“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.