Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee (5 page)

IT WAS HOW
she didn't scream.

How one night, she was silent.

How the darkness was almost peaceful in that one room.

Where I was allowed to sleep, but couldn't.

But she was never allowed.

That's how I knew she was Stacie, and I was Chelsea, and it was forever.

•   •   •

Lee makes me get a haircut first. She leads me toward a salon, a devious light in her eyes. “You didn't think I'd let you keep looking like that, did you?” She pushes me down in the seat, and I don't resist. She starts giving the lady directions. “Bring out her cheekbones. Doesn't she have beautiful cheekbones? You should be an actress, Amy. You'd look great on camera.”

“Is that what you want?” the lady asks.

“Whatever she says,” I say.

“This will look great,” she says. “Your friend is right. We'll
just even this up here . . . a few layers . . .” Snip, snip, snip. The haircut I gave myself with kitchen scissors disappears, replaced by something that looks like it was done on purpose. The face that was just a face looks totally different. I don't know whose brown eyes are staring back. This isn't my face, and it isn't Amy's either. I don't know if my cheekbones are beautiful, or what I'm supposed to be seeing as the lady hands me a mirror and turns my chair this way and that. It's like I'm watching a girl in a movie, and there's no connection between her and the person inside me at all.

Lee hands over my mom's credit card, and before I know it, we're walking through the mall again. She drags me into one store and then another, throws clothes at me. I try them on, and I let her buy what she thinks I should want. Only some of it is purple.

“Get this,” she says, tossing a bracelet made of purple beads on top of a pile of clothes at the register. “That way you'll always have something.”

“Do they have a pink one?” I ask.

She stops, a sudden silence in the stream of words. She fingers something I can't see. “Not a bracelet, but they have a necklace. Do you want this one instead?” She holds it up, a chain of pink plastic. Even I can tell it's ugly. But I want it.

“I'll take them both,” I say.

Lee sets the pink beads on top of the pile softly, as if it's important that they not break. She pulls out my mom's credit card, and in silence, we both watch as the clerk swipes it and bags the clothes.

I pull out the jewelry and rip the tags off. I put the bracelet on my wrist and the necklace around my neck. I haven't said a word about what these things mean, but as we trudge through the mall, weighed down by all the stuff we've bought, Lee is still silent.

We sit down on a bench and watch the people. A woman walks by with two kids, a baby in a stroller and a toddler she holds by the hand. As she passes us, she smiles at me. Not at Lee, at me. I'm sure of it.

“Amy?”

I watch the woman as she walks away. Where do they live? I wonder. Do they live in a house, with a lot of rooms, and a big yard, and does she have a husband who loves her? Do the kids have a dad who takes care of them? Will they grow up to be happy?

“Amy.” Lee pokes me in the arm.

“Oh,” I say. “What?”

“I said your name three times,” she says.

“My name is Chelsea,” I say.

“Oh,” she says. “Do you want me to call you that?”

I can't believe I said that. The truth just popped out. I can't let that happen.

“No,” I say. “Call me Amy. I have to remember.” It's a lot of work to be Amy, though. That's why I slipped, I tell myself. This day has been exhausting. First, I had to be silent. And then I had to talk as if I were normal. I don't know which one is harder.

“Okay, well, I promised your mom I'd get you home by
nine, and it'll take an hour and a half at least, so we should probably go.”

“Okay,” I say.

“But we can stop at the food court for some ice cream!”

We used to do that together, all four of us, me and Dee and Lee and Jay. We'd make a big extended family trip here every August before school started.

“That would be great,” I say.

Will they ever go to a mall for ice cream? I wonder which flavors they would like. I remember what Dee liked, though. Peppermint. And Amy always liked chocolate. She always wondered how Dee could get peppermint when there was chocolate in the world.

“I bet you want chocolate, right?” Lee asks as we get in line.

I want peppermint. I want peppermint more than anything.

“Yes,” I say. “And you want vanilla.”

“You remember!” She knocks against me with her shoulder. “Some things never change, huh?”

“Yes,” I say. I haven't had chocolate ice cream in six years. I wonder if I'll still like it. I wonder if when my name changed, the whole world shifted, so that nothing is what it was before. So I decide not to have chocolate, because I don't want to know. And I definitely can't have peppermint, because I will never be able to keep it together if I do that. “One scoop of vanilla,” I say when I get up to the front.

Lee stares at me.

“I can have chocolate next time,” I say.

“I'll have chocolate,” she says to the kid scooping it up. “We can taste each other's.” She smiles, but it's not just a smile; it's a smile with a little bit of the corner of the mouth turned down, and I wonder if she knows what I'm thinking, why I didn't want chocolate. And then she says something that makes me know she does. “It'll be just as good,” she says. “Trust me.” She winks as she takes her chocolate, and I notice that she got two scoops instead of one.

And it turns out it is good. It's everything I remembered.

•   •   •

I used to daydream about chocolate ice cream. The smooth bitter and sweet flavor rolling over my tongue. I would close my eyes and picture a cone and myself licking it, and the rasp of my tongue against the checkerboard sides of the wafer. I would picture one of my mom's white bowls, the small ones she used to trick us into thinking we were getting more. I would run my spoon around the outsides of the scoop and capture the liquid. I would slurp it down and then I would take a big, solid bite out of the middle of the ice cream. I would feel the ice cream headache and the relief when it passed, and I would take another bite and another.

Once I was sitting with my eyes closed on the edge of the bed, and Lola grabbed on to my leg. “Chel! Chel!” she said.

I opened my eyes.

“What are you seeing?”

“There's this food called chocolate ice cream,” I said. I rolled my tongue around my mouth, trying to think of some way to explain it, but I was drawing a blank. “It's really good.”

“Can I have some?”

“Well, we don't have any.”

“Ask Daddy,” she said.

“It has sugar,” I said. “Daddy thinks sugar is bad. He wants us to be healthy.”

“Why?”

“Healthy is good,” I said. I was afraid she was going to latch on to it and start begging for chocolate ice cream, but she didn't. She knew from when she could first talk that if Daddy thought something was bad, we didn't ask for it. That was just the way life was. So there was no ice cream in our house. And I wonder if she remembers, if she imagines herself eating whatever it is she thinks ice cream might be. I hope she does.

THE MORNING
Lola was born, I was a little girl.

That night, I was a mother.

No, I didn't give birth to her. I didn't carry her for nine months. I didn't endure the pain that made her life possible.

But I was her mother, because Stacie was fractured. Stacie was a little girl then, and she would be forever.

•   •   •

“If you don't get in the car, I'll kill her,” said the big man with the little head. He held a knife to Dee's throat. It was the largest blade on a big fat Swiss Army knife that he held in his fist. Even I could have cut Dee's throat with that. He had his arm around her, too, an arm big enough to squeeze out her last breath.

Dee was making sounds like a balloon losing air fast.
Zee zee zee.
Tears were rolling down her face, but her eyes were closed.

Never get in the car. That's what they tell you. Once you get in the car, you're dead. They used to teach us that at school. How you shouldn't talk to strangers. How if a car drives up alongside you, you turn and walk in the other direction. But whoever taught us that never had someone threatening their best friend with a knife.

I could have run away.

And then my mom would never have gone through this. And my parents would still be together. And Jay would only hate me the normal way a brother hates a sister, and he would secretly love me.

But if I got away, and Kyle thought someone would find them, he would have killed her. He had followed her around Grey Wood for weeks, even sitting outside her house and peeking through her bedroom window. He was obsessed with her, and in his own way, he loved Dee more than anything in the world. He loved her so much that no one else could ever have her. He only took me so I wouldn't tell, so nothing could get in the way of the life they were supposed to have together.

I thought about the things they'd taught us in school. It all went through my head in a second, and my legs tensed as if to sprint away. My eyes latched on to the road behind the car. I calculated how long it would take the man to turn the car around. I could get away, I was sure of it.

Zee zee zee.

“Now!” the man yelled.

I took the three steps toward the car. I fumbled with the door handle.

“Get in!” he shouted.

I jumped in, and I pulled the door shut behind me. It locked with a loud click, like the pop of a cap gun.

He leaned over Dee and pulled the passenger door shut. There was another click. It hit my heart like I'd been shot. I gasped, and the car started, and we were driving. We were driving fast, faster than normal, faster than any car I'd ever been in.

Dee burst into full-on tears, her little breaths changing to gulping sobs.

I froze. It was like I wasn't breathing at all.

“It's all right,” the man said to Dee. “I'm not going to hurt you.” He slowed down until he was going a normal speed. He turned his head toward her and smiled that big clown smile. “Everything's all right.”

Dee kept sobbing.

“My name's Kyle,” he said.

I watched the road through the window, trying to figure out where we were. But we were already somewhere I didn't recognize. We were out of Grey Wood, heading away from our old lives.

Once you get in the car, you're dead.
I gasped again, only my second sound.

“Everything's going to be fine,” he said. He turned back to me and smiled. His eyes were a light brown, like a deer's eyes.

•   •   •

By the time we got to the cabin, it was dark. Dee had stopped sobbing. I guess you can only cry so much, no matter what's wrong. She had gone completely silent, like me.

“I bet you're hungry,” Kyle said as he stopped the car in the dark driveway.

I was, but really, I had to pee. We'd just bounced up a long, winding gravel road after hours in the car.

“We're going to get out of the car now,” he said. “There's no point in screaming because this is the only place around for a while. And if you run, you won't get anywhere.” His voice was matter-of-fact. And from what I could see, it was true. There wasn't any light anywhere except what came from the car's headlights. We might as well have been on another planet. He unlocked the doors, and I got out, stepping onto the dirt.

Dee stayed in the car.

I walked over to her door and pulled it open. “You have to get out, Dee,” I said.

“Why?” Her face was in a bright spot of light reflecting off the cabin wall. It was blotchy and distorted.

“Because I know you have to pee as bad as I do. And we have to eat.”

Suddenly, Kyle was behind me. He pushed me aside with one hand, grabbed Dee's arm, and pulled her out of the front seat.

“Stop it!” Dee yelled. She twisted and writhed, but she
was no match for him. He held her close from the back and lifted her so that her toes left the ground. “Stop! Stop!” she kept yelling, but he didn't pay any attention. She might as well have been a pile of firewood he was carrying inside the house to burn.