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You’re No Better

Page 86

by Andrew Joseph White

I unfold the wallet, my dirty fingers prying through the compartments. Inside, there are a few stray dollars. A library card. A coupon for a restaurant.

A North Carolina driver’s license.

In the tiny black-and-white picture, Jane Doe looks tired, but she is alive. Staring down the DMV camera in mild apathy and lived-in dishevelment, the usual expression required for driver’s license photos. Her signature is neat and looping. According to the date of birth listed, she would’ve been twenty-six this year.

Her name is Cordelia Sutherland.

It’s not a name that means anything to me. For a moment, I thought I might see a last name I recognized: a story coming full circle, some cosmic loop.

I don’t recognize it at all, but the name still means everything. Cordelia Sutherland. A human name. A name with history, with family, with a chance to put everything to rest. A chance to dismantle the suffocating Saw trap that my life has become.

And when I peel the driver’s license out of its plastic cover with trembling half-numb fingers, a picture comes out, too.

It’s tiny and faded with age. A two-by-three on photo paper, the kind you’d get printed at CVS or Walgreens years ago. It reminds me of the crinkly photo albums in Alyssa’s house, the ones her dad keeps tucked away on the living room bookshelf. Candid, with bad lighting and a cluttered background, showing a messy floor.

It’s of a slightly younger Cordelia Sutherland with a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old, in a cramped, dirty home. It’s an awkward attempt at a selfie with what has to be a disposable Kodak camera. They’re both laughing.

The little girl—around the nose, the chin—looks a lot like Felicity.

Behind me, Felicity Keating’s switchblade goes snkt.

Anonymous 03/01/20XX (XX) 00:40:07 ID: 8d482c No.11829482

»11829479 (OP)

You don’t think the daughter is innocent, do you? It’s too late for her. She’s already a monster. Someone should put her down.

Felicity’s desperation in that bathroom stall with a blade to my face, threatening me as blood streamed hot and sticky across their neck.

The driver’s license, the photo, the documentary, if my bio parents find out I’m alive—

Their dead sister.

They knew who Jane Doe was this whole time.

I brace myself, wait for the pain of the knife: the plunge of it into my skin.

But it doesn’t come. There’s only the sound of Felicity’s hitching breath, the shaky inhale that comes before the breakdown.

“Felicity,” I say carefully. Like I’m trapped in this room with a snarling dog, or my father. “Put that down.”

They don’t.

“You look a lot like her,” I say. It’s clear now. Without the blood or bloat of death that obscured her in the crime scene photographs and autopsy reports, it’s obvious. “That’s why you dye your hair, right.”

In the silence that follows, I turn, try to catch sight of them over my shoulder. Felicity is a sniveling mess, tears leaking from puffy red eyes.

When I was ten, I didn’t just help kill Cordelia Sutherland. I traded their sister’s life for mine.

“She—” Felicity gasps through sobs. “She was here. She was here. You took her.”

I did. I admitted to it. In the bookstore that afternoon, the two of us exhausted and eating cupcakes while staring at crime scene photos. Only one of us was going to make it, me or Cordelia, and I picked me.

“I saw you,” they whimper. Shaking with the effort of maintaining what’s left of their composure. “In the lobby. Through the window. And then—and then she didn’t come back—”

They wail. A noise like an injured animal.

Felicity didn’t want Cordelia’s name for their podcast; considering the past thirty seconds, I wouldn’t be surprised if the podcast didn’t exist. What they wanted was to keep Cordelia’s name a secret. They needed to destroy the evidence before Hexagon Productions could stumble across it—before this driver’s license and faded little picture made it onto every TV and phone in the country.