SEEING STEVE WAS amazing. He looked just like he always did—a little taller than us, with a short Afro and a dimple in one cheek. But he was definitely acting weird. He practically dragged Cassie and me into some overpriced tourist café. We grabbed seats in the back and told the waitress we only wanted sodas. She seemed a little annoyed, but the place wasn’t crowded, so she shrugged and hurried off.
“Okay, spill,” Cassie ordered as soon as we were alone. “Who’s following you, James Bond, Junior?”
Steve stuck out his tongue at her. “I’m serious. Listen, I should start at the beginning.”
“Okay,” I said. “By the way, did our mom show up at your house today, by any chance?”
Steve held up his hand. “Enough with the grilling, twin dorks,” he said. “Just let me tell the story, okay? Because I think you’re really going to want to hear it.”
I shot my sister an amused look. Typical Steve! Just because he was a year older, he’d always tried to boss us around. But with two against one, it didn’t usually work.
Cassie didn’t meet my eye. She was leaning across the table, staring at Steve. “Okay, so tell it already,” she said. “We’re listening.”
Just then the waitress bustled back over. She plunked down three sodas, sloshing half of them onto the table. “Thanks,” I said, but the waitress was already racing off again.
Good. Because I was really curious now.
“Okay,” Steve said. “So it started the other day—”
“When?” Cassie broke in.
“I dunno.” Steve shrugged. “Monday, I think? Anyway, I was fixing myself a snack after school when someone rang the doorbell. I answered, and it was some skeevy-looking dude.”
“What do you mean, skeevy?” I asked.
He shrugged again. “I mean, he looked normal enough at first. Just some white guy in jeans and a dark sweatshirt. But he seemed twitchy, sort of shifty looking, you know?”
“Okay,” Cassie said.
“So he said he was looking for D. Waters.” Steve shot us each a meaningful look. “D. Waters? Get it?”
I blinked. “But there’s no D. Waters at your house,” I said. “Just C. Waters-Wiley—Aunt Cheryl, that is—and then you and Uncle Charles. Both Wileys.”
“There’s a D. Waters at our house, though.” Cassie shot me a duh-catch-up-already look. “Mom. D. Waters—Deidre Waters.”
“Right. But I wasn’t really thinking about that at the time,” Steve said. “Because this guy said he had something very important to give to D. Waters, and that he’d been assured by his . . .” He paused, squinting at his soda glass. “Uh, I think he called it his ‘esteemed photographer friend’ or something like that? Anyway, he said he’d been assured by someone that there would be a big reward if he delivered this important thing.”
“What thing?” Cassie was starting to look confused.
I knew how she felt. “And why was he looking for Mom at your house?”
Steve sipped his drink. “I didn’t see what the thing was at first. He had it in his pocket, I guessed—at least, he kept sticking his hand in there. Anyway, around then, my mom heard us talking and came out to see what was up.”
“Did she know the guy?” I asked.
“No. He said the same thing to her as he’d said to me, and then mentioned that he’d already been to ‘the place over on Refugio Street.’”
I gasped. “That’s our old address!”
“Exactly.” Steve nodded. “I guess when he didn’t find Aunt Deidre there, he searched for the name Waters and found my mom.”
I nodded. Aunt Cheryl had hyphenated her last name, and Waters came first. “So did you guys tell him she’d moved away?”
“Yeah, my mom explained the whole deal. And he practically freaked out.” Steve played with his straw. “He started blabbing about how he didn’t have time to go all the way out to Aura, and that someone was already on to him—”
“On to him?” Cassie blinked. “What’s that mean?”
“You got me,” Steve said. “Anyway, my mom was obviously pretty suspicious of the whole deal. She tried to send him away, but he kept insisting he had to hand over whatever it was to her, since she was D. Waters’s sister. Finally, he actually pulled the thing out.”
“So what was it?” Cassie asked.
Steve shrugged. “Just some cheap souvenir key ring,” he said. “Shaped like the British flag, all chipped up and old looking. Totally random, right? Only when Mom got a look at it, she flipped out. She grabbed the thing, threw some money at the guy, and rushed upstairs and locked herself in her room.”
I did my best to take that in. Aunt Cheryl was more laid-back than Mom, but almost as sensible. No way would she fall for some con man’s trick to get money out of her.
Cassie looked perplexed, too. “Wait,” she said. “There must have been more to it. It was really just a key ring?”
“Yeah, and a note.” Steve fiddled with his straw again. “It had your old address on it, and something about a reward—I didn’t get a good look. Oh! And I think there were some words scratched on the back of the key ring—the guy pointed that out to Mom. But I didn’t see what it said.”
My sister and I traded a look. “You said this happened this past Monday, right?” Cassie said slowly.
I gasped as my twintuition told me what she was thinking about—that phone call from Aunt Cheryl on Monday afternoon. “So that’s why she was calling,” I exclaimed. “She was telling Mom about the key ring.”
“But why was she so freaked out?” Cassie wrapped both hands around her soda glass. “Could it have to do with, um . . .” Her voice trailed off and she stared at me.
“What?” Steve looked from her to me and back again. “Hey, what aren’t you guys telling me? Spill!”
“It’s nothing,” Cass said quickly. “We just, um . . .”
“Eh, eh, eh!” Steve waggled his finger in our faces. “You know I can read you guys like a book. What’s going on?”
“It’s about our dad,” I blurted out. “We think he might still be alive!”
Steve sat back. “What? But he died, like, a million years ago.”
“More like ten and a half,” Cassie corrected. “But yeah, we thought so, too. Only our grandmother just showed up—”
“Maw Maw Jean?” Steve said.
“No—our other grandmother.” I bit my lip. “Our dad’s mom.”
“She’s British,” Cassie added.
“Oh, right. That’s where they met, right? In England?” Steve said. “Mom told me he was a local civilian who worked on the military base where she was stationed, or something like that.”
“Yeah, something like that.” I felt a little weirded out all of a sudden. Until very recently, our mom had refused to tell us anything about our dad at all. Just that he’d been white, and they’d met when she was stationed in England. Now it sounded as if Steve had known more than us all along. At least a little.
“So she just showed up and said he was alive?” Steve prompted.
I kicked at the metal leg of the table. “Sort of . . .”
Once again, Cassie and I exchanged a long look. We’d grown up with Steve, and he knew everything about us. Except for one pretty major new thing.
Up until now, we hadn’t told anyone about the Sight—at least not anyone who hadn’t already known about it. In other words, Grandmother Lockwood and Mom.
Steve was watching us through narrowed eyes. “You guys are terrible at keeping secrets,” he said. “So whatever you’re making moony eyes at each other about, you might as well just tell me. Because you know I’ll get it out of you sooner or later.”
“He’s right,” Cass told me. “Anyway, we can trust him.”
She had a point. Steve hadn’t told anyone about the time Cassie had snuck out to go to a concert last year. Or about my big crush on the handyman who’d painted our apartment. This secret was bigger than those, but I knew he wouldn’t give it away. But would he believe us? That was a whole separate question.
“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “It’s a good thing you’re already sitting down, because you’re not going to believe this . . .”
Taking turns, Cassie and I told him about the Sight. The basics, anyway. Our weird, confusing visions. The day we’d realized we were both having them, and that they were showing us the future. And finally, Grandmother Lockwood’s explanation about how one person in every generation of our family inherited the same special power. Only with us, it had turned out to be two people—twins.
Steve didn’t say anything while we talked, mostly just sipped his soda and tapped his fingers on the table. When we finished, he looked kind of confused.
“This is a joke, right?” he said. “I mean, seriously—my twin-dork cousins don’t really have superpowers. No way.”
“Want to bet?” Cassie shot me a look, then reached over and grabbed his hand. Then she frowned. “Hmm. Nothing.”
“What are you doing?” Steve yanked his hand away. “Seriously, what’s the punch line, guys?”
I guessed that Cass had hoped to prove what we were saying with a vision about Steve. The trouble is, the Sight doesn’t work that way. The visions come whenever they come. We’ve got no control over them.
Still, I figured it was worth a shot . . . Reaching over the table, I grabbed Steve by the wrist. Then I gasped as the vision hit me . . .
My cousin faded away, replaced by a brighter, sharper Steve . . .
By the time Steve jerked his arm away, I was smiling. “What?” Cassie demanded. “Did you have one?”
“Uh-huh.” I took a deep breath, doing my best to banish the spacey feeling leftover from the vision. Then I raised my eyebrows at Steve. “Do you have a dentist appointment coming up soon?”
“Next week—why?” Steve looked startled.
“Because I saw you in the chair.” I smirked. “Looking terrified while the dentist was pointing at your X-ray.”
“Uh-oh, someone’s got a cavity!” Cassie teased.
Steve scowled at us. “Shut up. You’re just messing with me, right?”
“Nope. But hey, it looks like you switched from Dr. Chan’s office,” I said. “Your dentist now is an older guy with a mustache, right?”
Steve looked startled. “How did you—wait. Are you guys for real about this?”
“For real, for real,” I assured him, while Cassie nodded.
He pushed his soda away. “You didn’t just ask my mom who my dentist is now or something? Just as a joke, or whatever?”
“Why would we do that?” Cassie rolled her eyes. “Talk about a lame joke.”
Just then my phone pinged. It was a text from Liam wondering where I was. “Oops,” I said. “Look, we don’t have a ton of time. And we need to talk about this key chain thing.”
I quickly texted Liam back, saying I was in the bathroom and would find him and Bianca soon. Meanwhile Cassie was asking Steve to tell us again exactly what had happened on Monday afternoon, every detail.
“So do you know what that key ring could be?” he finished. “Why did my mom freak out about it?”
“I’m not sure.” Cass drummed on the table with her fingernails. “But Mom met our dad in England, right? Could the British flag have something to do with that?”
“I wonder what it says on the back.” I tucked my phone in my pocket. “I wish you’d gotten a better look.”
“I can try to find it,” Steve offered.
“Thanks,” Cassie said. “But Mom snuck away from the group while we were touring the Alamo earlier. She told one of the other chaperones she had to take care of some family business.”
“I bet she’s over at Aunt Cheryl’s right now,” I finished. “Actually, I’m sure of it—because I already saw her there.”
“Huh?” Steve blinked at me. “What do you mean? You were at my house?”
“Keep up, genius,” Cassie told him. “She saw it in a vision.”
“Really?” He sat up straight. “What do you mean?”
I filled him in on the vision I’d had of Mom and Aunt Cheryl staring at something—that flag key ring, I realized now—in Aunt Cheryl’s hallway. Steve looked impressed.
“Whoa, so this Sight thing is pretty crazy!” he exclaimed.
“Tell us about it,” Cassie said.
“Okay. But this makes it easier, right?” Steve shrugged. “Aunt Deidre might still be at my house now. So, I’ll just go home and ask her what’s up.”
Cassie and I traded a look. “Have you met our mother?” Cass exclaimed. “Because if she doesn’t want to tell you, you know she’s not going to tell you.”
I nodded. “And based on how she’s been acting about all this, I’m guessing she’s not going to tell you. Or us.” I sighed. “So what should we do?”
Just then a snippet of a Sakiko Star song rang out from Cassie’s purse. She grabbed her phone and checked it.
“Uh-oh, that’s Megan,” she said. “She wants to know where I am. With, like, four question marks at the end.”
A glance at the clock on the café wall showed that we’d been away from our friends for quite a while. “We should probably get back before they get suspicious,” I said. “But I really want to keep talking about this!”
“Yeah.” Cassie stared at Steve. “But hey, maybe we can tell our friends the truth—at least part of it.”
“What do you mean?” Steve sucked up the last of his soda.
“We can tell them we snuck off to meet you,” Cassie explained, pointing to Steve. “I mean, you’re our cousin, and we’re practically right in your neighborhood. Makes sense, right?”
“Sure,” Steve agreed. “Then I can hang with you guys, and maybe we can find time to talk more.”
I smiled. “Sounds like a plan. Now come on, let’s get back to Viral Vinyl.”
It was only a five-minute walk to the record store. We practiced our alibi on the way.
Megan was waiting at the door, her face paler than usual. “Oh, thank goodness!” she blurted out. “Is Lav with you?”
“Lav?” Cassie echoed. “No, Cait and I just slipped out to meet up with our cousin. This is Steve, he lives right down the—”
Abby and Emily appeared behind her, looking frantic. “Did you find them?” Abby cried.
“The twins are here,” Megan shouted. “But they haven’t seen Lav either!”
“Oh, man,” Emily moaned. “This is what I was afraid of when I saw her with that guy . . .”
“Wait.” I held up both hands. “Slow down, people. What guy? What’s going on?”
Megan took a deep breath. “Ems saw Lav flirting with a cute guy earlier.”
“Really cute, and just Lav’s type,” Abby confirmed. “I saw him, too. He looked around eighteen, maybe? Dark hair, really well dressed.”
“Okay.” So far, I wasn’t seeing the problem here. I didn’t spend much time with Lavender, but even I knew that she flirted with anything in pants.
“Yeah,” Emily went on. “I saw them heading for the exit twenty minutes ago.”
Megan nodded grimly. “And nobody has seen Lavender since.”