Matchbox Girls by Chrysoula Tzavelas

strangely scabbed area, so it didn’t look quite so hideous.
    When she was done, she felt a bit better. The state of the injury itself linked to a whole sea of questions. But there’d be time to worry about those later. At least, there would be if she could avoid being shot at again.
    The twins were both sitting outside the bathroom door when she opened it, staring up at her with wide, worried eyes. “Hi,” she said, and stepped over them to find some clean clothes.
    “Don’t send us away!” burst Kari. “We’ll be really, really good.”
    Marley paused in the process of buttoning up her shirt. “Why do you think I’m sending you away?”
    “You packed up all our stuff!”
    Marley glanced over at the couch. So she had. “All of us are going. Together.” But the expressions on both little faces remained dubious.
    Marley sighed and sat down on her bed. “Come here and sit beside me; I want to tell you a little story.” When they were snuggled up next to her, she went on. “When I was a baby, my first mommy decided she didn’t want me. So she left me at a hospital, and I got a new mommy, and a daddy, too. My new mommy loved me very much, but I was always worried she was going to give me away, especially if I misbehaved. But she never ever did. Whenever I was difficult, she just gave me a hug, like this, and told me how lucky she felt that she got to be my mommy. Just like my new mommy wouldn’t send me away, no matter what I did, I’m not going to send you away, or go away from you. We’re going to go find Zachariah together.” She looked between their faces, hoping they had followed at least the essential point.
    Kari said, “Where’s your second mommy now?”
    “She lives south of here. It’s a bit of a drive, but whenever I want to go home, I can.”
    Lissa said, “Why did your first mommy not want you?”
    Marley flinched inwardly, but her voice was calm as she said, “Nobody knows. Most likely she couldn’t take care of me very well and wanted me to have a better life.” She ignored the child’s voice raging inside: She could have done it through proper channels, she didn’t have to just abandon me.
    Both twins were quiet, absorbing the story. Marley hugged them again and stood up to pack her own bag. She didn’t know where she was going, but she knew she couldn’t stay in the apartment, waiting for her mysterious enemies to come to her. The pair of women had been moving toward her home from the park.
    She stole a glance at the children while she unzipped a backpack. Kari was quietly repeating the story to her doll, changing it so it was the doll who never left her. Lissa was watching Marley with a solemn, thoughtful gaze.
    Marley hoped that the kids would never experience as much of the angst-filled side of adoption as she had. When she’d been nine, an unexpected baby brother had joined the family in the traditional way. By the time she was twelve, she and her parents had become aware of all the ways that her brother’s heredity made him like her parents. In comparison, all the ways she was different stood out as they never had before.
    Her mother, a screenwriter, and her father, an effects programmer, could share their love of stories with her, but they couldn’t teach her extroversion, or not to worry so much. They taught her to be practical, but they couldn't teach her to be cheerful. They couldn't teach her to be tall . She was just so different, and she'd realized it right around the time puberty hit and made things really complicated.
    She’d always known she was adopted; the evidence of the fostering process was too omnipresent in her very young childhood to just ignore. The story she’d told the twins was one, with some wording changes, that her parents had told her. Her parents had been quicker to assume the best of intentions on her birth mother’s part. But by thirteen, Marley no longer believed them. Heredity clearly influenced a lot, at least as much as upbringing. Her