She is stealing my life.
My mind is racing. If the girl can convince my own parents that she’s me, what hope does anyone else have? She’ll be able to keep me down here as long as she likes. No one knows I’m missing.
And once she has all the information she needs, there will be no point keeping me alive. Whatever disturbing mechanism she’s used to resuscitate my head independently from my body, she can just switch it off.
I try to wriggle free of the vice, but none of the necessary muscles are attached. Looking at my reflection, I see my disembodied skull hasn’t moved at all.
‘Can you feed yourself tomorrow night?’ Dad asks on the screen.
‘Nope,’ the impostor says. ‘Guess I’ll starve to death.’
Mum rolls her eyes.
‘Where are you off to?’ the girl continues.
I’m shouting inside my head: Look at her! That’s not your daughter!
‘We’re going out with Henrietta’s parents,’ Dad says. ‘Your mother wants to see that new Cate Blanchett film.’
‘And your father,’ Mum adds, ‘is doing an excellent job of pretending he doesn’t.’ She folds the corner of a page and closes the magazine. ‘I’ll make a salad for you before we go.’
‘I could fry those lamb chops instead,’ the girl offers. ‘Then I could eat one and you could reheat the others when you got back.’
‘I don’t want you burning the house down. Salad will be fine.’
‘OK,’ the girl says.
I’m not a kid any more, I would have said. I can cook without starting a fire. But there’s no sign that Mum or Dad has noticed ‘my’ strange behaviour.
What can I do to save myself? I can’t move. I can’t even talk unless she lets me. My only bargaining power is my knowledge—she probably wants more of it. I can stall her, or tell her lies. She can’t steal my whole identity with just my email password and PIN.
But she already has more than that. She has my face. If I become too unreliable, she might just kill me. A landslide of anxiety covers me as I picture her sawing the rest of my body into pieces and burying them in the back yard while Mum and Dad are at the cinema. Anything she doesn’t already know about my life, she can just pretend to have forgotten. Who would believe she wasn’t me?
I look over at the 3D printer. I’ve watched Mum use it to make mixing bowls, owl-shaped candles, even a pair of sunglasses. She positions the object under the laser scanners, and then the syringes drip various materials—wax, resin, silicone—in layer after layer of intricate patterns until the object is complete.
Maybe the girl removed my head, placed it in the scanner, and used the printer to create a hollow mask, realistic enough to fool Mum and Dad. A few days ago, I wouldn’t have thought this was possible. But a few days ago, I wasn’t a severed head on a shelf in the basement.
It won’t be enough just to tell her lies. I’ll have to tell her the kind of lies that will get her noticed. The kind that will make my family suspicious enough to come down into the basement and have a look at her ‘science homework’.
But I need something that won’t make the impostor suspicious when I say it. And I don’t know how much time I have.
‘Mum?’ she says, on the screen. ‘You want me to do the dishes before I go to bed?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘You sure? It’s no trouble.’
‘They can wait.’
The impostor looks crestfallen—as though she really wanted to do the dishes. She says, ‘Well, good night then,’ and kisses Mum on the cheek.
Dad is staring at a potted fern in the corner. He says, ‘Night, Chloe,’ without taking his eyes off the leaves. Is a camera in there? Has he seen it?
The impostor walks out of frame.
Mum and Dad remain seated.
I stare at the TV, willing them to say something about their daughter’s odd behaviour. But they don’t. They sit in silence for a while, before Mum gets up and asks Dad if he’s done with his coffee. Dad says no, and Mum leaves.
After a while, Dad gets up too. He walks over to the fern, and peers into it.
I’m thinking, Come on! Yes! Go Dad!
He clenches his fist around something inside. ‘Gotcha,’ he mutters, before washing his hands and following Mum.
No camera. It must just have been a bug.
After that, there’s no sound down here but the faint whine of the television and the toneless rumbling of the heating ducts. I wonder how long I can stand this before I go insane.
Part of me wonders if I already am.
YOU ARE READING
Replica
Teen Fiction"Whose body is that on the table?" I ask. She stares at me, as though the answer is obvious. "It's yours," she says. ~ This is a sample of REPLICA. Oxford University Press has published the full thing – get it from your favourite bookstore or from...
