Replica by Lauren Oliver

Author:Lauren Oliver
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2016-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 3 of Lyra’s story.

FOUR

SHE DIDN’T GO TO SCHOOL on Friday, claiming she was sick, and her mom didn’t even bug her about what was wrong—a sure sign she knew Gemma was faking.

Gemma was glad her dad was once again traveling. Glad they were separated by time zones and a big ocean. She couldn’t have faced him. If she had, she thought she would have spit at him, or kicked him in the shins, or finally said some of the things she’d been meaning to say for sixteen years.

The great Geoffrey Ives, cofounder of Fine & Ives Pharmaceuticals, Master of the Universe, total fucking asshole.

April called her during homeroom, a useless fifteen minutes of time between second and third periods when random juniors got shuffled together to suffer through announcements about basketball games, prom, and Tolerance Week.

After the third time Gemma didn’t pick up, April resorted to texting, flooding Gemma’s phone with scowling selfies. What the shit is going on?? Are you okay?

Gemma felt a sudden surge of viciousness, a desire to cause pain, since she had been caused pain. Maybe this was how Chloe and the wolves felt: maybe somewhere deep in their lives, someone was nipping at them, trying to make them bleed. No, she wrote back. Then: not going tomorrow.

There was a five-minute space between messages. Gemma wasn’t sure whether April was stunned or just pretending to pay attention to her homeroom teacher.

Her next message said: This is a joke, right?

She could have written back, explaining. Better yet, she could have called. She could already imagine April shoving the phone deep into her pocket while she hurried into the nearest bathroom stall, then perching, knees to chest, on a toilet seat and pressing the phone to her ear while Gemma sobbed. She could have explained about the broken window, and her father’s terrible words: This was a message for me. . . . It had all come true: her crashing fears, the strange terrors that had always infected her. Her father hated her. She might someday leave, but she would never escape—not him, not that truth, not really.

But she had already cried—had woken, in fact, with her throat raw and the taste of salt on her lips, and realized she’d been crying in her sleep—and today she felt nothing but a strange, bobbing sense of emptiness, as if she was a balloon untethered from the earth, slowly floating away into nothingness. She wondered whether her mom felt this way when she took pills.

So she wrote back: not a joke.

And, after a minute: sorry.

Her phone stayed quiet after that.

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