Chapter 20

Maddie

The screaming never leaves my head, but starts to wear on me. Like a song you hate when you first hear it, but then after listening to it several times, you start to understand the meaning. The screams have a meaning. They’re my past. They represent a torturous time in my life¸ where I was hurt, where I hurt people.

But eventually I become restless at the lack of movement in my life and fake conversations my mother tries to have with me. She pretends as if nothing happened, as if I didn’t see a man in our house, as if the alarm never went off, as if her daughter doesn’t need a box of buttons to make her feel better. To her, everything is perfect.

She’s fucking delusional. Always has been.

The longer it goes on, the more Lily gets restless and starts whispering to me more and more. She tells me not to hide from the world. That hiding is for the weak and that I need to get the hell out of the house and away from my mother. She sounds an awful lot like the girl in the memory and even though there’s no scar, I’m coming to the conclusion that it was her. That I talked to her then in front of a boy who seemed to know about us both. So who was the boy? I want to find out. I want to find out everything. Lily tells me to do so then. That if I want to remember things, then find a way to remember, instead of running away from the truth. And if I really want to remember who I used to be, the girl the detective was talking about, the girl in my repressed memories, then figure out a way—do something about it. Like it’s that easy.

And what about the man I saw. I’m not sure, but I know it had to be real. I even found bruise marks while I was taking a shower the next day and there was a bump on the back of my head, like I’d been hit hard by something.

One day, during one of my mother’s rare trips out of the house to restock the cupboards, Lily gives me an idea to attempt to get some answers. I start searching the house, for what I’m not sure. Photos and items that will show me what I already think I know. That behind the perfect daughter my mother has tried to convince me I am, I’m really a wild, confused girl who has no set identity.

I begin in the basement where my mother stores a lot of boxes. I don’t find much there, other than old papers, her yearbooks, old clothes. So I work my way to the upper floor and search my mother’s bedroom. I don’t come across anything, until I’m snooping around on the top shelf of the closet. There’s nothing there, but what I do notice is the entrance to the crawl space. It takes me a moment to get up onto the shelf, the wood creaking beneath my weight. So I hurry and push open the entrance and peek my head in quickly before the shelf gives out. I end up tumbling ungracefully onto the floor. It’s dusty and dark, full of insulation that makes my skin itch as I feel around blindly for… something. I’m not even sure what I expect to find, but I do find something. And envelope that’s sort of heavy. I knew that fucking woman was hiding something.

Clutching it in my hand, I duck out of the crawl space, shut it, and carefully climb down off the shelf. Then I go back into my room, lock the door and shut the curtains as paranoia sets in. I have something in my hand I’m not supposed to. I can feel it under my skin, deep inside my bones, and behind the veil that hides my memories.

Why are you hesitating?

“Because I’m afraid.”

Why, though? What exactly do you think is in there? She knows just like I know. I don’t even know how I know, but I do.

I stare down at my hand, clenched up, knuckles white as I grasp onto the bulky envelope. “Answers to my past.”

Don’t be afraid. Open it and find out.

I swallow the lump in my throat and then open up the envelope, dumping the contents out onto my unmade bed. It’s stuffed with papers and photos and a few larger, heavier objects at the bottom—a hospital band, a few buttons, and a key. The papers are, my social security card, passport, a small stack of photos and two birth certificates. The first one is for Maddie Asherford. My parents’ names are listed: Madison May Asherford and Markels Wellfordton. I never knew my mother took her maiden name back. I move to the next one, figuring it’s my mother’s, but it’s not. Lily Asherford, born the same day only a year earlier by the same parents as my own, which would make her my sister.

“What the hell?” I pick up my birth certificate and examine it closely. Lily is extremely quiet, as if she senses something bad is about to happen. “What is this?” I turn both of them over and compare them from front to back. They both look exactly the same, but one of them has to be a fake. It has to be. Either that or I had a sister who no one ever bothered to tell me about.

Keep going.

I set the birth certificate down and pick up the hospital band, which has the name Maddie Asherford and the date of when I was in the hospital six years ago. Shaking my head, I set that down and pick up the buttons. They’re all different sizes, shapes, colors. There’s three total and I wonder if they’re mine, wonder if my mom knows about my weird button obsession. I drop the buttons down on the bed, one by one they hit the mattress like little raindrops.

One by one the buttons fall and each one makes me feel safe as I count them. They distract me, even though they belong to him. They’re all I have in this world. “I have no one.”

“That’s not true,” the boy says, his voice so familiar, yet so far away. Distant. I can smell the scent of flowers flowing from outside. Something so beautiful, yet I hate the smell, because every time I smell them it means I’m really with him, not matter how much I block it out. “You have me. As long as you think of me, we can be whoever we want to be.”

“I don’t want to be me anymore.” I can smell the scent of cigarettes, the boy fading from my view.

Hold onto him.

“Let him go.” Sitting in the shadows of the small room, so confident, so content with all the screaming that seems to be echoing around us is a girl who looks so much like me. Long blond hair and able to smile through all of this. I wish I was her. “Don’t be weak Maddie. Let him go and get through this yourself, otherwise you’re going to turn into that weak girl again.”

I hesitate, deciding what I want. Good. Bad. Who am I? When I’m with Lily, I’m bad but it feels okay. But when I’m with the boy, I’m myself, I’m Maddie, and it feels right but in the most painful way.

Finally I reach for him, refusing to let him fade away from me. I won’t focus on the screaming, on the scent of the man, his voice, what he tells me to do, what he does to those girls, to me, to the boy. But it’s so hard to keep reaching for him. ”I’m too tired… too broken.”

But he manages to get a hold of my hand and the warm contact of his skin makes me feel at peace with myself, not so cold and hollow. So dirty. So wrong. So Lily. “You’re going to be okay.”

I glance over at the girl in the corner, so confident, so strong. She doesn’t fear the man as much as I do and I know she’d help me if she could. “But I want to become her and that makes me crazy.”

He shakes his head with a sad smile on his lips and I wish the sunlight would hit his face so I could see his eyes. “You’re only crazy if you think you’re crazy.”

I blink from the memory, the scent of lilies still lingering in the air. For a moment, I swear they surround me, white flowers growing from the grass, and I’m back in the place with the girl and the boy, fighting not to hold onto reality.

But soon it fades and I’m back in the moment. Taking a deep breath, I move to the photos and instantly discover why my mother hid them from me. They’re of me when I was younger, early teens, and I look very similar to the girl in the photo I found in Bella’s. Long blond hair just like the detective said, just like in some of the memories, just like my Lily. Piercing’s in my nose and lips, eyebrows, and my ears are studded heavily. I’m dressed in black, a short skirt, boots, and a crop top that shows my ribcage. Right where my scar is now, there used to be a tattoo, cursive font that traced the name Evan.

I touch my side and whisper, “Evan.” It rolls off my tongue, thick like honey and makes my stomach feel like it’s igniting in flames. “I don’t understand this.” I want to cry, but Lily won’t allow me to let tears fall. She’s just like the girl in the memory, making me be stronger than I want to be.

“Who’s Evan?” I wonder. “And why is there a scar where his name is now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he the boy in my memories? Did I have his name tattooed on my side, but when I got in the accident it was ruined?”

Go to the last item.

I stare at the key sitting on the bed, engraved with the number fourteen, and I touch the scar on my palm absentmindedly.

What are you waiting for? Pick it up.

“I’m afraid.” My voice is unsteady.

Of what.

“Of what it is… what it means… about me,” I say. Taking a deep breath, I slowly move my fingers for the key. The metal stings against my skin, icy cold. The sensation shoots up my arm and brands my mind. Scorching hot images brand my mind. I’ve held the object in my hand before and it’s not just the recollection that proves it. I know because it matches the shape of the scar on the palm of my hand. I clutched this very key that night in the road. That night six years ago when the rain poured down on me and the stranger who tried to take it from my hand. But it’s more than that.

With my hand open, I hold the key in my hand. It’s long and slender, silver with lines and diamonds fitting perfect on top of the scar, the numbers matching up perfectly. It makes my skin tingle—makes my mind tingle... makes my whole body tingle… Room 14…

Pitter-patter…. Pitter-patter… Pitter-patter… the rain crashes against the earth… through it, there’s a spark. I’ve seen it before. Heard the voice that follows me, calls out my name, shouts at me to stop! As I look back, I see bright orange flames, scorching through the trees and toward the sky, so wild that even the rain can’t even drown it out.

Don’t be afraid… just run. We need to run! Now! Before they catch us and lock us back up again.

I pause in the trees, coming to a stop. “Us? But I wasn’t locked up,” I say to Lily, standing beside me, her long blond hair wild, her eyes reckless as she scans the trees for a way out. “Just you.”

She shakes her head and rolls her eyes. “That’s always been your problem.” She ducks under the trees and shouts out. “You listen to what everyone else tells you instead of seeing it for yourself.”

“What does it mean… why was I running with it that night… and who was I running from?” I ask, tracing my finger across the jagged edge of the key. A solid steel door appears in my head with the number fourteen painted on it. “Does this go to the hospital room I was in?” As soon as I say it, I pause. In the memory, Lily told me that I was locked up, but I said I wasn’t. She said I believed what everyone told me and never saw things for myself. “But how can I ever see things for myself when I’m so blind… I can’t even remember anything.”

Because you repressed it yourself. Not because it was stolen from you.

She’s right, but still, at this point I think if I could actually remember, I would. Just to have some answers.

“Do you know what I did that night when I got hit by the car?” I ask, enfolding my fingers tightly around the key. “Do you know what happened before all of that? How I escaped the hospital… why I was there?”

I know as much as you. You’re mind is my mind. If you don’t want to remember then neither do I.

I feel my legs carrying me to the mirror on their own accord. “But I don’t know anything.” I study myself in the mirror, imagining myself as blond like the detective said, imagining myself as someone else. “Other than these pieces that don’t make any sense.”

You don’t know anything because you chose to forget. Everything you do, you chose to do.

She’s right. If I was a better person, then I’d simply go talk to someone—go to Preston and confess what’s going on. Tell him about Sydney. Bella. These horrifying memories and how I think I might be a killer. But I know I won’t. I’m not sure if that makes me a bad person, for carrying those thoughts inside me, not speaking about them because I worry what they mean. Maybe if I’d spoken up sooner, lives could have been spared. Maybe Sydney would still be alive.

“Maybe,” Lily says. “But maybe not.”