I dug my old backpack out of the corner of the closet. It was already packed with some spare clothes. I grabbed the laptop Lex had bought me, the stash of cash I’d been collecting bit by bit for weeks just in case, and the credit card with Danny’s name on it. I would make one last cash withdrawal tonight and then toss it.
I looked around the room. There was nothing of my own to take with me. The one possession that was really mine—the baseball card with the smiling boy—was in my locker at school where I’d hidden it. I’d always wanted to get rid of that boy, and now that I had to leave him behind, I felt a pang that was akin to a knife in the belly. But there was nothing I could do for him now.
I walked out of the room and out of the house. I paused only once, outside of Mia’s door. I pressed my palm against it. She was my one consolation in all of this, the one memory that wouldn’t feel poisonous when I was gone.
Then I left the Tate house, and I didn’t let myself look back.
? ? ?
Once I was outside of Hidden Hills, I caught a bus to Calabasas and walked a couple of kilometers to Ren’s house. By the time I got there, the moon was so high in the sky that it cast no shadows.
I’m not entirely sure why I felt like I had to go there. I’d never said good-byes before when it was time for me to leave a place. Leaving was what I knew best, and I knew it was best to do it clean.
But Ren made me feel messy.
I stood outside the gate that protected her aunt and uncle’s house and watched her windows as I called her. After the seventh ring, she picked up.
“Hello?” she mumbled.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” I said.
“That’s okay. What’s up?”
“I’m outside.”
“O-kay,” she said. “That’s a little creepy.”
“I need to talk to you,” I said. “Can you come down? It’s important.”
She sounded awake now. “You all right?”
“I’ll explain everything,” I said, which was a lie. I wouldn’t explain anything. I didn’t want to disappear with her hating me. There’d be plenty of time for that later.
“I’ll be right down,” she said.
A couple of minutes later the gate slid open and Ren stepped out wearing a robe tied over ice cream cone pajamas. Her hair was up in a loose ponytail, and she was wearing glasses and a bewildered expression, but still she was incredibly pretty to me in that moment. People are always their most beautiful when you know you’re never going to see them again.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I just . . . wanted to see you,” I said. Which, weirdly, was the truth. She’d never cared that I was Danny Tate, so our relationship was one of the only things I had that hadn’t just been tainted forever. Maybe that’s why I’d needed to come here.
She looked at the backpack slung over my shoulder. “What’s going on? Are you going somewhere?”
“No,” I said.
“How about you come inside?” she said. “It seems like you’re wigging out a little—which is cool, we’ve all been there—but I think you should call your sister.”
“No,” I said.
“Then, I can call her and—”
“No!”
She started at the sharpness of my tone, and then she was looking at me in that way that so many people did but that she never had. Like I wasn’t quite human. Like I was an animal or a thing, something fundamentally different from her. It was the last thing I needed, and she might as well have punched me. I sank down onto the curb and buried my head in my hands. After a moment, she sat down beside me. We were both silent.
“You said you wanted to get to know the real me,” I finally said. “Did you mean it?”
“Yeah,” she said softly, and when I looked up at her, that look in her eyes was gone, and I was a real person again.
“It’s hard for me,” I said. “To be honest with people.”
“Makes sense,” she said. It was true, too, just not for the reasons she thought. It wasn’t because I was some traumatized kidnapping victim, but because I had learned to be a con artist at the feet of my mother and the parade of losers she brought into our house. Saying just what I had to to keep someone from raising their voice or raising their hand. Being whatever they wanted me to be in that moment. Increasingly, saying and being nothing at all, because nothing made them happy. Ren bumped my knee with hers. “But hey, no rush. We’ve got time.”
Except we didn’t.
“I had—” I swallowed and tried again. “There was . . . this bat.”
She cocked her head at me in confusion.
“When I was in Canada,” I said. “I’d never had any pets, and I didn’t really have any friends or even a stuffed animal, but there was a hole in the screen over the window in the room where I slept, and there was a little silver-winged bat that would crawl in and sleep between the window and the screen during the day. And I . . .”
“What?” she asked.
“God, I don’t even know why I’m telling you this story. It’s stupid.”
“It isn’t.”
“Well, I . . . I sort of made that bat my friend,” I said. “I called him Grey Wing because of this comic book I once read, and I’d make myself wake up before the sun every morning so that I could wait for him to come back after hunting all night. Sometimes I felt like . . . as long as he came back, I could keep going, you know?”
She nodded.
“I was so scared that someday he wouldn’t, so I waited,” I said. The words had taken control now, and I watched as though outside of myself as I told her this story. This ridiculous but entirely true story. Something that was completely me and no one else and which I had never told another soul. I wasn’t even sure why I’d started, except that I wanted to tell her something true before I was gone from here and she discovered how much of me had been lies. “I would talk to him. I’d ask him how his night had been and imagine the story he was telling me in response about flying through the night, hunting moths, hiding from owls. Then I’d tell him about my day. I’d tell him everything that was bothering me, things I never told anyone else. That bat . . . he knew me better than anyone else in my life ever has. Maybe better than anyone ever will.”
“What happened to him?” she asked.
I tried to shrug. “One morning he didn’t come back.”
“Danny . . . ,” she said.
I couldn’t stand the sound of that name in her mouth. Not after the truth. I stood up.
“I have to go,” I said.
She got up too. “Are you sure? Want me to drive you home?”
I shook my head. “I’ll be okay.”
She frowned. “Okay.”
I looked at her for a second, thinking about what I should say, what I should do, what someone other than me would say or do right now.
And then I thought, fuck it. I was already gone. No reason not to do exactly what I wanted.
I pulled her to me and kissed her. My bottom two fingers curled into the top of her pajama bottoms, which were cool and fuzzy-soft, and my top two fingers curled into her flesh, which was sleep-warm and smooth. She was startled, but she didn’t pull away, and, slowly, she raised one hand to touch my jaw with her fingertips.
I’d never kissed anyone like that before.
She pushed me back, not entirely, just enough for me to see the worry in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I don’t want to go,” I said.