“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 who 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?”