The Twinning Project (8 page)

You're not that smart.

Smarter than some jock who never saw a laptop. You can't even play the violin. How are you going to pretend to be me?

Just give me the ball, I'll find a way. C'mon, we've got to go.

Where?

To the slipping place. We have to go now.

Who said?

Our grandpa. He explained it all to me while we were riding over here. C'mon. He said slipping only works when the sun's at a certain latitude.

Grandpa's demented.

That's not nice.

Truth hurts.

How come
your
truth only hurts other people?

Okay, let's go meet this grandpa.

He said you can bring your violin, but that's all.

You nuts? I need my laptop, my iPhone, my . . .

What for?

Text, get online, Google . . .

LAL. We don't have that stuff yet.

Wait just a minute. How do we even know we're really twins?

We thought about that a long time. We stared at each other. I felt as confused as Eddie looked.

And then we stopped breathing. We had gotten the same idea at the same time.

“Scar.” We said it together out loud.

We pulled down our pants. His pink scar, long and raised like mine, was on his right butt cheek. We got cheek to cheek in front of my closet mirror.

We were a match.

NEARMONT, N.J.

2011

 

E
DDIE
and I rode double on my bike to a field behind Grandpa's nursing home. Dad told me that all this had been woods long ago.

Grandpa was waiting beside a big old tree. It was my grandpa all right. But he was standing straight. His eyes were bright.

“Both my puppies together,” he said, hugging us. “I've waited for this day.”

“Is it really you?” I said. “I mean, are you feeling . . .”

“I'm fine, Tom. When the monitors landed, I needed to pretend I had dementia, so I could hide out in the nursing home.”

“Wait a minute.” I felt angry. “You've been lying to me, too.”

“Listen up, boys,” said Grandpa. He kicked some branches to clear a place on the ground. He sat down. Eddie and I squatted close to him. “This is all happening faster than we expected. We didn't have as much time as we hoped to prepare you to switch places. So. What can you tell each other? Tom?”

“Alessa's gonna like you, Eddie, because you're me, only nice,” I said. “She'll pick you up for school tomorrow at eight. Britzky is the bully who wants revenge on you.”

“What can you tell him, Eddie?” said Grandpa.

“You can trust Ronnie—he's my little sidekick. Be careful of Dr. Traum, he's the—”

“There's a Dr. Traum here, too,” I said.

“Uh-oh.” Grandpa frowned. “Be careful, both of you. This Traum is probably a monitor. They can be in two places at the same time.”

“Like you,” I said.

He ignored that. “You boys are going to be just fine.” He stood up. “John raised you to be rebel heroes.”

He handed me a paper bag and pushed me against the tree. “I got you a turkey wrap for the trip, Tom. I'll see you on EarthTwo.”

He took a small black box out of his pocket. He adjusted the dials. He pressed a button.

Eddie gave me a thumbs-up.

I felt myself moving. I was coming down with the flu again. I clutched the violin bag like it was a teddy bear. Through the padded fabric, I felt my cell, the TPT SafecrackerPlus, and my CloakII. Dr. Traum still had my TPT GreaseShot IV. I missed it. You hate to go off on an adventure without your best weapon.

But I knew I could do it. I was raised to be a rebel hero.

And then I slipped away.

NEARMONT, N.J.

2011

 

E
DDIE
was confused and nervous. How could he pull this off? Tom was so smart. And all those electronic gadgets. He didn't even know how to turn them on.

Tom's bike was complicated enough. The brakes were attached to the handlebars, and there were twenty-one gears. Twenty-one! He wobbled and nearly fell off before he got the hang of gently squeezing the brakes. Grandpa had his own bicycle. Eddie followed him back to Tom's house. He rode fast for an old guy, and Eddie had trouble keeping up until he picked up the rhythm of the bike and finally figured out the gears. He began to feel less nervous.

The houses in Tom's neighborhood were bigger and fancier than the houses in Eddie's neighborhood back home on EarthTwo. There were streetlights and traffic lights and many more cars, some as big as trucks. The trees were bigger and older. But the streets seemed sort of familiar, and they had some of the same names. Elm Street. Lois Lane. Knickerbocker Avenue. Tom's house reminded Eddie of his own house, but with a second floor and a garage. There were lights on upstairs and downstairs.

“Are they having a party?” Eddie asked.

“It's just Keith, and he's probably locked away in the basement,” said Grandpa. “Tom's mom is out of town for her job. Just go to Tom's room, up the stairs, first on the right. Get a good night's sleep. Alessa and her mom will pick you up at eight tomorrow morning.”

“I'm scared, Grandpa.”

Grandpa hugged him. “If you weren't scared, you'd be nuts, Eddie. Like your brother.”

“You think Tom's nuts?”

“Kinda. He's angry—about your dad disappearing, about his mom's business trips, about her tenant in the house. He just found out that your birth mom died.”

“I knew that years ago.”

“You seemed ready. He didn't.”

“You don't think he's scared?”

“He just shows it in a different way.”

“How am I going to learn all those machines?”

“They're not hard. Every idiot on EarthOne has a phone stuck to his face. Every old lady in my nursing home is texting her grandkids. They're on Facebook . . .”

“What's a facebook?” Eddie looked worried. “See? How can I make people think I'm Tom?”

“Don't worry. Just be yourself. People will believe you've turned into a different person because you're taking special pills to help you lose your bad attitude.”

“They have pills like that?”

“People here on EarthOne have been gobbling them by the handful for fifty years. Tom's mom helps to sell them. They're just starting to get big on EarthTwo.”

“I don't have to really take them, do I?”

“No. But you have to say you do. And here's the good part. The cover story is that these pills have side effects. They give you amnesia for a while, so you forget names, where classrooms are, songs everybody's listening to, TV shows. It's so bad, you can't even play the violin or use your computer.”

“That'll be easy to prove.”

Grandpa laughed. “Any problems, just come on over to the nursing home.”

“You'll be with Tom, too, right? That means you'll be in two places at the same time. Like the monitors.”

“That's right.”

“But you were a scientist, you told me,” said Eddie.

Grandpa nodded. “I'm glad you remembered. The head scientists decided that the Earths were unstable, that they could blow themselves up and wreck the universe. They wanted to destroy them. Your dad and I were part of the group that wanted to save the Earths.”

“Was Dad a scientist, too?”

“Your dad was a monitor,” said Grandpa. “We both became rebels against our own planet.”

“And now Tom and me are rebels, too.”

“We're counting on you boys.” Grandpa knuckled Eddie's head. “Now go get some sleep. Tomorrow's a big day.”

He handed Eddie a key to the front door, got back on his bike, and pedaled away.

NEARMONT, N.J.

2011

 

E
DDIE
tiptoed up the stairs and into Tom's room. He planned to look it over carefully, but once he sat down on Tom's bed, he decided he needed to stretch out for a few minutes first. That was it. As usual, whenever he was worried, he fell right to sleep.

He awoke early. Tom's house was noisier than his, alarms and machines humming and clicking. Because it was a big old house, it made creaky, grinding sounds. The groaning of the refrigerator downstairs almost drowned out Keith's snoring in the bedroom across the hall.

Eddie had slept in the chinos and blue shirt he was wearing when he left EarthTwo. They were wrinkled and a little stinky, but he kept them on because he felt shy about wearing Tom's clothes, which were mostly T-shirts with pictures and words on them and denim pants that looked more stylish than the dungarees he wore back home. He wasn't allowed to wear dungarees to school.

The kitchen was huge, like the kitchen in a restaurant, shiny metal and polished wood. He opened the refrigerator. It looked like a grocery store back home: boxes of berries, a cooked chicken in a plastic box, different kinds of milk and yogurt, bags of lettuce. There was a bag of green leaves marked “baby arugula.” What was that? Soda, beer, soy milk. What was soy milk? Were there soy cows?

In the freezer there were various brands and flavors of ice cream, even cones and pops. Pizzas, Chinese food, and boxes of entire dinners, including meat, potatoes, and vegetables. One of them said you could microwave it in seven minutes.

I have to find out what microwave is.

Grandpa usually made him scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast for breakfast, with hot chocolate in the wintertime. Eddie didn't want to start cooking in this kitchen. He peeked into a lot of cabinets before he found the cold cereals—at least six different kinds, including organic wheat with pecan flakes. He settled for Wheaties—the Breakfast of Champions—which he had eaten at home. He put berries and one percent milk on the cereal. One percent of what? He wondered what Tom ate for breakfast.

At eight o'clock he heard a honk. There was a huge black car, more like a delivery van or a small truck, in the driveway. He went outside. The passenger window rolled down and a big black face smiled at him. “Hey, Tom. You look soooo preppy.”

It had to be Alessa, but Eddie was surprised. Tom had never said she was colored. There weren't any Negroes in Eddie's school. Not that they were segregated, like in the South, but no Negroes lived in the neighborhood.

Tom's best friend at school is a Negro girl,
he thought
, and now she's supposed to be my best friend.
It made him nervous. What would he say to her? He didn't talk to girls that much. And he had never spoken to a Negro person.

“Let's go, Tom, we'll be late.”

He opened a back door and climbed in.

The driver said, “You look very nice, Tom.” She was a Negro, too, but thin. She wore a suit over a white blouse. She had very short blond hair and piles of makeup. Really pretty. Must be Alessa's older sister, a high school girl or maybe college.

“Thank you. You look very nice. Do you go to school here, too?”

She made a hooting sound. “Ohh, I think I love you, Tom.”

Alessa said, “I think some alien must have taken him over, Mom.”

Alien? Mom? Eddie looked back and forth between them, but they were just laughing. It didn't seem as if Alessa knew anything.

School was less than a mile away. They could have ridden bikes there—even walked, he thought. It was a red brick box, pretty much like his school but older-looking. The bricks were chipped and grimier. There was a big stone fountain out front, just like at his school.

There was a line of cars outside, most of them trucks like the one he was in. Kids were climbing out with suitcases. Some of them had wheels. Some kids had them strapped on their backs like the packs Scouts carried on overnight trips. Everybody had those little phones in their hands, and most of the kids were fiddling with them using only their thumbs. There were other Negro kids and lots of Oriental-looking kids, which was surprising, too. He wondered if he would be able to get along with them. On his planet, they'd been fighting wars with Japanese, Koreans, and even Chinese until not long ago.

When the big car pulled up to the entrance, Alessa's mom said, “Have a good one, guys.” She kissed the top of Alessa's head and waved her fingers at Eddie. She had a ring on every finger.

“Thanks for the ride,” he said. She gave him a big smile, and as he got out, she started talking. He turned back to answer, but she was talking to a little microphone above her head.

Alessa was waiting for him on the sidewalk outside the school. Kids rushed by. “You never got back to me.”

“About what?”

“The plans for today.”

“What plans?”

She scowled at him. “Well, you just check your texts. It's all there.”

Texts.
He remembered they were messages you get on your phone. “I don't have a phone.”

“Did you leave it at home?”

Eddie remembered that he hadn't seen the little phone in Tom's bedroom. Had Tom sneaked it along?

“I've got to stop using it for a while.”

“How can you do that?”

“The pills I'm taking.”

“What pills?”

“I had to take these pills to change my attitude.” He hated to lie, but he was surprised at how easy it was. “And they have these side effects. I can't play the violin. And I don't remember things.”

“Oh, Tom, that's terrible.” She squeezed his arm. “I'll help you all I can.”

“Look who's here, all dressed up.” A huge kid with a splash of pimples on his forehead made a big deal of looking Eddie up and down but without getting too close. “You running for class president?” He had a snorty laugh, through his nose.

A bully,
thought Eddie,
but he seems scared of me. Of Tom.
He dimly remembered Tom telling him about some guy he had to stop. Bratzky?