by Sara Shepard
“You know what.” Travis tapped away on the keyboard with his thumbs. A mosquito buzzed around his head, but he didn’t bother to flick it away. “You’re a sick freak.”
“What do you mean, Travis?” Clarice’s fuchsia-lined lips pursed worriedly.
Finally, Travis lowered the BlackBerry so everyone could see. “This,” he announced.
A stiff, hot wind blew against Emma’s cheek, the dusty air irritating her eyes. The blue-black evening sky seemed to darken a few shades. Travis breathed heavily next to her, reeking of pot smoke, and pulled up a generic video uploading site. With a flourish, he typed in the keyword SuttonInAZ and hit PLAY.
A video slowly loaded. A handheld camera panned over a clearing. No sound escaped from the speakers, as if the microphone had been muted. The camera whipped around to show a figure sitting in a chair with a black blindfold covering half her face. A round silver locket on a thick chain clung to a bony, feminine collarbone.
The girl thrashed her head frantically back and forth, the locket bouncing wildly. The picture went dark for a moment, and suddenly someone slipped behind her and pulled the necklace chain back so that it pressed up against the girl’s throat. The girl’s head arched back. She flailed her arms and kicked her legs.
“Oh my God.” Clarice’s hand flew to her mouth.
“What is this?” Emma whispered.
The strangler pulled the chain harder and harder. Whoever it was had a mask over his head, so Emma couldn’t see his face. After about thirty seconds, the girl in the video stopped struggling and went limp.
Emma backed away from the screen. Had they just watched someone die? What the hell? And what did this have to do with her?
The camera remained fixed on the blindfolded girl. She wasn’t moving. Then the picture went momentarily dark again. When an image snapped back on the screen, the camera was tilted over, fallen on the ground. Emma could still see a sideways shot of the figure in the chair. Someone walked up to the girl and pulled the blindfold off her head. After a long pause, the girl coughed. Tears dotted her eyes. The corners of her mouth pulled down. She blinked slowly. For a split second before the screen went dark, she stared half consciously into the lens.
Emma’s jaw dropped to her worn Converse sneakers.
Clarice gasped loudly.
“Ha,” Travis said triumphantly. “I told you.”
Emma stared at the girl’s huge, blue eyes, slightly upturned nose, and round face. She looked exactly like her.
That was because the girl in the video was me.
Chapter 2
THAT’S RIGHT, BLAME THE FOSTER KID
Emma grabbed the phone from Travis’s hands and started the clip over, staring hard at the image. As the person reached out and began to choke the blindfolded girl, fear streaked through Emma’s stomach. When the anonymous hand pulled off the blindfold, Emma’s identical face appeared on the screen. Emma had the same thick, wavy, chestnut-brown hair as the girl in the movie. The same round chin. The same pink lips kids used to tease Emma about, saying they were puffy as though she’d had an allergic reaction. She shuddered.
I watched the video again in horror, too. The locket glinting in the light caused a tiny shard of a memory to surface: I remembered lifting the lid of my baby box, pulling out the locket from under a half-chewed teething giraffe, a lacy receiving blanket, and a pair of knit booties, and putting it around my neck. The video itself brought back nothing though. I didn’t know if it had happened in my backyard . . . or three states away. I wished I could slap my post-death memory across the face.
But the video had to be how I died, right? Especially from that quick flashback I’d had when I’d awakened in Emma’s bathroom: that face close to mine, my heart beating hard, my murderer standing above me. But I had no idea how this whole death thing worked: Had I popped into Emma’s world the moment after I’d taken my last breath, or was it days—months—later? And how did the video get posted online? Had my family seen it? My friends? Was this some kind of twisted ransom note?
Emma finally glanced up from the screen. “Where did you find this?” she asked Travis.
“Guess someone didn’t know she was a star on the Internet, huh?” Travis snatched the phone from her hands.
Clarice raked her fingers through her hair. She kept glancing from the video screen to Emma’s face. “Is this what you do for fun?” she asked Emma in a hoarse voice.
“She probably does it to get high.” Travis paced around the patio like a prowling lion. “I knew some girls at school last year who were, like, obsessed with it. One of them almost died.”
Clarice clapped her hand over her mouth. “What’s wrong with you?”
Emma’s eyes darted from Travis to Clarice. “Wait, no. That’s not me. The girl in this video is someone else.”
Travis rolled his eyes. “Someone who looks exactly like you?” he deadpanned. “Let me guess. A long-lost sister? An evil twin?”
There was a low rumbling of thunder in the distance. The breeze smelled like wet pavement, a telltale sign that a storm was close. A long-lost sister. The idea ignited in Emma’s mind like a Fourth of July sparkler. It was possible. She’d asked Social Services once if Becky had had any other kids she’d abandoned along the way, but they said they didn’t know.
A thought burned in my mind, too: I was adopted. That much I remembered. It was common knowledge in my family; my parents had never tried to hide it. They’d told me my adoption had been a last-minute scramble and they’d never met my birth mother. Could it be possible? It explained why I was literally stuck to this girl who looked just like me, following her around as if our souls had been tethered together.
Clarice tapped her long nails on the table. “I don’t tolerate lying or stealing in this house, Emma.”
Emma felt like she’d just been kicked in the stomach. “That’s not me in the video,” she protested. “And I didn’t steal from you. I swear.”
Emma reached for her canvas bag on the patio table. All she had to do was call Eddie, her manager at the roller coaster. He’d vouch for her hours today. But Travis got to her bag first, knocking it over so all of its contents spilled out onto the pavement.
“Oops!” he cried gleefully.
Emma watched helplessly as her tattered copy of The Sun Also Rises landed on a dusty anthill. A crumpled ticket for a free all-you-can-eat BBQ buffet at MGM Grand got caught in the breeze and drifted toward Travis’s free weights. Her BlackBerry and a tube of cherry-flavored ChapStick skittered to a stop next to a terra-cotta turtle. Last but not least, there was a suspicious-looking wad of bills held together with a thick purple rubber band. The wad thudded to the patio, bounced once, and landed in front of Clarice’s chunky heels.
Emma was too stunned to speak. Clarice snatched the money and licked her pointer finger to count it. “Two hundred,” she said when she was finished. She held up a twenty with blue scribble in the upper left-hand corner. Even in the fading light, Emma could see a big looped B, presumably for Bruce Willis. “What did you do with the other fifty?”
A neighbor’s wind chimes tinkled in the distance. Emma’s insides were frozen. “I-I have no idea how that got in my bag.”
Behind her, Travis snickered. “Busted.” He was leaning casually against the stucco wall, just to the left of the big round thermometer. He crossed his arms over his chest, and his top lip was curled in a sneer.
The hair on the back of Emma’s neck rose. All at once, she understood what was going on. Her lips started to twitch, just like they always did when she was about to lose it. “You did this!” She pointed a finger at Travis. “You set me up!”
Travis smirked. Something inside Emma broke loose. Screw keeping the peace. Screw adapting to whatever the foster family needed her to be. She shot for him, grabbing Travis by his meaty neck.
“Emma!” Clarice shrieked, pulling her off her son. Emma staggered backward, bumping against one of the patio chairs.
Clarice spun Emma around so that t
hey were face-to-face. “What’s gotten into you?”
Emma didn’t answer. She glowered at Travis again. He had flattened himself against the wall, his arms in front of him protectively, but there was a thrilled glow in his eyes.
Clarice turned away from Emma, sank down in the chair, and rubbed her eyes. Mascara smudged on her fingertips. “This isn’t working,” she said softly after a moment. She raised her head and gazed soberly at Emma. “I thought you were a sweet, nice girl who wouldn’t cause any trouble, Emma, but this is too much for us.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Emma whispered. “I swear.”
Clarice pulled out a nail file and started nervously sawing on her pinkie. “You can stay until your birthday, but after that you’re on your own.”
Emma blinked. “You’re kicking me out?”
Clarice stopped filing. Her face softened. “I’m sorry,” she said gently. “But this is the best choice for all of us.”
Emma turned away and stared hard at the ugly block wall at the back of the property.
“I wish things were different.” Clarice pulled the sliding door open and padded back into the house. As soon as she was out of view, Travis peeled himself off the wall and straightened up to full height.
He sauntered casually around Emma, scooped up the tiny nub of the joint that was still under the chair, blew off the bits of dried grass that had stuck to the tip, and dropped it into his enormous pants pocket. “You’re lucky she didn’t press charges,” he said in a slimy voice.
Emma said nothing as he swaggered back into the house. She wanted to leap up and claw his eyes out, but her legs felt like they had been filled with heavy wet clay. Her eyes blurred with tears. This again. Every time a foster family told Emma she had to move on, she invariably thought back to the cold, lonely moment when she’d realized Becky had ditched her for good. Emma had stayed a week at Sasha Morgan’s house while the police tried to track down her mom. She’d put on a brave face, playing Candy Land, watching Dora the Explorer, and making scavenger hunts for Sasha like the ones Becky had masterminded for her. But every night in the glow of Sasha’s Cinderella night-light, Emma struggled to read the parts of Harry Potter she could understand—which weren’t many. She’d barely mastered The Cat in the Hat. She needed her mom to read the big words. She needed her mom to do the voices. Even now, it still hurt.
The patio was silent. The wind blew the hanging spider plants and palm trees sideways. Emma stared blankly at the terra-cotta sculpture of a shapely woman that Travis and his friends liked to dry-hump. So that was that. No more staying here until the end of high school. No more applying to a photojournalism program at USC . . . or even community college. She had nowhere to go. No one to turn to. Unless . . .
Suddenly, the image from the video fluttered through her mind once more. A long-lost sister. Her heart lifted. She had to find her.
If only I could have told her it was too late.
Chapter 3
YOU KNOW IT’S TRUE IF YOU READ IT ON FACEBOOK
An hour later, Emma stood in her little bedroom, her Army-Navy bags splayed open on the floor. Why wait to pack? She also held her phone to her ear, talking to Alexandra Stokes, her best friend from back in Henderson.
“You could always stay with me,” Alex offered after Emma finished telling her that Clarice had just kicked her out. “I can talk to my mom. She might be cool with it.”
Emma shut her eyes. She and Alex had been on the cross-country team together last year. They’d both wiped out on a downhill part of a trail run on the first day of practice, and they’d become fast friends while the nurse cleaned their wounds with ultra-stingy hydrogen peroxide. She and Emma had spent their entire junior year sneaking into the casinos and taking pictures of celebrities and lookalikes with Alex’s Canon SLR, trolling the pawn shops but never buying anything, and sunning themselves at Lake Mead on weekends.
“That’s a lot to ask of your family.” Emma removed a pile of vintage T-shirts from her top drawer and plopped them into the duffel. She’d stayed with the Stokeses for a couple of weeks after Ursula and Steve relocated to the Florida Keys. Emma had had a great time, but Ms. Stokes was a single mom with enough to manage already.
“It’s crazy for Clarice to kick you out,” Alex said. Soft smacking sounds filled the receiver; she was probably chomping on a piece of chocolate Twizzlers, her favorite candy. “She can’t honestly think you stole that money.”
“Actually, it wasn’t just that.” Emma scooped up a stack of jeans and tossed them in the bag, too.
“Was there something else?” Alex asked.
Emma picked at a loose military patch on the old duffel. “I can’t get into it right now.” She didn’t want to tell Alex about the video she’d seen. She wanted to keep it to herself for a little while longer, just in case it wasn’t real. “But I’ll explain soon, okay? I promise.”
After Emma hung up, she sat on the carpet and looked around. She’d pulled all her photography prints by Margaret Bourke-White and Annie Leibovitz off the walls and her collection of classic novels and sci-fi thrillers off the shelves; the place now looked like a pay-by-the-hour motel room. She stared into the open bureau drawer, which contained her favorite things, the stuff she carried to every foster home. There was the hand-knitted monster toy Mrs. Hewes, a piano teacher, had given her the day she’d mastered “Für Elise” despite not actually having a piano at home to practice on. She’d saved a couple of scavenger hunt clues from Becky, the creases soft and the paper nearly disintegrating. And there was Socktopus, the threadbare stuffed octopus Becky had bought for Emma during a road trip to Four Corners. Nestled at the bottom of the drawer were her five cloth-bound journals, stuffed with poetry, the Comebacks I Should’ve Said list, the Ways to Flirt (WTF) list, the Stuff I Love and Hate list, and a thorough review of every secondhand store in the area. Emma had mastered the thrift store circuit. She knew exactly which days new shipments hit the floor, how to haggle for better prices, and to always paw through the bottom of the shoe bin—she’d once scored a barely scuffed pair of Kate Spade flats that way.
Finally, Emma lifted the battered Polaroid camera and a large stack of Polaroid photos from the corner of the drawer. The camera had been Becky’s, but Emma had brought it with her to Sasha’s house the night her mom had taken off. Not long after that, Emma had begun to write fake news captions to match the photos about her life and the goings-on of her foster families: “Foster Mom Gets Sick of Kids, Locks Self in Bedroom to Watch Leave It to Beaver.” “Hippies Leave for Florida Unannounced.” “Semi-decent Foster Mom Gets Job in Hong Kong; Foster Kid Not Invited.” She was the one and only reporter on the Emma beat. If she were in the right mind-set, she’d craft a new top story for today: “Evil Foster Brother Ruins Girl’s Life.” Or maybe “Girl Discovers Doppelgänger on Internet. Perhaps a Long-Lost Sister?”
Emma paused at the thought. She glanced at the tattered Dell laptop on the floor, which she’d bought from a pawn shop. Taking a deep breath, she set it on the bed and opened the lid. The screen glowed to life, and Emma quickly called up the video site where Travis had found the fake strangling film. The familiar video was the very first item on the list. It had been posted earlier that evening.
Emma pressed PLAY, and the grainy image appeared. The blindfolded girl bucked and scratched. The dark figure pulled the necklace taut around her neck. Then the camera fell, and someone emerged and whipped off the blindfold. The girl’s face was ashen and dazed. She looked around frantically, her eyes rolling around in her head like loose marbles. Then she looked at the camera. Her blue-green eyes were glassy and her pink lips glowed. It was Emma’s exact face. Everything about it was the same.
“Who are you?” Emma whispered, a shiver running up her spine.
I wished I could answer her. I wished I could do something useful instead of just dangling over her silently like a creepy ghost-stalker. It was like watching a movie, except I couldn’t even call out or throw popcorn at the screen.
The clip ended, and the site asked Emma if she wanted to replay it. The bed springs squeaked as she shifted her weight, thinking. After a moment, she typed SuttonInAz into a Google search. A few sites popped up instantly, including a Facebook page by the same name. SUTTON MERCER, it said. TUCSON, ARIZONA.
Screeching tires out the window sounded like a cackle. The Facebook page loaded, and Emma gasped. There was Sutton Mercer, standing in a foyer of a house with a bunch of girls by her side. She wore a black halter-style dress, a sparkly headband, and silver high heels. Emma blinked at her face, feeling queasy. She leaned in closer, certain she would see a difference that would set Sutton apart from herself, but everything, down to Sutton’s petite ears and the same perfectly square, perfectly straight teeth, was identical.
The more Emma thought about it, the more she could believe she had a long-lost twin. For one thing, there were certain times in life where she felt accompanied, as if someone was watching her. Sometimes she woke up in the morning after having crazy dreams about a girl who looked like her . . . but she knew it wasn’t her. The dreams were always vivid: riding on a sun-dappled Appaloosa at someone’s farm, dragging a dark-haired doll across a patio. Besides, if Becky was irresponsible enough to forget Emma at the Circle K, maybe she’d done the same thing with another baby. Perhaps all those duplicate pairs of shoes Manic Becky bought weren’t for Emma at all, but for Emma’s twin sister, a girl Becky had already abandoned.
Perhaps Emma was right, I thought. Perhaps they’d been for me.
Emma moved the mouse over the girls standing next to Sutton in the photo. MADELINE VEGA, said a small pop-up tag. Madeline had sleek black hair, huge brown eyes, a willowy build, and a gap between her front teeth, just like Madonna. Her head tilted suggestively to one side. There was a fake—or perhaps real?—tattoo of a rose on the inside of her wrist, and her bloodred dress plunged provocatively to her breast bone.
