Sara Sue realises early on that a major city where you don't speak the language is not a great place to be a twelve year old girl on her own. She draws a man dropping his wallet unnoticed in the busy street, signs it, and snatches the wallet up when it materialises on the ground, but when she opens it, she finds it's full of currency-sized sketchbook pages instead of the francs she wanted.
She draws caricatures and sketches for tourists, enough to earn a little money, which she copies and recopies slavishly until she's satisfied with the likeness. When she scrawls her name at the bottom of the page, there's a small stack of francs in front of her.
Cafes and restaurants are fine; with her newly-minted currency, she can buy a meal and a place in the warm to sit and watch and sketch the people walking by. When night falls, it gets a little harder; she has enough now to pay for a hotel room, but knows that a child on her own checking into a hotel is going to attract concerned attention from the adults manning the desk.
She draws a hole in the wall of a large department store, opens it, and walks up to the third floor where they sell furniture. That night, in a private world she and the Eerie Number 2 pencil created between them, she jumps from bed to bed in her dirty shoes, shrieking and throwing things and generally acting like her brothers had always done, and like she had never been allowed to.
There's a cafe on the top floor. The ovens are cold and she can't figure out if there's a microwave or possibly a time machine sitting on one of the stainless-steel countertops, but there are plastic-wrapped sandwiches and she fills both her stomach and her backpack, then falls asleep on one of the sofas.
In the morning, she hides in the changing rooms when the first employees arrive, draws a dark tunnel that leads out into a quiet park with a still pond, and slips through it. When she's free and clear, she rips the sketch up to destroy the tunnel, and is almost hit by a car when her quiet park becomes a busy road. After that, she's careful only to draw the places she's seen.
She queues for hours to get into the Louvre, the first time. Afterwards, she can come and go at will thanks to a drawing of the public bathrooms, appearing by the soap dispenser at all hours of the day and night. It becomes a game to dodge the security guards, to trigger the alarms and draw some back alley or restaurant booth, to sign her name and vanish and reappear, laughing with the adrenaline and the sheer, giddy knowledge that she is misbehaving and getting away with it.
She draws herself new clothes, walks the streets in pastel-pink party gowns and designer tennis shoes, but eventually she wants to be able to sleep in a bed without the need to constantly stay alert. It's the first time she's drawn her mother since leaving Eerie, and she cries for an hour when she's done and Marilyn Teller appears in front of her.
The paper doll that is her new mother holds her and whispers soothing things in it's faint, whispering voice, and eventually Sara Sue calms down enough to have it walk over to the nearest hotel and book a room for the next two weeks. She's in the bath when her new mother knocks on the door to ask if she'd like anything from room service. When the chocolate mousse arrives, fake-Marilyn brings it in and Sara Sue watches in horror as her new mother's foot softens and dissolves when it comes into contact with a puddle on the tiled floor. The paper doll doesn't show any signs of discomfort, but Sara Sue finds she doesn't want that chocolate mousse after all.
She finds the stores aimed at tourists, steals phrasebooks and teaches herself French. Her creations prove useless in that regard; they only know what she herself knows, so she practises on the staff at the hotel, who are charmed by the shy little American girl who hides behind her hair and makes such an effort to learn the language. They murmur that it's a shame her mother doesn't care to teach her, and slip extra desserts onto the room service trays they deliver to her room on a nightly basis.
Sara Sue is careful to change hotels every few weeks, to avoid attracting too much attention. She find life-drawing classes and slips in and out of them for as long as they hold her attention. One night, she's caught in the rain on the way back from one class, and her mind is full of the things she's learned when she steps into the hotel lobby and sees the receptionist's face go white.
When she turns around, her new mother's face is melting. Pieces of Marilyn Teller slough away to reveal the hollowness beneath, and Sara Sue doesn't wait, doesn't try to repair the damage or stumble her way through a lie. She turns and runs back out into the dark, and doesn't stop running until she's bent double with a stitch in her side and her head pounding so hard from her racing heart that she thinks she might throw up, or pass out, or possibly both at the same time.
Her second mother is tall and blonde, with the sort of curves she recalls from the magazines her father used to leave lying around the house back in Eerie, but it's still Marshall's mom smiling down at her from atop hot-pink stiletto heels when she signs her name and brings her creation to life. The new doll collects their doorkey from a gawping hotel clerk, and Sara Sue throws herself onto the kingsized bed and cries herself to sleep.
The next morning, waking to see the new doll stood in the corner of the room with it's back to her, Sara Sue hangs a do-not-disturb sign on the doorknob, locks herself in the bathroom and spends the entire day staring at herself in the mirror, furiously working on a version of her own face that is a little older, and perhaps not so very sad.
It takes hours, and when it's finally done she's stiff and cold and tired and hungry. She orders room service, and when it comes she eats it in bed with the covers pulled up around her ears and the TV on, showing some programme that she can now follow almost in it's entirety. She's asleep when the paper doll removes the half-eaten tray from the bed, smoothes her long hair back from her forehead, and lays her down on the mattress.
It's four weeks before Sara Sue can bring herself to sign this latest sketch, and when she does, she closes her eyes and waits for the sound of movement behind her, for the scent of perfume that she's absolutely sure she'll recognise and for a voice that will be just like hers, except maybe a little deeper and perhaps not so very quiet.
She waits for what seems to be a long, long time. The air smells like paper, and pencil shavings, and the hotel soap she uses. When she opens her eyes, she's still the only person in the room. The doll rustles a little in the breeze from the half-opened window.
When she looks in the mirror, she has to clamp a hand across her mouth to muffle her scream. Her face is gone, and the face from her drawing looks back at her, the cheekbones a little higher, smile-lines around the mouth and crows feet around eyes the same shade of brown as her own. Sara Sue moves her hands away from her face, tilts her head, and in the mirror, her mother tilts her head the same way and beams out at her.