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PROLOGUE

Seventeen years prior…

I can taste the thick, floral grease and fake vanilla of the mass of candles lining the back wall of the cramped alcove. Every breath feels like I’m swallowing wool.

Standing two feet away from my best friends, they might as well be on the fucking moon. I can see their lips moving and hear the cadence of their laughter, but it feels like I’m watching from behind a thick pane of glass.

It’s not a want.

Not like wanting a new pair of jeans or a better grade on a history paper, anyway.

It’s a physical weight.

A boulder sitting right square in the middle of my chest, pressing down until I can’t get a full lungful of oxygen.

Unfortunately, there’s only one way to roll it off.

My eyes are vibrating. Darting, scanning, calculating. I see a necklace dangling from a little display card. Cheap silver, some religious guy with wings stamped into the pendant. Quis ut Deus? curves around the edge in tiny letters. Latin, maybe. Catholic, probably. I have no idea what it means.

It’s worthless, ugly. I’m not religious. I have absolutely no reason to want it.

Don't do it. Please. Fuck, just stay in your body.

I dig my fingernails into my palms until it stings, trying to let the pain remind me that I’m a person, a girl with a name and a family and a future not worth an ugly-ass necklace.

But the pain is nothing compared to the restless itch working its way through me. I can feel my bones pushing against this meat-sack casing, looking for a way out.

The static is everywhere, a white-noise roar in my ears, drowning out the Top 40 hits playing over the speakers. It’s telling me that the world is too much, that I’m too small, and that if I take this one thing, I’ll finally have a piece of control.

"Are you even listening?" Casey’s voice is a needle popping the bubble. I blink. My vision clears.

"Yeah," I say. My throat is so dry. "Yeah, I just... I think the lights are giving me a headache."

"You always have a headache," she says, but she’s already turning back to a display of velvet scrunchies.

She’s right. I do always have a headache. It’s the tension of holding back a flood. It’s the exhaustion of pretending there isn’t something hungry and ugly sitting right under my skin.

I feel a sickening sense of dual-consciousness. There is the Me who is nodding and smiling, the one who knows this is wrong, the one who is terrified of what could happen. And then there is the Other Me. The one who is cold and precise. The one who has already mapped out the blind spots of the cameras.

I’m not even the one doing it. I’m just a passenger, watching through my own eyes as my fingers slide the cardboard off the hook.

Inside, I'm screaming, my heart thumping like a trapped bird. But my hand is a separate entity, tucking the pendant into my waistband of my jeans while the rest of me watches in horror.

I take a deep, shaky breath, and the air finally reaches the bottom of my lungs. It’s the most beautiful feeling in the world. For thirty seconds, I am perfect. I am calm. I am the master of this room because I have broken the rule that says you can only have what you pay for. I have cheated the universe, and the universe didn't even notice.

I feel... light. I feel like I could float up to the skylights and drift away.

But the quiet is a lie, and soon enough, the familiar sound of reality starts to claw its way back to the surface.

It starts as a tiny prickle of heat behind my eyes. You’re a thief. You’re a liar. You’re broken. There is something fundamentally wrong with the wiring in your brain.

Casey is holding a hair tie, looking at the price sticker, debating if she should spend her allowance. She’s so honest and good and right that it hurts to look at her.

I want to put it back, to take the necklace out and throw it on the floor and run away.

But I can't.

The potential shame of being caught is worse than any other thing I can imagine—a total erasure of the girl everyone thinks I am.