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  “You will regret that comment mightily when my brilliant artistic endeavors make me rich and famous,” he said calmly. “Or at least rich.” He twirled the pencil through his fingers and then quickly sketched a tongue-sticking-out face on my notebook.

  “Nobody gets rich off art,” I answered, snatching the notebook away from him. “Not until they’re dead.”

  “Wrong. My exhibit A is the entire company of Pixar, and my exhibit B is that guy who makes sculptures out of Legos, and I could name a bunch of other people who’ve turned artistic ability into mountains of cash. But you’re entitled to your factually incorrect opinion.” Jake yanked up the sleeve of the green and blue flannel he was wearing over a Transformers T-shirt and used a ballpoint pen to draw a sneaker-clad praying mantis on his arm. He then drew a thought bubble over the mantis and wrote “KATE SUCKS!” in it.

  I sighed deeply and closed my eyes. “Jake,” I said. “Can’t you just be nice to me? It would probably take less energy.”

  He cracked a hint of a smile. “I don’t know, I’m pretty energy-efficient.”

  “Please,” I said. “I’m having a rough day and you know it.”

  “Everyone who’s seen your busted-ass face knows it.”

  “Exactly. So be a pal, okay?” Mr. Piper had just dumped a cardboard box filled with random pieces of metal and what looked like the insides of a computer onto our lab table, and the prospect of actually building something out of it was freaking me out almost as much as the thought of going home to find Rina still there.

  Jake threw down his pen and waited a long beat. “I’ll consider it.”

  “That’s the best I’m gonna get from you today, huh?” I said wearily.

  “Today, yeah,” he answered, grinning at me. He picked a square of metal out of the cardboard box. “Do you care if I decorate the outside of our robot when we’re done?”

  “Oooh. Did you just admit you’re going to help me build it?”

  He paused slightly. “Yes.”

  “Oh my God, then yeah, go ahead, decorate it however the hell you want.”

  Jake got out a black Sharpie and promptly drew boobs on the piece of metal he was holding.

  Fantastic.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I DRUMMED MY FINGERS NERVOUSLY ON THE steering wheel as I waited for a red light to change on my way home from school. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to get home quickly, see that Rina wasn’t there, and be relieved that it was all a bad dream, or get home slowly in case she was there. Why couldn’t the weird thing in my life be a fairy godmother, or the sudden acquisition of magical powers? Either of those would be way more convenient.

  The light turned green just as my phone beeped with a text message. “Dammit,” I muttered, easing the car past a small patch of ice on the street. I waited until I got to the next red light, then dug in my bag for the phone. The text was from Paul and read, Where r u?

  Oops. Clearly not at basketball practice.

  The light turned green and I stepped on the gas, then hit the speakerphone button and called Paul back.

  “Hey, this is Paul. Leave a message, thanks.” Beep.

  “Hey!” I said, my voice way too high and squeaky. I cleared my throat. “Oh my God, I’m so, so sorry! I totally forgot, and I’m not giving you an excuse, because I don’t have one. I just forgot, and I’m sorry. I suck.” I couldn’t believe that basketball practice was something I had on both my physical and mental to-do lists, and I’d still screwed it up. “I’m the worst girlfriend in the world,” I continued, “and I promise I will make it up to you somehow. Promise promise promise pr—aah!” A car suddenly pulled in front of me from the other lane and I had to slam on the brakes. “Asshole!” I yelled toward the windshield, before aiming my voice back toward the phone, which had fallen somewhere near my feet. “Hi again,” I said loudly, hoping my voice carried down to the floor mat. “Sorry, this car just—anyway. Um. Sorry. Call me later.”

  My phone beeped again as I pulled into my driveway. It was another text from Paul: Its okay dont worry about it. love u.

  Yay, he wasn’t mad! Or at least not enough to pick a text fight. I sighed with relief and sent love u! as a reply.

  Then I looked at my front door.

  “Please let no one be in there,” I said out loud. Unless it’s Mom, I mentally added, but I knew it wouldn’t be—she generally works until at least nine-thirty. Besides, her car was gone.

  I unlocked the door and surveyed the front hall. Then I looked toward the kitchen and living room. Everything was empty and silent. I shrugged off my coat, hung it up, went up to my room, walked in the door, and—

  “Hi!” said Rina.

  Crap.

  “Hi,” I said wearily. I let my bag drop to the floor and winced when I realized that my laptop was in it. Luckily, it had fallen onto a pile of clothes. In fact, the entire floor was a pile of clothes. Every single item in my wardrobe had been liberated from hangers and drawers and strewn haphazardly around the room.

  “Rina,” I said, trying not to scream, “What did you do?”

  “I tried on clothes!” she said cheerfully. “Do you like my outfit?”

  She was wearing a red and black bikini top over a white racer-back tank, dusty blue cargo pants rolled up to the knee, green-and-gray argyle socks, and the strappy silver heels I’d worn to junior prom. Her hair was in pigtails and she was using a pair of my sunglasses as a headband.

  “Your clothes are awesome,” Rina said.

  “Um…thanks,” I said. “You look…” I didn’t bother finishing the sentence.

  Rina plopped down on my bed and waved the book she’d apparently been reading. There was an orange bookmark stuck about half an inch into it. “This is really good,” she said.

  “That’s a thesaurus,” I said.

  “I know, it’s really good!”

  “Oh my God, how dumb are you?” I’d figured out that being rude to Rina didn’t dampen her mood.

  “I’m not,” Rina answered cheerily. “I’m really smart, like you. I learned a lot of stuff today. Plus, there weren’t any books in my house, so my standards are low.”

  Her house. I went to my computer and turned it on. It booted up normally, which was a relief. Now all I had to do was uninstall SimuLife.

  “Whatcha doing?” Rina peered over my shoulder.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said, casually trying to block her view of the screen. If I somehow figured out how to get rid of the game, would it, like, kill her? I assumed it would just send her back into the game, but I didn’t want her thinking that I wished her any harm (even though I kind of did). “You don’t happen to know how you got here, do you?”

  “Nope! One second I was in my house—”

  “In the game. SimuLife.”

  “Yeah, in my house, and all of a sudden boom, I was here!” Rina took a running jump onto the bed, bouncing onto it and then off it onto the floor. She squealed a barely suppressed “Whee!” Christ.

  “Could you not do that in those heels?” I asked. “They were kind of expensive.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Rina said, unbuckling the silver sandals. She chucked them onto a pile of crumpled jeans. I glared at her and got up to put them back on the shoe shelf in the closet. Then I went back to my computer and clicked the SimuLife icon. The “Welcome to SimuLife!” window popped up again, although this time my computer didn’t freeze. Progress. Now that it was actually in front of me, I vaguely remembered playing it back in the day. Granted, it was for a few weeks, tops. There hadn’t seemed to be much of a point other than making an avatar of yourself and having it do random things. I went over to “options” and selected “uninstall.”

  A message popped up: “Please insert game disk.”

  I sighed deeply. Maybe I could just delete everything in my account. I clicked “sign in.”

  “Please insert game disk,” said the popup window again.

  I clicked on “cancel account.”

  “Please insert game disk” said
the popup window yet again.

  Of course I didn’t have the game disk. Of course it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  “So how was your day?” asked Rina, who was now sitting on the floor giving herself a pedicure with some of my nail polish. I walked over to my closet. It’s a fairly big walk-in and there are some built-in cubbies along the back wall, where I usually throw tech stuff I don’t need anymore—old cell phones, manuals, warranties, all that crap. I started digging around, wondering whether the old SimuLife disk was in there somewhere. I didn’t know whether uninstalling the program was the way to go, or whether some other solution would reveal itself if I could just sign into the game. Either way, I needed that disk.

  “My day,” I said, tossing aside some dusty USB cables, “was extremely stressful. Probably because I spent all of it worrying about what to do about you and how to get rid of you—” Whoops.

  “Get rid of me?” Rina sounded hurt.

  “Yeah, well…I mean, no, not get rid of you. But you know, how do we put you back in the game?” I asked. “That’s where you live. I’m sure you want to go back there, right?” I started sorting through a stack of random CDs. No SimuLife. I did find something marked “summer vacation sing-along mix,” which looked promising and which I flung onto my bed, but no SimuLife.

  “Not really.” Rina shrugged. She admired her newly painted toes. They were now a pale, shimmery peach color, and I was surprised she hadn’t picked one of the glittery fuchsias or bright greens in the polish collection. “All I do there is sit around the house. I write in my journal a lot, but there’s never much to write about. Out here is way better. By the way, I went downstairs and ate some cookies because I was hungry. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Oh my God, yeah,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t realize—of course, yes, eat whatever you want. Are you still hungry? Do you want something else?” Wait a minute, what was I doing? I was trying to get rid of her, not running a bed-and-breakfast.

  “No,” Rina said, indicating an empty package of Oreos in the corner.

  “Wow,” I said. “Hope you have a fast metabolism.”

  “I do if you do,” she answered cheerfully. “Oh! I almost forgot. Right before you got home someone called for you. Anne? I talked to her.”

  “What?!” I froze in the middle of shuffling through another stack of old CDs.

  “Yeah, she wanted to know if you could forward her a physics e-mail your teacher sent that she accidentally deleted, so I said sure—”

  “You pretended to be me? Are you crazy?”

  “No, it was fun! So I thought tomorrow, I could go out and—”

  “What? No! It’s bad enough you picked up the phone, which you can’t do anymore, by the way. And you definitely can’t leave the house.”

  “Why not?”

  “Rina. Think about it.”

  She thought—visibly. She actually looked like she was pondering a weighty dilemma. Then she looked totally bummed and I realized how I must’ve seemed to my friends all day.

  “It might be weird if people saw two of us?” she asked.

  “Yes! Thank you. And it would definitely be weird. I’m just glad you didn’t talk to Anne long enough for her to think something was up.” At least, I fervently hoped that was the case. Anne’s round, angelic face concealed a penchant for casually messing with my head. It’s generally a minor annoyance, and anyone who even noticed would’ve thought it was just teasing, but the last thing I needed was for Rina to provide her with more material. I opened a dusty cardboard box, fighting not to sneeze.

  “I could go out in disguise,” Rina offered. “I could dye my hair! What do you think we’d look like blond?” She looked at herself in the mirror on the inside of my closet door and started messing around with her hair, taking out the pigtails and putting it in different styles—a ponytail, a side ponytail, and a messy bun, before giving up and letting the waves hang loose.

  “Terrible,” I told her. “I tried it sophomore year and trust me, it doesn’t work; our hair is too dark for it to actually look good, and it’s not right for our skin tone.”

  Whoa, I’d just said “our hair” and “our skin tone” as if it were perfectly normal for someone else with my exact hair and skin tone to be sitting in the room with me. I shook my head and gave myself five minutes to finish looking for the disk. A giant, tangled pile of cords and cables later, I had searched my entire closet. Still no SimuLife. Of course.

  Fine, I’d buy a new one. Rina was now giving herself a rather messy manicure with the same color she’d used on her toes. I felt her pain; I can never paint my own nails without basically covering my entire fingertips with polish either. I took advantage of her silence to go back to the computer and google SimuLife. I scanned the results of the search. Online simulation game…never really got popular…discontinued three years ago. Okay, so much for going to the store and buying it. I trolled eBay. Nothing. I checked Craigslist. Nothing.

  “All right, look,” I said to Rina. She looked up. “The next couple weeks are really important to me. Like, really important. I’ve got finals, the SATs, my Yale visit and interview, and I still have to write my application essay, so…obviously you can stay here for now, but—”

  “Yay! Thank you!” She made a move like she was going to jump up and hug me, but then realized she had a nail polish brush in her hand that was about to drip onto the carpet. She hastily put the brush back in the bottle.

  “But,” I continued, “you’ve gotta lie low, okay? I mean, obviously we’re gonna have to do something about you eventually, but I just don’t have time to deal with it right now. So we’ll figure it out in a few weeks, okay?” I couldn’t believe I was letting a virtual stranger move into my bedroom with me, but I couldn’t think of another solution.

  “Okay!” Rina said enthusiastically, waving her hands around to dry her nails.

  A door opened downstairs. “Hello?” my mom called. Oh wow, she was home early.

  “Hey Mom!” I yelled down, and then hissed at Rina, “Go in the closet.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Shhh! She’s probably on her way upstairs, so—” We heard the stairs creak and I grabbed Rina by the elbow, shoved her into the closet, and closed the door.

  “Hey,” I said to my mom as she approached, amazing myself with how casual I sounded. I leaned back against the closet door, bracing my feet on the floor in case Rina did something stupid.

  “Hey,” she said, poking her head around the edge of my door frame. “I had a client dinner but she bailed because her kid got sick. Thank God, right? That she bailed, not the sick-kid thing.” She took off her glasses and stashed them in her purse. “So…dinner?” she asked. “You and me? Are you okay just ordering something?”

  “Aren’t I always?” I asked, smiling.

  “I raised my daughter right,” she said, smiling back and reaching up to rub her neck with one hand, then slowly rolling her shoulders in a circle. “Okay, I’ll tell you when it gets here. You go back to studying, or…cleaning. Good lord.” She looked around at the complete and utter disaster that was my room, and I suppressed the urge to yell, “It wasn’t me!”

  I waited a few minutes after she left, then stuck my head inside my closet. Rina was sitting cross-legged on the floor and opened her mouth to say something. I quickly made a “shhhh” gesture with my finger.

  “She wants me to come down for dinner. Just stay in here, okay?” I whispered. “You can use my computer or something but if you even hear one stair squeaking, you gotta go back in the closet.” Rina nodded.

  I closed the door on her, then went downstairs and plopped down on the living room couch, pondering whether “Mommy and Me: The Adventures of Two Single Ladies Who Both Suck at Cooking” would be a good essay idea. Hmm, maybe. I jotted it down on a Post-it, then opened my AP Euro book, psyched to be away from Rina for a bit. Worst-case scenario, she would just have to…what? She couldn’t move in permanently. I couldn’t kick her out in the street, or s
end her to a homeless shelter, or stick her in the state foster care system.

  I was gonna have to figure this out somehow.

  Just not right now.

  MORE THINGS TO DO

  Anything Paul asks

  Figure out how to get rid of clone

  Attempt not to go insaner

  Essay!!!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5

  THE NEXT MORNING IN THE MIDDLE OF EURO, Kyla leaned over and wrote, “Long lunch?” on my notebook. That’s Kyla-speak for ditching fifth period and going to the mall. I started to write back to her, but she flicked my pen aside and wrote, “Let me guess. No. Too much work.”

  I smiled ruefully and nodded. She rolled her eyes at me and wrote, “Sucks to be you!” I managed to scribble, “Thanks,” before we both got the feeling we were missing too much of the French Revolution lecture currently being spewed forth at the front of the room.

  Before lunch Kyla dangled her car keys in my face with her “one last chance!” look, but I waved her off as Anne walked up to me.

  “Hey, thanks for forwarding me that physics e-mail,” she said, fiddling with the end of her blond ponytail. “I can’t believe you were already home when I called yesterday. I figured I would just leave you a message.”

  I smiled and nodded at her, my fingers clenching slightly as I imagined strangling Rina. “Yeah, I was kinda speeding,” I said casually.

  “You sounded a little weird on the phone, though. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, I just had a bad headache yesterday,” I explained, willing myself not to panic. She doesn’t know anything. She couldn’t possibly know anything! She’s just making conversation. I shook my head when Anne asked if I was coming to lunch, not relishing the thought of sitting down at a table with her, even with a bunch of our other friends. Instead, I bypassed the cafeteria altogether and dragged Paul to the yearbook office with me.