Becoming Sarah

by Simon, Miranda

  Becoming Sarah

  By Miranda Simon

  Text copyright © 2012 Miranda Simon

  All Rights Reserved

  IN THE BEGINNING

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IN THE BEGINNING

  “Hey, girl, c’mere.”

  I should never have answered him. I should have pulled my hand-me-down pea coat tighter against the night air and kept on walking. Instead, I paused and peered into an alleyway smelling of urine and garbage.

  “Hey, Jamie. Yeah, you know me.” He grinned, and his teeth shone bone white in the light from a street lamp.

  I did know him, a lanky, quiet kid who sat in the back row of my health class. Robert something? No, Ricky. Ricky Jones. He never said much, never did much except doodle in a spiral-bound notebook, but he wasn’t one of the rowdy ones, either – the bad boys who carried knives in the pockets of their sagging jeans.

  “Yeah, you, I got something to show you,” Ricky said, and when I hung back, afraid, he laughed softly. “What, you scared of me or something? You’re kinda cute when you’re nervous.”

  And those words hooked me like a fish on a line, because nobody had ever called me that before. Smart, sure. I made every honor roll. Reliable, absolutely. “I can always depend on Jamie,” my mother liked to say. “I get us into messes, she gets us out.” Usually this was after one of her binges, when I fixed up a payment plan with PG&E or stood in line at the church that gave out free groceries. But cute? Never once.

  I took a handful of nervous steps into the alley and stopped. “Hey, Ricky.” My voice sounded small and squeaky; I cleared my throat. “What’s up?”

  He motioned me closer. “Nothing much, just wanted to say hi. You going home?”

  I nodded and thrust my hands deeper into my pockets. “Yeah.”

  “You work at the library, huh? I seen you there.” His tongue crept out of his mouth to lick his lips. “It must pay pretty good there.”

  “It’s all right.” I rocked on my heels, my heart all of a sudden thumping in my chest. I glanced over my shoulder. No one on the street. I should have let Otto, one of the library techs, walk me all the way home, but it was out of his way and I’d urged him to turn back a few blocks ago. It was our late night, the one day of the week we stayed open until nine, and I knew he was eager to be home with his girlfriend and month-old son.

  I glanced back at Ricky, who took a sudden step toward me. “I – I have to get home,” I said, my mouth dry, but he caught my arm, hard, and wouldn’t let go.

  “Not yet,” he said, “not yet,” and he pulled me deeper into the shadows. Even through the wool of my coat his fingers pressed bruises into my flesh. In my mind I started screaming, but the sound wouldn’t come from my throat. He pinned me against the brick of one of the walls. I struggled – I was bigger than him, and almost as tall – but he was all wiry muscle and it did me no good. His mouth pushed up against mine without tenderness. He’d been drinking; his breath stank of beer – sour and yeasty. His front tooth cut my lip and I tasted blood.

  My first kiss.

  Sixteen and never been kissed. My best friend Maria said I was too serious for romance, too focused on the A’s I need for a college scholarship, but then she was always too kind. She swore up and down that with the right diet, the right zit cream, a new hairstyle and the perfect outfit, I’d look like one of the girls in Cosmo. I knew better. Boys didn’t look at me, not in that way.

  But oh, God, I never thought it would happen like this. Not in a stinking alley, not with the wall cold against my back and Ricky’s mouth grinding into mine. When his fingers tore at the button on my jeans I began to cry, huge gulping sobs. I groped for my phon, but it wasn’t in the one coat pocket I could reach.

  “Shut up,” Ricky said, his face twisted and ugly, “shut up, girl. You’re lucky I want you. Fat bitch, lucky any man will have you.”

  When I cried harder at that, he slammed my head back into the wall and then pushed me down on the ground, onto the damp, filthy street, and still I couldn’t quite believe this was really happening to me.

  Ricky tugged down my jeans and I just lay there, my head throbbing and aching, my eyes clouded with tears. When I blinked they ran down into my hair and I could see the sky – clear with a handful of stars. Between the fog and the city lights we hardly ever saw stars in San Francisco. Or had I simply never noticed, walking around all the time with my eyes on the sidewalk?

  Ricky knelt over me and fumbled with his own pants. I shut my eyes and waited for it to be over. Soon it would end and then, and then. . .I would get up and go home? Pretend it never happened? Go to the police and have everyone know, at school and at work and everywhere, and feel sorry for me?

  “No,” I said. The word came out choked and quiet, so I said it again. “No!”

  “Shut up, shut up!” He nearly screamed the words. I saw fear on his face, and it gave me hope.

  “Ricky, please, you don’t want to do this.” I couldn’t quit crying, but I pushed the words out between gulps. “Please stop now. Please.”

  “Shut up,” he said again, and struck me. A fist to my cheekbone this time, a pain so sudden and shattering I couldn’t even cry out. And then when I could I screamed so loud the sound grated in my throat and echoed in the dark. I screamed and kept on screaming until Ricky’s fingers closed around my throat and I had no breath left.

  Funny how the world narrows down when you can’t draw your next breath. Suddenly that’s all that’s important. I felt Ricky push into me and thought the pain would tear me apart, but somehow that hardly mattered. I couldn’t breathe and if I didn’t soon I wouldn’t survive. It was that simple.

  I clawed at his hands on my throat until a pool of black spread before my eyes, dark and thick as spilt ink. I’d never imagined this kind of crushing agony. I wasn’t sure I believed in God but at that moment I prayed anyway to whatever force in the universe might hear me.

  “I don’t want to die,” I said, “not now, not yet.” The words fell silent from my lips, but the wish was as urgent and true as any I’d ever made.

  Then darkness.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I woke with my throat on fire and sour vomit in my mouth. With great effort, I raised my head. I was lying on a chilly, unfamiliar tile floor, in an unknown bathroom, with a puddle of puke in the bathtub and a half-empty bottle of vodka within arm’s reach.

  “Oh, God,” I moaned, and the voice in my ears was a stranger’s voice, lower and deeper than my own. I wasn’t dead, but my head throbbed to the tempo of jungle drums and my body felt bruised, pummeled, abused beyond repair. I grabbed the edge of the sink to pull myself up. My fingers brushed a plastic prescription bottle and sent it clattering to the floor. I caught it before it rolled behind the toilet. Xanax, according to the label, prescribed for a Sarah Elizabeth Winslow. Empty.

  I set the pill bottle back on the sink, turned on the faucet, and cupped my palm to catch the spill of cold water. That’s when I realized, staring at my hands, that they weren’t my hands at all.

  My own fingers were short and stubby, with bitten-down nails and peeling cuticles. These were long, tapered, and elegant, with pretty oval nails painted a deep blood red. These hands wore several
and turquoise rings.

  Okay, then. I stared at the strange nails, the jewelry, the pale, smooth fingers and delicate wrists. So I’d been unconscious after what had happened in the alley. A shiver shook me as the images swarmed back – the smell, Ricky's mouth twisted with fear and rage, the impact of his closed fist on my cheekbone, his hands tight around my neck. But I was alive now, wasn’t I? So I’d been in a coma. My nails had grown out. Someone had given me a manicure, and slipped the rings onto my fingers. Sure.

  But this was all just a way to delay the inevitable. More than anything, at that moment, I didn’t want to raise my head and look into the mirror above the sink. Because I already knew, on some level, that I wasn’t me anymore. After 16 years, you know your own body and what it feels like to wear it.

  Slowly, reluctantly, I lifted my chin. There she was, the stranger in the mirror. Early twenties, I guessed. Brown eyes. Creamy skin, sooty lashes. Black hair, cut in a bob short enough to frame a flawless face and a model’s sultry pout. It was a breathtakingly pretty face. Chic. Sophisticated. The opposite of the old me.

  I looked down. I wore a pair of pale blue silk pajamas, the fabric fine and soft that it floated on my skin. The pajama bottoms hung on slim, almost boyish hips. In a daze, I unbuttoned the top to reveal breasts were small enough to cup in my palms. A small silver loop pierced my belly button. I touched it tentatively, as if it might hurt, as if the true owner of this body might slap my fingers away. I ran my palms over a belly flat and taut as a movie star's.

  I couldn’t argue with the truth. I was somebody else.

  And Sarah Elizabeth Winslow, if this was her body and her bathroom – where was she? Waking up in a hospital room, wondering why the nurses kept calling her Jamie Lumley? Why she now wore glasses and had red-brown hair hanging limply to her shoulders?

  Cold water still gushed from the spigot. I scooped up enough to wash the foul taste from my mouth, then turned off the flow with a sharp, angry twist of the handle. My throat still felt as if I’d swallowed a knife with jagged edges. My stomach hurt; my whole body ached as if I’d been beaten, but from the inside out. Part of me wanted to lie down again on the cool tile floor, close my eyes, and sleep until I could wake up in my own bed at home, under my fuzzy pink blanket, with my clock radio tuned to my favorite pop station. I’d hit the snooze button once or twice, curling deeper into my warm cocoon, before reluctantly swinging my feet over the edge of the bed and into frayed but comfortable Bugs Bunny slippers. I would pad out into the living room, where my mother slept on the couch, and – if she was working – shake her shoulder until she groaned and muttered, “All right, all right, I’m getting up.” I’d turn on the coffee maker, and pry my eyes fully open once the smell of brewing java filled every nook and cranny of our tiny flat.

  But no, that wasn’t an option now. I washed my face and dried it on an impossibly fluffy towel hung next to the sink, then pushed open the bathroom door. I moved through the rooms, quiet as a cat burglar, touching nothing. I was half certain that someone would come storming in and ask what I was doing where I didn’t belong. It was clear I didn’t belong here, in this apartment with its hardwood floors, white leather couch, high ceilings and a view of a quiet, tree-lined street bathed by early-afternoon spring sunshine. On the kitchen counter I found an iPhone, a set of keys and a wallet next to a stack of mail thrown carelessly on a counter. The counter shone so white and clean I couldn’t believe anyone had ever cooked a meal there.

  I fumbled the wallet open. It held stack of twenties crisp from the ATM, and so thick my stomach turned somersaults. For sure, more money than I earned in a month of shelving books. A platinum Visa in the name of Sarah E. Winslow. American Express, ditto. A membership card for a gym downtown. And – bingo – a California driver’s license. Same name, and a photo of the girl in the mirror, her eyes rimmed with black kohl, her expression sulky. According to the date of birth, she’d turned 24 just last month. Her address was on Hayes Street, San Francisco, apartment No. 4.

  So now I knew who I was, and presumably where. I figured I could find out a whole lot more by going through the mail, or checking the files on the computer I’d glimpsed in the spare room, or listening to the messages on the frantically blinking answering machine. But while I’d accepted – for now – that I was no longer in possession of my own body, I wasn’t nearly ready to let go of myself, of Jamie. For all I knew, this Sarah person could show up any minute and demand her life back. I’d be happy to give it to her, too, in return for my own. My mother must be going out of her mind right now. And Maria. I checked the clock on the wall. She would wonder why I’d skipped out on our geometry class, and whether I’d be around to eat lunch with her on the wall in front of the school.

  Except maybe Sarah was now in my body. One sure way to find out. I grabbed a cordless phone from its stand on the counter and dialed my home number.

  “Hello?” My mother’s voice. My throat went tight with longing.

  “Um, hi.” That low, throaty voice again. “Can I talk to Jamie?”

  A long silence. Fear blossomed in the pit of my belly. Please, no, I thought. Then another voice came on, one I recognized. Our neighbor, Janelle. Aunt Janelle, I’d called her since I was a child. Den mother to the whole block. Always at her house there with extra plate of spaghetti, a leftover slice of cake, especially at the end of the month when the Lumley family’s food stamps where long gone.

  “Who’s this?” Aunt Janelle demanded.

  “I’m, ah, a friend of Jamie’s. From school. From French club.”

  Another silence, too long. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to speak to her,” Aunt Janelle said. The suspicion lacing her voice had gone, leaving a weariness I’d never heard before. “She’s – something’s happened.”

  “But she’s okay, right?” I tried to swallow down the note of desperation. “I mean, she will be, right?”

  “No. I’m sorry, no. She’s not okay. She’s. . .dead.”

  In the background I heard my mother’s wail, like the shriek of a wounded animal. I dropped the phone; it clattered on the kitchen floor, skidded under a cabinet, and lay still.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the bedroom was a walk-in closet, the floor littered with discarded outfits. A sequined halter top. Latex pants in a red so bright they hurt my eyes. Shoes with heels three inches high. I touched my cheek to a sweater on a padded hanger; cashmere, and lovely beyond anything I’d ever owned. Sarah’s lingerie was gorgeous, too, tiny scraps of lace and silk. It felt weird to wear someone else’s underwear, but I didn’t have much of a choice. My own tended toward cotton, white, and high enough to cover my belly button. From Sarah’s collection I chose one of the few pairs of briefs from the heap of scanty thongs and g-strings. I pulled on the sweater, and a pair of low-rise jeans that barely cleared my hip bones but fit like a second skin.

  I did all of this with my brain working overtime.

  If Jamie Lumley was dead, who did that make me? Not Sarah Winslow. I had none of her memories. In my mind I was Jamie, my thoughts, emotions and identity as clear and sharp as ever. When I caught my reflection in the full-length bedroom I did a double-take, still; I expected to see my own face, not hers.

  So what had happened to Sarah? I could only think she must be gone, dead as she had probably intended when she took those all those pills. Or had she only meant to dull some awful pain, not to die? Either way, there was no trace of her now. If she still lurked in my brain somewhere, she kept silent.

  At the moment, though, I couldn’t bring myself to care much about Sarah Winslow – who she’d been, what she’d dreamed of, where she was now. I had only one goal, and that was to get my old life back. True, I didn’t look like myself anymore, but I – the “I” inside, the “I” that counted – hadn’t changed.

  There was only one person who would listen to me and know me. My mother would be hysterical, unreasonable, out of her mind. She never coped well with crisis. When I’d fallen off my bike as a kid, cracked m
y head on the pavement, and bled all over the living room, I’d called 911 myself while she sobbed and clutched at my arm.

  No, it was Maria I needed. Maria would help me figure out what to do.

  The iPhone rang as I snatched Sarah’s wallet and keys from the counter, but I ignored it on my way out the door. Her keychain said Lexus and was one of those buttons you pushed to unlock a car door. I wasn’t up to figuring out where she'd parked it, though, and besides, I felt less than confident in my driving abilities. While I’d passed driver’s ed last year, I’d never gotten around to scheduling a test at the DMV. I couldn’t see the point of getting a license with no car in my near future. My mother had once owned a beat-up Nissan, but it had finally broken down beyond repair, and now we both got around on Muni buses.

  Sarah’s front door led to a hallway and a narrow set of stairs that took me down three floors. Outside I discovered that she lived in the top flat in a Victorian house, its front painted pale yellow with purple trim. A far cry from the cramped, shabby box I shared with my mother. A whole different world.

  Maria would be in school now, but she’d be home in an hour. I needed to figure out exactly where I was and which bus to catch. Two blocks from Sarah’s building I found a corner store, bought a Muni map, and spread it out on the counter.

  “Where you trying to get to?” asked the clerk, as he leaned over the counter toward me. “Maybe I can give you a ride, gorgeous.”

  I looked up sharply, thinking he was making fun of me. He stared back at me, a young, good-looking guy with a goatee and a look in his eye I’d never seen before – not aimed in my direction, anyway. He wasn’t making fun; he was hitting on me.

  “Here,” I said, pointing to an intersection just off Third Street, in the southeast part of the city.

  He laughed. “Oh, no, you don’t. Too dangerous for a girl like you. How about some coffee instead? I’m off in an hour.”

  “No, thanks.” I’d seen what I needed to see. I folded up my map and left the store, headed for the nearest bus stop.