Your brother’s jeer feels like a spear thrust to your feeble heart. Of course you’d want to score with Lucy. You had a crush on her back in your sophomore year, and now that she’s closer, you feel you could have a chance.
Not that you want to admit it to your little brother. "So what if I am trying to score with her?" you retort.
"Well, at least you got good taste," Robert sarcastically replies. "You think you got a chance with her against, y’know, that Taylor guy?"
If there’s something that you hate about your brother, it's that he can be right in the most unexpected way. Taylor’s an unbeatable rival: athletic, good-looking, supportive, friendly ...
The last word lingers in your mind. You’ve grown close to Taylor these few days. Is it fair to snatch his girl from under his clutches, when he’s been nothing but supportive to you? Besides, Lucy has been quite the bitch every time you’re close; even this one moment where she was nice to you was only because you helped Taylor, not because of you.
Yet, you can’t fight the idea that she could change her mind if you just found her a way to get her life back.
You know, like you did with Taylor.
You emerge out of your thought bubble to see your brother looking at you closely. "I’unno if I have a chance," you mutter back at him. Fortunately, you’ve arrived at your home and quickly change subject. "Anyways, no word of this to Dad, you hear?"
"Sure," he jeers. "Just like I didn’t told him anything about your boyfriend!" He jumps out of the truck before you could even react.
Inside, your dad glances up at you and Robert over the top of his newspaper. "What are the two of you doing together?" he asks.
His question, and the edge of suspicion in his voice, gives you a chill. "Any reason we shouldn't be?" you stammer. When he only raises an eyebrow, you add, "I saw Robert on my way home and gave him a ride."
"Yeah, we didn't want to be late," your brother says. With a grunt, your dad returns to his reading.
Dinner has a very different dynamic; rather than fixating on your father, you are more worried about Robert. You even finish your meal almost at the same time as he does, and you do the dishes together; you notice your mother’s warm smile of satisfaction as she watches you working.
But upstairs, afterwards, you both revert to form. Robert follows you to your room and leans in your doorway with his arms crossed. You feel yourself bristling. "You need something?" you ask.
"An answer to my question," he smirks.
"What question?"
His smirk deepens. "You think you got a chance with Lucy against that Taylor guy?"
You leap for him, and he scampers off into his own room. You slam the door on the empty hallway, your face flushed.
But all evening long you're preoccupied with his question. Would Lucy be at least a little bit nicer if I tried helping her the way I helped Taylor? Would she be interested in me if I did? Would it fair to Taylor? With those questions swirling in your head, it's not until bedtime that you struggle through the last of your homework.
--
Tuesday morning. You wake up tired, confused and with a sense of dread and disgust that you can’t seem to explain. Breakfast doesn't help, and you ask your parents for a mild painkiller before paying a visit to the old school basement. Taylor's already there, dressed out as Scott, and you help him and Lucy move everything out of the basement. The sight of them together rattles you, and you spend the rest of the day in a daze. The only moment you were driven away from your distraction is when you receive your score for the time capsule assignment: a score straight between B+ and A-, as Walberg acknowledged it was a brilliant, if senseless, idea that made him laugh. You briefly wondered how a walrus would laugh before falling back into the funk you woke with.
When school lets out you roam around the city in your truck as you try to clear your thoughts. Neither Lucy nor Taylor will be at the hideout, but you suspect your brother will be looking for you there, and you don't want to see him. You briefly consider stopping at Top S(h)elf, to see if Mike and Carlos still could offer you a spot on their You Tube channel, and you even change direction to drive out there. But this takes you by the college campus, and it occurs to you as you pass it that Lucy's duplicate is probably somewhere on campus. And that gives you a wild idea: Why not try to find her, spy on her, see if you can figure out a way to kidnap her?
You pull into a small parking lot long enough to get out your phone and do an online search. The fake Lucy is connected to Professor Blackwell, so you search the college's website for his office location, then drive off to find a visitors' lot. By good fortune, one is directly across the street from the Humanities building, where Blackwell has his office.
And on your way in, you slow up when you pass a truck that looks a lot like the one that Scott Bickelmeir drives. Has Taylor had the same idea as you?
So your nerves are vibrating as you mount the stairs to the Anthropology Department is housed; not only might you run into the professor, but you might run into Taylor and have to explain yourself. But your luck holds again as you round a corner and spot Lucy's twin at a junction down the hallway. You dive back and peek around to watch as she studies her cell phone in the middle of the hallway. After a minute of reading and tapping a message into it, she moves off away from you. You hurry after, and pause only long enough to confirm that she was standing in front of Professor Blackwell's office door.
You follow her down and out of the Humanities building, keeping well behind in case she glances back, and you have a long and satisfying time to study the confident sway in her walk. She holds her head up and her shoulders back; her pose and gait put you in mind of a prize racehorse stepping proudly around the track for the enjoyment of the crowd. You've not seen the real girl show that kind of poise down in the school basement, but you've talked to her enough to know that the doppelganger is executing a perfect mimicry of the proud Lucy Vredenburg.
She leads you into the university library, and for a panicked few minutes you lose her in the maze of the stacks. When you find her again, she is sitting at a desk facing the windows, where she reads a book while tapping notes of some kind into her cell phone. You find a book and a desk of your own, and watch her.
--
An hour passes, and between your own stifled yawns you notice that she is yawning as well. She is slower to turn the pages of the book, and she lays her phone aside. Finally, she closes the book, lays her arms across it, and puts her head down.
You wait and watch and wait some more, hardly daring to move, watching to see if and when she will stir. With something halfway between courage and a reckless lack of caution, you lever yourself out of your chair and creep over to where she rests. She is breathing heavily, and when you peek around you see that her eyes are closed and her lips slightly parted.
Do doppelgangers sleep? Do doppelgangers dream? you wonder.
There's no time to call Taylor and tell him where to find you, or to ask what you should do. Either you go for it now, or you retreat. And if Taylor yells at you—
It's the thought of Taylor getting pissy at you that decides you. Fuck that and fuck him if doesn't trust you not to mess things up. The magic words are already forming on your lips as you reach around to place your fingers across Lucy's brow in the manner that you saw Taylor himself do. With a claw-like grip, you pull at the girl's face.
Too late you wonder, What if it's not a mask, but some other kind of magic? Also, too late, you wonder, What if it is a mask, and the fat professor is under it?
But when next you are aware of yourself and of where you're standing, you have a mask in your trembling hand, and beneath you, in Lucy's clothes, is ... What? Where Lucy's head and hair had lain, now there's a featureless lump of stone, laying atop other stones where her arms had been.
No— When you step back to examine the thing further, you see that it's one solid mass of whitish rock filling out her clothes. It's like removing the mask has caused the doppelganger to petrify while losing all its shape and features.
Your knees almost buckle with relief when you realize that you've won. You've disarmed Lucy's duplicate!
Now all you have to do, it comes to you in a rush, is call Taylor, tell him what you've done, and get him out here so the two of you can transport the thing out to where you can study it.
But as you are fumbling out your phone you get another idea. The mask you pulled off the thing will have Lucy's memories in it. What if you take it for yourself for a little while, and use it to delve into her mind, to figure out how she thinks? Why, inside her mask, with her book bag and clothes, you could even pass yourself off as her.
You could even disguise yourself as the doppelganger and become a double agent working against Blackwell.
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