“We have an assignment for you,” Clarice says, but I am too busy screaming thoughts to pay much attention. “There’s a girl. We need her.”
I start at the beginning, mentally screaming every obscenity I can in alphabetical order. Then I start setting them to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
“Are you listening, Sofia?”
I nod.
“This girl we need, her family has declined our generous scholarship. So we’ve been forced to go to extreme measures to help her. You’re going to kidnap her.”
I laugh, abruptly cutting off the chorus of my song. “I am, am I?”
“Yes. We’ve got all the information here. Pictures, important details about Sadie and her family. I’ll leave it to your discretion how to go about it all, but I will note that it might be easier for everyone involved if there were some sort of accident that meant she had no more family to ask questions or look for her.”
Some sort of accident.
Some sort of accident.
Some sort of accident.
My brain sticks on that phrase, like a skipping CD, repeating it over and over.
“We didn’t know about you and your sister then,” Ms. Robertson says from behind me. “In your case it was your parents’ accident and the news story about the blind girl who saw it that caught our attention.”
I laugh. It’s high and fast and strange. “Well, then, that’s all right. I’ll set a gas fire, maybe? Blow them all up! Then it would be efficient and pretty. And the girl—Sadie?—we can roast marshmallows before skipping back here and introducing her to her new home!”
“Sofia,” Clarice says, and her voice is low with warning.
“Clarice,” I answer, and my voice is not low with warning—my voice is high with giddy hysteria, but my eyes are knives. “I’m not doing it.”
“That’s not an option.”
I stand up, kick my chair over. It skitters across the floor and crashes into the wall. She jumps, stands, and backs away. I like that she’s scared of me.
“I’m going back to my room now. I’ll keep playing your stupid stocks games or your sick little physical challenges because I don’t have anywhere else to go. But if you think for one second I am ever hurting someone for you again, you’re wrong. I won’t do it. And you can’t make me.”
I turn and walk past Ms. Robertson, thinking CONTROL as loudly as I can at her.
“We’ll see,” Clarice says, her soft voice carrying through to the hall. “Remember. It’s your choice that did this. You did this.”
She’s crazy. Crazy crazy. And I don’t care. I skip down the wide, empty hallway, singing at the top of my lungs. I know I’m not free yet, but I feel like I am. This feeling, this huge horrible wrong nagging feeling I’ve had since I was twelve will go away and I’ll be able to breathe, I’ll be able to think, I’ll be able to use whatever it is they think I have for myself. I’ll use it to make my own path. I’ll never do it for anyone else, not ever again.
But the wrong feeling is getting wronger. I feel like the ground has been pulled out from underneath me. My heart races. I can’t breathe. Something is wrong.
It’s wrong wrong wrong WRONG WRONG WRONG! I need to find Annie.
I race up the stairs, through the hall, burst through her door. She’s there. Annie’s there, in her room, she’s okay, what’s wrong?
She’s sitting on her bed. Her face is blank.
“Are you okay? Annie?”
“I saw myself.” Her voice is as blank as her face.
“You—what?”
“I saw myself. In a vision. At first I thought it was you, but the hair was too short.” She lifts a hand to her hair that hits at her shoulders. “And the eyes were different. But it looked so much like you. Then I realized. It was me. I finally saw what I look like.”
I sit down, still dizzy with panic. “Told you you’re beautiful.” What is wrong? Nothing is wrong here. Why isn’t my body calming down?
She doesn’t react. “I was dead.”
I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. “What?”
“I was dead. There was a hole in my head. A perfect red hole. And my hair, it’s darker than I thought it was, it was all tangled up in the blood on the floor. There wasn’t as much blood as you’d think there would be. I was dead. They killed me.” She closes her eyes. “I’m going to die.”
“How would that happen? How would that even—”
I said no.
I told them no.
I thought I was in control.
They are always in control.
“What else? Any other details? Any other details at all? Do you know when it happens? Where? Anything!” She doesn’t react, so I grab her shoulders, shake her. “TELL ME ANYTHING. GIVE ME SOMETHING.”
“How can I tell you where it happens? I’ve never seen the room before. I’ve never seen any rooms before.” She laughs drily. “The only other detail was Clarice. She was standing next to my body, talking to someone on the phone.”
“Did she shoot you?”
“I don’t know.”
My heart picks up. Races. Don’t plan. Don’t plan. “But she was there? In the room?”