“Emma?” a guy’s voice called from another room. “You home?”
“I’m busy!” called a voice close by.
A tall, thin girl opened the bathroom door, her tangled dark hair hanging in her face. “Hey!” I leapt to my feet. “Someone’s in here already!” My body felt tingly, as if it had fallen asleep. When I looked down, it seemed like I was flickering on and off, like I was under a strobe light. Freaky. Someone definitely slipped me something.
The girl didn’t seem to hear me. She stumbled forward, her face covered in shadows.
“Hello?” I cried, climbing out of the tub. She didn’t look over. “Are you deaf?” Nothing. She pumped a bottle of lavender-scented lotion and rubbed it on her arms.
The door flung open again, and a snub-nosed, unshaven teenage guy burst in. “Oh.” His gaze flew to the girl’s tight-fitting T-shirt, which said new york new york roller coaster on the front. “I didn’t know you were in here, Emma.”
“That’s maybe why the door was closed?” Emma pushed him out and slammed it shut. She turned back to the mirror. I stood right behind her. “Hey!” I cried again.
Finally, she looked up. My eyes darted to the mirror to meet her gaze. But when I looked into the glass, I screamed.
Because Emma looked exactly like me.
And I wasn’t there.
Emma turned and walked out of the bathroom, and I followed as if something was yanking me along behind her. Who was this girl? Why did we look the same? Why was I invisible? And why couldn’t I remember, well, anything? The wrong memories snapped into aching, nostalgic focus—the glittering sunset over the Catalinas, the smell of the lemon trees in my backyard in the morning, the feel of cashmere slippers on my toes. But other things, the most important things, had become muffled and fuzzy, as if I’d lived my whole life underwater. I saw vague shapes, but I couldn’t make out what they were. I couldn’t remember what I’d done for any summer vacations, who my first kiss had been with, or what it felt like to feel the sun on my face or dance to my favorite song. What was my favorite song? And even worse, every second that passed, things got fuzzier and fuzzier. Like they were disappearing.
Like I was disappearing.
But then I concentrated really hard and I heard a muffled scream. And suddenly it was like I was somewhere else. I felt pain shooting through my body, before a final, sleepy sensation of my muscles surrendering. As my eyes slowly closed, I saw a blurry, shadowy figure standing over me.
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
No wonder Emma didn’t see me. No wonder I wasn’t in the mirror. I wasn’t really here.
I was dead.
Emma Paxton carried her canvas tote and a glass of iced tea out the back door of her new foster family’s home on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Cars swished and grumbled on the nearby expressway, and the air smelled heavily of exhaust and the local water treatment plant. The only decorations in the backyard were dusty free weights, a rusted bug zapper, and kitschy terra-cotta statues.
It was a far cry from my backyard in Tucson, which was desert-landscaped to perfection and had a wooden swing set I used to pretend was a castle. Like I said, it was weird and random which details I still remembered and which ones had evaporated away. For the last hour, I’d been following Emma trying to make sense of her life and willing myself to remember my own. Not like I had a choice. Everywhere she went, I went. I wasn’t entirely sure how I knew these things about Emma, either—they just appeared in my head as I watched her like a text message popping in an inbox. I knew the details of her life better than I did my own.
Emma dropped the tote on the faux wrought-iron patio table, plopped down in a plastic lawn chair, and craned her neck upward. The only nice thing about this patio was that it faced away from the casinos, offering a large swath of clear, uninterrupted sky. The moon dangled halfway up the horizon, a bloated alabaster wafer. Emma’s gaze drifted to two bright, familiar stars to the east. At nine years old, Emma had wistfully named the star on the right the Mom Star, the star on the left the Dad Star, and the smaller, brightly twinkling spot just below them the Emma Star. She’d made up all kinds of fairy tales about these stars, pretending that they were her real family and that one day they’d all be reunited on earth like they were in the sky.
Emma had been in foster care for most of her life. She’d never met her dad, but she remembered her mother, with whom she had lived until she was five years old. Her mom’s name was Becky. She was a slender woman who loved shouting out the answers to Wheel of Fortune, dancing around the living room to Michael Jackson songs, and reading tabloids that ran stories like baby born from pumpkin! and bat boy lives! Becky used to send Emma on scavenger hunts around their apartment complex, the prize always being a tube of used lipstick or a mini Snickers. She bought Emma frilly tutus and lacy dresses from Goodwill for dress-up. She read Emma Harry Potter before bed, making up different voices for every character.
But Becky was like a scratch-off lottery ticket—Emma never quite knew what she was going to get with her. Sometimes Becky spent the whole day crying on the couch, her face contorted and her cheeks streaked with tears. Other times she would drag Emma to the nearest department store and buy her two of everything. “Why do I need two pairs of the same shoes?” Emma would ask. A faraway look would come over Becky’s face. “In case the first pair gets dirty, Emmy.”
Becky could be very forgetful, too—like the time she left Emma at a Circle K. One summer night not long after that, Emma slept over with Sasha Morgan, a friend from kindergarten. She woke up in the morning to Mrs. Morgan standing in the doorway, a sick look on her face. Apparently, Becky had left a note under the Morgans’ front door, saying she’d “gone on a little trip.” Some trip that was—it had lasted almost thirteen years and counting.
The sliding glass door opened, and Emma wheeled around. Travis, her new foster mom’s eighteen-year-old son, strutted out and settled on top of the patio table. “Sorry about bursting in on you in the bathroom,” he said.
“It’s okay,” Emma muttered bitterly, slowly inching away from Travis’s outstretched legs. She was pretty sure Travis wasn’t sorry. He practically made a sport of trying to see her naked. Today, Travis wore a blue ball cap pulled low over his eyes, a ratty, oversized plaid shirt, and baggy jean shorts with the crotch sagging almost to his knees. There was patchy stubble on his pointy-nosed, thin-lipped, pea-eyed face; he wasn’t man enough to actually grow facial hair. His bloodshot brown eyes narrowed lasciviously. Emma could feel his gaze on her, canvassing her tight-fitting new york new york camisole, bare, tanned arms, and long legs.
With a grunt, Travis reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a joint, and lit up. As he blew a plume of smoke in her direction, the bug zapper glowed to life. With a crisp snap and a fizzle of blue light, it annihilated yet another mosquito. If only it could do that to Travis, too.
Back off, pot breath, Emma wanted to say. It’s no wonder no girl will get near you. But she bit her tongue; the comment would have to go into her Comebacks I Should’ve Said file, a list she’d compiled in a black cloth notebook hidden in her top drawer. The Comebacks list, CISS for short, was filled with pithy, snarky remarks Emma had longed to say to foster moms, creepy neighbors, bitchy girls at school, and a whole host of others. For the most part, Emma held her tongue—it was easier to keep quiet, not make trouble, and become whatever type of girl a situation needed her to be. Along the way, Emma had picked up some pretty impressive coping skills: At age ten, she honed her reflexes when Mr. Smythe, a tempestuous foster parent, got into one of his object-throwing moods. When Emma lived in Henderson with Ursula and Steve, the two hippies who grew their own food but were clueless about how to cook it, Emma had begrudgingly taken over kitchen duties, whipping up zucchini bread, veggie gratins, and some awesome stir-fries.