Escape Pod 1004: The Girl Who Came Before

The Girl Who Came Before By David von Allmen When me and my family pulled into our driveway, my five best friends were waiting in our front yard, waving glittery poster-board signs that read “Welcome Home Sam!!!” and jumping around with full-on 13 year-old girl dorkiness. It should have made me happy. And it did. For the most part. It was all I’d wanted for the last year: to hang out with my friends somewhere other than a hospital room and go to school and talk without an oxygen tube in my nose. But they weren’t my friends. Not really. They were her friends. The old Sam, the girl my body had been cloned from, the girl whose memories had been printed onto my brain. The girl whose life I was now supposed to live.