Replica (18 page)

GEMMA MUST HAVE BEEN THE only overweight sixteen-year-old girl in the entire history of the United States who actually
wished
she could participate in gym. It would be one thing if she were excused to go to study hall or free period. But due to “scheduling limitations” (the stated reason)—or, as Gemma suspected, the innate sadism of Ms. Vicke, the vice principal—instead Gemma was forced to go to gym and sit in the bleachers, pretending to work, while the rest of her classmates zigzagged across the gym, their sneakers squeaking, or flew across the mulchy, wet soccer fields, running drills.

In the bleachers, there was nowhere to hide. She might as well be a blinking
Does Not Belong
sign. Even worse: Mrs. Coralee, the gym teacher (also a sadist—the school was full of them), insisted that Gemma change into the puckered nylon shorts and matching tank tops the whole
class was forced to wear, which on Gemma only served to further underscore how little she belonged—like wearing full-on ski gear to the beach.

“You are so lucky.” April Ruiz, Gemma's best friend, swiped a lock of dark hair out of her eyes, as the girls filed back into the locker room. “I'm pretty sure dodgeball was invented by the same people who thought up rectal thermometers and wool tights.”

“Move it, Frankenstein.” Chloe DeWitt jabbed an elbow, hard, in the space where Gemma's waist should have been, if she
had
a waist instead of a roll of flab. Gemma probably had forty pounds on Chloe, but the girl was all sharp corners and she knew how to use them to her advantage. Her elbows felt like whittled blades. “Not
all
of us get to spend the whole period snacking.”

Gemma blushed. She had never, ever eaten in class. She had hardly ever eaten in the cafeteria, precisely so that Chloe, and girls like her, would never get the opportunity to make fun of her for it. But it didn't matter. From the time Gemma was little, Chloe had made it her mission to ensure that Gemma never forgot that she was a freak. In third grade, she'd hit on the name Frankenstein, after Gemma's second heart surgery had left her with a thick scar from her chest to her navel. After that, Gemma had never changed except in a bathroom stall—but no one at school besides April and her teachers
ever called her anything else.

What Gemma couldn't understand was why—if she were so delicate, like her parents were saying (
you're delicate, Gemma, that's why we have to be so careful; no roller coasters, Gemma, your heart is delicate
)—she couldn't
look
delicate, like one of the small crystal animal figurines that her mom collected and kept enclosed in the corner cabinet, with legs as thin as toothpicks. Like Chloe, with a tan that appeared permanently shellacked to the contours of her body, as finely chiseled and well-tuned as an instrument. Like she had been formed by a god with an eye for detail, whereas Gemma had been slapped together haphazardly by a drunk.

“Yeah,” she muttered, as Chloe and her friends converged on the sinks, laughing. “Lucky.”

“Don't let Cruella get to you,” April said in a low voice. April always took Gemma's side. Years ago, they had decided that either they were two aliens in a school of humans or possibly
the only two humans in a school of aliens
. “Someone forgot to shoot her with her morning dose of tranquilizer.”

April and Gemma waited until Chloe and the pack of wolves—a fitting nickname for more than metaphoric reasons, since Gemma was fairly sure that Aubrey Connelly had had her incisors filed into points, and wouldn't have been surprised at all to learn that she liked the taste
of human flesh—had changed before they stripped. They would both be late for study hall and would have to endure another lecture from Mr. Rotem. But anything was better than changing with the pack of wolves.

“Good news,” April said, when the rest of the locker room had cleared out. “Mom finally caved on the Green Giant. I told her it wasn't
safe
to drive sixty miles in that beast, much less six
hundred
. How's that for strategy? I used her own psychology against her.”

“And so the hunted becomes the hunter,” Gemma said, in her best movie-announcer voice. Sometimes she thought her favorite part of the week was sitting on the wooden bench just outside the shower stalls, which hadn't been used in twenty years, talking with April while she washed her face and reapplied her makeup painstakingly, even though the result always made it look like she wasn't wearing any. Like they were in their own protected world. But not a world her parents had made for her. A world she'd
chosen
.

“Something like that. Anyway, we'll be cruising down to Florida in our very own Lexus. Can you believe it? My brother's
so
pissed.”

Apart from Gemma's, April's parents were the most protective people Gemma knew. Neither Gemma nor April was allowed to date—not that it mattered, since nobody wanted to date them. The list of other things they
weren't allowed to do included, but was not limited to: (1) stay up past ten o'clock; (2) attend any school events or dances unless they were in a large group of females only, which precluded them from going, since they had no other friends; (3) go to Raleigh unless April's brother, a senior, chaperoned; (4) be on Instagram
.

Gemma was sure that even if she were five-eleven and a supermodel look-alike, her parents' absurd beliefs about social media (
It rots the brain! It's bad for self-esteem!)
would have ensured she stayed on the bottom of the social food chain. She was also sure that when her mom and April's got together, all they did was brainstorm elaborate and ever more absurd ways to make sure that both April and Gemma stayed safe, friendless except for each other, and totally miserable.

When half the junior girls decided to spend spring break in Miami, Gemma hadn't even bothered petitioning her parents to be allowed to go. She knew she had just about as much chance of being named the first female president of the United States . . . at age sixteen. Besides, she had no desire to spend her vacation bumping into the same predators she spent all her time deliberately avoiding at school.

But April—who was not only prettier, smarter, and far more optimistic than Gemma, so much so that had they not been absolute, sworn lifelong best friends, co-aliens,
outcasts together, Gemma would have despised her—hadn't given in so easily. She'd begged her parents. She'd cried. She had thrown a tantrum—a risky proposition, since her mother, Angela Ruiz, a renowned prosecutor for the state, had been known to frighten grown men into confessions at their first meeting. (And her
other
mother, Diana, was a computer programmer who had won several kickboxing competitions in her early twenties.)

Then the miraculous had happened. April hit on the magic word:
sexism
.

It was
sexism
, April claimed, that her older brother, Ryan, got to go on spring break with his friends. It was
sexism
that he got to drive a Lexus while she was stuck with the Green Giant, an ancient chartreuse station wagon. And even though Ryan was two years older, and the Lexus had been a congratulations gift for getting into Harvard early action, suddenly April's moms had generated a counteroffer: April and Gemma could take the car and drive down to Bowling Springs, Florida, for a week, where April's grandparents lived.

Even better, they had convinced Gemma's parents that it was a good idea.

And, yeah, sure, maybe hanging out in a community known for its 65+ dating scene and competitive weekly badminton tournament wasn't exactly the spring break of every girl's dream. But it was better than nothing. They
could stay for a whole nine days, paddle around the pool, walk down to the community tennis courts, and take their car to the beach. They could drink virgin piña coladas and sample fried gator at the local restaurants. Still better, they would have the house to themselves for three full days while April's grandparents were off attending some weird Positive Visualization Health Retreat that involved a lot of yoga and deep breathing—a minor detail Gemma had managed to avoid in all of her conversations with her parents.

Discussing spring break plans with her best friend made Gemma feel all-American, beauty-magazine, country-song normal. So much so that she wasn't sure she actually wanted to
go
, just so she could keep talking about it.

April had to hop, haul, and wiggle to get into her jeans. Her preferred fit, she always said, was
human sushi roll
. Gemma's was
airy trash bag
. “I'll pick you up Saturday at eight a.m., got it?”

“Got it,” Gemma said. They'd agreed on Saturday, March 19, eight a.m. weeks ago, but reconfirmed almost every day. Why not? This was the first adventurous thing either of them had ever done in their lives, unless you counted microwaving Peeps at Easter to watch them explode.

Gemma wished she only felt excited. She wished,
more than anything, that her parents' words and warnings hadn't over time worked their way like a virus into her cells, replicating there.

She wished she wasn't also just the littlest, tiniest bit scared.

But she told herself nothing would happen. After all, nothing ever did.

Turn the page to continue reading Gemma's story.
Click here
to read Chapter 2 of Lyra's story.

A LIST OF ALL THE medical conditions Gemma had had since she was born:

                 
1. two broken tibias

                 
2. one collapsed lung

                 
3. congenital heart failure

                 
4. pneumonia

                 
5. poison ivy (on her butt, of all places)

                 
6. pneumonia again

                 
7. a fractured wrist

                 
8. hypothyroidism

                 
9. pneumonia, a third time

A list of some of the medical conditions she had not had:

                 
1. the bubonic plague

                 
2. that disease where you stay really skinny, no matter how much you eat

Every so often, when Gemma approached the massive iron gates that encircled her property, she got a flash of something—not memory, exactly, but something close to it, like the sudden recollection of a song you heard someone sing only once. There was a high fence lost somewhere in the wild tangle of fever-dreams that had so often been hers as a very young child—a high fence, a giant statue of a man kneeling in the dirt, reaching, it seemed, simultaneously for heaven and hell.

The driveway was exactly one-quarter of a mile long. Gemma knew because one time she had asked her mom to measure it in the car. It bisected an enormous lawn spotted with ancient spruce trees and flowering dogwood. On days when April had chorus, taking the bus and walking the quarter mile up the driveway was infinitely preferable to having her dad's driver pick her up, which would require that she wait at the student drop-off area, in full view of the senior playing fields, and would be a tacit admission that she had only one friend to drive her.

Besides, it was practically the only exercise Gemma got. On nice days she walked deliberately slowly, making it last, enjoying the smell of freesia and honeysuckle and
listening to the faint whine of the mosquitoes clustered in the shade.

Today, she walked quickly, too preoccupied by the plans for Saturday (
the day after tomorrow!
)
—a ten-hour road trip, a real adventure, with her best friend—to care about the prettiness of the day. Because of the landscaping and the angle of the drive, she was practically on the front porch before she noticed two cop cars, one of which had its doors swinging open, as if the officers had been in too much of a hurry to bother closing them. Her mother was speaking to one of them, holding her throat with one hand.

Dad,
Gemma thought immediately, and, without realizing it, broke into a run, her backpack jogging against her back.

“Gemma!” Kristina turned to stare as Gemma arrived in front of her, already panting, sweat gathering beneath the waistband of her jeans and trickling down her spine. She reached out and seized Gemma's shoulders. “What's the matter? Is everything okay?”

Gemma stared. “What do you mean,
is everything okay
?” She gestured to the cop cars, and the cop who stood a little ways apart from mother and daughter, hands on his hips, sunglasses on, staring up at the sky as though debating whether he might still get a tan at this angle. “What's going on?”

“Oh.” Kristina exhaled long and loud, releasing Gemma's shoulder. “This? It's nothing. Something stupid. A prank.”

By then, Gemma had noticed that one of the large glass panes of the French doors was shattered, as if something heavy had been hurled through it. She could see a second cop moving through the living room, placing his weight delicately, his footsteps making a
crunch-crunch
sound on the glass. As she watched, a third cop emerged, a woman, holding what at first appeared to be a lumpy rock in an improbable shade of green between two gloved hands. But as she shifted it to show her colleague, Gemma's whole body went cold. It wasn't a rock, but a Halloween Frankenstein mask stapled at the neck. From the way the cop was handling it, Gemma knew it must be heavy. It had obviously been filled with something to help it maintain its shape.

“Oh my God.” Gemma could feel the blood pounding in her temples. Chloe. That fucking bitch. She focused on thinking logically so that she wouldn't start to cry. How had it happened? How had Chloe arrived so much quicker than the bus? Could she have cut last period? No. Gemma had seen her getting into Aubrey's car. And how had they gotten past the gates? The whole property was fenced in. But she was sure Chloe and Aubrey were to blame, would have staked her life on it.

Frankenstein.
The misshapen monster.

“It's all right, Gem. It's all
right
,” Kristina said, in a shrill voice, as if she didn't quite believe it. “No one was hurt.”

That only made Gemma feel worse.
No one was hurt
meant
someone
could
have been hurt
. What if her mom had been in the living room? Unlikely, of course. Even though the house—Château Ives, as April called it, only half-jokingly—could have fit an army during wartime, her mom never went anywhere except her bedroom, the kitchen, the downstairs yoga studio, and the bathroom, as if she were controlled by a centrifugal force that kept her rotating between those four places. But what if Ender and Bean, their cats, had been curled up on the sofa? What if Rufus had been sunning himself on the rug?

“If you want us to file a report, we'll need you down at the station,” said the cop with sunglasses, the one who looked bored. But he was doing his best to be polite. The Ives family, he'd obviously been told, was important.

Kristina shook her head. “I don't know,” she said. “If only Geoff . . .” She trailed off. “My husband is in a meeting,” she said, by way of explanation. Gemma's dad was always in a meeting, or in a car, or on a plane.

“How'd they get in?” Gemma blurted. The front gates could only be opened by a code. Guests had to be buzzed in. Château Ives meets Fort Knox.

Kristina blushed. Even when she blushed, she looked pretty. Gemma had tried for years to find herself in her mother's model-pretty face, in her high cheekbones and slender wrists. The most she could detect was a similar way of frowning. “There were vendors in and out for Sunday's horse show,” she explained, half to Gemma, half to the police. “Florists, the planner . . . I left the gates open so they wouldn't have to keep buzzing.”

Which no doubt meant:
I popped a Klonopin, had a glass of wine, and took a nap.
Since her parents never said exactly what they meant, Gemma had become adept at translating for them.

“Finke, look at this.” Yet another cop came jogging out of the front door. He, too, was wearing nylon gloves, and holding a note written on a scrap of paper between his pointer and middle fingers. “This came with the special delivery.”

The bored-looking cop flipped his sunglasses to the top of his head and read without reaching for it. The message was short, but Gemma felt the anger roil inside of her, pulling her heart down to her toes.

              
your sick your a monster you deserve to die

Kristina gasped as though she'd been physically slapped. Finke nodded, and the other cop withdrew, bagging the
note carefully in plastic. Gemma imagined seeing Chloe arrested, her hands wrenched behind her back, her face squashed against the top of a cop car. She imagined her thrown into jail for the rest of her life, bunking with a murderous boulder with a name like Princess.

She imagined wrapping her hands around Chloe's neck and watching it snap.

“I—I think I'd better come with you,” Kristina said. Now the blush was gone. She just looked pale, and confused. “Who would
do
something like this? Who would be so
awful
?”

“Have you or your husband been having any problems lately?” Finke asked. “Disputes? Legal issues?” Kristina shook her head.

“No other threatening messages, or phone calls?”

She again shook her head. “I just can't
imagine
—”

“Mom, wait.” Gemma felt the words like nausea.
It's my fault. It's because everyone thinks I'm a freak.
Her mom knew that Gemma had a rough time in school, but Kristina's sympathy always made Gemma feel worse. The only thing more painful than being unpopular was being the unpopular daughter of a former popular girl. She took a deep breath. “I know.”

“What?”

“I know who did it.” Now all the cops were watching her—pityingly, she thought. She felt her cheeks heating
up and was absolutely positive she did not look pretty like her mom. When Gemma blushed, she looked as if two pigments were trying to throttle each other beneath her skin. “It's just some stupid girl at school. She probably thought it'd be funny.”

Was it her imagination, or did her mom, just for the tiniest second, look relieved? “Oh, honey,” she said, and started to put her arms around Gemma. Gemma sidestepped her.

“It's fine,” she said. “I'm
fine
.”

“You still want to file the report?” Finke asked, but Gemma could tell he no longer thought it was a good idea. The whole vibe had changed. No one was looking at her. The cops were loading up, restless, eager to get back to more important things than some high school girl's social humiliation. Maybe they were annoyed they'd been dragged out here in the first place.

“It's up to you, sweet pea.” Kristina reached out and threaded her hand through Gemma's hair. “What do you think?”

Gemma shook her head. As tempting as it was to imagine Chloe in a prison-orange jumpsuit—surely, surely, even Chloe wouldn't look good in prison orange—she knew that if she made a big deal out of it, things would only get worse. Then she'd be Frankenstein-the-Crybaby. The Alien Snitch.

Still, she felt the sudden, overwhelming desire to scream. Chloe and her little pack of wolverines had been doing their best to make Gemma miserable for years. But they had never done anything this bad. They'd come to her house. They'd taken the time to fill a Halloween mask with rocks or concrete rubble or metal shrapnel from their mechanical hearts. They had said that she deserved to die. Why? What had she ever done to them?

She was an alien, adrift on an unfriendly planet. Hopeless and lost.

“Are you sure?” Kristina said, smoothing Gemma's face with a thumb. Gemma was scowling.

She took a step backward. “Positive,” she said.

“Okay.” Kristina exhaled a big breath and gave Finke a weak smile. “Sorry for all the trouble. You know how girls are.”

“Mm-hmm,” he said, in a tone that he made it clear he didn't and had no desire to, either.

Gemma felt like going straight to her room, possibly forever, but Kristina managed to get an arm around her shoulders. For a thin woman, she was surprisingly strong, and she held Gemma there in a death grip.

“I'm sorry, honey,” she said. “Why didn't you tell me you were having problems at school?”

She shrugged. “It's no big deal.”

Kristina smelled, as always, like rose water and very
expensive perfume. So expensive that it actually smelled like new-printed money. “I don't want your father to worry, do you?” She smiled, but Gemma read anxiety in her mother's eyes, decoded the words her mother would never say:
I don't want him to think you're more of a disappointment than he already does.
“Let's just tell him there was an accident. A kid and a baseball. Something like that.”

To hit a baseball from the street through the living room window, the kid would have to be a first-draft pick for the major leagues. Usually her parents' willingness to lie about things big and small bothered Gemma. If her parents were so good at making up stories, how could she ever be sure they were telling the truth?

Today, however, she could only be grateful.

“Baseball,” she said. “Sure.”

Gemma woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare that, thankfully, released her almost as soon as she opened her eyes, leaving only the vague impression of rough hands and the taste of metal. In the hall, Rufus was whimpering.

“What's the matter?” she said, easing out of bed to open the door for him. As soon as she did, she heard it: the sudden swell of overlapping voices, the angry punctuation of silence. Her parents were fighting.

“It's okay, boy,” she whispered to Rufus, threading a
hand through the scruff of fur on his neck. He was a baby about fights. Immediately, he darted past her and leapt onto the bed, burying his head in her heap of pillows, as if to block out the sound from downstairs.

She would have gone back to bed, but at exactly that moment, her father's voice crested, and she very clearly heard him say, “
Frankenstein.
For Christ's sake. Why didn't you tell me?”

Gemma eased out into the hall, grateful for the plush rug that absorbed the sound of her footsteps. Quickly, she moved past paneled squares of moonlight, past guest rooms always empty of guests and marble-tiled bathrooms no one ever used, until she reached the main staircase. Downstairs, a rectangle of light yawned across the hallway. Her father's study door was open, and Gemma got a shock. Her mother was perched on the leather ottoman, her face pale and exhausted-looking, her arms crossed at the waist to keep her bathrobe closed. Gemma had never, ever seen anyone besides her father in the study. She had always assumed no one else was allowed to enter.

“I tried calling. . . .” Her mother's voice was weak and a little bit slurred, as if all the edges were lopped off. It must be after midnight. He must have woken her up from a sleeping-pill slumber.