“That’s a good question,” Connor says. “The answer is no.”
I spit into the garbage can, but I can’t get the taste out of my mouth. “Do any of the others taste better?”
“Afraid not,” Connor says. “Here, have some sand.” At some point while I was stumbling around in half-real agony, he filled a water glass with the sugary sand. “Cheers.”
I tip it back and let the sugar dissolve in my mouth. It tastes like chemicals too, but at least it gets the taste of the fudge out. No, “fudge.” I can’t in good conscience refer to what I just ate as fudge. “Good God.” I run my tongue over my teeth, feeling the grit dissolve. “How could you do that to me?”
“Do what to you?” Connor says innocently. “I just urged you to follow your heart.”
“Oh really?”
He acknowledges me with a tip of his head. “Also, it was really funny.”
“I’m sure it was,” I say. I sigh. The door jingles open and I turn to greet the customer, but when I give the family my usual smile, they give me an odd look and retreat to the wall of fruit snacks. I realize too late it’s probably because my teeth are stained blue from the sand. That’s just wonderful. “You owe me.”
Connor waits for me to help the family with their afternoon treats, then leans back against the counter, propping himself up on his elbows. “I owe you, do I? What is it that I owe you, exactly?”
My cheeks and forehead are on fire. If I were in a movie, I’d tell him he owes me a kiss, and he’d kiss me, and it would sweep me off my feet both literally and figuratively, and we’d depart the next day on a journey to ride the tallest, fastest roller coaster in each Five Banners park across the U.S.
But it’s not a movie, and just the thought of asking him for a kiss makes my throat close in on itself and sweat prick cool on my forehead. “You owe me your hopes and dreams.”
“All of them?” He raises an eyebrow.
I cross my arms. “Every last one.”
His sigh gusts across the room. “In a fantasy world, in a few years I’ll be leading the U.S. men’s soccer team to a World Cup victory,” he says. “In the real world, I’ll be doing physical therapy. Exercise science.”
“I wouldn’t write off your soccer dream,” I say seriously. “Given the number of people who care about soccer over here, you might have an actual chance.”
A package of candy buttons bounces off my head. I rub the spot in mock pain. “Nice throw, but I’d be way more convinced of your ability to follow your dream if you’d kicked it.”
“You should come see me play sometime,” he says. “We have practice over the summer. At Riverside.”
The fire spreads to my entire face. “I don’t know anything about soccer.”
“So I guess your dream isn’t to head the U.S. women’s soccer team in the World Cup,” he says, sighing. “What is it, then? Don’t tell me—president of the Sky-fanatics?”
My dream. I don’t have a dream, not like that. I didn’t have time to dream when I thought I’d die in that basement. “I just want to be happy,” I say. “That’s all I want.”
“So profound.” One of his elbows slips, but he catches himself before he hits the counter. “You put me to shame.”
“Yeah?” I can’t see how; he knows exactly what he wants to do with his life, and the only thing I know is that I want my life to make me happy. I have no idea how I’m going to do it.
“It’s a good thing to want. I wish I could be more like that. Less about the planning.”
“You think so?” I say. “It makes me nervous, not having any kind of plan. Or even an idea.”
He squints at me and presses his lips together. “Well, what do you like to do? What kind of activities do you do?”
A laugh bubbles in my throat. This is a question for Melody. I like being free. Being free is my main activity. “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m still trying to figure that out.” I chew on the inside of my cheek. “I like math.”
“That’s practical,” he says. His eyes are almost golden in the light.
“Much more practical than soccer.”
His elbow slips again as he laughs, which makes him stand up and adopt a mock frown. “What about the rest of your life? You know that my brother plays the bari sax in the jazz band, which is really all you need to know about me. It’s your turn.”
I laugh again, but this one is plastic. “What do you mean?”
“Siblings, parents, school, pets, innermost secrets.” He ticks his words off on his fingers. “I want it all. Ready, set, go.”
I’m suddenly unable to swallow. This is where, in the past, I’d cut the friendship off.
But I can’t imagine losing Connor, so change-the-subject time it is. “Speaking of secrets, I’m glad to see you survived the secret crisis on the north side.”
Connor visibly shrinks; his shoulders fold in upon themselves, and he leans up against the counter, doubling over, so that his hands rest on his knees. “It was Cady,” he says. “She had a meltdown.”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“She was working in one of the stores where she and Monica always worked together, and I guess she kind of lost it,” he says. “They called me in to help calm her down.”
“Is she okay?”
Connor shrugs. “She’s functional,” he says. “She’s doing her job. I think that’s all they can ask at this point.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It must be really hard.”
“Yeah,” he says. “But enough of that.” I worry he’s going to go back to the whole innermost-secrets thing, but he continues with, “What are you doing this weekend, Scarlett?”
I hope I make it to the weekend after going somewhere with Katharina tomorrow. “I don’t know,” I say. “Working.”
“That sounds exciting,” Connor says. “Just kidding, it doesn’t. Are you free Saturday?”
“If I’m off,” I say. “I haven’t checked my schedule yet.” This time I’m actually telling the truth.
Connor waggles his eyebrows. “We’re all off,” he says. “As in, all of Merch. The park is closed for a private event on Saturday night, and most of the stores will be closed. So we’re having a special bonfire.”
“Yeah? Special? What makes it so special? What are you burning?”
“You know, the usual,” Connor says. “Effigies, animal sacrifices, the occasional young child.”
“Sounds like my kind of bonfire,” I say.
“We’ll be burning some of the hay I suffered to bale,” he says. “Don’t worry if you hear the smoke screaming. That’s just my spirit.”
“So it’s at your barn?” I say.
“At my house,” he says. “Well, in the fields behind my house.”
“I don’t get it,” I say. “I thought you lived in a barn.”
He picks up a chunk of fudge and tosses it up and down a couple of times for effect. “You’d better watch it, you,” he says. “Or I’ll make you eat an entire brick.”
“I feel like it would burn through my stomach and set my insides on fire,” I say. “On the bright side, I’d be a great fire starter on Saturday.”
“Very true,” he says. He puts the piece of fudge back. “Don’t worry. Just give it to the first person who’s mean to you. No one will know.”
—
A few months into our captivity, Pixie still hadn’t learned. She didn’t try to run three times a day anymore, but I could tell she was always looking for a way to escape.
I woke one night not to Pixie elbowing me in the stomach or kicking me in her sleep (that, I was used to), but to something rattling. I blinked, drowsy, and realized that my stomach was cold. Pixie wasn’t there. I sat up, suddenly awake. “Pixie?”
“Shhhh!” Her voice was rushing water. I squinted into the dark to see her hands silhouetted against the tiny barred window; she’d pushed the table underneath and was standing on it, one of the legs teetering just off the ground. Even with this extra height, she could hardl
y reach. “Someone will hear!”
I pushed myself to my feet and padded over. The floor felt like ice under my bare soles, and I shifted from foot to foot, trying to keep warm. “What are you doing?”
My eyes had adjusted enough to see the look she shot me. She looked like she thought I was an idiot. “Trying to see if I can get through the window, duh.”
“It’s too high,” I said. “I tried when I first got here.” And then I clamped my mouth shut, because what if Stepmother heard me?
“If I stack a chair on top of the table and climb on that, I should be able to reach,” she said.
“You’ll fall,” I said. “And anyway, there are bars on the window.”
“But maybe I could get the bars off,” Pixie said heatedly. “And if you hold the chair so that it doesn’t fall off…”
I blanched. Hold the chair? So Pixie could escape?
No one would be here to hold my chair.
Not that I could escape anyway. I had nowhere to go back to. My parents didn’t want me anymore. Stepmother was the only one willing to take me in.
“I’ll run and send someone back for you,” Pixie was quick to add. “I swear.”
“It won’t work,” I said. “And anyway, you—”
We hadn’t realized how loud we were getting. The door at the top of the stairs banged open, and I jumped. Pixie jumped too, right off the table. She landed with a shriek, her ankle folding beneath her.
“What’s going on down here?” Stepmother took a step down the stairs. She was all done up for bed, silver hair piled into a bun on top of her head, the skin under her eyes ghostly white with cold cream. Pixie whimpered. “What are you doing, girl?”
“Nothing.” Pixie’s voice was a gasp. “I was just…just trying to look out the window.”
Stepmother trained her eyes on me. They were ice blue, so pale they almost glowed in the dark. “Jane, what was the other girl doing?”
Stepmother at least called me a name, even if it wasn’t mine. Pixie didn’t even get that.
My heart felt as cold as Stepmother’s eyes.
“Jane,” Stepmother prompted. I stared at her. “Jane, tell me what she was doing, or you won’t like what’s going to happen.”
I couldn’t look back at Pixie. I couldn’t look into Stepmother’s eyes, either. I could only look at the floor. The cold, cold floor. “She was trying to escape, ma’am.”
I could hear Pixie gasp. It was drowned out, though, by the palpable sense of satisfaction oozing from Stepmother. “As I suspected,” she said. “Jane, would you like to sleep upstairs tonight?”
My mouth dropped open. I couldn’t look back at Pixie, but I could look into Stepmother’s eyes now. “Upstairs? Ma’am?”
“Candy is gone for the night,” Stepmother said. “There’s a spare bedroom upstairs. Would you like to sleep there tonight, Jane?”
I still couldn’t look back at Pixie. “Yes, ma’am.” It felt like a choice, but really, this wasn’t a choice. It was all Stepmother.
I didn’t look back at Pixie as I climbed the stairs, or as Stepmother ushered me through the door, or as Stepmother closed the door behind me. Stepmother stayed behind on the staircase, but I could hear her through the door. “You and Jane are close, girl, are you not?” she said. I would have nodded, but I pictured Pixie staring back defiantly, her chin thrust into the air. “If you try to escape, if you let her help you, I will kill her. I will kill her and it will be your fault.”
Pixie said nothing, but I didn’t think she would. A splinter of resentment pushed its way into my heart. She had to stop trying to escape now, now that she knew my life was in her hands. Not that Stepmother would actually kill me; I didn’t think she would, anyway. I was a good worker, a quiet worker, and I’d stopped trying to escape. She’d told me before how hard it was to find someone like me.
Once Stepmother came through the door, I let her lead me to Candy’s room, at the end of the main hallway. The house felt big when we were cleaning it, but, looking back, it really wasn’t a large house: a hall lined with rooms that were divided with false walls to make more rooms, but there were only two and a half baths for everybody. One floor and a basement. Maybe there was an attic, too, but we never saw it.
I waited for her to nod at the bed before I sat down. I cast my eyes down, looking at the floor and expecting her to leave, but she took a step inside and closed the door behind her. I blinked hard, focusing on the floor like it was the most fascinating thing in the world.
“Jane, look at me.”
She didn’t have to tell me twice. She was staring down at me, her lips ruby red, her cheekbones slicing the air. Her eyes narrowed as she studied my face. As she studied me. My skin prickled, and I had to fight the urge to look away.
She did a strange sort of shimmy with her shoulders. Back then I assumed that she’d been bitten by a bug or something—really, I didn’t give it too much thought. But it has stuck with me all these years, and now the leading hypothesis? She was fighting an urge herself.
Of course, it’s only a hypothesis. It’s entirely possible that she was cruel all the way through, her heart a shriveled black fist.
“You remind me of someone, Jane,” she said finally. “She had the same black hair, that same olive skin, those big, dark eyes.” Her throat worked. “Of course, you are eight now, are you not? Or nine? She was never eight. Or nine.”
I knew better than to respond; that had earned me the back of her hand striking across my cheeks enough times now. So I sat there primly, hands folded in my lap and back as straight as I could make it, until she nodded crisply at me and walked away.
I slept in a real bed that night, a real bed that still smelled a little bit like passion fruit, Candy’s favorite perfume. It was the most comfortable bed I’d ever slept in.
I didn’t dream of Pixie. I dreamed of another girl, a girl with black hair, olive skin, big, dark eyes.
—
Soon after our fudge-eating adventure, Connor has to leave and go do actual work, so I spend most of the afternoon planning my interrogation of Melody. Also wondering if the amaretto fudge is as lethal as the peanut butter fudge, but you know what they say: once bitten, twice burned. Or something like that.
Mostly I occupy myself with the Melody thing. I’m not at all surprised or suspicious that she and Katharina are such fast friends; Melody makes friends the way most people order hamburgers, and Katharina is beautiful and popular enough to be a worthy addition to her harem. No, what I’m most surprised and suspicious about is that they want to spend time with me.
I started seeing Dr. Martinez mere hours after I was found. She’d spoken with my parents, and Melody, too. I only found out years later what they’d talked about. Apparently, my rescue was just the beginning: a happy beginning, sure, but just the beginning of a very long and difficult road. I’d been in that basement for a span of time approaching four years: nearly a third of my entire life, more if you don’t count the baby years, which really you shouldn’t. They shouldn’t be surprised, she cautioned, if I didn’t remember basic things, like how to use a real toilet or interact with old friends, or if I woke screaming every night from one nightmare or another.
I never woke screaming. There had been enough nights where I’d woken whimpering or crying only to have my half-asleep bedmate kick me in the stomach to make me stop.
I did, however, forget basic things. My parents had kept my bedroom exactly the way I’d left it, dirty clothes in the hamper and hidden stash of (now rotten and crumbling) candy in the back of my sock drawer, but I didn’t remember which door off the upstairs hallway led into it. I remembered my best friends, Maddy and Nicole, and could point to their grinning, gap-toothed faces in my old pictures, but I’d totally forgotten the face of my cousin Ella, who lived way out in California. I could put together my favorite sandwich, peanut butter and honey and banana, with one hand, but I’d forgotten where the toaster was.
And so on.
At first I tried to
ask Melody for help. Ask her how to manipulate the shower handle so that the water wasn’t scorching hot or freezing cold, or where the apples were stored in the garage. Sometimes she’d answer, pointing wordlessly to a spot or showing me which dial to turn, but she never spared one more word than necessary, and those words she did spare were always accompanied by a stone-cold stare. One of those stares that looked right through me, like I wasn’t there at all.
I remember one Sunday morning, not long after I came home. I woke up early and determined that today would be the day I’d get my sister back. I knew Melody’s favorite breakfast was almond french toast (at the time—now, of course, she’d never touch it), so I gathered all the ingredients together and set to cooking. It took me a while, but I’d figured out most of the pantry and how the stove worked, so I was feeling very pleased with myself when Melody came plodding down the stairs, rubbing her eyes, and I was just taking the first delicious slice out of the pan.
“Breakfast is served,” I announced. She stood in the doorway staring, as usual, and then our dad came up behind her and stared too. I licked my lips and held the plate before me. “It’s not poisoned, I swear.”
Out of nowhere, Melody let out a laugh. This startled me more than a hug would have; I hadn’t heard her laugh at all since I came home. Not at our dad or the TV. Certainly not at me. “Do you remember,” she said, looking back at our dad, “for my sixth birthday, Scarlett woke up at, like, four in the morning and came downstairs to make me breakfast? She came in to get me and I screamed so loud I woke you and Mom up.”
A smile twitched at the corners of our dad’s lips too. “She was covered in so much flour and sugar you thought she was a ghost.”
Neither of them looked at me, and the pain cut me in a flash through my core. “Yeah, I remember that,” I said, way too loudly. “That was so funny.”
They both hushed midlaugh and exchanged another glance, one I couldn’t quite read. “I miss…,” Melody started, then stopped.
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