Under Their Skin

  Apple Tree Boulevard was the only street leading from their neighborhood to either Mom’s school or the college where Michael taught.

  So neither Mom nor Michael can get home right now? Nick thought.

  “And Dad’s out of town at that builders convention, or else I’m sure you’d have him snowshoe over to take care of us,” Eryn said, putting a bitter spin on her words.

  Nick glared at her. What if she ruined everything by sassing Mom?

  “I’ve tried the Chans, the Rodriguezes, and the Anthonys, but all of them left for work this morning before the worst of the storm hit,” Mom said, naming the neighbors they knew best. “If we were still in our old neighborhood—”

  “Mom, really, Eryn and I are fine on our own,” Nick said quickly. “We are.”

  He narrowed his eyes at Eryn, hoping she’d get the message: Don’t mess this up!

  Apparently it worked, because Eryn shifted immediately from sullen, surly kid to Mommy’s little angel.

  “You know Nick and I are good at watching out for each other,” Eryn said. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t go outside.”

  “I’ll make sure Eryn doesn’t make any messes,” Nick added quickly, sticking his tongue out at Eryn. It was a good thing Mom couldn’t actually see him.

  Mom sighed.

  “I don’t think we have much choice,” she said. “Things are supposed to clear up by midafternoon, so it shouldn’t be more than three or four more hours that you’re home alone. No more video games, Nick, because I know you already played some this morning. And I expect both of you to clean up after yourselves. And don’t go outside at all. And—”

  “We’re on top of it, Mom,” Eryn said, still with a saintly tone. Right now, she didn’t sound like she even knew what sarcasm was. “We’ll follow every single one of those rules.”

  “All right,” Mom said reluctantly. “Call me if anything happens, anything at all . . .”

  It took another ten minutes of them reassuring Mom before she finally hung up.

  “Boy, she really knows how to ruin any possible fun,” Nick grumbled. He sneaked a glance at Eryn. Would she really tattle on him if he spent the next few hours playing video games?

  Eryn’s face was lit up like a lightbulb. Nick wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her look so excited.

  “I can’t believe she didn’t make us promise not to do the one thing I’m dying to do,” Eryn said.

  “What?” Nick said blankly, squinting at her.

  Eryn reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out something small and thin and black. It looked like one of those metal things girls put in their hair if some strands weren’t quite long enough to be pulled back in a ponytail.

  A bobby pin. That’s what it was called.

  “We have a snow day and we’re all by ourselves and you want to play with your hair?” Nick asked incredulously.

  “No, stupid,” Eryn said. “I want to pick the locks on Ava’s and Jackson’s rooms.”

  ELEVEN

  We’re doing this, Eryn thought, poking one end of the bobby pin into the hole in the center of Ava’s doorknob. We really are.

  She’d decided last night that their next step would have to be breaking in to Ava’s and Jackson’s rooms, but she hadn’t been sure she and Nick would actually have the nerve. And when would they ever get the chance to do it? At night, when any noise could bring Mom or Michael up to investigate?

  The snow was like a sign; Michael’s car being stuck in the snowbank and Mom being stranded at school was like a gentle shove, accompanied by some voice only Eryn could hear: You have to do this.

  “What if that pin gets stuck in the door?” Nick asked, hovering nervously behind her. “What if that makes Mom and Michael find out what you’ve done?”

  “What we’ve done,” Eryn corrected him. “It’s not going to get stuck.”

  Right now she was more concerned that the lock was fortified somehow and the pin wouldn’t work. But even without looking at Nick, she could feel him worrying behind her.

  “If it does get stuck, I’ll use the wire cutters on it, so Mom and Michael won’t know what happened,” Eryn added, to calm Nick down.

  The pin hit something solid, directly behind the hole in the knob. Eryn pushed the pin harder. Something clicked.

  “Is that . . . Did it work?” Nick asked.

  Eryn pulled the bobby pin out of the hole and put her hand on the knob. She turned it and pushed tentatively on the door. It slid back a quarter-inch and came to rest at the very edge of the door frame. Another push would give her her first glimpse of Ava’s room.

  Eryn took a deep breath.

  “Yes!” Nick began chanting behind her. “Yes, yes, yes. . . . Why’d you have to do the girl’s room first?”

  Eryn handed him the bobby pin.

  “Right,” Nick said. “We could do this almost like a ceremony. You step into Ava’s room at the same time I step into Jackson’s. We find out what we need to know at the exact same time. . . .”

  “Less talking, more lock picking,” Eryn said, waving him toward Jackson’s door.

  She wasn’t sure how much longer she could wait before just shoving her way into Ava’s room. What would it look like? How strange would someone have to be to have absolutely nothing in common with Eryn?

  Nick bent in front of Jackson’s door and maneuvered the pin into the lock.

  “It goes straight in and then you have to push on it until it clicks,” Eryn told him.

  The click came just as Eryn was saying the word click.

  “Now,” Nick said. He turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped into Jackson’s room. Eryn, scrambling to catch up, shoved Ava’s door open all the way. It swung back and banged against the wall, knocking over a tennis racket.

  A tennis racket? Eryn thought. Just like mine?

  Ava’s room was painted the same light turquoise as Eryn’s room back at Dad’s house. The first poster Eryn noticed was of Liam from The Best Band—almost exactly the same poster that had hung in Eryn’s room until last night. A book of piano music lay on the desk.

  It looks like she’s a lot like me, Eryn thought numbly. Maybe . . . maybe it’s really just Jackson who’s totally different from us?

  But just as she thought that, she heard Nick scream from down the hall.

  “No way! Eryn, you’ve got to see this! It’s like Jackson cloned my room!”

  TWELVE

  Nick had been kind of braced for seeing dead bodies.

  But what he saw struck him as even stranger: a lacrosse stick and a basketball spilling out of Jackson’s closet, a trumpet mouthpiece balanced on the desk, a freaking map on the wall that might as well have been his own globe ironed out flat. Jackson even had the same sports books lined up on his bookshelf, with all the soccer balls, basketballs, and baseballs on the spines grouped together.

  Nick could wake up in this room and barely notice any difference from his own.

  He took a step out of Jackson’s room and raced down the hall toward Ava’s.

  “What’s it like in there?” he called to Eryn. “Oh.”

  Ava’s room was like a combination of Eryn’s room at Dad’s, plus the way her room at Mom’s had looked until last night. The Best Band posters were everywhere, and it looked like Liam was also Ava’s favorite TBB member. A poster of an intense-looking girl playing tennis hung over the bed, with the word Perseverance in large letters at the bottom.

  “Maybe we misunderstood?” Nick suggested. “Maybe Mom said Ava and Jackson are too much like us, and that’s why they didn’t want us to meet?”

  “That’s crazy,” Eryn said. “And—that’s not what she said.”

  She stood on the rug in the middle of Ava’s room—the rug was striped, just like the one in Eryn’s room. She slowly spun around, like she was trying to get her eyes to believe
what she was seeing.

  “Maybe . . . ,” Eryn said, “maybe it’s that Ava and Jackson are a lot like us in the activities they’re involved in, but they have a bad attitude or something. So Mom and Michael are afraid that if we met them, their bad attitudes would rub off on us.”

  “You’re the one with ripped-up posters in your trash can,” Nick said.

  “I don’t have a bad attitude!” Eryn protested.

  Nick decided not to say Then why’d you tear up your posters?

  “Anyway, it was a long time ago that Mom and Michael said we couldn’t meet those other kids,” Eryn said. “Back when I still had all these same kinds of posters on my wall.”

  She gestured at Ava’s walls.

  “How much do posters and bedspreads and tennis rackets tell you about what a person’s like?” Nick asked.

  “People change,” Eryn said fiercely. “Kids outgrow things.”

  Nick guessed that was her answer to the question he hadn’t asked, about why she’d ripped down and torn up her posters.

  “We need to become, like, super-detectives or something,” Nick said. “Find out what in these rooms really means anything.”

  Eryn walked over to the desk and began opening drawers.

  “If we’re lucky, Ava and Jackson keep journals, and they have separate ones for here and at their mom’s,” she muttered.

  “Yeah, right,” Nick said. “Anything like that, they’d keep on their laptops, and I’m sure they carry their laptops back and forth between their parents’ houses. Just like we do.”

  There wasn’t a laptop sitting on Ava’s desk. Nick was pretty sure he would have noticed if there’d been one in Jackson’s room.

  All the same, he went over and peeked into the drawer Eryn had just opened. Pencils, pens, paper clips, and Post-it notes lay in a compartmentalized plastic container.

  “She’s neater than you,” Nick observed. “Everything’s perfect.”

  “Or it’s fake,” Eryn said, scowling. “Mom and Michael want us to think she’s perfect.”

  “Mom and Michael didn’t want us to be in this room, so why would they fake anything about it?” Nick asked.

  Eryn turned her head toward Nick, but her eyes didn’t really focus. She squinted even more fiercely than usual. Then she shook her head as if that might help her think straight.

  “Or Ava is trying to act perfect for Mom and Michael,” Eryn suggested. “This whole situation is crazy. Don’t you feel it? Doesn’t it seem like nothing in this room is real? Like it’s all . . . staged?”

  Like how the pictures of Ava and Jackson look like the fake photos put in frames for sale? Nick thought.

  “And don’t our rooms back at Dad’s look ‘staged’ right now because we’re not living there this week?” Nick asked. “Don’t we always leave our rooms neater when we’re going to be gone for the week than we do when we walk out every morning just to go to school?”

  He found himself warming to the topic. He had a whole two weeks of experience as a stage manager—he knew about this.

  “And think about how Mom always makes us clean up our rooms before we have friends over,” he said. “Are you saying that looks staged too?”

  Eryn stubbornly pursed her lips.

  “This is different,” she said. “There’s nothing here that’s personal.”

  Nick yanked open the drawer below the one with the pens and pencils. A manila envelope lay on the very top. It was facedown, but Nick could see the smear of a postal mark on the back.

  “Look, a letter,” he said. “Letters are personal.”

  Eryn picked the envelope up, flipped open the flap at the top, and let the envelope fall as she pulled out two flat sheets of paper. One seemed to be some sort of heavy embossed certificate. Eryn began reading aloud from the other.

  “‘Dear Ava, Thank you for your participation in our production of The Ugly Duckling. We appreciate the dedication of all our actors and actresses . . .’ Nick, this is just a form letter and a stupid certificate,” Eryn moaned. “And it just proves that she had a role in a play. Like me.”

  “Does it have the name of her school?” Nick asked. “That would be something.”

  He bent over to pick up the manila envelope Eryn had dropped.

  “No, it’s from some community theater,” Eryn said. “So she and Jackson could be at any school around here.”

  Nick saw the words Maywood Children’s Community Theater, on the return address of the envelope just as Eryn said that. Eryn was still talking—something about how maybe she and Nick could get Mom and Dad to let them try out for the community theater, as a way to get to Ava and Jackson. But no, Mom and Dad would probably say no to that and just not say why, because . . .

  Nick stopped listening to Eryn. Instead he started tapping her on the arm to get her to stop talking. Because he’d found something even more important.

  “Eryn, Eryn—shut up and look,” he said, waving the front of the envelope in front of her.

  “Why—what?” she asked.

  “This wasn’t mailed to Ava at this house,” Nick said. He pointed to the address in the center of the envelope. “So this must be the address for Ava and Jackson’s mom. What do you want to bet they’re having a snow day too? So we could go and meet them right now?”

  THIRTEEN

  The words swam before Eryn’s eyes: “4083 Briarthorn Lane, Maywood, Ohio.” She didn’t know where Briarthorn Lane was. But if it was close, could she and Nick actually go there? Could it be that Ava and Jackson were home alone right now too?

  She imagined trekking through the snow, knocking at a strange door, and then . . . what? What would she have to say to Ava and Jackson?

  She remembered that she and Nick had promised Mom they wouldn’t go outside.

  “I’ll go look up that address,” Nick said, scurrying out of the room.

  Eryn let him go. For a moment she just stood there staring at walls painted her favorite color. Then she called after her brother, “Make sure you do it on your computer or mine. Don’t use Mom’s computer downstairs. Don’t do anything she or Michael could trace.”

  “Why would I go all the way downstairs?” Nick called back. A moment later she heard him cry out, “Oooh . . .”

  Eryn turned and raced after him. She found him in his room, staring at his laptop screen.

  “It’s three miles away,” Nick said. “I bet it’s closer if we walk through Lipman Park instead of going around it.”

  He pointed to the map he’d pulled up on the screen. Lipman Park, which was right in the center of Maywood, was a huge oval of green. Nick was right—it would probably be less than a mile if they went through the park.

  Eryn looked out Nick’s window. The snow was still coming down heavily.

  “If we’re already disobeying by breaking in to Ava’s and Jackson’s rooms, what difference does it make if we break Mom’s rule about going outside, too?” Nick asked, as if he could tell she’d been thinking about that.

  Um, because going out in a blizzard could get us killed? Eryn thought, but didn’t say. She knew there wasn’t actually a blizzard outside. It just looked like one.

  She fiddled with the edge of Nick’s laptop, where the protective case was coming loose.

  “Doesn’t breaking a direct promise seem worse?” she asked.

  She thought about how weird she’d felt last night, when she’d walked into her room and everything about it had seemed wrong. The perfect faces of Liam and the other members of The Best Band had suddenly seemed annoying, instead of dreamy like they always had before. The cheery kitten and puppy posters had seemed cloying and stupid, not cute.

  Evidently she was the kind of girl who could suddenly start hating things she used to love. The kind of girl who would rip up posters. The kind of girl who would break into her stepsiblings’ rooms. Did that mean
she was also the kind of girl who would make a deep, serious, heartfelt promise to her mother—and then turn around and break it barely forty-five minutes later?

  But how could they not go try to find Ava and Jackson now, while they had the chance?

  “You just think it seems worse because we’re more likely to get caught this way,” Nick argued. “Ava and Jackson’s mom might see us. And unless we get a lot more wind and snow at exactly the right time, Mom and Michael would see our footsteps in the snow . . .”

  “Yeah, they would,” Eryn said hopelessly.

  Wasn’t there any way this could still work?

  Suddenly Eryn saw a way to do it. She yanked her cell phone out of her back pocket. She noticed that her friends had sent her six text messages, but she ignored them all and called Mom.

  “What’s wrong?” Mom said, by way of a greeting.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Eryn said soothingly. “Nick and I are fine.” She was even careful to say Nick and I instead of me and Nick. “I was just thinking, there’s already a lot of snow in the driveway. You and Michael are going to have trouble getting into the garage when you get home.

  “I know you wanted us to stay inside, but if the snow slows down a little, would it be okay if we went out to shovel off the driveway for you? We’ll be careful. We’ll stick together, so both of us are safe.”

  The phone was silent for a moment. Then Mom said, “Eryn, that is very mature of you to think that way. If the snow slows down, and if you are careful, then yes, you can go outside. But promise you’ll stay in our yard and driveway.”

  Eryn frowned. That didn’t help!

  She noticed that Nick had leaned his head close, so he could hear Mom’s answer. Now he put his hand on the phone, turned it toward his mouth, and spoke into it. “Oh. I was thinking if we had time maybe we’d shovel Mr. Cohen’s sidewalk and driveway too. Since, you know, he’s so old, he probably can’t do it himself.”

  Nick grinned at Eryn. Eryn held her breath. Would Mom fall for that?

  Mom seemed to be thinking.

  “Sometimes you two really do amaze me,” she said. “Yes, if you want to shovel for Mr. Cohen, I have no problem with the two of you going around the corner. I’m proud of you for being so considerate. But do be careful, and promise you will stick together.”