Will You Be My Friend?

by P. J. Night

  The three girls headed to the kitchen. Chrissy opened the fridge and began pulling things out—bread, peanut butter, marshmallows, chocolate bars, cookies, a can of whipped cream. Next came the freezer and out came ice cream bars and ice pops.

  Within a few minutes the three girls were hunkered down at the kitchen table building wild concoctions worthy of a team of mad scientists.

  “Okay,” said Chrissy. “I’ve got a peanut butter, ice cream, and chocolate bar sandwich topped with whipped cream.”

  “Sick, in a good way!” cried Alice. “Here’s my marshmallow, chocolate chip cookie, and banana mash-up.”

  “I made a little building with ice pops as the sides, an ice cream sandwich as the roof, and animal crackers as the pets inside the house,” said Beth.

  “Ready, set, eat!” shouted Chrissy.

  The three girls tore into their snacks as if they hadn’t eaten in a week. When they finished, each of their faces was smeared with streaks of chocolate, drips of orange ice, and patches of whipped cream.

  “Face stuffing complete!” announced Chrissy, sliding down in her chair.

  “I don’t think I’ll eat again tonight,” Beth said.

  “I don’t think I’ll eat again this year!” added Alice.

  “Movie time!” shouted Chrissy. “Creature from the Cellar?”

  “Not again!” cried Beth.

  “But Alice hasn’t seen it yet!” Chrissy whined.

  “It’s pretty scary,” said Beth.

  “Cool, what are we waiting for?” asked Alice.

  The three girls pried themselves away from the table and bounded back upstairs. They stretched out on their sleeping bags as Chrissy set up her laptop so they could all see the screen. Then she started streaming Creature from the Cellar.

  When the movie ended, the girls chatted until they grew sleepy.

  Just before she dropped off to sleep, Beth thought about how much fun she had had tonight, hanging out at a sleepover, just like a regular kid. Then she thought about that girl Lizzie and couldn’t shake the idea that maybe she did have a sister that her mom had never told her about. She imagined what it might be like to grow up with a sister, possibly even a twin sister, and felt a rush of excitement mingled with disappointment.

  And then she fell asleep.

  “Lizzie! Hurry up. We’ll be late for school.”

  Beth stood at the bottom of the stairs, her backpack slung over her shoulder. She glanced out the window and saw the school bus pulling up in front of her house.

  “The bus is here! We’re gonna be—”

  “Hold your horses,” shouted Lizzie.

  She ran down the stairs, her feet barely touching each one, her auburn hair bouncing behind her, her freckles highlighted by the sun streaming through the window.

  Lizzie looked exactly like Beth.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Lizzie asked, rushing past Beth. She threw open the door and looked back over her shoulder. “You don’t want to miss the bus do you, sis?”

  Beth shook her head and laughed, then followed Lizzie out the door.

  After scrambling up onto the school bus, Beth flopped down into a window seat, leaving the aisle seat open for Lizzie.

  But Lizzie was not on the bus.

  The bus driver started to close the door.

  “Wait!” Beth shouted, dashing up to the front of the bus. “Wait for my sister!”

  The bus driver looked at Beth as if she had lost her mind.

  “Your sister?” the driver asked.

  “Yeah, my sister, Lizzie,” Beth stated flatly. “My twin sister? She looks exactly like me?”

  “I’ve been picking you up at this house for a year,” the driver explained, pulling the lever to close the door. “You are the only kid I’ve ever picked up at this house. Now take your seat or you’re going to make everyone late.”

  Beth looked out the window, expecting to see Lizzie standing there getting ready to bang on the door.

  No Lizzie.

  She looked down the center aisle of the bus.

  No Lizzie.

  I have no sister, Beth realized.

  That’s when she woke up and saw that she was in her sleeping bag on the floor of Chrissy’s bedroom. The whole Lizzie thing was just a dream.

  I have no sister . . .

  . . . or do I?

  CHAPTER 4

  When Beth opened her eyes the next morning, she glanced over at Chrissy and Alice, who were still sound asleep. The intense dream about Lizzie not only freaked her out and confused her, but it also sapped her energy and exhausted her. She soon fell back asleep.

  By the time Beth woke up for good, Chrissy and Alice were already up and downstairs. Beth joined them in the kitchen, where at least six boxes of cold cereal were lined up on the table.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead,” said Chrissy. “Welcome to our Saturday morning breakfast feast.”

  “Yeah, pick your favorite three cereals, mix them together, then dig in,” Alice added.

  “Only three?” Beth asked, smiling. She grabbed a box of Honey-Crusted Crunchies and poured them into a bowl. The she stirred in Fruit-Flavored Roundies and Fun Flakes.

  “Delicious!” she said, eating her first spoonful.

  “That was a great movie last night!” said Alice through a mouthful of cereal.

  “I’m going downstairs to get more peanut butter!” Beth said, mimicking the girl in the movie.

  “Arrrrrgh!” Alice groaned, lifting her arms and curling her hands into claws, pretending to be the creature.

  Chrissy giggled. “It was great having both of you sleep over,” she said.

  “It was so much fun,” said Beth. Then her mind flashed back to her dream. She couldn’t get Lizzie out of her mind.

  “You okay?” Alice asked.

  “Huh?” Beth replied, startled out of her thoughts.

  “Your expression just changed, like you were worried about something,” said Chrissy.

  “Maybe you’re worried about . . . the monster! Arrrrrgh!” Alice cried, doing her creature imitation again.

  Beth smiled. “No, no, I’m fine,” she lied.

  After breakfast Beth rolled up her sleeping bag and packed up her backpack.

  “Thanks again for inviting me, Chrissy,” she said as she stuffed her pajamas into the pack. “I had a really great time.”

  “Yeah, we should do it again soon,” said Chrissy.

  “It was so great to meet you, Beth,” added Alice. “I hope I see you again. And I hope I didn’t upset you talking about that girl Lizzie. It was just a little weird for me to meet someone who looks just like someone else I used to know.”

  “Nice meeting you too, Alice, and don’t worry about it,” Beth said.

  Alice and Beth exchanged e-mail addresses and phone numbers and talked about hanging out again soon.

  “See ya later,” said Chrissy, as Beth headed out the front door.

  On the short walk home Beth thought about the fact that Chrissy and Alice would be going to school on Monday. She felt a pang of sadness that she would not be going too. She pictured, not for the first time, what it might be like to go to school with other kids.

  Then she shook her head, as if answering her own thoughts.

  You’ve got it pretty good here, she thought as she headed through her front door. You’ve got a mom who loves you and is a great teacher. You’ve got a best friend who lives right next door. And your memory seems to be working pretty well these days. So quit feeling sorry for yourself. There are plenty of girls who are way worse off than you are.

  Beth set her laptop and schoolbooks on the dining room table. Her mom would be home from work in about an hour. She had gotten all caught up on her schoolwork before going over to Chrissy’s house yesterday, so she was all ready for today’s lessons. Even though it was Saturday, there were still lessons to be learned—one of the downsides of being homeschooled.

  But Beth could not get Lizzie out of her mind. The dream she had h
ad last night still haunted her. What if she did have a sister and just didn’t remember? Why would her mom keep something like that from her? She had to know.

  Beth began searching online for any information or pictures of girls named Lizzie who went to Glenside Middle School last year. She scanned as many search results as she could before her eyes went blurry but found no matches.

  She was almost ready to give up, to shove this mystery to the dark corners of her mind to join all the other unanswered questions she had about her life, when a noise sounded on her laptop, indicating that she had just received a new e-mail.

  The e-mail was from Alice.

  The subject read: Picture of Lizzie . . . kinda

  Beth anxiously opened the e-mail and downloaded the picture. When she clicked it open, a photo filled her screen. It showed a school cafeteria crowded with middle school students.

  At the center of the photo Alice and a group of her friends were clowning around for the camera. Beth assumed that this must be the cafeteria at Glenside Middle School. She stared at the shot but couldn’t figure out why Alice would have sent it to her. And why did the e-mail subject refer to Lizzie?

  That’s when Beth read the short message in the body of the e-mail:

  Zoom in, top right.

  Beth quickly opened her photo-editing program and imported the shot. She drew a frame around the top right section and then clicked the zoom tool. The image within the frame grew large. She clicked zoom again. The image grew even bigger.

  A final click revealed that among the frenzied chaos that was the school cafeteria, one girl, way in the background, sat alone at a table. Beth created another frame around the girl’s face and zoomed in on that.

  She was instantly overcome by a sickly feeling. Staring at the enlarged face in disbelief, Beth realized that she was looking at a picture of herself. Or rather, someone who looked exactly like her—same auburn hair, same freckles, and same brown eyes.

  Lizzie is real. And Alice is right—she does look exactly like me!

  At that moment Beth’s mom walked through the front door, having arrived home from work. Beth quickly closed her laptop.

  “Hi, honey, how was the sleepover?” Mom asked, joining Beth at the dining room table. “I didn’t get a panicked phone call so I assume everything went well.”

  “Hi, Mom.” Beth greeted her. “I had a great time. We made some delicious snacks and watched movies and laughed a lot. Didn’t get much sleep though. I don’t get why they call them ‘sleepovers.’ Not much sleeping going on.”

  “And what about Chrissy’s cousin, Alice? Was she nice?”

  “I liked her a lot,” Beth replied. “We’re going to try to stay in touch.”

  “Great,” said Mom. “Okay, then. Enough chitchat. Time to hit the books.”

  As Beth opened her history textbook and pulled up the paper she had written on her laptop, she turned and looked right at her mom.

  “Do I have a sister?” Beth blurted out suddenly. She surprised herself by the directness of the question.

  “What do you mean?” her mom asked in a shocked tone of voice.

  “I mean, do I have a sister you never told me about?” Beth repeated.

  “What brought this on?” her mom asked anxiously.

  Before she answered, Beth thought about what she should say next. The question seemed to have made her mother uncomfortable. And that made Beth think that her mother was hiding something. After all, she hadn’t answered with a simple yes or no.

  “When Chrissy’s cousin, Alice, first saw me, she thought I was someone else,” Beth explained.

  “What do you mean, ‘someone else’?” replied her mom.

  Beth explained. “Alice goes to school at Glenside Middle School. She said there was this girl in her class last year named Lizzie and she looked exactly like me. Like she was my sister or even my twin.”

  Her mom shook her head. “Come on, honey, lots of people look like other people. It’s so common, there’s even a word for someone who looks just like you, but isn’t your twin. Doppelgänger.”

  Beth eyed her mother warily. Nothing her mother had said had convinced Beth that she was telling her the truth. Beth turned the laptop screen toward her mom and brought up the zoomed-in photo of Lizzie in the cafeteria.

  Beth’s mom stared at the photo for a second, her face betraying no emotion.

  “That picture’s kind of fuzzy, don’t you think?” Mom asked. “Sure that girl has auburn hair and freckles, but so do lots of girls.”

  “Mom, she’s a dead ringer for me,” Beth insisted.

  “That’s a little bit of an exaggeration, I think,” Mom said. “Now let’s get to something important—your schoolwork.”

  Beth turned to her schoolwork but felt highly unsatisfied with her mom’s explanation of why this Lizzie person looked so much like her. It was clear that she was not going to get any help from her mom in figuring out this mystery.

  Beth Picard realized that she would have to take matters into her own hands.

  CHAPTER 5

  In the days and weeks that followed Beth continued to obsess about Lizzie. And the more Beth pondered the mystery girl, the more she began to question just how very little her mom had told her about her life before moving into this house. Beth had been told that she’d had an accident, and that her memories of all that happened up to the accident, as well as of the accident itself, were gone, most likely forever.

  But why had her mom not done her best to feed those memories to her? Why hadn’t her mom talked to her every day about her early life so that Beth would have a larger sense of who she was, where she came from, and how she grew to be the person she was now? Certainly her mom had been there. She must have memories of Beth’s first twelve years, yet she chose not to share them.

  For some reason these thoughts had never actually occurred to Beth before this whole Lizzie thing started. And now she had come to the conclusion that her mom was intentionally keeping things from her.

  Sure, her mom had said, Why dwell on the past? You’re young. You’ve got a long, bright future ahead of you. Focus on that. Let go of those lost memories. They can’t do you any good, even if I recited them to you over and over. They still wouldn’t actually be yours.

  That argument had always sounded logical to Beth so she had gone with it and kept her sights focused on the future and moving forward.

  But these days that argument just sounded like a lie, an excuse, a justification for hiding something. It was a way to keep Beth from knowing who she really was. She had always wondered about her past but had no idea how to start to find out any details.

  Now she had a starting place: Lizzie. And she couldn’t pass up a chance to finally learn the truth about who she was.

  Each day, once her mom was asleep or had gone to work, Beth searched her house or trolled the far corners of the Internet hoping to find the link she had been missing, the link that would bring her the facts behind Lizzie . . . and her own life.

  She hit a blank every time.

  If Lizzie does exist, she’s covered that fact pretty well, thought Beth. Maybe she’s a spy! Maybe she’s purged her identity from the Internet.

  Beth leaned back and took a deep breath. She began to form an idea.

  She had only one lead. She would have to follow that lead. And that lead was the student records at Glenside Middle School. Surely they had to have some record of a student who attended their school just the previous year. But how in the world would she ever be able to get inside to poke around? Somehow she had to figure that out.

  One random weekday afternoon Beth was hanging out at Chrissy’s house. They were checking out videos on the new tablet Chrissy had received from her parents.

  Beth had kept her desire to go to Glenside to herself, but she couldn’t hold it in any longer. She felt as if she had to share it with her best friend, or else she would absolutely explode.

  “So, remember when Alice and I slept over?” Beth asked when a video
they were watching had ended, realizing how dumb the question sounded as soon as it left her mouth.

  “Yep. It was only a couple of weeks ago,” Chrissy said.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Beth. “What I meant was, well, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Lizzie.”

  “Who?” asked Chrissy.

  “The girl that Alice thought I looked like when she first saw me,” Beth reminded her.

  “Oh, that. Sure, I remember, but you seemed to be in a big hurry to change the subject so I put it out of my mind, and I haven’t thought about it since.”

  “Well, I have,” said Beth. “Thought about it, that is. All the time.”

  “Why? What’s the big deal about someone looking like you?” asked Chrissy.

  “This,” said Beth, swinging the screen of her laptop around to show Chrissy the blown up version of the photo Alice had sent her.

  “Wow!” Chrissy gasped. “She really is your twin.”

  “Right?” replied Beth. “Maybe literally, in fact. Although that would be really weird to have a twin named Lizzie. Beth and Lizzie are both the same name really. Nicknames for Elizabeth.”

  “Hmm, what did your mom say about all this?” asked Chrissy.

  “That’s the thing. She shrugged it off like there’s only a tiny resemblance. But you see it. There’s no doubt.”

  Chrissy nodded her head.

  “So since I can’t remember anything about growing up,” Beth continued, “it’s possible that Lizzie is related to me, or at least could tell me about the past . . . my past.”

  Chrissy nodded. “But why would your mom keep that from you?”

  “I have no idea,” answered Beth honestly. “She seems to get really bent out of shape whenever I bring it up. When I bring up anything about my past, she gets all tense and quiet.”

  “Have you looked Lizzie up online?” asked Chrissy.

  “Every single day,” said Beth. “In every way there is to search. Nothing. Can’t find a single thing about a girl named Lizzie who was in seventh grade at Glenside last year.”

  Chrissy looked at Beth sympathetically. “So what are you gonna do?”

  Beth sighed. “The only thing I can do—follow the one lead that Alice gave me.”