Double by Jenny Valentine Read Free Book Online Page B

mother but was made of something different, something I could already see inside, something more like steel.
    I was afraid of breaking them. And just as scared of them breaking me.
    It was quiet outside. The wind had gone and the lack of sound was something thick and real, a silence I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard before. There’s always noise in the city at night. It’s rarely quiet and it’s always light. You get used to it, sleeping in the never-dark, sleeping while a plastic bag crackles like a flag in the branches of a tree above you, while trucks sigh and judder, while voices rise and fall and glasses smash and sirens rush to someone else’s tragedy, somewhere else. The noise and the light are like blankets that protect you from the silence and the black.
    There were no blankets here. I turned off Cassiel’s light for a minute and plunged myself into total dark. I tried to hear something in all that quiet. I lost my bearings. It was like disappearing. It was absolute nothing, the lip of a bottomless void. At last, somewhere on the hill, I heard the bleat of a sheep. I was grateful to it in that moment, for reminding me that I was still here.
    I put on the light, as low as it would go, and looked around. There had to be clues in here. There had to be secrets. I started to take Cassiel’s room apart, drawer by drawer, page by page, inch by inch, soundlessly, looking for the real him, looking for the little things I needed to know and do and say, looking for who to be in the morning when the others woke up, when Frank came home. I crept like a burglar in my brand-new room.
    I didn’t find much. I didn’t find nearly enough.
    Cassiel’s laptop was empty. It was wiped clean. His drawers were full of socks and pants and T-shirts, all too folded, all too small. There was nothing written in his books, nothing hidden in his wardrobe.
    A jacket on a hanger held one piece of letter-size paper, folded three times. There was nothing written on it.
    Hardly a hoard, hardly the ripe and helpless harvest my plague of locusts had been expecting. Cassiel’s room was like a stage set. It was unnatural. Edie had tried to re-create it when they moved. She’d made something that looked like his room from the outside, but there was nothing of him in it, nothing of him left. She’d made a fake. She’d made something like me.
    Is that what would happen? They’d search me for traces of him and find nothing? They’d take me apart and see that I was empty?
    What had they done with all of Cassiel’s stuff? Fourteen-year-old boys didn’t have rooms this empty. They had crap and junk and clutter. They had a thousand pieces of screwed-up paper with things drawn on them, things written. They had key chains and notebooks and harmonicas and chewing gum and deodorant and binoculars and music. They had secrets, for God’s sake. Where were Cassiel’s secrets?
    I gave up at two in the morning. I turned the light off and sat on his bed in the dark, waiting for the numbers on the clock to change, watching the seconds flash by.
    What would I do tomorrow? Keep it all locked in. Stay quiet. Tread carefully along the blade, one foot in front of the other.
    How long would it be before they saw me?
    Three knocks on the door snapped the silence into three loud pieces.
    “Who is it?” I said.
    There was no answer, but the handle turned. The door opened. It was darker out there than it was in here. I hadn’t thought that was possible.
    “Hello?”
    It was Helen. She came in like a quiet ghost, in pale pajamas and a crumpled white robe. Her face was gaunt in the gray dark, all hollows and shadows.
    “I can’t sleep,” she said.
    “Me neither.”
    “I can never sleep.”
    Her eyes glinted. What light there was stuck to the whites of her eyes and her white clothes. She looked at me strangely, like you’d look at a person who didn’t know you were watching. She drank me in.
    “Do you want something?” she said. “A hot drink?”
    “No,” I