3: 3
By the dim light of the stairwell I studied her closely, and in that moment I realized how much more we looked alike than I'd thought.
Illness had left her pale and drawn, but the shape of her face and the way her hair fell were exactly like mine.
The twisting pain in my chest, which had only just begun to ease, surged up again, and without thinking I braced myself against the wall.
She walked slowly up to me and said softly,
“Elle? I'm sorry. I didn't come to find you to cause trouble.”
“I only wanted to ask you something. You like Marlin, don't you?”
I stared at her and said nothing.
I didn't want to lay this twisted love at the feet of a girl who had so little time left.
None of this was her fault. The one at fault was the man who was using me as a stand-in.
“I know you like him. The way you look at him is exactly the way I look at him.”
As she said it her voice grew urgent, and she reached out as if to grab hold of me, then let her hand fall weakly back.
“Elle, after I'm gone, will you take care of him for me?”
I stood there staring at Carmen Fox, and the whole thing struck me as utterly absurd.
In a way, she and Marlin were rather alike.
One of them wanted a stand-in to numb himself; the other, afraid of his grief, wanted the stand-in to stay by his side.
She bit her lip, her eyes rimmed red, and forced the words out through a sob,
“He seems mature, but he's actually so childish. The smallest thing sets him off, and he gets stuck in his own head……”
“When I'm gone, he's sure to cry. And once he's cried, he'll bottle it up. He'd never let anyone see.”
“He's afraid of the dark, too. He hates being alone. At night he always needs a light on to fall asleep.”
With every word she said, my heart sank a little further.
The Marlin I remembered was always calm, always level-headed.
But it turned out that was only because he never needed to show me anything fragile.
His childishness, his fears—all of it belonged only to the Carmen Fox standing in front of me.
The dull ache in my chest swelled harder, and I cut her off, my voice hoarse.
“I don't like Marlin. You've got the wrong person.”
I couldn't bear to look at the shock in her eyes, and even less could I bear to admit that I was nothing but a pitiful replacement.
Like some disgraced coward, I turned and fled.
I ran the whole way back to my room, hastily swallowed the medicine the nurse had brought, and had just started to lie down when a panicked screaming rose up from below.
“Someone jumped!”
“It's Miss Fox—Carmen Fox jumped!”
