Ivy shook her head. “I don’t have a note. I don’t even have a file!”
Mrs. Abbott’s face flushed with sympathy, and before Olivia knew it, her mom was rushing around the table to give Ivy a hug. To Olivia’s surprise, Ivy didn’t stiffen. In fact, she actually seemed comforted by it. Of course, Olivia’s mom was a master of the art of hugging.
“I feel like I have a whole new daughter,” Olivia’s mom declared proudly as she began clearing the table a little while later. She beamed at Ivy. “I can’t wait to see more of Olivia’s other half.”
Olivia watched for Ivy’s reaction, half expecting her sister to look like a deer caught in headlights. Olivia loved her parents, but they could be super overbearing sometimes.
Ivy looked genuinely touched though. “That sounds killer.” She grinned.
The next thing Olivia knew, her father had a mountain of photo albums in his arms.
“Please, no,” Olivia whined. “Ivy doesn’t want to see pictures. Do you, Ivy?”
“Wait until you see Olivia dressed as a green kangaroo in her kindergarten play. She was so cute!” her mom squealed.
“As a matter of fact,” said Ivy, shooting Olivia a devilish grin as she followed Mr. Abbott into the living room, “I would like to see that.”
Three photo albums and hundreds of embarrassing photos later, Olivia was pretty much at the end of her rope. To her relief, a car horn sounded outside.
Olivia leaped to her feet and looked out the living room window. “Ivy’s dad’s here,” she said. “Time to go!”
“Aw,” Ivy teased from where she was sandwiched between Olivia’s parents on the couch. “But we’re just getting started.”
“Here’s Olivia with spaghetti in her hair,” her mom said.
“Sorry,” Olivia said firmly, pulling her sister to her feet. “Show’s over.”
Ivy grinned. “Thank you so much for dinner, Mr. and Mrs. Abbott,” she said.
“Call me Steve,” Olivia’s father said.
“And I’m Audrey,” said Olivia’s mother. “Why don’t you invite your father in for a cup of coffee, Ivy?”
“I can’t tonight,” Ivy said apologetically. “I still have some homework to finish.”
“Well,” Olivia’s mom said, “tell him we can’t wait to meet him.”
Olivia walked Ivy to the door.
“That wasn’t bad at all,” Ivy said in a low voice as she slipped into her jacket.
“You don’t think so?” Olivia demanded. “Okay, next time we’ll look at pictures of you drooling and wearing embarrassing clothes!”
Ivy laughed. “I’ll see you in the morning at school,” she said, giving Olivia a hug. “I bet nobody even reads the piece about us in the school paper.”
“Probably not.” Olivia shrugged. “But I’m still glad we told our parents.”
“Me, too,” Ivy agreed.
After Olivia had closed the door, her mom appeared and peered out through one of the glass panes.
“It must be hard,” Audrey Abbott said thoughtfully as Ivy climbed into her father’s car, “with only one parent.”
Olivia had never really thought about that. She gave her mom a hug. “I’m glad Ivy finally got to meet you,” she whispered.
Over her mom’s shoulder, Olivia saw her dad emerge from the living room.
“Nice girl, Ivy,” he said matter-of-factly, “but who died?”
Olivia rolled her eyes and started to explain, again.
Chapter 3
Standing on the front steps of Franklin Grove Middle School, Ivy flipped open her fuzzy black spider watch and tapped it with a black fingernail. If it was really 8:10 on Wednesday morning, where were all the people? The steps should have been packed. What if my watch is wrong and I’m late for class? she thought.
As Ivy rushed toward the huge oak doors, she could hear a commotion inside. Stepping out of the cold December sunshine, she found herself engulfed in a chattering crowd of people.
Looking around, Ivy realized she was at the end of a huge, disorganized line that led to the tables where the school newspaper was distributed. A pimply sixth-grader, who was coming the other way, walked right into her, his eyes glued to the front page of the paper in his hands. “Sorry,” he mumbled. Then, glancing up, his mouth dropped open. “It’s you!” he cried. “Or is it her?” he added suspiciously.
Ivy looked down at the paper he was holding and saw the towering headline, LONG-LOST TWINS FIND EACH OTHER! over huge, side-by-side photographs of Ivy and Olivia’s faces. So much for no one reading the article, she thought with a grimace.
She put her head down, letting a curtain of dark hair conceal her face, and started elbowing her way through the crowd. Being the center of attention was hazardous to Ivy’s health; it was like lying out in a bikini without any sunblock.
Luckily Ivy succeeded in plunging through the fray without anybody else recognizing her. Emerging at the edge of the crowd, she noticed another throng of people squeezing into a classroom up ahead. She skulked over and, balancing on the tips of her steel-toed boots, peered over everyone’s heads.
Olivia was trapped in front of the whiteboard, still in her coat. She was flanked by Toby Decker, who had written the article for the school paper, and her friend Camilla Edmunson who was wearing a blue hoodie that said THE PAST WAS THE FUTURE on it. Camilla was seriously into sci-fi.
People were shouting questions.
“Can you read each other’s minds?”
“Were you surgically separated at birth?”
“Have you ever met the Olsen twins?” Olivia was trying to answer, but people kept interrupting.
“Did you always know you had a twin?” a girl in a red beret shouted.
Sort of, Ivy thought. Looking back, she had always felt like something was missing in her life, but she had never known what it was until the day she found Olivia.
In the middle of the classroom, greasy-haired Garrick Stephens, probably the lamest vampire in the whole school, got up on top of a desk. “Does anybody have any questions about when I climbed out of a coffin during a funeral?” he called. Garrick and his boneheaded friends—aka the Beasts—had recently sparked a witch hunt on national TV that had almost revealed the existence of vampires. Now he was clearly jealous that someone else was getting all the attention. Somebody threw an eraser at his head, and he lost his balance and fell off the desk. Ivy couldn’t keep from laughing, and a girl in front of her looked around and gasped.