Summary: As Amanda grows up in the juvenile detention center, she creates the girl who isn't her, a girl who never had to hurt as she did, and the girl who is the only part of her capable of setting the world right again. Warnings for slight allusion to rape as well as abuse in the foster system, as mostly canonical references to the backgrounds of these characters.
Amanda Clarke is eleven when she invents Emily.
She's not stupid. She knows Emily isn't real, she knows she isn't Emily. Emily is pretend, and a secret, because if she told anyone about Emily then she would be given even more of the drugs that make her not want to eat, or be sick, or not able to think, or want to find a knife to drive through her wrists.
Emily is just the girl that Amanda is not. Her fake doppelganger. Emily doesn't wake up in the middle of the night screaming because men in black have come for her again. Emily cries for her father and mother, but not because her father is a terrible man in prison, but because her father and mother had a tragic accident and died long ago. Emily goes to school and she reads history books and the only pill she takes is one multivitamin that she knows is healthy for a growing girl.
Amanda doesn't get a mirror in her cell, after all the kids that broke them and caused paperwork, but sometimes out in the open areas she gets a glimpse in a window of her face, her blondish curls, and if she angles her face just right she can see Emily's face, which shows no marks of ever going without good food, or a restful night's sleep.
When nobody's looking, Amanda winks at Emily, and Emily winks back.
There are classes in juvie and Amanda does all her homework quickly enough that she can read and re-read all the books in the small library. (On the good days, anyway. Some days the medications steal.) When she is thirteen, she reads some trivial novel about a New York socialite who spends her summers in the Hamptons.
That's my life, she realizes, in a way she never quite realized before. That's the life I had. That's the life before all of Dad's friends said all those things about him that could never be true. Amanda looks around: she lives in a nine-by-thirteen cell and steals pencils to draw the beach, the sea on the lumpy paint of her walls.
That, she decides now, is Emily's life. Emily spends her summers in Southampton after boarding school in Switzerland all year, because she misses the New England beaches. Though her father never taught her how to anchor her feet in the sand until she couldn't feel the cold water, trips to Lake Constance taught her how to numb herself and swim until all her muscles burned. Emily, Amanda decides, has her first boyfriend at thirteen, a shy boy named Marco from Germany, and they do nothing more than hold hands.
Amanda doesn't have a first boyfriend. Just a poorly supervised hallway during the time everyone is allowed out of their cells, and an older boy named David who is already on a list. But she doesn't say a word about what he did so that the nurses won't call her a liar again, and that night she curls up on her thin mattress and pretends to be Emily, who was never afraid.
At fourteen, Amanda plots to escape juvie, with vague ideas that she'll pretend to be older, find a way to fake being a lawyer and arrange a meeting with her father. She just needs to see her father again and then... and then, she doesn't know, but she has to see her father again.
Amanda silently observes all the guards, the administrators, the doctors that come in to examine the inmates. All of them know her: she's been locked up for five years. She can see all the details, but that doesn't add up to a plan of escape.
But Emily, who has been sneaking out of her Swiss boarding school for trysts with an older boy named Mikhail, is better at plans. Amanda wonders if she is crazy, now, for allowing Emily to be this real that she has a different personality, one that doesn't mind manipulation and can disregard a guilty conscience. But it doesn't stop her from stealing a plastic ruler from her geometry class, breaking off a sharp shard and slitting her wrists (across, not down, as Lauren from three cells down had told her.) When she's carried to the infirmary, she relishes feeling bad about attacking the nurse and threatening her with the needle she had jammed into Amanda's arm (but hadn't injected the sedative yet.) She makes it to the outer room and slips past the guards; she is a ghost they cannot grab.
Amanda makes it all the way to the locked front doors and a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, and more medications. She spends the next month in a haze, and tells herself it's just the smuggled schnapps that Emily and her boarding school friends are partying with every night.
At sixteen, Amanda knows she should be learning to drive, thinking about college, doing... okay, she's not sure, but perhaps there is cheerleading or being captain of the equestrian team involved. She has learned to play by the rules and be who she's expected to be, so she starts dyeing her hair black and letting it hang long and straight down her back. Maintaining the image gives her something to do, and she looks like a resentful teenager, so everyone is well satisfied.
She plans out Emily's life in intricate detail, though she rarely dares to write any of it down. Sometimes she draws pictures of where Emily lives, her houses around the world. Emily took a trip to Cambodia the summer she turned seventeen, to see the ancient temples and stay on a private island off the coast, Song Saa. But perhaps by accident and perhaps by fate, she sees the impoverished of Cambodia, overhears the whispers of human trafficking. Some of the other wealthy families holidaying there talk about the charities they give to and how it helps those poor people, their voices oozing with condescension and pride that they do so much for those poor, poor people. Emily, one day, goes wandering around market on the mainland for souvenirs and gets lost. She finds herself on the docks where women are being loaded into a shipping container by men, and observes the proceedings for a minute. Then she wanders over to the man directing everybody, the one with a gun, and prettily asks him for directions back to the market. Before stumbling, bumping into him, and setting his gun off to shoot through his knee. He trips back, off the dock, hitting his head on a support as he goes down. He does not come up again.
Emily is not sorry.
The women flee from the container, their guards having disappeared when the supplier of their cash didn't rise from the ocean. But Emily is gone, back to the market. She did what mattered.
Amanda looks around her at the guards, the administrators. They serve a system, and they are mindless. She is in this place because of her father's business associates. He is in prison because of them. Amanda and David, both gagged and locked up and tidily disposed of, because the last thing the wealthy in the Hamptons want is an embarrassing mess.
But Emily is like them, and not like them. She knows how to fit in and never let her feelings show, which might let someone have power over her. And Emily likes, very much, to carefully build something and then, very precisely, knock it down.
It is not long after that Amanda meets a real Emily, who promptly tries to strangle her. Amanda resents this, and Emily Thorne resents her right back, and the two of them provide cafeteria entertainment until one of the administrators steps in. Win Emily Thorne over, she says, and she'll be yours for life.
It's almost like she knows she's talking to Amanda's Emily. And Emily responds.
Emily entrusts this Thorne girl with a bit of her past (as the world knows it, anyway). At this sign of trust, Thorne spills her whole story, how she went from foster home to foster home, the bruises, the foster father she put up with until she found him in the room of her five-year-old foster sister. Thorne tells her about how good the knife from the kitchen felt in her hand the next night, in the dark. How it was worth it. Revenge is not the hollow thing everyone will tell you it is; revenge is a balance in the world.
Amanda falls asleep, thinking of Victoria Grayson and what the shock of revenge fulfilled would look like on her pale face. For the first time in a long time, Amanda sleeps peacefully, with a psychotic murderer sleeping on the bunk above her.
From that moment on, as if Emily Thorne just needed to release the burden of her story to let steam off instead of regularly exploding, she and Amanda are sisters, born into a world that never intended to give them a chance at life.
It is several months after Amanda's release that Emily Thorne is released. She spends the time discovering her father from the new perspective of a woman who knows numbers and can guess at business; she contacts his old friends discreetly, to see which of his contacts are still willing to hear his name mentioned. She uses her new money to start creating documents for Emily Thorne to become Amanda Clarke and a paper trail tying her to the identity of Emily Thorne. She takes a few jobs, watching the socialites of New York circle each other like hawks, all predatory eyes and smooth plumage. She holds a champagne tray out to them while watching how they walk, how confidently they fill their skin as if they never need fear losing anything.
And Amanda exercises, and sleeps, and purges the last of the antipsychotics and sedatives from her body. It hurts, but she tells herself that it is only the pain of her dead old skin being sloughed away. A new girl is emerging. A new girl who will step into the role her father left for her, who spends her money wisely, on charities that put her in the same circles as the people who put her father away.
Some days she stares at her passport, the one that says Emily on it, and feels freedom opening inside of her.
Emily Thorne is amenable to the trade of identities and even more amenable to the money that comes with it. She would do anything for her chosen sister: while the families you are born into may screw you over, the family you choose is always there for you. Emily Thorne knows this, because Amanda said it, and Amanda is smart.
As they sit in the hotel room, the former Emily Thorne shuffling through her new identity and the details of the history she now has, Amanda gives over the last vestiges of the girl who made up stories, who cried alone in the dark, who was shut away and meant to never be heard from again. She pushes away the shame and the defensiveness and the longing for the whole truth that has always haunted her. She pushes away the helplessness and fear: she will never panic again.
She is finally, at last, free to be Emily, after all these years.