Hiding

just to make it all seem real. I never was hungry—they just put that there. I guess they wanted to see how I’d react, you know, and get their little private satisfactions. I didn’t even really ever have to pee; they just threw that in because somebody has a great sense of humor. I still can’t decide whether Dobey saw me or not. I guess I still have a lot to learn. Maybe dogs have a sense for this sort of thing. And walking around with the tablecloth over me? Had that tablecloth even been real? I felt like an idiot.

I was given this task for reasons I can’t understand.

I won’t say I saved her. She had to save herself.

But I put an idea in her mind.

I felt good about that. I mean, I don’t want to sound funny, but I felt I’d finally accomplished something pretty important.

Maybe I asked to do it.

I mean, I needed to have something to do, right? Anything was better than just hanging around my house. I’d spent a whole summer cooped up with my dad, listening to him talk to himself, bemoaning his fate, and even though I sympathized with him and everything, it really had become a little tiresome.

I was a ghost, for god sakes, just wandering. I had no idea what was going on.

Still, one thing puzzles me.

Maybe I was sort of dead my whole life, because I’d been hiding, and being really dead barely mattered, so I didn’t even notice until after the end.

Maybe I never even was hiding. Maybe I just thought I was, but really I was just reacting to never feeling like I was truly being seen.

But maybe this is not about hiding.

Maybe what this is really about is how I don’t think life is horrible and meaningless, even if it sometimes seems to be.

I know I said that big things never happened to me.

Well, that’s still true.

Because this happens to everyone.

And you know, you can’t say something’s really big if it happens to everyone.

It’ll happen to you too.

At the right time.

Because like my mom said, there’s a right time for everything.

I mean, sure, she said that when I was complaining about sex, but doesn’t the same advice apply to everything?

You have to show yourself.

You have to let people know you are there.

You can’t play hide-and-seek with your life, no matter how safe it may seem. You’ll get too good at it after a while, just like I did and Laura did, and you won’t be able to tell anybody where you are or how to find you.

You know, I never told you my name.

I was Danny Preston.

Don’t ever hide.

Acknowledgments

A number of wonderful and beautiful people helped me write this book. I want to thank my wife, Alma, for her suggestions, encouragement, and support—but mostly for her love. I want to thank my son, Hugo, for his love and encouragement, and for proving every day that a boy can be his own perfect self without ever having to hide. Alma and Hugo, you are forever the most wonderful and beautiful people in my life.

I want to thank my agent, Dan Lazar of Writers House, for his constant support, and for bringing my work to Clarion Books, and to my editor, the fabulous Anne Hoppe. Anne, your encouragement and faith in my writing led me to look deep enough into myself to find this story, and your sensitive comments and suggestions—through all the various drafts—helped put in my hand a light I could shine on Danny and Laura, to bring them out of hiding and into the brilliancy of their true selves.

Chapter One

I feel better now. I can move my arm some, and walk around a bit. Ache in my belly’s still there, but the doctor says it’ll go too. Says there’s almost nothing that can hurt a fifteen-year-old boy forever, and I’ll grow out of that pain like I grow out of a pair of old shoes.

Loads of people have asked me ’bout what happened. Police and doctors and just about everybody in the neigh­borhood. I never had so many visitors. Tell the truth, I’m tired of getting asked. I feel like just getting on with what’s happening now, and not thinking of what’s gone by. I want to answer everybody all at once and get it all the hell over with.

But there’s one big thing—where to begin.

Because you don’t know me.

Maybe you seen me on the streets walking around, or riding Old Man Pedersen’s bike if you was ever up at night. I mean that girls’ bike with the tassels on it. Or maybe you just seen me hanging round Shatze’s Pharmacy.

But really knowing me, few people do.

Sam Tate does. He’s a boy my age, and he said some­thing true. He come up here to my room the other day and we talked, not just ’bout what happened, but ’bout other things too, things we did together before all this big mess. He was sitting near my bed, right there on the windowsill, looking out the window at the trees. Then he looked at me and said, The real thing is, you’d never have done it, never even found out about it, if you hadn’t done all the things people hated you for. It turns out those were the right things to do, Billy. Isn’t that funny? All that stealing and never going to school. It’s what made it so you were outside a lot, seeing things nobody else saw. Hidden and secret things.

He was dead-on right with what he said. I laughed. I saved three boys, so they tell me. Got beat and shot doin’ it. And Sam says I’d never of done it, ’cept I was always stealing and busting things, and creeping around people’s yards at night. That is funny.

But I s’pose it’s true.

I don’t ride that girls’ bike no more. Got a new one. There it is, leaning against the wall over there, bright and shiny. Got