Parallelogram Omnibus Edition

by Brande, Robin

  “Get. OUT.” I say. “Both of you. NOW.” Then I hold my head again because it feels like it’s going to explode.

  Jake grabs my arm. And now he’s pulling me out of the room.

  Red runs along side me, pressing against my leg, the same way he did that very first day when I met him. He kept my bare legs warm. He was my friend. He’s still my friend.

  “Daniel?” I shout behind me.

  He’s already on his feet, coming to get me.

  Jake lets go of me for a second, squares up, and hits Daniel once more, hard against the face. Daniel stumbles, goes down.

  “Jake! Stop it!” I shout. And now I’m crying because everything I say is making me hurt so badly I want to vomit.

  “You need help,” he tells me. “You’re hurt. I’m getting you to a doctor.”

  “I don’t need a doctor,” I mumble, before proving him right by passing out.

  62

  I am lying on my back.

  Looking at a dark, unfamiliar sky.

  And rolling somewhere fast, even though I can’t move.

  There are people all around me, shouting to me, shouting to each other, and I see lots of those binoculars around, all of them pointing toward me, but I don’t care.

  There’s a dog running beside me, barking.

  I try to move my arms, but I can’t. I’m strapped down. I’m being pushed. I’m on a gurney, I think, because I’m covered in a blanket and strapped down, just like I’ve seen on TV shows.

  “Miss Markham? What’s happened?” a British man calls out. Another one shouts, “Miss Markham! Did one of them hit you?”

  I turn my head to see who asked me that, and catch a glimpse of why he even raised the question.

  Daniel is under a street light, being attended to by someone in a blue uniform, and his face looks like he’s just been in a boxing match. His eye is swollen, there’s blood on his cheek, and his split lip is now at least double its normal size.

  He brushes off the hand of whoever’s working on him, and rushes over to me.

  “What’s happening?” I ask him.

  “They’re taking you to the hospital.”

  “I don’t need a hospital—you know that.”

  “I’ll come along after you,” Daniel says. “Don’t worry.”

  And now tears are seeping out of my eyes.

  Red is barking and trying to jump up on the gurney with me. The person wheeling me keeps pushing him off.

  “Somebody take this dog!” he shouts.

  “No!” I cry. “He’s mine!”

  “I’ll take him,” Daniel says. “Halli, don’t worry. We’ll sort this whole thing out.”

  Now I’m being loaded into the ambulance. Red tries to hop up with me, but the blue-uniformed workers stop him. They’re too rough—I hear Red yelp as he falls back the wrong way.

  “Daniel?” I shout.

  “I’ve got him,” he says. “I’ll take care of him. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Someone shuts the ambulance doors, and I can still hear the dog barking outside.

  “Can’t he come with me?” I try to sit up again, but a hand on my shoulder gently pushes me down.

  “It’s all right, Halli,” Jake says. “I’m here with you now. You don’t need Everett.”

  “I was talking about Red . . .” But I’m too tired. I give in to the tired and close my eyes.

  The ambulance starts wailing out that horrible, awful song you hear in British movies—so much worse than American sirens, for some reason. It wails and whines and makes sure I know this is the absolute worst moment of my life.

  Jake kneels to one side of me while a worker sits on my other side taking my pulse, checking my pupils, all of it.

  Jake fishes for my hand under the blanket. He can’t lift it out of there because it’s strapped down too tightly.

  “I love you, Halli,” he says. “You’ll be all right.”

  “No,” I say, tears leaking again into my hair. “This is all wrong, Jake. You don’t understand—”

  “I love you,” he says again. “I’ll take care of you.”

  I close my eyes and try to block out the siren. Try to block out my head. Try to forget who I am. This isn’t happening. Just a short time ago I was back in my house, back in my room, about to have soup with my very own mother. What happened to that girl? I want to be her. Can’t I be her again?

  Maybe I can. Maybe that’s the answer.

  I silently call to Halli.

  I try to lift myself over the waves, find her, dive down.

  But the siren screams and Jake talks lovingly to me, and there’s too much noise all around me. Please, everyone shut up. Let me escape. Let me go find my life.

  “You’ll be all right,” Jake keeps saying. “They’re going to be able to help you.”

  No one can help me now.

  I’m trapped and I can’t get out.

  ******

  ******

  BOOK 3: SEIZE THE PARALLEL

  1

  I can’t blame Halli for what she did. She knew she was dead. I know now, too.

  What do you do when your real life is over, and all you have left is this one? You do the best you can. And if you’re Halli Markham, you do a better job than I’ve been doing, pretending to be her.

  “I’m not like you,” she told me. “I can’t be you.”

  I know that. Any more than I can be her.

  But that’s what we’re doing, both of us. Living our opposite lives, messing them up in so many ways, maybe improving them in others.

  So I don’t blame her, for most of it.

  Just for that one thing.

  But that one thing—I’m not sure I can get over it.

  2

  When Halli was growing up, she and her grandmother, Ginny, did a lot of dangerous things: exploring the Amazon; climbing the Himalayas; rowing across the Atlantic; trekking to the North and South Poles. The list goes on from there—Ginny Markham was a world explorer, a world adventurer, and she took Halli everywhere with her from the time Halli was a baby.

  But even though their adventures were dangerous, Ginny always emphasized two things: one, that preparation is the best defense against everything that can go wrong. And two, when everything goes wrong anyway, face up to it and keep on going from there.

  So Halli learned to anticipate. And Halli learned to adapt. To look at her situation with a cold, hard eye, and not wish things were different than they were, but to deal with exactly what was happening at the moment.

  So if a rope failed, a bone broke, if Halli and Ginny were lost somewhere in the middle of a violent storm, Halli learned to be quiet. To stop. To assess her condition, her surroundings, her options.

  Is it any wonder, then, that once it sank in—the conclusion that Professor Whitfield and I had come to that the real Halli was dead, and I hadn’t saved her from that avalanche at all, but instead had split off a new parallel universe where the only Halli who had ever existed was this new Halli 2, the one who was actually me inside Halli’s body, and there would be no way to reverse it because the original Halli was gone, that connection severed forever—was it any wonder that a calm came over Halli, and she started thinking about what she had to do?

  Especially once I disappeared again, ripped out of the body—my old body—that I’d been able to visit temporarily and share with Halli somehow. Now I was gone, and no matter what Halli and Professor Whitfield tried over the next several hours, they couldn’t bring me back.

  So as night fell, and my mother was calling to the daughter she thought was me, asking her what kind of takeout she wanted, and Professor Whitfield told Halli they’d have to try finding me again in the morning, Halli was already thinking about what to do next.

  Because just like Ginny said, if things go wrong, you have to be able to rely on yourself. No point clinging to a rockface after your climbing partner has just fallen, and crying because it’s all so sad and frightening. You’d better figure out a way to sa
ve yourself. You can cry about it later.

  So Halli began making a plan.

  3

  Meanwhile, me.

  Rushed to a London hospital and immediately pumped full of drugs.

  Drugs that made me hallucinate. Drugs that kept me in this kind of twilight sleep, never really dreaming, never really awake, but just floating in this sort of sick haze, unable to swim my way to the top of it or force it out of my system. My brain was gooey. Muddled. Limp and useless.

  “Halli?” I could hear Daniel saying to me, and if no one was around, “Audie?” I tried to form his name, but it was too hard. My mouth felt too heavy. I don’t think I even got the D out.

  Then other voices—Jake, other people—all of them shouting “Halli,” trying to get me to answer, but I was too deep and far away. And why come back when it was all so noisy? What I needed was quiet. And for someone to come dig me out. To grab me by the hair and keep me from sinking further into the deep. To sweep away all the haze and the gunk, and help me clear out my mind again.

  “She needs rest,” I heard a woman say. “Miss Markham needs her rest. Clearly she’s exhausted.”

  No, Miss Markham needs to find the real Miss Markham. Miss Markham is Audie Masters. She’d like to go home now. Her mother brought her some soup. She was just about to see her mother when suddenly Jake and Sarah and that reporter burst into the room and ruined everything. Now where am I? What have you done with her? With me? What’s happening?

  “Audie,” Daniel whispered. “We’re doing everything we can. I hope you can hear me.”

  I can. I could. Then it was back into the deep dark void for me.

  4

  Halli rose at dawn and went for a long run. It was Sunday, the day after my miraculous and all-too-brief visit, and Halli needed to mull over everything she had learned. She always did her best thinking when she was on the move.

  Over the past week she’d gone running at least twice a day: in the morning, as soon as my mom left for work, and again in the afternoon before my mom came home. In between, Halli spent hours cooped up in my room, talking to Professor Whitfield and his lab assistant Albert, alternating between trying to bring me back and learning everything she could about how to pretend to be me.

  And part of that involved pretending to be sick.

  My mother understood immediately. She had been expecting it for weeks. She kept warning me I was pushing myself too hard, not getting enough sleep, never taking a break from obsessing over getting accepted into Columbia University. My application was due November 1, and I kept promising her I’d relax after that. But she knew in her heart that it would all finally catch up to me, and when it did I would crash hard.

  So when she came home from her business trip and found Halli—theoretically, me—coughing and sniffling and dragging herself out of bed, my mother declared that school and my job were off-limits for a few days, and I was to stay home and do nothing but rest. Halli nodded meekly, let my mother heat up cans of soup for her and fuss over her a little, and then leapt out of bed as soon as the coast was clear and took off running every chance she could get.

  And it was fine for that one week. Halli figured it was temporary. She would work with Professor Whitfield to find me and reverse what had happened, and then she’d be back to her old life in no time.

  Meanwhile, it was interesting to learn about this other universe she’d dropped into: how the technology worked, how the people lived, what everything looked like. It wasn’t so different from experiences she’d had many times before, visiting new countries and learning the language and the customs.

  But mostly Halli was interested in the terrain. Ginny had taught her that was the first and best way of getting grounded in a new place: find out where you are and where everything else is around you.

  “I need maps,” Halli told the professor.

  “Maps of what?” he asked.

  “Everything.”

  “Halli, we need to keep working—”

  “I need maps.”

  She was so insistent, he finally gave in. Showed her how to access maps on my computer. “But don’t do it now,” he told her. “We have to keep working. Come on, Halli, we need your complete focus.”

  Reluctantly, she agreed. And returned to the more tedious business of mapping out my life.

  “See if you can find any identification numbers,” Professor Whitfield and Albert suggested. “Passwords...her driver’s license...bank information...notes...e-mails...pictures...” Anything and everything that would let Halli slip into my life and pretend to know what I should know.

  Albert had the bright idea of using my social security number and student ID to hack into my school records. That way they could find out what classes I was taking, what rooms they were in, and what my teachers’ names were, in case Halli had to take it all a step further and go to school as if she were me. She couldn’t just stand there in the hall and ask someone passing by, “Excuse me? Do you know me? Where do I go?”

  Halli took one look at my class schedule and didn’t like what she saw.

  “Physics? World History? English Literature?” she said. “I won’t know any of those. Don’t you think people will notice?”

  “We’ll coach you through it,” Professor Whitfield promised. “And maybe it won’t come to that. Let’s keep working.”

  The problem wasn’t just that Halli had never been to school in my universe, it’s that she’d never been to any school, period. Ginny taught her everything she needed to know: foreign languages, navigation, survival skills. Halli never spent a day of her life sitting in some classroom taking quizzes or writing essays. And the only thing she knew about physics was what little I’d taught her so far. That wouldn’t help if Mr. Dobosh called on her and asked her to explain some esoteric principle that I would clearly understand. Halli was right—people would be suspicious.

  With all the work involved trying to learn to be me, it’s no wonder Halli had to take as many breaks as she could to go out running. I’ll be the first to agree that having to cram in someone’s life in just a few days—not to mention having to learn as much as you can about how to function in a strange place in general, with technology you’ve never seen, around people who expect you to know who they are—can be totally mentally exhausting.

  On the other hand—and I don’t say this just because I’m jealous—it was pretty convenient for Halli to have a team like the professor and Albert helping her through all that. Even little things like suggesting she carry my laptop all around the house so they could see our appliances on the screen and explain how they all worked.

  I understand that was best for everybody since it meant fewer things for my mother to get suspicious about, but don’t you think I would have loved some help like that when I suddenly had to start pretending to be Halli? I was thrown into her life as abruptly as she was thrown into mine, and I didn’t even have time to properly freak out before there was a knock on her door and some guy standing there who looked exactly like the one I’ve been in love with most of my life, telling me his name was Jake instead of Will, and that he was there to fly me back by private jet to Halli’s parents’ private island, where I was supposed to be the star attraction at a company board meeting I knew nothing about.

  Not to mention that Halli’s parents are horrible, her world is confusing, and I never once, no matter how many times I tried, managed to figure out how to work the holographic tablets they have over there. So yeah, I would have appreciated a little help.

  I’m not saying Halli had it easy, just in some ways easier.

  While she sorted through all my stuff those first few days, searching for clues about how to be me, Halli couldn’t resist cleaning up a little as she went.

  I’ve never really minded living in chaos. I know where everything is in every pile in my room, so it’s never seemed important enough for me to take the time to clean. If I’m in there I’d rather be studying or sleeping. But I can understand someone else coming in and ne
eding to bring some order to the place, to sort out what’s useful and necessary from what’s not.

  Halli brought that kind of cold calculation to my closet one afternoon. She was sick of having to sort through all the clothes I crammed in there, just to find things that fit. I still had a lot of clothes from back in junior high, and maybe even a few from elementary school. What can I say? I’ve been busy the last few years.

  But Ginny never would have let me get away with something like that.

  “If you have something, use it,” she used to tell Halli. “If you don’t use it, don’t have it.” That applied to clothing, gear, equipment—everything. Despite all her wealth, Ginny liked to live very simply. She could fit all the essentials of her life into a duffel or two, and be on the move at a moment’s notice. Halli developed that same skill.

  By the time she was done cleaning my closet and my room, Halli had filled five garbage bags full of clothes, shoes, odds and ends—anything she couldn’t see an immediate use for and that didn’t suit her regular style.

  Gone were some of the pants and shirts I let my best friend, Lydia, talk me into getting over the years, but that never really fit me right. Gone were the flowery skirts my mother always gave me for my birthday. Gone were all the beat-up, worn-out flats and sandals I’ve worn for years because my shoe size hasn’t really changed.

  But Halli kept any T-shirts, sweatshirts, sweatpants, all my jeans, my shorts, my sneakers—any kind of clothing a person could run in or hike in or generally not have to fuss with. And she especially loved my cargo pants: comfortable, sturdy, practical with all their pockets—just the kind of thing she liked.

  She stowed all the bags in our storage shed. She wasn’t about to permanently throw out anything of mine that I might come back and want. Then she settled back into a bedroom that looked more like her clean, sparse house than the place I had left behind.

  It looked nice. I’ll admit I was shocked—and maybe even a little hurt—the first time I saw it. But the truth is everything Halli did needed to be done. Nobody can be as ruthless about purging your stuff as somebody else who’s never been attached to any of it. I’m actually grateful that she did it.