LUCILLE
I roll to a stop at the curb outside Life2, turn off the car, climb out, and stare.
I was here yesterday, dropping off the notebook and a set of clothes with Isobel, but today feels different. There’s a fullness, one that’s prickly and bright.
The video-com screen flicks on, and Isobel’s face appears. “Lucille?”
I step up. “I’m here.”
The gate opens.
She greets me in the lobby, wearing her usual stiff skirt suit and deliberate expression. I think of her weeping over me after the Mimeo, but it feels distant and surreal, like a dream. “Ready?” she asks.
I nod.
She leads me in the direction of the conference room. With every step, the knot in my chest goes tighter and tighter, until it’s so taut it hums.
And then we’re there.
Then she’s there.
“Lucille,” Dr. Thompson says, standing at the head of the table, “meet Lucy.”
She sits in the chair next to Dr. Kim across the table from me, her back to the courtyard with its brilliant sun streaming in around her. It catches in her—my—hair, illuminating the flyaway strands like gold.
Her eyes meet mine. My eyes meet mine.
She leans forward, and her hair slips over her shoulder. I lift a hand to loop my own behind my ear and am legitimately unsettled when she doesn’t lift her hand too.
“Sit,” Thompson says. “Please.”
I do, closing the distance between us to three feet.
She’s wearing the clothes I brought for her—loose white T-shirt, jean shorts, my extra pair of tennis shoes—and the notebook sits on the table in front of her. I wonder what she thought of it.
I wonder if she thinks. Are the things that pass through her head…mine? Not mine, as in an echo of what I’m thinking right now. But mine as in what I would think if I shared the same advent.
I stare.
She stares back.
I narrow my eyes.
She narrows hers.
I tip my head.
She tips—
“Lucy.”
She looks to Dr. Thompson, and her expression flips to an innocent grin. “Yes?”
My voice. Out of her mouth.
Thompson holds her eye for a moment, and there’s something there. An uncertainty. She takes the seat at the head of the table and turns to me. “Lucille. How are you feeling?”
“A little sick,” I say, then smile. “But don’t worry, I won’t make a mess on the floor again.”
She grins. “Good.”
Lucy huffs a breath out her nose. Is she remembering it?
I glance at her and away.
Thompson laces her fingers together on the tabletop. “Let’s get started.”
We stand in the lobby, half an hour of detailed protocol later. Thompson, Kim, Lucy, me. And Isobel, back a pace.
“Well,” Lucy says. “What are we waiting for?”
I swallow. My saliva, throat, the air, everything’s thick. Like a dream where it’s too hard to move. Like the SUV, pressing down around—
No.
I shake my head. Take a deep breath. Feeling weird is normal, right? This is weird. I should feel weird. “Nothing,” I answer. “Got everything?”
She holds up my notebook and the phone Thompson gave her for check-ins—literally the only things she owns—while giving me a blank-faced look.
“Right. Silly question.”
“Remember, first appointment is Sunday,” Thompson says.
We nod. At the exact same moment. In the exact same way. And I think, Deep breaths. That’s all. Deep breaths and the plan. Protocol. Daily check-ins by phone, weekly check-ups in person. The BAN—for monitoring vitals—and GPS chips in her neck. Call or get to Life2 immediately if someone suspects, if something goes wrong, with her body or otherwise. Plus the calendar filled out on the wall at home.
Just a month.
A whole month.
And like that, it’s gone. The tension, the fear. I walk out the door, Lucy a step behind, feeling buoyant.
“Good luck.”
I—we—pause, turn back. Mirrored movements. Duplicated like déjà vu. A glitch.
Isobel stands in the doorway wearing her impassive face, then as I watch, her gaze slides from me to Lucy.
They share a look.
Lucy nods.
Isobel steps back and lets the door close.
Enclosed in the tiny entryway, that nowhere gap between the real world and whatever Life2 is, Lucy turns to me, or, to the door, waiting for me to push it open.
She’s so real. So solid. So much more than a figment. So much more than parts.
She meets my eye, and I turn away.
LUCY
I’m raw. Squishy and bare. Like a mollusk ripped from its shell.
(Fun fact: When you de-shell a mollusk, it dies.)
We pull away from the curb, Lucille navigating with so much care and consideration it feels like riding in a marshmallow. Still, my heart races. I reach forward, turn on the radio, pick the preset for Dad’s favorite rock station, catch Lucille’s pinched expression, then settle back and close my eyes.
“How do you feel about meeting Lucille’s mother?” Thompson asked a few days ago. “Living with her?”
Blank-faced, I’d stared at my hand, resting palm-down on my thigh. I stretched my fingers, again and again. Stretch, hold, relax. Stretch, hold, relax. And wondered, was the blood running through those thin blue veins mine yet? Just mine, not Lucille’s. The heart pumps around two thousand gallons of blood each day. Kim told me that. Two thousand gallons per day, eighty-three gallons an hour, about a minute for a denoted drop to make its cycle through the body back to the heart. Which meant that on that day, the fourteenth day of my life, the blood they’d made for me had cycled through my conscious body something like fifteen thousand times.
Was that enough? Fifteen thousand passes through my self-aware heart?
“I suppose I feel…” I’d taken a deliberate breath. “Anxious? That she’ll be able to tell I’m not”—I couldn’t help it. A pause. But, a small one—“her daughter.”
A Rage Against the Machine song comes on the radio and, eyes closed, I whisper along with Zack de la Rocha.
Lucille breathes a laugh. “Who’d have thought that, of everything, the lyrics to ‘Bulls on Parade’ would stick.”
Her (my) voice still sounds so odd outside my head. “Right?”
“I remember Mom getting pissed that Dad listened to it with me in the car when I was little.”
Me too. “Probably why we remember,” I say, then open my eyes and meet hers for the briefest second before she looks back out at the road.
She swallows thickly. I watch her throat move, identical to mine, then turn to the window. Car, car, car, truck, car, truck, truck, semi, semi-my-my-my…“My head hurts,” I admit. “Admit.” What a loaded word. Like telling a secret, confessing a crime or weakness instead of answering a direct question.
“Right now?” Kim asks.
“Yes.” I’d have nodded, but this is day two and I can’t do that reliably yet.
“How much? Scale of one to ten.”
“I don’t know. A three?”
And the whole room relaxes.
“What?” I ask. “Would an eight mean my brain is melting back into goo-ooooooooo—”
Stress. That’s what this is. Overstimulation making me slip, making me relapse, making my thoughts skip-skip-skipskipskiiiiiiip.
White floors, ceilings, and halls. Smooth, slick, unblemished.
Ironic, maybe, thinking of Life2, but it works. My pulse slows. My head stills. The sound of the radio fades back in.
We exit the interstate, and it’s like looking through layers of tracing paper. A flip-book of inconsequential memories, of the hundreds of times Lucille has followed these streets, rounded these turns, all laminating together, one after the other, beneath this. Now.
I fight the urge to close my eyes again. Not because I don’t want to see. But because seeing all of this (again) for the first time…hurts. The gas station we (they: Lucille, Mom, Dad) always go to. The turn to the hospital, the one for school. The giant lilac bush eight blocks from the house that Lucille loves to cut blooms from when she walks Boris. The spot two streets over where she flipped over the handlebars of her purple-and-white bike when its tires lost traction in the gravel.
I reach up and touch the healing (still pink, still new) scar on my temple where one of the doctors used a scalpel to carve Lucille’s imperfection into my perfect (still pink, still new) skin.
Mine, but not mine.
All of it.
All of me.
You are the sum of your purpose.
Lucille slows and flicks on her blinker to turn toward home. I can feel it. Lifting my hand to flip on the blinker. Moving my foot to press the brake. My muscles twitch, nerves alit, ready to go through the motions even though my limbs don’t move and I’ve never actually driven a car.
She turns into the driveway and hits the button to open the garage door, pulls into the stall, turns off the engine, and clicks the button to close the door behind us. It’s too quiet. No music, no engine, just us.
Us.
We turn to look at each other, at the same time, sitting in the same positions. Each leaning an elbow on our door’s armrest, hands in our laps. I didn’t even do it on purpose. Only our expressions don’t match. Hers is…
Curious. Beatific. And mine?
LUCILLE
She’s…Clear. Appraising. Present. There’s a brightness in her—my—eyes that’s freaking invigorating. Sitting here—in a quiet interrupted only by our breathing and the muted clicks of my car’s cooling engine—I feel ready.
“Want to go meet Boris?”
Her brow tightens for the barest blink, obvious thanks to her otherwise impassive expression. Then she opens the door and climbs out of the car.
I go first, walking into the kitchen to the sound track of Boris’s delighted oh-my-god-you’re-home dance. He whines, picking up his front feet and wiggling his massive body. I pet his head, rub his ears. Then he sees her. He barks, loud and authoritative, and lunges.
I grab for him, missing his collar.
She brings her hands up and says, “It’s okay, Bobo.” In my voice.
And he stops, a pace back, whining again but different, tail tucked and anxious. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay.” Again and again, soft and calm, approaching him slowly, one hand out. He sniffs her. She steps closer, leans down. I hear her murmuring as she rubs the space between his eyes. He calms.
“Let’s hope it all goes that well, right?”
She glances up at me, then focuses back on Boris. “He thought I was a stranger at first.”
“True.” I purse my lips. “Do you want to see the garage apartment?”
We cross back through the garage. “The tape’s where the stairs don’t creak,” I say as we climb, pointing at the blue painter’s tape X’s marking half the stairs. “In case you don’t remember. I know it’s been a while since you’ve—since I’d been up here. Probably should’ve done this before the Mimeo.” I laugh a little. She doesn’t.
I push open the door—silent on freshly greased hinges—at the top. “Same in here.” More X’s dot the floor, randomly and in paths from the door to the kitchenette, kitchenette to the bathroom, bathroom to the bed, bed to the love seat. “So you can move around when Mom’s home.”
I watch her study the floor, the room. Her face reveals nothing.
“I tested the volume of the TV.” I wave at the note taped to it. “Don’t turn it up past twelve and you should be fine. Well, I wrote it all down.” I cross to the counter, where I left the instructions I wrote out on a piece of paper. “They’re in the notebook, too, but better safe than caught, right?”
Nothing.
I clear my throat. “Anyway. Only shower and flush the toilet when Mom’s gone. Leave the drapes on the driveway side closed at all times, but the ones on this wall”—I gesture to the windows framing the bed, both open to let fresh air in with the drapes pulled back—“are fine, at least while the tree’s…”
She looks to me, noticing my pause. “While the tree’s full?”
“Yeah.”
We both know she won’t be here when the leaves change and fall.
I turn toward the bathroom, opening the door to the closet that separates it from the kitchenette. “Clothes in here.” I close the door. “Shampoo, toothbrush, makeup, et cetera in the bathroom.”
“Sheets on the bed?” she asks.
“Yeah, of—” I catch her expression and breathe a laugh. “Sorry.”
“This is weird.”
I laugh again. “Really weird.”
She smiles. Not an Isobel Smile™ but one that’s quick and real—I think—then sets the notebook and phone on the counter. She walks into the apartment, going slowly, stepping from one taped X to the next, testing a blank space of floor and listening to the creak.
I move to the front door, and watch, wishing I could hear what she’s thinking.
Is she remembering the last time I was in this room before the Mimeo? Or something else? The last time Grandma visited? The times Cass and I had sleepovers up here, pretending we were grown-up, moved out, and living on our own? Eating ice cream, watching the first halves of scary movies before freaking ourselves out and swapping them for comedies. Gossiping about crushes. Wondering what it feels like to kiss. “Spit is not sexy,” Cass said one night while we were watching The Vampire Diaries.
A phone dings. Not mine, hers, on the counter atop the notebook. I hesitate. It’s hers, but does that mean it’s also mine? Is there such a thing as privacy between an Original and their Facsimile? I pick it up and read the text: Elevated BP 12:42 p.m., LH2010.2 pls respond.
At 12:42 we would’ve still been in the car.
“Life Squared texted you,” I say, and Lucy turns from the window. She walks toward me and I hold out the phone.
So many things I’ve never thought of. Never thought to think of. Like my shoulders. I never bothered to really consider my shoulders before. But now I see how they swoop up a bit. And the mole on her neck, the way it moves when she swallows.
She takes the phone. Her hand brushes mine. Skin on skin. And I flinch.
Our eyes meet.
I grin, embarrassed.
She reads the message, types out a reply, then sets the phone back on the counter.
“Are you…okay?”
The faintest crease appears in her brow. “Yes. Traffic,” she says. “Must’ve made me nervous.”
I nod, and she smooths her expression. “What now?”
I turn to the whiteboard calendar hung on the wall by the door. She joins me, echoing my posture—arms crossed, weight shifted to our left hips—and I honestly can’t tell if she’s doing it on purpose or not.
“So,” I say. “This is the plan.”
Silently she studies it, the legend denoting her purple and me blue, the color-coded blocks of time dividing a single life between two selves. I stare at her neck, just visible with her hair behind her ear. There are no scars from the BAN and GPS chips, though Thompson said they’re both implanted in the back of her neck….
Not “implanted.” Incorporated. That’s the word she used. “The chips were incorporated into the back of her neck at the base of her skull.” Built-in.
“Dinner with Mom,” Lucy reads in the purple section for tomorrow night. She looks at me. “Where will you be?”
I can’t help it. My smile. My blush. “My first date with Marco.”
LUCY
She wants me to ask about it, I can tell. She wants someone to share this news with. She wants (she wants, she wants, she wants) what she promised herself she’d get at the end of this countdown: to be more, enough, no longer alone.
But it’s partial. She wants me to want to ask about Marco. She wants anyone to share this news with. But he isn’t in the notebook, which means she doesn’t care to actually share him, this, what she really feels, with me. It’s conditional. I am conditional. The sum of my purpose.
So after an awkward beat I say, “I’m tired.”
And she says, “Right. Of course.” Then smiles, tells me to text her if I need anything, and leaves.
I stand in the same spot, as the sun moves and the apartment dims, for as long as I can, waiting. Finally, I hear her SUV in the driveway, the mechanism opening the garage door. And she’s here. A murmur through the walls and hollows, a dozen yards away.
Mom.
Moving up to press my ear to the apartment door, I feel my mouth go dry. On the counter, the Life2 phone buzzes. I ignore it. Follow the blue X’s into the kitchenette and open the mini-fridge’s door. Careful! Don’t slam! reads the hot-pink note taped to the handle. She’s even removed all the condiments from the door so the bottles can’t rattle. I grab the Nalgene (full of water since I’m not allowed to use the faucet while Mom’s home), unscrew the lid, and take a long drink.
Even after, my tongue feels fat, my spit-it-it-it-it…“is not sexy,” Cass says. “That’s why TV treats it like going to the bathroom or brushing your teeth. It’s there but not there.” On the show, Elena gets out of bed, leaves the hotel room, and ends up making out with Damon outside.
“Assumed hygiene.”
She laughs. “Right? No one has bad breath on TV.”
“Nope. Everyone tastes like mint or a cool mountain breeze.”
Blink, inhale, shake my head.
Staring at the love seat in the dim (no lights on after dark in case the neighbors notice), I can picture their heads above the back.
I could text her. I know her number. I wonder if Lucille’s talked to her at all since that day in Target. If she has, it isn’t in the notebook.
The truth is that I wouldn’t know what to say. Missing someone you’ve never met is the strangest feeling. Mom, Dad, Cass. They’re mine but not mine, same as my body, my memories. My everything. So, I don’t call. Instead, I sit at the counter, text Life2 back, then download Instagram, Snapchat, and the rest onto the phone, log into all of Lucille’s accounts, and delete the “log-in from a new device” notifications from her email.