Who I'm Not (5 page)

“That's okay.” Jo-Anne smiled again. “I can do a temporary sign-up for the computer, but you can't take any books out until you get a card. You'll have to come back for that.” She pointed behind her. “There's a computer free over in the teen section.”

I nodded back. “Yes, ma'am. Thank you, we'll do that. Can I still look around though?”

“Oh, sure. Take your time. If you find something you really want, they'll hold it for you at the desk downstairs.”

“That would be super, ma'am.”

Jo-Anne turned to Matt and asked his name. I nudged him forward, then headed into the book stacks, fast. Matt wouldn't last very long. I grabbed a few paperbacks. I'd leave some at the desk and come back for a card, but I needed at least one for now.

Boosting books from a library is not exactly hard, especially when you have big pockets in your cargo shorts. I ducked into the second-last aisle for a quiet spot where I could find the sensor stickers and tear them out and almost ran into one of those rolling carts they move books around on. A tall skinny girl in jeans and a sweater was sticking books back on a top shelf. We both kind of jumped. She had long mousy hair and ugly glasses and a name badge. She stared at me. I wheeled around and ducked down the last aisle instead. I found the sensors. When I heard her roll the book cart away, I ripped out the pages they were stuck on and slipped the two smallest books in my pockets. Then I went to run the fake theft.

There were a bunch of old folks I could bump into, but I wanted Matt watching. Then I looked down the stairs and saw a chance to get more money. At the checkout, the clerk was opening a cash drawer under the counter with a little key. Somebody was saying, “I've got five photocopies.” I looked around, saw the photocopier over near Jo-Anne, and it all just fell into place.

I palmed the ten-dollar bill, then went and got Matt. He followed me as I went to the copier and grabbed a sheet of paper from the wastebasket. I gave it to him. “Hold this, stand by the stairs and watch me.”

I started walking away from Matt, my head down. I bobbled the books I was carrying in front of me as if I was busy looking at them and bumped into a guy. There was no way I was really going to pick his pocket—I'm not good enough. Harley was pretty good at it, and he'd started teaching me, but not even he did it unless we really had to. Then I'd just be the stall while he was the mechanic. Now all I did was apologize and walk back to Matt. I flashed the ten in my hand and we started downstairs.

“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. Griffin 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.”