Shallow Pond (17 page)

“You don't act like it,” he said. “You won't even tell me what's bugging you.”

“It's a family thing,” I said. “I can't really talk about it. You wouldn't understand.”

“Are you forgetting who you're talking to? I was found in a basket outside a convent. I was raised by nuns.”

“Trust me, you're normal compared to me,” I said. It was more than I'd meant to say. For a second or two, I considered telling him everything, but I thought of how it had been to feel his lips on mine, his hand against my skin. I needed Zach Faraday, and if I went ahead and told him everything, he would never even look at me again. He would be repulsed by my very presence. I couldn't handle that. I might have been sort of a freak, but I wasn't ready to let the rest of the world know that.

“You and your sisters are aliens, here from another planet to observe life in a small American town?” he asked.

“Something like that,” I said.

He smiled at me, but when I didn't say anything more, he looked away. “Why do you shut me out?” he asked.

“It's not something I can talk about,” I said.

“Why not?”

“You wouldn't understand.”

“How do you know unless you tell me?”

I shrugged. He pounded his fist on the dashboard and I flinched. He shook his head and turned the key in the ignition.

“We're going back to school,” he said.

I didn't say anything. I turned and looked out the window. I watched as Shallow Pond flew past. I hated this place more than ever, but I would have traded places with just about anyone in town whose last name wasn't Bunting. It wasn't fair. I wished I had some nice, normal life, but I was some sort of monster. How could I explain any of that to Zach? Zach thought
his
life was messed up? He didn't have a clue.

I looked at him sitting there beside me, perfect in every way, and my heart ached with hunger for him. I wondered if this was what Annie had felt when she broke up with Cameron. It would be easier to reject someone than to have them run from you when they found out you were nothing but a complete freak. The fact that I could understand and relate to my sister scared me. Annie was no longer a mystery. Her peculiarities all made sense now; she was looking a whole lot more like a sensible and logical person.

I realized that no matter how hard I tried, I might have no choice but to become my sister—and then I reminded myself that she wasn't my sister. We were much closer than that. We were just different versions of the same person. Was my fate already decided? It seemed I might have no choice but to spend the rest of my miserable life in this town.

Twenty-Three

When I got home from school, Annie was waiting for me. She clicked off the television as soon as I stepped in the door.

“I got a phone call from the school today,” she said. Crap. “They said you were late this morning, which I thought was kind of strange since you left pretty early.”

“You're not my mother,” I said. “You can't yell at me.”

“I'm not yelling,” she pointed out.

“Look, it's not a big deal,” I said. I hung my coat up and started up the stairs. We weren't going to have this conversation.

I figured Annie would give up and turn the television back on, but I'd underestimated her. I threw my backpack on my bed, and when I turned around, she was standing there in my doorway.

“I know this hasn't been easy for you,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn't have told you, but I didn't think I could keep it from you forever. You're too smart for that.” She smiled at me, like complimenting me on my intelligence would somehow wipe away all my problems.

“I don't really feel like talking about this right now,” I said.

She nodded, but she kept standing there as if I might change my mind. I glared at her and she finally walked away. I threw myself down on the bed beside the backpack. I curled myself around it as if it was some piece of flotsam keeping me afloat in an endless ocean. I wanted to cry or scream or do something, but instead I just lay there staring at the wall in front of me.

“Who is Zach?”

I jumped. Annie had crept silently back into my room. I rolled over and saw her standing there, just inside the doorway. Why couldn't she just leave me alone?

“When the school called to say you signed in late, they said you were with another student, a boy, Zach Faraday. I didn't recognize the name.”

“He's not from here,” I said.

“Is he … ?” She let the half question hang there in the air. I sat up and shook my head.

“Don't do this,” I said. “Don't try and act all motherly. It's annoying.”

“Is he your boyfriend?” she asked.

“Genetic mutants don't have boyfriends.”

“We're not genetic mutants.”

“Yeah we are.” I stared at my sister; well, not my sister, my clone. She looked old, with the dark circles beneath her eyes and her skin pulled tight across her face. This was what I would look like in a few years.

“It's not like that. It doesn't really matter where you come from.”

“If that's true, then why the big secret? Why the phony birth certificate?”

“There are laws,” Annie said. She waved her hand in the air as if this was only some trivial thing. “It makes things easier.”

Easier? Or did it just keep us from getting locked up in some lab somewhere, where government scientists would poke, prod, and study us like the science experiments gone awry that we were? What would happen if the truth ever got out? Did we risk more than complete and total ostracism by everyone we knew? Was our very security at stake?

“There's a lot of people who wouldn't be cool with what we are,” I said. “Does anyone else know?”

“A few of Dad's old colleagues.”

“Dr. Feld?” I asked. I thought of his weird reaction to seeing us. Annie nodded in confirmation. “But you've never told anyone?”

“No,” she said.

I lay back down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. I thought of Cameron Schaeffer. With the memory of Zach's lips on mine so fresh in my mind, I wondered how Annie had done it, how she'd shut Cameron out of her life. Only she never really did shut him out, did she? She tried to pretend she did, but she'd never stopped loving him. It had eaten her up inside, turned her into a hollow shell of herself.

“If you hadn't broken up with Cameron, you would have had to tell him.”

“That doesn't have anything to do with this,” she said. Her calm motherly voice had given way to the clipped, angry tone. I'd had to go and pull that scab off the Cameron Schaeffer wound. I was such an idiot.

“But it's true.” I was nothing if not persistent. “We can never have a normal life. We'll always have this big dark family secret hanging over our heads.”

Annie's face softened. She came in and sat beside me on the bed. “Lots of people have secrets,” she said. “This is about Zach, isn't it?”

She let her hand rest on my shoulder, and I jerked it away. Why did she have to drag Zach into this?

Of course, I couldn't help but think about him. Did he have secrets? He'd told me his whole life story; it was hard to imagine he could have any secrets, but perhaps there were secrets even he didn't know about. After all, he didn't know where he came from. We were so alike that it was like we were fated to be together. Maybe that's what Zach meant when he said he was drawn to me. I knew what he meant—after all, there was something about him that was irresistible to me. We belonged together.

“Why did you fall in love with Cameron?” I asked.

“Why? Love doesn't really work like that. It's one of those things that happens whether you want it to or not.”

“Because two people have a lot in common?”

“Maybe, or simply because. Sometimes it doesn't make much sense at all. This Zach, he must be something special, I take it.”

I started to blush and tried to will the telltale heat away, but it only seemed to grow hotter.

“He's a nice guy,” I said, “but it's not like that. He's not my boyfriend.”

“Well, why not?”

Because I'm a complete genetic freak and I can never ever tell him that
was the first answer that came to mind, but I didn't voice this out loud.

“I don't need a boyfriend,” I said.

“Need,” she repeated in a quiet voice. She looked off into space. I worried that I'd upset her somehow, but there was a smile on her face. She returned to earth and said, “When it comes right down to it, nobody needs a boyfriend. We'd probably all be better off without them. Better off, but not necessarily happier.”

I puzzled over this comment. Annie was the last person I expected to be singing the praises of romantic love. How could she, after everything, still equate love with happiness? I thought of that mysterious “someone else.” I hadn't really believed he'd ever existed, but now I wasn't so sure. Could that be who she was thinking about whenever she got that dreamy expression on her face, this mysterious other guy that she refused to talk about? Who was he, and what had happened to him? If she was so in love with him, where was he?

“What happened to the guy you dumped Cameron for? Did he die?”

“Yeah,” she said. Her response arrived too quickly, and I saw the way she went rigid, the color draining from her face as soon as the words left my lips. Who
was
this mystery man, and why wouldn't she talk about him?

“How did he die? How come you never talk about him?” I knew I sounded like a demanding child, but she was being such a pain about this.

“The thing with love,” Annie said, “is that if you aren't careful, it can consume you. It doesn't take much for love to turn into obsession.”

Obsession? Was she talking about Cameron? The mystery man? I wanted answers, but I wasn't going to get them, at least not just yet. Gracie had gotten home and was shouting up to us, referring to us as lazy slugs for not checking the mail.

“I should get down there,” Annie said. She patted my leg as she stood up. “I didn't realize how late it was. I've got to get dinner started.”

I could tell by the speed (practically running) at which she left my room that she was eager to escape. My questions were not going to be answered. Maybe they would never be answered. After her big revelation, this did seem a bit strange. If she could tell us that we were clones, you would think that telling us something, anything, about some boyfriend she used to have would be nothing.

Twenty minutes later, I finally got up off my bed and trudged downstairs to see what we were doing for dinner.

“You got mail,” Gracie said. She pointed at my place, where I saw a white business-sized envelope.

I went over and picked it up to look at the return address, and saw a college's name and seal. It was a mark of how completely things had changed for me. As little as a week earlier, the sight of such an envelope would have caused my heart to start racing and a furious tumult of excitement and nervousness to overtake me. Now I felt numb as I stared at it.

“Aren't you going to open it?” Gracie asked. But I couldn't see the point of that. It was pretty obvious that I wouldn't be going off to college, that I would never leave Shallow Pond. The evidence was staring me in the face; Gracie and her supermarket job, Annie and her reclusive ways. If they were both still living in this crappy town long after their eighteenth birthdays, then I knew there wasn't any possibility that I would ever escape. The sooner I gave up hope, the less painful it would be.

“What is it?” Annie asked.

“From a college I applied to,” I said. Annie turned away from the stove, and Gracie was pretty much ready to explode with anticipation. Great, I had an audience. I sighed, then slipped my fingernail beneath the flap and began to gently pry the envelope open. I pulled out the letter and began to read.

It was a long letter, two pages. I knew that was a good sign. I read it through once, then went back and double-checked it to be sure.

“What does it say?” Gracie asked. In her excitement her voice had grown so high-pitched she was practically squealing.

“I got in,” I said.

“That's great,” Annie said. “Congratulations!”

“They're giving me a full scholarship,” I continued.

“Oh my God!” Gracie screamed. “That's awesome!”

In the second or so it took me to glance back at the letter one more time, Annie and Gracie attacked me as if they were boa constrictors, squeezing me so tight with their hugs that I nearly couldn't breathe.

“We're so proud of you,” Annie said. Her voice was cho-ked with tears.

I wouldn't have minded being able to cry, or at least being able to feel some sort of emotion. Anything would have been better than the weird blankness I felt. My dream had come true. Not only did I get accepted into college, but they were offering me a scholarship. There was nothing standing in my way. The road was clear. But I knew deep down that it didn't matter. Somehow or other, this was not going to happen.

“I would think you would be at least a tiny bit excited,” Gracie said when she finally released me from her grasp. I shrugged.

“It doesn't change anything,” I said. It took her a mo-
ment, but then Gracie's face fell when she realized what I was talking about.

“We're not going to talk about that,” Gracie said. “Be-sides, I'm not really sure I believe any of it. Annie, you can't believe anything Dad told you. He was completely crazy.”

“It's true,” Annie said, “and it doesn't change anything. Babie is going to college, but first we're going to eat some dinner.”

I went to bed early. I crawled into my bed, pulled the covers over my head, and tried to escape from everything. I sank into a world of disturbing nightmares. Creepy men in white lab coats chased me down narrow twisting hallways. I escaped only to find myself in a room filled with cages housing scientific experiments gone wrong. A normal-looking girl with octopus tentacles writhed against the bars of her cage. A half-bird, half-human creature made pitiful squawking noises in its cage. There were people with multiple heads and people with too many limbs. Then suddenly I found myself trapped in a cage. I clutched at the bars, shook them in a futile effort to free myself. The men in white lab coats appeared and began to reach through the bars of my cage. They poked and prodded at me. One grabbed my arm. I told myself it was all a bad dream and forced myself to wake up.

My heart raced. I was damp with sweat as I struggled to remember where I was. I wasn't in the lab anymore. I was in my bedroom. I was safe. The dream still clung to me, and something else. I let out a yelp when I realized one of the men in white coats was still clutching my arm.

“Relax. It's just me,” Annie said, her voice soft and comforting in the dark room. Fully awake now, I stared into the darkness and saw Annie sitting on the edge of my bed in her white nightgown, her hand on my arm. “You were having a nightmare.”

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Pieces of the nightmare flashed through my memory. A glimpse of tentacles, the long hallway, a boy with too many heads. I shuddered.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, but I didn't want her to go. It was nice to have her there in the darkness. I wasn't ready to be alone again. “Do you ever get used to it?”

“Does where you come from really matter that much?” she asked.

For some reason, her question made me think of Zach and his mysterious origins. “I think it does matter,” I said.

“Sometimes, if you're lucky enough,” Annie said, “you find that one person who completes you, the person so perfect that it seems like they were made for you. Love, the truest of loves, is a magical thing. There's nothing more beautiful or more wonderful, but there's a dark side too. The world can be a cruel place. Sometimes the person we love is torn away from us, leaving behind an emptiness that can never be filled.”

Was she talking about Cameron? Her mystery man? Her vagueness made things confusing.

“Is that why you never went to college? Is that why you stayed here?”