Parallelogram Omnibus Edition

by Brande, Robin

  And for that full minute and a half or however long it took for him to walk from his car to the door, knock on the door, me answer it, and Jake introduce himself—for that brief little time, I was thinking, Will found me somehow. He’s here to rescue me. That’s about the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard of.

  Fat chance. In the same way Will’s disgusting girlfriend Gemma has her own—and vastly superior, I must say—version over here in this universe, Will Stamos-Valadez has his own duplicate edition walking around in his same genetic outfit, claiming to be a totally different person.

  I’m not sure I can ever get used to these things.

  So I opened the door, and he told me right away who he was, and that he works for Halli’s father, and that he was there to pick me up and fly me back to Halli’s parents’ house for some sort of meeting they arranged with her last week.

  A meeting I knew nothing about. Halli hadn’t thought to mention it to me before. And now I was going to have to bluff my way through it. It was exactly like one of those anxiety dreams where you know you have a test starting in five minutes, but it’s for a class you never attended.

  Plus, just like in any good anxiety dream, I was standing there in my pajamas—Halli’s pajamas, actually. Jake seemed a little surprised by that. Apparently I was supposed to be dressed and ready to go.

  But he looked at me with those dark brown eyes of Will’s, and smiled at me in that way Will never does, and it felt even more like a dream than before.

  And then he snapped me out of it.

  “You must still be jet-lagged,” he said. “We saw you just got home last night.”

  Information. Here was my first clue about what had happened to me between the avalanche and now.

  And I knew how he knew.

  It was the tracking. Halli explained it to me before. There’s a kind of microchip embedded under her collarbone—she said everyone here has them—and her parents can use that to track her whereabouts, at least until she takes them off her list when she turns eighteen. Thank goodness we’re both still seventeen. Thank goodness if I’m wearing her body I can at least get some data out of it.

  I made a big show of yawning. “What day is it?”

  “Thursday,” Jake said.

  Thursday? My brain clicked into motion. The last time I saw Halli it was Tuesday in her world. How did I lose two days from her life? Where have I been?

  If I could see a printout of that—a detailed report of Halli’s whereabouts minute by minute since the avalanche—

  It might not solve my physics problem, but at least it would give me somewhere to start. Because right now I had nothing—no memory, no facts, nothing.

  “I’ll go get changed,” I told Jake, and rushed off to Halli’s bedroom.

  The dog came with me, and lay on Halli’s bed while I got dressed and packed. I changed into a pair of Halli’s jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, then stuffed a few more of each of those into the worn-out duffel I found at the bottom of her closet. A few pairs of underwear, a few pairs of socks, I was done. Halli told me once she always traveled lightly. Might as well live up to the image.

  I was about to put on a pair of her sneakers when something else caught my eye: Halli’s hiking boots.

  My heart nearly leapt out of its ribcage.

  Because the last time I saw those boots, Halli had been wearing them when we were together in the Alps.

  Which meant she’d made it out alive! She’d made it home.

  Then my brain had to squelch the whole thing. Of course those boots made it home. They’d been on Halli’s feet at the time, and I was currently wearing Halli’s feet. The boots had come home with me. That didn’t prove anything.

  I felt the tip of a wave. It was poised there, just waiting to break over me, to crash me down into despair. All it needed was for me to give in, even just a little bit. To be willing to really feel what this whole thing meant.

  But I couldn’t do that. It might be a great release in the moment to collapse onto Halli’s floor and have myself a big, hysterical cry, but how was that going to help Halli? It wasn’t.

  What Halli needed was my logical, thinking brain. What she needed was for me to be a robot, to not feel, to just take in all the necessary facts and then arrange them in the right, intelligent sequence so I could understand how to save her. I could be emotional later. This wasn’t the time.

  So I tugged the boots onto my feet. Onto Halli’s feet. And I told her dog we were going, and the two of us met Jake back up at the front. He took Halli’s duffel from me.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. Which was just the first of the many lies I knew I’d have to start telling from then on.

  3

  We are flying over water.

  Halli told me her parents live in Seattle. That isn’t quite true. They live near Seattle, which isn’t really the same thing, because what Halli neglected to tell me was that her parents own their own private island.

  Of course they do.

  When Jake points it out to me from the window, I nod like it’s all completely expected. Just like I had to be totally casual about the fact that the car he picked me up in earlier was driving itself for most of the way to the airport. All completely normal.

  “You’ve never been here before, have you?” Jake asks.

  I’m not sure how to answer. I’m pretty sure Halli hasn’t seen her parents in person since she was a baby. Halli’s grandmother, Ginny Markham, raised her, and Halli told me once that her parents never even tried to contact Halli for sixteen years—not until Ginny died last year.

  And since then, as far as Halli was concerned, they’d been contacting her too much. I witnessed a few of the “comm” calls between Halli and her mother—the ones where Halli’s mother’s head floated holographically in 3-D above Halli’s tablet—and Halli was always very abrupt and irritable. I know it had something to do with Halli feeling abandoned by her parents, but I also think she just didn’t basically like them. At least that was my impression.

  It’s just one more thing I wish I could question her about, now that I’m about to meet them. And have to pretend to be her.

  “I know it’s been at least ten years,” Jake says. “I’ve lived on the island that long, and I’ve never seen you. Trust me,” he adds, smiling in that way of his and looking me straight in the eye, “I would have remembered.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Mm-hm.” Halli never struck me as much of a blusher, but someone different is at the controls now. I’m sure my cheeks—her cheeks—are a nice warm red. I cover one of them by resting my chin in my hand and gazing back out the window.

  From the air the island looks green—almost completely covered in trees. I can see the tops of a few buildings, and a tan border along most of the edge, which I’m guessing is a beach, but otherwise the place looks completely wooded.

  And not with palm trees, either, which is what I thought all islands had. It’s forest, like in the mountains around Halli’s house back in Colorado. I wonder if her parents had all those pine trees imported.

  The island is too small for an airstrip, so the pilot parks the jet on the mainland, and Jake and I finish the journey in Halli’s parents’ own private ferry.

  As we come closer to the shore, I get a clear view of Halli’s parents’ mansion. Although “mansion” doesn’t really do it justice. It’s more like one of those enormous estates you see in old British period dramas—the ones where people go to balls and then all fifty guests sleep over and send for their carriages in the morning.

  The mansion is made of stone and wood and glass. It’s four stories high, with huge windows stretching from the bottom floor all the way up to the top, which must give a great view out across the water. And be ridiculously hard to clean.

  There’s a man waiting for us on the dock. He’s dressed very formally, wearing white gloves and holding a glass of champagne.

  “Welcome, Miss Markham,” he says, and offers me the glass.
/>   “I . . . no, I can’t,” I say. “I’m . . . too young.” I glance at Jake, who looks like he might laugh, but the servant or whoever he is just gives me a quick bow, and reaches down for the picnic basket at his feet.

  “Muffin?” he asks, holding it open. “Cranberry, raspberry, blueberry, ginger—”

  “No, thank you,” I say, afraid I might hurt his feelings, but there’s no way I can eat anything right now. My stomach feels like it’s digesting rocks.

  “Thanks, Lyman,” Jake says, helping himself to a muffin. “Are they—? Right. There they are.”

  I follow his gaze.

  It’s a strange thing to see your parents and know they’re not your parents. To have to hold yourself back from running to the mother you might never see again, and throwing yourself into her arms and telling her how sorry you are that you disappeared without saying goodbye. To see some other version of your father and think, “No, that’s not right. He’s not like that. Go back—you’ve got it all wrong.”

  They both look older, and heavier, than my parents. And richer. They’re dressed very expensively, and Halli’s mother is wearing all kinds of jewelry. Both of them look like they get their hair done. Halli’s mom’s is all puffy and stiff, and her father’s looks like it’s dyed.

  And the way they’re walking is all wrong. Both of their strides have this kind of weird aggression about them—like they’re marching somewhere to go tell somebody off. My parents aren’t like that. They’re pretty easy-going and never in that much of a hurry.

  But worse than anything else about them, it’s the expression on their faces as they come toward me. They don’t look happy. They’re not excited. This might be the first time they’ve ever seen Halli in person since she was an infant, and they don’t even look like they care.

  “Halli,” her mother says, opening her arms just a little. She steps forward, clutches me with these sort of bird claws on the sides of my shoulders, and leans in to press her cheek against mine. But she doesn’t really go for it, and instead just gives me this kind of air-cheek thing, all the while still keeping me in her death grip like she’s afraid I might twist and get away.

  “Halli,” her father says, giving me a nod.

  “Father,” I say back.

  This seems to confuse him. Halli’s mother, too. Then I remember Halli always called her mother by her first name, Regina—never “Mother.”

  The problem is, I have no idea what Halli’s father’s name is. I think I heard it once, but if so, it’s completely slipped my mind. The best I can do to cover it up is give him the same kind of nod he gave me—stiff and formal, like we barely know each other.

  Which I guess must be true. Even if it were still Halli inside here.

  Halli’s father turns to Jake now, ignoring me. “How was the noise level?”

  “Negligible,” Jake tells him.

  “Vibration?” he asks.

  “Non-existent,” Jake says.

  Halli’s dad asks him some more questions about the plane, and I’d like to hear what they’re saying, but meanwhile Halli’s mother is talking to me.

  “How was your flight?” she asks. “That’s our newest plane. Your father’s only ridden in it once. We hired DeMenici to design the interior. I hope you found it comfortable.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Dual-cell,” she continues, not waiting for my answer. “It’s our latest configuration. Uses only half the water of the previous model. It’s been a very difficult process—years in the making.” She gives me a tight smile. “But I don’t suppose you care about that.”

  “’Course she doesn’t,” Halli’s father butts in.

  I feel the need to stick up for Halli, but I’m not sure what to say. So I just give her mother a noncommittal shrug.

  Halli’s father says, “I have to get back to work.”

  He pivots around and heads back to the mansion without another word to his daughter.

  Halli’s mother flicks her fingers toward the man with the muffins. I forgot he was still there, standing at a respectful distance. He gives Halli’s mother a slight bow, then picks up his basket and champagne and hurries to get ahead of Halli’s father. I don’t understand why until I see the muffin man get back to the mansion just in time to hold open the door for his employer.

  “We’ll try not to take up too much of your time,” Halli’s mother says. “We wouldn’t have to involve you at all if your grandmother had behaved sensibly.”

  I don’t know if she’s referring to Ginny Markham dying, or to something else. But in either case, I know Halli wouldn’t have liked her mother saying anything bad about her grandmother. So I just don’t respond.

  “But,” her mother goes on, “things are as they are. We should be able to take care of all of it this weekend. We’ll have lawyers here, the board will be here—we can settle matters once and for all. Then you’ll never have to worry about any of this again. You can go on with your life, your father and I can go on with ours. How does that sound?”

  It might sound fine, if not for the fact that she’s standing there clasping her fingers together too tightly and smiling in this very tense way. I don’t know if that’s just how she normally is, or if something weird is going on.

  “So,” she says. “Any questions?”

  “Um . . . no.”

  “All right, then. Jake can help you get settled. I have to get back to work now, too.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Bye.”

  It’s all very cold and weird.

  “Dinner is at eight,” she calls back over her shoulder. “Dress appropriately. You’re in civilization now.”

  I stand there and stare after her. And no matter what I think about the whole thing, I know very clearly in my heart exactly what Halli would do right now.

  If it were her inside this body, standing on this dock, she’d turn right around, get back on that ferry, and never see her parents again. She’d never answer another one of her mother’s comm calls from now until February when she turned eighteen, and then she’d take her parents off the tracking access list and make sure they could never find her or contact her again.

  I know that was already her plan—she told me.

  But Halli’s tracking is the point. I can’t leave here until I get it. So like it or not, I’m stuck.

  “Well,” Jake says with a laugh, “that went well.”

  I turn to him and look at him with new eyes. He can joke about these people?

  “They were nervous to meet you,” he says.

  “Didn’t look like it,” I mutter.

  He smiles. “Want to take a walk?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I do.”

  4

  Red couldn’t be happier. There’s water to swim in, a strong guy with a good arm to throw him a stick—although whenever I catch sight of Halli’s arms I’m pretty sure she could hurl a shotput out there, she’s so much more muscular than I am. But I’m happy to let Jake do the dirty work, since Red keeps bringing him back the stick, shaking off all his water onto Jake’s legs, then standing there panting, ready for the next throw.

  “So,” Jake says to me.

  “So,” I say back.

  “What do you think of them?” Jake asks.

  He picks up the stick again and throws it for Red. I use that time to try to read his face. I can’t tell if he’s testing me, or just making conversation, or pumping me for information.

  The real question is, can I trust him?

  He seems like a nice guy, but that’s really all I can say. I don’t know him. And if he’s lived here for ten years, and works for Halli’s father, and has never met Halli before, then it’s safe to assume he feels more loyal to Halli’s parents than to her—no matter how nice he’s being to me.

  I decide it’s best to be cautious.

  “I’m sure they’re both very good at what they do,” I say, even though I’m not really sure what that is.

  Jake gives me a look like he knows I’ve just avoided his quest
ion.

  “What do you do here, exactly?” I say.

  I mean Halli’s parents and the company they run, but Jake thinks I’m asking about him.

  “I’m apprenticed to your father,” he says.

  “Oh. Doing what?”

  “As a chemist,” he says.

  I wasn’t expecting that—at all. Jake is a chemist? Halli’s father is one, too? She never told me that. Of course, she also never told me her parents own their own island, so I’m guessing there are a lot of things she left out.

  Jake tosses the stick again. Red plunges in after it.

  “I met her once, you know,” Jake says.

  “Who?”

  “Your grandmother.”

  “You did?” I say. “When?” I probably shouldn’t act this excited, but I always loved it whenever Halli would tell me stories about Ginny. She only told me a few, because they seemed to always make her sad by the end, so I’m ready for anybody else to tell me as many stories about her as they want.

  “I was young,” Jake says. “Eight.”

  I do the calculation as we walk down the rocky shore. Will—and therefore Jake—is the same age I am. So that means he met Ginny nine years ago—a year after he said he first came to live here.

  “I liked her,” Jake says. “A lot. She was tough and angry with your parents—you know how she could be—”

  I nod, even though I don’t know.

  “—but when she saw me hanging around, she told me to bring us a couple of horses, and then she took me riding the rest of the afternoon. It was . . . memorable.”

  I bet it was. From everything I’ve heard about Ginny, I know she was a fearless, adventurous woman. She brought up Halli to be the same way. I only wish Ginny could have lived long enough for me to meet her.

  Although if she had, Halli wouldn’t have been on that cliff a month ago, meditating in such a way that our vibrations exactly matched up. I’d never have found a way to slip past the barriers between our two universes, and end up bodily in this one.