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Finally, Saturday night arrived. We’d read Romeo and Juliet in English class, but I’d never seen the play. Francie and I had front-row seats in the school auditorium. As soon as the play started, I was transported back to long-ago Verona. After a while, I could even follow the gist of the dialogue.
Reese surprised me. I hadn’t seen him rehearse, so I’d had no idea that he would be a confident and even sexy Romeo. When he said, “See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!” I leaned my cheek on my hand and wondered how I would respond if he said something beautiful like that to me. Maybe that was the problem—I wanted Romeo instead of Reese.
Since I was in the first row, I could see how he kissed the girl playing Juliet—as if he enjoyed it. I wondered who he liked kissing better, the actress or me. I hoped it was me. Francie nudged me and covered her grin with her hand.
When Romeo and Juliet declared their undying love and got married secretly, I had to keep telling myself, It’s just a play, it’s just a play. At the end, when Romeo died and Juliet died lying on top of him, I was in tears, along with Francie and at least half of the audience. And then they were up and bowing, and Reese, not Romeo, blew me a kiss. I vowed to be more attentive to him.
Afterward, Francie and I waited around to talk to the cast members. When he’d changed into street clothes, Reese invited us to the cast party at the home of one of the actors. I glanced at Francie. We needed to get back to the cottage and search before Mom and Dad got home. But Dad’s band played until two in the morning, and I seriously doubted he would be up for driving Mom home between sets. My guess was that my parents wouldn’t get home until two thirty at least. We should have plenty of time. We both wanted to go to the party. So we went to the party.
Everybody danced, and the host parents served us food and soft drinks. The actors joked around and played with their lines. At one point, Reese knelt and proclaimed in his actor’s voice, “It is the east, and Faye is the sun.” I felt exotic and desirable and gave him a long, sexy kiss. The other kids hooted. I loved it.
* * *
AT THE END OF THE EVENING, Reese said, “Will you go to the prom with me? I’m sorry I waited so long to ask you. I was so involved with the play that time just crept up on me.”
“Of course I’ll go with you. I’d love to.” I gave him a big kiss to show that I was excited about being asked. But I knew I was acting, just like a character in a play. The prom would be fun, but it was hard to think about anything other than finding the photos and deciding what to do with them. And of course, running the Boston Marathon, which would be a week after the prom.
Before I went home, Reese said, “You don’t seem like yourself. Is something bothering you? Is it... someone else?”
Oh gosh. I wasn’t ready to tell him about the photos and my doubts about my family. I’d tell him later if I found out anything important. It was funny that he thought there was someone else. My crush on Kyle seemed long ago in a simpler, less complicated lifetime.
“No. I’m fine. Just worried about the marathon.” I kissed him slowly and deeply. “I’ll try to do better.” We laughed, and he grinned. He’d probably forgotten all about the kiss he’d given that other girl in the play.
Francie and I were home by eleven thirty. I knew Mom would call the house exactly at midnight and I’d better be there to answer the phone, so we started our search in my parents’ bedroom. I thought I would have a heart attack being in there again. In fact, my heart beat so hard and loud that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that my parents heard it all the way in town.
First, we searched through the dresser drawers. The photos by themselves were small, but if they were still in the black envelope, they’d be bulkier. Just in case Mom had taken them out of the envelope, we searched for something the size of the photographs—two inches wide by three or four inches long. I searched through their drawers and directed Francie to the closet to go through their shoes and jackets.
Nothing. We lifted the mattress off the box springs and found only a couple of Playboy magazines, which we didn’t touch. Ick. We lifted the rug. Nothing. We went through the metal box again, but the photos still weren’t there.
They clearly weren’t in my parents’ bedroom. When we were finished, I stood at the door and checked to make sure we’d put everything back to normal. And then we moved on. We searched the kitchen, the living room, and the bathroom. And that was pretty much everywhere there was to search.
I was right—Mom called at midnight. She sounded like she was having a good time. After a little chitchat, she said, “Now, I expect you girls to be sound asleep by the time we get home.”
“Fine, Mom. We will be.”
At one in the morning, I started to get tired. We only had an hour or so until we really did have to get to bed. We’d saved the trash for last. Holding our noses, we went through the inside trash and then the outside trash. We even sifted through the ashes of the trash that Dad had burned the previous week. The photos wouldn’t be there, of course, because I’d found them after that, but we were being thorough.
We stared at each other in frustration. Francie asked, “Could she have hidden them in your room?” Unlikely, but we searched it anyway. We found all my little treasures: the less-than-glowing report cards from all my different schools, my bedraggled stuffed bunny, the Cracker Jack ring a boy had given me in the fourth grade, and the family photo album. But there was no row of black-and-white photos of Mom and a strange baby.
We had to get to sleep. Francie had brought her sleeping bag, and she slipped into it on the floor beside my twin bed. I got into bed and turned off the light. We talked quietly, brainstorming about where the photos could be. The last possibility was in the truck. My parents would probably sleep late the next morning, so we’d search it then.
That didn’t make sense, though. Mom probably wouldn’t hide anything in the truck, where I might find it. If I happened upon the photos, how would she explain the damning writing on the back? No, they wouldn’t be there. The photos might be in her pocketbook but probably weren’t. They would be too easy for me to find if I went looking for lunch money.
I didn’t want to consider that we had failed or that the pictures might be gone. I didn’t see how I could cope with my life if we didn’t find them.
Finally, we saw the lights of the truck and stopped talking. When Mom peeked into my room, we breathed evenly as though we’d been asleep for hours. That was the last thing I knew until morning.
* * *
WHEN I WOKE UP, IT was daylight. Francie was still asleep, and the house was quiet. I decided to do the final search on my own, because it would be easier to make up an excuse if I got caught.
I searched the truck, Mom’s sweater pockets, and her pocketbook. Nothing. I was about to go back to the bedroom and have myself a quiet cry when I noticed Dad’s guitar case leaning up against the coffee table in the living room. It was the last place to check. Not that I thought for a minute that Dad had taken the photos. No, Mom’s handwriting was on the back of them, and she was in that picture. Dad might not even know the photos existed.
Moving as quietly as I could, I picked up the guitar case and slipped outside, where I laid it on the picnic table. I clicked open the latches and raised the lid. Faded red velvet lined the inside of the case, and the battered guitar lay on top.
I lifted the guitar and shook it, but only a pick fell out. Holding the guitar in one hand, I felt around the case for anything unusual. I found nothing other than a set of strings, two picks, and a pair of needle-nose pliers for cutting strings.
As I laid the guitar back inside the case, I noticed a slight tear in the fabric lining. Sticking my fingers inside it, I felt a piece of paper. Could it be? I slid the paper out, trying not to enlarge the tear. And there were the photos, right in front of me, without the black envelope. I had already started to think that I had imagined them. But this was my proof.
A pain settled into my stomach so hard and deep that I bent over and almost cried out. This was the end of one life, the life of the fake Dana Faye Smith. It might be the beginning of another life, but I didn’t know who I was. In terms of my real parents, what kind of weirdos would name their kid Pilot?
The pain passed, and I stood up, slipped into the house, and set the guitar back where Dad had left it. I tiptoed into my room and closed the door behind me. Francie was still snoozing. I slid into bed and examined the photos. Mom was much younger, of course, and she looked happier than I ever remembered seeing her. The baby was happy, too. The real Dana Faye was nearly bald, with wispy hair at the top of her round head. But she was laughing hard, as though somebody had just blown on her tummy.
Did somebody sit with me when I was a baby and laugh like that? Or blow on my tummy? I couldn’t help myself—I started to cry. My sobbing woke Francie. She whispered, “What’s wrong?”
I handed her the photos. She glanced at them then turned them over to read the handwriting on the back. “Holy crap,” she whispered. “Just like you said.” She handed the photos back. “I’m so sorry, Faye. What do we do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ll tell you what I’ve come up with. We’ve got to go to the cops with the pictures. Or at least tell my mom. She’ll know what to do.”
I thought about that. If I could force myself to confide in Laney, she’d probably help, as she had with the aspirin. And she’d likely take my side against my parents if it came to that. But she’d probably make me go to the cops.
“I need to think this whole thing through before I do anything like that. If they really are my parents, they’re going to be so mad at me for going through their stuff that they might kill me. At the very least, they’ll make us move away immediately. Dad wants to do that anyway. But I want to finish out the school year here.” I paused, thinking furiously. I could hardly speak the next words, even though I’d been thinking them for weeks. “And if they aren’t really my parents, I might have to go to an orphanage or something until the police find out who I really am.”
Saying the words out loud made the whole situation sound even worse. I started to cry again. Francie cried with me. After a few minutes, she blew her nose. “All right, let’s change the subject.” She sounded as sad as I’d ever heard her, but she didn’t hesitate. “I hate to bring this up after everything that’s happened, but the marathon’s in less than four weeks. Have you even asked your parents if you can go?”
I couldn’t lie to her again. “No. I’m sorry. First there was the wreck, and then the pictures. It’s hard to think about Boston when I don’t even know who I am.”
I held my breath and waited for her response. In a calm and even voice, she said, “Do you want to quit, then?”
Quit. That word reverberated throughout my entire being. Did I want to spend the rest of my life thinking of myself as the girl who could have run the Boston Marathon if only things in her life weren’t so terrible? Or as the girl who could have gotten a scholarship to college if she’d just persevered? No. No. No.
I sat straight up in bed. “Of course I don’t want to quit. Don’t worry. I’ll ask them today. Even if they aren’t really my parents, they’re acting like my parents. So I guess I’ll need their permission.”
After Francie left, I steeled myself to ask the big question, but I couldn’t bear the thought of what I would do if my parents said no. So I put it off again. I had one more week until Laney was going to call them to finalize the arrangements, so I would wait till the last minute and hope for the best. Miracles had happened before, and maybe another one would come my way in the next week.