Replica

by Lauren Oliver

  She liked how Pete looked at her.

  They pulled over at a diner across from a motel called the Starlite, its parking lot empty except for a white Chevrolet and a few beat-up, dusty sedans. She didn’t want to think about the kind of people who used the Starlite midday. Gemma climbed out, stretching, her body still sore from being contorted on a lawn chair all night. Once again she had that awful, full-body sensation of being watched. She whipped around, certain she saw a face peering out at her from a window of the Starlite. But it was only a trick of the light.

  Still, even after they were seated and tucking into enormous burgers and a platter of fries so towering it seemed to defy physics, she kept glancing out the window. Another car pulled into the diner parking lot and her heart stopped. But it was only a dad and his two kids. And after a while, she began to relax.

  “So what’s the next move?” Pete had waited until they were both finished eating before leaning forward and speaking to her in a low voice. “I mean, we can’t depend on Jake anymore. The replicas are gone. Are we finished here?”

  Again, she liked his use of the word we. “I’ve been thinking about that.” She’d eaten too much too quickly and now she was nauseous. “I have to talk to my parents. It’s the only way.” Even saying it made her chest feel like it might collapse, but she kept talking, half hoping to convince herself. “My dad has answers. He’s been miserable for years, and I think it has to be because of Haven.” She was surprised to realize, as soon as she said it, that this was true. “He walks around like he’s got something clinging to his back. Like a giant vampire bat or something.”

  Pete made a face.

  “What?” she said. “You think that’s a bad idea?”

  “I think it’s a great idea.” Pete sighed. He swiped a hand through his hair. It stood up again immediately. “This is big stuff. These are big, serious people. I worry . . .” He looked up at her, and something in his eyes made her breath snag. But he quickly looked away. “I was worried, that’s all.” He was back to his normal self, easy and silly. “You ready to hit the road, then? I made a playlist for the drive back, you know. ‘One hundred greatest bluegrass hits of the 1970s.’”

  “I’ll throw you through the windshield,” Gemma said. She felt surprisingly free now that she’d made the decision—as if something had clambered off her back. “Meet me in the car, okay?”

  In the bathroom she stood in front of the mirror and remembered the girl on the marshes, her reflection, her other. She leaned over the sink and splashed water on her face, as though it would help wash the image from her head. The cold did her good.

  She was going to confront her father and get answers, and she didn’t care anymore whether he got angry, whether he ever spoke to her again, whether he ordered her out of the house.

  She almost hoped he would.

  She would be fine on her own. She was stronger than she’d ever thought she was. She was strong, period.

  Outside, she saw Pete sitting very still with both hands on the wheel, staring at her with the strangest expression. He must be far more freaked out than he was letting on. His eyes looked enormous, like they might simply roll out of his head, and she felt a burst of gratitude for him. He was trying, for her sake, to act normal.

  “All right, Rogers.” She was speaking even as she yanked open the door. “Passenger gets DJ privileges, so hands off the radio—” All her breath left her body at once.

  There was a man sitting directly behind Pete, holding a gun to his head. She knew him instantly: it was the man who’d grabbed her outside the gas station. The same long, greasy hair, the same gray stubble and wild look.

  “Get in the car and shut the door,” he said. His eyes went left, right, left, right. She wanted to move, but she was frozen. Even the air had turned leaden. She was drowning where she stood. “In the car,” he said again, practically spitting. She saw the gun trembling in his hand and realized he was panicking. She nearly tripped getting into the car. She felt as if her whole body was coming apart.

  “Okay,” she managed to say. She got the door shut and held up both hands. Think, think. Her phone was in her pocket. If she could somehow dial 9-1-1 . . . “Okay, listen. Just calm down, okay? Let’s everyone stay calm. You can have my wallet. You can have anything you want.”

  “I didn’t come for money,” the man said. He nudged Pete with the gun. Pete had gone so pale Gemma could see a vein, blue and fragile-looking, stretching across his temple. “Drive.” She was amazed that Pete managed to get out of the parking lot without hitting anything. She was amazed by Pete, period. She’d never been so scared in her life. Her stomach was cramping, and she was worried she might go to the bathroom right there.

  “Please,” she said. Her voice came out in a whisper. “Please. What do you want?”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. But he didn’t sound as if he meant it. Gemma could smell him sweating in his old camouflage jacket. Rick Harliss. The name came back to her from the article she had read about Emily Huang and her involvement with the Home Foundation. He’d once worked for her father. He’d lost a daughter, Brandy-Nicole, when he went to jail. “I just want to talk, okay? That’s all I want. That’s all I ever wanted. Someone to listen. No one fucking listens, no one believes. . . .”

  He was getting agitated. His hand was shaking again. She was worried he might accidentally discharge the gun.

  “We’ll listen,” she said. “We’ll listen all you want. Isn’t that right, Pete?”

  “Sure,” he said. His voice cracked. He licked his lips. “Of course we will.”

  “Keep going,” Rick Harliss said, giving Pete a nudge in the neck again when he started to slow down at a yellow light. Instead Pete sped through it. “Highway,” Harliss said, when they came up on signs for I-27, and a sour taste flooded Gemma’s mouth. Somehow getting on the highway made everything seem irreversible. Not like she would have rolled out of the car at a red light, but still.

  She closed her eyes. She needed to focus. “Okay, you want to talk. So let’s talk, okay?” She’d heard once that in abduction situations it was important to share personal information, to get chatty, to humanize yourself. “Let’s start with names, okay? This is my friend Pete. Pete has terrible taste in music—”

  “Shut up,” Harliss said. “I’m trying to think.”

  “—but he’s a decent guy, all around, really. Probably the most decent guy I’ve ever met.” Gemma realized, even as she said it, how true it was. Poor Pete and the mess she’d dragged him into. And he’d never complained, not once. If they made it through without getting shot or butchered, she was going to buy him a lifetime supply of gummy bears.

  She was going to kiss him.

  “Gemma,” Pete said softly, and his voice held a warning, but she didn’t care.

  “And my name is Gemma Ives,” she said. “Germ Ives. At least that’s what the girls in my grade always called me, because I was sick a lot as a kid—”

  “I know who you are.” Harliss’s voice cracked. “Jesus. Stop talking, okay? You’re making my head hurt.”

  Gemma pressed her hands hard into her thighs, digging with her fingernails, letting the pain focus her. She was scared to anger him further. But she had to make him see that she understood, that she knew him. That she was on his side. She had to buy them time. “I know who you are, too, Mr. Harliss.”

  Pete sucked in a sharp breath. For a split second the silence in the car was electric, and she worried she’d made a mistake. She was in too deep to stop now. She had to keep talking.

  “You used to work for my dad, didn’t you? I must have been just a little kid. But still. That day at the gas station. My dog recognized you. After all these years, he knew your smell.”

  “What did your dad tell you about me?” Harliss asked. He sounded like he was talking through a mouth full of nails.

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” Gemma said. She didn’t dare risk turning around. “I read about you. I read about you and abou
t your girl—Brandy-Nicole. She disappeared when she was just a baby.” Harliss whimpered. “I know you think that the Home Foundation had something to do with it. But I’m telling you, Pete and I don’t know anything. We’re just as confused as you are—”

  “Bullshit.” The word was an explosion. Pete winced and Gemma bit her lip, trying not to cry. “Your dad was in it up to his neck. Don’t tell me you don’t know. It was all because of Haven. It was his fault they needed money. It was his fault they started grabbing kids in the first place. Your dad knew. He fucking knew all about it.” Rick Harliss took the gun from Pete’s head for just a second, just long enough to wipe his nose on his sleeve. Before Gemma could do anything, or even contemplate doing anything, it was back. “They took her from me.”

  “Please,” Gemma said. “We can help you. We’ll get people to listen to you. But please just let us go. . . .”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. He did sound sorry. They were coming up on an exit for Randolph. He gestured to it with the gun. “Pull off here. This is far enough.”

  He directed them to a Super 8 motel. They climbed out of the car. Gemma first, carefully, conscious of the gun angling in her direction as if it were a live thing, a dog snapping at its tether, trying to get loose. Pete and Rick Harliss left the car together. Rick kept his gun, now concealed inside his sweatshirt pocket, trained on Pete’s back. He herded Pete and Gemma together, forcing them to walk side by side directly in front of him, so they shuffled awkwardly toward the lobby together, bumping elbows. Rick Harliss kept stepping on Gemma’s heel. It would have been funny if it weren’t so awful.

  “Some knight I am,” Pete said quietly. He found Gemma’s hand and squeezed. When he tried to let go, she interlaced their fingers instead. “I’m sorry, Gemma.”

  She almost couldn’t speak. “You’re sorry?” She shook her head. “This is all my fault.”

  “Quiet,” Harliss said as they jostled together through the door. Gemma felt like a Ping-Pong ball bouncing around a tiny space. She was sure the receptionist would notice something was wrong—she was desperately hoping for it—and kept trying to telegraph desperation through her eyes. He’s got a gun. He’s got a gun.

  But the receptionist was flipping through a magazine and barely even glanced up at them.

  “Can I help you?” She had long pink nails with faded decals on them. Sunflowers.

  “We need a room.” Harliss pulled out some crumpled twenties and placed them on the counter.

  “One or two?”

  “Just one.”

  The receptionist briefly lifted her eyes but they only went to the money before dropping back to the magazine, seemingly exhausted. “Room’s forty-five a night.”

  “It says forty out front.”

  “Rates went up.”

  “Don’t you think you should change the sign, then?”

  There was a plastic fern in the corner, cheap blue wall-to-wall carpeting on the floor, a gun at their backs. Gemma felt the same way she did when she was dreaming—so much was true and familiar and then there was always some weird element distorted or inserted, a talking bird, the ability to fly. Finally Harliss forked over another five-dollar bill—Gemma caught herself nearly offering to pay before remembering that Harliss was kidnapping them—and they went bumping and jostling again back into the sunshine. Room 33 was on the second floor, up a narrow flight of cement stairs covered in graffiti, at the far end of the open-air corridor. Not that they could have shouted or banged on a wall, anyway. They appeared to be the only guests at the Super 8.

  The room reeked of stale cigarettes. Once they were inside, Rick Harliss bolted and chain-locked the door and drew the blinds. For several long seconds, it was dark enough that Gemma saw bursts of color and patterns blooming in the blackness of her vision. Then Harliss turned on the lamp, its shade yellowed and torn. He sat down on the bed. He removed his gun from his pocket and Gemma drew in a breath. But to her surprise he placed it in the bedside table, on top of the Bible, and closed the drawer.

  “I told you,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. Sit.” He gestured to the second twin bed. “Come on, sit,” he said again, raking his fingers through his thinning hair, so it stood up. Gemma remembered that he’d been handsome at one point. Strange that time could do that to a person, just work like a hacksaw on them.

  Gemma and Pete moved to the bed together, as if they were tethered by an invisible cord. Once they were sitting, they were separated from Harliss by only a few feet of space, and Gemma noticed the cheapness of his jacket and oiliness of his skin and the way his fingernails were picked raw, and found herself feeling not scared of him anymore but just sorry for him. She realized in that second she actually believed he didn’t want to hurt them. She was sure he wouldn’t even be able to if he tried.

  “I told you,” she said, speaking gently, as if he were a child. “We know even less than you do. That’s why I came down here. Because I didn’t know anything. Because I was in the dark about Haven.”

  “Huh. That’s funny.” Harliss laughed without smiling. “I’d think you’d have wanted to know all about it.”

  Gemma’s hairs stood up. She felt in the room a subtle shift—an electric stillness. “What do you mean?”

  Harliss looked up at her with those sad-dog eyes. “Well, that’s where they made you, isn’t it?”

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 13 of Lyra’s story.

  FOURTEEN

  SHE WAS DIMLY AWARE THAT Harliss was still talking. She felt as if a hole had opened inside of her and she was dropping into it.

  Made there. She’d been made there.

  Just like that girl on the marshes . . .

  Gemma wasn’t the original. She, too, was a replica.

  Impossible, she wanted to say. She remembered all those baby pictures with her mom in the hospital. Could they have been staged? No. No one could fake her mother’s look of exultation and exhaustion, the sweat standing out on her forehead, the look of bewildered joy. Impossible. But she couldn’t make her voice work, and it was Pete who said it.

  “That’s impossible,” Pete said. He was staring at her and she turned away, too numb even to be embarrassed. He sounded horrified. Why wouldn’t he be?

  “. . . took me a long time to put it together,” Harliss was saying. “I had nothing else to do, sitting there in state for twelve years. Not saying I didn’t deserve it. I did. I used to do work around your house, you know, before they brought you back from that place. But I was all banged up. Got hooked on the shit they gave me for my back. I was out of my mind half the time.”

  “You’re out of your mind now,” Pete said. “It’s not possible.”

  If Harliss heard Pete, he gave no sign of it. He was still looking directly at Gemma. “My ex-lady used to do some cleaning. Your mom was in real bad shape then. Real bad. She’d just lost her baby. SIDS. That’s sudden infant death syndrome, you know. Poor thing was only six months old.”

  Gemma’s heart stopped. “What baby?” she managed to whisper. She’d never heard her parents mention another baby.

  But Harliss just barreled on. “Aimee—that’s my ex—used to say it was funny, all the money in the world but still you can’t buy your way out of that. When Aimee got pregnant with Brandy-Nicole, your mom would just sit there with her hand on Aimee’s belly, trying to feel the baby kick. She started cutting out articles, you know, how Aimee should be eating, how she was supposed to be laying off booze and cigarettes. Even bought us some stuff, a crib and a stroller, some baby clothes. You could tell she was all broken up. Your mom said she couldn’t get pregnant again. Something about what had happened when the first was coming out.”

  There had been another one, a sister, a baby Gemma had never known about. Kristina had lost a baby. And somewhere deep in Gemma’s mind an idea was growing, thoughts like storm clouds knitting together before they burst.

  “When Brandy-Nicole was ten months old, I got
picked up for holding and was sent to Johnston for eighteen months. That’s a state prison near Smithfield. Reduced to twelve for good behavior. The day I was out I started using again.” He touched his neck once, briefly, as if amazed to find a pulse still there, to find himself alive. “Your dad was decent. He knew I’d been sent away but he gave me the job back. I told him I was cleaned up. He believed me.”

  Life doesn’t hand out second chances. Wasn’t that what her father was always saying? But at some point he’d thought differently.

  There was another baby. . . .

  “Well, Aimee was still going over sometimes to clean. You were home by then, and only six months younger than our Brandy-Nicole. But your mom didn’t like you two to play together. She hardly let anyone near you. We thought it was because she was worried you’d get sick like the first one.”

  The first one. The first daughter. The original. And she, Gemma: a shade.

  “Funny, though, Aimee said to me. They look just the same. Could have been twins, she said, except for Emma had a birthmark on her arm. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Only later, when I started figuring what Haven was for and what your dad had paid them for, I put two and two together.”

  Emma. She had a name, this phantom sister who was so much more than that. Gemma closed her eyes and thought of her mother, sweaty and exhausted and triumphant, a baby nestled in her arms. Not Gemma. Emma.

  All these years, Kristina had lived with a reminder of that first, lost daughter. Emma. What a pretty name; much prettier than Gemma. She was the original. Gemma was the copy. And everyone knew copies were never as good. Was that why her mom had started taking so many pills? Oxycontin and Pristiq and Klonopin and Zoloft? An A–Z array of pharmaceuticals, all so that she could forget and deny.

  All because Gemma was a monster.

  “The Frankenstein mask.” She opened her eyes. “You threw the Halloween mask.” She remembered what her father had said about Frankenstein: In the original story, in the real version, he’s the one who made the monster. She’d thought he meant it because she was awkward, and sick, and fat. But he’d meant it literally. Truthfully.