by Katy Cannon
“Think about it,” Willa said, her voice soft and persuasive. “I can spend the summer in London with your evil potential step-mother, and it doesn’t even matter what she’s like because I’ll never have to see her again. In fact, I can put her off ever dating your dad again! You know, play the nightmare teen until she decides that dating a dad was the worst idea ever. It’s the perfect solution to your problem!”
I had to admit, it was tempting.
If Mabel just decided she wasn’t cut out for step-mothering and they broke up … that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. And even though I’d only known Willa for an hour or two, I could already tell she’d be a much more difficult houseguest than I would.
“So what would I do while you were putting Mabel off step-mothering?” I couldn’t believe I was even talking about this as a real plan. But I could already tell that Willa was going to keep on about it all the way to London if I didn’t come up with some solid arguments as to why it wouldn’t work. Something better than ‘it’s insane’. “Meet your aunt in Italy and pretend to be you? Won’t she notice her niece has suddenly changed eye colour and dropped an inch or two around the…” I trailed off and waved my hand around my chest area.
Willa shrugged. “I’ve never met her, remember? She’s meeting me at Heathrow to escort me, so getting you to Italy isn’t a problem. And I doubt she’s seen any recent photos of me. Mum said that Dad barely knows Aunt Sofia himself. They’re half-siblings and they’ve never been close. Apparently Granddad Andrews ran off to Italy with a younger woman when Dad was a teenager, and Dad barely spoke to him ever again. I didn’t even know he was in touch with Aunt Sofia.”
I could imagine running off to Italy. I’d explore the beach, maybe find the nearest village and make friends with some local kids my age, learn Italian. Maybe I’d even get to have a summer crush…
“Apparently she fosters these other kids – there’s one there about my age too. Built-in friends for the summer…” Willa said temptingly.
Of course, it couldn’t be that tempting if she didn’t want to spend time there, but I supposed she had her reasons. And it would be nice to have some company that wasn’t Mabel…
“I bet Mabel has seen photos of me, though. Dad would have sent her some so she could recognize me at the airport, if nothing else. Your dad has probably done the same for your aunt.”
There we go. A perfectly logical reason why the plan wouldn’t work. I should be pleased.
But for some reason, I felt a little bit sad instead.
“That’s true.” Willa frowned. Then she lunged forwards and grabbed my phone from where it sat on my knee. “Right, show me the most recent photos of you he might have sent.”
She held the phone as I unlocked it with my thumbprint, and scrolled through, trying to think which photos Dad might have picked.
“Um, this one, probably?” I angled the screen so she could see the shot of Dad and me at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, from the early, sightseeing part of our trip. “And maybe this one.” A shot from last Christmas of me decorating the tree. He’d loved that photo so much he’d used it as his Christmas email card to his friends and colleagues, and printed it out for his desk. I squinted at it again, trying to see what he liked so much about it.
“Oh, that’s a nice one.” Willa pulled the phone closer for a better look. “You’re smiling, for a start.”
“I smile,” I protested, but not very hard. I knew it was true that my resting face was sort of, well, thoughtful.
Willa flicked between the two photos, sending them to her own phone and studying them again.
“OK, well, this is easy. In the Sydney pic you’re wearing jeans, T-shirt and that jacket open over it, right?” I nodded. It was what I nearly always wore. “Which is basically what you’re wearing now. We’ll switch clothes in the loo, so I look like you do in that photo. Neither shot is close up enough to see your eye colour, and if I part my hair like yours, we’ll look enough alike for this to work. What about your passport photo?”
I pulled my passport from my bag and opened it at the right page. My own stony stare looked back at me. Willa glanced at it and laughed.
I shut it quickly, but she grabbed it from me. “Don’t worry, mine is worse.” She passed hers over and I took a peek. She was right. It was worse. “No one looks like their passport photo anyway,” Willa went on. “We can just switch passports and no one will notice. This’ll be easy.”
Maybe she was right. I mean, those boys and the flight attendant had all thought we looked enough alike to be sisters. It could work.
Wait.
“I didn’t say I would go along with this,” I pointed out.
Willa flashed me a grin. “Yeah, but you’re going to.”
“How do you know?” I mean, I didn’t.
“I have a sense about these things,” Willa replied, sounding superior.
I flopped back into my seat, thinking hard, as the plane started to taxi along the runway.
“It’ll never work. I mean, we’ll get caught.” It was inevitable.
“Not necessarily.” Willa leaned over in front of me, straining her seatbelt. “When are you meeting your dad again?”
“Um, his flight gets into Heathrow in three weeks. The twenty-ninth. I was going to meet him at the airport, then we were going to get the train home to Cambridge together.”
“Perfect! I’m supposed to fly back and meet my dad on the same day! It’s clearly a sign.”
“A sign of what?”
“That we’re meant to do this!” Willa bounced a little in her seat. “Here’s what we do. You fly back from Italy on the twenty-ninth, as me. I’ll come to the airport and meet you and we can swap back before you meet your dad!”
“What about Mabel? She’ll probably want to come meet Dad too.”
“Not by the time I’ve finished with her,” Willa said, with a sly grin. “Leave that part to me. I’ll come up with something. Then I just have to hang out at the airport for a night then meet Dad. Mabel will dump your dad, my dad will go back to ignoring Aunt Sofia, and no one will ever know that we spent the summer in the wrong place.”
Unless we told them. And I had to admit, it would make a great story. No one could ever call me boring again if I did this. I might not throw myself off boats into the ocean like my dad, or get invited to parties with the Year Elevens, like my ex-best friend Claire. But I could have my own adventure.
There were still a lot of details to work out. We needed to come up with plans for every possible eventuality, think of all the things that could happen to trip us up and get us caught – and I sensed that the planning part of this would fall on me. And even with the perfect plan there were still a lot of things that could go wrong.
In fact, I was almost certain that by the time I’d thought of them all, there was no way either one of us would want to go through with the swap.
But despite all my doubts and worries, there was one familiar phrase going round and round in my head.
“Death or glory, think of the story,” I murmured. It was something my dad used to say, before he ran off on his latest trip around the globe. He stopped saying it after Mum died.
“What does that mean?” Willa asked.
I sat up straighter. “It means we need a plan.”
Death or glory. I liked the sound of that. Either we’d get caught at the first passport control or we’d get away with it and…
Well. That would be awesome. And not just because I’d get to spend summer in London and go to my theatre course.
I could almost imagine my parents’ faces when they realized what I’d done.
Because, yeah, OK, I’d told Alice that no one would ever know. But that was just to get her to go along with my plans. What was the point of pulling a prank like this if no one realized they’d been pranked?
I would tell everyone about this. My friends, the people I met on set, maybe even the papers if Mum and Dad carried on being so awful. My parents were going to go absolutely nut
s.
But by then I’d have spent the summer in London and I’d have a role on Heatherside. This summer could change everything. No way my parents could just ignore me and push me around after all that.
“So … how is this going to work? Hypothetically, I mean,” Alice added quickly.
Above us, the ‘Fasten seatbelt’ sign pinged off. Normally, I’d be settling in with some snacks and a rubbish movie around now. But we had less than ten hours before we landed in London, and Alice was right – we needed to come up with a plan.
We were doing this.
Unclipping my seatbelt, I swivelled in my seat to face Alice, folding my leg up under me.
“OK, so here’s what we do,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Halfway through the flight, when they turn the lights out, we’ll nip to the toilet and switch clothes. Then, when we come back, we’ll sit in each other’s seats, and swap all our stuff.”
“Everything except phones,” Alice said quickly. “We’d need our own phones, if we were going to do this. My dad will be out of range for video calls on the boat, but he’ll still want to call me when he can.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea.” Apparently Alice was already three steps ahead of me – even if she was still pretending she might say no. I could tell she was as hooked on the idea as I was. “What about money? I’ve got a stash of euros you can have, plus I guess my dad has sorted things with my aunt. Oh, and there’s my mum’s credit card I can use. It’s supposed to be for emergencies, but I reckon this counts. She’s bound to have lifted the block now I’m out in the world without her, and I need to do some more revenge shopping.”
Alice frowned. “Won’t she get a bit suspicious if her credit card statement starts showing transactions from London?”
She had a point. Unfortunately.
I smiled as another thought occurred to me. “Then you’ll have to do it!” I tugged my purse from my bag and showed Alice the credit card. “There’s a piece of paper with the PIN on it somewhere too… Here. Promise me, if you go near any good shops, you’ll buy clothes on this.”
“O-kay,” Alice said, drawing the word out as she shoved the credit card back in the purse.
She totally wasn’t going to do it. Oh well. Aunt Sofia’s farm was in the middle of nowhere anyway, so it wasn’t like she’d have that many opportunities.
And if she did… Well, I had another three weeks to talk her into revenge spending on my behalf.
Alice carried on planning. “Dad said he’d transferred money to Mabel for anything I need this summer, as well as an allowance, so you should be covered there. Plus my mum always insisted on keeping an emergency twenty-pound-note somewhere, especially when travelling, so you’ll have that if you need it. It’s in the back of my passport case.” Reaching into her bag, Alice pulled out a notebook and Biro, and began chewing on the end of the pen as she flipped through to find an empty page. “OK. We’ll need to know as much as we can about each other. And you’ll need to lose that American twang in your voice.”
“I pick up accents easily,” I said in broad American. Then I switched to my usual English accent. “I can drop it no problem.”
“Good.”
Alice smoothed out her notebook. I twisted my head to try to read the page that had writing on, but she covered it with her arm before I could get a good look. I glanced away and pretended I hadn’t been interested anyway.
What mattered was that she was talking about our plan like it was happening, at last.
“We could email each other a sort of profile,” I suggested, as she tapped her pen against the empty page. “Everything You Need To Know About Me, you know? Enough that we can fake it, anyway.”
“That’s a good idea,” Alice said.
I shrugged. “My mum took over from another actor on a show once, playing the same part and hoping the viewers didn’t notice she looked totally different. When she got the role, the director sent over like a character bible, telling her everything she needed to know to play the part. I figured this is kind of the same.”
“I guess it is.” Alice smiled. “You said you were supposed to be going to a course at a theatre in London. Do you want to be an actor like your parents, then?”
“Maybe.” As in, ‘definitely, absolutely, try to stop me’ maybe. I’d grown up in TV studios, on film sets, backstage at theatres. I’d watched my parents and their colleagues be hundreds and hundreds of different people, doing different jobs, loving different people, experiencing different lives. The idea of getting an ordinary office job was just … boring. What other job in the world let you try on a different life with every part you played?
And playing Alice for the summer would be my first starring role.
“What about you?” I asked in return. “Do you want to be a professor like your dad?”
Alice lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “I don’t really know what I want to be, to be honest. Maybe something with languages? I like French and Spanish at school. I wish we’d studied Italian…”
Suddenly Oonagh appeared at our seats. “Now, how are my two girls doing? Are you settled in all right? You don’t need anything?”
Before we could answer, some guy started calling for her in an annoyed tone.
“So you’re fine? Great!” With another smile, she dashed off to deal with the man who was still yelling.
“Yeah, I don’t think we need to worry about her noticing we’ve switched stuff,” Alice said quietly, as we watched her bustle away down the aisle. “She’s barely had time to look at us since we got on the plane.”
“So all we need to do is learn enough about each other to pass until we can email full details, yeah?”
Alice nodded. “I guess so. I mean, if we were really doing this.”
I gave her a look. “Alice. We’re doing this. Right?”
She chewed her lip, still looking uncertain. But I could see in her eyes that she wanted to as much as I did.
“I mean, how bad could it be if things go wrong?” I pressed.
“We could get arrested and thrown in jail and ruin our futures.”
She was such a pessimist. “The worst that will happen is we get yelled at, and I’ll tell them I forced you to go along with it or something. OK?”
“You’d take the blame?”
I shrugged. “At least if I got arrested my parents would have to pay me some attention, right?”
That made her smile, just a little.
“So, where were we?” I said.
“Um, we were talking about what we needed to know about each other until we can get full dossiers written and sent,” Alice said.
I rolled my eyes at the word ‘dossiers’. Only Alice would call it something so dorky.
“Well, what do we already know?”
Alice looked down at her blank notebook page as if it would help, then up at me again. “OK, well, all I know so far is that your name is Willa Andrews, your parents are actors and you want to be one too, and you’re going to stay with your Aunt Sofia somewhere in Italy.”
“I think it’s near Naples, if that helps?” I screwed up my face trying to remember what else Mum had told me. “I can’t remember anything else about it.”
“I guess if you don’t know where it is it doesn’t matter that I don’t either.”
“Good point.”
“So, what else do I need to know?” she asked, and I realized what a weird question it was to answer.
What do I need to know to pretend to be you?
Alice would have my clothes, my passport, my identification. She’d have my aunt there, already believing she was me.
What else was I, apart from my belongings and my family?
“Um … I’m fourteen years old,” I started.
“Same as me,” Alice put in.
“Great, that’ll make things easier to remember. So you’ve just finished Year Nine, right? Like me?” Alice nodded, so I carried on. “I grew up in Cheshire with Mum and Dad, and I go to Croftdean School there
. My best friends are – well, were – Noemi and Tara, plus there was a whole gang of others, but they don’t really matter—”
“Wait. Were?” Alice asked. “What happened?”
I sighed. I guessed it was stupid to think that Alice could pretend to be me without knowing the whole awful story about my parents’ break-up.
“It turned out my friends were more interested in the fact that my parents were famous than in me as a person,” I explained. “When my dad left Heatherside on sabbatical this spring, he left my mum too. Like, permanently. Ran off with the actress who played his teenage daughter on the show when she got written out. I mean, she’s twenty-seven in real life, but still, it’s pretty gross.” And it didn’t feel great, either, being left behind. “Anyway, at that point my friends decided it was far more fun talking about me behind my back than to me.”
Alice winced. “Not cool. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s why my mum is so determined to make it in LA right now. To show she doesn’t need him. Prove that she can be a bigger star without him anyway.”
I pulled up a photo of me and Mum together to show Alice.
“She’s pretty,” Alice said, as she stared at the photo of Mum and me in matching ripped jeans and leather jackets. Mum had posted the photo on Twitter after the break-up with the caption ‘Andrews girls hit LA’.
I wondered what she’d post now I’d gone. Agent Veronica would probably have some ideas. At least I’d got to take the jacket with me. I reckoned it would be just right for London in the summer.
Except it wouldn’t be in London with me, I realized. Alice would have it, along with the rest of the contents of my suitcase. And I’d have Alice’s battered khaki canvas jacket instead.
Maybe I hadn’t thought this plan all the way through, I realized, looking down at Alice’s coat, jeans and T-shirt. Never mind missing my family – I would definitely miss my wardrobe. There was the most incredible Forever 21 red top I’d bought on Mum’s card sitting in my suitcase that I hadn’t even got to wear yet…
But looking at that photo, remembering that day with Mum, reminded me that there was something very important I needed to know about Alice before we swapped lives.
