The Third Twin

by Cj Omololu

  “I’m sure it will all get fixed soon,” Maya says. “The cops know what they’re doing.”

  I can barely manage a grunt in reply. As we walk away from my locker, I see people whispering and turning away. Everyone tries to be casual, but I can feel the glances like ice on my skin as we head toward the quad.

  Maya squeezes my hand as she turns toward Building A. “It’s going to be okay. I’ll meet you for lunch, all right?”

  I nod, not trusting my voice, feeling like a kindergartner on the first day of school.

  It’s like the cops have given me a magic power that renders people completely silent the minute I come within three feet of them. Everyone’s talking at a normal volume until they see me; then it’s dead silence. Pun intended.

  I make it through the first three periods by staring either straight ahead or down at my books. Apparently I was wrong—the only thing worse than sitting at home and waiting for bad things to happen is being at school and waiting for bad things to happen, knowing that half the people around you are looking forward to the show.

  “Hey,” Zane says, pulling me toward him with one arm around my shoulder as I walk to Spanish. Twenty-four hours ago, things were so different. I feel so much bottled-up energy, I’m not sure how I’m going to sit at my desk and conjugate verbs for an hour.

  “Hey yourself,” I say, trying to pretend that I’m not on the verge of losing it. “Thanks again for calling Ms. Alvarez. She’s been cool.”

  “Any time. Glad to see she got you out of the joint.” He looks around at the people in the quad. “No Ava?”

  I shrug. “I haven’t seen her since she bolted out of the car this morning. She’s not exactly helping things, anyway.”

  Zane looks concerned. “Did you guys have a fight?”

  “Sort of. Not really.” I try to put it into words, but I can’t. “She’s just been … different lately.” I look away from him. “I don’t know.”

  Zane is silent for a moment. “You don’t really think Ava had something to do with this?” he finally asks.

  I don’t want to think about it right now. I don’t want to try to come up with reasonable explanations for all the clues that seem to be pointing right at us.

  Zane touches my arm. “Because whatever’s going on, she’d never do something like that to you. She was a wreck when they took you away yesterday. And I saw her in Annie in ninth grade. She’s not that good an actress.”

  I don’t answer. I want to believe him, I really do. I want to know that Ava would never betray me like that. She’s been part of me since before we were born, and while there’s none of that mystical twin crap with us—no private languages, no feelings of pain when she gets hurt, no telepathy—I can’t imagine not having her next to me.

  “You think I don’t see it, but I do,” Zane continues. “You pretend she drives you crazy, that you don’t have anything in common, that you’ve carved out these specific roles for yourselves over the years.” He pauses. “But I know that’s all bullshit. She’d do anything for you, and you know it.”

  I turn to face him. “So how do you explain the jacket that mysteriously shows up both in the surveillance photo and her closet? The speeding ticket, the hair salon—even the bartender at the club that night. Only two of us can pretend to be Alicia, and the only thing I know for sure is that none of those have been me.”

  “How many girls have bought red leather jackets recently? And what if it is her in that photo? So she went out that night—doesn’t mean she had anything to do with Casey’s death.”

  “But why wouldn’t she tell me the truth about where she was the night Casey was killed? Why would she just let me get ambushed at the police station like that?” It feels like we’re playing tennis—every excuse he can volley at me, I have an answer I can smack back at him. There’s one answer I haven’t wanted to look at too closely. One that makes so much sense, it scares me. “Maybe …,” I say, hesitating, because once I say it, it might become real. “Maybe Dylan broke up with Ava because he knew too much, didn’t want to get implicated. And maybe that’s what got him killed.”

  Zane glances at me. “You watch too much crime TV.”

  He doesn’t believe me. Nobody will believe me. “And your opinion of the average person is way too high,” I reply. “You and Ava are not exactly average people,” he says.

  “So,” Ms. Alvarez says, flipping back through the papers in the large folder on her big wooden desk. “It looks like we have some decisions to make.”

  “I don’t like any of the options,” Dad grumbles from his seat next to me. “Are you trying to tell me that there’s no easy way to make this whole mess disappear?”

  Ms. Alvarez puts her palms together. She looks so different today with her hair pulled back in a severe bun and a dark brown lawyer suit on. Less I’m here to help and more Don’t screw with me. Which is basically what you want in someone whose job it is to save your life. “I’m afraid not. There’s just too much evidence for an easy dismissal. I can help her avoid actual jail time at this point, but she’s going to have to be arraigned, and my guess is it will be sometime in the next two to three days.”

  “Arraigned.” “Jail.” Words I never thought would be said about me. Everything still feels so surreal, like someone’s going to call off this practical joke any minute.

  “What are the charges exactly?” Dad asks Ms. Alvarez. I know he agreed to keep her as my lawyer only because the lawyers he knows said that she’s the best criminal defense attorney around. He hates that she wasn’t his choice, and the creeping tone of impatience in his voice gives that away.

  Ms. Alvarez’s face is impassive. “Two counts of first-degree murder, with a possible additional charge of lying in wait for Dylan Harrington.”

  Hearing the charges out loud suddenly makes it all real. “So … what?” I breathe rapidly to keep from crying. “The cops aren’t even out looking for the real killer?”

  “They did look for the real killer,” Ms. Alvarez says, her eyes steady on me. “They found you.”

  I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. “But I didn’t do anything!” I say quickly. “This is crazy! I get assaulted by some asshole, and the next thing I know, I’m the one in trouble. I only met Dylan once when he was with Ava.”

  She glances at Dad. “Which is where some of the decisions have to come in.” Ms. Alvarez taps the front of the file folder with the end of her glasses. “Listen, they have evidence that puts you in the vicinity right before Casey’s death.” She pulls out a paper and glances at it. “They have the sweater covered in blood that they found at the scene, Casey’s DNA on your keys, and traces of his blood on your steering wheel.”

  “But I already explained all that! Over and over! I must have had blood on my hands from scratching him when he attacked me. That’s how it got on my steering wheel.”

  “I know,” she says. “And that’s the story we’re going to build for your defense.” She leans forward on the desk. “They have nothing but theories for Dylan Harrington’s death at this point. Most of what they have is hearsay. The DNA evidence they found on Casey is shaky at best. From what I can see, we’ve got enough wiggle room to get out of it.”

  “So the DNA they got from Casey didn’t match the girls’?” Dad asks. I can tell from the eagerness in his voice that he’s looking for any bit of good news.

  Ms. Alvarez shrugs. “It did, but there’s no evidence that it happened right before his death. There is some newer genetic testing they can do that might be able to separate each girl’s DNA, but it has to be sent out and takes a long time. And there are no guarantees that the differences will be enough to tell which girl’s DNA was actually under his fingernails. Right now, we can make the argument that Lexi’s DNA got there during the struggle in the car the previous night. In any case, it’s a hole in the case big enough to drive a truck through.” Her eyes narrow as she looks through the notes in her files. “There’s no fingerprint evidence at either scene, at least non
e that can’t be easily explained.”

  “What do you mean ‘easily explained’?” Dad asks.

  She looks pointedly at me. “It means that there aren’t any of Alexa’s fingerprints in Casey’s blood. That would be difficult to explain.”

  “There aren’t any because I wasn’t there when he was killed,” I say again. I think about the girl in the red jacket. “Neither of us was.”

  Ms. Alvarez closes the folder. “Which is where our decisions come in.” She turns to Dad. “Nobody has asked for a sample of Ava’s DNA or fingerprints. Right now, there’s nothing concrete linking either girl directly to the deaths, and I don’t think there’s a jury in the world who will convict Alexa on such flimsy evidence, despite the seeming coincidences. We need to decide if we’re going to offer up Ava to the prosecution or try to keep her out of the proceedings altogether.”

  Dad hesitates, then takes a deep breath and turns to me. “I agree. They’ll never convict you. If what you’re saying is true, there’s no way to prove that you had anything to do with the deaths of those boys. No sense in throwing your sister under the bus if we don’t have to.”

  “So, what? I get to deal with all this while Ava just sits home and watches TV?” I can’t get the image of the girl in the red jacket out of my head. My resolve to keep Ava out of this is slipping.

  “As long as you’re telling us the truth, you can both sit and watch entire seasons of the Kardashians, for all I care. They won’t convict you.” Dad sounds so sure of what he’s saying.

  “Everything I’m telling you is true! I didn’t have anything to do with any of this.”

  “So the only other answer is that someone is setting you up,” Dad says. “Who would do that?”

  Ms. Alvarez shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. It’s not our job to prove who committed these crimes. My only job is to convince a judge that Alexa didn’t.”

  I glance at her. If we can find out who really did all this, then Ava and I are both off the hook. “Someone hacked the online page.” I turn away from Dad. He’s going to be pissed. “The one we set up for Alicia.”

  “You set up a page for her?” Dad practically shouts. “How far did you two take this thing?”

  Ms. Alvarez ignores him and sits forward, interested. “Hacked? What do you mean?”

  I glance down at the floor. “I mean that we set up a page for her—you know, in case someone went looking. We wanted to make it feel like Alicia was real. Anyway, we found out that someone else got into it and has been posting Photoshopped pictures of Alicia in places we’ve never been.” I hesitate. “There was even a message that we didn’t put there. One from the night that Casey was killed.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?” She turns to her computer. “What’s the address?” Ms. Alvarez types quickly, her short nails clicking on the keyboard. She turns the monitor so that we can see it. “Is this it?”

  There’s the same bad selfie from the other day. “Yeah, that’s it.”

  Dad leans forward but doesn’t say anything to me. I can feel the disappointment flowing off him.

  “What parts were hacked?” she asks.

  “Scroll up. The new stuff is at the top.”

  She passes the photos of Tijuana and the reggae festival. “Right there,” I say, spotting the message from the night Casey was killed. “We didn’t write that.”

  “Hmm,” she grunts, taking a closer look. “Has anyone else seen this?”

  “I don’t know. We originally locked Alicia’s page so that only people we wanted to could see it, but now it’s open so anyone can search it. The password’s been changed, and we can’t get into it now to change anything.” Ms. Alvarez scrolls up faster and passes some new pictures that weren’t there the other day. “Wait! Stop.”

  “What?” Dad asks.

  “That one,” I say, pointing to the screen. “It wasn’t there before.” I put my hand to my mouth and take a quick breath as I realize what I’m seeing. “Jesus. It’s me and Casey in the parking lot.” My stomach lurches as I recognize the moment when he was pounding on my car window. You can’t see my face in the shadows of the car, but I remember the feeling of fear all too well. “Go up more.” Ms. Alvarez scrolls up to the next photo in the feed. “That’s Dylan,” I say, pointing to a photo of Ava and Dylan at the lifeguard tower. His face is a mask of fury as he shouts and gestures in her direction. “That must have been when Ava caught him cheating on her.” I feel sick and back away from the desk. “Oh my God. Someone’s been following us around and documenting everything. But why?”

  I hear Ms. Alvarez tapping on the keyboard. “There’s more,” she says.

  I shake my head—it already feels like my reality is splitting into two. “I don’t want to see any more.” I collapse back into my chair and put my head in my hands.

  “Who’s that?” Dad asks. “I don’t recognize that boy.”

  I lift my head toward Ms. Alvarez and see a photo of Eli and me standing on the lawn at the apartment party just seconds after he figured out Alicia. There’s hurt behind the anger in his eyes in the picture. I can’t believe somebody put it up there for everyone to see.

  “That’s Eli. A boy Alicia went out with a few times.” That’s as much as I can manage to explain right this minute. “What are we going to do?” I ask. I feel helpless and alone.

  “I’ll get some people on these,” she says. “And hope that nobody else finds them first.”

  I’m grasping at ideas as they flash through my brain. “But if both Ava and I are in them, then it proves that someone else was there. Someone else was watching us.”

  Ms. Alvarez turns away from the screen. “All these prove is that you had motive and opportunity. Showing a jury photos of you and your sister with boys who were murdered shortly after they were taken would definitely change the case, and not in your favor.”

  I glance back at the image on her computer, and my heart races as the reality hits me. She’s right—all of these guys were killed after these photos were taken. All except one. Eli.

  I fasten the pendant around my neck and look in the mirror. I can tell that I put the makeup on in a hurry, but I hope that no one else can. Eli knows I’m not Alicia now, but a small part of me thinks he might change his mind when he sees me. Going to the club in full-on Lexi sweats and Uggs isn’t going to help that at all.

  I look down at my cell. Eli still hasn’t answered any of my texts, and his phone is going straight to voice mail. I try not to think about what that might mean. I just have to get out of here and fix this before it’s too late.

  The house is quiet as I open my bedroom door. If Dad catches me sneaking out, he’s going to kill me, but if I don’t, Eli’s life could be in danger. I have to make him believe me, even if nobody else does.

  I slip down the hallway with the heels I swiped from Ava in my hand to avoid making too much noise on the imported terra-cotta tiles. My prayers are answered when I see Ava’s bag sitting on top of the kitchen island next to her jacket. Thank God. If she’d put it in her room, I don’t know what I’d do.

  I reach in and fish around quietly until my hand closes on her key ring. I’m focused so hard on staying quiet that I don’t hear anyone else in the room.

  I stifle a squeal as her hand darts out to grab my wrist. “What do you think you’re doing?” Ava asks, pulling my hand out of her bag, her keys dangling from my fingers.

  I hesitate, feeling my heart pound in my chest. I can’t tell her what I know—not if there’s even a tiny chance she’s in on it. “I need to borrow your car. To go see Eli.” Lies are always easier if you make them close to the truth.

  She smiles. “Eli? What for?”

  “I need to talk to him again—maybe see if we can work this out. Tonight might be the only chance I have to apologize. You know, before the arraignment.” I force myself to stop talking before I start babbling.

  She looks at me strangely. “Dad said that they’re not going to let you see the inside
of a jail cell.”

  “That’s what he thinks. Ms. Alvarez can’t guarantee anything. I have to at least try to apologize.”

  Ava seems to consider this for a moment. If there’s one thing she’s a sucker for, it’s doomed true love.

  I close my hand around her keys. “So can I borrow your car?”

  Ava tilts her head and looks at me. “No.” Neither of us says anything for a brief moment. “But I’ll drive you.”

  My heart races. I have to tell Eli that he’s in danger, but I don’t want her anywhere near him. On the other hand, if Ava’s with me, then at least I’ll be able to keep an eye on her. Besides, she’s caught me. If I want to see Eli tonight, I don’t have any other choice. “Okay. He’s playing at a club downtown.” I glance at the clock over the oven. “They go on in half an hour.”

  In a quick motion, Ava snatches the keys from my hand. “Let me grab a couple of things and we’ll get out of here.”

  “You have reached your destination,” the mechanical voice says from the dashboard of Ava’s car.

  “Where?” Ava asks, peering through the windshield at the grimy storefronts and flickering neon signs in the windows.

  “Over there, I think,” I say, pointing to a doorway where a few people are spilling out into the street.

  “Not exactly uptown.” Ava fixes her lipstick in the rearview mirror. “Let’s do this,” she says, pouting at her reflection.

  As we approach the club, I see a couple of girls in heavy eye makeup and torn black leggings, and I’m suddenly glad that I put on skinny jeans and a silver top. This is a rougher crowd than I’m used to.

  “Why the Aliciafication anyway?” Ava asks, glancing at me.

  I shrug, a little embarrassed that I’m thinking about Eli when there’s so much else going on. “I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to look the part.”

  Ava steps back and looks me over. “You look good, but I can do a little better.” She reaches behind me and pulls my shirt tighter, tucking it into the back of my jeans. She motions to me to come closer as she rummages in her bag. Pulling out a couple of pencils, she drags me into the light of the one hardworking streetlamp on this block. “Look up,” she says, bringing my face close to hers. I feel something cold on my eyes as she lines them, and then she smears some of her lipstick onto my mouth. “There,” she says after pulling my hair out of the loose bun and combing it with her fingers.