LUCY
I pull the handle, half open the car door, and pause.
“You’ll be fine,” Lucille says in the driver’s seat. “It’ll be good.”
I take a slow breath (in, one, two, three, out, one, two, three) and finish opening the door. Out on the sidewalk, I turn back, bend down. She’s wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap. Lucille Harper, Off Duty. “Will you pick me up, or should I walk?”
“It’ll be too busy after school, so walk? Or I could pick you up a few blocks away?”
“I’ll walk.” I step back and close the door. Lucille waves as she pulls away from the curb. She’s trying so hard. And I get it. I literally feel it. But beside her urge to say and do the “right” thing with me is the ticking clock, and her utter indifference about what it means for me. I’m like a Band-Aid for her. There when you need it to cover a wound, easy to discard once you’re healed.
The Life2 phone buzzes in my (her) messenger bag, and I wonder which chemical concoction my emotions have triggered for the BAN this time. “You planning to check in with me every time I hiccup?” I’d asked at the Facsimilate appointment yesterday, and Thompson had smiled humorlessly and said only, “Yes.”
I pull the phone out. Status? the text reads. I write back, First day of school.
It’s gone before I think to reword it. To wonder if the fall semester at DU has even started yet. But no one replies, which is just more proof they don’t care. Lucille’s age is like this open lie we’re all in on. Thompson explicitly, with the others following her lead. As long as my skin’s not sloughing off and I haven’t gotten caught, right?
I watch her brake at the parking lot’s exit, blinker on, turning left. Away from home. Once she’s out of sight, I turn to the building. I’m more than half an hour early. Early enough that I wonder if the doors are unlocked. I reach in the bag and dig out a pair of earbuds I found in Lucille’s desk.
I thought about it. A lot. When Lucille left Friday night, when Mom was in the shower, when the movie ended and Mom woke up (she’d fallen asleep halfway through) and shifted her blurry self upstairs to bed. I could’ve done it right then. Climbed the stairs, sat at the desk, opened the computer, and plugged in Isobel’s flash drive. I’d had it in my pocket all night. I even got as far as holding it poised beside the USB slot.
Then I pulled the Life2 phone out of my back pocket and downloaded a bunch of music onto it instead. Because I (I—I—I—I—I) wanted to.
And because there are some questions I don’t want answers to. Questions like: Did Thompson tell the truth about what happens when the trial’s over? If so, what happens if I stop serving “my purpose”? Or when a newer model comes along? Will I get scrapped for parts? Clean Life2 bathrooms? What the fuck does “decommissioned” even mean? The asset returns to us, to be decommissioned or repurposed as we see fit. That’s a good one, memories-wise. One that’s so bland and unimportant in Lucille’s mind that it’s mostly blurred. In my head, it’s lit like a fuse.
But that’s the B team. The first-string questions are even better: Am I an abomination? Am I even human? Do I have a soul?
The truth is, I don’t know why Isobel gave it to me. Sure, knowing what’s on it would probably help clear that up. But answers or a warning, does it matter? What difference could it possibly make? Knowing won’t suddenly make me not a clone. Not an “asset.” Plus, there’s something terrifying about knowing. About not knowing, too, I guess. But right now I have my knowns. Four weeks to prove to Life2 that I’m a success and can be Lucille, refrain from melting into a pile of exceedingly expensive, manufactured bio-goop, and return whole and seasoned and ready to do my duty as a living prop. All so Life2 can take RapidReplicate to market.
I control almost nothing, but at least with the drive I control what I know. Once I open it, that’s it. No going back. As (not) my mom loves to say, “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” And I don’t know if I want to squish this toothpaste out.
I couldn’t look at Isobel yesterday. As omnipresent as ever (if not more so) and shadowing me through every diagnostic step. Silent, but with her expectation hanging in the air like exhaled breath.
Sorry, Isobel, but what I don’t know can’t hurt me, right?
I head inside, plugging the earbuds into the phone, into my ears, and cranking “Ænima,” by Tool. All the flushing and fucking (not the biblical sort) really speaks to me right now. I wouldn’t say being a clone makes me a nihilist, but that’s only because I don’t know what being a clone makes me. So, thanks, “Dad,” for the easy access to all things nineties rock/metal/grunge, because it’s…helping.
I click the volume a few ticks higher. So high I can’t hear anything else. Not the few other students and teachers populating the halls at this ghastly hour. Not even my own footsteps as I walk to the library to hide until the warning bell.
We practiced for this. Lucille (always) had a plan: Study the notebook (which was the driest shit ever, filled with stuff like what she and Mom ate for dinner, what she and Dad watched on TV, and what they talked about—her class and Reach the Sky and SAT prep junk, avoiding all things “Marco” and “clone,” like mentioning them might trigger some ancient curse). Rehearse talking points like what “I” did this summer. Be Lucille.
Easy, right?
I close my eyes and take three deep breaths through my nose.
Mom couldn’t tell the difference.
I’d felt like a cinnamon roll, all warm and sweet and gooey. A trivializing simile, I know. But I don’t know how to describe it in a way that’d do it justice. Sitting with her Friday night, wrapped up in the same blanket on the couch. The warmth, the calm and simple existence. And not just existing, but belonging. I fit. I fit. In all my Lucille-shaped, ersatz individuality.
It was the best moment of my life.
I open my eyes and sigh a laugh. “My life.” All nineteen conscious days of it, counting the fourteen spent on the Facsimilate hamster wheel.
The first bell rings, a ten-minute warning, and I push out of the chair, trying to wrap that cinnamon-roll feeling around me. But it flakes off with every step.
First up is AP calc. I pick a seat in the back and keep my head down while the other desks fill up around me. No one says hi to me. No one says anything. I can’t decide if it makes me feel relieved or impressively, immaculately lone-, lone-…“Lonely?”
“No,” she says. “Why would I be lonely?”
Cass shakes her head. “Because you spend every lunch in the library like a fourteenth-century monk?”
“How specific,” Lucille mutters flatly, but I feel the sting, a crystalline film between my muscles and skin.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“So?”
Annoyance. Impatience. That’s what Lucille heard. In the memory, I could feel her hear it, like anticipating a blow.
But.
Like with so many of my (her) memories, it’s like looking through a filter. A heavy tinge of Lucille, her biases, her assumptions. Coloring Cass’s stance and expression and tone until every flicker of genuine interest and concern had been tainted.
(Project much, Lucille?)
Someone kicks my desk, and I flinch.
I look to my right at a senior I recognize from pre-calc last spring. He points to the teacher at the front of the class, who asks, “Lucille Harper?”
“Yeah.” It comes out more croak than word. I clear my throat. “Sorry, yeah. Here.”
He nods and calls the next name, finishing out the list. Then class starts, and like every first class in the history of first classes, it’s pointless. Books. Syllabus. Goals. Hopes. Dreams. Then thirty minutes of pre-calc refresher before the bell rings and we file out toward second period, which is art. Painting, specifically.
I duck into the art room, lean against the wall beside the door, rest my head back, and close my eyes. It smells like clay. Wet, heavy, cold…beneath my bare feet, flip-flops discarded in the grass. “You sure your mom’s not going to be mad we’re digging a hole in your yard?” Cass asks.
“It—It—It…” I shrug. “It’s just dirt.”
We’re nine. With muddy hands and muddy toes, knee-deep in a fresh hole with full shovels and the summer sun so bright and hot in my hair—
“Lucille?”
I open my eyes.
It’s Bode. Coming out of the connecting kiln room, arms full with a roll of canvas and lengths of wooden framing, wearing dark-rimmed glasses, a neon-pink T-shirt, black pants, and worn-out skate shoes.
I can feel them. A heat, an ache. A flip-book of strobing images, feelings, assumptions. Every single memory she had of Bode, peeling, cracking, bending. Shifting rapidly from hers to mine, mine, miiiiiiiiii—
“You okay?”
I blink.
“Yeah.” Take a breath, deep and slow. “Yeah.” I step forward, hands out. “Need help?”
“Sure,” he says, and gestures for me to take the canvas roll.
I slide it out from where he’s got it wedged under his arm and follow him toward a massive table set up by the slop sinks in the back corner of the room. Bode drops his armload of frame lengths onto it. I set the roll of canvas beside them.
“So,” I say. He’s the first external person to “meet” me as Lucille, and I feel like my guts are going to writhe their way out of my abdomen. Maybe this is it. What they’ve been so diligently testing for. Day nineteen, and it starts with my intestines. IntestinalAbsconding.
No.
It’s nerves. Regular-ass nerves.
“You’re in this class?” I ask.
Arranging the lengths of framing by size, Bode smiles. It’s one Lucille’s seen before. Close-lipped, eyes averted. In her memory, it’s tinged with polite indifference. But now I think he just looks shy.
“Sort of,” he says. “First period is my independent study. And right now I’m technically in life studies, but I’m helping Mx. Frank out as their TA for it.”
“Wow. You get to spend all morning in here?”
He smiles again, looking up and making quick eye contact this time. “Yep.”
“I’m jealous.”
He breathes a laugh. “Really?”
It’s so strange, because I can hear it the way Lucille would hear it. With a bite of condescension. But I also hear it my own way. With straight disbelief.
I laugh back, just as breathy. “Obviously.” I gesture to the windows, the colors, the smells. Can you feel nostalgic for a place you’ve never been? Can I feel nostalgia at all?
“I didn’t think you liked art.” He shifts the roll of canvas on the table, making sure it’s parallel to his sorted lengths of framing. “I remember in junior high how much you hated that papier-mâché mask project we did. And, well”—he glances at me, sidelong—“really, every project.”
“Huh.” I cross my arms. I can’t find those memories. Not even a whiff. “I don’t remember that.”
He shrugs.
It’s uncomfortable. Not being able to recall those memories makes me feel partial. Is it because Lucille doesn’t remember? Or because the Mimeo’s flawed?
I shake my head. “Well, I’m excited to be in this class.”
A pair of students walk into the room, talking to each other, oblivious to us. Bode looks at them, then back at me, fidgeting with the placement of the canvas roll again. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Luc—” I catch myself. “I was dreading the art credit, but now that I’m here? I’m, um…excited?”
“That’s, um…good?”
A hot little ball of hurt forms in my gut.
Then he grins. He’s teasing. I grin back.
The warning bell rings, and people file in quicker now. As the final bell sounds, Mx. Frank walks in through the kiln room that connects to the pottery-drying room, supply closets, and their office, and tells us to circle around the massive table for a demonstration on making our own canvases. Except for when he’s helping with the demonstration, Bode stands with me for the whole class. When the bell rings, he asks, “Coming?”
I nod and follow him into the hall.
Lunch. Her memories all wear a brittle Lucille Harper, Overachiever, veneer of Necessity and Productivity. But beneath that sits the tarlike puddle of rejection. Syrupy, viscous. And even though this is what I’m supposed to do (Your goal for the trial is full immersion, Lucy. Find the boundaries and test them), I wonder what she’d think of this. Me, walking with Bode. Him, wondering aloud if there’ll be any good vegetarian options this year, or “shitty iceberg salad with, like, two sad cherry tomatoes and a little crouton dust” like last year.
Me, thinking, Butterflies, just butterflies. From a crush. A normal-ass crush. Thanks to years of memories and feelings and his smile’s so nice, not sections of my intestines going necrotic, necrosis, neurosis, neurotic-tic-tic-tic…
Him, saying, “It’s not even because meat is murder. Though it is.” He steps into the line in the cafeteria. “Technically. It’s killing. Purposefully. Which is murder, right?”
Laugh. That’d be normal. He’s joking, kind of. So, laugh, laugh, la-a-a-ahhhhh…I squeeze my eyes shut tight and shake my head. The Life2 phone vibrates in my bag. “Can’t say I know Webster’s official definition of ‘murder’ off the top of my head.”
He grips the straps of his backpack, high up on his shoulders. “It’s more the muscle part. I can’t get over the fact that you’re eating something’s muscles.” He sticks his tongue out and fake-gags.
“Mmmm, muscles,” I say.
We reach the front, and he hands me a tray from the pile before grabbing one for himself. “Right? So gross.”
“Muscles from a carcass.”
“See? Yuck.”
“Or a corpse.”
He laughs. “Stop.”
“Ooooh, cadaver.”
“Okay, but for some reason that one doesn’t gross me out.”
“A moist cadaver.”
“Fine. You got me. That’s horrifying.” He loads up his tray with a salad (spinach and arugula, no iceberg lettuce in sight), a banana, and a carton of chocolate milk.
I fill my own tray, and we pay. “Sure, no muscles, but gland secretions are okay?”
Walking a pace in front of me, weaving between the tables full of students eating, he glances back and smiles wide. “Chocolate gland secretions.”
My stomach flips.
A crush. A real one, right? Not some residual imprint.
Cass, Aran, Louise, Finn, and Matt are already crowded around their table, eating and talking and laughing. Bode walks up with me, and they stop. Like in a movie. A cartoon where the characters blink with the accompanying blink, blink sound.
Cass says, “Hey!” And Aran grins, but with uncertain context. Louise’s eyes go skeptically wide. Finn grins, takes a sip of their drink. Matt waves.
And I…stand there.
There’s only one empty seat, Bode’s, between Louise and Matt. But he sets his tray down, grabs a chair from a nearby table, and shoves it in next to his (on the Matt side), forcing everyone to shift over to make room.
“Hey, Lucille,” Aran says.
I smile. “Hey.”
“Long time no see,” Finn says.
“Yeah. Long time.”
Sitting across the round lunch table from me, Cass asks, “How was your summer?”
“Good.” What else am I supposed to say? It was awesome. Spent most of it piecemeal, growing in a series of high-tech pods before being assembled and gifted with life last month. “Yours?”
“Same,” she answers. “Good. Short.”
“What happened to your face?” Aran asks.
“What?” Brain matter oozing out my nose, cheekbones shifting, skull going concave.
“The cut on your temple.”
I reach to touch it, though I know what he means. The still-pink scar to mimic Lucille’s. Cass narrows her eyes. “Isn’t that from…”
“Bike wreck,” I finish.
She keeps looking at me (don’t notice, don’t see, don’t don’t doooo—), then shakes her head. Aran shifts his focus to Bode, asking if he wants to go skate after school, and the mood settles. Cass takes her phone off the table, stares at it in her lap, then meets my eye with a small, significant grin. I look back and shrug a shoulder. She checks her lap again, frowns, sets her phone back on the table, and the moment’s gone. Then Bode teases Matt for eating “ground-up moist cadaver,” aka a hamburger, and lunch devolves into a gross-out contest with Aran winning by a landslide by bringing up the origins of “artificial vanilla flavoring,” aka beaver anal glands.
Louise makes a face. “That can’t be true.”
“What I want to know,” Cass says, “is where they get it all. Beaver farms?”
“No one google that,” I say.
“Please,” Bode adds. “For the love of ever having an appetite again. Don’t.”
“I’m doing it.” Cass picks up her phone and taps in a search. “It’s called castoreum. From the castor sacs of North American and European beavers.” She reads for a few seconds and paraphrases, “The sacs are located by their anuses, and they use it to mark their territory and such. And”—she holds up a finger and quotes—“ ‘Though it’s been used by humans in perfumes and foods for more than eighty years, it is too expensive and difficult to obtain to be found in many foods today.’ ” She sets her phone down. “There you have it, fools. Put your fears of eating beaver-butt discharge to rest. Though the article said you can buy it on Etsy if you’re so inclined.”
“I’m buying some,” Aran announces.
“No,” Bode and I intone. We smile at each other, and it feels like a real-life Moment. With the clicking and the sparks.
Then he turns to Aran. “Actually, do it. I dare you.”
“Dude,” Aran says, looking at his phone. “It’s like twenty-five bucks for five milliliters. Before shipping.”
“A steal!” I cheer. “For genuine beaver castor gland secretions?”
“Except also,” Bode says, turning back to me, “a whole beaver probably died for it.”
“As opposed to half a beaver.”
The warning bell rings and we move. “Could you kill half a beaver while keeping the other half alive?” he asks.
“Jesus Christ, you guys are morbid,” Louise complains.
I grin, half to myself, and say to Bode, “Sure you could. Scientists have started growing human organs for transplant. Seems like they’d be able to keep half a beaver alive, no problem.”
The others file toward the trash cans and the door. Bode hangs back with me. “The front half or the back half?”
“Either?”
He laughs. We walk side by side, shoulder to shoulder. I dump my trash, then he dumps his. “Is that for real? The organ thing?”
“Yep.”
“That’s…”
“Gross,” Finn says while Matt says, “Incredible.”
We hover by the doors. “Like, using the recipient’s DNA?” Cass asks.
“Yeah. Removes the threat of rejection.”
Matt nods. “Like I said, incredible.”
“Or a slippery slope,” Bode says.
I frown. “Toward?”
Aran leans in and whispers theatrically, “Clones.” Then laughs.
(Kidneys, lungs, liver, femur, skull, jaw, muscle, muscle, skin, skin, skin…Pod after pod. Full of them. Full of it. Full of me.)
“Okay, shut up,” Cass says, and waves her phone around at us. “First-day-of-junior-year group selfie!” She turns her back to us and crowds in between Aran and me. Aran wraps his arm around her shoulder and crouches down to fit in the frame. Bode shifts closer to me. Matt, Finn, and Louise mash in around us. Cass holds her phone up and says, “Smile!”
LUCILLE
“This is making my organizational heart very happy,” I say, watching Marco lay out the intended contents of his pack on the floor in his room. The twins—school doesn’t start for them and Marco until next week—are downstairs watching TV.
“In that case, you can be in charge of checking things off the list. Call it foreplay.”
“Ha!”
Smiling, he turns from his project and loops his arms around my waist. “The PG-13 kind?”
I tip my chin up to meet his eye, arch one brow—all cute and coquettish and who is this new Lucille, I like her—and say, “That would be acceptable.”
He leans down to kiss me. “Okay.”
Downstairs, the volume of Teen Titans creeps up a dozen decibels. Marco pulls back, rolling his eyes. “Sam!” he shouts toward the hall. “Turn it down!” The volume quiets. He turns back to me right as my phone dings.
“It’s a conspiracy!” he wails, melodramatic.
I laugh, reaching for my phone on his desk because, well, my clone’s at school pretending to be me, and it could be any—
It’s a text from Cass.
Cass, who I haven’t talked to since I ran into her at Target the day before the Mimeo, saying, It’s really good to see you. We should hang out. Catch up.
My first instinct is to text back, and I tap the message bar to bring up the keypad, undoubtedly summoning the pulsing ellipsis on her end, before I realize what the text means.
I swipe down, close out of messages, and check the time. Lunch. Smack dab in the middle of it. The knot yanks tight in my chest. But why? Jealousy? Of my clone, of myself? This is what we’re supposed to be doing. This is what I want to be doing. But the thought of her spending time with Cass stings.
“Hey.”
I look back.
Marco stands with his head tilted and brow curved with concern. “Everything okay?”
“Sorry, yeah.” I smooth my expression, realizing I’d been glaring at my phone like I was trying to divine my future in a cup of tea leaves. “All’s well.” I put my phone facedown on his desk and join him in the center of the room.
A boy’s room. With posters for movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer—clearly, I am clairvoyant—Scream, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers on his walls. With a hastily made bed, pile of dirty clothes in one corner, and a cheap bookcase against one wall filled with worn Vonnegut and Atwood paperbacks.
A boy whose taste I’ve become familiar with. Whose hands feel welcome resting on my hips. Whose chest I lean into, pushing him back, step by step, until we’re on his bed and I choose to forget about everything but lips and hands and him, him, him….
The volume of Teen Titans balloons to eardrum-bursting levels again. We’ve rolled over so he’s on top of me, his hips against my hips, my shirt inched up, exposing my waist to the bottom of my ribs. Propped up on his elbows above me, Marco groans, then drops his head into the space between my shoulder and neck, mashing his face into my hair. “Turds,” he grumbles.
I laugh.
He kisses my neck three times, fast, then rolls off me and his bed. Standing, he takes an exaggerated deep breath, pulls his shirt—twisted and bunched up around his chest—straight, then runs his hands through his hair. I sit up, and he smiles at me like I’m the sun.
I give him the same smile back before he turns and stomps down the stairs, yelling, “Sam! I told you to turn that down!”
Downstairs, the volume quiets. I can hear murmuring, Sam and Ari arguing about something, Marco patiently mediating. I take my time combing my fingers through my hair, smoothing out the tangles, thinking about Marco. Sweet, funny Marco, who can list every way Jason Voorhees has died in all twelve Friday the 13th movies, in order. Marco, who is so unabashedly himself. Confident but not arrogant. Considerate but not self-conscious. Marco, who likes me, who wants me, even though when I think of myself, it’s with a prevailing sense of fear.
Fear of inadequacy, of looking foolish, of being too much or too little. Fear of not doing something, anything, everything right.
I resent it. That omnipresent sense of judgment. Feeling like I could do it all “right” yet still be wrong. Be ambitious, but don’t try too hard. Be capable, but not intimidating. Be attentive, but not clingy. Be aloof, but not unattainable. Be feminine, but not too girly. Be “one of the boys,” but not better. Fast, but not faster. Smart, but not smarter. Funny, but not funniest. Be cute. Be sexy. Be fun. Be likeable.
Be needed. Be wanted. Be desired. Like how Life2 needs me, how they chose me. And how Marco wants me.
That’s the answer. Two of me now, here and there. Two of us to fill up one space. There should be more than enough. We should overflow. Lucy, there, fixing a friendship, keeping up with classes, my parents, and everything else I’ll get to step back into. Me, here. All of it, knitting together. Yet when I tried to spend time with her this weekend, keep her company when we were home alone after my mom got called in, she claimed exhaustion and turned me away at the studio’s door.
My phone dings again.
I get off of Marco’s bed to grab it from his desk. Not a text this time, a notification from Instagram. Telling me that @KickassCass tagged me in a photo. I open it and see Lucy.
Lucy, standing with Cass, Aran, Finn, Matt, Bode, and Louise in the cafeteria. Lucy, smiling next to Cass, who’s got her arm outstretched to snap the selfie. Lucy, scrunched up next to Bode, who isn’t looking at Cass’s phone but at me, at her, in a way that’s only a few shades off from how Marco looks at me.