Winnie’s double met her in the hall upstairs and silently led Winnie into her bedroom. Winnie was surprised to discover that the girl’s room wasn’t up in the attic like Winnie’s, but in the large, bright bedroom next to Father’s study on the second floor. It was the room that Brunhilde used back home. Did Brunhilde sleep in the attic in this world? Was there even a Brunhilde here?
Once the door was shut behind them, her double spoke.
“Well?” she asked. “What’s the plan?”
Winnie’s head throbbed dully. She didn’t feel good, but supposed it would be stranger if she did, considering all that had happened. She glanced around the room, trying to get her bearings. Her double’s room had no books. How could she sleep in a room with no books? Split-Winnie’s bed was unmade, and yesterday’s clothes were strewn on the floor, where they were a bit rumpled, but still in better shape than anything Winnie was wearing. Winnie glanced down at her dirty, wrinkled attire—she really did need to change.
When she looked back at her double, the girl was massaging her temple. Did she have a headache too?
“Scott says I need to be able to pass for you if I’m going to stay here,” Winnie told her double.
“Here? With me?” the girl said, raising her eyebrows. “Easy for Scott to say! I’m not going to try to hide you in my room like a puppy or something.”
Winnie recognized her own expression of incredulity, although she’d never seen it from the outside. There was an unexpected harshness to it. All those times Dora had begged her to be friendlier to their school acquaintances, to teachers who misspoke or just plain got things wrong, to stupid boys in soda shops, she’d thought her friend was just being pushy. But meeting herself, she had to wonder.
“No, I just meant here, in this world,” Winnie said, trying not to sound irritated. “I was actually thinking I could stay with Dora. If . . . well, she is your friend here, right?”
“She is.”
“Okay, good.”
Split-Winnie just stared at her.
And was this what it was like to talk to her? She had never suspected her reserve was so . . . chilly.
“So,” Winnie continued, “can I borrow some clothing?”
“Oh—yes, of course.”
The girl opened her closet, and Winnie saw that her double had easily three times the clothes she did, all of them as fine as could be. Her double took a pine-green cardigan with delicate pearl buttons off the hanger, passed it to Winnie, then searched for something to match, finally pairing it with a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and a sharp plaid skirt.
“Thank you.”
“I can cut your hair too,” her double said. Then she regarded Winnie’s face critically, with much the same focus and intensity Winnie imagined she herself showed when examining a broken-down piece of laboratory equipment. “And I’ll need to make up your face, obviously.”
Obviously.
Winnie tried not to let her annoyance show.
She took off her dirt-smudged shirt and skirt and caught her double giving her a sly once-over. The girl’s curiosity wasn’t exactly welcome, but it was certainly understandable. Winnie found herself wondering what “her” body might look like, not caught in the mirror or glimpsed up close in parts—a glance down at her knee as she lifted her leg to put on stockings, a peek at her elbow to look at a bug bite—but in full view, right there in front of her.
How odd that a person could live in a body for sixteen years, and still not fully know what it looked like!
Her double startled her by putting a gentle finger to the jagged scar on Winnie’s upper arm then.
“I’ve got one too,” she said, eagerly stretching the neck of her sweater to show a matching scar. “From the car accident, right? You really are me, huh?”
Winnie nodded, although it felt false. The two girls weren’t really the same. Winnie suddenly felt shy standing in front of this person—herself, but somehow also a stranger—in her underpants.
Winnie couldn’t take her eyes off her double’s scar. When that shard of windshield pierced her double’s arm, it had been her arm. Different as they might seem, they had been the same person then, in the same accident.
“Isn’t it so strange?” Winnie said. “The worst thing that ever happened to me, and it happened to both of us.”
Her double gave a little humorless laugh.
“The worst? Worse than this?”
Winnie blinked in surprise. Of course it was worse. Mama died in that accident. Unless—
“Wait—is Mama alive here?” Winnie asked eagerly.
If Mama was here—that wouldn’t make Scott’s accident worth it, but at least there could be some tiny speck of good. To see Mama again, to hug her again—Winnie’s body thrilled with hope! She felt warm all over, like the sun was kissing every cell.
That must be where their worlds diverged. Both of them had been in the accident, but this girl—this confident, beautiful her—had a mother who’d survived it.
She grabbed her double’s arms tight.
“Well, is she? I want to see her!”
Her startled double blinked back in surprise. “Let go of me!”
“Tell me! Tell me where she is!”
Her double stared back at her, eyes wide and mouth agape.
This must be what it looked like when Winnie was scared.
“She’s gone!” her double said.
“Gone?”
“She died in the crash, just like yours!”
Her double must think she was completely unhinged. Winnie realized how tightly she was gripping her double’s arms and tried to let go, but there was some strange resistance there, like her double was—sticky? No. Magnetic.
Winnie peeled her fingers away with difficultly and took a few steps back. She’d practically assaulted the girl. What was wrong with her? The flesh of her double’s arms held the indentation of Winnie’s fingers for a few uncanny seconds, like a couch cushion or florist’s foam.
Both girls stared.
Winnie’s double opened her mouth first. “What—” she began, but by then the flesh had sprung back to fullness. “What was that?” she finished shakily.
“I’m not exactly sure,” Winnie said. “Scott said that me being here might cause some sort of energy imbalances, but . . . it’s better now, right?”
Her double nodded slowly.
“I’m sorry,” Winnie said, her voice small. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just—well, you would understand.” She looked at her double, eyes full of tears, but for once unembarrassed. “Can you imagine thinking for a second that you’re actually going to see her again?”
Her double nodded grimly. “I understand.”
Winnie finished dressing quickly. When she checked her reflection, she was both disappointed and relieved to discover that even in her doppelgänger’s lovely clothes, she looked like herself.
Her double stood behind her, and it was beyond strange seeing both their reflections in one mirror. For a moment, Winnie was overcome with vertigo. She put her fingers on the dresser top to steady herself.
“What are you thinking?” her double asked. “It feels like I should be able to tell, but I have no idea.”
“I really don’t even know myself.”
Words often felt inadequate to express her full feelings—it was part of why Winnie was so quiet in general—but they had never been this deficient.
“Here, go wash your face,” her double said. She handed Winnie a washcloth, careful not to accidentally brush fingers with her.
“I don’t think I’ll really be able to pass for you,” Winnie said.
Her double smiled faintly. “I guess we’ll see.”
After Winnie washed up, her double sat her in front of the mirrored dresser and draped a towel around her neck. Winnie touched one of her long braids, which had been wrapped around her head to tuck them out of the way during the day. She hadn’t cut her hair in years, enjoying the way it cascaded over her shoulders when she loosened her braids at night. She could imagine herself Rapunzel up in her attic hideaway, trapped, but with the promise of escape. But now, seeing her doppelgänger, she thought her twin braids make her look silly, younger than her sixteen years. Why hadn’t she realized it before?
Winnie watched in the mirror as her double carefully combed a section of hair straight and began to snip away. Wisps of dark hair fell and settled on Winnie’s shoulders.
“Did you and Scott come up with a plan beyond hiding—a way to get you home?”
“Not yet. First we need to figure out how I got here.”
Her double sighed. “I don’t understand why you won’t let us tell Daddy.”
Winnie frowned. Father was clearly a different sort of man here. But in what ways—and why? She was curious, but not curious enough to risk meeting him, and maybe being given up to Hawthorn.
This wasn’t something she thought her double would understand. How could she explain the tangle of hate and love, guilt and fear, she felt toward Father to a Winnie who called him “Daddy”?
To a Winnie who didn’t even know he wasn’t their father at all . . .
“I’m more worried about Hawthorn than your father,” Winnie said, “but your father works for him.”
“He is able to keep a confidence though. It isn’t like he’s so wild about Hawthorn anyway.”
Winnie was glad to hear that, but ultimately, it didn’t make a difference.
“I still don’t want him to know. So, can you keep a secret?”
“Yes—if I understand why.”
This frankness surprised a laugh out of Winnie. Of course her double would be the type of person who wouldn’t blindly agree to something without knowing why! And although it was inconvenient, Winnie recognized they had at least that much in common, and if she were being honest, she’d be disappointed—and disconcerted—if her double weren’t like that.
“All right,” Winnie said, nodding her head resolutely. She would have to tell her double some slice of the truth, even though such openness went against her natural inclination. But she needed her double to trust her. And Winnie wanted to trust her double too. After all, she had to trust someone in this strange other reality, and who better to trust than herself?
“In my world, Scott’s friend James has gone missing—and Hawthorn is either responsible, or he’s covering it up.”
Her double’s eyes widened in concern. Winnie couldn’t help but notice that it made her look even prettier.
“That’s terrible! But how do you know Hawthorn’s involved?”
“Well . . . I don’t know. But Scott was sure of it. Do you need more evidence than that?”
Some things—most things—required proof. But not Scott.
After a moment, her double shook her head. “Okay. I won’t tell Daddy about you,” she said.
“And don’t tell Scott about James—please. I’ll explain it to him myself when we’re planning our experiment.”
Scott would need all the details, since it was likely that James’s disappearance was linked to Hawthorn’s experiments. When James disappeared, Scott had done everything he could to try to find him.
Would Dora do the same for Winnie? Would anyone else even miss her? Brunhilde, maybe. She wasn’t sure about Father. Her life suddenly seemed very small, considered like that.
Scott had made it feel bigger.
Did her double know how lucky she was? Winnie had thought she appreciated Scott as much as humanly possible, but now that he was gone, she felt every wasted moment keenly. She should have told him how she felt. She’d assumed there would be more time. She’d thought they had a future together, perched out there on the horizon, waiting for them. As if futures didn’t vanish as easily as fog!
Now that future was gone, and she’d never even shared the idea of it with Scott, the one person who could have made it real.
Winnie’s chin began to tremble, and her eyes welled with tears.
“What is it?” her double asked, recoiling from her a bit. “What’s wrong?”
“Scott died in my world,” Winnie said. It was a little bit easier to say, this time. She took a few breaths to calm herself and waited for her tears to recede before she continued. “He died in the same accident that transported me here. We’re going to try to figure out a way for me to go back in time to stop it, but . . .” Winnie trailed off with a helpless shrug. “As it stands now, he’s gone.”
“Oh,” her double said softly. “That’s—” she started, but then broke off. “If I saw Scott die, I’d want to disappear too,” she finished simply.
“I didn’t want to—”
Winnie fell silent. Hadn’t she?
When she saw what happened to Scott, she remembered thinking that she didn’t want to live in a world without him. And now here she was.
“Well, I guess I kind of did,” Winnie said. “Father was doing an experiment, and something went wrong, Scott got hurt, and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him.” Winnie took a shaky breath. “And the next thing I know, I’m here, and Scott’s here, and he’s fine.”
“But he’s not your Scott,” her double said, her eyes narrowing slightly. “He’s a different one.”
“Yes,” Winnie said, then shrugged. “But the two of them—it’s not like with you and me. Scott here seems just like the one back home. It’s as if they’re identical.”
Split-Winnie just stared.
Winnie realized how pathetic she must sound—speaking longingly of someone else’s boyfriend. It would be bad enough in any scenario, made worse here by the fact that that someone else was a better-off version of herself.