“Audie,” my mom called, “ready?”
Ready enough, Halli thought. It was time to put the first phase of her plan into action.
It was time she seized control.
7
“I’ll get us a cart,” my mom said, but Halli was already heading off in her own direction.
“Oh, okay,” my mom said, clearly surprised. Usually the two of us walk the aisles together just to keep each other company. But Halli neither knew about that nor cared.
“I’ll come find you,” my mom called after her. “I just need to pick up a few things...”
Halli didn’t bother listening. She was on a mission.
Because she knew if her plan were going to succeed, she needed to get to work on my body right away. It had done all right for her so far whenever she took it running, but she was about to start putting a lot more demands on it, and for that she needed strength.
And for that she needed proper food.
No more takeout, no more microwavable vegetables smothered in cheese, no more chips or sugary cereals or any of the other junk my mom and I love so much. Halli needed fresh food. Home-cooked food. And good coffee—she was a snob about that. I remember her taking a whiff of the cheap coffee my mom always buys, and telling me, “We’re better than this.”
So she scooped up a basket from the end of one of the checkout lanes and headed toward the right. She had been in that store once before, and knew exactly where she wanted to go.
She’d gone in one morning while she was out on one of her runs. She had a craving for fruit—not something we normally keep in our house, since it usually goes bad before my mom or I remember to eat it—and she was curious what kinds of food she might find.
But Halli wasn’t in the habit of bringing any money with her, and she forgot that in my world she couldn’t just step up to a cashier and have the person wave a sensor over the microchip beneath Halli’s collar bone, and punch in a code to have the purchase deducted from one of her accounts. Not only do our stores not work that way, but my body doesn’t come equipped with a microchip.
As Halli walked out of the store that day without the banana and kiwi she meant to buy, she made a note of that. Not of the fact that she needed money to purchase food in my world—that was obvious—but of the fact that she didn’t have any money of her own, and would have to ask my mother for anything she wanted.
Halli didn’t like that one bit.
It had been different with Ginny: the two of them were a team. Halli never had to beg or negotiate with her grandmother. They both understood that if either of them needed anything, they would just get it. It had always been that simple.
Of course, it helped that Ginny was rich—very rich. And when she died she left everything to Halli. Money was never a worry in Halli’s life—not like in mine at all. My mom and I have been basically poor my whole life. And that was the life Halli stepped into.
When she searched my room those first few days, looking for clues so she could impersonate me, Halli found my wallet and the whopping $27.52 I had in there. She also found the bank statements showing a little over $2,000 in my savings account—money I’d been accumulating over the past several years to help my mom pay for college.
But that wasn’t Halli’s money. At least not in her eyes.
Yes, she could have gone into my bank at any moment, shown them my ID, and withdrawn every penny I had, but she wasn’t like that. What was mine was mine, what was hers was hers.
And at the moment, nothing was hers.
But she had a plan to change that. One she had been thinking about ever since she learned the day before that she might be stuck exactly where she was.
It was why she was currently loading up her shopping basket with several pounds of potatoes, squash, beans, bananas, apples, parsnips, turnips, onions, carrots, greens—
“Audie,” my mother said, staring in shock at Halli’s overflowing basket. “Honey, we can’t get all that.”
“Why not?” Halli was genuinely perplexed.
“Well...we’ll never eat all that. It’ll just go to waste.”
“No it won’t,” Halli said. “I’ll eat it.”
“But...who’s going to cook it?” my mom asked. She tugged at the bunch of Swiss chard. “I wouldn’t even know what to do with some of this.”
“I do,” Halli said. “I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry.” She patted my mom on the arm.
My mom laughed at her. “Honey! Listen, I think it’s great that you want to start taking better care of yourself, but we can’t just waste money like this. Now why don’t you go put some of that back, and let’s think about what we can realistically eat over the next week.”
Halli took a deep breath and held her annoyance in check. She smiled as politely as she could. “These are the foods I want, and I know how to cook them. Nothing will be wasted. I’ll make food for you, too. You’ll like it. Trust me.”
My mom gave her a look like I’d suddenly sprouted an extra head. Or like I was suffering from amnesia. We both know neither one of us has a clue how to cook. It’s the whole basis of our takeout lifestyle. And it’s why we’re always so thrilled whenever Will and Lydia’s mother, Elena, invites us over to their house for dinner.
“Everything will be fine,” Halli said. “I promise. And if I need to, I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mom muttered. “Come on.”
My mom stood nervously watching the cashier ring up Halli’s purchases. But she paid without saying anything more.
As they loaded bags into the trunk of our car, Halli took one more stab at reassuring my mother.
“I’ll make us something for dinner,” she said. “You’ll see. You’ll like it.”
My mom shook her head. “Audie...”
She reached out and hugged me. Who she thought was me.
Halli stiffened. Then she caught herself. She tried to relax, and ended up giving my mom a couple of friendly pats on the back. Then she pulled away.
“I’m...excited about you trying to cook,” my mom said.
Halli just smiled. She couldn’t tell my mother that she had cooked for herself most of her life: in fancy kitchens and primitive ones, in many countries and on every continent, on mountaintops, in jungles, on the deck of a wildly pitching boat, while suspended from ropes on the side of a cliff, and huddled next to a sled on a field of sea ice while Ginny guarded against polar bears.
No doubt about it, Halli would be doing a lot more than “trying.”
8
“Miss Markham?” I could hear a voice calling to me. Female, with an accent. Not British, but something else. “My name is Dr. Rios. Can you hear me?”
“Mmm,” was the best I could do. My mouth was dirt dry, my throat raspy and sore. My eyes felt crusted over. I tried to pry them open.
The doctor lifted one of my eyelids and shined a light into my pupil. Pain rocketed through my head. I jerked away.
“What does that mean?” I heard Jake ask. “Is she all right?”
“It could be a reflex,” Dr. Rios said. “She’s still heavily drugged. We’re continuing to scan the brain to search for any damage.”
That didn’t sound good. I tried to open my eyes again.
“Halli?” Jake said. “Can you hear us? Halli, say something, please.”
Too much trouble. He had no idea how much effort it took.
And I didn’t feel all that motivated to do him any favors, considering it was his fault I was even lying there in the first place.
I couldn’t remember everything, but I could remember enough:
Daniel and me together in a dark, quiet room at his parents’ production studio. Me trying to contact Halli for the second time that day.
The first time hadn’t ended well. A woman named Olga and her daughter Christine showed me how to calm my mind, how to let it drift while I felt for the energy of Halli out there in the vast ocean of time and space. And then, once I found her, how to dive down and rej
oin my own body back in my own world.
But all it took was Halli’s exuberant greeting to pull me out of the moment. I lost control. I don’t know if it was because I came out of it too abruptly, or if something else went wrong, but for whatever reason it was like someone ripping my skin off and turning me inside out. Like spikes driven into my head. It was the worst pain I’d ever felt in my life.
Until it happened the second time.
Everything had being going well: I’d been able to talk to not only Halli, but also Professor Whitfield. We were getting somewhere. He had a theory about how it was I ended up in Halli’s body, and she ended up in mine. Neither one of us understood how I’d jumped ahead three days in the process, but we probably could have figured that out if we had time.
And then I heard my mother coming in the front door of our house. I hadn’t seen her since the whole thing happened, and I was desperate to look at her face again, to give her a hug, even just to hear her voice. She called out that she had soup for me. I started to run to her.
But then it all blew apart.
The door to Daniel’s and my private sanctuary burst open, and in rushed Jake, Daniel’s sister Sarah, and the reporter who’d been following us around. And then it was utter chaos: shouting, fighting, screaming. The screams were mine. I’d been ripped out of my real body once more, and this time the crash of pain felt like an explosion inside Halli’s head. My screaming only made it worse, made Halli’s brain feel like it was splitting down the center, but I couldn’t stop myself. The sound just kept coming.
Daniel tried to protect me. I could hear him yelling at the three of them to get out, to leave us alone, but then Jake started pushing back, and finally punched Daniel in the face.
I couldn’t worry about that—I just wanted the pain in Halli’s head to stop. But the next thing I knew, there was more shouting, a bigger crowd, and I was being wheeled along on a gurney and then loaded into an ambulance. I remember poor Red, Halli’s big yellow Labrador, trying to jump up in there with me, and being kicked away by the medic. And I remember looking over and seeing Daniel’s bleeding face. I remember flashes of it all, each one more horrible than the next.
And now waking up in the hospital, in this prison of a drugged mind. I was going to have to convince somebody to stop feeding that into my veins. My only salvation would come from having a clear head again so I could travel back to my own universe. I needed a mind free to figure out the physics, and this gooey mind wasn’t capable of it.
“Halli, open your eyes,” Jake tried again. “Please. Come back to me. I love you.”
I mumbled something. Couldn’t get the words out. Couldn’t tell him what I really wanted.
Which was for him to go find Daniel for me, and then get out of my life forever.
9
By the time Halli and my mom got home from grocery shopping, the phone in our house was ringing.
“Can you get that?” my mom called. She went back to the car to bring in more groceries.
Halli had been avoiding the phone all week. She knew there wouldn’t be anyone calling that she wanted to talk to. The only people she wanted contact with were Professor Whitfield and Albert, and they always handled that by video chat. Even more important, Halli assumed that whoever was calling would expect her to know who they were. Even Caller ID wasn’t any help, since Halli had never met any of those people in her life and wouldn’t exactly know what to say to them.
This time the Caller ID said Stamos-V. That narrowed it down to someone in the Stamos-Valadez family: Lydia, Will, or their mom, Elena. I’d shared details about all of them here and there in my conversations with Halli—including my sad, secret, unrequited love for Will—but it still wasn’t really enough for her to fake knowing any of them. On the other hand, she couldn’t think of a good excuse for not answering the phone when my mom had just asked her to. So she picked it up and waited.
After a moment of silence, the voice on the other end said, “Hello?”
“Yes?” Halli answered.
“How come you never called me back? I’ve left you like four messages.”
It was Lydia. She didn’t bother saying so, since obviously I’d know her voice.
“Oh,” Halli said. And she left it at that. Not only had she not been answering the house phone or my cell phone, she had no way of ever accessing my messages, even if she wanted to.
Because even though her search through my desk drawers and notebooks had turned up quite a few of my passwords, she never would have found the code for my cell phone. That’s because I had no need to write it down. I’ll never forget it: it’s Will’s birthday.
I know, pathetic.
Apparently Lydia didn’t care that Halli hadn’t offered a full explanation, because she just went on with her message. “My mom says for you two to come over tonight. She’s making enchiladas.”
Halli hesitated. Should she say she was still sick? Avoid any social situations for as long as she could, in hopes that she never had to deal with any of them?
No, because realistically, she was going to have to move forward one way or another. And that probably meant showing up at school the next day and doing her best to pretend to be me. At least until she could come up with some better solution.
So if that was inevitable, then she might as well smooth the way by meeting at least a few of the people she would be expected to know.
Besides, Halli was curious about a certain person.
“Will Gemma be there?” she asked.
“Probably,” Lydia answered with a certain tinge of disgust. Neither of us particularly cares for Will’s obnoxious, hair-flipping, boob-thrusting, eye-winking British girlfriend. I, of course, hate her more, and would hate her even if she were the greatest person in the world. But Lydia doesn’t know that. I’ve never told her about my feelings for her twin brother. That would be a disaster all its own.
But Halli was curious about Gemma for her own reasons. While Halli and I were hiking in the Alps, we met a party of three Brits: Daniel, who eventually became my sort-of boyfriend; Daniel’s friend Martin; and Daniel’s sister, Sarah. Halli and I both ended up adoring Sarah. She could be a little outspoken sometimes, a little wearing in her need for attention, but she was also a fun and lively girl who turned out to be a good friend to both of us.
And yes, Sarah was partly responsible for the whole episode that ended up getting me dragged off to the hospital, but she had no way of knowing that. She thought she was just helping out some friends.
Sarah, as I’d explained to Halli, had a parallel version over in my universe. That girl was the hideous Gemma. I had described all of her hideousness to Halli, but now she was curious to see it for herself.
“What time?” Halli asked.
“Dinner’s at six,” Lydia said. “I have to teach, so I’ll be there a little late.”
“Teach...yoga?” Halli remembered me telling her that Lydia did that.
“Uh, yeah,” Lydia answered, in a tone that said obviously.
“Can I come?”
Lydia wasn’t expecting that. Why should she? She’s been trying to talk me into taking yoga ever since she started. I’ve always said no.
“Sure,” Lydia said. “But why?”
“I want to,” Halli said, and left it at that. “What time?”
“Four-thirty.”
Lydia still sounded skeptical, so Halli knew she had to be careful with her next question. Should she ask for the name of the yoga studio so she could look up the address? Or was there a sneakier way to do it?
“My mother has to use the car,” Halli said. “Can I go with you?”
“I’m taking the class before that,” Lydia answered. “Then teaching the four-thirty right after.”
“That’s fine,” Halli said. “I’ll go to both of them.”
“You’ll what? Audie, what’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Halli said. “I just feel like getting some exercise today.”
“Did you hit yo
ur head or something?”
“I’ve decided to make some changes.” It was an explanation that was going to have to do—for a lot of things. Halli decided she might as well be upfront about it. People were going to start seeing some of those changes soon enough. Doing several hours of yoga on a Sunday afternoon was as good a start as any.
Lydia must have been shaking her head over on her end. “Sure. Whatever. I’ll pick you up at two. But if you hate it after the first class, you’re going to have to get a ride home.”
“I won’t hate it,” Halli said. “I promise.”
10
My body is my body no matter who happens to be inside it, so it took a little coaxing to get it to do what Halli wanted. But the yoga studio is always kept pretty warm for just that reason, to let people unclench, and so by the end of the first class Halli found what she was looking for from my limbs and my joints and my whole skeleton in general.
Lydia seemed amazed.
Not so much that I could do it, but that I even tried.
“Are you sure you want to stay?” she asked Halli after the two of them finished the first class. “I mean, you did great, but it’s a lot of yoga for one day. You shouldn’t try to push yourself or you’ll be sore tomorrow. Then you won’t come back.”
Lydia had seen it before with people who came to the studio all ready to change their lives, and went limping and groaning out, never to return.
But Halli had her own reasons for wanting to stay. Not just to do another round of yoga—she’d had her fill, and could have happily run home right then, since the studio was just a few miles from our house, and now she knew the way—but because she was avoiding someone. Two people, in fact.
Professor Whitfield and Albert were all hot to continue looking for me. And that required Halli. They wanted her to sit in my room and meditate to see if I made contact again.
But Halli had been thinking about it. Or really, feeling about it. She trusted her instincts, and this time her instincts told her it was no use. She had devoted hours over the previous week doing everything the professor suggested, trying to bring herself into some sort of resonance with me, but none of that had worked.
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