Popular Clone (13 page)

“What did you say?” said a teacher's voice.

“Me? Nothing,” said another as they walked out of the teachers' lounge. “Must've been the air vents again.”

They walked away down the hall as the door swung back, leaving Fisher tottering dizzily for a moment before he could continue. FP had ducked behind a potted plant, and he slipped out to rejoin Fisher.

The English classroom was wide and had two doors, and as the class filed in through one, Fisher and FP took advantage of the before-class bustle to sneak in through the other. They concealed themselves behind a partly extended retractable wall that was sometimes used to split the room in half. Mrs. Weedle began the class, as kids filed into their seats. As she began droning on about
Romeo and Juliet
, most of the students' eyes glazed over. Some desperately searched for something interesting outside the window, others focused on the clock and tried to push its hands forward with their eyes.

Mrs. Weedle was lecturing about Romeo's friend Mercutio in her Jell-O-in-a-garbage-crusher speaking style when a hand shot up in the middle of the classroom. Oh, no. Two.

Why did Two insist on drawing attention to himself? When would he learn?

“Yes, Fisher?”

“I don't get him, Mrs. Weedle. Mercutio invites Romeo to a party, gets him this girl, and then Romeo thanks him by letting him get stabbed? He should know better if he's so smart.”

Several students snickered. The kids at the back were exchanging hushed whispers. The teacher stiffened.

“I'd give Mercutio more respect if I were you, Fisher,” she said, raising her nose and tilting her eyes upward as she always did when she was about to make a point. “The way Mercutio observes the action of the play makes him a stand-in for you, the reader.”

“He's standing in for me?” repeated Two, looking around to see the reaction he was gathering. “Wow, I do respect him now! I guess I'll be going then, and let him do the reading. He can do my homework, too!” He stood up as if to leave, and the class was split between laughter and applause.

Mrs. Weedle managed to restore order and get Two back to his seat, but her hold on the class had slipped.

Fisher sat out the rest of the class, crouched in his hiding spot, his panic increasing. When the period was over and the kids started to leave, he and FP snuck quietly back to the door they had entered through. Fisher looked out into the hallway. Unfortunately, since classes were changing, it was full of people.

Fisher knew he had to move quickly if he was going to get to the biology classroom in time to observe Two. He spotted an old backpack with a broken strap and a stray textbook lying on one side of the hallway. He swept them up. FP went into the bag, flailing his short legs and squeaking in protest.

Fisher held the open book in front of his face and slipped into the crush of people, moving quickly. He navigated as best he could by sneaking quick glances over the top of the textbook. He was jostled from all sides, as usual, but nobody seemed to notice him … also as usual. Small hooves pushed into his back, and he tried to hold the backpack tightly enough so that the movement inside of it wasn't obvious.

After a minute, the crowds began to thin. Fisher ducked into a smaller side hall, just next to Mr. Granger's classroom. He collapsed back against the wall to take a quick breather and felt something give way behind him. He turned around, but not in time to avoid plunging backward …

… into a large air duct.

He sat up, sneezing out dust. The air duct extended for dozens of feet into the darkness, and Fisher realized that it must connect with all the classrooms. It would be a perfect place from which to spy on Two. He freed FP, who was wriggling and squeaking, from his backpack prison.

Fisher and FP crawled several feet through the narrow duct until they reached another vent. Fisher's bet had paid off. Through its metal grille, they had a full view of Granger's classroom.

Mr. Granger was overseeing an experiment. The students stood behind rows of Bunsen burners, solutions carefully simmering in their beakers. Chemical smells wafted through the air, and FP wrinkled his snout and squeaked.

“Shhh! Quiet, FP,” Fisher commanded, reaching out to put a hand over FP's snout.

Two had been partnered with Amanda Cantrell. Fisher watched as they began to set up their equipment. Amanda would start to arrange it on the table, and when she looked away, Two kept switching things or rearranging them. She would turn back to find the equipment out of place, then he would chuckle and she'd laugh with him, shaking her head. This happened several times.

It took Fisher a few minutes to realize that Two was flirting. Fisher shook his head in disbelief. Had someone spliced different DNA into his petri dish when he wasn't looking?

FP snuffled restlessly, and Fisher scratched his neck to keep him calm. Once they had their equipment set up and the lab got going, Mr. Granger walked over to Fisher's lab table. “Hello, Fisher,” said Mr. Granger. Fisher thought his smile seemed kind of tight—although it was somewhat difficult to tell from this angle.

“Hi, Mr. Granger,” responded Two flatly.

“How's your lab going?” asked Mr. Granger.

“According to plan, I think,” said Two. Fisher started to sweat. Two wasn't behaving at
all
like the original Fisher, and Granger knew Fisher better than most people. Would he be able to spot the differences?

“Oh, good,” Granger continued. “Did you have any trouble with the homework?”

“Nope. I got through it just fine,” Two said.

“Say,” said Granger, leaning forward and setting his hands on the table. “How'd you like to come by at lunch and see my newest white-shrimp-migratory data?”

“I'm afraid I've got more important things to do at lunch,” said Two casually, turning his eyes back to his Bunsen burner.

Mr. Granger's face fell. Fisher wished he had invented a retractable fist, so he could reach out and give Two a big, hard punch.

“Oh. Well, all right then.” He started to turn away, then stopped and reached into his pocket. “I almost forgot—you left your pen in class last week. I found it at your desk.” With that, he took out a large, black pen that Fisher had, without question, never seen in his life.

That's not mine!
He wanted to scream at Two, but of course he couldn't.

Two reached for the pen and pocketed it. “Thanks, Mr. G.”

Mr. G?
Fisher could feel sweat crawling down his neck. He heaved a sigh of relief as Mr. Granger—after shooting one last puzzled look in Two's direction—continued circulating through the class.

It was only when Mr. Granger's back was turned that Fisher saw Two smile.

And it wasn't a sweet little-boy smile. One corner of Two's mouth curled up, and he looked like he was stifling a chuckle under his breath. Fisher gulped. Two was planning something. He could feel it.

Fisher scanned the classroom, searching for something amiss.

Then he saw them. At the back-most lab table, where no one was working, were little air nozzles sometimes used in experiments. The four on the back table were all turned on, and each one had a balloon around its end.

The balloons must have been inflating slowly for the whole period. Fisher wanted to shout and warn Mr. Granger, but he couldn't. He could only wait in silence, despairing, as they got bigger and bigger, nobody noticing.

Two had planned the prank perfectly. At exactly ten minutes before the end of class, just as the students were all about to clean up the lab, the balloons slipped off the nozzles. One, followed two seconds later by another, and by another after two more seconds, until all four were flying around the room in crazy loops as their air rushed out.

Beakers got knocked off their stands. Kids went diving for cover. Mr. Granger spun around in a panic as he tried to tell his class
not
to panic. A balloon smacked straight into his nose, and his thick, round glasses flew off. He crawled on the floor, scrabbling with his bony arms until he scooped them back up.

As he was about to stand up again, a pair of tiny white blurs ran straight up one of his sleeves. Einy and Berg! The balloons had toppled over their cage, and in the panic of screaming kids and zooming balloons, they sought the safest, most familiar thing they could find. Mr. Granger stood up, waving his arms in a crazy dance as the rodents scampered around under his shirt. It took him almost a minute of spinning and twitching to finally reach inside and fetch them out.

When he finally regained his composure, he stood up and saw that Two was the only one in the room not dodging or gasping, but smiling. A look of disbelief came to his face.

“Is this your work, Fisher?”

“Some of my best, Mr. Granger,” answered the clone. “I hope I taught the class a valuable lesson in ducking.”

Mr. Granger struggled for a reply. “This is, this is absolutely … G-Go, go to the, the …”

But before Mr. Granger could even pronounce the word
principal
, Two had already sauntered out the door.

“My God, FP,” Fisher whispered. “I've created a monster.”

CHAPTER 12

Hypothesis: Two identical organisms occupying the same environment make each other less important. To escape this, they will naturally tend to act in wildly different ways.

—Fisher Bas, scientific Principles and Observations of the Natural World (unpublished)

Fisher was clenching his fists in anger. Standing up to Weedle was one thing, but Mr. Granger was his friend. His close friend. His
only
friend. And now this clone was turning him into a laughingstock.

Besides, Granger was a biologist, and a very intelligent man. What if he began to suspect something? If Two kept acting like this, Mr. Granger could blow Fisher's plot wide open. Three days and this new Fisher was on the brink of bringing
both
of their lives to a crashing, crumbling halt.

Lunch period was next, and Two had said he had “important things to do.” Fisher backed away from the vent overlooking the bio lab as quickly as he could and headed in the direction of the cafeteria through the narrow air ducts. FP trotted along behind Fisher. They crawled in a straight line for about a hundred feet. The tunnel took a turn to the right and began slanting steeply upward, and Fisher followed.

Then, suddenly, it turned sharply downward. He reached out a hand to steady himself, but the metal surface was too slippery. He felt himself sliding, sliding … then tumbling, head over feet, a hollow
thump-thud-thump-thud
accompa-nying his long fall. FP was sliding on his stomach, squeal-ing in terror.

At last he struck the bottom with a gong-like crash. He heard a thin, wheezing squeak, and FP landed right on top of him, flapping his forelegs wildly to try and slow himself.

Fisher's arms were tangled behind his head. He felt a weird twinge in his spine and hoped he hadn't turned his torso around backward when he landed. He was reassured to look down and see his stomach rather than his back.

“Oof!” he said as FP put a hoof directly in his collarbone.

FP snorted excitedly. He was obviously still thrilled about the expedition. Smells of week-old potato soup, concrete-hard wheat bread, and charred hot dogs drifted through the duct, and those were just the recognizable aromas. Fisher took as few breaths as possible as he began to unknot himself.

Once he had recovered from the fall, Fisher crawled farther along the duct, FP still behind him. They were getting close. It wasn't long before the smells were joined by sounds. Excited voices were filling the space, and Fisher quickly heard his own name popping up in conversations. Arm over arm, he pulled himself up until he reached the wide duct whose vents opened into the cafeteria's ceiling and found one he could see from. FP pressed up next to him.

The cafeteria was buzzing with chatter, and Fisher was able to catch snippets of it from his high vantage point. There were too many conversations going on at once for him to hear one completely, but he was able to piece together the story.

“Hey, did you hear what …”

“… Fisher pulled this crazy stunt …”

“ … Vikings were in gym class, playing softball …”

“Fisher replaced the softball with some kinda rocket!”

Fisher seized up for a moment when he heard the rocket mentioned. Had Two actually blown the Vikings to smithereens?

“… kablooie! All over the Vikings! And you'll never guess …”

“… full of King of Hollywood spicy sauce! They were covered in it! Brody's still trying to get it out of his ears!”

Fisher exhaled. Not a real rocket. He could be thankful for
that
at least.

“… just don't know how he comes up with this stuff!”

“Brilliant, totally brilliant!”

As the chatter about his clone continued, Fisher tried to sort out his own buzzing thoughts. In a matter of a few days, his clone had gone from making new friends, to starting fads and gaining popularity, to becoming nothing less than a full-blown hero. And although the Vikings deserved all they'd gotten and more, now Two was the center of attention of the
entire
school.

Fisher remembered what his mom had said: no
one
can know about the AGH.
It will put us all in danger.

This did not bode well.

And yet … for all of Two's troublemaking and carrying on, Fisher couldn't help but admire him. Two was everything that Fisher wasn't. He had courage, self-confidence, pride. Charm, even. Thanks to him, everyone at school was starting to think differently about Fisher. People liked him. They laughed at his jokes. Girls exchanged those
looks
with each other. About
him.

Fisher had never envied someone so much in his life, and part of him wanted nothing more than to see the clone humiliated the way that he had always been. But another part of him knew that Two had
earned
his newfound social status.

Something he had never imagined, never could have predicted, was taking place.

Fisher—at least, Fisher-2—was becoming popular.

The scattered gossiping and chatter turned into a single, huge cheer as the main door into the kitchen swung open and Two walked in. Or, actually, rode in: he was driving a long, motorized food cart, and though its cargo was covered, a new, delicious, and distantly familiar scent began to waft up, cutting through the unknowable smells of the cafeteria. Fisher's mouth began to water.

Two plucked a small microphone from the side of the cart, check-tapped it, and motioned the crowd to silence.

“Boys and girls, thanks so much for your appreciation! The Vikings have been pushing and shoving their way through this school for too long, am I right?” Another cheer went up. “I'm sick of it, and I'm sure you all are, too. That's why I decided to let 'em know that in the only language they understand: humiliation.” More cheers and laughs. “Now you may be wondering, where did Fisher get all that amazing sauce? I'm glad you asked. You see, the new King of Hollywood franchise needs to promote its opening. And we all just happen to be their target market. So we made a deal: I get lots of their stuff for free, and in exchange I get you all pumped for its opening. The only catch is this… .” He snapped his fingers and two smartly uniformed KOH employees jumped seemingly out of nowhere and took hold of the two lids covering the long cart. “We have to eat all of the merchandise!”

The lids came up to reveal rows and rows of the restaurant chain's signature star fries, alongside cleverly softball-shaped containers of the very sauce that was still seeping into the pores of the Vikings. The final ounce of restraint the kids had been showing collapsed, and the cafeteria exploded in shouting as more King of Hollywood assistants started distributing fries to everyone.

The chanting continued. Fisher watched as Two approached Amanda Cantrell. He reached behind his back and smoothly pulled a model of a duck nest from behind his back. It contained more of the fries and sauce.

“To coexistence,” he said. Amanda smiled and took the gift. Then Two got back on the microphone. “I would also like to announce our new school mascot! I don't think a badger, however furious it may be, can really represent us anymore. That's why I'd like to introduce you all to … Billy!”

A student wearing Fisher's dad's giant double-billed yellow-bellied bilious duck burst into the cafeteria, waving excitedly to the crowd.

“Fish-er! Fish-er! Fish-er!” The chant grew in intensity until Fisher had to cover his ears. The only thing that cut through it was the shriek of the loudspeaker turning on and the announcement that followed: “Fisher Bas, please report to the principal's office.
Immediately
.”