Vanessa glanced back and forth between Kayla and me. "Who's Jack?"

"Um, just some boy Mazie knew from back in Spokane." She kicked me under the table. "Right, Mazie?"

My mouth gaped open and I realized I was still facing Jack's double. Twins. That was it. Blake had an identical twin who died. But that didn't make sense. Kayla would have known about him if that were the case.

Darren brushed his hand over mine. It touched me briefly and then he pulled back. "If you stare at him too long, you'll turn into a pillar of salt."

I blinked hard and swiveled so I was facing Kayla again. "Sorry..." This was not the time to explain to new people about my ghost situation. "Blake just reminds me of someone I know. He looks so much like him, it's crazy." I emphasized this last line for Kayla's benefit.

"Well, I hope their looks are the only thing they have in common." Vanessa scowled in Blake's direction. "Blake Sumner is not nice. He told the whole school last year that Lydia Niece had chlamydia."

My eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. I didn't know how to make sense of all this. "That's awful. I can't believe someone would lie like that just to hurt another person."

"Oh, it wasn't a lie. She did have chlamydia. But still. You don't go telling everyone. It was personal information. That's what she gets for trying to be a Popular, I guess."

The three friends talked about video games and the teachers they either loved or hated for the rest of lunch. I barely joined in. Usually my lack of conversational participation would have been rooted in the fact that I most likely had never played the video game or seen the show or taken a class with the teacher. In this case, though, all social anxiety had been replaced with total confusion. I didn't have a chance to talk to Kayla alone until after lunch on our way to sixth period.

"What the hell was going on back there, Mazie? I think your brain short circuited because I could have sworn you said Blake was your little ghost friend."

I stopped walking and pulled her over to the wall. "He is, Kayla. I'm not making this up. I don't understand it, but Jack looks exactly like Blake."

Kayla crossed her arms and rolled her eyes. "I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but that's not possible. For better or for worse, Blake is still on this side of the dirt heap."

I flinched. I wasn't good at arguing with friends and this felt very much like the beginning of an argument. "I don't know what to say. I wouldn't believe me if I were you either, but it's the truth." If only she could see Jack, then this misunderstanding would be over and done with.

She sighed. "My class is at the end of the hallway. Yours is right there." She pointed to a room across from us. "I don't know what to say either but we're still on for driving around town, right?"

Relief hit me so hard, I practically toppled over. "You still want to do that, even though you probably think I'm out of my mind?"

"I haven't made a final decision on your capacity to distinguish between fantasy and reality, but yeah, we're still on." She uncrossed her arms. "Bell's about to ring. Gotta go. Meet me in the parking lot after school!"

After school. Such a sweet phrase. I entered my next class, Communications, and scanned the room for the spot least likely to draw attention to myself. No sooner had I sunk into the chair than I realized I was being stared at. Not new. People had been staring all day. But this felt particularly intense, so intense that I whipped my head around, ready to fumble my way through a bit of awkward small talk that would indicate to the staring person that I wasn't someone they really wanted to get to know.

My resolve fell when I saw who'd been glaring at the back of my head with enough intensity to ignite a forest fire. Ethan Campbell.

"If it isn't my long-lost cousin."

"Oh!" Ethan was the last person I expected to see. "Um, hello?"

He scowled. "I forgot you might be here."

Something about his tone brought my ire back up. This time, I refused to fumble with my words. "I meant well back in the hospital, and I'm truly sorry about your brother. You don't have to be a jerk."

His scowl eased a bit. "I'm sorry. I'm not used to this." He brought his hand up to indicate the classroom and most likely all of Dorn High.

"Why are you here, anyways? I thought you were homeschooled."

He shifted uncomfortably. "My parents have their hands full with my brother. They didn't want me left to my own devices or just hanging out at the hospital all the time, so here I am. None of us are really happy about it, though."

He could add me to that list. I decided to take the high road and not respond cheekily. "Well, we're both new here, so we probably shouldn't act like mortal enemies."

His discomfort didn't diminish. "Yeah, whatever, fine. We can be frenemies or whatever dumb term you people use."

You people? What the hell did that mean? The bell rang just as I was working up the nerve to ask him if he was a misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, homophobic dipshit who doled out "you peoples" to anyone who didn't share his exact background and outlook on life.

For the next forty-five minutes, we were given an outline of what we'd be learning in Communications by a short man with a long red beard named Mr. Beedi. Mr. Beedi seemed like he could have benefited from taking the class himself, but I recalled Vanessa saying she liked him, so I kept my mind open. I thought about Ethan drilling his laser eyes into the back of my skull; first impressions weren't always right, but a lot of the time, they were dead on.

When the bell rang to release us to the next period, Ethan hopped out of his desk and retreated without a word to me. Since this was often my MO, I couldn't totally fault him, but I managed to anyways. "Jerk," I mumbled under my breath.

Two more periods, the next one study hall and then Computer Sciences. The end was nigh. If I could just make it through without slipping on a banana peel or tearing a big hole in the seat of my pants, the good and bad of the day would just about even out, though it's weirdness would shine bright in my memory for the rest of my life.

After Computer Sciences, I only had a brief pitstop at my locker to drop off some books and pick up a few more. Then I could fly free in Kayla's old clunker. I rounded the corner and stopped dead in my tracks.

Blake (it's hard to think of him by that name but I needed to get used to it) leaned against locker number 156—my locker, chatting up perfect hair tanning bed girl from my homeroom, who happened to have the locker right next to mine.

What to do, what to do... I needed my English textbook, but did I need it more than I needed to avoid Jack's doppelganger slash school's prince asshole?

Swallowing, I decided to be mature, eff-the-world Mazie and just go up to my own locker and demand that he gets his testosterone-fueled body off it. Or maybe just ask politely.

"Um, excuse me. If you could just..." He turned in surprise as if to be spoken to by someone such as myself was a brand-new experience for him. I motioned to my locker. "That's mine."

Tan bed girl grabbed his shoulder with her perfectly manicured nails, because of course. "That's her locker, Blake."

He continued to glare. "So? I didn't hear her say please."

This was when a more self-assured person would jump in and say something like, "I didn't hear you fuck off." But a self-confident person wasn't talking to Blake Sumner, Mazie Rivera was, so instead I said, "Could you please get off of my locker, asshole?"

No, I didn't. I left off the asshole part like the coward I was. But I thought it. I thought it so hard.

Blake moved like a snail crossing a garden path. Tanning Bed girl laughed. "You shouldn't be so mean, Blake." Which translated into reality as "I know you're wrong to act this way so I'm going to pretend to scold you, but it actually makes you so much hotter!"

"I'm not being mean, Dakota. She's new. She has to learn how things work around here. It would be meaner if I didn't address her inadequacies, now, don't you think?"

Dakota. If I had my facts straight, Tanning Bed Girl from my homeroom was Miss Junior Popular Queen herself. Faaaaantastic.

By now, Blake had inched himself far enough away from my locker that I could open it, slip in my Computer Sciences book and take out my English textbook. I closed and locked it and then hurried away, hoping I wasn't expected to curtsy before I left their royal presence.

Their laughter stayed with me all the way to the end of the hallway.

Jack, my kind, tapdancing friend, couldn't possibly be related in any way to Blake. And yet, that crooked smile. And every single other feature. They were exact clones of each other, only Blake was the evil clone created in a lab by a supervillain and Jack was the unsuspecting original article. Who also happened to be a ghost.

When I realized this crazy scenario was the most logical one I could come up with, I ended my last moment of day one in Dorn High School by bursting into tears.