Page 72 of Forget Me Not
I lean back, angling my body so my legs are hovering high in the air. Then I bend my knees, slamming both heels as hard as I can.
I hear a sharpcrack,the familiar sound of splintering wood, and I twist around in the dark, feeling a pang of panic at how much noise I’m making as I frantically feel around for the board I just broke.
At last, I find it, that small seed of hope starting to grow as I position my body again, bringing my feet down in the exact same spot.
I hear another crack, even louder this time, and I know I made a sizable hole as my heels plunge past the wood. Then I spin around, my fingers shredding away at the floor as fast as they possibly can.The shards are like razors tearing at my arms, their jagged edges slitting the skin of my wrists, but I do my best to ignore the pain because the wood is disintegrating faster now as I continue to grope around in the dark.
I pry up a large chunk, finally, and I can tell the leg of the bench is just barely hovering in the air, the wood beneath it pulled completely away.
I guide my hands where they need to go, feeling the chain slip into the gap before, at last, I pull my arms free.
I exhale, adrenaline and fear coursing through my veins as I stand up, my hands blindly searching the workbench for something I can arm myself with. There are plenty of options, this place is chock-full of tools, but with the doors shut, I can’t even see my hands in front of my face. Still, I glide my fingers across the surface, trying to find anything with some kind of point.
Then I come across something metal and hard, my hands recognizing the shape of the shears I used to work in the garden. The ones with the sharp, serrated edge.
I grab the handle, palms stinging as I run toward the doors before I remember they’re padlocked shut. I’m still trapped until Liam comes back—but now that I’m standing here, so close to the wall, I can hear the shuffle of footsteps on the other side.
Someone is out there, walking closer.
I freeze, trying to decide what to do next. If Liam still has that gun, I’d be better off hiding the fact that I’m armed, so I make my way back to the bench, sitting on top of the hole I just made.
Then I twist my arms behind my back, clutching the shears with sweat-soaked palms.
The padlock unhooks, cold sweat coating my skin as the door slowly swings open. Liam is already back from wherever he went… but then I blink, the glow of the moon backlighting thebody before me making me realize it isn’t Liam at all. It isn’t even the body of a man.
Instead, it’s Marcia, standing in the opening between the two doors.
“Marcia.”I exhale, instinctively starting to reach out toward her. I completely forgot that I swapped her drink, had hinted at trying to help her escape. It must have worked. She must have understood me, slipping outside after Mitchell fell asleep, creeping to my car to find my tires were slit.
Then she must have turned to the side, heard all my noises coming from the shed like a panicked animal trapped in a snare.
“Marcia, thank God,” I say, a new hope bubbling from the depths of my chest. “We have to go—”
But then I watch as Mitchell steps in from behind her, Liam standing quietly off to the side.
They’re all here, all three of them, and I feel the air rush from my lungs as I realize that my attempt to help her escape must have been the thing that gave me away.
“You told him,” I mutter, thinking back to how I had grabbed Marcia’s mug, slowly swapping it out for my own. The fact that Liam had known to come into my cabin the very moment I was out in those woods. “Why?” I ask, the initial sting of betrayal quickly replaced by rage as I realize that none of this would have happened had I just been willing to leave her here.
That I would have been in my car right now, speeding to safety, if I didn’t care enough to help her escape.
“Why would you do that?” I yell. “I was trying tohelpyou.”
I stare straight ahead as Marcia stands in the moonlight, this puppet stuffed in a box for the last forty-one years. Her tarnish chipping, color fading. Her will to live stripping away.
“You don’t have to do this,” I plead, thinking about how deeplyshe must be damaged, how completely she must be controlled. Mitchell pulling her strings for so many years that she’s forgotten how to do anything on her own. “I know this isn’t the life you wanted. You deserve so much more than this.”
She stays silent, a cloud from outside moving away from the moon suddenly amplifying the small sliver of light. Then I watch as her eye catches the beam, that liquid gray staring straight back.
I look over at Liam, envisioning the cerulean hue of his own as comprehension hits me like a punch to the gut.
I think of that picture I just got developed, the one of Marcia gaping into the lens. It hadn’t registered before, but I realize now that that’s the only picture I’ve ever seen of her in color. The ones from the paper had been in black-and-white, scanned and archived and grainy on my screen, but now I think of the unease that settled into my stomach when I first took in that image, stared into her eyes.
Something felt off, something feltdifferent,and now I finally know what it is.
In that picture, Marcia’s eyes had been blue. Not their current, lifeless gray.
“You’re not Marcia,” I say, everything making a sick kind of sense.
