“If she found out,” I say.
“We’ve never told anyone,” Bet says. “At least I haven’t.” She looks at us funny. “Have you guys?”
“No!” Ella says definitively.
“No,” I say. “I’ve never liked anyone enough to want to tell them.” I look at Ella. “I mean, don’t you sort of want to tell Dave? To let him know you for you?”
“I’d be lying if I said the thought hasn’t crossed my mind,” Ella says, folding her arms over her chest, “but I’d never do it. We made a pact.”
“When we were kids,” Betsey says, and I can tell she’s on my side.
“Still,” Ella says, “we could get Mom into serious trouble. And if she goes to jail, what happens to us? Mom’s parents are dead—we have no family. Do we go into foster care? Or does the government take us into custody and examine us like lab rats for the rest of our lives? I just don’t think it’s worth it.”
“You watch too much TV,” I say, smiling a little to ease the tension. “And besides, those things would only be a concern if Sean told someone else. Which he wouldn’t.”
“You hardly know him,” Ella says. “How do you know you can trust him? That we can trust him?”
“I just know.” I can’t help but smile because it’s the truth. “I just have this feeling; I’m positive that he’ll keep our secret.” I pause, searching the faces that I know by heart because they’re copies of my own. “I want to tell him, both for him and for me. I want to let him in.”
We’re all quiet for a few moments; the house creaks like it’s joining the conversation. In the end, there are no more words spoken. But the look on Betsey’s face, then the subtle nod from Ella, tell me that tonight at this haphazard meeting in the dark hallway, we three have made a major decision for ourselves for perhaps the first time in our lives. I know without words that they’re okay with it.
We’re telling Sean; we’re letting someone else in.
And we’re doing it whether Mom likes it or not.
thirteen
“What are you doing right now?” I ask, blocking Sean’s path out of the classroom. My phone’s in my hand, the email from Betsey still on the screen.
She left early. You’re in the clear.
“Standing in the aisle,” he says jokingly, but it comes out a little too sarcastic. I know he’s still confused: He was standoffish all period. I’m so nervous I think I might get sick.
I take a deep breath. “What I meant was: What are you doing after school?”
“Oh,” he says. “Yeah, I figured.” He pulls his backpack onto his shoulder and glances at the door: We’re the only people left in the classroom. “I’m probably just going home. Why?”
“I wanted to ask you…” I say, confidence seeping out of me with every passing second. I had it all planned out earlier, before I was actually standing in front of him. “I… do you want to come to my house for a little while? I still want to talk to you, and I need to… show you something.”
“At your house?” he asks, still confused, but curious, too. It calms me a bit.
“At my house.” I nod once.
“Don’t you have cheer?” he asks.
I force a cough. “I’m sick.”
“Okay, sure,” Sean says, smiling. “Lead the way.”
“This is where you live?” Sean asks, squinting down into the forest fortress twenty minutes later. His car is parked out on the main road and he’s next to me in the sedan just outside the gate. All you can see from up here is a small part of the roof.
“I don’t like Dave,” I say, ignoring his question.
Sean glances at me and says, “It’s none of my business.” I hope it’s just a defense mechanism; the aloofness bothers me.
“Do you seriously feel that way?” I ask quietly, eyes on the gate. “Because if you do, then—”
“No,” he interrupts. He looks away, out the window at nothing. “You’re making me crazy.”
“Good,” I say, smiling. “I mean, not good, but good that you… care.”
“I care.”
“Okay.”
I inhale deeply and blow it out. Then I punch the buttons to open the gate.
“So, as I was saying, I don’t like Dave,” I reiterate as I navigate the driveway with less fear than usual. “I mean, he’s nice enough, but I don’t like him in that way.” Pause. Say it. “I like you.”
I look at Sean and catch his half smile as he looks down at his hands. Then his eyes are on mine. “Then what’s with hanging out with him?”
“That’s one of the things I want to try to explain,” I say, parking in front of the garage. I turn off the car; he looks at me, ready to listen. “Not here,” I say. “Not in the car, I mean. We have to go inside. But I’m just warning you, I’m going to tell you some strange stuff. Your normal day ends now.”
Sean smiles at me like he did that night at the game. “I think I can handle it.”
I pause on the porch, thinking of all that’s about to change. Wondering for a beat if I’m doing the right thing, then remembering how confidently I told Ella and Betsey that we can trust Sean. Because we can; I know we can. And I wasn’t kidding when I said that I needed to tell him for me, too. I need to get my life back, a step at a time. Step one: Grab the door handle. I push through, my heart thumping hard in my chest.
“Come in,” I say quietly.
He walks tentatively into the house and immediately looks up. It’s hard not to do: The soaring ceiling with the colossal crystal chandelier in the center is attention grabbing, to say the least. Sean’s eyes travel up the grand staircase and across the balcony until they meet walls where the bedrooms are. I watch as they continue to meander up, up, and up.
I clear my throat.
“Sorry,” he says, eyes on me now. “But your house is sweet.”
“Thanks,” I say, kicking off my shoes. Sean copies me, and I start up the stairs. “Let’s go.”
I pause on the second step from the top. I know that they know we’re coming—their nervousness is making mine snowball. I turn to face Sean; he’s two steps behind me, so I’m taller than him. “Ready?” I ask.
“Okay, now you’re starting to freak me out.” My face must look as worried as I feel, because he grabs my hand. “Hey,” he whispers, “I’m fine.”
I nod, then turn and finish the climb, still holding his hand. The double doors to the rec room are open; Ella and Betsey are sitting on opposite couches. They both turn to look at us.
“Hi, you two,” Betsey says warmly. Ella waves stiffly.
“Hi,” I say back before glancing at Sean. His eyes float from face to face. As planned, we’re all in different clothes, but still, I’m sure it’s a lot to take in.
“Are you guys triplets or something?” he asks, following me into the rec room after I tug a little on his hand. Ella laughs and it’s higher pitched than usual. Sean and I sit down in the open chairs.
“No,” I say, “at least not anymore.” Sean looks at me funny; I gesture to the others. “That’s Betsey, and this is Ella.” They both smile at him, and I wonder if it seems like he’s looking at two copies of me. It makes me feel the opposite of special.
Average.
But I force myself to get over it and do what I brought him here to do. “Sean, there’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just go for it,” I say, sitting up a little straighter. He looks at me again.
“The thing is that we’re not triplets,” I say. “We wish we were triplets. We used to think that we were, back when we were little. But really, what we are is… well, we’re clones.”
Part of me wonders whether Sean’s going to stand and run out of the room screaming, but he doesn’t move at first. His eyes stay on mine; his expression is expectant, like I’m going to shout, “Just kidding!” and we’re all going to have a big laugh. But then, about five seconds later, his features give it away when he realizes I’m serious. The upturned corners of his lips flatten out, his eyebrows dip just slightly
enough to make him look disbelieving. I could swear his grip on my hand loosens. I loosen mine, too, and our hands fall apart, into the space between our chairs. That space feels like a valley; I knit my hands together in my lap.
“What does that even mean?” Sean asks, looking at the others. Betsey scoots forward to the edge of her chair.
“It means that scientists created us in a lab from someone else’s DNA,” she says, sounding like a mixture of teacher and mother. “We were implanted into our mom’s womb and came into the world just like you did.”
I’ve never been so aware of how much Betsey’s voice matches mine as I am in this second. I hate that Sean’s probably aware of it, too.
“You look exactly alike,” he says, eyeing us. I’m increasingly anxious until he looks at me and says quietly, “Almost.” It makes my stomach flutter and it calms me. A little.
“We do look alike,” Betsey says, “but maybe less alike than identical twins. We’re copies of someone else, while twins start out as the same person but the egg splits apart into two people.”
“How’s that different?” Sean asks.
“A copy’s never as good as the original,” Ella jumps in. “Our Original might have been smarter than us. Or taller. And we probably have other differences because we were grown in our mom’s eggs and not her mom’s eggs.”
Sean’s eyes widen a little. “Is this why you were freaked out by Twinner?” he asks me. “You don’t think that girl is the one—”
Ella and Betsey talk at the same time.
“Maybe,” Bet says.
“No,” Ella says.
I just shrug. “Our mom told us that the baby died.”
“How did this even happen?” Sean asks.
I sigh; this is not going how I planned. But I’m determined to share this side of myself with Sean, so I begin to explain.
“Before we came along, our mom was a well-known scientist at a federally funded genetics lab. Of course, the government didn’t know this, but the lab was working on human cloning in private. One day, this rich couple approached the head of the lab, Mom’s boss, Dr. Jovovich, and secretly offered him and his team a boatload of money to basically bring back their baby daughter who died.”
“Are you serious?” Sean says, looking horrified. “That’s like a movie.”
“Completely,” I say, answering both questions with one word. When he doesn’t ask anything else, I go on.
“Anyway, the scientists agreed, and after tests, they determined that the problem might have been a genetic disorder from the mother, so they decided that they’d need to implant the DNA into a different host’s eggs before they were put in the client’s womb. Mom volunteered her eggs, as she was the only woman on the project. The clients were presented with a full medical history on the egg donor, but never knew it was our mom.
“Around the time when the DNA was implanted into the eggs but before they were put into the mother, the father shared that he and his wife wanted only one of the three viable eggs—the best one—and they wanted to destroy the rest. Mom thought they wanted to make sure that the scientists wouldn’t secretly grow the others in the name of research.
“Mom was probably way too involved in the project at this point, and because she was the egg donor, she sort of felt a claim to us. She didn’t want any of us being discarded. So she and her boss came up with a plan: He’d put the eggs in Mom’s womb instead and she’d disappear, and then he’d tell the clients that there had been an accident in the lab and all the eggs were destroyed.”
“Your mom stole you and raised you herself,” Sean says, looking a little pale. I nod. “But you weren’t hers,” he says quietly.
“We didn’t come from her DNA, so no, not technically,” Betsey says, “but she used her own eggs, and she gave birth to us. She raised us. We’re hers.”
“Oh,” Sean says like he’s not really buying it. Like he thinks Mom did something wrong. I try to make him see that what she did was good. Because as much as I hate living as a third of a person, I’m living at all because of her.
“She did it to protect us,” I say. “We moved and lived as triplets, and we had a happy childhood.”
“Then why don’t you live as triplets now?” he asks.
I tell him the story of when we were nine and Dr. Jovovich was publicly arrested. “He admitted on the stand during his trial that there could be a set of three female clones our age living somewhere in the United States. Girl triplets went under the microscope and Mom freaked out. We went into hiding.”
Sean stares at me; I clarify.
“We each do a third of the day.”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“I mean Ella goes to school until lunch, I do the afternoon classes and cheer practice, and Betsey does our night job and college class, and any other evening activities.”
“But the ones who aren’t at school are homeschooled in the same classes,” Ella adds, like she doesn’t want him to think we each only have a third of a brain, too.
“You’re telling me that since you were ten years old, you’ve only been allowed out of the house one-third of each day?” he asks me, incredulous.
“Nine,” I say, “but yeah.”
“It’s not really that we aren’t allowed out,” Ella says. “It’s just our system.”
Sean turns his body to face mine and there’s an intensity in his eyes that I haven’t seen before. “This is what you meant when you said your mom is strict?” he asks quietly, but doesn’t wait for me to answer. “I mean, this is more than strict. This is… Lizzie, do you realize how messed up it is?”
I’m quiet a few seconds; it’s possible that the others are holding their breath. Then, “I think you get used to things,” I say. “I think you just go with your reality.” I sigh before adding, “But I know how strange it must seem to you.”
I’m about to tell him that it’s strange to me now, too, when he runs his hands through his hair and stands up.
“I’m going to go get some air, okay?”
“Okay,” I say, unsure whether that means he’s going to open a window or flee the scene. But when he jogs down the stairs and goes out the front door, I get my answer.
“That went well,” Ella mutters after he’s gone.
“Shh,” Betsey snaps at her. She nods in my direction, knowing I’m on edge. Probably feeling it. “He’ll be back.”
At first, I think Betsey’s right. But then a half hour passes, and someone turns on the TV for background noise. The cell phone buzzes and my heart leaps out of my chest; I can’t hide my disappointment when I discover that it’s just one of the cheerleaders checking to see why I’m not at practice.
“I should skip work, in case one of them happens to go to the restaurant after practice,” Betsey says.
“If you want to,” I mutter before glancing at the clock for what must be the hundredth time.
Bet leaves to call in sick, and Ella drapes a blanket over her lap and turns up the volume. She’s really watching now: It’s not just background anymore.
My insides rage with nervousness: I need Sean to call me.
Two hours after he leaves, the others force me into the kitchen for sustenance. We opt for a cocktail party–style dinner: crackers with cream cheese and jalapeño peppers, microwaved chicken skewers, carrot sticks with ranch, and cut-up fruit. My eyes are tearing up from putting too many jalapeño slices on my last cracker when there’s a knock on the door so faint that I barely hear it.
“What was that?” I ask.
“The door?” Bet says.
“I’ll get it,” Ella offers. But I shove her aside and run down the hall and across the entryway. Just before I open the door, I realize that Sean’s shoes are still here, where he kicked them off.
“Where have you been?” I ask when we’re face-to-face.
“Out here,” he says. “Getting some air.”
“For two hours?” I ask. “I thought you left.”
“No,” he says,
“I just needed to think. You weren’t kidding when you said the normal part of my day was over. I think the normal part of my life is over.”
“Want to come back in?” I ask. “Or are you just here for your shoes?”
“Actually, I’m here for you,” he says quietly. “But I’ll take my shoes, too.”
I inhale salty air and gently brush my hair out of my mouth as Sean and I drive, windows down, away from my house. It’s a warm day, but it’s nearly October so there’s a little bite to it; I’d like to roll up the windows, but I guess Sean’s need for air continues. I keep looking at him, trying to mentally yank his thoughts out of his brain with the help of my eyeballs.
“I have a million questions,” he says finally. I exhale, relieved.
“I have a million answers,” I say. “Go for it.”
“Okay,” he says, turning a corner and turning down the radio. Then, noticing me shiver, he apologizes and rolls up the windows. “Was Ella in creative writing this year? At first?” He glances at me and I smile.
“Good eye,” I say. “I failed a trig quiz and Mom made us switch. My first day was the day I fainted.”
“I thought so,” he says. “You were so much cooler after that day.” He pauses, then adds, “I mean, not that Ella’s not cool.”
“No, it’s okay,” I say. “I get it. Thank you.”
“Sure,” he says. “So my next question is: Why didn’t your mom just move to another country when you were babies? Why’d she stay in the U.S.?”
“She’s not some international spy or something,” I say, laughing. “She probably just wanted to stay in the country she knew. I think she really thought hiding us in plain sight would work.”
“I see,” he says, pulling onto the freeway. He thinks for a second. “Okay, what about your system: Why do you split each day in thirds instead of just doing every third day?”
“We tried that once; it didn’t work,” I say. “It was too hard to keep up on classes if we were only in them every third day. And South had block scheduling, so that made it really hard. This works better.”
Sean pauses before firing off another question. “So, what’s it like?” he asks finally. “Looking exactly like two other people?”