Duplicity (3 page)

“Well, well,” Ginger says in her babydoll voice. “Look who's back in The Corner. Thought you'd switched crowds on us. I can totally picture you in Calvin Klein.”

I shoot her a glare and pull my phone back out. Ginger saunters over, darkening my screen with her shadow.

“Branching out to corrupt the innocent now, are you?” she says. “Or maybe you're going soft on us.”

My phone buzzes. I tap to open the message and then Ginger's finger is on my nose, where the metal between my eyes used to be. I grab her hand and squeeze, hard.

“Ouch, Brandon, damn!” She pulls away, then raises an eyebrow. “So if you're not going soft … did you do any corrupting while you were gone?”

See you then,
says the message from my contact. I think about fifty grand, about the ZR1 Corvette I've been wanting, and it must bring a smile to my face because Ginger squeals.

“No!” she says, hand to her mouth. “You took Emma Jennings's v-card, didn't you? Dog!”

“What?” Beretta shouts, fingers frozen over her smartphone. “And you haven't burst into flames yet?”

“Ginge, shut
up
!” I say. “I didn't take any v-cards. Emma's just been helping me with Spanish and econ, okay? End of story. Leave me alone.”

Her smile softens. “Baby, you haven't called me Ginge since we broke up.”

For once I'd like a girl to exist who didn't overanalyze everything. I've never been so grateful to hear the period bell, loud and metallic from the overhead speakers, and I scoop up my book and head for the hall. I've almost escaped when Ginger grabs me by the belt loop and swings in front of me.

“You know, I've missed you a lot,” she says, tracing a black fingernail over the R on my shirt.

“She really has,” Beretta says behind her, fingers flying over her phone screen. “I'm sick of hearing about it, so if you could just get back together so I could hear about something else please, that would be great.”

“Forget it,” I say.

Ginger trails her finger down my chest and gives me a twisted little grin. “You remember how good I am at making up?”

“Almost as good as you are at being annoying,” I snap, pushing her hand away.

“Oh, come on,” she says, hands on her hips. “I made you happy.”

“That's debatable.”

“I won't pick fights about stupid stuff. Promise. I'll limit my texts to very important announcements only.” She steps closer. “Everything else was good, right?”

“We're done, Ginger.”

I skirt around her, past giant “Deathrow” Riggs and his Goth group. She follows and grabs my hand. I shake her off.

“Look,” I say. “The only way you have a chance of spending time with me is if you know anything about trig. I have an assignment due tomorrow and I haven't paid attention half the semester.”

She considers this and tries for my hand again. I shake her off. Again.

“Sure,” she says. “I'll stop by tonight.”

“I meant during school, you know like—” She disappears in the other direction. “Lunch or something.”

I'll probably need a restraining order by the end of the week. I sigh and consider the door of Spanish III, which has never looked so much like it might open into Hell, until I remember I'm Brandon Eriks and I'm not afraid of anything. I'm a machine, all gears and wires. Like the tattoo on my right arm.

Gears and wires and not caring a bit whether Emma's inside already.

Not caring.

Not.

 

3. FIRST I'M GOING TO FIX YOU

THIRD PERIOD
late bell rings. I sit in my assigned place in the first row, sweating, tapping my pen on the desk like a crazy person and watching the clock. Emma's seat, to my right, is empty. Maybe she's sick. Maybe she transferred classes. Maybe she moved to Africa to look after orphans.

The kid behind me, a hawk-faced jock named Jason, kicks my seat. “Stop tapping, freak.”

I breathe out and make myself relax. I didn't care what Emma thought yesterday and I don't care now.
She'd
been the nosy one, anyway, who noticed I never turned anything in and offered to help. I didn't need her help, but I agreed because … okay, because she's hot. And she never interrupted me. And she talked about dreams in between “
Como se llama
” and snippets of
Don Quixote
. How she wants to teach kids to paint, how she wants to run a marathon.

I think about telling her how I wished I could start school over and pull the grades for MIT.

I think about telling her I how want a family that actually cares.

Freaking Emma.

“
Hola, estudiantes, como están?
” asks Mrs. Barreto, clasping her plump hands as she beams at us from the front of the room.

The class drones, “
Muy bien, Señora Barreto
.”

“Homework to the front, please.
Tarea al frente, por favor
.”

She gestures forward. The class shuffles, papers move up the rows, and I turn and grab a stack of homework from Jason, who murmurs, “Nice hair.” I give him my best “screw-off” look before turning and handing the stack to Mrs. Barreto.

“Nothing today, Brandon?” she says, frowning as she rifles through the names on the papers. “Where is Ms. Emma this morning?”

“I don't know,” I say under my breath, and like the devil's watching, the door swings open and in walks Emma Jennings.

One look at her and you know she's way out of my league. White collared shirt, sleeves rolled to her elbows, buttons open to the scoop of her pink sweater vest. Brand-name jeans tucked into tall gray boots. Brunette curls tossed into a bun. Sweet face, the kind that believes in angels and unicorns and miracles, or did until yesterday, I guess. She swallows, tightens her grip on her tablet computer, and hands Mrs. Barreto her assignment.

“
Lo siento, Señora
,” she says. “I had to stay late for Mrs. Penz.”

She doesn't look at me the whole way to her seat. Or when she collapses into her chair and sends a wave of peppermint in my direction that makes me think of her laughing. I lean away, as far to the edge of my seat as I can considering the stupid thing's attached to the floor.

I don't care. I don't care, I don't care, I don't—

A pencil taps my shoulder.

“What'd you do to Emma?” Jason whispers.

I sit forward and thumb through my Facebook account on my iPad. Jason pokes me again when Mrs. Barreto turns her back.

“
What?
” I say.

“How was she?” Jason asks, grinning.

I snap his pencil in half and straighten just before Mrs. Barreto looks our way.

“Oh, I get it now,” Jason whispers when she turns again. “You made a move and got rejected. You're not really surprised by that, are you?”

Emma makes a small noise that sounds like a snicker. But she's facing away with her hand clenched in her hair and I can hear the strain in it, and then I remember I don't care and I switch to my note-taking app.

“Okay,
amigos. Asociarse, por favor
,” Mrs. Barreto says, passing out new sheets of work.

Partner up. I toss the assignments over my shoulder without waiting for Jason to grab them, smirk as I hear them cascade to the floor, and look behind Emma to check my options. I'm in the far row by the door, so I've got a wall to my left. There's a couple kids behind her, but they're already chatting with their default partners. Emma realizes the same time as me that we're screwed. She turns to me slow, eyes down.

Jason blurts, “Emma, want to work with—”

“Yes!” she says. “Dave, can I switch seats with you?”

The heavy boy behind her nods, eyes wide, and scrambles to get his things. Then Emma's smiling and chatting with Jason, and just like that, we move on.

That's fine. This is how it should be.

“Hey,” I say to Dave. He stares at me like I'm a grenade with the pin pulled, his tiny brown eyes shifting hectically between the piercings in my ears, the ink down my arms, the gas mask on my shirt.

“Um, h-hi,” Dave says, fumbling with a mechanical pencil. I kind of want to talk to him about knives or something to really freak him out, but Mrs. Barreto's watching, so I just scribble my name on the sheet.

“How 'bout we just compare answers after we're done?” I say.

Dave looks down, relieved. “Yeah, o-okay.”

It's a
Don Quixote
pop quiz. I try to concentrate on question one (Who is Pedro Alonso?) while listening to Jason compliment Emma on everything from her boots to her brains to how glad he is they finally get to work together. I've started on question two when Jason says, “You going to homecoming?”

My pen smears a blot of ink on the page.

“I … well, I don't know,” Emma says. “Might be out of town that weekend.”

“If you're in town, want to go with me? The guys are getting limos and we're hitting The Bent Fork before.”

“Um…” She pauses. I can feel her eyes drilling the back of my head. “Sure. I mean, if we'll be here, that is.”

Jason kicks my chair, twice. I think about running my pen through his eye, but I clench it and get up instead, and I'm pushing out the door before Mrs. Barreto can raise a finger.

I know what she's doing. She thinks I'll change my mind, that I'll regret what I said, that I'll crack and admit she was right about … about us being good together. But she doesn't know who she's messing with, and she can't win a war I've already ended. She thinks she's in my head, but this is temporary. This is just muscle twitches on a corpse.

The classroom door clicks as someone opens it. I edge around the corner and into the bathroom.

And stare, with my pulse on panic mode, at the wall-long mirror over the sinks.

It's a mirror.

It's a freaking sheet of glass.

I take a breath and turn on the first sink. My reflection does the same, looking as stupidly terrified. I move my hand to the left. My reflection copies me. I take a drink. It does too. And then I laugh, though it sounds miserable, because I'm finally so messed up that I'm scared of
myself
, and I fill my hands and splash my face. Let the water run while I turn to the wall and tear a paper towel from the dispenser.

I'm wiping my forehead when the faucet squeaks off.

My pulse spikes to hummingbird intensity. No way,
no way
this is possible. Someone else came in while I was washing. Had to. Or I'm still dreaming.

I don't want to but I lower the paper towel.

And turn.

My reflection isn't across from me. It's by the farthest sink, holding a sheet of paper against the glass.
You're not dreaming.

The paper towel drops from my hand. I want to say that's exactly what it would say if this
was
a dream, but the sweat prickling my neck feels very real. I look, and look again, at where my reflection's supposed to be. My double smirks and lowers the paper. Scrawls on it with the pen I left by the sink, a pen that's no longer on my side of the glass, but only on his.

LOOKS LIKE I FOUND YOU FIRST.

I choke and brace myself on the counter. My heart's pumping hard enough to lift me off the ground, but as much as I want to move, I can't. There's a virus
in the mirror
and I can't more.

FIRST I'M GOING TO FIX YOU,
he writes.

He turns the paper over and adds,
THEN
LET'S
TRADE.

He plucks out one of my lip piercings and washes it down the sink. He goes for the second and I grab my lip, but the ring vanishes under my fingers and I watch it go down, too, down on the other side of the mirror where things aren't reflecting as they should. He goes for the bar on my eyebrow. I pry my hand off the counter and spring for the door. I feel the metal slide free as I burst into the hallway and—

It's gone. Three less piercings than I had a minute ago, like I'm going back in time.

There's a virus in the mirror. A virus. In a sheet of glass.

“Fixing” me.

I touch the spikes in my ears, counting seven in each one, and steady my breathing. They're still there. I run the piercing in my tongue along the roof of my mouth.

(Did I take something this morning?)

Caffeine pills. Unless I grabbed the wrong thing. Which is completely possible, because Mom has all sorts of unlabeled junk in our medicine cabinet, and that's when all this started, isn't it? Yes, it is, so it must be the pills. They'll wear off soon. They have to. They
have
to.

I lean against the wall awhile, willing my heart rate to lower, until I imagine that thing coming out of the mirror after me and I get moving. I touch my ears every few seconds and chew my cheek. Nothing else goes missing. Maybe it can only change me in front of a mirror.

And now I'm coming up with rules for nutcases.

“Brandon. On your way back to class?”

I jump and turn to see Mom's nemesis, Principal Myer, with his arms crossed over his pinstripe suit and a knowing, stalkerish glint in his eye. I haven't spent much time in his office the past few weeks because of Em—er, it doesn't matter—but I'm not in the mood to tick Mom off today with another of his phone calls.

“Yeah,” I say, and set my course for Spanish. Principal Myer's footsteps follow me the whole way and soon I'm back in my seat next to Dave, pushing my fingers into my temples and focusing on my questions and not looking anywhere else.

*   *   *

The bell finally announces the end of third period. I slip out before most of the kids have gathered their things and head for The Corner, thinking about trig, thinking about fifty grand, thinking about anything but
that
(because it's just the pills, they'll wear off soon and I'll be fine), when someone jumps on my back and wraps fishnet legs around my waist.