You Can't Catch Me by Catherine McKenzie

Author:Catherine McKenzie [McKenzie, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

Replacements

After the funeral and the conversation on the dock with Kiki, I was feeling down. Not because Todd was dead, but because of everything that Todd had done. Kiki was right. I was as stuck as the rest of them. I might’ve left, but I hadn’t moved on. Besides Liam and The Twists, I didn’t have any close friends. My life didn’t feel permanent, and despite all my studying, I didn’t fit in at college like everyone else did. I had a fake backstory ready for when people asked: I’d grown up in a small town that no one had ever heard of, been homeschooled, moved to the big city, and that was it. Nothing to see here, folks! I never mentioned Todd. I never used the word cult. The scar on my wrist was hidden most of the time and was from an accident, if someone happened to see it. My parents were dead.

Only they weren’t. My mother, Therese, was standing right there in front of me as I walked back to the Gathering Place. She was dressed in white—Todd hated black, and I’d worn a black dress to the funeral out of spite rather than mourning—and her hair had gone completely gray. She’d cut it short, and with her thinness and the hard planes of her face, she might’ve been a man. She still had that light in her eyes, though, this clear certainty that dissuaded me from asking too many questions.

I’d avoided eye contact with her and my father during the funeral, but I couldn’t help but notice that there was a child standing with them. She looked to be about four, though it was hard to tell, as children in the Land of Todd were often small for their age. She was dressed in one of the Scout uniforms I used to wear, and her blonde hair was in two braids. She looked enough like me at that age that it was disconcerting. Who was she? Had my parents had a replacement child after I’d left? No, that was impossible—they were too old. Did they kidnap her from somewhere? I wouldn’t put it past them. Why was my mother holding her hand? Why was this little girl leaning against my mother as if she was someone who could provide comfort?

What the hell was happening?

“Hello, Jessica,” my mother said when I’d gotten to within ten feet of her.

“Therese.”

She flinched. “I wish you’d call me Mom.”

“You must be joking. ‘There are no mothers or fathers. Only citizens. We all belong to one another—’”

“Stop.”

“What? You don’t want to hear the words of your precious Todd anymore?”

My father came out of the lodge with my aunt Tanya. He went by the name Trevor, a T name like the rest of them. I was supposed to change my name to one when I turned eighteen, but that had never happened. I wondered what Kiki’s name was now, but I also didn’t want to know.

My father wasn’t wearing white. Just a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt that had a faded college logo on it.

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