were my files. Were I tattooed. Which I wasn't. What was that about?
Maybe you got all the tattoos, Irma cooed. And I got all the men.
In Helena's room, we all doffed our hot, sticky business suit jackets and sat at a slate-topped table near a sink/small refrigerator unit.
Helena's phone buttons linked her net-comp to the room TV screen.
"Some of this is very puzzling," she warned us. "Most of it, in fact. Ric, take Delilah's hand in yours. Delilah, let him."
"What is this," Ric asked, now uneasy too, "a shotgun wedding?"
Helena's face looked a little old for the first time, shadowed by the suite's trendy spot-lighting.
"I can't say it's good, but I can say this is not the Delilah we know. And love."
She punched a tiny button on her keyboard, and scanned copies of printed pages hit the big screen.
Most were tiny-typed reports. A few photos flashed by: me looking like a deer in a police lineup spotlight, front and profile. I gasped audibly.
Helena clicked into close-up. "No panic. See the tattoo on her neck? Almost lost under the hair at her nape? A coiled snake, I think. It looks like you, but the expression is defiant and knowing. Not you, Delilah. Or the photos have been manipulated. Easy to do. Look. Here's a from-the-hip-up photo. You can see the twin cobra tattoos on her biceps. Definitely not you, even I can see that."
I eyed the loose-limbed, gaunt version of me in a raw preteen ranginess I didn't remember, wearing a Rolling Stones wife-beater tee-shirt, a chain hip-belt, and stone-washed jeans.
Young Lilith. It had to be.
I shook my head, feeling Ric's hands compulsively running over my arms and hands, circling my hips, covering - sheltering, claiming - the parts of my screen-revealed body.
"Honest, Mom-doc," he said, sounding like a defensive teenager for the first time in my hearing. "No marks on her that I haven't put there. I swear."
"TMI," Helena said, raising her palms.
She shut her eyes, revealing azure eye shadow gathering like a glittering monochromatic rainbow in a few faint age creases.
"I said this was a puzzle," she reminded us. "These images are not Delilah. Not only do my eyes and your joint testimony tell me that, but my ... amplified insight. This might explain why Delilah had a difficult childhood. She had, at times, a supernatural shadow persona. This girl. This very disturbed girl. No girl is bad, but this one had very little good shown toward her and returned it in kind to others."
"An evil twin?" Ric put my thoughts into words.
I'd never told him about Lilith, another dirty little secret kept to ensure his peace of mind and my keen sense of privacy.
"The TV soap operas are dead, Helena," he said, dismissing his foster mother's theory. "They lost their audience years ago. Evil twins have been a hokey plot device since forever."
"Call me hokey. Few would dare, young man."
How fascinating to watch the two revert to a non-blood-kin parent/son mode. I liked Ric going hot-blood and testosterone-y in my defense, something he'd never do if we were facing real danger. I'd never had an inner teenager - except for Irma, come to think of it, who acted like an eternal teenager - but I felt like a prom queen now.
Wichita was peeling off all my hard-won defensive layers. I couldn't indulge that luxury for too long.
"I'm talking about a post - Millennium Revelation effect," Helena said. "The dates when 'Delilah' was picked up for juvenile delinquency are after January first, two thousand."
"I was never 'picked up' for anything," I protested.
"You admit you don't remember a lot about your childhood, until after high school, really," Helena pointed out.
"Who does?" Ric argued. "You remember the high and low points. I know I do, and I'm a star graduate of your methods, Helena."
She sighed. "The records show her - you, Delilah - with a history of running away from the group homes and hanging out at pool parlors, garages, tattoo and piercing shops with 'a bad crowd.'"
"No," I said, shaking my head. "I hid out in plain sight, in the group homes. I had a metal nail file for a weapon, yes, but it was against those creepy half-vamp punks who gave me a hard time. I wasn't even menstruating then, but they still came after me."
Helena's lips folded tight. Then she said, "I believe you, Delilah. I believe you had your own history in your mind, and ... this person in the police photographs was never a