Matchbox Girls by Chrysoula Tzavelas Page A

brother was her mother and father mixed together! And she was—what was she?
    No matter what anybody told her, teenage eyes could see The Truth. Anybody who gave a baby up for adoption was wicked in the eyes of society. Adopting parents were heroes, but those who gave their children up were poor, which meant lazy, or unready for a child, which meant irresponsible—and they were almost certainly sexually active without being married, which was the most basic definition of a bad girl.
    Her adolescence had been a battlefield. She was so intent on proving that she'd been born unlovable that if it had just been her versus her parents, she probably would have succeeded in wrecking her life. But fortunately, she'd had Branwyn, and later Penny, to help stabilize her. They’d proved, over and over again, that some people thought she was worth caring about, even people who hadn’t invested as much as her parents.
    As she’d grown up and failed to convince her parents to reject her, the battlefield had faded away. Didn’t they all? And as the tempers of adolescence cooled, she realized and accepted that nothing could convince the woman who had raised her to stop being her mother. But that didn’t heal the wounds inside, scraped raw by constant teenage worrying at the question of her birth, and worrying at the truth of what she’d inherited from her genetic parents. It simply made her adopted parents saints.
    Guilt twisted inside her. She didn’t visit them enough. When her parents came to visit her, she had a good time, able to appreciate her family as she couldn’t ten years ago. But the old house was the site of too many fights, and too many tantrums she hadn’t yet forgiven herself for. They laughed about the new kitchen in the old house, which replaced the one she'd set on fire. But she couldn't laugh. Maybe if she'd been theirs biologically...
    She shook her head, shook away the bad habits that clustered around her like flies. As she’d told the twins, she could go home anytime she wanted. But that wouldn’t be today, especially not with who-knew-what after her.
    Lissa suddenly asked, “Are we taking the kitty?”
    Marley blinked. “Absolutely,” she said. “Thank you for reminding me.” Between the threatened evacuations from the wildfires, and the bad guys, she had no idea when or if she’d be able to get back. She wasn't leaving anybody behind.
    She looked around her apartment, searching out the cardboard cat carrier, and realized that, as Lissa had inadvertently pointed out, there was more to leaving than just responding to an initial instinct. She thought it was dangerous to remain at the apartment, and she wasn’t the only one who lived there.
    She’d have to talk to Branwyn. She thought about it a bit more. At least it gave her a short-term plan more focused than “running away.”
    It took longer than she liked to load the children and the cat, along with supplies for a few days, into the car. The girls were obedient, but too helpful, and the cat... a small cat can get places one would rather not stick one’s arm. Marley did her best not to think about it.
    After the kids were strapped in, she moved around the outside of the car, studying the tires and wondering how to tell if the vehicle had been sabotaged somehow. She felt the old familiar anxiety rise up, and hard on its heels came a realization: the medication had burned out of her system.
    Her thoughts were sharper and more focused than they’d been for a year or more. How had that happened?
    But she had no time to worry about it, because the kaleidoscope sight fractured her vision again. Neighbors walking through the parking lot rippled with a half-dozen variations on themselves, all wounded or scarred. But the twins, looking out the back window at her, were unchanged, without refractions.
    The sight calmed her. The anxiety vanished before it could become a full panic attack, and the kaleidoscope vision vanished with it.
    Marley let out her