The next day at lunch I sat with Ren again. We talked about art class and A Life of Love, Lex’s favorite soap, which Ren also happened to be a fan of. Nicholas watched me from his table across the courtyard, and Dr. Singh watched me from a window. Neither tried to speak to me.
This is when the old me would have run.
The new me was starting to have too much to lose.
? ? ?
“Want to come over to my house later?” Ren asked when the bell rang at the end of our lunch period.
I blinked. “Why?”
I’d blurted the word out without thinking and was afraid she might be offended, but Ren just laughed.
“Sorry, did you have other plans?” she asked. Although the mockery was gentle, it was still mockery. Pretty ballsy when you’re talking to a poor, delicate kidnapping victim. “Plus, I don’t totally hate your company.”
“I, uh . . .” I swallowed.
“It’s cool. You don’t have to if you don’t want. Or I could make up a good reason if that helps? Like how I’m really terrible at art, and I’m afraid our stupid class is going to sink my GPA if I can’t learn how to make a bowl of fruit vaguely resemble a bowl of fruit. Actually, that’s not even made up. That’s totally true.”
Ren was not scary. Ren could not expose me. But she made me nervous anyway, in an odd way I couldn’t explain.
When I didn’t answer, she waved a hand. “You’re obviously not into it. No worries.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said quickly. “I’ll come.”
This was the whole point of becoming Danny Tate, wasn’t it? To have the friends and family and opportunities I could never have as myself? Surely that list was supposed to include a pretty girl.
When the final bell rang at the end of the day, Nicholas wasn’t waiting for me at the doors to the student parking lot like usual. He’d barely spoken to me since the day before, but it was hard to believe he’d just leave me to find my own way home. If nothing else, he had to know Lex would kill him for it. He had history last period, so I checked with his teacher, who was packing up to leave when I poked my head into the classroom.
“He was called to the guidance office,” she said. “Check there.”
My stomach dropped. “Okay. Thanks.”
I walked quickly toward the front office. Dr. Singh wasn’t allowed to speak to me, so she was going to interview my relatives instead? She wouldn’t dare say the same thing to Nicholas about my real identity that she’d said to Lex, would she? I walked faster. This was bad. I’d deeply pissed Nicholas off during that lunch at the diner when I’d said that stupid thing about him being my best friend, and he’d never been completely sure about me in the first place, so there was no telling what he might say to Singh.
I reached the front office just as Nicholas emerged with Dr. Singh. The woman nodded to me—“Danny”—and disappeared back inside the office.
“Ready?” Nicholas said as if nothing had happened.
“What were you talking to her for?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing,” I said. I’d decided earlier that day that I was going to try harder with Nicholas, be extra nice to him and win him back to my side, but I couldn’t stop the heat rising in my voice. “You’ve been there since the middle of last period. Did she ask about me?”
“Not everything’s about you,” he said. “Are you ready to go home?”
“I just want to know what you were doing in there.” I knew I was losing it but I couldn’t stop. “You know how upset Lex was—”
“Look, this isn’t really any of your business,” he said. “It has nothing to do with you.”
“Just tell me what the fuck she said!” I burst.
For one stunned moment Nicholas just stared at me.
“No,” he finally said, slowly. “I don’t think I will. Now, let’s go, okay?”
I took a deep breath. Shoved everything back down inside. Acting out right now would only make things worse. I shook my head. “I don’t need a ride.”
“What? Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m going to a classmate’s house,” I said.
“Who, that girl you sat with at lunch?” he asked.
“Yeah.” He was looking at me with such confusion that I added, “She needs some help with an assignment.”
He laughed. “You’re helping someone with homework? You just started school again. You’re not even doing homework yet.”
I didn’t understand why he hated me so much. So Danny and Nicholas hadn’t gotten along great as kids, but I was still his loving brother, miraculously returned to him. Shouldn’t that have made up for any childhood issues he had with me?
Unless the real problem was that he suspected I wasn’t his brother at all.
“It’s an art assignment,” I said. “I’m good at art. Besides, she’s new here too.”
Nicholas looked at me closely. “Danny, you’re not new here.”
I swallowed. “You know what I mean. Anyway, tell Lex I’ll be home in a couple of hours.” I started to walk toward the library, where Ren and I had arranged to meet.
“You haven’t talked to her about this yet?” Nicholas called after me. “She’s not going to like it—”
“Just tell her, okay?” I said as I turned the corner and Nicholas disappeared from view. I would start being extra nice to him tomorrow.
? ? ?
A few minutes later I was climbing into Ren’s car. I surreptitiously scoped it out; any place where a person spent a lot of time could tell you a surprising amount about them if you knew how to look. Like Nicholas’s BMW: It was gray and pristine and he always kept it cold. Ren’s car was chaos. It was messy but not dirty, a blue Mercedes convertible from the ’70s or ’80s that had the right hood ornament to fit into the student parking lot but whose sharp, boxy lines refused to conform. It smelled of old leather and the cucumber hand lotion that lay on the passenger’s seat along with some crumpled papers, a half-empty water bottle, a phone charger, a candy bar wrapper, and a tube of lip gloss. Ren scooped all of this up without apology and tossed it into the backseat with the other teenage detritus that littered the leather seats. Some aggressive, upbeat girl rock blared from the speaker when she turned the car on, and she turned the music down but not off as she drove us to her house in Calabasas. I filed every detail away to analyze later, because despite a couple of days of careful study, I still hadn’t figured Ren out.
Her home was an ultramodern place of glass and steel that wasn’t quite as big or grand as the Tate house, but that was grading it against a brutal curve. It still would have held a dozen copies of the house I grew up in. She parked her car in the driveway and led me in through a side door that connected to the kitchen. She grabbed a couple of sodas from the fridge and handed me one.
“When did you move here?” I asked.
“Six weeks ago,” she said. “It’s my aunt and uncle’s place. My parents are working on this skyscraper in Dubai for the next year, so I’m staying here until they get back.”
“You didn’t want to go with them?” I asked.
She screwed up her face. “Hell no. I mean, I love my parents, but no way was I going to change my entire life to be with them. Transferring schools junior year is bad enough. My aunt and uncle are cool. They’re not around a lot, and they basically let me do whatever I want.”