The entire drive home is a nightmare. Her mom won't stop blaming herself and her dad keeps talking about finding "their" daughter. Bay can't stop the questions that enter her head. Is she that bad a person that they can't wait to find her replacement? Why else would her mom - not her mom - be blaming herself for not noticing sooner that Bay didn't belong to her?
Bay's life has been turned completely upside down. She thought she wanted this. Proof that she was some kind of mutant-vampire in a family of strawberry-blonde perfect people. But she never actually thought it would be true. She never considered the possibility of seriously belonging to some other family.
She walks into the house and it doesn't feel like home. Bay always thought she felt out of place before. But really, what she felt before is nothing compared to this. She walks slowly through each room. She feels shock, and sadness. She stares at the pictures of her with this family and wonders where her own could be.
"Hey! How'd the appointment go? Are you an alien species?" Toby asks, coming up to her and grinning. They haven't told him.
"I'm not your sister," Bay says, with no animosity in her tone. With tears in her eyes.
In an uncharacteristic move, he embraces her and holds on. She should cry. She should feel something, but there is just this numbness she can't get past. "Maybe not by blood," he says. "But where it counts, you are."
"I wish Mom and Dad felt the same…" Bay says, pulling back and looking him in the eye. "They're all about payback and finding the kid that should have been me…" she pauses, looking around. "This house doesn't even feel like I belong in it anymore. It feels like my whole life was a huge joke, and everything I know was pulled out from under me…"
Toby just listens. "Did Mom and Dad really say that?"
"Pretty much…" Bay responds, dropping into a chair. Once there, she finds she can't sit still. "I'm going out. Cover for me, will you?"
"Are you going to be okay?" he asks, somehow still knowing her, even though Bay finds, she does not know herself.
"Sure," she says, and walks to the garage, where there are no pictures of the family. No strange house where she feels she never should have lived. The only pictures here are the ones she creates.
Bay grabs her stencils, and her paint. She gets on her bike and rides. Normally she would balk riding a bike when she could take her parents' car out. Illegal, yes, but so much fun. For this, though, she didn't want anything that might lead police back to her. A license plate would do that. So she rode to the spot that felt more like home than her own home did. An empty wall, in a totally sketchy part of town. This, somehow, feels right.
She tapes up the stencil, shakes the can and starts to paint. The girl in the pink dress is looking behind her, much like Bay has been doing ever since she has found out. Minutes later, she rides away, casting furtive glances over her shoulder checking for police. Bay feels a heaviness in her chest. She doesn't look back anymore. The girl on the wall is doing that enough for both of them.
It isn't perfect, but then, nothing in her life really is.
Now, at least, some part of her, can feel at home somewhere.