Now You See Her

by Lisa Leighton

  But when Zach finally leans over, our noses hit and one of his front teeth knocks into mine, sending shivers up my spine for all the wrong reasons. My eyes water and I pretend it’s from where his tooth hit my lip, but as usual, it’s a lie.

  The disappointment of that first terrible kiss comes rushing back as though we’re back at that movie and not on our way to school. I’ve seen the two of them kiss a million times on every social media platform, after tennis matches if Zach doesn’t have football, in the hallways. They practically invented PDA. It’s the reason they’re always voted cutest couple, the reason girls sigh when they look at them, wishing that they had a boyfriend that perfect, a life that perfect, a love that perfect. Because #relationshipgoals. I’m just as guilty, zooming in on every photo, wondering what it might be like to not be me for once, to be someone a little bit like her. To have someone a little like him.

  Zach pops his car into reverse and as he waits for the gate to open at the end of our driveway, I can’t help myself. I’m going to take one for the team here. I lean over the seat, grab his cheeks, and turn his face toward mine. The moment our lips touch, I know.

  When he pulls away, his face is bright red. “Whoa, take it easy, killer,” he jokes, but neither of us laugh. “Sophie, are you feeling okay?”

  I shake my head. “I can’t do this.”

  Sophie is such a liar. All the endless couple shots, the hashtags, the handholding and kissing and snaps of the perfect couple midlaugh. It’s all just a bunch of bullshit. These two people might as well be complete strangers. They have absolutely zero chemistry whatsoever. No wonder Sophie hooks up with Jake on the side. It’s just shocking that she’s willing to go through the motions. For what? A pretty picture?

  “I don’t know what your deal is, but you’re kind of pissing me off,” he says, pulling into the street. I’m pissing him off because I can see right through them?

  I see Murray idling next to the stop sign at the corner. I have no idea what their deal is, but at this point I don’t have time to care. “Actually, I think I’ll just get out here,” I say, shifting toward the door.

  “You can’t . . . I mean, if you get out now, it’s over. I mean it, Sophie. No Homecoming Queen and King. No Cutest Couple. We’re done.” Zach’s yelling but his eyes look a little like Mrs. Graham’s in front of the stove this morning. Desperate.

  He’s presented me with the opposite of an ultimatum. Yes, please. “Then I guess we’re done.” I get out of the car and slam the door. Screw Zach Bateman. Screw Sophie and her stupid, fake life. I’m done with it. It’s time to get real.

  Twenty-Two

  LANDON HANDS ME A STILL-WARM SCONE WRAPPED IN PARCHMENT paper, topped with a thin layer of white icing and speckled with fresh lemon zest. No wonder his car smells like a bakery.

  “Trouble in paradise?”

  Instead of answering I take a huge bite of the scone. It’s like nothing I’ve ever tasted, all butter and sugar and citrusy deliciousness melting on my tongue.

  “Rosemary?” I ask.

  He nods. “My mom was skeptical but I couldn’t resist. You know how she hates it when I mess with her recipes.”

  “You made these?” He nods and gives me a weird look, like I shouldn’t be surprised. I lean my head back against the seat, resisting the urge to lick every finger. “Oh. My. God.” The memory of Sophie stuffing that scone in her mouth has nothing on actually tasting it. I promise to never forget no matter where I end up.

  I hear the roar of Zach pulling away and keep my eyes carefully trained on the scone. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “That’s cool. I totally get it. But something tells me she’s not going to take no for an answer.”

  He gestures out the window and I see Janie running at his car, waving her arms in the air.

  “Wait! Wait! Please! It’s important!”

  Landon rolls down his window without consulting with me, probably because he’s worried I’d force him to blow right past her. Even he can sense I’m in full-on destruction mode. Destroying Sophie’s friendship with Janie would just be the icing on the proverbial scone. Besides, she sold me out yesterday when she texted Sir Graham. How could I possibly trust her again?

  But before I can say a word she’s thrusting a wrinkled piece of paper through Landon’s window, washed out and bleached by the sun.

  “I found it on the side of the road. I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said yesterday, about the man trying to hurt Amelia Fischer. So I pulled over to see if I could find anything, any evidence of a kidnapper or whatever. I don’t really know what I was looking for but . . . I did find this. I think maybe you’re right.” Janie’s face is tight and there are tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Sophie. I believe you.”

  I recognize the article from the Haven Times right away, only it wasn’t snipped from the newspaper but rather printed off the internet. My blurry face is circled in black ink, my name below the image highlighted. In the margin of the page all of our names are written in blocky print.

  Carol Fischer

  Amelia Fischer

  Mae Fischer

  Below that, Morristown, Ohio, is handwritten and underlined three times.

  I feel like I’m going to be sick.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, Soph. So sorry. It’s just that you’ve been acting so weird since the accident and your parents made me promise to tell them if I noticed anything out of the ordinary. I was scared.”

  “Okay, why do I feel like I’m missing something kind of critical here?” Landon is looking back and forth between Janie and me like he’s trying to figure out how he got sucked into our vortex of crazy.

  “Ugh, keep up, newspaper boy. Sophie saw someone try to take Amelia the night of the accident. And I found proof. And now we’ve got to figure out what to do about it.” Janie locks her car that she’s parked on the side of the road, opens the driver-side door, and gestures for Landon to let her in. He climbs out without a word because no one argues with Janie McLaughlin. Not even Landon Crane.

  “I need to warn them,” I say, the paper shaking between my fingers. “No one believes me, but I have to show them. This is proof.”

  Before I can even ask him to, Landon slams on his brakes and takes a left in the opposite direction of our school. I glance at the clock, not for me but for him. “What about first period?” Missing AP chem is no big deal for me, I’ve already got an A in the class and Mr. Oster loves me. “Janie, you have calc.” As soon as I complete the thought, my stomach feels tight. Yet another piece of Sophie has somehow clicked into place in my mind.

  “Relax, relax, Ms. I’ve-Never-Made-a-Mistake-in-My-Life. I’ve already got it covered,” he says, misunderstanding my anxiety. “Also, I’d say this situation kind of trumps first period.”

  “Holy shit, these are amazing,” Janie says around a mouthful of scone that she helped herself to in the back seat. I raise my eyebrows at the girl who wouldn’t touch a donut with a ten-foot pole. She shrugs her shoulders. “What? Stress burns calories, right?”

  The entire situation is surreal. I’m sitting in Landon Crane’s car with Janie McLaughlin, trapped inside Sophie Graham’s body, trying to figure out a way to save my family from a crazed, saint-obsessed kidnapper. But what I can’t figure out is why. Why would this guy be targeting us? How did he know our names? What could he possibly want with us? We’ve never been anywhere long enough to piss anyone off.

  And then I remember the secrets I’m uncovering in Sophie’s life, all the stuff hidden under that veneer of perfection. If Sophie’s flawless family had this much to hide, what skeletons were in the Fischers’ closets? And how the hell did I miss them?

  The thing is, it’s so easy to blow up Sophie’s life. To destroy her fake boyfriend, send off the guy she’s hooking up with, avoid her worried friends, rekindle old relationships. In Sophie’s life this defiance feels possible, natural even. The consequences don’t feel quite as real. I can’t help but wonder if I was playi
ng it too safe in my old life, always too focused on the one foot we had out the door instead of focusing on the one we had inside. Maybe I missed the skeletons because I was too focused on all the cracks in our foundation. The barely missed evictions, the constant worrying about money, the knowledge that we could have to move again at a moment’s notice.

  Maybe if I’d been a little more grounded, a little more invested, my life would have had more of this. More boys in cars, more friends who text, just . . . more. And maybe I would have seen more too. Maybe then I’d know who hated my family enough to try to destroy it. I need to figure all this out, I need to protect my mom and Mae. I need to understand why someone would want to take us. I know the skeletons are there now, I just have to find them.

  But maybe I’m here for Sophie a little bit too. Maybe you don’t really notice your skeletons when they’re right there hanging in your closet every morning. They blend in with the hangers and you don’t want to look too close because if you actually see them it would be a hell of a lot harder to sleep at night.

  Maybe I’m here to help us both. Maybe we need to see our lives for what they are instead of for how they feel when we’re trapped inside them. Maybe it’s time to look at those skeletons in the broad light of day and face them head-on.

  Twenty-Three

  THE WINDOW IS COOL AGAINST MY FOREHEAD AS I WATCH MORRISTOWN fly by. There’s the park where every Thursday in kindergarten Sophie would go up and down the twirly slide fifteen million times to the tune of “Again! Again!” before her mom dragged her away. There’s Morristown Country Club where Sophie watched fireworks blooming in the night sky, the bursts of color reflecting in Zach’s wide eyes, her chest tight with longing. And the baseball fields where if you drive your car far enough, you can park in a spot where no one will catch you making out with the guy who is definitely not your boyfriend because your real boyfriend definitely doesn’t want to make out with you. Did these moments lock into place overnight when Sophie was busy dreaming away Amelia?

  I see the blue and yellow carnations first, the colors of the Morristown Knights on a wreath stand like you’d see at a funeral. Only I haven’t died. Yet. There are weary-looking stuffed animals, bunches of flowers, a big cross that says Amelia that looks way too much like a headstone, and even an old racquet and a can of tennis balls. I can’t imagine who would have thought to leave these things in my honor. I didn’t really have any close friends. I guess maybe Mae might have left some of it. Or my mom. But when I see a soggy box identical to the one sitting in the back seat next to Janie I realize that maybe there were more people who cared about me than even I realized.

  Landon slows down respectfully and the speed of his car, the slow creep, brings back the memory of rain pounding on Crimson’s roof. I hold the memory tight even though it’s terrible. I refuse to tear my eyes away from the colorful collection along the patchy side of the road.

  “Wait. Wait! Pull over.” I’m out the door before Landon comes to a complete stop and make a beeline for the cross.

  “What is it? What do you see?” Janie sticks her head out the window.

  The metal glints in the sun again, the circular coin dangling from a piece of string hanging from the wreath. I lift it and let it rest in my palm, a third St. Anthony winking at me in the sun. I can’t help but wonder if he’s still here. Watching. Waiting. For Mae? For my mother? Clutching the coin inside my fist, I shiver through a chill despite the blazing sun.

  “It was nothing,” I lie. I’m not quite ready to tell them about St. Anthony yet, about the breadcrumbs the stranger seems to be leaving. Janie just ratted me out to the Grahams yesterday and I can’t imagine trying to explain the strange necklaces to cynical Landon. My gut tells me to keep the unbelievable to a minimum if I want Landon and Janie to help me get to Mae and I desperately need them to do just that.

  “Let’s go to Amelia’s house, she lives right down here,” I say, indicating that Landon should turn right at the stop sign. “Their driveway is easy to miss, so go slow.” Where those hidden gems of Morristown shone so brightly through Sophie’s eyes on our way back from the hospital and through town today, the street my family has called home for the longest stretch of continuous years feels dull and somehow less familiar. “Right . . . here,” I say, pointing to the left where the trees open enough to let a car down the winding gravel driveway.

  “I never even knew there was a house back here,” Landon says, leaning down a little to make sure he doesn’t hit the low branches.

  “Seems like that’s kind of the point,” Janie says.

  It’s only after I hear her say the words that I wonder if it’s true.

  All of the different places we’ve lived have had one thing in common. They were remote, almost hidden, tiny shacks barely seen from the road, shitty apartment complexes in the middle of nowhere. It’s like the house angel, right in front of me so long that I never really bothered to look at it. And all of a sudden, I’m back on that road. Sheets of rain pouring around me. Fingers reaching, pulling, fighting to loosen his grip. I’m back in the middle of that road, headlights rushing toward me.

  And then it hits me. We were hiding. From someone. From something. All these years, we’ve been hiding. And now we’ve been found. And for the first time ever, we can’t run. Or else I’ll be left behind.

  Landon is carefully navigating Murray to the top of our driveway, and it’s all I can do not to jump out of the car. I need to get in there. I need to see my mom and Mae. I need answers.

  “Actually, stop here. If you go too far up, you won’t be able to back out.” Landon looks over at me, surprised. “We had a tennis dinner here once and parking was a nightmare.” The lie doesn’t even sound remotely believable to my ears. “I’ll walk the rest of the way. But give me a few minutes. I’m sure this is all going to come as a shock and they’re, um . . . super private. So . . . yeah, I’ll be back in a sec.”

  “Um, there’s no way in hell you’re going in there alone.” Janie unbuckles her seat belt and tries to follow me out of the car.

  “Stop!” The word comes out too loud, too desperate, and Janie freezes in place. “I mean, I need to do this on my own, okay? We can’t ambush them. I need you to trust me this time.”

  The reminder of her betrayal yesterday has its intended effect, and Janie sags back into the car.

  “Fine. But you have ten minutes. After that we’re coming in after you.”

  I take a deep breath, the weight of the bag on my shoulder a comfort because it holds the notebook, the flimsy pieces of paper that tether me to my old life. I walk the rest of the way up our long driveway, turning to see how much of Landon’s car I can make out through the thick trees. Just a few spots of red. They won’t be able to see or hear me.

  The rush of everything hits me at once. Seeing my old house through Sophie’s eyes gives me the strangest sense of vertigo or maybe it’s more like whiplash: worlds colliding, familiar and unfamiliar all at the same time. I don’t have a plan, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s time to stop overthinking everything. I have proof in my hands. Proof that my family is being hunted. Proof that we’ve been found.

  But what I don’t understand is: Why? Who would want to hurt my family? Why would they want to take me away? What secrets has my mother been hiding from us all these years? I have no answers, but I sure as hell intend to find out.

  My stomach sinks when I see the garage door shut tight. I guess part of me had some sort of fantasy where I walked in as Sophie and shared my incredible story and everyone believed me. I’d prove my identity through details only we would know. The year we lived near Dairy Queen in Iowa and Mae and I ate so much ice cream we still, to this day, find rogue sprinkles between the seats of Mom’s car. Or how in Indiana, we begged for days for Mom to take us to the Blueberry Festival. The rides were dinky and the fairgrounds smelled like spilled beer and pee, but the fried dough was so light it melted in your mouth and we were sweaty and tired and happy.

  If they were h
ome I could warn them about the shadow man and this time they’d actually listen. And then whatever strange magic landed me here would bring me back.

  I stand in front of the keypad for way too long, trying to figure out the combination of numbers that will open the door. But there are too many other numbers rattling around in my head—2683, from Mrs. Graham’s slip of paper; 908125, Sophie’s iPhone passcode; 8654, her address; 0523, her birthday. Just when I think I have it, I punch in the numbers and nothing happens. It takes me a minute to realize that I punched in the Grahams’ garage code. Shit.

  I take a step back and force myself to look at the keypad like one of those weird optical illusions that looks like a dog’s face, but really is a woman in a dress. I try to squint to convince whatever muscle memory the Amelia in me has left to shut down Sophie’s brain and allow the numbers to float through the murk, but it’s gone. For good. What will go next? How many other known quantities have slipped away without me realizing it?

  I walk around to the front of the house. One of the shutters fell off the dining room window, and it still hasn’t been replaced. Two of the outside lanterns are broken because I convinced Mae to hit with me in the driveway last summer. Remembering all these useless facts makes me want to scream. How can I remember how the lanterns were broken but forget our freaking garage code?

  The yard is overgrown and the paint is peeling. There’s no doormat. No wreath hanging on the door, no sign that anyone actually lives here. As usual my mom had one foot out the door the whole time. We all did.

  I cup my fingers around my eyes and look through the dirty glass windows that flank the front door. There’s no movement, no footsteps, no distant murmur of voices. The house looks the same and yet altogether different now that I’m seeing it through Sophie’s eyes. It’s like returning to a house I haven’t been in since I was a toddler. Everything looks smaller, shabbier, and somehow tired, like the house itself has given up.