Final Girl by Michelle Schusterman (beach books .TXT) 📕

wiped my eyes furiously. Now I knew what the Thing was doing. It was making sure I moved back to Ohio permanently. And it was doing a killer job of it, too. Judging by the heartbroken look on Dad’s face, I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t telling Jess and the others right now that the next episode would be his last.

Slamming the laptop closed, I sat there and fumed for nearly a minute. The only way to stop the Thing would be to tell Dad about the Thing. Except that wouldn’t work at all, because whether Dad believed me or not—whether he thought I was being tormented by a ghost or just “crazy”—he’d definitely want to leave the show. And if I didn’t tell him about the Thing, he’d just go on believing I was doing and saying all this horrible stuff because I was afraid to tell him I really wanted to be with Mom. Solution: again, Ohio.

No matter what I did, the Thing would win.

I was moving back to Chelsea.

CHAPTER NINE THE GIRL WHO CRIED DOPPELGANGER

INTERIOR: ATTIC—NIGHT

LEE climbs the ladder into her grandmother’s attic. She pulls a chain and the single overhead bulb flickers on, casting dim light onto dusty boxes, trunks, and old furniture. Lee looks around somberly. She wanders over to a box and opens it. A flurry of dust makes her cough.

LEE (amused)

So you weren’t a total clean freak then, Gran?

She turns around and gasps at the sight of her own reflection. Then she laughs when she realizes it’s just a tarnished old mirror. As she steps away, we see in the reflection a dark figure moving swiftly but silently in the shadows. Lee moves toward an old dresser against the wall.

LEE (softly)

What the . . .

Lee picks up a small figurine. It’s identical to the princess figurine on her dresser at home, but this one is blackened, as if it has been burned. Clearly puzzled, Lee turns around, still gazing at the figurine, and finds herself face to face with her doppelganger. It’s identical to her except for its eyes, which are solid black. Lee drops the figurine and screams at the top of her lungs, stumbling back against the dresser and knocking off the mirror. It shatters on the floor, and Lee runs to the ladder and hurriedly climbs down. The doppelganger picks up a shard of mirror and studies its reflection for a moment. Then, gripping the shard like a knife, it slowly follows after Lee.

THE business center was deserted, and I yawned hugely as I pulled out the rolling chair in front of the nearest computer. It was five to eight in the morning, which was absurdly early for me, but the twelve-hour time difference between Beijing and Ohio made it necessary. After plugging in my headphones, I signed into my e-mail and made sure the available option was checked in my video chat window.

Once Dad had gone to bed, I’d huddled under the covers and read Mi Jin’s screenplay by the light of my phone. Weirdly, reading a story about someone’s horrifying struggle with their evil doppelganger was the perfect distraction from my actual real-life experience with one.

I hadn’t made any notes, though. Not yet. I was nervous about that part. Mi Jin had asked for feedback, and I was torn between fear of criticizing her work and offending her, and fear of not criticizing her work and letting her down.

I did have some ideas of how to make it better, though. Overall, it was an awesome story, and I could totally picture it in my head as a movie. But as I’d read, I’d found myself mentally rewriting some parts, changing a little bit here and there. Which, I knew, was what Mi Jin wanted me to do. It was just that actually telling her what to do with her screenplay seemed really . . . arrogant.

A soft boop-beep interrupted my thoughts.

trishhhhbequiet is calling you. Accept?

I clicked Yes, and a moment later, Trish and Mark appeared on the screen. The sight of the two of them in Trish’s room, where the three of us had spent so much time together in sixth and seventh grade, gave me the strangest feeling every time we video chatted. It was equal parts happiness, wistfulness, and a third emotion I never let myself think about too hard.

“Hey!” Trish exclaimed, adjusting her laptop screen. “Whoa, you look tired.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “It’s eight in the morning for me, you know. Hi, Fang!”

Grinning, Trish glanced over her shoulder at the tank on her dresser, where her pet snake was coiled up. “He says hi.”

“What was the bridge like?” Mark pushed his glasses up his nose and leaned forward eagerly. “We already read your blog post. See anything creepy?”

I hesitated. I hadn’t told Trish and Mark about the Thing, because . . . well, for a lot of reasons. Mostly because I knew how ridiculous it would sound to anyone who lived in the suburbs and went to school like normal kids, instead of spending every hour of every day with a bunch of ghost hunters. But in a few days, the next episode of P2P would air. And everyone would see the Thing on television.

“Yeah,” I said finally. “We did, actually.”

I launched into a description of our trip out to the Yongheng Bridge. But I left out the part about me trying to project the Thing on my camera, about the weird, roller-coaster loop feeling it had left me with. And when I got to the part about the ghost having my face, I found myself telling them Mi Jin’s doppelganger theory. As if this ghost version of myself had just appeared, and I had no idea why.

I was lying to my best friends. Just like I was lying to my dad. I didn’t want to, not at all . . . but the longer I kept these secrets about the Thing, the more secrets there were to keep, the bigger the lie became. Like a cartoon snowball, rolling