Chapter #6The Doppelgänger by: Seuzz   "Invalid Entry" 
Let me say that again.
I looked into Mr. Santiago's classroom and saw that I was already sitting at my desk.
It took me, like, forever to process that fact. Here's the way it went down:
I was catching my breath and willing myself to cool off and for all the sweat that was caking up on my arms and legs and lots of other, more embarrassing places to just disappear! please, when I looked through the window of the door into the classroom. It's a small window, one of those tall, narrow panes of glass that's cross-hatched with black wires.
The first thing I did was scope out Elijah Denton, because he can really fill out a t-shirt, and then I checked out Aedan Finnegan, because I have a serious thing for red-headed guys with green eyes. Today he was in a forest-green polo shirt, which really made his hair pop.
I made a face and shook my own shirt out a little more, and decided to count to five before walking in. It's not like Aedan ever paid much attention to me—we hardly had any classes together and I don't even think he knew I existed, except as the warm body that occupied the chair across the aisle to his left in Mr. Santiago's classroom—but I didn't want him to start noticing me today as the warm body that occupied that chair while stinking up the room. And as I thought about that—and counted past five to six and seven and eight—my eye drifted a little and I frowned at the girl who had taken my spot. I didn't recognize her.
And then I did recognize her. Except it took a couple of seconds for my brain to figure out that I did recognize her even after alarm bells started going off in the back of my head.
"Citrus Leahy, it's time to wake up." My phone sounded much more clearly in the empty halls.
That's when I realized it was me sitting in my usual chair, right across from Aedan. That was me bending over her desk and writing firmly and steadily with just a trace of a concentrated frown on her face.
I wasn't late for school or for class. I was already in class.
Then what was I doing outside of class? Standing on the other side of the door, peering in like a ghost?
Somebody moved—Ben Rice, sitting up and stretching—and I darted back a step. I blinked a couple of times.
No, that's not me in there, I told myself. Don't be silly, Citrus. I took a deep breath and stepped back up to the door. But my hand froze on the handle.
The girl sure looked like me. She had dirty-blonde hair trailing down to the top of her shoulders, dark eyebrows, chipmunk cheeks, and a nose that my mom calls "Roman" and that I call "my big-ass schnozzola." I went up on tiptoes so I could get a better look at her clothes. If she wasn't wearing my favorite Hawaiian shirt under my favorite hoodie with the red-and-gold Westside dragon stitched over the heart, then she was wearing their duplicates.
Duplicates.
That really brought it home. There was a duplicate of me, wearing duplicates of my clothes, sitting in my desk. I jumped back to the side and leaned against some lockers. I tried to catch my breath, which was quickening fast.
I'd heard of such things before. I've seen horror movies and sci-fi movies just like everyone else has, and read stories about evil twins and robot imposters and clones and alien pod-people and all the rest. But I didn't panic right away.
Partly that was because I knew that stories like that are just stories, y'know? and real life has got to have logical explanations.
So I'd go in—I pictured this happening to myself, all at once, in a really vivid fantasy played at 40x regular speed—and I'd walk up to the girl and say Excuse me, I think you're in my seat, and she'd look up and say Oh, sorry, this is my first day here and I'd see that although she looked kind of like me, she wasn't me. And then she'd move and after class I'd go up and introduce myself and she'd tell me her name and we'd both be a little weirded out by how much alike we looked and then I'd help her find her next class and we'd have lunch and who knows, maybe we'd become friends? Like that?
I looked back through the window.
God, she looked just like me. The resemblance got even clearer, and spookier, when she raised her head and frowned distantly at the wall above Mr. Santiago's head while tapping her test paper with her pencil tip.
Then she did something that sent me flying backwards down the hall.
She looked over at Aedan, stared for a moment, and swallowed.
I had done that very thing so many times!
I bustled into the girls' restroom at the end of A wing and dropped my bag by the sink. Get a grip, Citrus, I told myself, but I only gripped the edge of the sink. You just need to go in there and take your test. There's nothing to be afraid of. Even if she is your evil twin, what's the worst she can do? Give you all wrong answers on your US History test? Mr. Santiago will just give you another one, and then she'll flunk the test.
My fingers tightened around the sink, and I raised my face to look at myself in the mirror. I was a wreck, but it was my own face—splotchy, breaking out in zits, tangled hair dropping out of a pony tail that had come half-undone on the way to school. I ran some cold water in the sink and clapped it to my cheeks. Then I dried it and brushed my hair out.
"Citrus Leahy, it's time to wake up."
I wished I was dreaming. With shaking hands, I took my cell phone out, turned off the alarm, and did some thinking.
The thing to do was to go in there and see what happened. People might stare and point and whisper, but things would get straightened out. I was me, and she was ... whoever she was. If people couldn't tell us apart, well, I had my student ID and presumably she'd have hers. Unless they hadn't given it to her yet, because she was new.
And if there was something spooky going on?
Back when I was still talking to my bat-crazy grandmother, she used to tell me stories about her bat-crazy grandmother—
And by the way, that's how come I don't talk to my grandmother anymore, because I'm afraid she's a preview of coming attractions in my own case.
Anyway, her bat-crazy grandmother used to talk about her "doppelganger." Only this wasn't a monster or an imposter, the way the word gets used these days. For Great-Great-Grandmother Heinzmann, her "doppelganger" was just a kind of 3D reflection that would go out in front of her or trail behind her or run errands for her. Once (she told my grandmother) she took a train down to Florida to see one of her uncles, and when she went into a hotel to get a room, she found out that one had already been reserved in her name, and the desk clerk recognized her: "So good to see you again, Mrs. Heinzmann," he said. "Your room is ready just as you requested, on the first floor." Because she couldn't abide heights, you see.
Well, wouldn't that be awesome, if it turned out that not only was I going to be bat-crazy by the time I was fifty, but I was going to be twice as bat-crazy as anyone else because there'd be two of me running around!
I shivered. What if I got a reputation as a weirdo, just in time to ruin not only my junior year but my senior year too?
And that's what decided me against going back into Mr. Santiago's room to see what the heck was going on. I didn't want people to start thinking of me as that girl there was twice as much of as there should be.
So I crumpled up my tardy slip and slunk down to the library. If it turned out to be some weird misunderstanding, I'd just come clean and tell Mr. Santiago I was so freaked out at seeing myself sitting my desk that I bolted class and could I please make up the test after school?
I killed the rest of the period by taking out my history notes and doing some cramming.
But when the bell rang, I waited two minutes until I was sure the coast was clear, then went outside, cut across the quad to the far end of A wing, and went in through the outside doors that no one hardly ever used. The halls were bustling, but I watched carefully for any faces that were too familiar until I came to Mr. Santiago's room. I paused there a moment, took a deep breath, and went in.
It was already starting to fill up with students for third period, but I ignored them and marched up to the teacher's desk. He looked up at me with mild curiosity, and said nothing.
And that almost killed me. If he'd said, Where were you? that would show that I'd been panicking over nothing. But he just looked at me with those dark, tired eyes.
I decided to grab onto the situation and punch it right in the face. "Um, Mr. Santiago," I stammered. "Can I look at my test a moment?"
Did he say, But you were absent or You weren't here or How could you take a test when you weren't in class? No. He just shuffled through the stack of papers on his desk until he found one, and pulled it out, and handed it to me.
I leaned against the desk to keep from falling over. Citrus Leahy, it said at the top. And it was in my handwriting, right down to the little circle over the "i" I always make. You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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