Double

• One
  
• Two
  
• Three
  
• Four
  
• Five
  
• Six
  
• Seven
  
• Eight
  
• Nine
  
• Ten
  
• Eleven
  
• Twelve
  
• Thirteen
  
• Fouteen
  
• Fifteen
  
• Sixteen
  
• Seventeen
  
• Eighteen
  
• Nineteen
  
• Twenty
  
• Twenty-one
  
• Twenty-two
  
• Twenty-three
  
• Twenty-four
  

For Maikki Ranger, my accidental twin

I
didn’t choose to be him. I didn’t pick Cassiel Roadnight out of a lineup of possible people who looked just like me. I just let it happen. I just wanted it to be true. That’s all I did wrong, at the beginning.

I was in a hostel, a stop-off for impossible kids in east London somewhere. I’d been there a couple of days, walked in off the streets half starved, because I had to. They were still trying to get hold of me. They were still trying to find out who I was.

I wasn’t going to tell them.

It was a tired place run by tired people. It smelled of cigarettes and floor polish and soup. They gave me old clothes, washed thin and mended and almost the right size. They asked me lots of questions in return for two meals and a dry place to sleep.

I tried to be grateful, but I didn’t speak to them.

They locked me in a storeroom for fighting. Hot and airless, four pale walls, a shut and rusted filing cabinet, a shelf piled with papers, a stack of chairs.

The boy I fought with was hurt. That’s why I was locked up, really, for winning. You’re not allowed to do that. I don’t remember his name. I don’t remember what the fight was about, even.

I was in the storeroom for over two hours. I wanted to wreck it. I watched myself doing it, somewhere in my head.

I heard one of them coming, saw the wavering, moss-colored shape of her through the mottled glass of the door. I banged on it hard. She stopped and turned and took a quick breath of her disappointed air.

Her voice was small and jumpy. “What do you want?” she said.

“I want you to let me out.”

“I can’t do that.”

I put my head against the cold skin of the wall. “Please help me,” I said.

“Are you hurt?” she said. “Are you bleeding?”

“I’m thirsty.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You can’t deprive me of water.”

“I’ll go and ask,” she said, and through the glass she warped and gathered and was gone.

I counted to four hundred and thirty-eight.

When she came back, she had someone else with her. They unlocked the door and swooped in with a plastic cup half filled with water. I drank it down in one gulp. It wasn’t enough.

The man had a hook nose and loose, curly hair. I’d seen him before, but not her. He sounded like keys jangling.

He said, “Have you finished fighting?”

I shrugged. “Probably not.”

I didn’t like the way the woman was looking at me. I stared back so she would stop, but she didn’t. Between us there was just the blood in my ears, pounding and pumping, and the look on her face.

She kept her eyes on me while she spoke to the man and as she left the room. “Hang on a minute, would you? I’ll be right back.”

The man sat in one of the chairs, shifting, trying hard to look relaxed. He leaned toward me and his black eyes blinked, quick and vigilant, like a bird’s. I wondered if he minded being alone with me. I wondered if he was afraid.

“Why won’t you tell us your name?” he said.

I pretended he wasn’t there. I pretended he wasn’t talking.

“I’m Gordon,” he said. “And the lady’s name is Ginny.”

“Well done,” I said. “Good for you.”

“And you are?” he said.

I looked at my shoes, somebody else’s shoes, black and lumpy and scuffed. I wondered how many nobodies had worn them. I felt the fabric of someone else’s shirt against my skin, nobody else’s trousers. How was I supposed to know?

I smiled. “I’m nobody,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “Everyone is somebody.”

It was amazing, really, how he could be so sure of that.

It was the fifth of November when I found out I wasn’t who I thought I was. I remember the exact moment. I didn’t know myself anymore. I asked a man for the time so I could commit it to memory. He looked at his watch and told me it was twenty-five past seven. Then he just went back to his newspaper.

I said, “Do you know me? Do you know who I am?” I knew he wouldn’t, but I needed him so badly to say yes.

I could tell he wasn’t concentrating on his reading anymore. He just had his eyes on the words while he waited for me to go away. He was scared.

The Ginny woman came back with something in her hand, a piece of paper. “Can I have a word?” she said.

Gordon got up and they left me in the room on my own again. I could hear them on the other side of the door. They were whispering, but I could still hear.

She said, “I only saw it this morning. Pure coincidence.”

“Bloody hell.”

“He’s been gone nearly two years.”

“Well. I. Never.”

“Do you think it’s him?”

“Look at it. It’s got to be.”

The door handle moved. I shut my eyes and tried to be ready. I tried to stop time. When they came back in they were altered, careful, like I was a bomb that might go off, a sleeping tiger, a priceless vase about to fall.

I thought they’d found me. I wondered how far I would get if I just ran.

Ginny’s hand hovered over mine, without touching. Gordon tried to smile. I was terrified. Was this it?

“Cassiel?” she said.

I looked straight at her. I didn’t know what was going on. “What?”

“Cassiel Roadnight?” she asked.

My name is not Cassiel Roadnight. It never has been. My name is Chap. That’s what Grandad used to call me. I always thought it was a good name. I always thought it suited me.

“Who,
me
?” I said.

Gordon gave me the piece of paper. It was a printout, a picture of a boy with the word missing across his forehead.

A picture of me.

“Oh my God,” I said, and I took in a breath and I held it.

It was old. I was about fourteen maybe, something like that. Brown hair, not long and not short. Blue eyes, same shape, same lights and colors. My face exactly—my nose, my mouth, my chin.

I wondered if it was the last photo anyone had taken of me, and I wondered who took it.

I wondered why I was smiling. I didn’t smile when I was fourteen. What did I have to smile about?

“Oh my God,” I said again.

They misunderstood me. Ginny let her hand touch mine, and she squeezed. Gordon blew the air from his mouth with puffed cheeks, like a deflating ball. I kept my eyes on the picture.

There was something wrong with it.

Here are some things I know for sure about my face. I see them every time I look in the mirror. I know they are there without even having to look.

One. I have two scars. The first runs from my earlobe to my cheekbone, thin and raised and shiny, like one of the mends on my shirt. A dog bit me when I was five. It hurt like hell.

The second is beneath my left eye, a red mark, a swelling under my fingers, a diamond-shaped hole made by a boy with rings on every finger. I remember his face and I remember the sharp, weighted sound of those rings landing. His name was Rigg.

Two. I have three piercings in my left ear and two in my right. I did them myself with a needle and salt water and a cork. I breathed in deep and they didn’t even bleed. There’s nothing in them anymore, no studs or rings or whatever. I took them out, but the holes are still there. My ears look like pincushions.

Three. My teeth are bad. One at the front is broken, and three back ones are going to come out, even though they’re supposed to last me a lifetime. My teeth are terrible.

In the picture there were no scars on my face, no piercings. I had perfect teeth. I was happy and well fed and wholesome.

In other words, it wasn’t me.

I tried to tell them. I looked up from the picture and I said, “No.”

“Cassiel,” Gordon said. He crossed his legs. His trousers and his mouth made a shushing noise.

I shook my head. “Not me.”

“Come on,” Ginny said, her hand still on mine.

I wanted to swat it off. I didn’t answer her.

“Whatever trouble you’re in, Cassiel,” she said, “whatever reason you had for running away, we can help you.”

“No, you can’t,” I said. They were too close to me. I didn’t like it.

“We’re here to help,” she said.

“Help someone else,” I said. “Help someone who wants it. I’m not him.”

“Who are you, then?” Gordon asked.

Good question.

I stared at him. I smiled my angriest smile.

“What are the odds,” Gordon said to Ginny, like I wasn’t there, “of there being two
identical
missing boys?”

“
Billions
to one,” Ginny said, like that settled it.

“I don’t care what the odds are,” I said. “It’s not me.”

“So what’s your name, then?”

Maybe this is it, I thought. Just a trick to get me to tell them my name. I wasn’t falling for it. They weren’t going to find me. I’d managed to keep away from them for this long.

“It’s not
Cassiel
,” I said. “No way it’s that.”

They glanced at each other.

“Have another look,” Gordon said.

And Ginny said, “Take your time.”

They didn’t believe me. They wanted to be right, I could tell that. They were going to insist on it. It doesn’t matter what you say to people like that. When they have made up their minds, they stop listening.

I breathed in hard and tried not to think. I looked at the boy in the picture. I thought how incredible it was to have a double like that, somewhere out in the world, to look exactly like a total stranger. I looked at Cassiel Roadnight’s happy, flawless, fearless face. And the thought occurred to me then, that I could be him if I wanted. It crept in. I could see it coming and I tried so hard not to notice it.

I
could
be.

And if I were Cassiel Roadnight, the thought said, I wouldn’t have to be me anymore, whoever that was.

You won’t exist
, it said.
You could wipe yourself off the face of the
earth in a second. You could vanish into thin air, right in front of your
pursuers.

I gave that thought my full attention. What did I have to lose?

There were people looking for Cassiel Roadnight, but they were people who cared. He had a family and friends. He had loved ones. He had a life I could step right into.

And what did I have?

Nobody. Nothing, except the fear of being found. The people looking for me just wanted to pull me apart.

I always wanted to be someone else. Doesn’t everyone?

“Okay,” I said to the thought, so quietly I almost didn’t say it at all.

“What?” Gordon said.

They looked at each other and then back at me. It was like they’d been holding everything in. Suddenly there was this noise in the room of them breathing.

“Okay,” I said.

“Good,” said Ginny.

And Gordon said, “Your name is Cassiel Roadnight?”

“Yes,” I told him. “My name is Cassiel Roadnight,” and I watched the smile spread and stick to his face.

I lied. That’s what I did wrong.

It didn’t feel like much. Everybody lies once in a while. And just in case it counts in my defense, I wished it was the truth, I really did.