Chapter 14
Fourteen
Miles is in his backyard wearing a headlamp. He’s scanning the grass and using a pooper-scooper to pick up poop as Chardonnay
watches him. Every time he finds a pile of her shit, she barks at him while he picks it up.
“Wouldn’t it be better to do that during the day?” I call out.
Miles jumps and turns to me, holding out the pooper-scooper like a weapon. “Jesus.” He puts the scooper down next to the tall
plastic trash can he was carting around the yard and comes over to me.
“How long have you been watching me pick up piles of shit?”
“Long enough to know Chardonnay certainly doesn’t like you doing it.” Chardonnay jumps up again for pets, which I’m happy
to provide.
“Yeah, well, Chardonnay doesn’t like anything. Don’t believe the hype, golden retrievers are assholes. She hates me, the mail
carrier, the hot UPS guy, the ugly UPS guy, the neighbor’s cat, and our lawn man—who is coming to mow tomorrow, which I forgot.
Hence picking up dog shit by moonlight so he doesn’t throw a hissy fit and charge my mom for cleaning his mower blades.”
“Ah, it all makes sense now.” But does it?
“Does it, though?” Miles asks. I can’t help but laugh harder than I probably need to since I just thought the same thing.
“I did come over here to talk to you, though.”
“Moi? How exciting. Have you come to teach me the traditional Slovakian dance of Odzemek?”
“How much do you know about Slovakia?”
“Only what I googled this afternoon to set up that bit.”
“Well then, I’m here to tell you two things.”
Miles closes his eyes and crosses his fingers. “Please be the dance.”
“One, I’m not a Slovakian serial killer with dwarfism!”
“Dammit.”
“Two. My mom told me we used to be friends. And I came out here to apologize.” Miles grows serious now. “I . . . My doctor—therapist—said
I have post-traumatic amnesia. Apparently I blocked out mostly everything from before eight months ago.”
He looks at me as though he’s studying a foreign language. “Right. And what, pray tell, happened eight months ago?”
I wish I could tell him the truth. I wish I could tell everyone the truth. Being Nate has been exhausting. The constant worry
that I’m going to slip up and say something wrong.
“I escaped from whoever kidnapped me,” I tell him, sticking with the lie. “I lived on the street until I was arrested for
shoplifting in DC three days ago and they told me I had been missing for almost ten years.”
Miles nods. “Ten years in July. And it’s okay, by the way. When I saw you earlier, I thought . . . I don’t know. I didn’t
think amnesia—little too soap opera, no offense.”
“All offense taken. My life isn’t your pop culture.”
He snorts and narrows his eyes at me. “So listen, we were friends before. Want to be friends again?”
My chest starts to feel a little warm and fuzzy. I haven’t had a friend in a while. “I’d like that.”
He gestures back to the trash can behind him. “I have to finish cleaning up after Chardonnay, but want to come hang out?”
I didn’t expect him to want to hang out immediately, but I definitely wouldn’t mind getting out of the Beaumont house. But
then I remember how Valencia freaked out because I explored the backyard and left a door open.
“My mom is a little . . . overprotective right now. I’ll have to ask if she’s okay with it.”
“Understandable. You apparently got kidnapped and don’t have any memory of anything before eight months ago!” It almost sounds
like he’s mocking me, and it makes me laugh. It’s nice not to be treated like I’ll break if someone says the wrong thing.
He holds out his hand. “Give me your phone.”
I hand it over, glad I closed out of any Nate-related searches I’ve done. He types something and hands it back. When I look
at the screen, I see a text saying, Hi it’s me. Here’s my phone.
“Ask her if she’ll let you walk next door to hang out with an old friend. If yes, text me. If no, text me.”
I nod. “Wish me luck.”
He picks up the pooper-scooper. “Shitloads of it.”
“Ugh.” But still I smile all the way back to the deck. Marcus has his arm over Valencia’s shoulders and their wineglasses
have been topped off, the bottle sitting on the table between them.
I decide not to wait it out and just ask. “I was talking to Miles, apologizing for not remembering him earlier. He asked if I could go over and hang out.”
Valencia looks paler in the dim light of the deck. “Tonight?”
“Yeah.”
She takes Marcus’s arm off her shoulder, turning it into the light to read the gold-and-silver watch on his wrist.
“It’s a little late,” she says, letting Marcus’s arm go. But I know from my phone it’s only eight thirty.
Marcus puts his hand on her leg. “Hon. He’ll be right next door. Let him see his friend.”
Valencia still looks like she’s sending me off to war. Or college.
“Be home by ten,” she says quietly. Then pipes up, “Or sooner, if Miles’s parents say so.”
I tell her okay and go into the house to text Miles. I cut a piece of each pie and put it on a paper plate, wrapping it in
plastic wrap. I pass Valencia and Marcus, telling them I’ll be back by ten, and go around to the front of Miles’s house.
He answers the door before I press the button on his doorbell camera.
I hold out the plate. “I brought you pie.”
He gasps, taking the plate from me. “What a gracious guest.” Chardonnay hops up on her hind legs, nostrils flaring as he holds the plate high out of her reach.
He steps aside for me to enter. Miles’s house is a little more modest than the Beaumonts’.
The exterior is redbrick and it has a normal staircase instead of their grand staircase.
But the rest of the layout is very similar.
The dining room is to our left, and on our right is the living room, where his parents are sitting on the couch watching TV. They come over to join us.
Miles’s mother is tall and thin with lightly tanned skin and beautiful wavy brown hair. His father has the same strawberry-blond
hair as Miles; it’s just as curly, but he keeps it cut shorter. He’s also paler and covered in freckles like his son. They
both greet me, shaking my hand.
Miles points to the pie. “So, first step in your reeducation process is . . . I’m type 1 diabetic, so I probably shouldn’t
eat these.” He pulls up his shirt to show me a little plastic pod stuck to his lower abdomen. A blood glucose monitor.
“Oh.” My cheeks flush. “I’m sorry.”
But Miles’s mom holds out her hand for the plate. “We’re not, though. He gets that from his grandfather. We’ll happily enjoy
this and report back.”
Miles puts his finger to his lips. “I’m going to guess chocolate tasting notes for this one . . .” He points to the chocolate
chiffon pie, then drifts over the other. “And lime for this one.”
Miles’s dad peels off the plastic wrap and acts like Marcus smelling a glass of wine. “One has plum notes, and the answer
may surprise you.”
Christ, is being an adorable family in the water around here? Or maybe they’re overcompensating. Where were Miles’s parents
earlier this afternoon while their son was distracting me? Too distrustful? Probably. But I didn’t survive being homeless
for eight months by being naive.
Miles takes me upstairs to his room. It’s bigger than Nate’s and doesn’t have the Jack and Jill bath like Easton and I share.
As he closes the door behind me, I scan the pictures and posters hung up around the room.
What’s visible of the walls is painted navy blue, and different-colored string lights hang from hooks screwed into the ceiling.
Next to his bed is a collage of pictures—Miles with friends from school.
Some other pictures on the wall above his dresser are black and white and look more artistic.
One is a flower, one is graffiti on a brick wall, and another is unmistakably that island out in the bay behind our houses.
There’s a professional-looking camera on his desk, next to a large flat-screen monitor hooked up to a laptop, which is closed.
I point to the pictures. “Did you take these?”
“Yeah.” He crinkles his nose. “That was when I was figuring out how to use actual cameras instead of my phone. They suck.”
“They do not.” They’re actually really good. But Miles picks up the camera on his desk and turns on the screen, standing beside
me. He scrolls through some of his more recent pictures, and yeah, they do look a lot better. Professional.
They’re pictures of a girl. She’s posing in different areas—on the bench outside a supermarket, on a dock, at night under
a streetlamp. All in the same emerald-green dress.
“Well, I still think the others are good, too,” I say, then nod to the camera. “Is she your girlfriend?”
He snorts and side-eyes me. “Gurl.”
I laugh, but the subtext is nonexistent.
“I mean, you’re not totally wrong, because we did date for a week in fifth grade.”
“So ex-girlfriend.”
“To be fair, we never officially broke up. . . . Oh my fucking God, do I have a girlfriend?”
Again, I laugh and it feels normal. All this feels normal. Like maybe if I stop trying to pretend to be Nate so much, I can just be him. Or be myself with Nate’s name. No one has seen Nate in almost ten years, so who’s
to say he isn’t like me?
Miles puts the camera back on the desk next to a microphone plugged into the same dock the monitor is plugged into. Next to
it is a pair of noise-canceling headphones. I point to the microphone.
“Do you livestream or something?”
“Or something.” He shakes the mouse to wake up his computer, then unlocks it with a password. There’s a program up with rows
of different-colored bars stacked atop each other, and little sound waves across the length of the bars. “I run a highly unpopular
true crime podcast. We average twenty listeners a month! That’s down from thirty-five last year, but at least it’s not zero.”
A true crime podcast? I wonder if he ever did one on Nate.
“Cool,” I say.
“It is!” he says, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning against the desk. “That’s actually how I know you’re not really
Nate. So why don’t you tell me who you really are, and why you’re pretending to be him.”