Broken Hearts, Fences and Other Things to Mend (39 page)

opened my eyes and pushed myself up to a sitting position, I

could see that it was almost totally dark outside. The ocean was

rough and choppy, and the trees were swaying in the wind. The

second thing I heard was my phone, which was ringing away on

the bedside table.

I reached for it, then stopped when I saw Hallie’s name— and

the picture of her I’d taken as she posed next to the fake

phonebooth— lighting up the screen. I wasn’t sure I was awake

enough to handle Hallie and keep my cover stories straight. The

phone stopped ringing and I sat back against the pillows, re-

lieved. I would call her later that afternoon, when I’d had some

coffee and could think about what I was going to say to her, how

I would explain the sudden appearance of my friend Gemma

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Tucker.

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I had just had this comforting thought when the phone

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started ringing again. It was Hallie again, and I knew she would

think something was off if I kept ignoring her calls. My heart

thumping, I answered the phone.

“Hi, Hallie,” I said, clearing my throat after hearing how

scratchy my voice sounded.

“Sophie, hi,” Hallie said. “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

“No, it’s fi ne,” I said, pulling the phone away from my ear and

squinting at the time. It was almost eleven in the morning, so it

wasn’t like Hallie was calling at the crack of dawn or anything.

“What’s up?”

Hallie sighed, and said, “I just wanted to . . . apologize about

last night. I’m sorry the party kind of fell apart at the end.”

“No, it’s fi ne,” I said quickly, closing my eyes for a second.

Hallie’s voice sounded tired and thick, like she’d been crying, and

most likely because of me. Again.

“I know this is a little bit of a strange situation,” she said. “I

don’t know how much . . . what exactly Gemma has told you.”

I paused before replying. The way Hallie had pronounced my

name was awful. She’d practically spat it out. “We, um,” I said,

not really sure how much to admit I knew, “went into things a

little bit last night.”

“Well, I’m just so sorry to put you in the middle of all this,”

Hallie said, sounding sadder than ever. I was about to tell her

that
I
was the sorry one, but before I could, Hallie took a breath,

sounding like she was psyching herself up for something. “But

that’s not exactly why I called. Is Gemma there? Do you think I

could speak with her?”

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“Oh,” I said, my mind racing. “You know, I don’t think that

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would be such a good idea. She’s still sleeping. In fact,” I said,

getting a sudden inspiration, “I think she’s actually heading

back to Connecticut, like, this afternoon, so—”

“Hey!” There was a pounding on my door and I jumped. It

swung open, and Sophie, her hair up in a face- washing topknot

that also somehow managed to look chic, stuck her head in my

room. “Are we going to get breakfast? I’m starving.”

I was giving her all the
stop talking for god’s sake now
ges-

tures that I knew, but Sophie obviously didn’t have her contacts

in yet, as she just squinted at me. I knew I probably just looked

like a gesticulating blob. “What?” she asked loudly, and I in-

wardly groaned.

“Was that her?” Hallie asked, her voice quiet, and I knew I

couldn’t really tell her that I’d had another friend magically show

up on my doorstep in the last twelve hours.

“Yeah,” I said. “Um . . . hold on a second.” I pressed the mute

button and scrambled out of bed. “It’s Hallie,” I whispered to So-

phie, even though I knew Hallie couldn’t hear me, and that I

could just talk at a normal volume. “She wants to talk to you.”

“Me?” Sophie asked, looking panicked.

“Well, she wants to talk to
me
.” I mouthed this last word, as if

Hallie would be able to hear it. “But she thinks you’re me. So . . .”

Sophie backed out of my room and down the hall, and I fol-

lowed. “What am I supposed to say?” she asked. “What does she

even want?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think the longer we keep her on

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hold, the more she’s going to think something strange is going

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on.”

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Sophie looked down at my phone for a long moment, then

took a breath and nodded. “Okay,” she said, gesturing for me to

give her the phone. “Is she going to yell at me?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said, with much more confi dence than I

felt. “It didn’t sound like it.”

Sophie nodded and unmuted the phone and I leaned against

the wall, realizing that we’d stopped to have this conversation

right in front of the framed
Nightmare of the Zombguana
poster.

I turned away slightly from it, as the bright colors and tepid praise

from bought- off critics— not to mention the zombie- iguanas—

were really not helping at the moment.

“Hello?” Sophie asked, her eyes on me. “This is . . . Gemma.” I

tried not to wince when she said my name. It was, I knew, how

I must have sounded when I called myself Sophie the fi rst few

times— completely unnatural. Sophie listened for a moment, then

shook her head. “No, I’m not leaving,” she said, shooting a ques-

tioning look at me a moment too late, and I realized Hallie must

have asked her about what I’d said “Gemma” was planning to do—

head back to Connecticut today. She listened for a long moment

while I bit my fi ngernails, straining to hear and wishing I’d told

Sophie to put the phone on speaker. “Okay,” Sophie said. There

was another long pause, and she nodded. “Sounds good. See you

then.” She ended the call and gave the phone back to me.

“That’s it?” I asked, shocked that the conversation had been

so brief, not to mention so free of yelling.

“Yeah,” Sophie said, sounding a little shocked herself. “She

wants to meet for coffee at noon. So we can talk things out. It

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didn’t really sound like she was that mad, Gem.”

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“So you’re having coffee with her in . . .” I checked my phone.

“An hour.” I was starting to get a fi erce headache, and felt that

the sooner I got caffeine, the better for all involved. “And you’re

going to go there pretending to be me.”

“Should I not have said yes?” she asked, biting her lip. “I

mean, I thought it would be weird to say no. I was worried that it

might make things even worse.”

I nodded; I couldn’t argue with that. “Okay,” I said. “Well . . .

maybe this will be fi ne. We can see what she thinks about me,

right?”

“Right,” Sophie said. I could hear my best friend using the

same voice I currently was— a cheerful tone on top of growing

panic.

“It’ll be fi ne,” I said.

“Right! Fine!” Sophie echoed, even though it was clear nei-

ther one of us believed this.

Just then, there was a huge crash of thunder from outside

that rattled the panes of the windows— which
really
didn’t seem

like a good sign.

“Come on,” I said, giving up on all attempts at forced opti-

mism. “We should get ready.”

O O O

“Okay,” I said as I turned the car into a spot across the street

from Quonset Coffee and cut the engine. The wipers stopped

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and the windshield was instantly engulfed in rain. The weather

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had not improved, and in fact had gotten worse as the morning

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had gone on. I had found a giant golf umbrella in the garage,

which we had needed just to cross the driveway to the car— and

even then, we got drenched. “So . . . are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah,” Sophie said, fl ipping down the visor mirror and fl uff-

ing up her hair. “I just want to get it over with.”

“I hear that,” I said. I was hoping that this would be fi ne, that

I wasn’t sending my best friend into the lion’s jaws.

But I just wasn’t sure what Hallie wanted out of this. Her re-

quest for a meeting with her former adversary was the last thing

I expected. I couldn’t make any sense of it, and it was with an

increasing sense of alarm that I was sending Sophie in my place.

I was also wishing that Ford hadn’t made me watch the God-

father movies with him quite so many times.

Sophie fl ipped the mirror back up. “Is she really going to

think I’m you?” she asked. “I mean, what if I’m in there and she

starts talking about how she knows I’m an imposter? And then

she throws her coffee at me or something?”

“She won’t,” I said, trying to sound as sure of this as possible,

despite the fact I’d been worried about something very similar

on the drive over. “And of course she’s not going to say you’re an

imposter. She believes I’m you, so why wouldn’t she believe you’re

me?”

Sophie bit her lip and nodded. “Okay,” she said. She pulled out

her phone. “Sure you want to do this?”

I nodded and took out my own. On the drive, we’d devised a

plan so that I could listen in to the conversation. I would call her

and she would just leave the connection open, with her phone in

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her purse, which would be as close to the table as possible. This

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way, if things got tricky— if Hallie asked Sophie about something

that I would have known— I could text her the answer.

“Here we go,” I said. I called her, and Sophie answered, then

stuck the phone in her purse. “It’ll be fi ne,” I said, trying to sound

much more sure of this than I felt.

“
Mercedem non sine periculo,
” she said. “It’s the Clarence Hall

motto,” she explained. “I picked it up when I was dating Justin.”

“And Jason,” I reminded her.

Sophie waved this away. “Anyway, it means ‘no reward with-

out risk.’ Appropriate, right?”

I nodded and forced myself to smile. “Thank you for doing

this,” I said. Sophie gave me a smile back, but I knew her well

enough to see that she was really ner vous.

“Here I go,” she said, squaring her shoulders. Then she looked

out at the rain and sighed. “Ugh.”

“Take the umbrella!” I said, starting to reach into the back-

seat. “It’s pouring.”

“No,” Sophie said, “I’m just going to run for it.” She took a

deep breath, then got out of the car and darted across the street.

I had just lifted the phone to my ear when the passenger door

opened and Sophie was back in the car again, half- drenched and

dripping.

“You want the umbrella after all,” I said knowingly. Sophie

just shook her head, and I felt my heart leap. “She wasn’t there?”

I asked hopefully. “We got stood up?”

“I haven’t gone in yet,” Sophie said, talking fast and brushing

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droplets of water from her face. “It just hit me. Clarence Hall!

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That’s where I know that Reid guy from. He was Justin’s room-

mate.” She frowned. “Or Jason’s. I can’t remember. But I
knew
I

knew him from somewhere!” she said triumphantly.

“But . . .” I said, now worrying about more than this coffee

date. “If you remember him, that means he might remember

you, right?”

“Oh,” Sophie said, her face falling. “Right.”

“And he’d remember you as Sophie Curtis. Not as Gemma

Tucker.” I let out a breath as the ramifi cations of this became clear.

Reid was staying with Hallie and Josh, and at any moment he

might remember how he knew Sophie, including her name—

which would make everything I’d built this summer come crash-

ing down around me.

“So . . . what now?” Sophie asked. “Do I still have to get coffee

with her?”

“I think so,” I said. “And I’ll . . . come up with something in

the meantime.”

“Okay,” Sophie said, though she sounded very unconvinced.

She looked outside, shuddered, then headed into the deluge once

more. When I saw she’d made it across the street and gone inside

Quonset Coffee, I lifted the phone to my ear.

“Hello,” I heard Sophie saying. Even though her voice was

muffl ed though the bag, I could tell that she was ner vous. “It’s

me, Gemma. I mean, hi.”

Hallie said something in response, and I pressed the phone to