by Ryan Schow
Georgia’s trapped in a hug looking at me like, WTF?, and I’m mouthing the words, “We have to go, like right now.”
I manage to stand up, but Kaitlyn’s father says, “Not so fast.”
“We have to go,” I say, my legs unsteady beneath me. “We shouldn’t have come here.” His fists unclench, and the air around him settles, but then the fists remake themselves as dark things rifle through his gaze.
I say, “Georgia, now.” The pain is receding. My faculties are returning. I’m still having a flush of wicked pain, but my adrenaline is kicking in and I can take it.
“You’re not Kaitlyn, are you?” he says. He knows the answer. He just wants to hear her say it. The look on his face says he wants the truth, that he can handle it even if his wife can’t.
“No, I’m not Kaitlyn. I keep trying to tell you my name is Georgia.”
“It’s our baby,” Kaitlyn’s mother is saying to him, dark lines of mascara streaming down her face. Georgia is squirming in her arms, trying to break free. She finally pushes the woman back and stands up.
“I’m not your baby, I’m sorry. Savannah, where are we? Who are these people?”
“You’re an abomination!” the husband roars. Apparently he can’t take the truth. A vein on his forehead swells, looking like a throbbing earthworm beneath his skin. Growling, he says, “Get the hell out of my house!”
Me and Georgia freeze, terror washing through us. He grabs Georgia by the arm, starts to drag her from the house. Kaitlyn’s mother is wailing behind me. She’s yelling for her baby, for her Kaitlyn. She’s telling her husband to take his hands off their baby girl.
I’m trailing behind him, telling him to let my friend go, but he’s shouting and cussing and calling Georgia names, saying she’s sick, unnatural, a perversion of science. He gets Georgia to the front door then shoves her hard enough to send her tumbling across the front lawn. I nudge past him without incident and he slams the front door hard enough to break one of the fan shaped window panes. Through the broken glass on the door, Kaitlyn’s mother’s wailing intensifies.
Georgia gets to her feet, straightens her shirt and stares at me with terrified eyes. “What in Jesus’ name was that?”
Just then a car pulls up, a Honda Accord with tinted windows. The driver parks behind Rover, behind Georgia’s BMW X5. The boy in the Whittaker family photo. He gets out of the car, staring at me and Georgia. No, glaring at her, then me. He skulks up to me with wild eyes like his father’s and says, “What are you doing here? And why did you bring her?”
Georgia says, “You live here?”
“I didn’t know,” I tell him, breathless. Looking at the boy from the family photo, I’m wondering how everything went so wrong. “I swear, I didn’t know.”
The beautiful, tortured Damien Rhodes ignores Georgia. He can’t peel his hate-filled eyes off me. “Is that my step-mother crying inside?” I nod. Deflated, his body sagging, he says, “She saw her, didn’t she?”
“I couldn’t have known,” I say, flabbergasted. “You should have told me!”
“Why are you even here?” he growls, rage riding the edge of his voice.
“Investigative Journalism. The headstone in the cemetery, it was Kaitlyn’s. You have different last names.”
“She’s my step-sister.”
“Is that why you were so mad on the bus? Because we were going to—”
He says, “Just go,” then heads inside the house, the crying inside climbing a few octaves when he opens the front door, then falling again the minute it shuts.
Georgia says, “Can you please tell me what just happened?”
“You didn’t tell me there was another one of you.” I expected any number of responses, but not the one Georgia gave. She looked puzzled. “Wait a minute,” I say. “You didn’t know?”
“What do you mean, there’s another one of me?”
“Kaitlyn Whitaker went to Astor Academy two years ago before she disappeared. There is a picture of her on the mantle and she looks exactly like you. Except when she started school four years ago, she looked nothing like you. She looked normal, not beautiful like you and your friends. Not even close.” Her flawless skin blanches and that’s when I tell her, “Tonight you’re going to tell me all about you and your friends, and you’re not going to lie anymore.”
“I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. She can’t even look at me when she says this.
“Then how did you know to give me four pills instead of two? And why did you tell me the other night that it won’t always be this bad?”
Shrugging her shoulders, hiding her eyes, she says, “I was trying to comfort you.”
“Liar,” I snarl. When she doesn’t respond, I say, “Don’t you get it, Georgia? Whatever happened to you, it’s now happening to me. Eventually I’ll find out the truth. Or maybe this is why none of you will talk about it. Is that it? Because I’m becoming like you? Turning into a freaking clone?” Except I don’t say freaking. The word I used, it rhymes with duck. Or suck. Or motherfreaking chuck.
“We’re not clones,” she says, defensive.
Inside the sound of yelling hits a new level. Damien is yelling at his father who is yelling back and in the background Damien’s step-mother is wailing like there’s no tomorrow.
“We need to leave. After dinner, you’re telling me everything. Do you hear me? You are telling me everything!”
The Rainbow of Food and Violence
1
Me, Brayden and the non-triplets eat together, but Georgia and I say very little throughout the meal. It’s the first time I wish Brayden wasn’t with us. Bridget looks at me, then at Georgia, then back to me. She blows out a breath, sets her fork down and says, “What’s wrong with you two?” and Brayden chimes in saying, “Yeah, it’s like, so uncomfortable.”
Georgia says, “Julie, or Cameron…one of them, or maybe both of them…they gouged something horrible in Savannah’s car door.”
“What?” Victoria says.
“They wrote the words ‘Disgusting Pig’ across three panels with what could have been a tire iron, or a screwdriver.”
“Seriously?” Bridget snaps. I nod. Georgia nods. We exchange looks. Unbelievable. Bridget says, “I’ve had enough of this crap!” She dumps all her food off her tray, then with just the tray, she’s on her feet, fast, determined.
“What are you doing?” I ask after her.
Without response, she turns and heads toward Julie Satan and the Diabolical Three where they are dining two long tables down.
“Oh shit,” Victoria says.
Georgia says, “Bridget!” but Bridget doesn’t reply. She walks up to Julie, lifts the tray up high and drives it down on the back of Julie’s head with enough force to wobble the girl. Bridget turns to Cameron and hits her across the face with the tray so hard the entire cafeteria startles at the impact. Julie goes down, but Cameron recovers. Bridget drops the tray and punches Cameron in the face twice until the girl falls backward with a bloody nose.
Cheers and shouting ignite the cafeteria as Bridget stomps angrily back to our table. Halfway there, Theresa Prichard grabs a whole apple and overhands it at Bridget. It explodes off the back of Bridget’s head. Brayden grabs a carton of milk and line-drives it at Theresa, but hits Maggie instead and from there full scale chaos erupts.
The air between our tables becomes a flurry of flying food and open drinks. A milkshake catches me in the shoulder, blasts semi-frozen chocolate across my face. I turn and launch my bowl of quinoa down the table at the girl who threw the milkshake, but it seems anticlimactic and does nothing because quinoa is possibly the worst food-fight food in the world.
Gosh damn diet!
I throw my chicken next, missing the milkshake girl but hitting a boy I’d seen before and thought was cute. He calls me a nasty name and pitches his bowl of chili at me but hits Victoria instead. Everyone is ducking for cover.
Hunched beneath our table, all of us laughing hysterica
lly, we’re wearing everyone else’s food and drinks, and for some stupid reason it feels like the sour mood between us has lifted and everything is fine again. We needed to blow off steam and Bridget sensed that. I look at her and say, “Bridget, I love you. That made my day. That made my entire life!” Bridget simply smiles as more food and drinks rain down around us. By now, the entire cafeteria is involved.
“Yeah,” Georgia says. “Julie had that one coming. Both of them did.”
Brayden clears his throat, looks at Bridget and says, “I decided I’m in love with Bridget,” and we all laugh even harder. Seconds later a cup of soda hits the top of Victoria’s head and sprays all of us down the line. Without question, this is the best lunch ever.
2
That night I ask Georgia to come over, so we can talk, and I’m hoping the four pills I took earlier stave off another attack because if I use my eight pills early and can’t get through a subsequent attack, then chances are I’ll either end up with multiple personality disorder or dead.
At this point in time, I’m not sure which I prefer.
Before Georgia arrives at my room, I log into student records and go through Georgia’s, Bridget’s, and Victoria’s files and what I see shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. All three girls enrolled two years ago, and when they first arrived, they were all ugly. Dog ugly. There wasn’t a single one of them that didn’t make Ugly Betty look like Miss Universe and suddenly I know why they befriended me. They were just like me. And I’m becoming just like them. I print out their entrance pictures, then—shifting gears—I call Brayden.
“What’s up, Buttercup?”
“I need you tonight.”
“I like the sound of that. Will Bridget be there?”
I groan into the phone. “As if.”
“It could happen,” he says, hopeful.
“No, Brayden. It can’t happen. We’re not part of Janine’s smoking hot six, or did you forget?”
“God, be a buzz kill already.” Lots of silence, then: “So what do you want?”
“You to come over at like nine, nine-thirty. I have something I need you to do, and only someone with your skills can do it, if you know what I mean.”
I hear him perk up. “I think I do.”
Someone knocks on my door. I say good-bye and hang up the phone. When I answer the door, I expect to see just Georgia. But it’s the non-triplets. All three of them. The looks on their faces has me wondering if we’re not besties anymore. I almost mention the fun we had starting the food fight because, the truth is, them being my friends is the reason I haven’t fled from Astor Academy already. Suddenly I’m feeling anxious, or nervous.
They take seats on my bed, and at my desk. I ask if anyone wants anything to drink and suddenly I know I’m ruining things by being too formal, too polite.
Victoria says, “Georgia told us about Kaitlyn. She told us about her mother, how you said there was a fourth one of us.”
I give a somber nod, thinking about how much I need them as friends. With the way this day is degrading, I’m sure me and Brayden will have to grovel our way back into Janine’s ugly five. Or four. Whatever. The truth is, in my head, I’m already composing my big speech. Or maybe it will be me and Brayden from here on out. Regardless, despite my fear, the last thing I want is to lose the girls as friends.
Bridget says, “We didn’t know there was another girl like us. We didn’t even know we would all look the same until we did.”
Georgia says, “The shots you’re getting, we got them, too. But not at the same time.”
“Me and Bridget got them first,” Victoria says, “and when we saw the birthmark on the back of Georgia’s leg in PE last year, we knew she was becoming one of us, too.”
“Look at your leg,” Georgia says.
I have pants on. I say, “This isn’t about me.”
Georgia says, “You’re going to be one of us, too, and you don’t even know it.”
I pull down my pants, insecure about my thick, rippled legs. Looking over my rump, I see something. A mark? I scuttle to the mirror and look over my shoulder at my reflection and sure enough, there’s the birthmark. The one resembling Alaska.
My world swims, tilts sideways, then blurs along the edges. I grab the counter, trying to ride out the dizziness. “So I’m going to look like you guys, too?” I hear myself ask.
The three of them are suddenly here, in my bathroom, watching the realization wash over me. I think of how beautiful I will become, and how unoriginal. I’ll be the fifth. I used to envy their perfect faces and bodies, but lately I’ve been wondering if they are synthetics, like everyone claims. Clones. As beautiful as they appear, I don’t want to be a copy of them. I don’t want to be one more doll off Gerhard’s assembly line.
“We’ve been wondering the same thing,” Victoria says. “But your dark skin, it seems to be getting a little darker. That alone makes us think otherwise.”
She has a point. Imagine Vanessa Hudgins. Now imagine she’s butt ugly and everything pretty about her short, brown body is so very, very wrong, as if sculpted by a talentless hack with sausage fingers and long range vision. That’s me. If I was going to look like them, my skin tone should be getting lighter, not darker. And I should be getting taller.
“So how do you explain Alaska?” I say.
“Alaska?” Bridget says.
“Our birthmarks,” Victoria says. “They look like the state of Alaska.”
Bridget’s face shines with the revelation and she says, “Wow. It does look like Alaska. I never thought of that.”
“It’s been two years for us,” Georgia says. “Who knows what advancements Gerhard has made since then. Maybe he can leave some traits alone while manipulating and changing others. At the time, when we spoke, he said I would look like Bridget and Victoria, but—like them—I would be more beautiful than any woman I have ever seen before them. What you don’t know, what none of you know, is before coming to Astor Academy I had a liver transplant that left me with a pencil thick scar. My cystic fibrosis, not only was it destroying my lungs, my chances of having children was pretty much none. I was disfigured and barren, and my chances of living a normal, decent life were dismal at best. I didn’t care how I ended up looking, I just didn’t want to die. And I wanted kids.”
We all look at Georgia as she says this. I am the first to hug her when her eyes begin to tear. Victoria and Bridget join in.
“I’m okay,” Georgia says. “I’m alright now. Dr. Gerhard says I can have children. And that nasty scar is gone, so I’m pretty happy about that, too.”
After a minute, Bridget tells me, “If you’re worried you’ll look like us, it’s not like we’re going to be in the same town after school. And since our fathers aren’t in the press like you and your family—well, mine is—crap. Yeah, this could be a problem for us. Can you see my dad’s flock seeing me and you in the press? Looking like identical twins? Eventually it will come out. Everything. What would the press say about our fathers paying money to a scientist hell bent on playing God? Talk about hypocrisy, at least on my father’s end.”
Her father, the preacher.
“The press would destroy us. We’d be called”—and this is where I hear Kaitlyn’s dad’s voice in my head—“abominations.”
Georgia says, “I can’t imagine it would ever come to that.”
“You don’t know the paparazzi. They’re vultures who pick through the detritus of your life, searching for something to photograph, something to exploit. And us? We’re low-hanging fruit.”
“I think that’s why there are no others like us,” Bridget says. “Gerhard realized this and he’s been working on changing the formula. Trying to correct it. Or expand it.”
“Do you think there are others here like us? Getting the treatments I mean?” They shrug their shoulders. None of them know for sure. “So what’s going to happen to me next?”
“It’s hard to say,” Georgia says. “You could be different than us, but kind of the same,
too, based on the birthmark.”
“Her skin is getting darker, and she’s not as tall as us,” Victoria says to Georgia. “That’s proof Gerhard changed something.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “Victoria was the same height as me when she first came here.”
They all look at me, stunned.
“How do you know that?” Victoria says. I pull the copy of her school records with her picture and basic physical information on it and hand it to her. She looks breathless, not sure if she should be upset, but unable to conceal her emotions. She takes it from me and says, “Where did you get this?”
“School records. We’re paperless here, remember? Not so secure.”
“So how’d you get it?” Bridget says.
“Doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t even care because your secret is my secret and you can bet it’s going to stay that way.”
“So what do we do now?” Victoria asks, a flush of color traveling up her neck, residue from the surprise of seeing her old face. Or perhaps from me knowing she was once ugly like me. She’s folding up the printout, trying to make it disappear.
I say, “I believe all this somehow ties into Kaitlyn Whitaker’s death.” I tell them about my Investigative Journalism assignment, since none of them have that course, and how Kaitlyn came to be the subject of my report. I hand them the first picture of Kaitlyn when she started at Astor.
“We never knew her,” Victoria says. “She was already dead before we got here.”
“That explains why Damien hates us,” Georgia replies. “Why he won’t even look at us, or talk to us.”
Victoria says, “Bridget totally wanted to do him last year but she couldn’t even get up to bat, let alone first base.”
“That explains everything,” Bridget says. “I mean, I was totally irresistible. I thought he was maybe a pole smoker until he started plowing that come dumpster Cameron O’Dell. Then I took it personally and stopped trying.”
