Six Steps to a Girl (18 page)

Adopted. Lost.
I typed the words into the search engine box.

I’d been thinking about it a lot recently. Last week I’d even checked out some of the adoption information websites. You’d have laughed if you’d seen me: heart thumping, palms sweating, stomach screwed up into a knot.

I mean, it’s not as if there’s going to be some site that says:
Lauren Matthews – click here for your adoption details.

Anyway. D’you know what I found out?

That if I wanted to know anything about my life before I was three, I needed Mum and Dad’s permission.

How unbelievable is that?

My life. My identity. My past.

But their decision.

Even if I asked, there’s no way Mum would say yes. Well, you’ve seen how she is about the subject. Gets a face on her like a smashed plate.

It would serve her right if I went ahead and did it anyway.

I clicked on the search icon.

Adopted. Lost.
Nearly a million hits.

My heart thudded. I could feel my stomach clenching again.

I sat back in my chair. Enough.

I was just wasting time. Putting off the homework. I reached over to close the search. And that’s when I caught sight of it:
Missing-Children.com.
An international site for lost or missing children. I frowned. I mean, how do you lose a child and then them not turn up? I can see how you might lose one for five minutes. Or even an hour. And I know sometimes children go missing ’cause some psycho’s murdered them. But Mum’s always saying that only happens like once or twice a year.

I clicked through to the homepage. It was a flickering mass of faces. Each face the size of a stamp; each stamp turning into a new face after a few seconds.

My jaw dropped. Did all these faces belong to missing children? I saw a search field. I hesitated. Then I tapped in my name.
Lauren.
I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing. Just messing about – seeing how many missing Laurens there were out there.

It turned out there were one hundred and seventy-two. Jeez. The computer was flashing at me to refine my search.

Part of me wanted to stop. But I told myself not to be stupid. The flickering faces on the screen weren’t adopted children like me – with no past. They were missing kids. Kids with
only
a past.

I just wanted to see who was there.

I added my birth month to the search criteria.

Lauren. March 1992.

I watched as three Laurens appeared on the screen. One was black, missing since she was two weeks old.

One was white with blonde hair – she looked about nine or ten. Yeah – she’d only been missing since 2001.

I stared at the third child.

I looked at the face above the words. A chubby, smiling little girl’s face. Then at the date she’d gone missing:
September 8 1995.

Less than two months before I was adopted.

My heart seemed to stop beating.

The birth date was a couple of days out. And I was British, not from America like the missing girl.

So it wasn’t possible.

Was it?

The question seeped like a drug through my head, turning me upside down and inside out, filling me up.

Could I be her?