Mara did not scream when she saw my body.
She did not cry.
Under the jaundiced alley light, her face went completely still. A stranger might have mistaken that stillness for indifference.
I had made that mistake before.
Mara touched my cheek.
The instant her fingers met my skin, the invisible tether binding me to the corpse snapped tight.
The world went black.
When it returned, Mara was standing and my body remained on the pavement.
I stepped back.
One pace. Five. Ten.
Nothing pulled me toward the corpse.
Then Mara moved toward the mouth of the alley.
I moved with her.
The tether had changed anchors.
She paused as if a draft had slipped beneath her collar and glanced over one shoulder.
“I’m here,” I said.
Her eyes passed through me.
She crouched again, but this time she did not study my face. She checked my wrists, upper arms, neck, knees. Clinical. Efficient. Infuriating.
“What are you doing, an autopsy?”
Then she found an old bruise.
Not from tonight.
Her fingers moved to my left wrist, where yellow had spread beneath the skin. Then an older scratch near the elbow. A purple shadow below my ribs.
I stopped talking.
I had explained those marks a dozen ways.
Stairs.
A desk corner.
Gym class.
Once, Mara stared at my wrist through an entire dinner.
“Who did that?”
“I fell.”
“You’re lying.”
“Mara.”
She had gone silent.
I won that argument only because I was the older sister by seven minutes and she still treated those seven minutes like a form of legal authority.
Now her hand rested on the bruise I had hidden.
She did not ask again.
She knew.
Mara wrapped her jacket around the worst of my face, pulled the sack closed, and lifted one end.
“Call the police,” I said.
She didn’t.
“Mara. Call them.”
She deleted the tracker location from the app, wiped the keychain with her sleeve, and took me home.
By the time we reached the house, I understood the ugly logic. If the police found my body immediately, whoever had ordered the assault would know I had been recovered. They would destroy evidence, change stories, disappear.
Mara wanted them to think I was still missing.
At least until she knew which direction to look.
I hated that it made sense.
Behind our house stood a magnolia tree.
Dad planted it the year we were born. He claimed one tree for two babies was efficient. Mom called him cheap. When Mara was four, she wrapped both arms around the trunk and announced, “Claire’s.”
“What about yours?” I asked.
She considered the problem with great seriousness.
“I share hers.”
That night, Mara dug beneath that tree.
The soil was rain-soaked and heavy. Each time the shovel struck a root it stopped with a dull thunk. At some point her palm split. I noticed only when a dark stripe of blood appeared on the wooden handle.
“Stop.”
She kept digging.
I sat beside her and discovered that death could become real more than once. It was not only the body in the sack. Not only the blood.
It was the hole deepening beneath the tree our parents had planted for us.
This was where I would disappear.
Mara lowered me into the earth with maddening care.
She filled the hole, tamped the soil flat, and stood under the magnolia until the sky began to pale.
Finally she said, “Idiot.”
One word.
I turned away.
Of course.
I died, and my sister had one thing to say.
Idiot.
Mara went upstairs, showered away the mud, and entered my bedroom.
She opened my closet.
“What are you doing?”
She pulled out my school clothes.
We were identical twins, but no one at Grayhaven High knew that in any useful way. By senior year we were both eighteen. Mara had not attended a regular school since middle school; after our parents died, she finished classes online, avoided neighbors, and treated strangers as an inconvenience. I learned early that saying I was an only child invited fewer questions than explaining my sister.
That lie was about to become useful to her.
Mara tied her hair the way I did.
She chose one of my sweaters, my jeans, my shoes.
Then she sat at my mirror and practiced smiling.
The first one was too wide.
The second never reached her eyes.
By the fifteenth or twentieth attempt, I wanted to cover the mirror.
Near dawn, the person in the glass looked enough like me that even I had to check twice.
Mara stopped smiling.
Her reflection did not.
It held the expression for half a heartbeat longer.
Mara froze.
So did I.
In the mirror, the smile slowly faded.
She touched the glass.
Nothing happened.
After several seconds, she turned away, apparently deciding that an unexplained phenomenon did not deserve priority over a plan.
My Grayhaven High student ID sat on the desk.
Mara picked it up.
“Claire Mercer,” she said in my voice.
Too low the first time.
Almost perfect the second.
She tucked the card into my wallet.
Before leaving, she looked at the photograph beside my bed. In it, I had one arm around her shoulders while Mara stared into the camera as if family pictures were an administrative burden.
She set the frame upright.
Then turned it facedown.
That morning, my sister walked out of our house wearing my clothes, my face, and my name.
I followed because I had no choice.
I did not yet know whether Mara intended to find the people who killed me.
Or kill them.
Worse, I began to wonder something else. If she wore Claire Mercer long enough, would she ever want Mara Mercer back?
3 thoughts on “CHAPTER 2 — BECOMING ME”