Remember Jamie Baker (Jamie Baker #3)(7)
“Yes,” I snapped. “Literally.”
My anger deflated quickly. It wasn’t this guy’s fault I was a freak. Amnesia was a lot more awful than simply not knowing my past. It also left me socially inept and made me feel like an idiot all the time. “Want to fill me in, or just keep staring at me like I’m a freak?”
He flushed in embarrassment. “Sorry. It’s just…she’s so…everyone knows who she was. She’s so famous they’re making a TV show about her. Plus, you have the eyes, and you’re wearing the necklace.”
My hand flew to the charm on my neck. “You recognize this?”
The guy looked at me as if I were insane, and pointed to a small souvenir rack. Among all the postcards, Las Vegas shot glasses, and cacti, there was a whole stack of necklaces that looked exactly like mine. They were cheap plastic knockoffs, but they were exactly like my necklace. I picked one up and examined the little charm. “What’s this in the middle? Does it light up?”
The guy shook his head in bewilderment. “I can’t believe you’ve never seen one of these before. Yeah, it lights up just like Chelsea’s Angel’s did. Though, they say hers didn’t need batteries. She lit it up with her power. How cool is that?”
I gulped. Power? That could light up a lightbulb? That was certainly something I could do. “So…who was she?”
“She was a superhero.”
I laughed, relieved. For a minute I’d been so sure he was talking about me. “No way.” I may not have known much pop culture yet, but I definitely knew my comics. Tony was the biggest comic book junkie on the planet. (Hello, he named himself after Tony Stark.) “My ex is a comic book freak. I know my Marvel and DC characters well, and there is no hero called Chelsea’s Angel.”
The guy shook his head, but his eyes lit up. “Chelsea’s Angel wasn’t from a comic book. She was a real superhero. She was strong and fast and could shoot lightning from the palms of her hands.”
My blood froze in my veins, and goose bumps formed all over my entire body. How could it be? It wasn’t possible. I couldn’t be this Chelsea’s Angel person; I’d been locked up in a lab most of my life.
“Nobody knew who she was,” Motel Guy went on. “They called her Chelsea’s Angel because she used her superpowers to rescue a little girl named Chelsea, who’d been kidnapped. The girl mistook her for an angel and the name stuck. Chelsea’s Angel used to go all around the country helping people, until she died in that explosion south of town about six months ago.”
The only explosion south of Las Vegas six months ago was the one I caused that had left me brain-damaged.
This didn’t make sense; something wasn’t right. It didn’t add up. This girl couldn’t be me. It was impossible. But it couldn’t be coincidence, either. Was there someone else out there like me? Another girl who had my same powers? Was it possible I had a sister? Maybe I had a family who knew Visticorp had taken me. Perhaps this Chelsea’s Angel knew I was being held captive and was trying to break me out. Maybe we were trying to escape when the explosion happened.
My heart started to race as I dared to hope.
But my theory didn’t make sense, either. If this man was telling the truth—and why would he make it up?—Tony should have known this story. He would have known if someone was helping us escape at the time of the explosion.
He also had to know about this Chelsea’s Angel person. If her story and death were common enough to have her necklace mass replicated, then Tony should know who she was. But he couldn’t know. He searched the Internet for days after he found me, keeping track of all news about the Visticorp explosion. And, he was obsessed with superheroes. Even if he was locked in a lab until six months ago, he would have heard about Chelsea’s Angel in his searching. He would have told me about her. This was a huge clue about my past.
“Do you have Internet here?”
The guy laughed and pointed behind me. “It’s a slow connection on a crap computer, but knock yourself out. Look up the Chelsea’s Angel Live Rescue on YouTube. It’s the only video of her in person. You’ll freak. I swear you’re like her twin.”
“Thanks.”
He nodded and handed me a key to room number seventeen. I didn’t bother taking my stuff to my room first. I sat down at the dinosaur of a computer and held my breath as I did a Google search for what I hoped would be the key to my identity. Twenty minutes later, Motel Guy brought me a cup of coffee. “See? I told you, you look like her.”
I blinked at the monitor and gratefully accepted the caffeine. “It’s crazy.”
I didn’t just look like her. I was her. I had to be. She looked identical to me, with the exception of my craptastic green hair. She even had the yellow eyes, and they glowed when she used her powers, like mine do.
I’d spent the last six months in a constant state of confusion, but as I sat there reading article after article about Chelsea’s Angel and the explosion at the Visticorp lab, my perplexity reached an all-time high. Chelsea’s Angel was everywhere. She was beloved by everyone, and even worshipped as a saint by some. She was the most popular Halloween costume last October, and she had her own action figure.
There were also dozens of articles linking Chelsea’s Angel to the Visticorp explosion. There was a reporter she’d come to rescue that day who blew the whistle on all of Visticorps’s human lab testing. There was so much information on the Internet about Visticorp—information I’d tried to find a hundred times at home that had never come up in any of my searches before.