From Trash to Treasure

My family threw me out in the snow to freeze. I was ten. My crime: one extra piece of meat. So I decided to steal a missing girl's life and call her parents mine.

The flyer blew into my face while I was shaking inside a dumpster. A little girl in a red padded coat, hair in two neat braids, smiling up at the camera.

Her name was printed under the photo. Born the same year as me. Missing for six years. I fished a shard of mirror out of the trash and held it up to my face. Same eyes. Same nose.

Same mouth. My filthy, jaundiced little face grinned back at me. Dopey, exactly like hers. She had a birthmark on her arm. I had a bruise in the same spot. Same shape.

Put there by the same kind of hand. Her parents couldn't find her. Mine didn't want me. So I'd become her. Chapter 1 My last dollar, pinched between two fingers.

Up on my toes at the payphone. It rang. Someone picked up. "Hello? Are you calling with information?" My throat locked. "I'm—" Nothing came out. "I'm..." "It's alright.

Take your time. I'm listening." "I'm Adeline." The man went silent. A chair scraped, like he'd shot to his feet.

When he spoke again his voice was soft as cotton. "Where are you right now, sweetheart?" I gave him the address. The call died the second I finished. Last of my minutes, gone. Cold.

Starving. Would they believe me? Here's the thing about staying alive: you learn how to make people want to save you. I'd been doing it my whole life.

I scooped up a handful of snow and scrubbed my face clean. Nobody comes running for a filthy stray. I picked the spot under the cardboard where the streetlight would fall on me.

I curled up small and pitiful, the way the girl on the flyer would look if she were freezing. Keep the voice soft. Soft, and sweet, and hers. Then I waited.

A car stopped a little way off. A man and a woman climbed out, dressed like people off a TV screen. "Addie!" the man called. "You heard it too, didn't you? She said she was Adeline.

Are we really about to get our daughter back?" The woman's voice cracked. Her eyes swept the dark, hungry, hoping. "It was a child's voice.

Maybe this time..." The man pressed the corner of his eye. He looked maybe thirtyfive, and half his hair had already gone white. They called into the dark. Addie. Addie.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I tried again. And again. But some animal part of me had learned a long time ago that nobody comes for a girl like me.

It clamped my throat shut, because if I answered and they took one look and changed their minds, I didn't think I'd live through it. So I said nothing. They gave up. Doors shut.

Exhaust bloomed white in the cold, and the car pulled away. Then I cried. Ugly, scrapedraw, no sound to it but breath. The sky went dark. You know the little match girl?

When she froze to death, she struck her matches and saw a feast, a warm hearth, the grandmother who had loved her. I dug through the garbage. No matches.

Just a lighter with one swallow of fluid left in it. I lit the trash. Snow kept falling. The flame stayed small, so I fed it. Scraps of paper. A plastic bag.

It coughed up thick greenblack smoke. Why couldn't I see anything? The match girl had a grandmother waiting to carry her home. Nobody was coming to carry me anywhere.

The fire went out. What little warmth it left thinned into the dark. Just sleep, then. You fall asleep, you stop being cold. Somewhere far off, faint beneath the snow. An engine.

Chapter 2 I dropped into a pair of strong arms. Then into a softer pair that smelled sweet. So warm. I smiled with my eyes shut. Was this my next life?

My afterlife mother and father, come to carry me off? Take me with you. I woke to the smell of antiseptic and a white room. An IV taped to the back of my hand.

Soft clothes on my body. A box on the wall hummed and breathed out heat. Air conditioning, I'd learn to call it later. The cut on my arm itched. I wanted to claw at it.

A woman held my hand, slumped asleep against the edge of the bed. Her lips moved. "Addie." They'd come back. They'd found me. My heart slammed against my ribs. I didn't dare move.

I turned my head, just enough to study the side of her face. My stomach had other ideas. It growled like thunder and woke her.

She smiled. "Hungry?" She opened a food container and my eyes went wide. A whole chicken leg. Fish beside it, shrimp, greens. A bowl of rice porridge, still steaming.

She fed me herself. I ate the way I always ate. Fast. Swallowing around the drool, like it might get snatched away. She didn't rush me. Didn't call me a starving animal.

She just picked the bones out of the fish, peeled the shrimp, and made each bite a little smaller so I wouldn't choke. My nose started to burn.

I dropped my head and pressed the back of my hand hard against my eyes so she wouldn't see. I finished the whole thing before I could remember what any of it tasted like.

She dabbed my mouth with a napkin.

I ducked my chin. "Thank you." A breath. "Mama." She went still. "Say it again." I made myself look up at her. "Mama." She smiled, and the tears spilled over, and I reached up and wiped them away for her.

The man came in and caught us like that. Second time is easier than the first. "Papa," I said, right away. I'm Adeline. I am Adeline. I said it inside my head, over and over.

Wanda, the girl nobody wanted, died back there in the trash. I left her in it and walked away.

He gave an awkward little smile and smoothed my hair, and something like pity crossed his face. He was holding a few sheets of paper. Lots of writing on them. Mama read them.

The light went out of her face. And the hand that had been wrapped around mine came loose, finger by finger. The warmth left with it. I'd lived that second before.

The one where a person decides they're done with you. "Let's talk outside," Papa said to her, and he didn't look at me. "Baby.

Press the red button if you need anything." Their backs turned. The door swung shut behind them. And all at once I was back in the snow, and no one was coming.

I pulled the needle out of my hand and went after them