If she thought it odd that I had shown up in a car, it didn’t show in her demeanor. (The truth of the matter is that I felt a vehicle would afford some degree of privacy for the conversation I wanted to have. Popping up a little ways from her house had been an attempt to be low-key.) Upon reaching the car, she opened the front passenger door, slid her backpack off, and dropped it on the floor. She then slipped inside and shut the door.
“So, did you talk to him?” she asked eagerly, repeating the question she’d asked on the phone as I began driving, heading towards her school.
“Uh, not exactly,” I said, not sure how to begin.
“This is all a mistake,” she suddenly stated. “I’ll admit it’s my fault, but it’s not what it seems.”
I cleared my throat. “Look, I know you said we talked on Friday, but–”
“It’s my fault,” she repeated, cutting me off. “Plus, I really didn’t tell you everything.”
“I need to stop you,” I chimed in. “You and I didn’t–”
“I really love Smokey, you know?” she interjected, as if she hadn’t heard me. I realized then that she wasn’t really listening to anything I was trying to say. Moreover, I could sense empathically that she was racked with guilt and almost consumed by melancholy and depression. Whatever was going on, she obviously needed to talk to someone about it. I probably wasn’t the ideal candidate since I had my own agenda here, but the best course of action at the moment seemed to involve lending a sympathetic ear.
“So what happened?” I asked.
She looked at me askance. “Didn’t I tell you all this on Friday?” I opened my mouth to speak, but she went on without waiting for an answer, saying with a sigh, “It all started with my family.”
I waited a few seconds, but she didn’t say anything more, just stared out the window.
“What do you mean?” I prompted after a few moments.
“My parents are immigrants,” she said. “Came here from the old country. They also brought some of the old traditions with them – notions about courtship and relationships.”
“Such as?”
“Arranged marriages.”
Taking my eyes off the road for a second, I looked at her in shock, finding it difficult to believe that another teen could have the same matrimonial problem I did. “They want you to get married?”
“No,” she replied, shaking her head. “I mean, someday, but not soon. The real issue is that they want me to be with someone from a similar background.”
“What?”
“It’s like that movie about the Greek wedding,” she explained. “They want me dating someone from the same culture.”
“So your family doesn’t like Smokey?”
“They like him well enough. I mean, they know he’s a nice guy and that he treats me well. They just don’t see me with him long-term.”
“Isn’t that your choice?”
“Not exactly. They’re my parents and I have to obey them, so in order to date Smokey, I had to make a deal.”
“What kind of deal?” I asked, not sure where this was going.
“I’m free to date Smokey, but if they find someone who they feel is appropriate for me, I have to go out with him.”
“You mean they make you date someone else while you’re going out with Smokey?”
“It’s complicated. I only have to go out with the guy they pick once, and if I don’t like him that’s the end of it. They’re basically banking on me having so much in common with one of these guys that I’ll dump Smokey.”
“What do you mean, ‘one of these guys’?” I asked. “How many times have you done this?”
“Too many,” she admitted, sounding despondent.
“Does Smokey know about this?”
“Of course. In terms of dating me, it was the cost of doing business. But he always knew when it was happening, where we were going, what we were doing, and so on. And I’d always tell my parents I didn’t want to see the guy again.”
I shook my head in confusion. “Then I don’t understand. Smokey said you went out with another guy, but if he’s aware of this deal you have with your parents and has made his peace with it, I’m confused about what the problem is.”
Sarah lowered her eyes. “The problem isn’t that I went out with one of these guys. It’s that I went out with him a second time.”
“Okay,” I droned, letting that roll around in my brain. “Well, what did Smokey say when you told him about the second date?”
She looked up at me but didn’t say anything, and I could see tears streaming down her face. In that moment, I knew what had happened, and didn’t even need my empathic abilities to figure it out.
“You didn’t tell him,” I concluded as she pulled a tissue from her purse. “You didn’t tell him about the second date.”
“No,” she admitted, wiping her tears with the tissue, “but somehow he found out about it and now he won’t talk to me.”
My first inclination was to say, “Can you blame him?” but I held my tongue. Sarah appeared to be suffering greatly, but there seemed little doubt that this girl had mistreated my best friend.
“It’s not what you think,” Sarah said, as if reading my mind. “I didn’t like the guy – not like that, anyway. I mean we hit it off, but it was completely platonic.”
“Well, if that’s all true, why go out with him a second time? Why keep it from Smokey?”
She put her hands to her face, then pushed them up and back, running her fingers through her hair. “I just needed a break from the pressure,” she said.
I gave her a stunned look, then quickly turned my attention back to the road, as I was still driving. “Wait a minute. Smokey’s been pressuring you?” I’m sure the surprise showed in my voice, because what she seemed to be suggesting was something I never would have suspected. “Has he been pushing you to–”
“No, no, no,” she stressed forcefully. “It’s not pressure from him I’m talking about. It’s pressure from you guys – his friends.”
I had trouble hiding my astonishment. After a few moments, I said, “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to explain that.”
She sighed. “You, Electra, Li – you guys are all Smokey’s friends and you’re all supers, with cool powers. On top of that, you go on amazing adventures together. By comparison, I can’t help but be boring.”
“That’s not true,” I insisted. “You’re lots of fun, and we love hanging out with you.”
“Yes, but I have to be ‘on’ all the time. I don’t have any amazing abilities, so I have to compete on personality. I have to constantly be smiling, bubbly, charming and so on – especially when we’re around you guys.”
“Sarah, I’m sorry,” I said sincerely. “I apologize if we ever made you feel like you had to be or act in any way contrary to what you feel.”
“And that just makes it worse,” she intoned. “It would be a lot easier if you guys were aloof snobs, arrogant jerks, boorish imbeciles, or something along those lines. Then it wouldn’t matter to me because I wouldn’t want to be your friend anyway. But you’re all friendly and funny and nice, which just makes me feel like I have to do even more to appear interesting.”
I nodded. “I think I understand, and again I apologize if we did something to make you feel you couldn’t be yourself around us.”
“You don’t need to apologize for being a nice guy, or for having nice friends.”
“Well, if it’ll take some of the pressure off, I could always be a jerk and backhand you – rough you up a bit,” I said, and raised my hand mockingly.
She laughed, the first sound I’d heard from her today that didn’t come out heavy with gloom.
“I appreciate the offer,” she commented, “but I’ll manage.”
“Anyway,” I said, “this guy you went out with?”
She sighed. “As I said, we hit it off, but it was platonic. I just had a good time hanging out with someone without feeling like I had to compete or perform. I wen
t out with the guy again because of that reason, not because I had feelings for him, so it wasn’t a real date, in my opinion. I didn’t tell Smokey because I wasn’t sure I could properly explain it without making him feel like he had to choose between me and his friends. That’s not a choice I wanted him making, because…”
She trailed off without finishing, but from her emotional vibe, I knew what she was feeling.
“You think that if Smokey has to make that kind of choice, you’ll lose,” I concluded.
She nodded. “It’s like you’re a poor kid whose best friend has a rich neighbor who’s always inviting him to big parties, offering him limo rides, and so on. How do you compete?”
Her face took on a pained expression, and emotionally I noted an ache in her so potent that it almost equated to physical pain. She felt completely dejected, like she was drowning in a sea of hopelessness and despair.
I desperately wished that there was something I could do for her, that I had some ability to cure what ailed her. I did have a healing ability, but it didn’t come at my beck and call, and even if it did, it only worked on a physical level. It wouldn’t do any good here.
And then, I suddenly realized that there was something I could do for Sarah. I pulled over to the side of the road, and then turned to her, opening my arms. Without a word, she leaned over and buried her face in my shoulder, sobbing fitfully as I gave her a hug.
Chapter 36
It only took Sarah a few minutes to get it all out and then regain her composure. I had pulled over maybe a block from her school and then waited patiently in case there was more she wanted to say, but she had seemingly said her piece. Subtly checking my watch, it appeared that Sarah was in no danger of being late, which meant we had time to address the real reason I’d wanted to see her.
“Look,” I began, “I’ll say something to Smokey, but I can’t promise he’ll listen to me.”
“I know,” she said with a nod, dabbing her eyes with tissue again. “But if you can just get him to talk to me, it’ll be enough.”
“Okay, in the meantime, though, there was something I needed to ask you about. Remember when you said something about having talked to me on Friday?”
*****
It didn’t take long to explain the situation to Sarah, and get the story out of her. Although plainly unnerved by the thought of me having an evil twin, she detailed what had happened in fairly succinct terms.
“You dropped by for a friendly visit on Friday after I got in from school,” she said. “The conversation naturally turned to Smokey, and you promised you’d talk to him for me.”
“Did I say anything else?” I asked, noting how odd it was to be speaking of my lookalike as if he were me.
Sarah shook her head. “No, you mostly asked questions.”
“Questions? What kind of questions?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know – all kinds of stuff. How everyone had been while you’d been away, had anything unusual happened, what everyone was up to, etcetera. Just a hodgepodge – you kind of jumped around in terms of subject matter.”
I frowned but didn’t say anything. Being a shapeshifter myself (and therefore knowing how they operate), I understood that my double’s visit to Sarah had had one primary purpose: to get information. She had given it willingly, but couldn’t be blamed since she’d been under the impression she was talking to a friend.
Rather than continue grilling Sarah, I put an end to the questions and finished driving her to school. Once there, she made me promise one last time that I’d talk to Smokey, then got out of the car and headed inside just before the bell rang. I pulled away, driving another few blocks before turning in to the lot of a strip mall and parking. Then I teleported, car and all, back to the garage of the embassy.
Chapter 37
I teleported back to my room and flopped down on the bed, thinking about what I’d learned. The fake me had gotten a decent amount of information from Sarah. None of it was earth-shattering, but it was enough to allow him to do what shapeshifters do best: get close to people without arousing suspicion. But who else, exactly, had he gotten close to?
That was a difficult question to answer. Anyone who saw my double would probably assume it was me, as Sarah did. I’d only discovered that my evil twin had approached her because she called me and referenced a conversation that we’d never actually had.
Hmmm. Had anyone else spoken to me in a way that suggested we had interacted when we actually hadn’t?
I grabbed the notepad containing my witness list and started scanning the names. However, I stopped about halfway through as a new thought occurred to me: my list only contained the names of people from the party on Saturday, but my doppelganger had been in business since at least the day before that, when he had met with Sarah.
Letting out a despondent sigh, I flung my mind back yet another twenty-four hours in time and tacked onto the list the names of people I had interacted with as of Friday afternoon. There weren’t many, so within a minute or so, I felt I finally had a complete list of all the people I had crossed paths with over the past few days.
Looking at the names, it quickly became apparent to me that, from the standpoint of the fake Jim, a good number of them wouldn’t have been worth talking to. The bulk of them were folks that I didn’t associate with on a regular basis – case in point, the people who had come through the receiving line. They wouldn’t have enough information about me to merit a conversation. (Of course, all of this rested on a hypothesis that I was somehow the focus of my double’s actions, but since he was walking around with my face and basically setting me up to take a fall, it didn’t seem too much of a stretch.)
Next, I started eliminating those whom my double was unlikely to have made contact with, such as my family. As they could all read minds and generally kept a mental tab on me when I was at home, my mother and grandparents had a pretty good idea of what I “looked like” telepathically. Fooling them would be next to impossible, so I would have heard about it if they’d been approached. Likewise, there were others who would be hard to hoodwink.
In the end, I was left with a short list of people who might have been contacted by my lookalike. In fact, upon reflection, there was at least one person whom I was all but certain had interacted with my double, and I made a phone call to BT asking her to look into it for me. After eliciting a promise from her to get back to me asap, I called Mouse.
My mentor answered after the first ring, stating, “If you’re calling for a status update, I don’t have anything.”
“No problem,” I said. “I was actually calling to update you.” I then gave him a quick overview of what Sarah had told me (sans the part about her issues with Smokey), and my efforts to narrow down the list of people whom my evil twin may have reached out to.
“That’s not bad detective work,” Mouse admitted grudgingly. “It’ll be interesting to see what BT comes back with, but what about the others? Have you contacted them?”
“Uh...not yet,” I said a bit timidly.
“Get on it,” Mouse ordered. “I’m still at home, but I can be at HQ in an hour. Meet me in my lab when you’re done.”
He then hung up without waiting for any acknowledgment.
Chapter 38
There were three names for me to check out: Li, Smokey, and Electra. I decided to take them in reverse order and started with my girlfriend.
In an ideal world, I would simply have called her on her cell phone. However, like Sarah, I expected Electra to be in class by this point, and since cell phone use was prohibited during the school day, I had to go to Plan B.
I teleported to her school, popping up in the student parking lot at the rear of the campus. Electra actually attended a different high school than I did, so – while I had a vague notion of her schedule – I didn’t know exactly where she was.
It was chilly out and I hadn’t worn a jacket, so I adjusted my body temperature to compensate. Unbothered now by the weather, I reached out empathically,
extending my ability in the direction of the school. Almost immediately, I started picking up a number of typical adolescent sensations: teen angst, high school crushes, simmering rebelliousness… In a similar vein, there were vibes with a more mature undertone that presumably originated from faculty and administration, including pent-up frustration, joy of accomplishment, and hopefulness mingled with worry.
Much like I could recognize her voice, being around Electra on an almost daily basis had allowed me to become attuned to her empathically. Thus, it only took me a minute to lock in on her emotional vibe, so to speak, and thereby pinpoint her location. I phased and simultaneously turned invisible (which automatically switched my vision over to the infrared), then flew towards the school building – bypassing the doors in favor of simply going through the walls.
I found her in what appeared to be a math class. Still invisible, I floated up into a corner of the room and hovered there for a second while I cycled my vision through the light spectrum to something approaching normal. Then I spent a moment looking at my girlfriend.
She was dressed in jeans and an oversized, maroon turtleneck sweater. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, revealing a pair of tear-shaped earrings that I had brought back for her from Caeles. As to cosmetics, the only thing I noted appeared to be a light application of shiny lip gloss. All in all, while not as stunning as she had been at the party, she was still storybook beautiful – and as it turned out, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
Electra was actually watching the teacher, who had his back to the class and was writing something on the board about polynomials, when a girl at the desk next to her passed her a note. Obviously surprised, Electra took the note, which had been folded over several times and had a little heart drawn on the outside. She turned to the girl who had given her the note with a perplexed expression, and emotionally I sensed genuine confusion coming from her.
Rather than reply, the girl who had passed the note hooked a thumb over her shoulder. Glancing in the direction indicated, I saw a guy sitting there and took a moment to look him over.
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