Parallelogram Omnibus Edition

by Brande, Robin

  “What are you doing home?” Professor Whitfield asked when Halli was finally able to reach him. He had his own classes to teach. The two of them weren’t supposed to talk until later that afternoon.

  “It won’t work,” Halli said.

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” she said. “I went there, I pretended to be her, and I can see it isn’t going to work. We have to think of something else. Right away.”

  “Halli...” The professor tried to talk some sense into her. Tried for fifteen minutes straight. But Halli’s mind was made up.

  “This isn’t my life,” she said. “I have other things to do.”

  “Like what?” the professor demanded. He had lost patience with her. She didn’t seem to understand what needed to be done.

  “I think I should come back there,” Halli said.

  “Back...where?”

  “To Colorado. To your college. I think it’s the only smart move.”

  The professor wasn’t expecting that. But he didn’t immediately dismiss it.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Halli went on, determined to make her case. “As long as I’m here, we’ll always have to be careful. Sneak around. Make sure Audie’s mother doesn’t know anything. But if I can somehow come live out there—”

  “How, Halli?” the professor asked. “Audie is still in high school.”

  “Can’t she...leave? I don’t know how it works.”

  At some point during the conversation, Albert had come into Professor Whitfield’s office. He’d been sitting on the couch, listening in. Now he stood to make his face visible on the screen.

  “Halli? Hold on a minute.”

  Albert booted up his laptop and started typing. He studied his screen for a while, then turned it so Professor Whitfield could see.

  “What is it?” Halli asked.

  “Just a minute,” the professor said. He wrote a few numbers on a piece of paper. He looked at Albert’s screen a few more times.

  “What?” Halli said.

  “Just a minute!” they both answered.

  Finally Albert smiled.

  “Okay, there’s a possibility,” Professor Whitfield said. He let Albert take his spot in front of the computer and explain it all to Halli.

  “It’s a good thing Audie’s a geek,” Albert said. “She’s taken summer school the past three years. She already has enough credits to graduate. She didn’t even need to take any of her senior year.”

  “So I can leave?” Halli asked.

  “Well...almost,” Albert said.

  There are things you do in your life that you think will only have consequences at the moment. Things you do your best at, not realizing that if you fail, some other person’s life might hang in the balance.

  I’d been trying for three and a half years to get past Algebra I. I had high hopes for finally doing it my senior year—okay, maybe not high hopes, but some hope at least—and I really was trying hard.

  But now Halli was going to have to pay the price for my utter inability to pass that one stupid class.

  Because the only thing standing between her and ever having to go back to high school?

  Math.

  20

  “Just that one class,” Halli repeated.

  “Right,” Albert said.

  “So I have to sit there day after day just for that. No. I won’t do it.”

  “Audie can’t graduate without it,” Albert said.

  “And they won’t admit you here if you don’t have it,” Professor Whitfield said. “I’m sorry, Halli. It’s a requirement on both ends.”

  Halli took a break to lie back onto my bed. What she needed was another run or some kind of exercise. Her head was too jumbled. She needed to clear it.

  She could hear Albert and Professor Whitfield discussing something in the background. She didn’t care anymore. This whole thing was so ridiculous. She had absolutely zero interest in making sure I completed high school. But she did care very much about escaping to Colorado. It had seemed like the perfect plan.

  For several reasons, including a few she wasn’t ready to share with the professor just yet.

  “Halli?” Professor Whitfield said.

  She lifted her head up just enough to see the screen. “Yes?”

  “Albert reminded me there is one more possibility.”

  She tried to muster some optimism. “All right, let’s hear it.”

  “Do you think you could learn algebra?” Albert asked. “If you studied it on your own?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, sitting up all the way now. “Why?”

  “There’s a kind of test you can take,” Albert said. “It’s called a CLEP test—College Level Examination Program. It’s a way to get out of taking certain classes in college. I used it a lot in undergrad—got out of a couple of Humanities courses, Bio I, Calc I and II—”

  “You realize I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Albert said. “Bottom line is you study up on a subject, take a few practice exams, and then when you think you’re ready, you take the real one. Multiple choice, ninety-minute test. And if you pass, you get credit for the course, just like you took it.”

  “But you said that’s for college,” Halli said.

  “Yeah, but now they let home schoolers use them, and some high schools accept the scores, too. From what I just read on Audie’s school website, it looks like they do. So if you think you might be able to learn algebra on your own...”

  A smile spread across Halli’s face. Because she knew exactly how she was going to do it.

  When Halli was nine, Ginny decided it was time for her to learn Russian. Not only to speak it—Halli had already learned various phrases during their travels—but to read it and write it, too.

  Ginny treated it like a game. Every day she presented Halli with a new set of sentences featuring those strange letters from the Russian alphabet. None of them made any sense to Halli. But what did start to make sense were the patterns.

  She learned to recognize certain symbols as they combined to make words: This set meant “Hello.” This set meant “Goodbye.” This set meant “Thank you.”

  Ginny’s challenge every day was for Halli to translate those symbols as fast as she could, starting with the ones she’d learned the day before and the day before that. So Halli was always building, always improving. Ginny wouldn’t let her go on to a new set until she’d mastered the old ones.

  And just as Ginny suspected, once she turned it into a game like that—best of all, a speed game—Halli learned in rapid time. Words led to phrases, which led to sentences. Soon she could read a Russian newspaper with no difficulty at all.

  Now it was Halli’s turn to apply the method. To symbols as foreign to her as the Russian alphabet had once been.

  She explained her strategy.

  “You know, I’ve heard of that,” Albert said. “Some teacher in Japan came up with a way to speed-teach math that sounds just like that.”

  “So you’ll help me?” Halli asked.

  “Of course,” Professor Whitfield said. “What do you need?”

  “Worksheets,” Albert interrupted. “Lots and lots of them. You start with the basics, then you keep drilling them until you’re ready for the next and then the next—”

  “Good,” Halli said. “Send me whatever I need. I’ll start work right away.”

  If it sounded too easy, that was about to change. Because there was one more detail they had to take care of.

  “You need permission,” Professor Whitfield said.

  “Permission for what?” Halli asked. She wasn’t accustomed to asking anyone permission for anything.

  “The school will have to agree to accept the test as credit. And they’ll have to agree to let you—or Audie—graduate early.”

  Halli blew out a breath. “Fine. What do I have to do?”

  Albert looked up the name of the three counselors at my school. “One of the
m can probably process the paperwork.”

  Halli wrote down their names and slipped the paper into a pocket.

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, there’s Audie’s mother,” Albert pointed out.

  “You’ll need her permission, too,” Professor Whitfield agreed.

  Halli was growing more irritated by the minute. She had been completely independent for the past year of her life. And before that, Ginny treated her like an adult long before anyone else might have. Halli wasn’t used to a life like mine, where you constantly have to ask and negotiate for what you want. Halli was used to doing and having and getting.

  “Send me the worksheets,” she told Albert before clicking off the call. Then she made herself a quick snack of peanut butter and banana, refilled her water bottle, and took off at a run, heading back toward my school.

  Where she fully intended to get exactly she wanted.

  21

  “You’ll regret it,” Mrs. Brussell, the school counselor, said. “You’ll miss your friends. You shouldn’t be in such a hurry, Audie. This time in your life is precious.”

  Halli listened politely, then repeated her request. “I’d like to start the process now. What do I need to do?”

  Mrs. Brussell tried one more thing.

  “Audie, I think we both know from your grades that the chances of you passing an algebra test on your own are...not good.”

  “That will be up to me to manage,” Halli said, trying to keep the coldness out of her voice. She wondered how I could stand having people try to push me around all the time, telling me what I could and couldn’t do. What I was capable of. It made Halli want to grind my teeth.

  But she forced herself to be civil. “Now,” she said, giving Mrs. Brussell her standard fake smile, “you said you have a form for my mother to sign?”

  Mrs. Brussell was no match for the will and determination of Halli Markham. But Halli knew my mother would be a harder challenge.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about it. Trying out certain ways of phrasing it, of arguing her point. She imagined all my mother’s objections, and tried to think of responses to all of them. But she knew that no matter how logical she was, this would still be difficult. The problem was, she didn’t really know my mother.

  If it had been Halli’s mother, Halli wouldn’t have even bothered asking for her permission. She would have done what she wanted and ignored anything either of her parents wanted.

  But in my world, Halli was dependent. She hated that. But the fact was, until she could earn her own money somehow and move somewhere where she could live on her own, she had to take my mother into consideration. She couldn’t burn that bridge. Not yet.

  And I don’t mean that she didn’t like my mother. She just didn’t know her. My mom seemed really pleasant, really nice, but Halli had no feelings toward her. It was as if my mom were just some roommate living in the same house. A roommate who bought all the groceries and paid all the bills.

  Halli knew that the sooner she could move to Colorado, the sooner she could begin her independent life. It wasn’t just about getting out from under my mom’s watchful eye, the way she’d told the professor. It was really about Halli’s plan for how she was going to make some money.

  Because in her various hours spent searching the Internet, she’d been doing a different kind of math than algebra: calculating what it would cost to travel to all the places she wanted to visit, like India and Iceland and the Alps, and how much it would cost to find lodging there. So far she’d mapped out a series of trips that would cost her about $4,500. She wasn’t sure how long it would take her to earn that much money, but she knew the sooner she got started on the project, the better.

  There was that other source of funds, of course, if she chose to use it: the money in my savings account. But she didn’t choose to use it. What she wanted was to earn her own money as quickly as possible.

  And that’s where another part of her plan came in. The part she hadn’t shared with the professor and Albert yet.

  Halli’s skills lay in a very specific area: outdoor exploration and adventure. She might not be good at working in a restaurant or an office, or trying to make change at a fast food place, but she did know how to tie a knot that would allow someone to ascend a rope up out of a crevasse. And she could splint a broken leg with just sticks and a few items of clothing. She could navigate her way across mountains and deserts and oceans. She could speak dozens of languages. She could row, paddle, ski, climb, run, hike, backpack, kayak, sail. She could do all sorts of things that she knew, from her Internet research, people were willing to pay for. People wanted guides. People wanted instructors. Halli had a lot to offer, under the right circumstances.

  But she wasn’t going to be able to set up that kind of life in Tucson. Not because there weren’t outdoor opportunities, but because she’d never be able to hide it from my mother—at least not for long.

  How was she supposed to explain herself? “I know you think all I’ve done the past several years is stay in my bedroom and study physics, but really I’ve secretly been preparing myself to become a mountain guide. I’m going to go take some clients up to the top of Mount Wrightson today. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”

  Right.

  But Colorado—that was a different story. Halli knew she could set up a new life there. Pretend she was going to college at Mountain State, but then start offering her services right away to the more than twenty guiding companies she’d found in the area. With her various skills, covering activities in every single season, she’d be able to work all year long. And maybe in that year, she could earn more than enough to start traveling.

  The other useful thing about Colorado was that Halli knew from studying the maps that the mountains and rivers were exactly like the ones in the Colorado she’d spent so much time in back in her own universe. Some of the places had been given different names, but the maps proved to Halli she knew the terrain. She had been all over that wilderness for years.

  Ginny owned a house in a town called River Grove, Colorado—the house where I’d first woken up in Halli’s body a little more than a week ago—and Ginny and Halli stayed there for large parts of the year. They used it as their base, but then took off whenever they wanted to go camping or backpacking, hiking or skiing. Halli felt confident she would have no trouble navigating her way around. In fact, Colorado was exactly the perfect place for her to begin.

  There were several steps to the whole plan, but Halli was ready to take them.

  1. Get out of school.

  2. Get to Colorado.

  3. Get a job.

  4. Get lost. Go out into the world and remake Audie Masters’s life into something more fitting for Halli Markham. Something Halli could understand.

  And what if, in the midst of all this, the real Audie Masters showed up again? Great. Terrific. Halli would be happy to turn over the keys to this body again—as long as she had another one she could inhabit.

  Halli hadn’t forgotten a single word of the conversation between Professor Whitfield and me. The one about her being dead. About her body being gone. The professor might want Halli to do whatever she could to help find me and bring me home, but Halli, in her own secret mind, needed assurances. If she didn’t have a live version of herself to take over, then she wasn’t budging out of my body or out of my life.

  The professor didn’t know that. Albert didn’t know that. I certainly didn’t. But any of us should have guessed. Halli was a survivor—is a survivor. A future as a dead girl wasn’t the future she was pursuing.

  And if it turned out she had to stay as Audie Masters, then Audie Masters would soon be leading a spectacularly different life.

  22

  When my mom came home that night, Halli was ready for her. In a way I never would have been.

  I’ve never been a particularly good liar. To be good at it, I think you have to have a certain amount of fearlessness. You need to really commit to your lie, no matter
what someone throws at you.

  Granted, I’d been able to hide from my mother the fact that I’d been visiting a parallel universe every night. And yes, I also managed to sneak off to Colorado without her knowing, so I could spend the weekend undergoing tests with Professor Whitfield.

  But this was a different kind of lie. It required face-to-face conversation, and Halli couldn’t waver for one second. But she was up for it.

  “Mmm, what’s that smell?” my mom asked when she walked in. Halli met her in the kitchen.

  “Roasted vegetables,” Halli said, pulling open the oven to show my mom. “Potatoes, leeks, garlic, carrots, zucchini...”

  “Audie, that looks delicious! Where did you learn to—”

  “Thanks,” Halli said, cutting her off. “It still has to cook a while longer. I was hoping you and I could talk about something in the meantime. Something important.”

  My mother looked worried. “Of course, honey, what is it?” She sat down at the kitchen table.

  Halli sat, too. She took a deep breath, like what she was about to say was hard for her.

  “I did a lot of thinking last week,” she began. “And I think you’re right about Columbia University—I’ve been pushing myself too hard.”

  “Good, honey. I’m glad you understand that.”

  “But it’s more than that,” Halli went on. “I thought about a lot of things—school, my future, what I want to do with my life. And I came to a decision.”

  Halli got up. “Wait a minute. I need to show you something.”

  She went to my bedroom and came back with a folder of papers. She handed it to my mother.

  “What’s this?”

  “I talked to someone at the school today,” Halli said. “I found out I have enough credits to graduate right now—I had enough after this summer. Now all I have to do is take a test, and I can graduate. I want to do that. I want to leave. Right away. But I need your permission first.”