Never Missing, Never Found (22 page)

I look. To my surprise, a laugh jumps from my throat. It’s my knife. The same size and shape as the one we found under Violetta’s mattress. “I bought it a few years ago,” I say, and wander over to pick it up. It’s hard and cold and feels like sadness made solid. It hasn’t always felt that way. “That knife saved my life. I felt naked without one, especially out here. You never know what might happen out here.” I’ve always felt relatively safe in the woods, but that doesn’t mean totally safe. Pepper spray only slows someone down; it doesn’t stop them forever. And out here, where it’s at least a mile to civilization, slowing someone down might not be enough.

“I just want my life back.” Katharina sounds like she’s crying, too, like the words stuck so fast they clogged her throat all the way up to her tear ducts. “You took everything from me. You owe me this, at least.” She’s been shackled to the wall by a girl with a knife, a girl who’s proven herself ruthless where she’s concerned, and yet she’s not backing down. I admire that.

And it doesn’t surprise me. I would do the same thing. We were always so much alike, me and her. Her and me.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I really am. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can’t leave her here forever, but I know I can’t let her free to ruin my life. I’m finally okay, or as okay as I can be. I have a job I like that makes me feel useful, and I need to find out what happens to Skywoman after the cliff-hanger of the last issue of the comic book, which left her now-Blade-allied self at odds with Wonderman on the roof of the Silver Corporation. If I let Katharina go free, I can never work to put people like Stepmother behind bars, where they belong.

I don’t realize I’m staring at the knife until I blink and see silver dazzling on the backs of my eyelids.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I seem to have gotten stuck. Katharina covers her face with her hair, maybe so she won’t have to see what’s coming, and I feel a twinge deep in my belly. She thinks me capable of murder. Which isn’t surprising, given what she’s seen of me.

My lip trembles—if you weren’t looking for it, you’d miss it. “I’m sorry,” I say, still looking at the knife, and then I hear the door open behind me.

“Scarlett?” Melody’s voice cuts through the tension, and Katharina peers out through her hair. “Scarlett!” I swing around only to see that Melody isn’t talking to me.

She’s talking to Katharina.

Melody is talking to Katharina, is calling her Scarlett, but she should be talking to me. I drop the knife, feeling sick at what I almost considered doing.

Pixie is dead. I killed Pixie when I slashed Stepmother with my stolen knife and ran out into the sun and ran through the woods and ran until my feet bled and ran out in front of the truck that stopped so close to me I could feel its heat touch my arms. I killed Pixie when I walked through the police station, leaving a trail of bloody footprints all the way, and told the police lady who wrapped me in a blanket and gave me hot chocolate that my name was Scarlett Contreras and I was from Merry Park, outside Chicago, and that I had never had pet rabbits. I killed Pixie when I let Scarlett’s parents hug me and bring me to Scarlett’s house and put me to sleep in Scarlett’s pink canopy bed, underneath Scarlett’s sea of glow-in-the-dark stars.

I
am
Scarlett now. I
am.

I made that choice. It was the first choice I ever made that meant anything. I could have chosen to tell the police lady that my name was Pixie Lopez and I was from San Antonio and I had no parents, and I could have chosen to let her send me back into the foster system to people who thought of me as a living, breathing check. Instead I chose to become Scarlett, because Scarlett clearly didn’t want her life anymore, not if she’d chosen to stay behind and die when she could have run with me. She was dead. She wouldn’t need her old life anymore.

I knew I was killing her. I knew Stepmother would kill her for letting me run. And I ran anyway.

It wasn’t an easy choice. My real name was on the tip of my tongue the whole time, every time a teacher called me Scarlett or when I lined up at the beginning of the alphabet instead of in the middle, but it got easier. It got easier every time I fell asleep in my warm, safe bed and smelled the soapy smell of my baby brother’s head and went to a real school where there were kids who went off to college instead of kids who tried to stab each other between classes.

But Melody is still talking to Katharina. “Scarlett, did…” She glances at me, glances longer at the knife on the ground. She’s not sure what to call me. “Did she hurt you?”

Katharina…Scarlett—no, I can’t call her Scarlett, she has to stay Katharina or I’ll break right in two—
Katharina
doesn’t reply. She has eyes only for me. “I trusted you, Pixie,” she says. “I wasn’t mad when you ran and left me behind. Stepmother didn’t care about you the way she cared about me.” She stops and blows out a deep breath. “Okay, so I
was
mad, but I understood. You had to do what you had to do. I couldn’t forgive you for it, but I understood.”

“I’m sorry,” I say helplessly, because it’s all I can do. I can’t, and I won’t, go back. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I
can’t.

“Stepmother got sick, and she told me to go before she died and someone else took over the business,” Scarlett—no, Katharina!—says. Her voice is the same monotone as the Blade’s voice actor. She sounds almost like she’s bored. “I knew my parents didn’t want me back, so I asked somebody if I could borrow their phone, Google my name, see what was out there.”

Now it sounds like something is rising in her throat, like she’s going to spit it on the floor. “Only it turned out I’d already been found.” She looks at me hard, and I have to look at the floor. “I had to talk to you, Pixie, before I went to the police.”

It hits me like a punch to the stomach. “That’s why you drugged me,” I say, and look at Melody. It’s her turn to look at the floor. I turn back to Katharina. “After you guys talked at the vigil, you wanted to prove to her that I didn’t have the scar. That
you
did. But there were people around. And so you decided to drug me at home, in the kitchen, Melody.” I remember the cool hand slipping under my dress, her voice yelling for my father. “You tried to show Dad. To prove I wasn’t really her.”

Melody’s voice shakes. “I always knew,” she says, and suddenly her behavior throughout the years makes sense. Her constant cold stare. The hatred that simmered just below the surface. “But when I told Mom and Dad right after you came home, they told me to stop it. To stop lying and to welcome you back home.

“When I showed Dad you didn’t have that scar, I expected him to be shocked and furious,” she says. She looks up, and her eyes are shiny, her lower lip trembling, her voice foggy. “He sat me down and said he knew. That of course he knew. He knew his own child and he knew you weren’t her. I didn’t understand. Why didn’t he ever look for Scarlett? Why did he keep you?”

Katharina doesn’t say anything. I hear her breathing fast, so fast her chains rattle. She doesn’t want to tell, and I know why.

“It’s because Mom sold Katharina,” I say for her, because I can’t change what happened, but I can give her this one tiny gift. I can feel Melody’s shock in vibrations in the air. “Mom was an addict, and she was strung out, and she owed a lot of people a lot of money, and if the police had found out, they would’ve taken us all away. You and Matthew, too. That’s why Dad didn’t expose me. Mom couldn’t live with the guilt after I showed up, and she ran.”

Melody is shaking her head before I’m even done. “No,” she says. “No, you’re lying.”

“It’s true,” I say. I don’t look to Katharina for confirmation. She doesn’t owe me anything.

Katharina speaks anyway. “Stop calling them Mom and Dad,” she says. “They’re not your parents. They’re
mine.
And Melody is
my
sister.”

“Scarlett,” Melody says, but she’s looking at the floor, and I don’t know which one of us she’s talking to. I hope it’s me. I want it to be me.

Tears rise in my throat, but I don’t let them out. Skywoman didn’t cry when her world cracked around her and came crashing down. I won’t either. “Melody, please,” I say. “I am your sister. I
am.
”

She shakes her head. She’s still looking at the floor. I don’t know if she’s shaking her head at me or Katharina or the unfair world or her shoes. “This is too much,” she says. “I can’t…” She backs away and hits the wall, shaking her head the whole time, burying her face in her hands.

Melody has to understand. She has to understand there isn’t any other way. I am trapped in a corner, in a basement, and Katharina is blocking the door. The only way out is through her. “Melody—”

“Scarlett?”

My heart thuds to my feet. Melody must have brought Matthew with her when she followed me, because our dad wasn’t home and she couldn’t leave him back at the car, but he can’t be here. I can’t lose Matthew.

He’s standing in the doorway, looking suspiciously from Katharina to me to Melody, who’s shrunk so far back into the wall she may actually be turning into wood. “Scarlett?” he says, and he’s talking to me, and it’s that more than anything that gives me strength. “Scarlett, what’s going on?”

I could grab him and run. I could tuck him under my arm like a football and take him away, away, away.

My cheeks tingle with nausea. No. I could never do that. I could never do to him what was done to me.

I need to think. I need time to think. I can’t hurt Melody. I can’t hurt Matthew. But I can’t—

“Scarlett?” Matthew is tugging on my sleeve. “Scarlett, what’s going on? Why’s that girl have handcuffs on? Why’s Melly crying?”

“It’s a game,” I say, and it kind of is—a mind game. “Matthew, shhh. Let me think.”

“Hey,” Katharina says to Matthew, trying to reach for him. Matthew shrinks away. “Hey, do you know who I am?”

“No,” he says. I drape my arm around his neck, my flesh a gorget. I want to tell her to shut up, to stop talking, but I know she won’t listen. I wouldn’t listen if I were her.

Katharina juts her chin at me. “That girl isn’t Scarlett. She isn’t your sister,” she says. “I am. I’m Scarlett.”

Matthew shakes his head, slowly at first, then so fast I think his head might fly right off his shoulders and sail out the window. “You’re not Scarlett,” he says, and the certainty in his voice fills me with another shot of strength. “You’re not.”

“I am,” Katharina hisses. “I am, and you need to let me out of these chains.”

“No,” Matthew says, his voice trembling. “Scarlett, let’s go home.”

Home. I don’t know what home is anymore. I don’t know if I have a home anymore.

I need to think, and I can’t think here, not with Melody crying in the wall and Matthew tugging at my sleeve and Katharina hissing and spitting from her corner like a soaked cat.

“Melody…,” I say, and my words stick in my throat. She doesn’t look over anyway. I want to know what she’s thinking, and I don’t want to know what she’s thinking. Her thoughts could burn me.

“Melody, I’m going to take Matthew home,” I say. Home. For now. I know when Melody gets herself home, Katharina in tow, I’ll have to leave. I’ll have to go somewhere. I don’t know where. I don’t know what will happen. All I can do is focus on my brother.

I turn and leave, Matthew’s hand hot in mine. I leave the knife in the cabin. I don’t need it anymore. I don’t want it. I never wanted it. It was never going to keep me safe.

Melody lets me go. I don’t think she even sees me leave.

But she must, because I hear the clanking of chains just as I step out the door, hear the sigh of relief whoosh out of Katharina’s throat. Melody’s let her go. I walk faster. “I just want to talk right now,” Melody is saying inside, and then she yelps. My steps still, but then I speed up. Whatever’s happening, I need to get Matthew in the car. I need to get Matthew safe.

I’m still focused on the thought of the car, still focused on Matthew, when Katharina tears out the door behind me and rips him away from me. I turn and freeze when I see Katharina holding Matthew tight. Over her shoulder I meet Melody’s eyes, horrified as she stands frozen in the doorway.

“You both need to listen to me,” Katharina says, her voice high and thready, and then I see the knife.

My time with Stepmother was divided into two parts: Before Pixie left and After Pixie left. B.P. and A.P.

Objectively, A.P. wasn’t all that different from B.P. During both eras I lived according to Stepmother’s whims, and came upstairs and went downstairs at her call. I ate food over the sink and showered when she told me I was starting to smell. I slept on the same mattress, still curled in the shape of a comma around the hole where Pixie should have been.