Ivy summarily dumped the file on the table, and they both started sifting through the papers.
“Anything about them having kids?” Ivy asked.
“No.” Olivia shook her head. “Just a potential hybrid alert.”
Then Olivia’s hands fell on a Xeroxed newspaper clipping from The Andover Rover. The headline read, LOCAL, SUSANNAH KENDALL, 34, DIES IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT. Her breath caught, and she pushed the clipping in front of her sister. Ivy closed her eyes for a moment and let out a heavy sigh. Then her eyes flew open. “The guard!” she whispered. Sure enough, Olivia could hear faint footsteps outside in the hallway. Together, they frantically shoved the pages back into their folder and shoved the folder back into the cabinet. Olivia pushed the cabinet shut as Ivy turned out the lights.
The main door of ASHH hissed open. “Shhh,” Ivy whispered to her sister. Olivia backed into a corner as the tall shadow of the guard moved slowly along the glass wall. Ivy saw a display cabinet behind her sister, with a small sign atop it that said ALARMED.
“Wait!” Ivy whispered as her sister bumped into the cabinet.
The guard’s shadow on the wall froze, and Ivy and Olivia both held their breaths as the glass cabinet rocked back and forth. Ivy prayed that it wouldn’t tip over and shatter. Miraculously, it righted itself.
I’m sure just a bump wouldn’t set off the alarm,
Ivy thought with relief. That’s when the office flooded with flashing red lights and a blaring high-pitched noise. Ivy and her sister dove underneath the stainless steel table as the guard burst through the door.
Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, he gave a confused grunt, and moved around the table to examine the display cabinet. Olivia and Ivy carefully inched to the other side of the table, then slipped out of the door under the cover of the blaring alarm.
The main door to ASHH slid open and the twins raced through it and down the hall. The elevator beeped and started to open as they flew past it. As she rounded the corner at the V-Gen end of the hall, Ivy glanced over her shoulder to see a herd of uniformed guards stampeding out of the elevator toward ASHH.
We made it! Ivy thought, and shared a giddy look with her sister as they walked through the V-Gen lab door.
“Hey!” Brendan waved from his seat in the corner, where he was sipping a large glass of water.
“Are you okay?” Ivy ran over and hugged him with mock concern.
“I’m fine,” Brendan grinned. His face was damp—somehow, he’d managed to wipe off Olivia’s blush. “It must have been something I ate at the school cafeteria today.”
Mr. Daniels appeared behind them. “They must stop putting garlic in everything when so many young people are allergic,” he said in a serious voice. He turned to Ivy. “Where did you two disappear to?”
“We were in the ladies’ room,” Ivy answered quickly. “I was so anxious about Brendan’s condition, I suddenly had to go.” She tried to look embarrassed.
“You must have been gone for fifteen minutes,” Mr. Daniels observed.
“We got locked out,” Olivia stammered. “We had to get a security guard to let us back in.”
“Oh, no,” Mr. Daniels said with genuine concern. “Well, it appears all of us have had quite an eventful afternoon.”
As the three of them skipped out of the office building arm in arm a few minutes later, Ivy and her sister debriefed Brendan on their escapade.
“That’s killer,” Brendan remarked. “You found out almost everything you could have hoped for!”
“Thanks to you,” said Ivy, squeezing his arm.
The sun was starting to set as the three of them sat huddled on the curb in front of the guard hut waiting for the bus.
“Maybe our parents wanted to keep us secret,” Ivy theorized.
“From ASHH?” Brendan asked.
Ivy nodded.
“And maybe from the whole Lazar family, too,” Olivia pointed out. “After all, the Lazars didn’t approve.”
Ivy entwined her sister’s fingers in her own and looked down at the alternating pattern of pink and black fingernails it made. She lay her head on her sister’s shoulder. “At least now we know their names,” she said.
“Karl and Susannah.” Olivia sighed.
“Karl and Susannah.” Ivy repeated thoughtfully.
Chapter 9
All day Tuesday, Olivia still felt giddy from their success at the ASHH offices. In fact, she was still humming to herself Wednesday morning, when Ivy and Sophia appeared at her locker while she was putting her jacket away.
“Code black.” They grinned before darting away. Olivia knew from secret meetings during the Serena Star affair that that meant she should meet them in the science hall bathroom immediately. She quickly slammed her locker shut and followed them down the hall.
“With smiles like those, you two are a disgrace to Goths everywhere,” Olivia teased as the bathroom door swung shut behind her. “What’s up?” Ivy bent down to make sure all the stalls were empty. When she gave a thumbs-up, Sophia reached into her black cat backpack and pulled out a magazine. She held it out to Olivia with both hands.
It was the new issue of Vamp. And she was on the cover! The picture was of Ivy and Olivia, looking into each other’s eyes in the ornate mirror in Ivy’s guest bathroom. The headline read, TWINS TO DIE FOR. “If anyone in our community didn’t suspect you knew our secret before,” Sophia said proudly, “they sure will now. But nothing swings public opinion like the cover of Vamp.”
Olivia grabbed the magazine and flipped it open. She landed right in the middle of a series of glossy pictures of her and her sister, each coupled with a little paragraph of text.
“It’s eight pages long,” Ivy enthused, and she and Sophia gathered around Olivia so they could all look at the same time.
There was Ivy playing the piano, while Olivia sat on top of it. “That was such a killer idea,” Sophia murmured.
There was Ivy in her cocktail dress, trying to pop a huge round pink bubble gum bubble that had been photoshopped in over Olivia’s mouth.
“So cool!” said Olivia.
And there they were in front of the stairs, looking totally glammed out in their burgundy and green gowns. The last spread was the grand finale: a collage of artsy black-and-white photos of the twins together in the mirror.
“‘Ivy Vega and Olivia Abbott share a bond that only blood sisters can,’ ” Ivy read over Olivia’s shoulder. “ ‘They laugh at each other’s jokes and cry at each other’s hardships. Now that they have discovered each other, they are, in a word, inseparable.’ ”