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I walked up the jet bridge like a man must walk up to a scaffold. Dragging my feet, eyes on the ground, slipping once again into the traumatized child routine I’d used to fool people so many times in the past. I pulled my baseball cap down low over my eyes like I always did, and I’d shaved carefully that morning, even though what little blond stubble I had was barely visible. Usually these two things were effective at hiding my true age from disinterested cops, but I couldn’t hope this would slow down the Tate family for long. Maybe, if I was lucky, the act would last long enough for me to get away from them and disappear, something I’d been trying unsuccessfully to do ever since this thing started.
Patrick put an arm around my shoulder as we walked, both to reassure me and to move me along. He didn’t seem stupid. Maybe, despite all I knew about deception, I had underestimated people’s ability to fool themselves when it suited them.
The blast of cold air from the AC as we stepped from the gangway into the airport was shocking. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the sky was a bright expanse of uninterrupted blue, and the sun made the tarmac shimmer like water. In Vancouver the gutters were still full of slushy brown snow. I had emerged from that plane into a different world.
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Want to know how it happened?
I came up with the plan the night Martin caught me at the bus station. There was no way I was going to let myself be sectioned, but I’d blown most of my money on a bus ticket I’d never get to use and was being watched like a hawk by the staff at Short Term 8, who had also changed the code on the security system. I needed a scam that would occupy the cops for a while and give me the time I needed to figure a way out of there so I could run my traumatized-teen-found-by-a-tourist scheme in another city.
Things were never supposed to go this far.
Martin returned me to my bed at about one in the morning that night. I lay there thinking, figuring out my next move. Every half hour, Alicia cracked open the door to my room to make sure I was still there, and I feigned sleep. Five minutes after her 4:00 a.m. check, when I was sure she’d be back in the office, I slipped out of bed and retrieved my remaining cash from the hidden pocket in my backpack. I had one ten, one five, and a bit of change. Not much, but it should be enough.
I crept out of my room and into the room next door. It was a double occupied by two boys: Marcos, a twelve-year-old who was bigger than most linebackers and talked almost as little as I did, and Aaron, a scrawny kid who was prone to outbursts and mild kleptomania. I shook Aaron’s shoulder to wake him. He blinked up at me in confusion.
“Want ten dollars?” I said.
“What do you want?” he answered.
“I want you to scream.”
He eyed me warily. “Show me the money.”
I pulled the ten out of my pocket and let him see it.
“What are you going to do?” he said.
“None of your business.”
He sat up. “Fifteen.”
I clenched my jaw. That would leave me with next to nothing, but I didn’t have time to waste negotiating with this little asshole.
I handed over the fifteen dollars and told Aaron what I wanted him to do, and then I returned to my room. A couple of minutes later, Aaron started to scream. Tucker muttered a curse but didn’t open his eyes, and Jason just rolled over and covered his head with a pillow. When you grow up in care, you learn to sleep through a lot of shit. Seconds later, footsteps came pounding down the hallway, Martin’s heavy ones and Alicia’s lighter ones. When something set Aaron off, he would not only scream at the top of his lungs but punch and kick. It took two people, one holding on to each arm, to restrain him until he had calmed down. And during the night shift there were only two people on duty.
As soon as I heard Martin and Alicia enter Aaron’s room, I got out of bed again. I only had as much time as Aaron’s lungs would hold out, so I moved quickly. I went straight for the office but found the door closed. I was hoping Alicia would leave it open, but no such luck. The door locked automatically whenever it was closed, so I needed to find a way in. I inspected the doorknob. It was just a standard lock, which seemed generous and not a little naive given the type of kids who occupied Short Term 8. I could crack it easy.
I crossed the hallway to the recreation room and rummaged through a box of art supplies. A handful of paper clips and safety pins floated around at the bottom. I grabbed a long silver paper clip and straightened it as I returned to the locked office. Aaron was still going strong.
It took me a minute or two of fiddling and changing the bend in the paper clip, but eventually I got the office door open. I slipped behind the ancient desktop and jiggled the mouse to wake it up. Alicia had a game of solitaire going; she must have been really bored. I minimized the window and opened a web browser.
After a few minutes of searching, I found Daniel Arthur Tate on the website for the U.S.’s Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I felt pretty clever, coming up with the idea to pose as a missing American child. They wouldn’t section a poor abducted kid, and the amount of red tape that would need to be untangled in an international kidnapping should give me enough time to get my hands on some cash and get out of Vancouver. Daniel seemed like a perfect cover. He looked vaguely like me and would be about the age I’d been posing as, which was several years younger than my actual age. He’d been missing for long enough that the old pictures of him wouldn’t immediately give me away as a fake.
Because I was on borrowed time, I printed his missing poster and the first article I found about his disappearance to read later. Normally, I planned my scams better than this, but I didn’t know how long Aaron could occupy Martin and Alicia. I folded up the printed papers and stuck them in the waistband of my pajamas, cleared the browser history, pulled Solitaire back up, and put the computer to sleep. Then I closed the office door and crept back to my room. Once I was safely back in bed, I banged on the wall with my fist. It was the signal I’d prearranged with Aaron. Over the next few minutes he pretended to calm down, and everything inside Short Term 8 returned to normal.
I read the missing poster and printed article in the dim glow of the blue safety light outside my window, memorizing the details so that I’d have some basic information to back up my claim. If there were any questions I couldn’t answer, I would just claim trauma related amnesia. I stared at Daniel Tate’s face, imagining who he was, imagining myself becoming him. I constructed a story about where I’d been for those missing six years, and I felt Daniel start to take shape inside of me.
It had seemed like a good plan. There was no way for me to know what I was getting myself into.