from?’
I blinked at her. ‘Excuse me?’
‘You said back in the hallway that Gabriel rescued you. What from?’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Lulu Collins and Brandon Stark kidnapped me last night and took me to Nikki Howard’s loft. But you can’t tell anyone, OK, Free? Because I don’t want to get them into trou—’
‘LULU COLLINS?’ Frida was on her feet and shrieking. ‘You met Lulu Collins? And Brandon Stark? Are you kidding me? You hung out with them? Where did you go? Did they take you to Cave? Oh my God, did you get to see Justin Bay?’
‘Whoa,’ I said. ‘Hold on. First of all, stop yelling. And second of all, no, it wasn’t like that—’
‘Oh my God.’ Frida stopped jumping up and down and looked at me, wide-eyed. ‘Brandon Stark and Nikki Howard are — used to be — dating. If he thought you were Nikki, he must have — did he try to kiss you?’
I shook my head. No way was I telling my little sister about Brandon’s tongue-dive, let alone what had gone on with Justin — or how much I’d enjoyed both.
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘He and Lulu were just worried about their friend. It really sucks, Free. I mean, that people think I’m Nikki.’
Frida, to my surprise, rolled her eyes. ‘Oh yes,’ she said sarcastically.
‘Being mistaken for the world’s most famous teenage supermodel? I’m sure that must suck.’
‘Um,’ I said, stung. ‘Actually, yes, it does. And thanks for telling me when I woke up.’
‘Telling you what when you woke up?’ Frida cocked her head to ask.
‘About how they’d put my brain in Nikki Howard’s body,’ I said, injecting as much sarcasm into my voice as possible. ‘I appreciate it.’
If I was concerned Nikki’s voice was too high-pitched and babyish for sarcasm to come across, I needn’t have worried. Frida looked immediately sheepish.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That. Yeah, well, I wanted to. But they told me not to. They told me… well, they said it might upset you. They wanted to give you time to adjust first.’
‘Great,’ I said, still working the sarcasm thing. ‘Way to watch my back, sis.’
But I saw that I’d gone too far when her eyes filled up with tears and she said, ‘Em… I was really scared. I thought… these past few weeks I thought when you woke up, you wouldn’t even know who I was. They told me that you’d be… you know. Yourself. But then I’d look at you, lying there, and I’d just see… Nikki Howard. And I thought, There’s no way. I mean, that you’d wake up and be your old self and be mad at me for trying out for cheer-leading—’
‘You tried out for cheerleading?’ I yelled. ‘Are you insane? Do you know what Mom’s going to do to you when she finds out? Because I’m assuming you haven’t told her, seeing as how you’re still alive.’
But Frida, instead of looking offended, burst out laughing.
‘See?’ she said. ‘It’s so great that I’m hearing that… well, kind of great, because it’s still annoying. It’s just so weird that all that annoying stuff is coming out of Nikki Howard. I guess it’s better than never hearing it again, but—’
‘Hearing what again?’ Mom asked, coming back into my room.
‘Um,’ Frida said quickly. ‘Nothing. We were just talking about… clothes.’
Dad, following behind Mom, looked amused. ‘That’s what I like to hear. Things sound as if they’re getting back to normal if you two are squabbling. But Em was talking about clothes?’
‘Well,’ Frida said, looking panicky. ‘No, not exactly… ’
‘We were talking about school,’ I said quickly. ‘And what’s going to happen now? I mean, now that I’m going to have to start working, and I’ll be living at Nikki Howard’s loft and everything, I guess I’m going to be way too busy for high school—’
‘On the contrary, young lady,’ Mom said, something like the old spark
I knew so well showing up in her eye, just as I’d known it would, at the suggestion I drop out of school. ‘Under no circumstances will you be forsaking your education.’
‘Absolutely not,’ Dad said. He looked shocked. ‘You can’t put off college, and certainly not high school. There’s no long-term financial stability in modelling, like there is in teaching or a career in law or medicine.’
‘Of course,’ Mom said, chewing her lower lip. ‘With your schedule, attending regular school might be hard. We might have to look into enrolling you into one of those performing arts high schools. Or maybe getting you tutors. Perhaps Stark Enterprises could help us with that… ’
Much as I disliked the idea of us allowing Stark Enterprises any more access to our lives, I shot Frida a triumphant look.
‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘But I just love Tribeca Alternative so much. I’d really like to be able to keep going there, if I could.’
Mom and Dad looked plenty surprised to hear that. But their surprise was nothing compared to Frida’s scowl. I guess she’d thought, with me out of the way, she could just do whatever she wanted — become a member of the Walking Dead, try out for cheerleading, maybe even start going out with an upperclassman.
Well, she’d thought wrong.
‘Really, honey?’ Mom looked stunned. ‘Well, I suppose we could speak to Mr Phillips. I’m sure Stark Enterprises could arrange something with the school. There’s no reason why, if your schedule allows it, you shouldn’t be able to take some classes there when you can. You may not be able to graduate on time next year, but you’ll still graduate… eventually.’
‘That’d be great,’ I said with completely false enthusiasm.
‘Nikki Howard would never get into a school with academic standards as rigorous as TAHS,’ Frida, the expert on all things Nikki Howard, chimed in quickly. ‘I mean, technically, age-wise, I guess she’d be a junior like Em. But she dropped out of high school her freshman year, when she got her first big modelling contract… ’
‘I’m sure if Stark Enterprises gave a big enough financial gift to the school, they could get her in,’ Dad said. ‘If that’s what you really want to do, Em. But, like Mom said, there are tutors — and other schools we could try as well.’
Frida turned towards me eagerly. ‘Yeah, Em. See? You don’t have to go back to TAHS.’
‘Oh no,’ I said, giving Frida the evil eye. ‘TAHS is exactly where I want to go. And they can’t act like they don’t have space. We all know there’s an opening in the junior class, don’t we?’
And my going back there would kill two birds with one stone… I could keep watch over Frida and make sure Christopher was OK. And, OK, it wouldn’t be fair of me to make sure he wasn’t dating other girls. I knew if I really loved him and all, I was supposed to set him free. But… why should I, when I wasn’t really gone?
And I also knew I couldn’t tell him who I really was, either.
But still. Maybe we could become friends, like we were before the accident. And maybe… just maybe… more than friends. Like Brandon and Nikki were more than friends.
Only hopefully neither of us would be fooling around behind the other’s back like those two appeared to have been doing.
The bad thing would be that I would always know something Christopher didn’t know… that apparently, a lot of famous people — because only the super rich (or people like me, who had a massive corporation like Stark Enterprises paying for it) could afford a whole body transplant — who we’ve been told are dead are actually really alive, just living in a new body.
I’m not going to name names (primarily because no one at the Stark Institute would tell me for sure), but hints were dropped that a lot of famous people — some of whom had been about to be sentenced for crimes like securities fraud, several others of whom were famous musicians long thought to be dead by their adoring fans, and still others of whom were members of certain British and European royal families — who supposedly ‘died’ are actually alive and well and just living in different bodies under assumed identities, while their family members go around pretending to this day like they’re all sad about them having passed away.
But the joke’s on us, because they aren’t dead at all.
In other words, Christopher and I were right all along: there really are Walking Dead.
The problem?
Now I’m one of them.
