Double by Jenny Valentine

Author:Jenny Valentine
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction - Young Adult
Publisher: Disney Publishing Worldwide

F I F T E E N

Helen and Frank and Edie were sitting at the kitchen table when I got back. Helen stubbed out her cigarette. She said, “I thought you were in bed.”

“I needed some air.”

“How was it?” Edie said. Her hair was wet, just washed. She looked very young.

“Good,” I said. “I saw Floyd.”

Helen coughed suddenly and convulsively, like she’d just breathed in water. Edie went white and shook her head at me, a quick, tight, definite warning.

Only Frank didn’t react. I don’t think he heard. He was reading the paper, and he closed it, shook it out, and folded it neatly—rustle, crack, and rustle. He showed me the cover. There was a picture of us, dead center, under the headline HOME AT LAST. I took it out of his hand.

“‘Cassiel Roadnight, of Felindre, near Hay-on-Wye, has returned to his family after a long absence,’” I read out loud. “‘Cassiel went missing at Hay on Fire two years ago, and his family have fought long and hard to find him. “This is a vindication of all our hard work,” said his sister, Edie.’”

“No I didn’t,” Edie said. “We all know I never said a word.”

“‘Cassiel’s brother, Frank, a banker now living in London, and his mother, Helen . . .’”

Helen pointed at herself and giggled.

“‘. . . said they couldn’t be more delighted and overjoyed at his safe return.’”

I studied the photo. I didn’t look like an impostor. I looked real and clean and loved and at home. I looked like Cassiel Roadnight. It’s amazing what storms your face can hide, what terrible wrecks can writhe and heave beneath, without one ripple on the surface. I looked at that picture and saw a family reunited with their son. It was thrilling.

But under the thrill, and the weird swell of pride, there was a black seam of panic, like coal deep under the swell of the hills around us. I let it play out in my head like a movie.

Wherever he was, Cassiel saw the picture of him that wasn’t him. He snatched up the paper to take a closer look, this picture of me with his family, bunching it up in his fists. He tore out my face, a ragged square in his pocket, a space in the picture where I . . . where he had been. Cassiel Roadnight was on his way back to take everything.

I could feel him getting closer. He was on the train, watching the country slip by, watching his face, our face, in the window. I saw him walking up the long hill to the new house. I had this sudden crystal-clear picture of him at the front door. The boy whose life I’d stolen, finally home. I had this instant crippling vision of us meeting here in this room, of us coming face-to-face, me and my lie. Frank would go out on the porch to meet him. I imagined him coming in with his arm around his real brother, the same way he had done with me.

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