Duplicity (18 page)

“I'm so sorry, Mrs. Eriks, it's all my fault. Brandon's been really tired and he wasn't paying attention to our homework assignment, so I said a couple things I thought would be funny, but he took them out of context, and that Jason kid, he can be a real jerk sometimes,
he
took it out of context, too, and said something nasty and Brandon … Brandon hit him.”

“Oh,” Mom says. “It wasn't over drugs, then?”

I'd be holding my breath if I could. Emma blinks. “Drugs?”

Mom gazes at her phone and begins typing. “It's just a matter of time, really. Lord knows he's never used his money for anything useful.”

“But I don't think he'd—”

“He's either in his room wasting away his life on those violent video games or out inking himself up with his fake ID. I imagine drugs aren't too far behind, the way he dresses.” She looks up. “You look responsible. Are you two using protection?”

I'm not sure if it's the groan that escapes my mouth or the traumatized look on Emma's face that makes Seb snicker.

Emma stammers, “It's not … we aren't … we wouldn't—”

Mom waves her off. “Neither here nor there. I suppose I should get him help soon, someone who can work out whatever's wrong with his head.”

Emma just stares. I want to tell her,
welcome to my life
.

“If it wasn't the fight at school,” Mom says, “it would be something else. I figure he must have run into some major trouble since he's cleaned up and started helping around the house. I know it won't last, of course, but it
has
been nice—”

“Are you hearing yourself?” Emma says, and for a second I think she's going to apologize, until her eyes narrow. “How can you talk about him like that? Brandon's smart, he's never been mixed up in drugs and how he dresses has no relation to any of it! Have you ever sat down with him to talk about why he doesn't do his homework or why he skips class? I bet he'd tell you, if you took more than five minutes out of your day for him. I can't decide what's worse, that you don't bother to know who your son really is or that you don't care if he
is
hurting himself!”

Mom's fingers have frozen over her screen. I'm resisting a very strong urge to break through whatever it takes to get to Emma and kiss her until I can't breathe. Seb whistles somewhere in the background, impressed.

Mom, of course, is not.

“How dare you talk to me like that in my own house. Who are you again?”

Emma shakes her head and laughs, sadly. “Emma,” she says. She pushes back in her chair. Mom winces at the screech it makes against the marble floor. “I'll let myself out.”

“That would be wise,” Mom snaps, diverting her attention again to her screen. Emma leaves the picture and I hear the front door open as Mom adds, “Oh, and Emma,
darling
?” She gets this crazy smile on her face that I never want to see again. “Don't make the mistake of thinking you know my son, either. I knew he'd reached too high when he brought you home, but I didn't realize how good a liar he was. Do yourself a favor. Find yourself a nice boy, and stay away from Brandon.”

*   *   *

Mom's last sentence is like a bullet between my eyes.

I don't care that after Emma leaves, Mom drops her phone on the table and puts her head in her hands. Like she's hurting. Like anything Emma said to her made a dent.

All I can think is how I
want
her to hurt. How I'm not even surprised she'd crucify me like that. Emma won't listen, she
can't
listen, but Mom's good at planting those little needles in people and Emma will ask …

She'll ask Obran about the drugs.

(It was just a little weed in Boston. I stopped. I
stopped
.)

I can't concentrate enough to keep the mirror open. The room goes black.

“Brans?” Seb asks, so quiet, so gentle, but it still makes me jump.

“Obran's probably upstairs,” I say.

“Brans, if you don't want to do this today, I understand.”

I'm numb. I don't care. I'm already thinking of my room, of the mirror by the foot of the bed and the angle that takes on my closet and dressers. The mirror's narrow, so I have to move to see everything, and the shadow version of it shifts around me until I spy Obran at my desk on the other side.

“The hell did he do to my room?” I say.

It's not just that he's cleaned—drawers back in place, clothes hung neat in the closet, glass shards swept off the floor—it's that he's dehumanized my walls. Replaced my rock idols and pinups with school posters for Colorado School of Mines, MIT, Villanova. A few music posters remain, but they're dressed in cowboy hats or suits.

Country singers. There are country singers on my walls.

“I think I'm in love,” Seb says, fixated on preppy Obran, who's typing away on my laptop in a red polo and jeans, hair spiked like some boy band star. “You clean up nice. Unlike you, I'm a sucker for blonds.”

“I am
not
blond! It's brown. Maybe light brown. Who cares? And what did I tell you about the
L
word?”

“I bet he says the
L
word.”

“Look, we need to—”

A knock to the left. Obran lifts his head. Mom lets herself in and I feel a flare of anger before I remind myself I don't care.

“Hi, honey,” she says.

Honey. Like she calls me that all the time. Obran smiles, but I can tell it's my fake one.

“Are you feeling all right?” Mom asks.

“Yeah. Why?”

“You look tired.”

“I'm good, Mom. Some tests are coming up, been studying a lot.”

He goes back to typing. Mom fidgets, glances at her phone, and clears her throat. “Your father and I were thinking … well, we'd like to take you to dinner.”

Dinner?

“I've got a test to study for tonight,” Obran says. “How about tomorrow?”

Mom winces like he's thrown something at her, then forces a smile. “Okay. We'll make that work. Where would you … what do you like to eat?”

“I could go for Italian. Johnny Carino's?”

“It's a date.” Mom stands there a moment longer, then backs out and has almost closed the door when her face pokes around the side. “Thank you, by the way, for cleaning Dad's office today. I've been trying to get to it for a week and a half.” The door closes. Swings back open. “Oh, and Brandon?”

Obran turns, unsmiling.

“If you'd like, you may invite Amy to come with us.”

“Emma?”

“Yes, I'm sorry. Emma. I owe her … I owe her somewhat of an apology.”

“Okay.”

The room wavers because I'm losing it. That woman is not my mother. She's never admitted to being wrong, she's never apologized, she's never taken me to dinner. I've tried behaving. They ignored me more that month than ever before. What could they possibly like better about Obran?

Maybe I
do
belong here.

“Why?” I say.

“Why what?” Seb asks.

“Why does he get to go to dinner?”

I'm thinking not even Seb can answer that mystery when he says, “Not that it's any of my business, but have you ever done something for your mom without being asked?”

“That shouldn't matter. It's cleaning, it's just stuff. Stuff piled in places it's not supposed to be. If you put it away, someone pulls it back out. It doesn't mean anything.”

Seb's quiet a minute. “There's definitely something wrong with your mom,” he says, “and this is a guess, really. But I think she appreciates that you're—I mean, he's—doing things for her she doesn't have time to do.”

I whirl to glare at him, but he's in the code layer, out of sight. I glare at the mirror instead.

“Why should I?” I say. “They'd never do that for me. Won't even do things I ask for.”

“Um, it's funny to say, considering they're your parents … but sometimes if you want things to change,
you
have to set the example.”

“Thanks, Gandhi. Can we just focus on getting out, please?”

Seb shuts up. I push all that crap down and let it simmer in my chest and use it for fuel. Press into that dream state where nothing's real. Where nothing can hurt me. The liquid blue silhouettes dissolve into numbers and commands, darting like miniature trains around the edges of the shadow furniture.

I will take back my life.

I will fix it without Obran's help.

The shadow form of my dresser stands two feet away, its edges lined with blue and green sevens. I think of the angel figurine, of how I normally don't have to touch anything at my workstation to make it do anything, and I imagine the dresser sliding over to block the door. It obeys. I grin, and a voice in my head asks if I'd like to connect to the target.

I almost lose the room again saying yes.

“Yesss, Brans,” Seb says. “Whatever you're doing, keep going.”

We've cracked it. Get on the mirror server, picture the room in reverse. If your double's on the other side, you can connect to him. Of course. That's what Obran had to do any time he changed me, and now it's my turn … my turn to change him.

I have arms again. And legs. My body updates to match Obran's current appearance, everything from his preppy hair to that awful polo. I grab what I know is a pen off the desk, even though to me it's a line of fives and eights. The pen disappears from the real world. Like when Obran vanished my piercings.

I feel like a monster and it feels good.

Obran jerks his head at the sound of the pen. He stares at the desk where it used to be, wide-eyed, then slowly turns his head to the mirror.

“Ooh, Kathy, I found something,” Seb says, somewhere overhead. “‘Target in range.' Wonder what this does.”

It must open the visual connection between the mirror server and the real world, because Obran's face contorts and his gaze snaps to the pen in my hand. He overturns his chair in his rush to get up and promptly falls, yelping, when I dig the pen into my arm and start drawing. I designed both my tattoos, but it doesn't seem to matter that I have no clue how to put them on myself. My memory re-creates them in detailed perfection, shading and correcting the lines.

“See how you like it, jerk,” I grumble, finishing the tail of the smallest scorpion.

“Ooh, I don't like this,” Seb says, sounding distant. “He'll report to JENA, he might've already, and she can take control of him whenever she wants—”

“Then block him, Seb. You've got control of the connections.”

“Oh, right.”

Obran gasps and stumbles toward the mirror. I hope replacing tattoos is as painful as having them ripped off, or even better—as having your muscles ground to sloppy joe consistency by zombie dogs. I finish the claws of a large scorpion on my forearm and start another. Blood trickles off Obran's arm.

“
You
,” Obran says through gritted teeth, bracing himself on the bed frame. “JENA will delete you for this!”

I laugh. “She has to catch me first.”

“I found something interesting,” Seb says, singsong. Obran's eyes flutter. He loses his grip on the bed and collapses to the floor. I stop doodling.

“What did you just do to him?” I ask.

“I found a log file with recent commands sent to your double. At the same time every night, 'round nine or ten o'clock, JENA sends out that command. I'd say it puts you to sleeps.”

I finish the scorpions and toss the pen aside.

Seb materializes near me, arms crossed. “It can't be that hard to make the actual switch. It's just a command, like everything else.” His eyes dart to my left. “Where are you? I couldn't detect you in the code layer, but I can hear you. And obviously you're not visible, so…”

“You can't see me?”

It looks like I can reach out and touch him. He disappears again.

“Nopes,” he says. “You're making me nervous, Bran Bran, and I freak out when I get nervous.”

“Seb, I'm in the code layer. I think. That is, everything looks like numbers but I'm in Obran's—I mean, my real world body. I'm actually not sure … how to get back.” I try to picture the room made of shadows instead of numbered lights, but that's like trying to find the image in a stereogram after your eyes have unfocused. Now that I've seen it in this view, I can't remember what it looked like before.

“Must be automatic when it's your double on the other side of the mirror,” Seb says, not sounding entirely convinced.

“I can't pull up any logs,” I say. “Wait…”

A blue light blinks in the corner of the mirror screen, one I hadn't noticed until Obran passed out. I reach for it. Five blank boxes appear in front of me.

ACCESS CODE,
reads the text above the boxes.

“Got something,” I say.

“I still can't see you,” Seb says.

“It's asking me for a password.” I trace an “F” in the first box and an “I” in the second. “Fifty” would fit, but I don't want to get locked out trying the wrong word, so erase them with my palm. “Is there a log file for swap passwords? Should be five letters long.”

“I'm looking,” Seb says.

A bright yellow light flashes through the room like a bomb. The boxes stay, but the flash happens again, and the mirror flickers. Like someone's trying to get in.

“I think we're running out of time,” I say.

“Try 384GF.”

I trace the letters in. They flash red, then disappear. “Nope.”

“4EN46?”

Another flash of red. Seb calls out a few more numbers, but I'm thinking about the encryption key I have to use every day when I code for JENA, the one that converts numbers to letters. My ID, “Fifty,” encrypted would be—