“Hello!”
I stepped back, looking down to find a little curly-haired brunette girl standing before me, smiling brightly.
She was beautiful. She had a smattering of light freckles across her face, her eyes shining bright, her hair in little pigtails, and she was wearing this cute little floral summer dress with white tights and little black shoes. She looked just like something straight out of a book.
Her smile was big and toothy. “My name is Baily,” she introduced. “But sometimes mom calls me Bailybailybailybaily. Only when I’m running, and she pretends not to catch me.”
But I had stopped listening, my eyes widening as my lips parted in absolute shock. She looked…she looked exactly like me when I had been a kid. What…what thefuck?
“Hey,” Evelyn said when I didn’t say a word, her voice far away. “My name is Evie, and this is my friend Olivia. That over there is my brother, Everett. We were wondering if your mom was around. Maybe we could talk to her?”
Her face scrunched as she looked from Evelyn to Everett and finally to me. She watched me for a long time before her face lit up. “You have the same eyes as me! Mom!Mom!” she shouted, dancing up and down. “Moooooooommmmmmm!”
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” I heard a soft voice say. “What have I told you about answering the door?” she laughed, wiping her hands on her apron as she turned the corner at the end of the hall, ripping my eyes from the girl to her.
She was more beautiful in person. Beautiful blonde hair, bright blue eyes, freckles across her cheeks. She was…she wassobeautiful. Second to Evelyn, but very clearly one of the most beautiful people I had ever seen. “Hey, how can I help you?” she asked, picking Baily up.
“Mom, look, she has the same eyes as me! Look! Look!”
Stella found my eyes, her smile stretching across her face. “She does, look at that,” she sang. “See, I told you it was a superpower. Like finds like. Always.”
I couldn’t breathe. My mom hated it. She absolutely hated that I wasn’t perfect. That one of my eyes had a deformity, she had called it.
I had always loved my eyes, even while mom said all of those horrible things, I thought it made me special. It set me apart from the Lemont family, but this girl? Baily. She believed it was a superpower.
As she should.
As she always would.
“Yup! Mom says that my eyes are a superpower. They let me see things nobody else sees. What about you? What do you see?”
Me. I saw me. I saw me at 4-years-old, wincing as the flashes of the cameras blinded me. I saw me crying in my bedroom, wanting nothing more than to play with kids my own age, only for my mom to drag me out by my arm and force me to put on another ‘adult’ dress and wear more makeup so we could do another interview.
I grabbed my chest, my breathing growing short and shallow.
Stella’s eyes furrowed as she adjusted Baily on her hip. “Are you okay?” she asked nervously, glancing to Evelyn and back.
I fell back a step, feeling a hand slide around my back, keeping me from falling down the stairs. The roaring in my ears grew and grew. I grabbed onto the wrist and turned away from the house, falling down the steps, my stomach churning as I ripped out my phone.
Someone appeared in front of me, and I grabbed onto their arm again, gripping into the leather, the world sparking in grainy colors as I found the pictures my mom had sent me years ago.
Somebody was saying something. Somebody was talking, but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear anything above the roaring in my ears, the bile raising in my throat as I pulled up a picture of my dad and I when I had been only five years old.
My eyes widened, my heart racing.
It was Baily. We were identical. Down to the way our hair curled. Down to the big toothy smile. We were the fucking same.
Everything came up at that point. I couldn’t stop it. I leaned over the arm, now holding me up, and ejected everything I had in me onto the sidewalk.
My hair was pulled from my face, wrapped in a fist as I heaved and heaved, my muscles contracting as I suffocated, unable to catch my breath. Unable to do anything but puke.
When I didn’t have anything left in me to eject, I used the sleeve of the jacket and pulled myself up into his arms.
Everett’s arms.
Because he had followed me down and held my hair as I vomited all over the hot sidewalk.
I gripped into his jacket, his shirt, breathing deeply, the tears falling down my cheeks as I breathed through my open mouth. No, no, no, no. Please no. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t happening. “Lie to me,” I begged, my voice hoarse, my legs weak. “Lie to me right now. Lie.”
