Extra Life (21 page)

“Know what?” I croaked.

“About
this
. That I was in danger.”

“I saw the online posts.”

“Any idiot could’ve seen it was a fake profile.”

“I wasn’t one hundred percent sure.”

“You’re lying. How did you get here almost right on time?”

Paige’s cat meowed questioningly at us from the top of the stairs. I could empathize.

“
Russ
,” Paige insisted.

“Listen to me, please. I have no clue what just happened or why it stopped happening or what to do if it happens again. All I know is we both need to get out of here. And you have to contact your mom and let her know not to come home.”

I was kind of hoping she’d be spooked enough to just go with it.

Nope. “
Why
?” she demanded.

“Whatever just attacked us—you need to keep away from it,” I tried to explain. “Go someplace unexpected, and don’t even tell
me
where. I think it’s following me, or it knows what I’ll do next. We’ll have a better chance if we fool it with unexpected moves.”

She clenched her jaw at me, glared down at that knife in her hand. My blood was on her tank top and her hair was an alluring mess. Right then probably wouldn’t have been a good time to ask her more about that surprise kiss. “Tell me why you know these things,” she said.

“What if I said it was way too much for you to deal with?”

“I’d say
try me
, or I’ll kick your ass.”

Her cell phone jingled. She gave me a
don’t move
scowl and shimmied it out of her pocket. I was so focused on escape, I never even thought to wonder who might be calling.

But then she answered, and listened to her caller, and the impact of this bizarro scenario corrugated her forehead. She said to the caller, “Shut up. Who is this really?”

My own voice came faintly through the receiver: “…just make sure you were all right.” Russ 2.0 was calling, just like he did in the last reality I visited. Only this time, Paige wasn’t dead, so she answered.

“What kind of sick prank is this?” she asked.

In that moment of uncertainty, I took my chance, pulled open her screen door and made a break for it. No time for goodbyes. I leaped off her front stoop, tripped over my bike in a lame attempt to mount it. My shoes couldn’t find the pedals fast enough. The tires wobbled through the sandy lot before they reached the sidewalk.

Paige grunted as she pounced on me. The bike flopped over, trapped my left leg against the ground. I rolled onto my back to scramble away, but she squatted onto my stomach and jammed an elbow under my chin to keep me docile. Her knee braced on my sternum thrust away my breath.

Gritty pavement bit through the towel wrapped around my hand.

“You just—called me,” she said. “That was you on the phone. I don’t know how—but it was.”

“…wasn’t me… not exactly…” I choked out.

“Talk, Russ.” She lifted her knee to let me breathe.

There wasn’t much left to hide so I did talk. I told her everything in a rush, from the first leap and my solitary confinement at Conrad’s house and then the escape and the news of her supposed suicide, to the second half-leap that landed me in my bedroom at one o’clock in the afternoon.

And I told her fast—because I was running out of time to stop Bobby Keene-Parker from crashing his car.

P
AIGE WAS
a born myth-buster, so she wasn’t going to let me off after some rant that totally sounded like I’d taken a major dose of Molly. I was lucky she even released me from her death grip.

“We should call the cops,” she said.

“And tell them what?”

“I don’t know, but it’ll be interesting to hear their opinion.”

I said, “They’ll think we’re both nuts, and they won’t be any help.”

“You don’t seem to have much of a handle, either, coming at me with this story.”

“I haven’t had tons of free time to Sherlock through everything.”

At least the nightmare in her bedroom got her to vacate her apartment. One small victory. Another plus was getting her to agree not to let anyone else in there. She volleyed quick phone calls between her mom and grandma, convincing them they needed to have dinner at Grandma’s straight after her mom got out of work because the landlord just up and had their duplex fumigated for roaches without any notice.

As for Paige herself, she refused to go into hiding like I asked. Instead, she bummed a standing ride on the back pegs of my bike. Gripped her fingers on my shoulders as I pumped us back uptown toward the Silver Bullet Diner. She wasn’t going to let me out of her sight.

Bobby’s Rapide was still parked outside. I leaned my bike against the diner’s siding—nowhere to lock it and bigger things to worry about. When I pushed through the entrance, the bell hailed my arrival. No time to form a plan or consider how the other version of me would react.

There he was, standing beside the far-end booth, the Russ Vale who’d taken a leap through the wormhole only once and was still under the impression he had his universe under control. I had to think of him as Russ 3.0, even if his existence in this universe technically started six hours before mine. Those were hours I already lived.

He glanced up at me from his camera, put his attention back to the screen. Then he did a double take.
Yes, it’s you, Russ Vale. And by
you
I mean me.
I don’t know why, but I kind of expected 3.0 to raise his hands in surrender.

In the booth, Savannah and Bobby were still acting the scene, unaware that the camera eye was tilting to the floor and their director had totally quit paying attention to their performance.

But then Savannah spotted me—a mirror image of the guy standing beside her—and she bolted upright. At the soda machine, Sally the waitress also saw double and sprayed Coke all over her hand instead of into a cup.

Behind me Paige muttered, “Y’all were really
serious
with this,” as if the phone call from another me, and the inexplicable techno-vortex that almost killed her, weren’t enough evidence already.

Russ 3.0 rushed at me, bug-eyed, waddling in Connie’s flip-flops and oversized jeans. Savannah followed close behind him. With Paige at my hip—and her kiss still fresh on my mind—this was the weirdest double date in history.

“Aw, don’t look so surprised,” I told 3.0, even if I had to admit that when I was still him, I never would’ve anticipated
this
.

“What’re you doing here—what is this?” he asked. His lips were stiff as a ventriloquist’s, so nobody else could read them, I guess.

“I’m not who you think I am,” I said, voice dialed down to private mode.

“Who do you think I think you are?” 3.0 asked.

“You think I’m the blissfully unaware Russ who lives in this reality…”

He jolted back as he realized. “You’re…”

“From the future,” I said. “Already ahead of you.”

“But… I’m supposed to be…”

I mean, he’d already taken one leap, so he knew exactly what wacko physics we were dealing with. He should’ve been able to process the concept of another Russ showing up, further down the time line. Seriously, just a few hours ago, I
was
this guy. I remembered the triumph of standing behind that camera, the sense of invincibility. I remembered everything except this part, where another, future me shows up.

“I’m here to stop you from making a huge mistake,” I said.

“What mistake?” he asked. “And, Paige—how did you—”

“Not the right place to explain,” I said, nodding at the bystanders.

Sally leaned over the counter, drying her hands with a towel. “Care to introduce me to your look-alike, sugar?” she said to neither one of us in particular. Savannah was also pondering the existence of two of us like we were matching statues in a museum.
See if you can spot the fake.

“This is my—my twin brother, Seth,” 3.0 explained.

“Nice save,” Paige snarked behind me.

I tried not to wince at 3.0’s improv. Not that I could’ve done better, even considering my time-space advantage. And since we had the same brain, I caught on to his little inside joke: Seth (or Set, if you like) was the Egyptian god of chaos and destruction. The brother and polar opposite of the good god Horus, who, not so incidentally, was the deity of time, source of the word
hour
.

Horus. Horace. Clever.

“How come I never knew you had a twin?” Sally asked. “Lemme guess—y’all been playing me, coming in here pretending to be the same kid but I don’t know the difference, right?”

I shrugged and said, “You caught us.”

“You boys,” she said, wagging her finger.

Easy enough, until Savannah stepped forward and studied us in that heart-melting wistful way of hers. “You both have black eyes,” she noted.

“Mine’s painted on, stage makeup,” I blurted. “It’s part of what we do, pretending to be each other, so Horace Vale can be in two different places at once. We’ve got to keep it authentic.”

“Why?” Savannah asked.

“Well, uh, it’s a kind of performance art. We’re prepping for a mockumentary where we fool people with our twin antics. A punking-people-out kind of thing, like
Bad Grandpa
.”

Paige snorted.

“Wait a minute,” Savannah said. “So this whole thing… why aren’t both of you going to Port City Academy? There’s no way you could get away with pretending to be the same guy if you’re both…”

This wasn’t going well. I’d hoped to just barge in, fix everything in a few seconds, then run off without all the pesky explaining. But I hadn’t even gotten to Bobby yet.

“You’re right,” I told Savannah. “I’m the home-schooled one. Don’t like crowds, plus the ‘rents can only afford tuition for one kid in private school. Free online education. Wave of the future.”

While I talked, 3.0 gave me looks like he was holding off explosive diarrhea. Luckily, Savannah was enough of a go-with-the-flow kind of girl that she’d accept just about any cockamamie answer I gave. Already she was on to other things.

“
Ouch
,” she said. She raised my wounded hand by lifting my fingers gingerly with her own. Even a gentle touch made the pain throb up my arm. Paige’s towel wrapping was soaked through with blood, some of it drying brownish. Not exactly the ambiance you want in a diner.

3.0 went pale when he saw it. Imagine knowing you were fated for a painful injury in the next few hours, thinking it was unavoidable. The anticipation could be worse than the aftermath. “What happened?” he asked.

“Yeah, we didn’t coordinate so good on this,” I said. “It looks worse than it is. Listen, Savannah, I know this is a lot to take in at once, and I’m sorry for the gotcha here, but would you mind if me and my brother have a chat in private for a second? Bobby’s getting lonely over there.”

“Oh! Sure.” Ms. Lark jaunted back to the major TV star she’d somehow neglected for at least a full minute. Down at the booth, Bobby had lost interest in the twin brother routine and had instead taken to flicking his lighter in agitation again. Not a good sign. Why couldn’t he have a harmless text-checking compulsion like everyone else?

I kept tabs on Paige every few seconds, trying to assess her mood, how long she’d let me play out this scenario. She was over by the newspaper rack, leafing through a local
Star-News,
as if in search of a splashier headline than multi-reality clones.

“Why’re you here?” 3.0 demanded.

“To stop you,” I said.

“Stop me
what
?” He hugged the digital camera against his chest like I meant to knock it out of his hands. I was here to crush his big-time dream, and he knew it. I felt sorry for him—the deepest kind of empathy you could feel because
I had been here
.

I said, “What you’re doing to Bobby, you can’t. You’re tapping into some wicked daddy psychology stuff. You—
we
arranged it that way. It was our plan, but it’s gonna backfire
big
. This guy, he has the fragile psyche of a lab test animal.”