Page 64 of Forget Me Not
I barrel back into the guesthouse, the gush of hot air like an impenetrable wall the second I step through the front door. Then I close it behind me, my heart hammering hard in my chest as the singe of Mitchell’s gaze burns the back of my neck like two cigarettes pressed into the skin.
My head rests against the door as I glance around the room, this home of mine for only a week. Then I look down at the mug still in my hands before taking a few steps to the sink, pouring the tea straight down the drain.
I turn on the faucet, letting the water run for a while before glancing back at my bag on the floor, Marcia’s diary still slipped into the pocket. I have a few more hours until it’s dark enough to venture back out so I walk to my briefcase and grab the diary before making my way to the bed and picking up my phone from where it rests on the table. I check the battery—still half full from when I charged it in town, the time on the screen reading half past eight—and climb on top of the sheets before opening the book’s covers, thumbing my way through the last hundred or so pages.
I can practically taste the end of it, Marcia’s recollections coming to a close, and I take a deep breath as I turn on the flashlight, helping myself to her memories one last time.
CHAPTER 41
MAY 1984
Marcia stared down at the strip in her hand, the little blue square staring straight back.
She didn’t know what to do, what to think, other than sit on the edge of the water-stained tub as she held the thing between her slick fingers. Her head felt detached from the rest of her body, her limbs tingling like they did every time she sucked from one of Mitchell’s thin joints, sipped from a mug of his homemade tea. In truth, she didn’t even know this kind of technologyexisted. She had simply been doing the same thing she’d been doing for weeks: rooting around in a stranger’s cabinets as she and Lily hit a house a few miles from the Farm. They were closer to home than what they normally liked but they only needed a few things this time: toilet paper and towels, some food for dinner. Lily was on the hunt for a dress, beelining straight to the bedroom closet, so Marcia had come into the bathroom on her own, combing through cupboardsuntil her fingers grazed against a box wedged in the back. Big blue words screaming at her in the dark.
ADVANCE PREGNANCY TEST: Accurate Results in 30 Minutes!
Then she had leaned back on her legs, a queasy feeling sliding through her stomach as she ticked off the last few months in her head. Her parents had never really bothered to teach her these things, though she knew the basics from health class at school, and she suddenly thought it strange that she couldn’t actually remember when she had her last period.
It had been a few months, at least.
“Marcia!”
She twisted to the side at the sound of her name, Lily’s voice echoing from the other side of the door.
“What are you doing in there? It’s been forever.”
She turned back around, staring down at the strip in her hand. Blinking a few times as if the blue box was nothing more than a mirage and a simple flip of her lids might make it dissolve back to white. Of course, she hadn’t actually been expecting it to be positive. She took the test out of pure curiosity, closing the door with a quietclickand that creeping heat rising into her cheeks only once the color started to change. Then she began to tally all the evidence she had simply shrugged off: the fact that her stomach had started to look so subtly swollen, those waves of nausea she sometimes felt when she caught a whiff of something strong on the Farm. Up until that point, she had attributed those things to all the changes that had taken place in her life. Her diet was different. She didn’t eat much anymore, all their food in such scarce supply, but the things shedideat were often rotten, leaving her feeling bloated and ill.
“Marcia!”Lily called again, sounding impatient, so she tuckedthe strip into her pocket as she tried to think through what to do next.
“What?” she asked, emerging from the bathroom to find Lily sprawled across a king-sized bed. She was wearing a coat of faux white fur, something bulky and black in her hand. Then Marcia saw a bright light, a mechanical whining as Lily laughed out loud.
“Say cheese,” she said, giggling as Marcia blinked away the black spots.
“What are youdoing,” she snapped, her vision swimming as the room slowly started to come back into view.
“Relax,” Lily said, lowering the camera as she climbed off the mattress. “It’s just a picture.”
“I don’t want my face on there.”
Marcia stared at the girl, realizing the magnitude of what she’d just done: the flash preserving her image in ink, proof of their presence in this place where they didn’t belong.
“Take it out,” she hissed, gesturing down to the camera before her eyes darted to something strange on the headboard, that familiar sentence etched into the surface and the coiled wood shavings dusted across the duvet.
Lily was here.
“I’m serious,” Marcia pressed, suddenly seething at the hubris of it all. The way Lily was flaunting their crimes as if it were all a big game. “Take it out.”
“Fine,” Lily muttered, popping open the camera and dumping the film onto the bed. “What iswithyou today.”
Marcia stalked into the closet, not even bothering with a response. Then she started flipping through hangers, opening drawers. The test hot in her pocket as the reality of her situation settled in like a sickness, the last handful of minutes since she learned she was pregnant enough for her to have experienced a small mental shift. She felt a new kind of clarity as she looked at her life, theplates in her mind clicking into place to reveal the full picture of what it had become. In the beginning, those early days at the Farm had felt like an escape. She had been dipping her toes into forbidden waters, getting a taste of a life she had spent so much time watching from afar. A life of brazen independence, of wild free will. The exact opposite of the life she had at home… but slowly, silently, she had started to realize it was all just pretend.
Like sneaking into that theater at night, losing herself in some faraway dream, it was an illusion, a fantasy.
She was playing a part in a film that wasn’t even her own.
“Are you okay?”
