Pretty Girl Thirteen (13 page)

“What was that, hon?” Mom gripped her trembling hand. She was crouched on the floor beside Angie. “What did you say?”

“They saved my life,” she whispered.

A throaty laugh echoed between her ears.
You’re welcome.

The voice terrified her. It was like having a wild demon in her head. She squeezed Mom’s hand and pleaded with her eyes. “When can we start? When can we do the new procedure?”

Angie was late back to school because of the appointment, arriving just at lunchtime. She had stopped shaking from the glimpse of horror, and the memory was already bleeding away until she couldn’t quite remember what she’d seen—just that she was left feeling unsettled.

The cafeteria was filled with eating, joking, rowdy students. All she had to do was find a table of strangers and sit down so she could eat in peace. What she’d told the doctor wasn’t entirely true. She wasn’t making new friends. Sure, she had a crowd of followers, of fans, but it wasn’t like she wanted to get close to any of them. Ugh. They were like fleas. Hopping onto her, touching her all the time, sucking away her energy.

It was much easier to float along, remain a mystery, keep them at arm’s length. She didn’t need to explain anything about herself that way.

She was still scanning the room with her food tray when a hand jostled her elbow.

Rebalancing her tray, she whirled to see Kate, or a three-years-older version of Kate, who made a quick sign of the cross on her chest. “It
is
you,” she said in a hushed voice. She patted Angie, testing her solidity. “Oh wow. I only saw you from the side a couple of times, and I wasn’t sure. I mean, I heard the gossip, but I had to know for real. Come over here.” She grabbed Angie’s tray and took it over to a table for two.

“Sit.” She leaned her head close to Angie’s, foreheads almost touching. “I can’t believe it. I didn’t hear anything on the news. When did they find you? Where were you? What happened?”

“Apparently I found myself,” Angie replied. “I showed up at home—total amnesia.”

Kate’s jaw dropped. “Oh, my. I’m sorry. Do you know who I am?”

Angie rolled her eyes. “Of course I do, Katie-Latie. You were one of my best friends.” She noticed that she’d automatically used the past tense, like she was getting a sense of time—a
then
and a
now
. She didn’t feel thirteen anymore. She felt—undefined.

Kate grabbed a baby carrot off Angie’s salad, just like she used to. “Well, you probably don’t know it’s social death to be seen with me. I should warn you. I’m a leper now.” She said it so matter-of-factly, Angie assumed she was kidding.

“I’m not kidding,” she continued. “So if you don’t want to—”

Angie shrugged. “Because of the keg thing?”

Kate startled. “See. You’re back from the other side and even you know about it. Who told you?”

“Greg and Livvie,” she replied.

“So how come you’re not hanging with them?” Kate’s nose wrinkled. “They’re right over there.”

Angie looked in the direction Kate pointed with her chin. Liv had a sour look on, watching the two of them. Well, no wonder. If Greg had told her what happened, Liv had an excellent reason to look at Angie that way. She felt the color creep into her cheeks just thinking about it.

But if he’d kept it secret, then it looked like she’d just ditched them. She never called Liv that afternoon, and she’d blocked Liv’s number after the fifth time Liv tried to call her. She didn’t want to start her new life with an all-out catfight over something she hadn’t even done on purpose. It wasn’t like Liv would take “It was my other personality” as an excuse.

And now Angie was eating lunch with the enemy.

Greg’s expression was harder to read, more intense. Whatever it was, it made her hot and squirmy inside. “Nah. Things have changed too much,” she said.

Kate raised her eyebrows. “You could easily win him back if you wanted.”

“It’s not a contest,” Angie said primly.

“Yes, it is,” Kate argued. “Everything’s a contest. Popularity, love, grades, success. You just have to learn the contest rules.”

Rules. The word struck a chord. “Why’d you break the rules? Why’d you tell on them?”

Kate’s smile was unexpected. “I may have lost the popularity contest, but I won the integrity award. If anyone had crashed coming down that twisty mountain road from Kurt’s house drunk, I couldn’t have lived with myself or with Kurt. So I told, and no one got hurt.”

“Except you.”

“Except me. Acceptable losses.”

Angie wanted to hug her across the table, but salad dressing would have ruined her expensive T-shirt. She grabbed Kate’s hand instead. “Kurt was your boyfriend, wasn’t he?”

Kate’s smile slipped. “Was. Yeah.”

“And you told on him anyway? I heard he got suspended.”

Kate’s sigh was heavy. “It wasn’t easy. But what he did was wrong. Dangerous to himself and everyone else. So yeah. I tattled. Broke the first rule of the playground. No tattling on friends. But I had to in this case. That’s the rule of self-respect.”

No tattling.
The words echoed.
But I had to. What he did was wrong.
Angie found a strange resonance in Kate’s story. It clung to her.

“Can we be lepers together?” she asked.

Kate’s grin was the brightest thing Angie had seen in days.

The best part of Saturday mornings was smacking her six a.m. school alarm and sinking back into sleep. But today, too nervous and excited about starting the experimental treatment, Angie’s brain kicked right into wide-awake mode. She rolled out of bed and stretched, up to the ceiling, down to the floor. Her arms swung loose around her toes, and she noticed black smudges on the first two fingertips of her left hand, like pencil marks. Weird. She was right-handed. She rubbed her fingers together, and the black smeared into gray. A crumpled piece of paper on the desk caught her eye. Shreds of pink eraser covered the surface. She smoothed the paper and gasped.

Childish handwriting sprawled crookedly across the page and swerved diagonally at the end of each line. Some of the words had been written and erased and rewritten in a straighter line with a left-handed slant. The ghosting of the erased words made the note even more illegible. The writer must have crumpled it in frustration at the end. Angie dropped into her rocking chair and read.

A cold feeling dribbled all the way down Angie’s spine as she read the note. She flipped her left hand over, awkwardly picked up a pencil, and tried to copy the letter onto a clean sheet of paper. Goosebumps raised the hairs on her arms. It wasn’t her handwriting, for sure. She could barely form the letters left-handed. The child’s writing looked polished next to hers.

The first one she could hear? What did it mean? And who was the big girl by the door? Was that Girl Scout or someone else? The gatekeeper, maybe?

Her life was a bunch of questions that no one else could answer. Instead of going away, the mysteries multiplied. Wonderful. Just like her personalities. All locked in her head.

What was so awful, so terrible, so frightening that she couldn’t even tell herself? She’d survived, after all.

The idea of a little girl hunched over the desk in the dead of night, laboring to leave her a message, touched her in a way all Dr. Grant’s wordy explanations never could. She was real—a child with her own dreams and fears. The scary lady doctor. Angie smiled.

Her smile faded as she thought about the new treatment. Dr. Grant had promised that all the alters would have their last chance to speak to her before they were erased. It was up to the alters to decide how much they wanted to tell. And it was up to Angie to decide how much she wanted to know.

She considered the crumpled paper in her hand and the little girl who wanted to speak directly to her, now, before it was too late.

Did they know about the treatment starting this afternoon? Could they hear and understand? Was this crumpled note a kid’s desperate plea for communication before she was erased?

Angie pictured her, Tattletale, blond hair streaming out behind her, blown by unseen wind, a pencil in her tiny hand.

She decided. It was time for secrets to come out of hiding. Ready or not, here I come.

T
WENTY CLEAR PLASTIC BOXES STACKED FOUR HIGH AND
five across lined the garage wall. Clothes, books, toys, drawings—who knew what else? Good thing Mom was such a pack rat. Angie caught her in the kitchen, scrambling some eggs for Dad’s Saturday breakfast. “Hey, Mom. Do we still have that old Fisher-Price tape recorder I used to love so much?”

“Look in ‘Toddler Two’ on the left,” Mom suggested. “Second row.” A pack rat with a perfect mental filing system.

Angie left the connecting door open behind her as she returned to the garage. She unpiled the boxes and dove into Toddler 2. Sure enough, the friendly recorder with the red-and-yellow microphone was next to the barn with the pudgy plastic animals. She cradled the pink pig in one hand, the rooster in the other, lost in the childhood memory.

“What do you want that for, hon?” Mom yelled out.

“I, um, was working on a song and I wanted to get it on tape before I forget,” she called back. She tossed Wilbur and Doodle-doo back in the bin, snapped the lid, and restacked the boxes.

Mom smiled to see her blowing silently into the microphone. “Batteries dead?” She turned away from the eggs and pulled open a drawer. “Fresh ones in here. Hey, I’m glad to hear the sounds of guitar strumming in your room again.”

Okay, she wasn’t exactly writing a song, but she had reunited with her guitar. Gradually fingering the chords and relearning the picking patterns she’d worked on so hard in the before-time was relaxing. It took her mind away from … from her mind for a while.

She glanced over Mom’s shoulder at the steaming yellow fluff in the pan. “Add a dash of thyme and some paprika,” she suggested. “Dad’ll love it.”

“Since when are you the master chef?” Mom’s right dimple showed her amusement at the unlikely suggestion.

“I have absolutely no idea,” she said flippantly. “Maybe a recipe I whipped up in captivity.”

“Oh Lord, I wish you wouldn’t joke like that,” Mom said. Her cheeks sagged.

Angie was pretty sure she had Girl Scout to thank for that culinary suggestion. “Mom, if I can’t joke about it, I don’t think I can live with it.”

“Just please, not around your father. He’s having a hard enough time.”

“Work?” Angie asked.

Mom was silent.

A sharp pain cut across her chest. “Me? Having me home again?”

Mom was more silent.

“Why?” Angie’s voice rose. The words and fears she’d been holding back poured out with ugly urgency. “He already had me dead-and-buried in his mind, didn’t he? I am a ghost to him. He doesn’t even see me.”

“What on earth are you talking about, Angie?”

“I saw it, Mom. I know about it. I saw the picture.” Her chin trembled, but she wouldn’t cry. “I found the scrapbook and I saw the grave.”

Mom’s heated face faded to white. “No, Angie. That was a mistake.”

“That was supposed to be for my body. My mangled, murdered body. Tell me the truth, for once.”

Mom’s hand flew to cover her mouth. “It wasn’t like that,” she whispered between her fingers. “Our grief counselor, she told us to do it. To begin to move on, because I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. We never gave up. I swear.”

Cold invaded Angie from head to toe. Her voice was pure ice. “You didn’t, Mom. But Dad did. He moved on. He started a replacement child. Is it a girl? A boy? Has he named it?”

In the last month, the size of Mom’s stomach had grown from “too much dessert” to “no more tucking shirts in.” It was so obvious, Angie couldn’t pretend it away anymore. They had to talk about it. But not now. She wasn’t ready.

“Ange, please …” Mom shook her head, reached out with the spatula. “It’s not that.”

Angie dashed it to the ground. “Do you realize he’s touched your stomach more in the last month than he’s touched me? He hates me now.”

Mom studied the grease splatter down the front of her white shirt to avoid Angie’s eyes. “Oh, you silly girl. He’s petrified, don’t you see? He can only imagine what some anonymous maniac must have done to you. He’s sick. He can’t sleep at night.”

Angie felt a bubble of rage. “Because his precious daughter is damaged goods? Because he thinks I would be better off dead?”

Mom pulled herself up to her full five foot six and glared. “No. Because he failed to protect you. He lost you. He is burning up with guilt.” Her voice broke, and she looked away with brimming eyes. “Do you want some of these eggs? I can’t eat any. The smell is killing me.”

“You guys are killing me,” Angie said. “As if I didn’t have enough pressure.”