet aftertaste of the hot chocolate on my tongue, the warmth in my body that came from being loved and belonging. I could almost believe it was a real memory.
I watched the entire video of Christmas/Klosters—which turned out to be some fancy ski resort—and another of the grandparents’ wedding anniversary. Mostly, the videos reinforced what I’d already learned about Danny. He was extroverted, funny, and high-spirited, with a tendency to be inconsiderate of others. He worshipped Patrick, but he and Nicholas fought frequently, which had to explain some of Nicholas’s ambivalence to me, although it did seem a bit extreme for him to be holding a grudge against his kidnapped brother over some childhood scraps.
But then, half-asleep and almost ready to throw in the towel for the night, I noticed something I hadn’t before. I couldn’t believe it had escaped my attention for so long.
In one way, if no other, Danny was a lot like me. He was a watcher.
I was well into the anniversary video before I caught it, because he was surprisingly subtle, but when I ran back the DVD, I saw things I’d missed the first time through. Danny eavesdropping on a conversation between his parents, pretending to fill up his drink while Jessica and Robert had a low conversation just a couple of feet away. Peering around Lex’s shoulder to read what she was texting. Even peeking at Nicholas’s present. I’d assumed that Danny’s thoughtlessness was the product of a childlike obliviousness to his surroundings, but now I was thinking that very little escaped Danny’s attention.
For the first time I felt a real kinship with him.
By the end of the anniversary video I could barely keep my eyes open anymore. The rest of my research would have to wait for another night. I shut down the DVD player and replaced the DVDs I’d removed. On my way back to my room I stopped in the kitchen. It had been many hours since dinner, and my stomach was rumbling. I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and was rummaging in the pantry for a snack when I heard the front door open. I froze as the beeps of someone entering the security code into the alarm panel echoed off the marble floors of the foyer and into the kitchen. I was stuck with no way to get back upstairs.
I heard the soft tapping of shoes in the hallway, and then, before I could decide what to do, Jessica was standing in front of me.
• • •
She startled when she saw me, and I could tell from the quickness of her reaction that she was actually sober. She reached automatically for the light switch but then dropped her hand without flipping it.
“What are you doing down here?” she asked.
“I was thirsty,” I said.
“Oh,” she said.
Silence.
“I guess I’ll go back to bed now,” I said.
“How is school?” she asked, the words coming out in a rush.
“Um, it’s okay,” I said.
She nodded. “That’s good.”
“Yeah.”
She twisted the two rings she wore on her right hand, spinning them around and around. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around much lately. I haven’t been feeling well.”
Rampant alcoholism will do that to you.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I hope you feel better soon.”
“Thanks,” she said.
This was bizarre. I had to get away.
“I’m going to go back to bed,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
To get to the stairs I had to pass her. Her hands clenched into fists as I got closer to her, like she was afraid they would reach out to me of their own accord.
“Good night, Mom,” I said over my shoulder as I walked away.
She didn’t turn look at me. “Good night.”
• • •
After those first few days in the Tate house, I’d rarely thought about Jessica. Except for the day she resurfaced to enroll me in school, she was such a nonentity that I sometimes forgot she even existed. Aside from Mia, who sometimes asked where she was, no one ever talked about her.
Maybe because of the mother I’d had, it didn’t strike me as particularly strange at the time.
I still can’t believe how blind I was.
• • •
“She hates me,” I told Lex the next morning. “She won’t even look at me.”
“I told you, Danny, she’s sick,” Lex said. She was scrambling eggs while I was keeping watch over the toaster. It was Saturday morning and we had the house to ourselves. Patrick was at work, Mia was at Eleanor’s house, and Nicholas had gone hiking with Asher, which I assumed was a lie, because I couldn’t imagine Nicholas hiking. He had been pointedly ignoring me since whatever happened out at the pool, and he’d even snapped something I couldn’t make out at Lex this morning on his way out the door.
“She keeps all of us at arm’s length, not just you,” Lex continued. “And I think . . . Honestly? I think she’s a little scared of you.”
The toast popped out of the toaster, and I jumped. “What? Why?”
She shrugged. “If she lets herself believe you’re really back, you could disappear again. I know it sounds stupid, but I think she’s just trying to protect herself. Because she loves you so much.”
“Is that Nicholas’s excuse too?” I asked.
Lex’s back was turned to me, but I saw her freeze. “What do you mean?”
“He just seems mad at me all the time,” I said.
She turned and scooped some eggs from the skillet onto my plate, a tight smile on her face. “Well, there’s always been tension between you two, and he’s not great with change. I’m sure he just needs a little more time to adjust to all of this.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Don’t worry about Mom and Nicky,” she said. “It’ll be okay.”
• • •
That night at dinner Jessica and Nicholas both showed up. I wondered what threats and/or bribes Lex had handed out to make this happen.
Mia was updating us on the progress of The Magical Mermaid, and Jessica was well into her second glass of chardonnay when she suddenly looked up at me and said, “How was your day, Danny?”
Everyone fell silent.
“I . . . fine,” I said.
She nodded, her eyes barely meeting mine. “That’s good. Are you enjoying your classes?”
“I like my art class.”
Nicholas abruptly stood, his chair scraping against the wooden floor, and walked out of the room.
Patrick dropped his fork and grabbed his
drinking glass. His face was full of thunder.
“I need more soda,” he said. “Does anyone else want more soda?”
We all shook our heads, and he went after Nicholas in the direction of the kitchen.
“So, Mia,” Lex said as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. “What happens after the mermaid battles the Octopus King?”
Even Mia, who was usually too young to pick up on the tension in a room, was shaken. She struggled to pick up where she’d left off, and I could see the tears starting to well in her eyes. I felt a powerful rush of heat—like anger, but different—wash over me. Like no one had ever done for me, I reached out and took her hand.
“Hey,” I said, squeezing her fingers. “It’s okay. Remember, the mermaid had frozen four of the Octopus King’s tentacles with her magic powers, but the other four were still free, and he was trying to catch her with them? What did she do next?”
Mia gave me a tremulous smile. “She swam around and around in circles until his tentacles got all tangled up.”
“That was pretty smart of her,” I said, and Mia nodded.
In the other room, we heard the muffled sounds of Nicholas and Patrick arguing and then the slamming of the front door. Patrick came back a minute later with his knuckles white from how hard he was gripping his full glass of soda.
“Pass the green beans,” he said as he sat.
• • •
I didn’t know what to do. The harder I tried to make things work with Nicholas, the worse I made it all. I couldn’t tell if he didn’t believe me or just didn’t like me, but either way he was the thorn in my side, the one thing ruining my perfect scam. At any moment he could convince Lex and Patrick I was a fraud or go to the cops, and there was nothing I could do but wait for it to happen and try to be ready if it did. I kept a packed bag in my closet at home and in my locker at school, and I moved my baseball card—the only truly incriminating item I owned—out of the house and into my locker, where I stuck it in the pages of book. I figured it would be safer there, where it was locked up, than in my room at home, where Nicholas or Lex could easily find it. I had to be extra careful now. Somehow I had gotten everything I’d ever wanted, but whenever I looked at Nicholas, I felt it all slipping away from me.
Luckily, I didn’t have to feel that very often, because Nicholas did everything he could to avoid me. He still had to drive me to and from school, but he ignored me at home and no longer sat beside me in the one class we shared. I sat with Ren at lunch, and he sat with his back to us, while Asher gave me the occasional awkward wave across the courtyard.
“Hi, Danny!” a cheerleader whose name I didn’t know said to me as I walked toward my regular lunch table. The guy with her put out his fist for me to bump as I passed. This was what school was for me now. Ever since that day I’d told a group of students about my abduction and realized the power in choosing to be seen on my own terms, I’d gone from infamous to just famous. Stares and whispers had become waves and fist bumps. Everyone wanted to be my friend, to laugh at my jokes and invite me places after school, and they all acted like it had always been this way. Their transparency would have been gross if it wasn’t so fun.
Ren definitely thought it was gross, but she still let me sit with her at lunch. The day after I’d fled her house like some kind of freak and vowed I’d stay away from her, I found myself watching her across the room during art class again, and whenever her eyes met mine, she smiled. It did something to me. It made me not care that I didn’t know how to act for her, because it wasn’t about me anymore. It was about her. All I wanted from her was to get to know her, if she’d let me, and when I approached her at lunch that day, she called my name and moved her bag aside so that I could sit down next to her. I’d sat with her every day since, and she put up with the circus that followed me now. I think she was even amused by the more desperate bids for my attention.
“What’s that blonde’s name? Taylor?” she said as we walked to the science wing after lunch together.
“I think so, yeah.”
“You mean you don’t remember her from when you two were OMG-best-friends in the second grade?” she said, imitating Taylor’s vocal fry and hair toss. “She totally let you cheat off her math homework all the time!”
I laughed.
“How does it not drive you crazy?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I kind of like it. I’ve never been popular before.”
We stopped in the hallway near her biology class. There were still a couple of minutes until the bell, so I leaned against the wall and she leaned up next to me.
“Don’t take offense at this,” she said, “but you know they’re all fakes, right? Leeches. They only want to be around you because of the reflected fame.”
“I know,” I said, “but they still want to be around me.”
“You can do better than that,” she said.
I looked up, and when my eyes met hers, something felt different about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Her eyes were the same as always, pretty but not particularly special. Yet the texture of the gaze felt new and strange. It gave me a weird, hollow kind of feeling in my belly. Was this what normal people felt? Did she feel it too? It drove me crazy that I couldn’t tell.
“You think?” I said, leaning closer to her. I didn’t even mean to; my body just did it.
She nodded. “I do.”
“Interesting.”
“Listen.” This time she was the one who inched closer to me. “I know we haven’t been hanging out that long, but I want to make sure you know I’m not another Taylor.”
“I do,” I said.
She gave me a mysterious little smile. “Good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m hoping that means I’ll get to see the guy behind the act sometime.”
My chest hitched. “What act?”
She gave me a look. “Please. You do a good job of faking with the fakers, but I see right through you. You’d better get moving; the bell’s going to ring any second.”
But I didn’t move. I was thinking about her seeing through me and how she actually wanted to and how, maybe, I wanted to let her. Comfortable home, loving family, adoring girlfriend. Everything a person could ever want, right?
“Earth to Danny!” she said.
I shook myself from my thoughts. “Sorry.”
She squinted at me. “No teachers ever write up the miracle boy for being tardy, do they?”
“You’ve got it,” I said.
“You’re shameless and I kind of love it,” she said. “Now get out of here.”
“Hey, you want—” I took a breath. “Want to do something? After school?”
She smiled. “Yeah, okay.”
I nodded, and we went our separate ways.
• • •
At the end of the day I met Nicholas at the glass doors to the student parking lot to tell him I didn’t need a ride, but he forestalled me.
“Lex just texted,” he said, already more words than he’d spoken to me all week. “She wants us to come straight home.”
“Oh,” I said, and there was my old friend Disappointment. “Okay.”
I texted Ren on the way home, said a family thing had come up. She texted me back a picture of a man sticking out his tongue. When Nicholas and I arrived home, I went to look for Lex. She was in the kitchen, making a snack for Mia.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Not sure,” she said. “Patrick’s on his way over.”
My hands suddenly felt cold. If Patrick was leaving work in the middle of the day, something was wrong.
“Sit down, Danny. I’ll make you something to eat while we wait,” Lex said. She handed Mia a plate of apple slices with a spoonful of peanut butter.
Nicholas sat down beside Mia, and I frowned at him. On the rare afternoons he didn’t spend at Asher’s, he usually went straight to his room.
“I’ll take an apple too,” he said. Apparently, he’d decided to wait with us.
Lex had the line between her eyebrows that indicated annoyance but dutifully started to cut up another apple for him. I sat down on the other side of Mia. She was knocking her heel against the chair leg in an erratic pattern that mirrored the beat of my heart, and we waited.
Patrick walked through the front door only a few minutes later. His face was flushed, probably from driving here with the top of his convertible down. His eyes sought out Lex first, and something wordless passed between them.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“It’s no big deal,” Patrick said, which meant that it was. “We knew this was coming. The FBI needs you to come in for an interview.”
Lex closed her eyes. Nicholas looked over at me. My stomach dropped.
“I put them off for as long as I could, Danny,” Patrick continued, “but they won’t let me delay them anymore. I told them that you’re in no state to discuss what happened yet, but they’re insisting. They want you to come in on Thursday.”
“It’s okay,” I said, shoving down the sudden surge of fear that went through me. I could handle this. “I’m ready.”
“No! You shouldn’t have to do this. Not yet,” Lex said. She looked at Patrick with the big eyes that had probably gotten her her way more times than not. “Isn’t there anything else you can do?”
“I’ve done everything I could to get us this much time,” Patrick said.
“Why can’t we just say no?” she pressed.
“You remember Agent Morales. She won’t let anything go, and I don’t think we really want to piss off the FBI.”
“Why not?” Mia asked.
“You’d think you’d want to talk to them,” Nicholas said. “You know. Help them catch the people who did this to you.”
Fuckfuckfuck.
Lex shook her head. “It’s not—”
“Don’t you want that?” Nicholas said. “Danny?”
“Why don’t you want to piss off the FBI?” Mia asked.
“Don’t say ‘piss,’ ” Nicholas told her.
“Of course,” I said. “It’s okay, Patrick. I want to go.”
Here Lies Daniel Tate Page 14