Chapter 7
1058 Words
7
“I’ll get us a cart,” my mom said, but Halli was already heading off in her own direction.
“Oh, okay,” my mom said, clearly surprised. Usually the two of us walk the aisles together just to keep each other company. But Halli neither knew about that nor cared.
“I’ll come find you,” my mom called after her. “I just need to pick up a few things...”
Halli didn’t bother listening. She was on a mission.
Because she knew if her plan were going to succeed, she needed to get to work on my body right away. It had done all right for her so far whenever she took it running, but she was about to start putting a lot more demands on it, and for that she needed strength.
And for that she needed proper food.
No more takeout, no more microwavable vegetables smothered in cheese, no more chips or sugary cereals or any of the other junk my mom and I love so much. Halli needed fresh food. Home-cooked food. And good coffee—she was a snob about that. I remember her taking a whiff of the cheap coffee my mom always buys, and telling me, “We’re better than this.”
So she scooped up a basket from the end of one of the checkout lanes and headed toward the right. She had been in that store once before, and knew exactly where she wanted to go.
She’d gone in one morning while she was out on one of her runs. She had a craving for fruit—not something we normally keep in our house, since it usually goes bad before my mom or I remember to eat it—and she was curious what kinds of food she might find.
But Halli wasn’t in the habit of bringing any money with her, and she forgot that in my world she couldn’t just step up to a cashier and have the person wave a sensor over the microchip beneath Halli’s collar bone, and punch in a code to have the purchase deducted from one of her accounts. Not only do our stores not work that way, but my body doesn’t come equipped with a microchip.
As Halli walked out of the store that day without the banana and kiwi she meant to buy, she made a note of that. Not of the fact that she needed money to purchase food in my world—that was obvious—but of the fact that she didn’t have any money of her own, and would have to ask my mother for anything she wanted.
Halli didn’t like that one bit.
It had been different with Ginny: the two of them were a team. Halli never had to beg or negotiate with her grandmother. They both understood that if either of them needed anything, they would just get it. It had always been that simple.
Of course, it helped that Ginny was rich—very rich. And when she died she left everything to Halli. Money was never a worry in Halli’s life—not like in mine at all. My mom and I have been basically poor my whole life. And that was the life Halli stepped into.
When she searched my room those first few days, looking for clues so she could impersonate me, Halli found my wallet and the whopping $27.52 I had in there. She also found the bank statements showing a little over $2,000 in my savings account—money I’d been accumulating over the past several years to help my mom pay for college.
But that wasn’t Halli’s money. At least not in her eyes.
Yes, she could have gone into my bank at any moment, shown them my ID, and withdrawn every penny I had, but she wasn’t like that. What was mine was mine, what was hers was hers.
And at the moment, nothing was hers.
But she had a plan to change that. One she had been thinking about ever since she learned the day before that she might be stuck exactly where she was.
It was why she was currently loading up her shopping basket with several pounds of potatoes, squash, beans, bananas, apples, parsnips, turnips, onions, carrots, greens—
“Audie,” my mother said, staring in shock at Halli’s overflowing basket. “Honey, we can’t get all that.”
“Why not?” Halli was genuinely perplexed.
“Well...we’ll never eat all that. It’ll just go to waste.”
“No it won’t,” Halli said. “I’ll eat it.”
“But...who’s going to cook it?” my mom asked. She tugged at the bunch of Swiss chard. “I wouldn’t even know what to do with some of this.”
“I do,” Halli said. “I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry.” She patted my mom on the arm.
My mom laughed at her. “Honey! Listen, I think it’s great that you want to start taking better care of yourself, but we can’t just waste money like this. Now why don’t you go put some of that back, and let’s think about what we can realistically eat over the next week.”
Halli took a deep breath and held her annoyance in check. She smiled as politely as she could. “These are the foods I want, and I know how to cook them. Nothing will be wasted. I’ll make food for you, too. You’ll like it. Trust me.”
My mom gave her a look like I’d suddenly sprouted an extra head. Or like I was suffering from amnesia. We both know neither one of us has a clue how to cook. It’s the whole basis of our takeout lifestyle. And it’s why we’re always so thrilled whenever Will and Lydia’s mother, Elena, invites us over to their house for dinner.
“Everything will be fine,” Halli said. “I promise. And if I need to, I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mom muttered. “Come on.”
My mom stood nervously watching the cashier ring up Halli’s purchases. But she paid without saying anything more.
As they loaded bags into the trunk of our car, Halli took one more stab at reassuring my mother.
“I’ll make us something for dinner,” she said. “You’ll see. You’ll like it.”
My mom shook her head. “Audie...”
She reached out and hugged me. Who she thought was me.
Halli stiffened. Then she caught herself. She tried to relax, and ended up giving my mom a couple of friendly pats on the back. Then she pulled away.
“I’m...excited about you trying to cook,” my mom said.
Halli just smiled. She couldn’t tell my mother that she had cooked for herself most of her life: in fancy kitchens and primitive ones, in many countries and on every continent, on mountaintops, in jungles, on the deck of a wildly pitching boat, while suspended from ropes on the side of a cliff, and huddled next to a sled on a field of sea ice while Ginny guarded against polar bears.
No doubt about it, Halli would be doing a lot more than “trying.”
- Writer
