? ? ?
Just a few minutes into second period, an office assistant came to get me out of class. She told me to bring my stuff. I glanced over at Nicholas. His frown of confusion was the same as mine.
When I approached the office, I spotted Lex waiting for me in the hall. My steps slowed. In the early morning bustle of getting everyone ready for work and school, I’d managed to avoid saying much to her and Patrick. I wasn’t sure how to now that I knew the truth.
When she looked up from her phone and saw me, she beckoned me toward her.
“Come on,” she said. “We’re leaving.”
She hooked her arm into mine and led me outside. I was caught.
“Why?” I asked. The bright glare of the sun hurt my eyes. She was acting normal, but I knew now how little that meant, and my mind jumped to worst-case scenarios. The FBI wanted to see me again right then. Lex and Patrick were tired of this game and had decided to turn me over. They knew I knew and were going to make me disappear the same way Danny had.
“You tell me,” she said as she slid into the driver’s seat of her car, which she’d left idling by the curb.
If I started running, now, how far could I get before she caught me?
The passenger’s window came rolling down, and Lex peered at me from behind the steering wheel.
“What are you doing?” she said. “Get in the car.”
If I did get away, how far could I get?
“Danny!” She laughed. “Get in the car!”
It’s not like I had a real choice. I opened the passenger’s door and climbed inside. Lex started to drive.
“Nicholas’s mystery boyfriend called me,” she said as we pulled out of the CHS parking lot. “Seems like a nice kid. He said it looked like you could use a personal day.”
I was relieved, and annoyed. “I told him I was fine.”
“Well then I sprang you for nothing,” she said with a shrug. “But at least you can keep me company today. It gets so boring when you guys are all at school. We’ll have fun.”
“Okay,” I said. I’d have to figure out how to be around Lex at some point anyway, and at least this way I wouldn’t have to figure out where to sit at lunch today.
She turned and smiled at me, and it turned out that Lex was ten times the liar I was, because if I didn’t know better, I would have sworn it was real.
? ? ?
She took me to lunch, where we talked about my school and Mia’s upcoming surgery to have her brace removed and a hundred little mundanities. Truthfully, once I relaxed a little, it wasn’t that different from before. We were both still lying. The only difference was I now knew it, just like she always had. Well, that and the sour, queasy feeling I got in my gut whenever she gave me one of her loving smiles or asked with apparent interest how I was doing, not because she actually gave a shit about me, but because it was her job to manage the impostor and make sure nothing went wrong with the scheme. I couldn’t believe what an idiot I was for not seeing it before. Me, of all people.
We returned home to find Jessica’s car—the now repaired SUV she’d crashed the night I should have realized the truth—parked in the driveway, that mysterious orange dust lining the treads of the tires. We didn’t see her, though, and Lex and I ended up in the rec room, sprawled out on the couch, watching her soaps on the big screen.
“Wait, Savannah is with Gage now?” I asked as the two characters kissed passionately.
Lex nodded and popped back a couple of chocolate covered coffee beans from the package she’d grabbed from the kitchen on our way down. Then she passed it to me. “Yeah, his girlfriend—”
“Cordelia?”
“Right. She died in the same plane crash that killed Savannah’s fiancé, so they bonded.”
“Cordelia’s dead?” I asked around a mouthful of coffee beans. “I liked her!”
“Well, they think she’s dead,” Lex said, “but no way they’d kill off such a big character. I’m guessing she’s still alive.”
After the next commercial break the camera zoomed in on Cordelia waking up in the home of the strange mountain man who’d saved her from the wreckage of the plane crash. I laughed, and Lex whooped and turned to me for a high five.
For a second I’d forgotten. And when I remembered, it stung all over again.
It must have shown on my face, because she said, “Hey, you okay?”
“Yeah, I just . . .” I swallowed. “This is nice.”
“Oh, sweetie,” she said. She scooted over until we were right beside each other and wrapped me up in her arms. I let her hold me. Part of me hated her, but it still felt nice. It still, somehow, made me feel better, even though I knew it was a lie.
It had to be a lie. Lex was just that good an actress. I couldn’t let myself start to believe that maybe she’d really come to care about me outside of the con, the way I’d really started to care about her.
That would be incredibly stupid.
“Lex,” I said.
“Hmm?” I felt her response more than heard it, the hum of her voice against me.
“Can we watch one of the home movies?” I asked. “From before everything got so messed up?”
I wanted to see her again with Danny. Maybe it was different from the way she was with me. Maybe it would show me that some of whatever this was between us was real.
She pulled away and looked at me. “Yeah. Sure, we can do that.”
“Thanks,” I said.
She got up and went to the credenza where the DVDs were kept. She read the labels on the spines before grabbing one and putting it into the player, then sat down beside me again as the movie started. The date at the bottom of the screen said it was 2009. On the screen Robert Tate was filming his wife, who had baby Mia, dressed in a pink bathing suit with little blue dolphins printed on it, held in her arms. Jessica kept trying to hide her face from the camera, telling Robert to go film the kids. Instead, he zoomed in close, until her face—ocean blue eyes, her cheeks pink from the sun, an American sweetheart face—took up the entire frame. Jessica batted him away, and Mia started to cry. Jessica gave Robert an exasperated look, and retreated to the cabin of the boat with the baby.
Robert turned the camera on himself and made a grimace. An I’m-in-trouble face. Then he turned the camera toward the kids who were swimming off the back of the boat.
“Oh, I remember this. It was the Fourth of July,” Lex said. “It was so hot it felt like we would die if we got out of the water for even a second.”
Danny climbed back onto the boat. He ran, dripping, up the stairs to the wheelhouse and climbed over the barrier until he was standing on a tiny perch, only his grip on a metal railing holding him there. A teenaged Lex yelled at him to be careful. He grinned and let go, cannonballing into the water below. My eyes went back and forth between the video and Lex as she watched it.
“You never had any fear,” Lex said with a sad smile.
The picture suddenly grew dark, cutting from the kids horsing around in the water to the family huddled together under blankets after the sun had gone down.
“Remember the fireworks?” she asked.