Finally, Travis lowered the BlackBerry so everyone could see. “This,” he announced.
A stiff, hot wind blew against Emma’s cheek, the dusty air irritating her eyes. The blue-black evening sky seemed to darken a few shades. Travis breathed heavily next to her, reeking of pot smoke, and pulled up a generic video uploading site. With a flourish, he typed in the keyword SuttonInAZ and hit PLAY.
A video slowly loaded. A handheld camera panned over a clearing. No sound escaped from the speakers, as if the microphone had been muted. The camera whipped around to show a figure sitting in a chair with a black blindfold covering half her face. A round silver locket on a thick chain clung to a bony, feminine collarbone.
The girl thrashed her head frantically back and forth, the locket bouncing wildly. The picture went dark for a moment, and suddenly someone slipped behind her and pulled the necklace chain back so that it pressed up against the girl’s throat. The girl’s head arched back. She flailed her arms and kicked her legs.
“Oh my God.” Clarice’s hand flew to her mouth.
“What is this?” Emma whispered.
The strangler pulled the chain harder and harder. Whoever it was had a mask over his head, so Emma couldn’t see his face. After about thirty seconds, the girl in the video stopped struggling and went limp.
Emma backed away from the screen. Had they just watched someone die? What the hell? And what did this have to do with her?
The camera remained fixed on the blindfolded girl. She wasn’t moving. Then the picture went momentarily dark again. When an image snapped back on the screen, the camera was tilted over, fallen on the ground. Emma could still see a sideways shot of the figure in the chair. Someone walked up to the girl and pulled the blindfold off her head. After a long pause, the girl coughed. Tears dotted her eyes. The corners of her mouth pulled down. She blinked slowly. For a split second before the screen went dark, she stared half consciously into the lens.
Emma’s jaw dropped to her worn Converse sneakers.
Clarice gasped loudly.
“Ha,” Travis said triumphantly. “I told you.”
Emma stared at the girl’s huge, blue eyes, slightly upturned nose, and round face. She looked exactly like her.
That was because the girl in the video was me.
Chapter 2
THAT’S RIGHT, BLAME THE FOSTER KID
Emma grabbed the phone from Travis’s hands and started the clip over, staring hard at the image. As the person reached out and began to choke the blindfolded girl, fear streaked through Emma’s stomach. When the anonymous hand pulled off the blindfold, Emma’s identical face appeared on the screen. Emma had the same thick, wavy, chestnut-brown hair as the girl in the movie. The same round chin. The same pink lips kids used to tease Emma about, saying they were puffy as though she’d had an allergic reaction. She shuddered.
I watched the video again in horror, too. The locket glinting in the light caused a tiny shard of a memory to surface: I remembered lifting the lid of my baby box, pulling out the locket from under a half-chewed teething giraffe, a lacy receiving blanket, and a pair of knit booties, and putting it around my neck. The video itself brought back nothing though. I didn’t know if it had happened in my backyard . . . or three states away. I wished I could slap my post-death memory across the face.
But the video had to be how I died, right? Especially from that quick flashback I’d had when I’d awakened in Emma’s bathroom: that face close to mine, my heart beating hard, my murderer standing above me. But I had no idea how this whole death thing worked: Had I popped into Emma’s world the moment after I’d taken my last breath, or was it days—months—later? And how did the video get posted online? Had my family seen it? My friends? Was this some kind of twisted ransom note?
Emma finally glanced up from the screen. “Where did you find this?” she asked Travis.
“Guess someone didn’t know she was a star on the Internet, huh?” Travis snatched the phone from her hands.
Clarice raked her fingers through her hair. She kept glancing from the video screen to Emma’s face. “Is this what you do for fun?” she asked Emma in a hoarse voice.
“She probably does it to get high.” Travis paced around the patio like a prowling lion. “I knew some girls at school last year who were, like, obsessed with it. One of them almost died.”
Clarice clapped her hand over her mouth. “What’s wrong with you?”
Emma’s eyes darted from Travis to Clarice. “Wait, no. That’s not me. The girl in this video is someone else.”
Travis rolled his eyes. “Someone who looks exactly like you?” he deadpanned. “Let me guess. A long-lost sister? An evil twin?”
There was a low rumbling of thunder in the distance. The breeze smelled like wet pavement, a telltale sign that a storm was close. A long-lost sister. The idea ignited in Emma’s mind like a Fourth of July sparkler. It was possible. She’d asked Social Services once if Becky had had any other kids she’d abandoned along the way, but they said they didn’t know.
A thought burned in my mind, too: I was adopted. That much I remembered. It was common knowledge in my family; my parents had never tried to hide it. They’d told me my adoption had been a last-minute scramble and they’d never met my birth mother. Could it be possible? It explained why I was literally stuck to this girl who looked just like me, following her around as if our souls had been tethered together.
Clarice tapped her long nails on the table. “I don’t tolerate lying or stealing in this house, Emma.”