Who I'm Not Read online

  “How’d you do that?” Matt whispered.

  “Never mind. I had to learn it. Now, c’mon.”

  I led him to the kids’ section. “Grab five big books.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. Just do it.” I was getting really tired of Matt.

  We took all the books to the desk. I balanced them there in a stack.

  The lady there was no bigger than me. Her name tag said Daphne. “We need to come back to get cards, ma’am, but Jo-Anne upstairs said you could hold these for us.”

  “Absolutely,” Daphne said. She looked at us over those half-glasses. I told her our names and address and she wrote it all down on a slip of paper. She was quick, like a bird, which was not good. I decided to go for it anyway. Before she could touch the stack of books, I said, “Oh, and we have to pay for a photocopy.” Matt was still holding the sheet of paper. I passed Daphne the ten. As she opened the cash drawer to make change, I tipped over the books. They hit the floor on her side of the counter. “Oh, sorry!”

  She went for the books. I leaned over the counter like I was trying to help. Instead, I slipped the first bill I could reach out of the drawer and scooped it behind my back to Matt. Then I ran around to help for real. As I did, the tall girl from upstairs came to the desk. I was pretty sure she hadn’t seen what I’d done. I kept my back to her. She didn’t say a word.

  We got the books gathered up again. Daphne gave me change from my ten for the photocopy. It had cost a quarter.

  When we got outside, Matt was bug-eyed. I said, “How much did we get?”

  “Five dollars.” His voice was shaky. He started to reach into his pocket.

  “Not here! Get your bike.”

  He pulled his bike out of the rack, and we crossed the street into a park. I pulled the books I’d boosted out of my pockets. Matt’s eyes got even bigger. “Okay,” I said, “so we made five plus nine seventy-five…Wait.” I put the books down on a picnic table under a tree. I fished the money out of my pocket and dumped it on the table. The Canadian five was blue, and there were a couple of those weird two-dollar coins. The ten had been purple. I pushed it all toward him.

  “What’re you doing?” Matt said.

  “You helped,” I said. “You did great. So we’re partners. You won’t tell, right? ’Cause if you do, we’re screwed. Can I trust you?”

  “Y-yeah. Sure,” Matt stammered.

  “And to show I trust you, I’m going to let you hold it for us. You got a secret place at home where you keep your money safe?”

  He nodded.

  “How much you got?”

  “Twenty-eight bucks.”

  “Good. Plus this. Put it all there. But you got to show me where it is, so I’ll know you haven’t skimmed it. Okay?”

  “Okay.” He stuffed the cash in his pocket. His hands were trembling.

  “Cool. I guess we got money for drinks, huh? See why I like going to the library? And believe me, your mom will like it that we went there too.” I picked up the books. I was feeling good. Thanks to Matt, who’d be too scared to talk, I now had a hiding place for cash, ID on the way and books. Matt didn’t know it yet, but he’d just donated his twenty-eight bucks to my escape fund too.

  As we went to the variety store, there was only one thing niggling at me. The tall girl in the library: as we were leaving, I’d seen her name tag. I could’ve sworn it read Gilly.

  TEN

  Roy went back to work the next day. Shan took the kids to dentist appointments that afternoon. She was all worried about leaving me alone. I was dying for them to go.

  “Are you sure, hon? We won’t be long. They’re booking a checkup for you for next week. I tried for today, but they’re full up.”

  “I just wanna read.” I waved a library book.

  “Well, you’ve got my cell number, right?”

  As soon as they were gone, I went through the house, top to bottom. Like I said, it was an old habit.

  Roy had a couple of joints in a cigarette pack in the back of his sock drawer. Shan had underwear that surprised me, and in one of her winter boots there was $187, a bunch of it in those one- and two-dollar coins. That, plus the money Matt showed me in the bottom of the Lego box, was an excellent start for my escape fund. Then I hit another jackpot: a stack of old home DVDs. I started watching them. When they all got back from the dentist, it was after four. I told Shan I’d make dinner. I’d already checked the kitchen, and there was stuff for spaghetti.

  “Really?”

  “I used to have to cook sometimes,” I said. It was true. After Darla left, Harley kept the RV for a while. Later on we stayed as much as we could in places with kitchenettes, because it was cheaper. He said it was healthier too. Whenever we could cook, Harley would claim he’d gone off junk food after his carney days. Then he’d get me to help him make stuff. We only ever made a few things, like spaghetti or tacos or chili, and then we’d downgrade to KD and frozen fish sticks, and then we’d be back to KFC or pizza.

  It was a hot, sticky afternoon. The house didn’t have central air. Shan sat by the kitchen door, sipping from a tin of iced tea and watching Brooklynne in her blow-up wading pool. I dumped ground beef in the frypan. As it began to sizzle, I said, “Know what this reminds me of? Remember the time I tried to make Momma a birthday cake?”

  “Oh God, yeah. What were you—nine, ten?”

  I shrugged. The answer was ten—I’d checked the date/time stamp at the bottom of the DVD screen—but you don’t always want to be too accurate; it can look suspicious.

  Shan started to giggle. “There was flour everywhere, remember? And Toby got into it…”

  Toby was a dog. I still didn’t know what had happened to him. “Yeah, and there were balloons or something.”

  “Right. God, I’d forgotten.” She looked at me like she was stunned “How did—”

  I shrugged. “Some stuff just sticks, you know?”

  She nodded slowly and looked back to Brooklynne. “You know, I think I even recorded that. I’ve got that somewhere. We transferred everything to DVD. I’ll look after dinner.” I didn’t tell her it was third from the bottom in the left-hand pile. “We should eat outside, it’s so hot,” Shan said. “The big saucepan is down there.”

  I found it and turned on the tap.

  “God, this is so sweet of you,” she went on. “Listen, Danny, Meg from Children’s Aid called me today. She’s coming tomorrow to meet you. And Monday afternoon the police will be here. They just need to get a statement. She said not to worry, that she’d be with you for that.”

  Something must have shown on my face, because Shan said, “I’m going to come home early so I can be here too.”

  ELEVEN

  I kind of liked Meg. You could tell she was new enough to the job that she didn’t have her whole Bad Time vibe happening yet—or maybe my just being “poor Danny” made her switch it off. Either way, she was young and very hot, with long dark hair and shiny nails. Best of all, she never questioned anything I said. I think she liked it best when I didn’t say anything and just looked hurt or small or whatever. Her favorite thing to say was “We all want to make this work.” She said TV reporters and newspapers had been calling her office about me, and she’d deal with them if we wanted her to. “I’ll just say that it’s a private family time and that everybody is relieved and happy that you’re home.”

  There were two cops, Swofford and Griffin. Swofford was a young guy with a cue-ball head, all steroids and golf clothes. Griffin was a bag of cement. Gray everything—sloppy suit, hair, tie, clipped moustache. Even his eyes were gray. The cops made Shan’s little front room feel even smaller. Meg perched on the stool that went with Brooklynne and Matt’s electric keyboard. You could see down her top when she leaned forward. Shan sat on the couch beside me. I could feel her wanting to hold my hand. Swofford had a chair from the kitchen. Griffin slumped in Roy’s recliner like he owned the place.

  Constable Swofford had a little voice recorder and took notes. Grif
fin was a detective sergeant. “Retired, actually,” he said. He even had a cement voice. “But I handled your case when you disappeared. Wanted to see it wrapped up. Hope you don’t mind.” He asked Shan how she was, said he hadn’t seen her in a long time. She gave him a tight, one-millisecond smile. When he asked about Ty, she didn’t even give him that.

  “He’s fine.” Good, I thought. Cops brought the Bad Time with them like crap on their shoes. I didn’t want Shan tight with them. Your enemy’s enemy is your friend.

  Then Meg said, “We all want to make this work.”

  Swofford clicked his pen and started the recorder. I gave them the same line I’d fed Josh.

  Two guys in a white van offered me a ride. They gave me a drink—it must have had drugs in it. When I woke up I was in the place they kept me for a long time. There were other boys there too. Mostly everyone spoke a foreign language, Spanish maybe. The suckers changed the way we looked. They injected my eyes with something. Men came there and we had to do things for them. They kept us on drugs. We weren’t supposed to talk. The windows were barred and we weren’t allowed out, except to go in this little yard where it was always hot. A few months ago I escaped when a door was left open. I tried to get far away. I didn’t go to the police because I thought some of the men at the place I got away from were police. I don’t know how far I got. I didn’t even know where I was when the guy who died in the parking lot saw me. He said his name was Bill. He said he’d bring me up to Canada if I helped him do some stuff along the way, like what we were doing with the pin machines. I knew that was shady, but Bill said if I told the cops I’d go to jail too. I had to do what he said and hope I could get close enough to home to get away.

  That was it. Simple. I talked low, looking away from the cops. Every so often I’d stop, as if it was too much for me. That part wasn’t hard: it almost was too much for me. The story had worked with Josh, but even he might not have believed all of it. He’d believed I was Danny, though, and that was what counted. Cops listen differently. Swofford nodded and wrote. Griffin just slouched until I got to the part about my eyes. Then he said, “That must have hurt.”

  I nodded. “It was bad. I don’t like to remember.”

  “What about your hands, Danny?” Griffin asked. “Did they do anything to your hands?”

  Swofford looked up from his notebook.

  I looked down at my hands. What was this about? Did he mean altering fingerprints? Harley had said he’d heard about guys trying to do that. If that’s what Griffin meant, he might be accidentally feeding me a big out. One I could use if they ever checked me against Danny’s prints—if they had them. It also meant he was buying my story. I wanted to scream “YES!” but I had to play it like everything else. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. I looked back up at him “I-I don’t know. It’s hazy from, like, the drugs. I think I remember them being wrapped up, but I thought that was so I couldn’t grab anything or try to escape.”

  “Hmm,” Griffin said, staring at me. “We got some latent prints from your house after you disappeared. They’re in the file.”

  My heart started revving. All I could do was look back at him and shrug.

  There was a silence like glue. Then he shifted his bulk. The chair creaked and the mood snapped. “The prints are useless. Too faint. Till puberty really kicks in, there’s not enough oil in a kid’s skin for a print to last more than a few hours.” He slowly shook his gray head. “Eye color. God. When they find a way to mess with DNA, we’re done.”

  Shan hugged me. “Well, nobody tampered with this guy’s DNA,” she said. “He’s just the same as he always was.”

  I almost hugged her back.

  Next, they asked a bunch of questions about Harley. I told the truth about where we’d been for the last while because it was too easy to check. When it was over, Swofford flipped his notebook shut and turned off his recorder and said he was glad I was back. He said he’d bring me a statement to sign for the files and that they’d be in touch with the FBI, who might want to talk to me too.

  We all stood up. Meg bent to pick up her shoulder bag. I got another look down her top. Swofford looked too; I saw him. Griffin said, “Good to meet you.”

  I nodded.

  “We rarely get a happy ending.” He cocked a gray eyebrow. “Stay safe, huh?”

  Stay away from you, I thought.

  TWELVE

  After the cops left, I relaxed a little. It felt like Shan did too. Maybe she was just getting used to having me around. Now the only ones I hadn’t met were Danny’s mom, Carleen, and his half-brother, Tyson. Peterborough, where Tyson lived, was half an hour north, but he’d had his license suspended for DUI. He’d also had his car repo’d. It didn’t look like he was going to be much of a player.

  Carleen, though, she was another story. I knew she was close by. Shan kept saying she’d be coming over soon. A couple times I heard Shan talking on the phone, and I got the feeling she was talking to Carleen. I don’t know why exactly—just an edge in her voice that put me on edge. For a whole week Carleen didn’t show. At first I worried that it was weird, a mother not coming to see her long-lost kid. Then I remembered Shan had said that things had been bad between Carleen and Danny before he disappeared, and that she’d been pretty messed up back then. Maybe she was worried about what I was going to do or say. Besides, what did I know about mothers? Whoever my mother was, visiting wasn’t at the top of her list either. Finally, I decided not to worry about it. As long as Carleen wasn’t around, she was one less person to fool.

  I’d gone to the library a couple more times and gotten my card. I wanted to see if I could find that girl again. I just couldn’t believe I’d seen Gilly on her name tag. It became a kind of good-luck thing for me. I thought if I could see the name and it was Gilly, then it would be some kind of sign that somehow things were going to work out all right. I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

  Harley could be like that too—watching for signs that his luck was running. He’d glued a little tourist-shop carving of a totem pole on the dash. He’d reach over, tap it and say, “touch wood” any time he was talking about how a deal should go. Other times, though, when he’d had a few beers or when he saw people lined up to buy lottery tickets, he’d start in on how there was no such thing as luck. “Luck is what you make for yourself,” he’d say. “Luck didn’t buy this watch.” Then he’d flash his big silver watch at me. Which was kind of funny, because Harley was right. Luck hadn’t bought it, he had, for ten bucks from a bald guy named Charlie, who’d had a gym bag full of fake Rolexes and Tag Heuers. I’d been with him. Sometimes Harley could get so into it that he’d forget what was a scam and what was real. Maybe that’s what made him so good.

  Whatever her name was, the girl never showed up at the library. I told myself that was okay, that it didn’t mean I’d read the tag wrong. As long as I didn’t know for sure, my luck was still holding.

  Another thing about the library was, it was the perfect place to get away from everybody. With Harley I’d been like a con-game sprinter; now it was starting to feel as if I were running a marathon.

  The getaway part backfired, of course. Shan was impressed that I liked books. “It’s so great,” she said. I was lazing on Roy’s recliner, which was a no-no. I knew Roy was also ticked about how much hot water I used. “Reading was such a problem for you. Remember how you used to hate it?” She was always saying stuff like that to me. Remember how and remember when or, holding something up, remember this? Sometimes I wondered if she was testing me, sometimes it was almost like she was coaching me. But I only thought like that when I was really uptight. Mostly it felt as if she just wanted someone to remember with her. It made her happy. That was my job, to make her happy.

  Anyway, I wasn’t surprised to hear about Danny not reading, and it was easy to handle. “There was no TV,” I said. “Just a bunch of old books. I didn’t have any choice. Now it’s a habit, I guess.”

  “Good,” she said. “I hope it rubs off o
n Matt.” Then came the catch. “Listen, do you think you could take Brooklynne to the library? I haven’t got time, and it would be so good for her.”

  What could I say? I took Brooklynne. She wanted me to read to her. It wasn’t so bad; I like little-kid books. I don’t remember anyone ever reading to me, so it was like I was reading for myself too.

  When we came back to the house, we went around to the backyard. Shan was standing in the wading pool. In front of her, smoking a cigarette, was a skinny woman in denim cutoffs and a sleeveless yellow top. She had a tattoo of a dragon or something twisting up one arm. It sounded as if they were arguing, but they cut it off and turned when they heard us. Shan’s face was red.

  “Gramma,” Brooklynne said.

  So this was Carleen.

  I used to have a dream about my mom. She was darkhaired, young and pretty, but still mom-looking. She’d have on a hair band and a blue gingham shirt and jeans, and she’d be smiling as she served me pancakes. I held on to that until the day I saw her doing the same thing on TV to a gap-toothed kid with freckles and realized I’d been rerunning a syrup commercial in my sleep.

  For a while after that, I figured my mom was more likely a crack whore and probably dead. I wasn’t even sure what a crack whore was, but it sounded like the worst thing you could be, and that had to be her. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she come get me? Then I made her into someone more exotic who couldn’t get to me, or didn’t know about me. A cool spy who couldn’t risk blowing her cover because her family would be in danger, or an heiress who’d had me when she was sixteen and whose evil family gave me away and told her I’d died, but she’d always kept a baby picture of me and one day she’d find me and take me home and I’d be rich.