not my face. I take a step away from the mirror and stare at the reflection, mesmerized and confused. I slide my hands over the contours of my lanky body. So does the reflection. The reflection is mine.
I stare at myself, at my small breasts. And curved hips. The last time I looked at myself in the mirror … I didn’t have them. I touch my cheek, and my heart starts hammering again. Something mars the back of my hand. Black, spiderish, wrong. I take a closer look. It’s a tattoo, an oval with ten legs. A mark. “Conceal the mark,” I whisper. The words leave my mouth without me even meaning to speak them, as if someone else put them on my tongue. Yet I know in my gut that I must obey them.
I pull open the bathroom drawer and sigh with relief. Some of Lis’s makeup is in it. I take a tube of flesh-colored stuff and open it. Concealer. What Lis used to use to cover zits. I remember her putting it on in the mornings before she went to nursing classes at the University of Colorado, when I was twelve and wishing I were as old as my big sister. I remember everything from back then. My sister. My parents. My twin brother, Jonah. But I can’t remember why I have a tattoo on my hand, or why I have to hide it. I can’t remember when my body stopped looking thirteen and started looking like … a woman’s.
Outside the bathroom door, the stairs groan—a sound I remember well. It means someone is coming upstairs. For a moment, I’m giddy with hope. Hope that my mom has come home. But then dread makes my heart speed up, because what if it isn’t my mom? I take a wide step around the spot where the floor squeaks and tiptoe to the door. Opening it a crack, I peer through.
A man is creeping up the stairs. He’s wearing a tattered pair of cutoff shorts but no shirt, and his hair is long and stringy around his face. Muscles bulge in his arms, flex on his bare chest, and swell in his long legs, and thick veins pulse under his tight, suntanned skin.
Like an animal tracking prey, he leans down and puts his nose to the carpet. The muscles in his shoulders ripple and tense, his lips pull back from his teeth, and a guttural sound rumbles in his throat. In one swift movement, he leaps to his feet and sprints down the hall toward my bedroom, his bare feet thudding on the carpet.
I have to get away, out of the house, before he finds me. I should run. Now. This very second!
Instead I freeze, press my back to the bathroom wall and hold my breath, listening. The house grows quiet, and slowly, I reach for the doorknob. My fingers touch the cool metal and ease it open a hair wider. I peer out with one eye. The floor in the hall groans, and my knees threaten to buckle. I am now trapped in the bathroom.
I grip the doorknob, slam the bathroom door, and lock it, then yank the vanity drawer open so hard it breaks away from the cabinet. I need a weapon. My hand comes down on a metal nail file, and, gripping it in my damp palm, I toss the drawer to the floor.
The bathroom door shudders and I stare at it, wondering how long before the man breaks it down. Something crashes into the door a second time. I jump as the wood splinters, and scramble backward, never taking my eyes from the door. Something hits the door a third time, shaking the entire house, and I turn to the window—my only hope of escape. Because there’s no way a nail file is going to stop the man who is beating down the door.
The window groans and fights me, the catch slipping in my sweaty grasp. As the window grates upward, the bathroom door implodes, a spray of splinters shooting against my back.
I grip the narrow window frame, just like I did as a kid, and swing my feet through. My hips follow, and then my shoulders.
A hand thrusts through the open window, attached to a scraped, straining forearm. On the back of the hand is the twin of the symbol that marks me—an oval with five lines on each side.
As I jump out the window, fingers slip over my neck, gouge into my cheek,