The Lost Girl

8

Stolen



My force of will has never been tested so severely. As I get off the bus, it’s all I can do to keep chatting to Nikhil and Sasha without breaking off, or crying, or frightening them. I do my best to seem normal. But only one thought runs through my mind as I look into their faces: their parents might go to prison because I made a stupid mistake. The ground beneath my feet feels shaky; it’s not solid enough to hold me up anymore.

Erik warned me. He told me what exposure would cost us. I tried. I pulled it off for months. But I slipped in the end. I grew up refusing to be Amarra, and now I’m paying for that.

At the house, I settle Sasha in front of the telly and wait until Nikhil heads out to play cricket with some of the neighborhood kids. The moment he’s gone, I race up the stairs. I can hear Alisha in her attic studio, clattering away, working feverishly on something new.

“Ray knows,” I burst out before she can speak. “He knows about me. What I am.”

Alisha’s eyes widen. “You’re not a what,” she says. “You’re a who.” She rubs her forehead, leaving behind a patch of paint. “So he knows about the new body?”

“Yes.”

“But doesn’t he know it’s you?” she demands.

“He doesn’t believe it is,” I falter. “Like—like Dad.” The word is alien to me. “He said he’d tell everyone in class, make sure they knew the truth. He could go to the police. Anyone else could. I just—I wanted to warn you. You could take Nik and Sasha and go away somewhere so the police don’t find you. Leave the country—”

I sound hysterical, but I can’t stop myself. I can’t watch them go to prison. How can I let that happen to Nikhil and Sasha? Or to Alisha? After all this time living with them, I care. I even like Neil. He doesn’t care much for me, but he’s been kind to me regardless.

“Amarra,” says Alisha, very calmly and firmly, “take deep breaths.” She holds my face in her hands and looks me in the eye. “We’re not going anywhere, not yet. If Ray won’t listen to you, I’ll talk to him. You know him. He always acts before thinking about it. But he’s not cruel or cold. He’d never betray you.”

“He doesn’t think I’m that person,” I miserably remind her. I think about that intense hate in his face. How the light died and he became someone else. I liked who he’d been: that he was nice and funny and moody. I liked it when he liked me. I never deserved it. I tricked him. I lied to him. Now he will always hate me.

“But you are that person,” Alisha insists.

I nod. Even now, I have to pretend. I could tell her the truth, scream that they’re right and I’m not Amarra. But I’ve seen the pain that truth has caused. I saw it in Ray’s face only an hour ago. How can I tell her that her daughter’s dead? If her own family won’t take what little hope she has away from her, how can I?

“I’ll talk to him,” says Alisha. “If I can make him understand what his lack of belief will do to us, he may be willing to keep quiet.” She straightens. Her eyes are anxious, but she smiles at me. “You stay here and watch Sasha, baby. I’ll go see Ray.”

“But—” I want to tell her it’s futile, but she has to do this. She won’t give up her life and her husband’s life, her children’s, if there’s a chance she can make Ray understand how she feels.

So I step back. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

Her face softens. “Everyone makes mistakes,” she says. “It’s not a crime.” For a moment, something flickers in her eyes, something that makes me wonder if she sees me and not Amarra. She blinks. “I’m the reason you’re here. In a shitty situation. You can forget I said shit, by the way. Ray drove that car too fast, and he’s also the reason you’re here. We gave you a body and all these rules, shoved you into something strange and different.” God, she could be talking to either of us. “When you’ve been put in such a small box, there are really only so many steps you can take before you hit something.”

She kisses the top of my head, then walks past me down the stairs.

I sit on the steps and wrap my arms around my knees. I messed up, but maybe it would have happened anyway, sooner or later. Ray was never entirely sure of me. Amarra must have told him she had an echo. He always knew I existed. But if he tells the rest of the class, someone’s bound to go to the police. I wish I knew how to protect us all. How to make sure Nikhil and Sasha don’t lose something else.

Can they prove I am an echo? I don’t know if the Mark can be removed with laser surgery, but it surely can’t withstand a knife removing the skin? I almost laugh at how reckless and awful that idea is, but if I can replace the Mark with a wound—a scar from the accident splitting open, perhaps—if I can somehow replicate Amarra’s old scars in time, maybe no one will be able to prove that I am not her. Or maybe they will. I don’t know. I don’t know how the Weavers and my familiars arranged this.

My panicked, rash thoughts tumble one after another as I sit there on the steps. It’s only the thought of Sasha downstairs, knowing I should check on her, that makes me get up and go down again. I sit on the sofa with her and wait for Alisha to come back.

It’s a couple of hours before she does. She goes to the kitchen to talk to Neil, and I run in after them. I don’t know how Neil feels about me right now, but I have to know what happened.

“He was angry,” says Alisha, “and in pain. He wouldn’t believe me. He told me that you and I, Neil, we had no right to keep the truth to ourselves, that we aren’t the only ones who loved her. And he wouldn’t make any promises not to tell the rest of your classmates. He thinks they should know. But,” she adds as both Neil and I stare at her in alarm, “he did say he wouldn’t tell the police. He seems to understand that it’s the kids I’m worried about.”

She smiles. I can’t help feeling relieved too. At least no matter what happens at school, Nikhil and Sasha won’t suffer for this.

But Neil says, “Can we be sure someone else won’t go to the police? If he tells her friends—”

“He seems to believe they’ll keep their mouths shut,” says Alisha, rather tiredly. “He says no one would show so little respect for Amarra’s memory or so little care for two innocent children. I did try,” she says to me. “I tried to tell him, but he refuses to believe you’re you. I’m worried about how your friends will treat you if they won’t believe it either.”

“That’s okay,” I say, giving her the most reassuring smile I can muster. “Honestly, it’s going to be fine. As long as no one tells the police, nothing else matters.”

I catch Neil’s eye, and there’s a look on his face that tells me he knows I’m lying. If Ray tells everyone, he knows they will never forgive me either.

“You don’t have to go back to school,” he offers. It’s kind of him. Kinder than I deserve right now.

I shake my head. Turning away from school will only reinforce his belief that I’m nothing like his daughter. It will only shake Alisha’s belief. It won’t make them any happier.

“They’re my friends,” I say, because that’s my line and even Neil might believe it. “I can’t not see them again. They’re too important to me.”

We look at one another in silence for a minute or two. Typically, it is Alisha who regains her composure first.

“It’s time to eat,” she says firmly. “Why don’t we make Sasha happy and pick up some malai chicken from the club?”

I spend the night and the rest of the weekend fighting a constant urge to be sick, my nerves all knotted up into dread. Every time I think about school my stomach hurts, and I have to take Alisha’s sleeping pills to get to sleep at all. I don’t know who Ray might have talked to over the weekend. It wasn’t Sonya or Jaya: both called me a couple of times and sounded normal. But Ray will have plenty of opportunities to talk to them and everybody else at school.

Neil offers to call school on Monday morning and tell them I’m not feeling well, but I say I will go. Alisha seems pleased. She’s the kind of person who thinks hiding is the wrong way to deal with a problem.

I scramble to get ready, looking for a set of my uniform that’s not in the wash, finally finding a spare skirt and shirt in the closet. I grab one of Amarra’s favorite necklaces, for no reason other than I feel like I have to try doubly hard to look like her today, and I curse myself the whole way through. I so, so badly don’t want to go to school today. Or ever again, really, but I have to. If I don’t, the illusion breaks and I transform into an echo my familiars don’t need to keep.

On the way to the bus stop, I have to be sick by the side of the road, a gesture that excites no little attention and thoroughly alarms Sasha and Nikhil. Nik suggests I go home, and he even offers to walk me back most of the way.

“It’s okay,” I insist. “I’m better now.”

Hardly.

I straighten up, rub my eyes, drink some water, and get on the bus. As we rumble away, I fend off Jaya’s concern, my tongue growing thicker and heavier with each mile that takes us closer.

When we arrive at the high school courtyard, I spot Ray immediately. He’s on his own, at the far end, half concealed behind a wall sheltering the watercooler. He has his back to me. I take a quick look around the courtyard to see if anybody’s looking at me funny. They don’t seem to be, everyone’s busy with the usual Monday morning chatter, and I turn my attention back to Ray.

I am so intent on him I walk straight into Lekha.

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay, I’m too sturdy to knock over!”

I’m about to walk away when I realize she’s staring at Ray too, her eyes beady and alert, her head tilted to one side like a bird.

“Amarra?” she says before I can turn away. “I know you feel like you’re all on your own and there’s nobody to rely on, but that isn’t true. It will be okay, you know. No one’s ever alone.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, stopping her midstep. “Why would I feel like that?”

Lekha raises her eyebrows, surprised. “We both know you’re not the Amarra who was in the accident. Now it looks like Ray knows too.” She tilts her head again, ignoring my shocked expression. “If I were you, I think I’d be feeling lonely. And scared. And I’d wear that necklace more often, it’s very pretty, but that’s beside the point.” A smile brightens her eyes.

I open my mouth to offer a panicked denial, but she gets there first.

“Try lavender,” she recommends. “Or sage! Don’t you love the word sage? Such a nice round word. Math exams give me panic attacks. Sage helps. Or maybe I mean rosemary. I can never tell them apart.”

She beams at me and wanders off to see a couple of her friends. I watch her go and I realize that, for the first time in two days, I could actually laugh.

Ray doesn’t speak to me all day. But as far as I can tell, he doesn’t speak to anyone else about me either. Once I catch Sam, the boy who first spoke to me on my first day at school, shooting me a strange look, but he looks away so fast I don’t know if I imagined it. The waiting is agony.

He doesn’t make me wait long. Just until PE, two days later.

I get changed as usual. I put my hair up, making sure the gauze is firmly taped over my Mark, and Sonya tries to get a look at it, also as usual. I swat her hand away and she laughs as we all traipse outside onto the fields to wait for the PE teachers.

We’re about halfway across the field when I feel a pair of hands on my shoulders. I know the feel of those hands. He must have touched my shoulders any number of times on those days we used to spend together. But never like this.

Startled, I jerk forward, but it’s too late to pull away. Ray’s fingers bite painfully into my skin.

I stop, go still. A dull, resigned kind of relief sweeps over me. It’s done, and I don’t have to feel guilty about tricking these people any longer.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sonya demands angrily, and her voice is so loud that the rest of the class turns our way.

Ray ignores her. He’s speaking to me, his voice harsh. “No one believes me,” he says, with a short, humorless laugh. “I tried telling them, but they won’t believe me. They think I’ve lost my mind. You know, maybe I have. Maybe that’s what happens when someone you love dies.”

“Ray,” Jaya pleads. “Ray, stop—”

“Ray, this is crazy—”

“I’m not crazy,” he tells them, and his voice is so sad. “I wish I was. I wish it wasn’t true, I want it so badly to be her.”

The field has gone very quiet. Ray grips my shoulders to keep me from moving. He doesn’t have to. I couldn’t move even if I wanted to right now. My knees feel like jelly. I might be sick again.

“You’ve been on and on about some shit for two days, and I’m sick of it,” snaps Sonya. “Why are you trying to convince us that Amarra’s not Amarra?”

“It’s not,” he says. “It’s an echo.”

Sonya utters a sharp, incredulous laugh. “You’re completely bonkers. Amarra doesn’t have an echo. Ew.”

Ew.

“She did,” Ray snaps back at her. “She told me she did!”

There’s a split second of shocked silence, and then Sonya’s face turns purple. “She told you she had an echo?” she shouts. For a brief moment, she is outraged, jealous. A thousand times angrier with Ray than with me.

“Ray, you’re hurting her,” Jaya says very softly. “Can’t you let go?”

“You don’t believe me?” Ray challenges them. “I have proof this time, I can show you. Want to see that scar she’s been hiding?”

In one sharp, savage move, he rips the gauze off my neck. He turns me around so my back is to the rest of the class. His face is satisfied, furious. Sad.

We both hear the gasps. Ray has been touched by a magic wand, transformed. He’s not crazy, he’s been wronged.

“There,” he says bitterly. “Now you know what she is.”

“But—” Sonya falters, her voice cracking in dismay. “But that means . . . that means Amarra is . . . she’s—”

Ray releases me abruptly. “Yeah,” he says, and there’s so much pain in his voice, “I know.”

“No!” Sonya cries. “No, she’s not! She’s not!”

“Ask her,” says Ray. “Ask her who she is. Who it is.”

“I’m not an it,” I say, stung by the injustice of this.

“So he was telling the truth?” someone asks in a hushed whisper.

I force myself to square my shoulders and be truthful. “Yes,” I say, my heart pounding in my ears, “he was.”

“I don’t believe this,” Sonya says. The girl who looked at me with such affection is gone. This girl detests the very sight of me. “You lied to us for months! You stole her life, you pretended—”

Angry murmurs build among the watching faces, like wasps in a small, confined space, and I force myself not to back away.

“I had to.”

Even to my own ears, it doesn’t sound like much of a reason. When you balance duty and law against death and grief, the duty seems worthless.

No one speaks for one shocked, shivering moment.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I never wanted to trick anybody.”

“You’re sorry?” Sonya repeats. “You’re sorry? Do you even know what being sorry means? Do you even understand the difference between right and wrong? If I were you, I’d be crawling away in shame. But I guess things like you don’t have feelings like that?”

I hear a hollow laugh. It’s mine. I want to be patient, to turn away with dignity, but the jibe about my not even being human tips my temper over.

“I didn’t ask for this,” I say angrily. “I never asked for this. I’ve never had a chance to choose what I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to do. Never! I didn’t come here because I wanted to; I didn’t pretend to be Amarra because I enjoyed it. I had to be here; I had to do this. I have never been able to choose!”

Before anyone can reply, a figure flies across the field toward us. It’s Lekha. I realize she’s been missing all this time.

“The teachers are coming,” she says in her high, clear voice, “and they’re going to skewer us through the brain if we haven’t started warming up by the time they get here.”

“We’re in the middle of something,” Sonya snaps at her.

“Eff off,” says Lekha agreeably. “That’s short for efferves-cence, you know, which means ‘do go and jump in a well.’”

A tiny, impossible smile tickles the corner of my mouth.

Everybody just stands around in a kind of angry, trembling shock. Ray makes a noise deep in his throat, like a hurt animal, and stalks off the field. Jaya starts to cry. I want to comfort her, but what use am I when all she wants is her best friend back? It’s tempting, oh, so tempting to leave the field and leave school altogether. But I don’t. There are any number of names they’re going to call me and names they’ve called me already, but I’m not going to let them add coward to the list, too.

Somehow, impossibly, I make it through the day. And the next. And the one after. Things only get worse as the week winds down. The hostile remarks evolve slowly from “liar” and “thief” to insults aimed specifically at the monstrosity that I am. All my classmates have ever been taught about me was gleaned from rumors and overexaggerated news stories. I grow steadily more torn between guilt and fury. I know they have a right to be angry. I know they are suffering the aftershocks of learning Amarra’s gone, but how long am I to be punished for?

On the other hand, the police never come. Whatever they think of me, no one has gone to the police. Not yet.

I have a feeling some of them want to, like Sam and Sonya. But if Ray told them what it would cost Amarra’s family, it’s worked. They’ve chosen not to tell. They’ve understood that it’s not just me they would be punishing. And that, at least, is a very good thing.

Having exiled myself to my room over the weekend, I concentrate on homework. I read three tedious chapters for geography and make notes on a Second World War diary extract for history. I rework the tale of the mongoose and the snake for creative writing. I finish two pages of calculus for math. I reread a few chapters of Wuthering Heights and the last act of Macbeth for literature.

On Monday, I go back to school, same as always. I try not to notice the scowling, the hostility, the humiliating comments about my Mark, my stolen face.

I get to the high school but don’t make it to the classroom.

On my way to get some water, the bell rings, and everyone scrambles to their classes. I don’t realize there are people behind me until it’s too late. I’m toppled, pushed, flung hard against the watercooler. It’s tall, and made of steel and plastic, and it bloody hurts.

One glance at the faces around me is enough to tell me they’re all young but unfamiliar. They must not go to school here. Beyond them, I see four of my classmates, Sam among them.

“You’re joking, right?” I snap.

“It’s only what you deserve,” says a voice I don’t know. Then my head is knocked back and hits the cooler again. Everything is a blur now and I scramble onto my knees. As one of them grabs me, I elbow her. She doubles over. There’s another who catches me on the cheekbone. I make a spitting sound and throw myself at him. He cries out in pain and pulls away.

I wonder if that means I won.

As quickly as it happened, it’s over. There’s light again, the shadows have moved, and the bell has stopped ringing.

I can see shapes by the wall. My classmates. The strangers have disappeared. There’s a girl who looks sick; so does one of the boys. Sam can’t seem to look at me. I’m reeling in pain, in fury that I could have let this happen. I should have reacted faster, kicked harder. I want to shout at Sean. He told me echoes could be angels among mortals, but I can’t imagine I look like much of an angel now.

Then I hear a new voice. I hear a trace of French and I tense.

“What the hell just happened?” Ray demands.

Someone mutters a reply.

“Weren’t they expelled last year?” asks Ray. His voice is scathing. “I remember them. Really charming. Stayed friends with them, did you, Sam?”

“I play tennis with them,” Sam says in a low voice.

“And they agreed to come and do you a little favor? That’s sweet. If you were so pissed off you wanted to hit her, couldn’t you have done it yourself? To do it like this—”

“Why didn’t you hit her?” Sam asks. “Make her face look less like your girlfriend’s? You hit me during football last year.”

“You were cheating. That’s like asking to be punched. And I don’t hit girls.”

“She’s not really a girl.”

“I don’t care. What if they’d gone and killed her by accident?”

“It’s not murder if it’s one of those things,” Sam mumbles, but he sounds uncertain.

Ray sighs. “Grow a brain, Sam. It can still get us all expelled. And those people who made her, the Weavers, they could get you for damages. You idiot. What d’you think she’s going to do now, smile sweetly and forgive you?”

“Why isn’t she getting up?” says one of the other boys. “Shit, did they kill her?”

I see someone kneel down beside me. I jerk away.

“They didn’t kill her,” says Ray. He sounds angry. Because I’m alive? No, I don’t think so. He’s angry they did this. He hates me, but he knows what’s right and what isn’t. I feel a great pain deep in my chest. For a moment I hate him, too. I never wanted to care what he thought of me.

If you pretend you love a boy, maybe after a while you start to care. If you spend months with the traces of someone else’s love and memories inside you, maybe those traces become a part of you. Or perhaps Amarra has nothing to do with this. Perhaps I care because I’m jealous of what she had. That kind of love. That kind of freedom to love.

I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.

“Ugh,” I hear a girl saying, “don’t let them ever come back on campus, Sam. There’s a reason they were kicked out.”

They disperse until there’s only one shadow left. I turn my head away. I try to get up, but my legs feel weak and my head is spinning. There’s something warm and wet in my mouth. It tastes rusty; it has a smell like roses gone bad.

A pair of arms hoists me to my feet.

“Get off me,” I snarl. If I were a wolf, I could have bitten his hand off. Pity.

Ray releases me without comment, his face tense, his eyes darker than those of the boy who sat in the sun and smiled at the girl he loved. That photograph feels like a dream now.

“Why don’t you leave?” he asks me. “Sam only did this because he’s angry. He wanted to tell the police about you, but I made him swear he wouldn’t. Nobody wants you here. How can you be sure someone else won’t try to hurt you?”

“Is that a threat?”

“Of course not,” he says irritably. “I just want you to go. It hurts like hell to look at you and see her face.”

I straighten up. “This is my face.”

“Just leave. Go, pack, do whatever. Haven’t you realized you’ll be better off that way?”

That puzzles me. “Why do you care whether or not I’m better off?”

Ray gives me a look that feels like burning. “Wish I knew,” he says under his breath. “Good-bye, then. Have a nice life.”

He stalks away. My body aches. What now? Ring Neil and tell him I’ll be quitting school, thank you very much?

No. Of course not. I am not about to run or do the sensible thing. I will win this one.

I glance across the courtyard, at the classroom with the puke-colored door. My heart is still hammering. I’m so tired. I go to the bathroom to wash off the blood. It’s not as bad as I thought. Only a bit of swelling and bruising.

I go back to class. Mrs. Singh will have just started Monday’s double English Lit and Wuthering Heights. Her dry inquiry about my ability to read the time has no effect on me. I take my seat, enjoying the flabbergasted expressions on people’s faces. Most of them, like Lekha, are simply shocked by the state of my face, their eyes huge. Nobody expected me to come back. I’m glad I did.

Mrs. Singh launches into a lecture about Heathcliff’s apparently indisputable status as “a being of ultimate evil” in the novel.

I speak before she can ignore my raised hand.

“I don’t think he’s evil,” I say. “I think he was sad and angry and he did some horrible things because of it, but he wasn’t evil.”

“I didn’t ask you, Amarra—”

“I think,” I continue, determined to be intrusive, “he’s like Victor’s Creature in Frankenstein.”

“You mean the Monster,” Mrs. Singh corrects irritably.

“No, I mean the Creature.”

“Frankenstein himself referred to him as a monster.”

“That was probably why Frankenstein lost everything. If he’d given the Creature a chance, taught him and raised him instead of rejecting him, well, things would have turned out differently, wouldn’t they? If he had loved the Creature, they might both have had a much happier ending.”

“Loved the Creature?” Mrs. Singh’s glasses almost topple off her nose. “Gothic novels are not Hollywood extravaganzas! Why would anyone love what was made so unnaturally?”

Somebody laughs. Mrs. Singh appears to realize what she has said, and she flushes scarlet. My face grows hot under the pain.

Then an arm shoots into the air.

“I agree with Amarra,” says a high, clear voice, without waiting for Mrs. Singh to call on her. “There was some good in the Creature. He even loved Victor. Same with Heathcliff. Doing a bad thing doesn’t necessarily make someone evil. If you expect the worst, you’re only denying someone a chance to be better. That’s pretty much what Amarra said, and I agree. I,” Lekha reiterates, lest anybody have failed to grasp her meaning, “agree.”

Nobody knows what to say. I realize something that at once jolts and amazes me. By making my point far more eloquently than I did, Lekha has done something nobody expected. She has chosen a side.

Mine.

Mrs. Singh also seems to see that, somewhere along the way, battle lines were drawn. Her lips purse as though she has an especially sour lemon in her mouth. She sniffs and immediately sends me to the nurse to get my face looked at. But it’s too late to quell the whispers or put out the fires. I go off to the nurse, smiling for the first time in days. Someone has chosen my side, and that is more than I ever expected.