"Uh, My. Freaking. God.' I was vaguely aware the voice was mine, but everything else had faded away. The only thing in my universe just then was this girl, who had obviously been cloned from my DNA. Obvious-but impossible.
Racey quickly looked at me, then at the other me, and she literally gasped. "Holy Mother" she breathed.
The other me looked like someone had just put a binding spell on her-frozen in place, eyes open wide, muscles stiff. Then I noticed one difference between us.
"Your face is green," I said, just as her eyelids fluttered and she started to collapse.
Racey and I caught her, and Ms. DiLiberti hustled out from behind the counter and led us into the assistant principals office. Someone got a wet paper towel. I fanned the new girls face with a copy of the student handbook.
Almost immediately, she opened her eyes and sat up, though she was still kind of whitish green around the edges.
I hadn't taken my eyes off her. So that's what I would look like with layered hair, I thought, realizing I felt stunned and not enjoying the experience. My heart was beating hard, and a million thoughts pushed insistently at my brain, I didn't want to let them in.
"Who are you?" I asked. "Where are you from? Why are you here?"
She drank some water that Ms. DiLiberti brought her and pushed her hair off her face. "I'm Thais Allard," she said, sounding almost exactly like me but more Yankee-ish.Tm from Connecticut, My dad died this summer, and my new guardian lives here, so I moved here."
Her dad died. Who was he? I wanted to shout. Had that been my dad too? Had we been separated at birth and Thais adopted by strangers? Or maybe I-was Nan my nan? She had to be. But she'd never, ever mentioned that I might have a sister. And this girl, even if she was from the planet Xoron, had to be my sister. We were just too freakishly identical, down to our matching birthmarks. The birthmark that I'd alternately loved and hated, the one Andre had traced, had kissed just yesterday-was on her face.
"Who was your dad?" I said. "Who's your new guardian?"
Thais wavered and looked like she was about to turn on the faucets. Outside the office, we heard other students coming and going,
"I'm going to be late for homeroom," she said faintly, and I thought, Sacree mere, she's a weenie.
"Your teachers will understand," Ms, DiLiberti said firmly.
"My dad was Michel Allard," the girl said. I'd never heard of him. "My new guardian is some weird friend of his." She shrugged, frowning.
It was all too much to take in, I felt a little weak-kneed myself, but unlike The Fainter, I sagged gracefully into a chair.
The girl-Thais-seemed to be coming back to life. "Do you have parents?" I saw the sudden eagerness on her face, and it was only then that I realized that Nan had to be her grandmother too. I would have to share Nan.
I'm a successful only child. I mean, I'm successful at being an only child. I bit my lip and said, "I live with my grandmother. My parents are dead." Our parents were dead.' When is your birthday?" I asked brusquely.
"November twenty-second." Now her eyes were examining me, her strength coming back. Diesse, was she even a witch? Well, of course, she had to be-but did she grow up being a witch? How could she not?
I frowned. Tm November twenty-first" I looked up at Racey to find her staring at me, like, what the hell is going on? Such a good question. One that I intended to ask Nan as soon as possible. I thought- Nan was probably not home now. She was a midwife, a nurse-practitioner at a local clinic. She had irregular hours, but she'd been getting ready to leave when I was walking out the door this morning.
"Where were you born?" Thais asked me.
"Here, New Orleans " I said." Weren't you?"
Thais frowned."No-I was born in Boston."
Racey raised her eyebrows. "That must have been a neat trick."
The first-period bell rang. I couldn't remember a time when I'd felt less like going to class, which in my case was saying something. All I wanted to do was go home and confront Nan, ask her why a stranger had shown up at my school in my town with my face. I'd just have to wait till she got back tonight.
"Well, this is certainly a mystery," said Ms. DiLiberti, standing up. "You two obviously have some figuring out to do. But right now I'm going to write you passes for your teachers, and you're going to get to your first-period classes"
I consulted my class schedule. "I have American history."
Thais looked at hers. She still seemed shaken and pale, which made her birthmark stand out like red ink on her cheek. "I have senior English."
"You girls get going," said Ms. DiLiberti briskly, handing us pink slips, "You too, Racey. And I can't wait to hear how this all plays out."
"Me neither," I muttered, gathering my stuff.
"Me neither," said Thais, sounding like an instant replay of me,
"Me neither," said Racey, and Thais looked at her, seeming to notice her for the first time. Tm Racey Copeland," she told Thais.
“I don't know who I am," Thais said in a small voice, and suddenly I kind of felt sorry for her. And for me. For both of us.
"Were going to find out" I said.
Nan didn't come home until almost six o'clock. When she works late, I'm in charge of dinner, which we call emergency dinners, because cooking is yet another domestic art I'm not strong at.
Tonight's emergency dinner was a frozen pizza and a salad. I ripped up a head of lettuce and got a tomato from the garden in back. Ta da.
From the moment I'd walked in the door, I'd been wound as tight as a window shade. My shoulders literally ached. This afternoon I'd planned to see Andre-I'd finally been going to go to his apartment, and who knew what would happen? But now all I could think about was the fact that my double was walking around New Orleans, looking like me, sounding like me, yet not being me. I mean, it wasn't her fault, obviously, but I felt like a Versace bag that had suddenly seen a vinyl imitation being sold on a street corner.
So I just paced around the house, my jaw aching from being clenched, missing Andre and wanting to run to him and have him make me forget all about this and instead counting the minutes until my grandmother got home.
Finally I felt her pushing open the front gate. I didn't go meet her but waited while she turned her key in the lock and came in. She looked tired, but when she saw my face, she straightened up, very alert.
"What is it? she said. "What's happened?"
And that was when Clio Martin, stoic queen, non-crier in public, non-crier in general, burst into tears and fell on her shoulder.
Nan was so startled it took a moment for her to put her arms around me.
I pulled back and looked at her. ”I’m a twin!' I cried. "I have an identical twin!"
To say I'd managed to take Nan by surprise was a gross understatement. I had absolutely floored her, and believe me, Nan did not floor easily. She'd always seemed like she'd seen everything, that nothing could rock her or make her upset. Even in second grade, when I'd slipped on a watermelon seed and split my head open on our neighbors cement porch, Nan had simply filled a dish towel with ice, told me to hold it in place, and driven me to the hospital.
But this, this had really managed to stun her. Her face turned white, her eyes were dark and huge in her face, and she actually staggered back. "What?" she said weakly.
Okay, now-most people, if they went home and told their grandmother they were a twin, the grandmother would laugh and say, "Oh, you are not."
So this was not good.
Nan wobbled backward and I stuck a chair under her just in time. She grabbed my hands and held them and said, "Clio, what are you talking about?"
I sat down in another chair, still sobbing. "There's another me at school! This morning they called me to the office, and there was me, standing there, but with a haircut! Nan, I mean, we're identical1. We're exactly alike except she's a Yankee, and she even has my exact same birthmark! I mean, what the hell is going on?" My last words ended in a totally un-Clio-like shriek.
Nan looked like she'd seen a ghost, only I bet if she saw a real ghost, it wouldn't faze her. She swallowed, still speechless.
Something was so, so wrong with this picture. I felt like the two of us were sitting there, waiting for a hurricane to hit our house, to yank it right off its foundation, to sweep us up with it. I quit crying and just gaped at her, thinking, Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. She knew.
" Nan — "I said, and then stopped.
She seemed to come back to herself then, shaking her head and focusing on me. A tiny bit of color leached back into her face, but she still looked pretty whacked. "Clio," she said, in this old, old voice. "She had your same birthmark?"
I nodded and touched my cheekbone. "Hers is on the other side. It's exactly like mine. Nan — tell me!"
"What's her name?" Nans voice was thin and strained, barely more than a whisper.
"Thais Allard," I said, "She said her dad had just died, and now she lives here with a friend of her dad's. She used to live in Connecticut. She says she was born in Boston but the day after me."
Nan put her fingers to her lips, I saw her soundlessly form the name Thais. "Michel is deads!" she asked sadly, as if from far away.
"You knew him?
Was that-he wasn't my real dad, was he? Wasn't he just someone who adopted Thais?" I felt like my sanity was about to rip in half. " Nan, explain this to me.Now"
At last, her eyes sparked with recognition. She looked at me with her familiar, sharp gaze, and I could recognize her again.
"Yes," she said, her voice firmer, "Yes, of course, chen I'll explain. I'll explain everything. But first-first there are some things I must do, very quickly,"
While I sat with my jaw hanging open like a large-mouth bass, she sprang to her feet with her usual energy. She hurried into our workroom, and I heard the cupboard open, I sat there, unable to move, to process anything except a series of cataclysmic thoughts: I had a sister, a twin sister. I'd had a father, maybe, until this summer. I'd have to share Nan. Nan had been lying to me my whole life.
Over and over, those thoughts burned a pattern into my brain.
Numbly I watched Nan come out, dressed in a black silk robe, the one she wore for serious work or when it was her turn to lead our covens monthly circle. She held her wand, a slim length of cypress no thicker than my pinkie, She didn't look at me but quickly centered herself and started chanting in old French, only a few words of which I recognized. Her first coven, Balefire, had always worked in a land of language all their own, she'd told me-a mixture of old French, Latin, and one of the African dialects brought here during the dark days of slavery.
She went outside, and I felt her circling our house, our yard. She came onto the porch and stood before our front door. She came back inside and moved through each room, tracing each window with a crystal, singing softly in a language that had been passed down by our family for hundreds of years.
Every now and then I caught a word, but even before then it had sunk in what she was doing.
She was weaving layer after layer of spells all around our house, our yard, around us, around our lives.
Spells of protection and ward-evil.