Work Text:
1.
When you are eight years old, your parents die in a fire. The newspaper says “incinerated,” and you look up the word in the dictionary in your bedroom. Incinerate, verb. Destroy by burning. Origin: late 15th century: from medieval Latin incinerat-‘burnt to ashes.’ You copy this information onto an index card, and then you sob into the sleeve of your sweater for an hour and a half.
You spend exactly one night in a foster home, shoved into two bedrooms with half a dozen other kids. You howl into your dirty pillowcase, and the older girl sharing your bed elbows you in the side, hard. “Shut up,” she hisses. “Don’t be a baby.”
Close your eyes tight and concentrate on imagining a big black pit inside your chest. Concentrate very hard and you can stop crying.
2.
Your new bedroom is pink and white and it has all the toys you could ever want. Concentrate. Stop crying.
3.
You recognize Aldous Leekie, the American—or no, Canadian—from before; he sits you down in his office and says, “I’m very sorry for your loss.” It makes you feel like crying again. (Don’t.)
He has five manila folders stacked on his desk. “There’s something your parents didn’t tell you, Rachel,” he says. “You are…” He hesitates. “Special.” Your parents did tell you that, but you don’t think it’s in the way he means. You curl your hands into fists. Your fingernails are too long (no one cuts them for you here), and the feeling of them digging into your palms helps you focus on what Aldous is saying.
“I don’t know that word,” you say. “Gen-etic-eye-dentical.”
“It means…” He thinks for a moment. “Clone. Or copy. It’s a little bit like an identical twin.”
“So there are other girls, in other places, who are clones of me.” You think maybe you should be angry, but you’re sad, still; you’re sad and it’s like a fog all around your head and you can’t remember how to be angry.
“Exactly!” His grin is lopsided, showing teeth. “Would you like to see them?”
You should say no. You know this like you know you shouldn’t interrupt when other people are talking, or like you know that if you hit someone else it hurts them. It’s just a feeling, right in your stomach. You should say no.
“Okay,” you say, and your heart beats faster as he pushes the stack of folders across the table. These are only a few, Aldous tells you, a few of many. There are dozens—thirty-eight, to be exact—and they’re all over the world. “Scattered across the globe,” is what he says. There’s a globe set up next to his desk, all shiny black and gold. He spins it, with a flourish.
“And we’re all the same?”
“Well,” he says, “none of them know the truth.”
You open the first file and see: Katja Obinger, eight years old. Her birthday is only one day after yours. She looks like you, but her hair is cropped short and spiky, almost like a boy’s; she gets good grades, like you, and her eyes are exactly the same color as yours. Hazel.
You always wanted a sister.
You try not to think about that. Try not to think about how you begged your parents to get another baby; instead say the word “copy” to yourself. Say it over and over again until you’ve learned that you are not the same as them. Put a drawing of a girl into the photocopier and make a copy, and make another one of that copy, and do it thirty-seven times until number thirty-eight is a speckled black mess. Look at the original drawing and the precision of the lines and tape it to your bedroom wall.
4.
When you turn eleven, you ask Aldous to buy you eyeliner and lipstick. You practice in the vanity mirror in your room. You haven’t thought about your mother in a while, but when you bring the tube of color to your lips you remember the pale pink shade she used to put on for events, and how she would kiss you goodbye and leave lipstick residue on your cheek.
Dig your fingernails into your leg until you don’t think about her anymore.Put on your red lipstick. When you go outside the boundaries of your lips: wipe it off. Try again. Do this until it’s perfect, and blow a kiss at the mirror; remember the words “she’ll be a heartbreaker, that girl.” Pretend the mirror is a boy whose heart you’re about to crush beneath your shoes, and smile because he has no idea.
5.
You are afraid of Marion Bowles. When she sees you wearing lipstick for the first time, she pulls you aside and asks if there’s anything else that you need. No, you tell her. “Well,” she says, “if you ever need something but you don’t want to go through Aldous, you know where to find me.”
When she leaves, you are shaking. Stop.
6.
It’s Marion who buys you high heels when you tell her that you’re tired of being treated like a child. It’s Marion who helps you get birth control when you’re sixteen, calls in the gynecologist and sets you up for an appointment. You’ve seen enough movies to know that first times are supposed to be sacred, but you have thirty-seven slices of real life at your fingertips and you’ve learned that movies are wrong about almost everything. Nine of your genetic identicals have already had sex, and you read the accounts from monitors—best friends, boyfriends—and roll your eyes at the cliché of it all. Seven with boys. Two with girls. All, regardless of nationality or sexual orientation, seem to have lost their virginities to the sound of Madonna playing in the background.
You like to think of the two as aberrations: Janika Zingler with a new awful haircut every other month, Cosima Niehaus with the scars on her eyebrows from unsuccessful piercings. So you pass over the women and pick the new concierge, Ryan, an eighteen-year-old business major with well-pressed suits and a permanent furrow in his brow.
He insists on taking you out to dinner. You eat filet mignon and smile, smile, smile as he talks about his family and his dog and the last movie he saw, and at the end of the night you bring him up the darkened staircase to your bedroom. He kisses you and you don’t like it much, the insistent hands at your waist, the pressure of his body. You push him away. You grip his shoulders and kiss him, hard, and you learn: this is better. This is not beer-drenched teenage romance; this is how you show that you are stronger than they give you credit for. Aldous and the doctors and the psychiatrists—they tiptoe around you like you’re made of glass. Show them that you know how to win. Push him down on the bed and fuck him like girls aren’t supposed to fuck boys, like he’s nothing, like he’s not even there. Don’t let him touch you with tenderness.
It’s over when you are finished with him. And when you are lying alone in the damp sheets, remind yourself that you are different. Because they—Janika and Katja and Petra and Miranda and all the others—they had something taken from them. You took.
Remind yourself that you are better.
7.
You are searching through the archives when you find them: five boxes labeled Duncan filled with video tapes. “What is this?” you ask the archivist, and you make your voice steely and sharp like you have heard Marion do. He’s barely stuttered through an explanation when you order the boxes sent to your room.
Your parents, in motion, are unfamiliar. Your file has headshots and you’ve memorized the lines in those faces, the soft expressions, the ill-advised haircuts. But here they are laughing and smiling and everything is bright, red leaves in autumn, blue-green pool water in the summertime. “I love you, too, Daddy,” the child on the tapes insists. She is thrown into the pool shrieking with laughter and comes up, still giggling, flailing in a poor imitation of the forward crawl until she reaches the edge.
The places are familiar: the side yard of the house, the library, the community garden. But you don’t remember laughing like that. You don’t remember laughing at all.
You watch through the tapes over the next week. You watch the girl on the tapes turn five, six, seven, eight. You watch her laugh and scream and sing herself “Happy Birthday” and throw water balloons and do cartwheels and talk about how much she loves math and science and how she wants to be an astronaut, and your chest is hollow.
Watch them until you remember.
(Watch them until you have memorized every word and can pretend this is remembering. Watch until you have memorized your parents’ voices and can pretend this is love.)
8.
You are tired of the way your hair flows dark around your shoulders, the way you can braid it into one docile plait down your back, the way it makes you look like Beth Childs and Danielle Fournier and Regina Butler and Olga Ivanov and Jennifer Fitzsimmons. You could be any of them; you could be none of them; you could die and without Dyad sequencing your genome nobody would know that one of them had taken your place.
You are tired of looking the same as the little girl in the videos.
Cut your hair like a blade. Bleach it lighter and choke on the stench of ammonia; rinse it in the bathroom sink. Take off your clothes and look at yourself in the mirror. Put on your dress and your heels and know, when you walk into a room, that they are afraid.