The day the special police raided the scam operation, I was sitting on a small stool memorizing fraud scripts. Captain Luke Reynolds snatched the phone from my hand, his voice sharp with anger. "You could come and go freely. You even had your phone. Why didn't you call the police?" I clutched my fraud notebook tightly to my chest and shook my head blankly. "Call the police? So you could send me back home? But Captain, even breathing is a luxury there." Luke stood frozen in place. Since I was twelve, my grandmother had installed tiny cameras in my room — by my bed, at my desk, even in the bathroom — so she could monitor me around the clock. Every time I showered, I watched that little red light blinking, and I could barely breathe. I cried and begged my mother for help, but she only said: "Evelyn, I work so hard to make ends meet. Your grandmother only does this because she cares about you so much." When I was sixteen, I saw a guy with bleached hair on the street and walked straight into that scam den. I couldn't stand another second in that suffocating house.
When Luke grabbed the notebook from my arms, my instinct was to lunge forward and bite his hand. Two young officers held me back. I kicked my legs, eyes locked on that blue-covered notebook. "Give it back! It's mine!" Luke flipped open the notebook and stopped. He turned page after page. There wasn't a single fraud script inside. Just locks. All kinds of locks. Padlocks, deadbolts, security locks, combination locks. Each one had detailed cross-section diagrams with the internal mechanisms labeled. Even the number of pins was clearly marked. He closed the notebook, glanced at me, and shoved me into the back seat of the police car. The moment the door shut, my eyes swept across the corner of the ceiling. A small black sphere with a red light on top. A dashcam. I pressed my back against the car door, curled into a ball, and my teeth started chattering. "What's wrong with her?" The young officer driving glanced at me in the rearview mirror. Luke turned around and frowned. "Turn off that dashcam in the back." "But regulations —" "Turn it off." The red light went out. My teeth kept chattering, but my body slowly relaxed. At the station, a short-haired female officer poured me a cup of hot water. Luke sat across from me, flipped through a file, and looked up. "Your family reported you missing. Did you know that?" I didn't respond. "You were cleaning at that operation. You had freedom of movement. Why didn't you think to call the police?" "What would you have done if I had?" "Sent you home, of course." "I didn't want to go home. Why would I call?" Luke's pen stopped. "You can charge me with fraud," I said. Luke put down his pen and reopened my file. After flipping two pages, his finger stopped on one line. "Evelyn Carter. Social Security number marked deceased." He turned the file around to show me. "Two years after you disappeared, your legal guardian applied for a declaration of death." "Legally, you're already dead." I looked at that line and smiled slightly. "Being dead is nice." "What do you mean?" "Dead people don't get watched." Luke didn't press further. He had the female officer take me to a single rest room. The room was small — one bed, one table, one incandescent bulb. The first thing I did after entering was stand on a chair, take off my jacket, and cover the smoke detector on the ceiling. That round white thing looked too much like a camera. After covering it, I climbed down from the chair and sat on the cot for a while. Then I lay down. The ceiling was stark white. Nothing there. No red lights. No reflective circles. No pinholes hidden in stuffed animal eyes. This was a clean room. Though it was a police station rest room, I slept soundly. In the hallway, Luke watched through the one-way glass as I curled up on the bed. He stayed silent for a long time. "Contact her family. Pull the police reports from back then." Officer Foster acknowledged on the other end of the line. Luke glanced once more at me sleeping behind the glass and lowered his voice. "And find out when her family filed that death declaration."
The next day, the station brought in a psychological evaluator. Dr. Morgan was a woman in her early forties wearing gold-rimmed glasses. She seemed kind. She pulled a voice recorder from her bag and placed it on the table. There was an indicator light on top of the recorder. When she pressed the switch, it lit up. Red. My stomach clenched violently. I vomited the oatmeal I'd eaten for breakfast all over the floor. Dr. Morgan jumped, quickly offering tissues. I pushed her hand away and dry-heaved several times. Tears streamed down my face. Luke heard the commotion and pushed through the door. He glanced at the recorder on the table with its red light and reached over to turn it off. "Put away anything with indicator lights." Dr. Morgan opened her mouth but said nothing. She packed the recorder back in her bag. Luke pulled a pen and a palm-sized notebook from his pocket and set them on the table. "Nothing is watching you now." He sat across from me. "You can talk." I wiped my mouth with a tissue and stared at the table for a long time. "What do you want me to say?" "Start from the beginning." I closed my eyes and began to remember. On my twelfth birthday, my grandmother gave me a teddy bear. Brown, palm-sized, fluffy, very cute. I slept with it for three days. On the fourth night, when I rolled over, my arm bumped the bear's head. In the darkness, I saw the bear's right eye flashing. Blinking red light. I took the bear to my desk lamp and dug the eye out with my fingernail. A pinhole camera, lens pointed right at my bed. Holding the now one-eyed teddy bear, I ran downstairs barefoot. My grandmother was sitting in the living room watching TV. "Grandma, what is this?" She glanced at the camera in my hand. Her expression didn't change at all. "Your father's dead, your mother's not home. I'm an old woman who can't keep an eye on you. What's wrong with installing something to watch you?" I said I didn't want it. She ignored me and changed the channel. I called my mother. On the other end, my mother's voice was exhausted and tearful. "Evelyn, do you know how hard I work to support this family?" "You're your grandmother's only granddaughter. What's wrong with her watching you? Can't you understand what I'm going through?" I told her my grandmother had installed a camera in my room. My mother was silent for two seconds. "She's old and worried about you. Don't fight with her. I'm begging you, okay?" The call ended. The next day, the teddy bear's eye was replaced with a new one. Still red. Luke's pen stopped on the notebook. "And then?" Then there were more and more. One in the pencil holder on my desk. One on top of the wardrobe. One behind the alarm clock on my nightstand. One above the door frame. Every time I found one, I destroyed it. My grandmother just replaced it with a new one, hidden in a more concealed spot. The winter I turned fourteen, while showering, I happened to look up at the exhaust fan. Through the gaps in the metal blades, something was reflecting light. I stood on the wet bathroom tiles, completely naked, staring at that reflection for a full minute. Then I grabbed the showerhead and smashed it. The next day when I came home from school, my bedroom door was gone. The bathroom door was gone too. Even the door frames had been removed. The doorways gaped open. My grandmother stood in the hallway leaning on her cane. "You love smashing things? Fine. I removed the doors so you can't close yourself in and do god knows what." From that day on, I changed clothes, showered, and used the toilet without any doors. I tried using a shower curtain. My grandmother had someone remove the curtain rod. I tried blocking with a chair. My grandmother had all the chairs removed from my room. When I was fifteen, my uncle's son Dylan came to stay during summer vacation. He was a year younger than me. He brought four or five male classmates. That afternoon I was changing out of my school uniform in my room. The doorway was wide open. I faced away from the hallway, moving quickly. Laughter echoed from the corridor. I turned around. Dylan was holding my grandmother's phone, the screen showing a live surveillance feed. Four boys crowded behind him, watching together. "Hahaha, look at her." I rushed over to grab the phone. Dylan shoved me away hard. He was half a head taller than me. The push sent me crashing into the door frame. The back of my head hit hard, raising a bump. I got up and went to find my grandmother. "Grandma, Dylan used the surveillance to watch me change." My grandmother was in the kitchen making chicken soup for Dylan. She didn't even turn around. "What's there to see on a worthless girl like you?" "If you had half your cousin's promise, would I need to watch you like this?" I said I'd call the police. When the cane came down, I didn't dodge in time. Three strikes across my back. My clothes tore. Blood seeped through. My mother called that evening. I thought she'd stand up for me, but instead she said: "Evelyn, Dylan's still young and doesn't know better. Don't hold it against him."
She cried on the phone. "Do you know how hard it is for me out here alone? I'm so grateful your grandmother helps me take care of you." "Just endure it. Once Dylan gets into college, things will get better." But he wasn't my brother. He was my uncle's son. My uncle was my grandmother's youngest son, her precious baby. And my father was the eldest son. An unwanted eldest son who was now dead. When I was sixteen, I found a waterproof camera in the bathroom drain. This time, I didn't smash it. I started secretly saving money, skimming from my lunch money — one dollar, two dollars — hiding it in the lining of my backpack. I saved for two months. One hundred forty dollars. But my grandmother found the hidden compartment. That night, she locked me in the basement. All four walls of the basement were covered with screens. More than a dozen screens of various sizes — some old phones, some tablets. Every screen was playing surveillance footage. My room, my desk, me changing clothes, me using the toilet, me hiding under my blanket crying at night... Four years of footage, all there. My grandmother locked the basement door. From outside the iron door, her voice leaked through the gap. "You were born a Carter, you'll die a Carter. Don't even think about escaping my grasp." I stayed in that basement for three days. Surrounded by images of myself. Countless versions of "me" staring at me from the screens. When I was released on the third day, I'd vomited six times. For the next month, I dry-heaved at the sight of anything reflective. Luke's notebook was filled with writing. He never looked up. "Did your mother know about all this?" "She knew everything." "What was her attitude?" "When she wiped the blood off me, she'd cover my mouth so I couldn't cry out loud." "She'd say, 'Just endure it. Once Dylan gets into college, things will get better.'" When I was sixteen, my grandmother sent me to the store to buy eggs. When I reached the intersection, a guy with bleached hair shoved a flyer into my hand. "Health and wellness seminar. Free attendance, plus free eggs." The back of the flyer had an address. Very remote. I held it and looked for a moment. The guy walked toward a white van parked by the roadside. The windows weren't tinted. I could see the seats inside from outside. I scanned the interior. No cameras, no red lights. "Where's this seminar held?" The guy turned back with a grin. "Get in the car and you'll see. Real close." I knew this was probably a scam. Those days, fraud operations were all over the TV news. But I turned and looked back the way I'd come. The doorless room, the basement plastered with screens, the waterproof pinhole in the bathroom... and my grandmother's voice that rang out every morning at six sharp. "Evelyn, get up. I'm watching you." Without hesitation, I got in the van. From that day on, I became one of them. Ironically, I finally had a room with a lock. I still remember that afternoon, holding the key to the storage room, standing at the door for a long time. Then I inserted the key and turned it. The bolt clicked out. I crouched on the floor, hugging my knees, and cried for a full hour. For the first time in four years, I had a door I could lock from the inside. Luke suddenly interrupted me. "Is that why you stayed at the scam operation?" I didn't answer. I just lowered my head and looked at my fingers. "Mr. Reynolds, do you think the people at that operation were bad?" "Yes." "They're bad people. But those bad people gave me a lock." "My own grandmother wouldn't even give me a door." Luke didn't ask anything more. He picked up the peeled apple from the table and handed it to me. "Evelyn, no one will ever take your door away again." I took the apple and bit into it. Suddenly, the door was pushed open. Officer Foster stuck his head in halfway, his expression grim. "The family's here." "Causing quite a scene outside."
I heard crying from the hallway. "My granddaughter! My poor granddaughter!" It was my grandmother. Her legs didn't work well, so she sat in a wheelchair, pushed by a caregiver. My mother followed behind, wearing a black cotton jacket, her face bare. They started crying as soon as they entered the station lobby. My grandmother's crying was loud wailing, with slapping and shouting. My mother's crying was silent, wiping tears, shoulders shaking. Several young officers on duty all looked over. "Don't worry, we found the girl. That's good news." My grandmother grabbed the female officer's hand. "I've been looking for her for four years!" "Her father died young. I'm just an old woman who raised her, and she just..." Halfway through, she clutched her chest, unable to breathe. The caregiver pulled out quick-acting heart pills and shoved them in her mouth. My mother dropped to her knees with a thud. "Officers, please, I'm begging you to let me see my daughter." "I dream about her every night." The officers who didn't know the truth got teary-eyed. Someone went to open the interrogation room door. The moment the door opened, my mother rushed in and hugged me. Her arms locked around my back, her face buried in my shoulder. "Evelyn, my Evelyn, I finally get to see you." All the officers nearby were wiping tears. How touching. But only I knew that the second she hugged me tight, her right index and middle fingers dug into the soft flesh at my waist. Her lips pressed against my ear, her voice masked by her crying. Only I could hear it. "If you say anything wrong, I'll deal with you properly when we get home." My body went rigid. Exactly the same feeling as when I was twelve. My grandmother's wheelchair was pushed in front of me. She reached out her hand, trembling as she touched my face. In everyone else's eyes, this was a white-haired old woman caressing her long-lost granddaughter. But I could feel her fingers searching through my clothes. From the collar to the back of my neck, from the roots of my hair to behind my ears. She was looking for bugs, for recording devices. She knew these things all too well. After finishing her search and finding nothing, her fingers stopped on my cheek, the pressure suddenly increasing. "If you don't want to actually become a corpse... play dumb." She released her hand, slowly lifted her face, tears streaming down as she turned toward Luke standing in the doorway. "Officer, this child isn't mentally well. I need to take her home." Luke stood in the doorway without moving. His gaze swept across my face and caught the two white fingerprints on my cheek. Then my mother pulled a medical record from her bag and handed it to Luke. "This is Evelyn's psychiatric evaluation. Severe schizophrenia, diagnosed two years before she disappeared." "No matter what she's said, it can't be taken seriously." Ha. You're really in a hurry. You don't even know what I said, but you're already rushing to discredit everything I've told them. Luke took it and flipped through two pages, glanced at me, and said nothing. My grandmother chimed in from the side. "We've already contacted a psychiatric hospital. She can be admitted today." A white ambulance was parked outside, with two orderlies in blue uniforms waiting in the hallway. I clutched the table leg tightly. "I'm not going back! I won't go back even if you kill me!" My mother lunged over and grabbed my arm. "Evelyn, you're having an episode. Listen to me..." Two young officers who didn't know the situation started to help. "Don't move." Luke stepped between me and that mother-daughter pair. "She's a key witness in a major criminal case." "No one's taking her anywhere." My grandmother's face darkened. "She's my own granddaughter. I have guardianship!" Luke slapped the medical record on the table. "The hospital that issued this record — Grace Recovery Hospital — had its license revoked three months ago for selling fake diagnoses." "This thing is just a piece of waste paper to me." My grandmother's mouth twitched. Luke pulled out another paper from the file. "Also, Evelyn Carter is twenty years old, a person with full civil capacity." "More importantly..." "Her Social Security number is marked deceased." "You have no legal basis whatsoever to take away a dead person."
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