“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.