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.
I didn’t get another companion. After Pixie, after what she did and what she said, I knew better than to ask for someone else. I did the work of two people, scrubbed thoroughly and silently, and resigned myself to the loneliness.
I thought about Pixie all the time. I scrubbed harder when I thought of her, scrubbed fiercely at the wet streaks on my face.
B.P. was four years long. A.P. was another three years. I was eight when the man scooped me into his car and deposited me in the basement. I was fifteen when I left.
I knew something was going to happen a few months before it actually did. Stepmother’s skin was slowly turning gray, as if she were hardening into stone, and her hair was thinning out and then finally gone, her patchy scalp covered at all times by one of the girls’ colorful scarves. One morning, just after my fifteenth birthday, I was sweeping the living room when a man showed up, one whose pencil-thin mustache and greasy hair made the hairs on my arms rise straight up.
She called me into the kitchen as soon as he left. “Jane,” she said. “The door is unlocked. Go.”
I looked at the kitchen door. It was indeed unlocked. I looked back at her and didn’t move. This had to be some sort of trick.
She sighed. “Go,” she said wearily. “I’m going into hospice at the end of this week, and that man will be taking over my operation. You don’t want to be here for that. This is a kindness, Jane. Take it.”
I took a hesitant step toward the door, then looked back. I didn’t know what I was looking for. If she was telling me to go, I was going to go. I had never disobeyed her before.
“Don’t tell anyone about us, of course.” Stepmother’s voice was still strong, even if her body wasn’t. “I may be dead, Katharina Svecova may no longer walk this earth, but you wouldn’t want the girls to get hurt.”
Katharina. Stepmother’s name was Katharina. I nodded at Stepmother, at Katharina, and I fled.
I didn’t tell on her, and I didn’t forget her. I borrowed her name when I needed a new one. I borrowed her name when I needed to be as hard and cold as she was.
I borrowed her name when it came time to make Pixie pay.
The seconds tick by so loudly it’s like I’m trapped inside a clock. Wind rustles the branches above but flees when it sees the scene below.
Katharina is holding a knife to Matthew’s throat. She’s holding. A knife. To my little brother’s throat.
I’ve never seen Matthew so still. He stands rigid, pressed against her stomach, his eyes so wide they might pop out and roll away on their own. The metal of the knife must be cold against his skin. “It’s okay,” I tell him, but my voice shakes. “It’ll be okay. Don’t move.”
He doesn’t move. Good boy. I turn my attention to Katharina. “Let him go,” I say. This time, my voice is deadly calm. I search my mind for other things to say, for threats, promises, pleas, but I come up blank. She has a knife against my little brother’s throat. “Let him go.”
Katharina is seething, spit practically frothing on her lips. “I will cut his throat.” Involuntary yelps escape my and Melody’s throats at the same time. “I swear to God, I will cut his throat if you don’t give me my life back.”
“He’s your brother,” Melody says. Her voice is shaking. “You can’t hurt him. He’s your brother.”
Katharina doesn’t listen. It’s like she doesn’t even hear her. She’s focused on me, eyes shining, and I notice her arm, the arm holding the knife, is shaking too. “I will cut his throat if you don’t give me my life back,” she says, and her voice is steady, and I don’t doubt her for a second. I don’t even need to hear what she says next. “I did it before.”
A breath stops halfway to my lungs. “Monica…”
Katharina barks a laugh, but she doesn’t sound angry. Just sad. “She found out I was living in the storage building. She found out what I was. I had to stop her. I couldn’t let her tell.”
The breath charges in, hits my lungs so hard I feel sick. “She was innocent.”
Katharina spits out another sad laugh, and somehow I find myself feeling pity. She isn’t a psychopath. She didn’t enjoy killing Monica, and she doesn’t enjoy the thought of hurting Matthew. She’s warped. She’s made too many choices in the wrong direction.
Nobody can come back from that.
“No,” Melody is saying behind her. “No, no, no, no, no,” and it sends me right back to the basement, to the flow of words I couldn’t stop, to the feeling of Scarlett’s shirt damp against my cheek.
I can’t focus on Monica now. She’s already dead, and there’s no coming back from that, either. “Let Matthew go,” I say, and sorrow cuts through me. “I will give you your life back. You can be Scarlett again. I swear.” I swallow hard, rocks cutting into my throat. I’ve lied before. I’m not lying now. “I will do anything, anything, to keep him safe.”
Melody is sobbing, the “no’s” dissolved into tears. She is useless right now. I can’t depend on her, so I zero back in on Katharina. “I swear,” I say, and I’m looking at her and she’s looking at me and her arm is shaking and my throat is gulping and her face shifts and something in my face or my voice must convince her, because she drops her arm and lets Matthew run to me; he buries his face in my shirt and I know he’s getting snot all over me and I don’t care.
“How should we do this, then?” Katharina says, and she sounds calm, like ten seconds before she’d been ordering a sandwich or processing a return, not holding a knife to a little boy’s throat. “Make the switch? Obviously, we’ll have to go to the police.”
“Obviously,” I say, pushing Matthew behind me and moving closer to her.
“I’ll ask them not to be too hard on you,” Katharina says. “Even with all you did. You’ll probably get sent to juvie or a state facility or something. You’ll get out and get to have a normal life after a few years.”
“Sounds fine,” I say, moving closer, slipping my hand into my pocket.
She’s gazing off into the distance, eyes dreamy, like she’s visualizing her pink canopy bed, the glow-in-the-dark stars spotting her ceiling. The new pink sneakers sitting untouched in her closet, way too small now for her feet. “I can’t wait to be back in my old room,” she says. “I can’t wait to—”
She doesn’t see me—or the pepper spray—coming. Melody does, though, and jumps out of the way just in time for me to slam into Katharina, who’s doubled over wheezing, and push her through the door of the
cabin, then pull the door shut and snap the padlock closed. She shrieks in surprise and then pounds on the door, still coughing. The door won’t open as long as the padlock is closed, but it won’t take long for her eyes to clear and for her to climb out a window or something. One is already broken. This is a temporary measure only.
“She had a knife,” Melody says. Her tears have dried up, leaving shiny trails down her cheeks. “What if she stabbed you?”
I didn’t even think about that. I just shake my head. Even if I had thought about it, I don’t think I would have cared. “I’m going to take Matthew home,” I say. Let her try to stop me. I dare her. I don’t want my baby brother to remember me like this; if I’m going to have to run, I want him to have a good memory of me as his last one. This car ride is all I have. “And then…” I stop. I don’t know what comes after the ellipsis. I just know I’ll have to get away before Katharina gets out, before Melody tells. “I don’t know. I just need to take him home.”
Melody nods, but she doesn’t move. I don’t know if she’s in shock or if she’s waiting for me to leave so she can let Katharina back out, usher her back into her old life. It doesn’t matter; I can’t do anything either way. I leave her behind, glancing over my shoulder once. She’s watching us go.
I spend most of the car ride home trying to make Matthew feel better; he’s panicked, quite understandably, about having a knife held to his throat, and stops shaking only when we’re almost home. I also tell him I love him approximately five hundred times. When he thinks of me, I want that to be what he remembers: that I love him. That I love him more than anything else in the world.
“You okay?” I ask as we pull into the driveway. My dad’s car is there. My heart twists and squeezes, a piece of wrung-out laundry.
He nods, but tears carve a path beside his nose. I pull him close to me and kiss his head. “I love you, and I am your sister,” I say. “That’s the truth.”
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