After school, I do my homework at the kitchen table and I eat a snack with Gracie and talk with Mama and even Dad, when he gets home. What else am I supposed to do? When Blake is around, I politely ignore him, because everything between us is completely broken. It’s over. I don’t know what a counselor is going to be able to do about that. But I’ll still go. I’ll go because I am Ethan Manuel De Wilde, and I am a part of this family, no matter what anybody says or does to make me feel small. There’s nothing Blake can do now to make this worse.

Nothing.

Still, that night, after I brush my lips against Cami’s and hold her close in the dark, cool evening, and then make my way home to my basement and listen to the icy-cold argument in my parents’ bedroom, going on and on about me again, the doubts find their way into my head. No matter how much I push them aside, it takes everything I have inside me to stop them. I lie on my stomach, arm dangling off the side of the bed, practically daring Gracie’s momsters to come out from under it and snatch me away, and I can’t stop thinking. Little questions slip out through the cracks of the dam I have built in my brain to keep the bad shit away. Why can’t I remember anything before the abduction? Why? Was it because I wasn’t really here? I can’t get the nagging thoughts out of my head. This might kill me if I let it. I can’t let it.

In the morning, I find Gracie’s lunch box outside my bedroom door. It’s been there three days in a row now. Every day there’s a drawing or knickknack inside, or one of her starred or smiley-faced worksheets from school. Today it’s a photo of us from my coming home party. She signed her name over it, doing cursive all totally wrong, just connecting the letters and adding curly lines around it. I take it out and slip it into my wallet. Then I put the blue race car and some marbles inside the lunch box, and leave it for her in the same spot. We don’t talk about it, not to anyone or to each other. It’s our own private, secret, made-up game, and we both instinctively know the rules.

After school is counseling again. And it’s hard. Really, really hard. We sit there, stone-faced, refusing to talk about anything, as Dr. Frost thoughtfully taps a pencil to her lips and Mama fidgets with her purse strap, running it over and over between her thumb and forefinger, trying not to interrupt, trying to let the doc handle it. I’m sure she wants to smash our heads together, but I don’t trust Blake and I’m not giving in, and neither is he, no matter how hard Mama pleads. No matter how sternly Dad stares at me.

And Dad looks at me differently now. He does. More distant. He still hugs me and says he loves me, but I know that he doubted me once. And he knows I know. That look on his face at the table when he saw Blake’s photoshopped picture was a real killer. When he looks at me, I look back, focus on a point in the center of his forehead, try to let it go. It’s not doing me any good.

I can’t blame him. I really can’t. He can’t help his feelings. That’s what Dr. Frost says. She says we’re all okay having the feelings we have, and that what we need to do is to communicate them and work through them. That’s what Dad did that night when I overheard what he said to Mama. But the bad thing about communication is that when you say something, you can’t take it back. It’s forever entered into memory, and you can try to dilute it all you want with opposite words, but you can’t make it disappear. So no matter how many times Dad says he believes I’m his son, those words he said to Mama will always be echoing back at me.

It’s okay. It is. It has to be. I think the thing that is keeping me together is what Mama did. Or rather, what she didn’t do. She’s convinced that I am her son, and she never doubted me. She believes in me—that’s what’s giving me hope right now that we’ll all get through this alive. And I hang on to it. Because if you don’t have at least one person believing in you, then there’s not much reason to give a shit about anything.

CHAPTER 45

At least nothing else bad happens, unless you count silence. Today with Blake looks like this: we don’t acknowledge each other at breakfast, we don’t look at each other at the bus stop or on the bus or anywhere. At least he stopped yelling. Though his silence is almost a little scarier than the yelling. It makes me wonder what he’s up to. But I remind myself that I am new now. I’m different. I don’t let him rule the way I feel anymore. I just go to school, hang out with Cami, play the lunch box game with Gracie, help my parents. Try to be normal for once, feel like a normal kid in a normal family, and it’s finally working, sort of. In spite of Blake trying to wreck it all. I’m even getting decent grades. Mostly B’s and C’s. Not bad.

I get my first A- in English class for a paper I wrote, and that totally makes my day, it really does. My teacher said it was compelling and it would have been an A except for some misspelled words and passive sentences. It was one of those five-paragraph personal essay assignments, and I wrote about how I found my family using the computers at the library in St. Louis. It’s weird how much easier it is to write all the junk down than it is to talk about it. I show the paper to Cami on the bus ride home.

She reads it right there, holding tight to my hand. Her eyes dart back and forth. One-handed, she flips the page really fast to read the rest. “It’s really good,” she says.

“Thanks.”

“So you were in St. Louis for almost a year, then, huh? But weren’t you in the south, too?”

“Around seven years with Eleanor in Oklahoma. I guess I was there from the beginning, after the abduction, but we moved around all the time and I’m not sure about the early years.” I trace my thumb along her forefinger. “Then a year in Omaha at the youth home, until I ran away from there. Hitchhiked to wherever truckers would take me after that, and I ended up homeless in St. Louis. It wasn’t too bad there. I’d go back if I had to.”