Eugenia part 22

Read part 21 here!

After everyone finally filed out, Malia dragged a mattress into the room where we had met and gave Julie and I a couple blankets and pillows. Julie fell asleep almost immediately, but I was restless and followed a dim light into a small kitchen where the bookkeeper sat, sipping a steaming cup of tea.

She smiled up at me and poured a second cup, which I accepted.

“I wondered if it was you, you know.” The old woman told me. “The day you told me your name. I remembered hearing it in the news that you’d escaped, and of course you look so much like your father.”

“My father? How-”

“Oh, he used to come in here when he was a young boy. Loved reading. And he knew I’d always have a warm cookie for him.” Her eyes wrinkled merrily at the memory. “But after his sister failed her test, well, he stopped coming in so much.”

I choked on my tea. “He had a sister?”

“Of course he did! Lisa. She was a beautiful girl, very smart. Wasn’t much for reading, but your father loved her. Looked up to her quite a lot, I understand. She was two years older than him. But she was several points shy of that 160 mark.”

Sitting back in my chair, I pondered this. No wonder my father was so strict.

Malia and I sat in comfortable silence, quietly drinking our tea. It smelled like oranges.

“They moved back here, you know. After you failed. The last I heard, your mother was pregnant.”

“They have another child?”

The old woman just smiled.

After a while, she cleared the cups from the table and told me to go to bed. “You can leave around noon. The lunchtime foot traffic is incredible at that time. Goodnight.”

I still couldn’t sleep though, so at about two in the morning I got up. A dusty phone book lay on the desk next to the cash register, and I flipped through it until I found the names I was looking for.

Carroway, Ray and Gina

The address wasn’t far, and I took off, ignoring the voice in the back of my head telling me that it was a bad idea. I didn’t care; it was just something I needed to do.

Their house was smaller than ours had been, but just as elaborate. I recognized my mothers touches in the many flowerpots and brightly colored drapes. A bright floral patterned drape caught my eye, and I walked slowly to that window, peering in curiously.

There were a few inches of a young girl’s room visible in the moonight. A nightlight in the corner illuminated a face that could have been mine thirteen years before. The small girl was my double, with the same long brown hair as I’d had, and the same oval face. A stack of familiar flashcards littered her bedside table.

I couldn’t pull myself away for over an hour, when a dog barking startled me into rushing back the bookstore.

Julie and I left when Malia had mentioned the next day, and spent the day with our respective creative endeavors.

The group insisted on calling us “The Resistance”, which I had thought was kind of a given. I didn’t understand why we needed to have a name at all, but apparently the person feeding them all of their information didn’t get a say.

While the rest of the “Resistance” worked out new ways to get the list from Bluff, I had another mission.

My sister’s name was Emma. At six, my father was already grilling to poor girl. From what I could tell, he was harder on her than he had been on me. Probably, he didn’t want another mishap.

I visited the house almost every day, despite Julie’s indignation. While she didn’t know where I was disappearing to, she knew I wasn’t supposed to be there.

But I just could stop. After a week, I learned their schedules. At 5 o’clock, there was a house-wide wakeup call. From 5 to 5:30, Emma recited Latin prefixes and got ready for the day. From then until my mother took her to school at 7, my father kept her busy with flashcards while she ate her cereal.

School ended at 1:30, at which time she would do her homework and then be grilled with more flashcards until dinner. After dinner, Emma played the piano for an hour before going to bed, and this was the only time throughout the day that the little girl smiled.

At first, I didn’t understand this last bit of the day. I’d never been given the privilege to do something enjoyable. But one night, I noticed a tattered book on the coffee table. “Beating FF: Play your way to a 160.”

According to the copy I found at Malia’s later, musically inclined children scored better on the IQ test. The fact that Emma seemed to enjoy it was purely a happy coincidence.

At the end of my second week observing the family I was once a part of, I was sitting outside Emma’s window while she snored quietly. I was considering telling Julie about my obsession later that night when a small head popped up in the window.

“You look like me.” Emma informed me, unclasping her window.

I stared.

“You’re Meg, aren’t you?”

“How do you know that?”

Emma brushed her long hair out of her eyes, the way I used to. “I’m not supposed to, but sometimes, when mommy and daddy think I’m asleep, they talk about you. Daddy doesn’t like to, but mommy wonders sometimes.”

“Wonders?”

“Where you got to. They were told when you ran away. Thought you might come home.” She wrinkled her nose. “Guess they didn’t realize there wasn’t much to come back to.”

My heart broke further with every grave, measured word. No six year old girl should have to be this mature. I hated my father more the longer she spoke.

“So are you going to rescue me tonight? I packed last week when you watched me play the piano.”

I blanched. “Rescue you?”

Emma nodded. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To get me out too?”

This girl was good. Either she was being bluntly honest or she was manipulating me through pity; regardless, it was working.

“Right. Yes. I’m here to rescue you. Er, get your things.”

With a whispered yelp of excitement, Emma lugged a tiny purple backpack from under her bed and clambered out the window. She took my hand and looked up at me expectantly, as I wasn’t moving.

Jolted back to reality, I was suddenly afraid. How was I supposed to take care of the three of us? With Emma kidnapped, as my parents would see it, this gave us a whole new slew of problems, problems I wasn’t sure I was prepared to deal with.

Emma, exhausted after another grueling day of flashcards, was too tired to walk very far, so I ended up carrying her most of the way back to my little house.

The more time we walked, the more I recognized our resemblances. She was already lanky, as I had been. There was no doubt she was going to grow up tall. Her eyes were the same grey and size, and her fingers were long and graceful, like mine were. I was dragging home my twin, separated by thirteen years.

We didn’t get home until well after midnight, but Julie was still awake.

“Where have you been? I’ve-” she stopped as the lantern light fell onto Emma, asleep in my arms. “What is that?”

“That is my sister. Julie, meet Emma.”

Continued in part 23!