Who I'm Not Read online

  The monitor blanked. Harley was gone. I was on my own. I walked out into the front room. Josh was slouched in a chair, holding a Starbucks tall cup, laughing about something with two hardcore-looking girls. He turned and saw me.

  I waited a heartbeat. I said, “My name is Danny.”

  “Hey, later,” Josh said to the girls. He stood up, tossing the cup at the wastebasket. Then he walked toward me.

  THREE

  My name is Danny Dellomondo. I was born November 9, 1994. I am short and slim, with curly black hair, a long nose and a cocky, wise-guy kind of smile. My eyes used to be gray-green. I had a mole on my right shoulder blade, a scar on my right calf where I got cut by a wire fence when I was little. I’m right-handed. I like honey-garlic wings, cookie dough ice cream, Medal of Honor on PlayStation, metal bands, Star Wars and mirrored aviator sunglasses. I toe out when I walk. I use the word sucker a lot. My mother is Carleen. My older half brother is Tyson and my older half sister is Shannon. I live at 1787 Coach House Road, Grafton, Ontario, K2R 3P5.

  I disappeared the afternoon of Tuesday, April 27, 2006, when I didn’t take the school bus home and hung out with friends instead. About 5:30 I phoned Tyson on a friend’s cell and asked for a ride. Carleen was supposed to take me to the mall that night and I was scared she’d be mad and change her mind if I was late. Tyson said no. I started walking. I was wearing a black rapper’s toque with a little brim turned to one side, a blue puffy vest, a black Slayer jersey, baggy jeans slung low over Simpsons boxers, and gray Vans skate shoes. I was carrying a purple and black backpack with Led Zeppelin written on one side in marker. I had a gold chain with a letter D on it around my neck. At the corner of Dairy Street and County Road Two, my friends went one way and I went the other. That was the last time anyone saw me.

  Until yesterday in Tucson, Arizona.

  I stood in the washroom, staring into the mirror, running over the sketchy line I’d fed Josh about being kidnapped and held captive.

  My biggest problem when I’m snowing a mark is that I get carried away. I say too much. I’m probably saying too much right now. Anyway, this time I’d done my best to keep it simple, even if it sounded stupid. I’d tried to follow Harley’s rules: No details, no confusion and It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. So I made it too awful for me to talk about—I stopped and started and shrugged and looked away, like I’d done all those times in all those principals’ offices back in the Bad Time.

  I only got fancy once, because parts of Danny’s description didn’t match me. That came after I said I’d woken up in a place with barred windows where everyone spoke a different language. I whispered, “I…just…they…they did something to my eyes. With a needle. It hurt. Now they’re brown.” I twisted my leg around. “And I had this mark on my leg where I cut it when I was little. They took it off too.” Could you do that stuff? I didn’t know. I think it was all in a spy story I’d read in some crummy motel where they didn’t have cable. Did it matter? It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

  “Why did they do that?” Josh had asked, still leaning back, watching.

  I’d hugged my elbows, as if I was cold. “They said that way…no one would believe…and they wanted…me to…us to…look…uh…certain ways…for…”

  Josh’s Conversed foot came down off the desk. “There were more kids?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many?”

  I hugged myself harder and rocked back and forth. “I don’t know. They changed.”

  He gave a low half whistle–half whisper. Then he said, “I know it’s hard to trust anyone, but the main thing you have to remember is that you’re safe here.”

  I’d kept my head down. I heard him swing his chair to his darkened computer monitor. “I understand how tough this is for you. Let me do some checking.”

  Bingo.

  I’d figured it would take Josh a couple of days to check things out. That would have given me time to figure out how to steal some coin and duck out of there before it all came apart. It didn’t happen that way. About three hours later, I was staring at a piece of pizza while the suppertime news blared on a TV outside Josh’s office. I was listening for something about Harley when Josh came in and said, “We’ve reached your family, Danny. They’re on the phone. You think you can talk to them?”

  I’d freaked, but I couldn’t show it. Part of me knew I should say no and stall for time, but part of me said I had to go for it, that this was a test, almost. Maybe it was the way Josh was so fake relaxed about it. His voice and his slouch said it’s cool, but his eyes were locked on mine again, and they seemed extra dark. I nodded. He picked up a cordless phone from its cradle on the desk and punched a button on it. “Yes, ma’am,” he said into it. “I have him here with me now, and he’s willing to speak with you. Hold on, please.”

  He’d held the phone out to me, then raised his eyebrows and mouthed, Your sister, okay? I nodded again and lifted the phone to my ear, making sure to wrap my hand around the mouthpiece to muffle my voice, the way I’d seen Harley do it a million times. “Hello?”

  A woman’s voice quavered, “Danny?”

  At least they spoke English in Canada. What else could I do? I mumbled, “Yeah. Is that Shan—” Right there, I’d lost it. It was too crazy. My mouth had gone dry and the rest of her name disappeared. I felt Josh’s eyes boring into me. I figured I’d blown it.

  There was a gasp on the other end of the line. Then the voice said, “It’s Shan, Danny, it’s Shan.” Then I heard muffled voices, urgent-sounding, almost like an argument.

  Another voice had come on then, this one razorsharp. “Who is this?”

  I’d wrapped my hand tighter around the receiver and turned away from Josh. I went with it; I had no choice. “It’s Danny. I—I want to come home.” Why not? In a way it was even true.

  Silence. Could I hear her breathing? Then there was the crumply sound of a hand over the phone and more voices, almost yelling. What were they saying? I was sweating again. Then the Shannon voice was back, shaking. “You just stay safe where you are. I’m coming to get you.”

  And less than a day later, she was here. Or almost here. I hadn’t even had a chance to run, let alone score some cash. For all that I’m here to help crap, old Josh had made sure to stick me in a “secure residential facility” overnight, where I’d “lost” my five dollars with a little help from a kid with a gang tat. It was the Bad Time all over again. It had been all I could do to keep my head together enough to come up with a new twist on my plan.

  I looked in the mirror. After three years, Danny might look something like me. I tried the smirky little grin again, curling the right corner of my mouth and just lifting the upper lip on my left. That helped, especially with the shades and toque I’d asked Josh to get for me.

  I didn’t have to fool anyone for long. I didn’t think I would fool anyone for long. I wasn’t even sure if Josh believed me now. I’d said I didn’t want them to meet at the shelter, because the little rooms were too much like where I’d been held for so long. I wanted to meet in a park, with lots of people and open space around us, so I could be calm. And so I could run like hell. All I had to do was get everyone confused enough for me to get a head start.

  I pulled the little black brim on the toque back past my ear. I wondered how truly stupid it looked with Gap cargo shorts. I wondered if Josh was a fast runner. I flushed the toilet for show, then stepped into the hall, toeing out.

  Josh was waiting, waggling keys to the shelter’s van. He looked at me and grinned. “You know how hot it is out there, Danny?”

  “This sucker is my look,” I said from behind the shades. I was already getting tired of saying sucker. “Let’s go.”

  The park was flat and open, cartoon green under sprinklers. I scoped an escape route around a fountain, through a playground and across the next parking lot. There were cars to dodge around and a sun-baked boulevard with a lot of traffic. Get across that, and then what? I guessed I’d find out.


  Josh backed the van into a space at the edge of the lot and we sat there, waiting. There were only a few cars. Apparently Tucsoners didn’t go to the park when it was a hundred degrees out. My legs started bouncing.

  “It’s okay to be nervous,” Josh said.

  Tell me about it, I thought. I wondered again about him and running. The van doors were locked, and Josh had some kind of central control of them. I’d already tried mine when Josh was busy messing with the radio as we waited at a red light.

  “There’ll be a Canadian government person with her. From the consulate in LA. No police.”

  The air conditioner was on, but sweat prickled under my hat. I promised myself I’d dump it first chance I got. I wedged my hands under my legs to keep from fiddling with the door. I tried to breathe slowly and quit the bouncing, but I was fried. I’d only had a few hours’ sleep, on top of everything that had happened. My brain was zapping around like a video game.

  Then a white Focus with a rental-company sticker pulled up a little ways off. Two women got out. The one on the driver’s side was small, with a frizz of blond hair above a beige jacket and skirt. She had flat shoes and a stylin’ leather briefcase that Harley would have liked. The woman on the passenger side was chunky, in a yellow-and-orange-striped sundress that didn’t make her look any smaller. She had tangled dark hair and a round, pale face behind oversized sunglasses. Her legs and feet were pale too, with red nail polish that matched her sandals. A white sweater was draped over a white shoulder bag.

  “Here we go,” Josh said. He popped the door locks. We climbed out. A chain-link fence ran along my side and behind us. There was nowhere to go but forward. I couldn’t even do that: the heat slapped me harder than my first foster mother.

  As I stood there, stunned, the women looked our way. The chunky one flinched. You could see her mouth, “Danny?” Then she screamed it. “DANNY!” and she skittered toward me, her sandals clacking on the pavement. Before I could move, she had grabbed me. I don’t like it when people touch me.

  “Danny.” Now she was sobbing. She was all over me, and I couldn’t move. It was awful. Finally, I lifted my hands on either side of her. It felt as if I was holding them out for the cuffs to be snapped on.

  “Shan,” I said. She didn’t let go of me until the two of us were on a plane to Toronto.

  FOUR

  It was almost too easy. Shan was a motormouth. I could hardly keep up. She had photos with her of how the family looked now. “Just so they don’t weird you out. Oh, Grampy looks frail, doesn’t he? And he limps now. He had a stroke last year.

  “Roy and the kids and I are in Port Hope now. I’m receptionist at the clinic and Roy’s still at GM, thank God, even with the cutbacks. Brooklynne’s going into grade one in September and Matt will be in grade five. Haven’t they grown? Matt still remembers that time he got scared up on the big slide and you climbed up and pretended to be a monkey to get him down. He slides around in front of the TV just the way you used to. Sometimes I’ll come in behind him and for a second I’ll think it’s you.”

  “Slides?” I fished. My voice sounded tight. I couldn’t help it. Not only was this crazy, but I’d never been on a plane before.

  “Oh, you know.” Shan was still looking at the pictures. “How you used to put your hands flat on the floor and scoot around on your butt? I always thought it looked as if you were revving up to take off.” She glanced over. “Oh God. Look at you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you took off when all this…We know now they took you.”

  She hesitated a beat, then grabbed my hand, which was clutching the armrest. I pulled it back. I took a deep breath. “It’s okay. It’s just—” Use the truth when you can. It’s easier. I looked at the seatback in front of me. There was a little TV screen there. “I don’t like when people touch me. Because of…”

  From the corner of my eye I saw her lips pinch in as she watched me. “Aw, hon. It was bad, I know. Josh told me about it.”

  I nodded and kept looking forward. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  I waited a second, and then I fished again. “Did you— did Momma—think…”

  “That you ran off?” She looked at me hard. “Oh, hon. We were frantic. We didn’t know what to think. And the police…” She closed her eyes. “They thought all kinds of things. They thought Da—I mean, you—” She flapped her hands around. “Oh God. Sorry, hon. It’s been so long thinking…I’m having trouble getting my head around all this…Oh my God, never mind. Never mind what the police thought. Never mind any of it. It was awful. Never mind. You don’t need to know.”

  “Know what?”

  She shut her eyes and shook her head sharp and fast, as if she was trying to knock bad memories loose. Then she stopped and took a deep breath. Her voice went low and confidential, as if she was willing me to remember. “Listen, it wasn’t always good at home. That’s why you went to foster—to live with other families those two times. And it wasn’t good, right before you…left. For anybody.”

  I nodded.

  “Ty was way out of line, and he was scary, with his temper and the hitting. He hit you too—you don’t have to pretend he didn’t. And it was tough for you with Momma too. But you were younger then, and you were tough for her, being so wild and all. Okay? But after, when it got real bad…she blamed herself. She’d say it was all her fault and now Da—you were gone. She and Ty were both twisted up. Ty was just crazy after you disappeared. You might hear stuff about that. But you know what?” Shan’s voice cracked. She fumbled a tissue out of her bag. “It made Momma stop drinking. No more drugs either. She’s completely clean, sober, and Ty’s way better too. He lives up in Peterborough. Isn’t that great? And it’s going to be way better now, because you’re back. It’s a fresh start for everybody.” She was crying as she said it.

  I nodded again. It really was all I could do just then because the plane was bumping around. I locked my eyes on the seatback screen. I was squeezing those armrests tight. When things settled down, I said, “I’ve never been on a plane before.”

  “Awww, sweetie, it’s okay,” she hiccupped through her tears. “When Roy and I took the kids to Orlando…”

  I let her talk until she fell asleep. She’d told me she’d been up and rushing around ever since the phone call. I knew how she felt.

  FIVE

  I was tired too, but the feeling that something was wrong nagged at me. Like I said before, it felt almost too easy. Maybe I was just too wired, but when I was sure she was asleep, I went through Shan’s shoulder bag. I didn’t really know what I was looking for—it was habit, I guess. She had gum, tissues, makeup, a hairbrush, a pen, a chunky paperback called Wild Haven, sunglasses, tampons, headache pills, a newspaper page with a halfdone Sudoku, a phone bill for 26 Yardley Street, Port Hope, ON, a wallet, her passport, the photo album.

  Everything matched up. I took ten Canadian dollars from her wallet. She had over a hundred with her, so I figured she wouldn’t notice right away. The bills were all different colors, like Monopoly money. Never pass up a chance. I wanted the birth certificate she’d shown for me at the airport—since Danny was fifteen, they’d said he didn’t need a passport—but I left it for the time being. I stuffed the ten into a pocket of my shorts and turned to the pictures. The photo album was brand new. Shan said she’d put it together just for me. The pictures looked real. Why they would have been fake, I don’t know. I was feeling pretty paranoid right then, and so tired I was getting mixed up.

  I looked at Roy, muffin-topped in a golf shirt, arms around giggling kids; Gram and Grampy, perched in lawn chairs outside their RV in Florida. I half-wondered if I’d seen them. Harley and I had spent a month doing a charity-canvassing scam at seniors’ RV parks down there last winter. There was skinny brother Tyson with a beer, a mullet and some bad tattoos. He looked like barbed wire in a T-shirt. Little momma Carleen looked about as huggable as a baseball bat, even in a Santa hat.

  Whatever I was
looking for, I didn’t find it. Anyway, if Shan was the real deal, I couldn’t see any reason why she’d be stringing me along. I put it all out of my head; I had enough to worry about. The seatback screen was showing a map of where we were in the flight. It wouldn’t be long now—two hours at most. I flipped through the photos and looked into all those eyes. They hadn’t seen Danny in three years. Could I fool them? Any of them? For how long? Long enough to figure out some kind of next move? What if Josh had figured it out and called ahead? What if cops were waiting? Would they check fingerprints? DNA? I closed my eyes. Don’t overthink. What choice did I have? It was this or the Bad Time. Sooner or later, I was going to have to run. I could hit the ground running. Yeah, if it wasn’t snowing up there in Canada, I could always run.

  SIX

  I must’ve slept, because I felt a bump and then we were landing. It was sunset. It wasn’t snowing. It was summer. There were no cops, no questions, no calls from Josh. I felt like glass. At Immigration, I snagged Danny’s birth certificate when they handed it back. “S’okay. Sucker’s mine, right? I’ll feel safer.” I stuffed it into the same pocket as the money and jammed on my shades. We moved toward a sign that said CUSTOMS. Past it were blank sliding glass doors. Past them was anybody’s guess. I was ready to run. Shan grabbed my hand as we stepped through the doors. As I tried to shake her off, I heard “There!” People rushed us. I yelled and spun away, but Shan held tight. I flailed at her. Then I was drowning in people.

  “Oh my GOD!”

  “…thought we’d see the day…”

  “…hoped and prayed…”

  It was the family. Later I saw the pictures. They were carrying a Welcome Home banner. I had a sort-of smile that looked as if it had been glued to my teeth. I’d thought I’d shatter every time someone grabbed me.