She looked at the image, then to me, then to the image again. “Normally I would tell you that you’ve taken one too many hits, but every time I look back at it, for like a tenth of a second, I remember something about it.”

She grabbed it away from me. “Like this—” And she pointed to the hands I drew on the wave. Don’t ask me why a tsunami has hands, but it does. “You drew four fingers, but it only has three. Isn’t that right?”

And yes, she was right.

“Can I keep this?”

“Sure.”

She folded it and stuck it in her locker, and that’s when Layton appeared like a stealth bomber, putting his five-fingered hand around her waist. “What’s going on here?” he asked jovially. “Something I should be worried about?”

Katie didn’t miss a beat. “Ash was just asking if I knew where you were.”

He pulled her closer in a bone-crush of affection. “I’m right here.”

“So . . . I was wondering if I could borrow your notes for science,” I told him, pulling the fiction out of thin air just as deftly as Katie had. “My notebook fell in our Jacuzzi.”

“I thought your Toughbook was waterproof,” he said. “You’re always bragging about it.”

“Oh, right. No, I meant the paper kind.”

He scoffed at the idea of me using a paper notebook. In my old life I didn’t have any waterproof electronics. Just an old iPhone with a perpetually cracked screen, and a “fair condition” eBay Mac with memory issues.

“Why don’t you ask that brainy kid, Peter, that you hang out with?”

“It’s Paul,” I told him.

“Yeah, ask him—his notes’ll be way better than mine.”

Then he sauntered off to class with Katie in his proprietary grip. Katie didn’t turn back to look at me or say goodbye. Maybe because she knew Layton would notice or maybe because the near headlock he had her in restricted her motion.

Mission two of that morning: identify the twin skaters. I started by charming the school secretary before class with small talk and mild flattery, noticing how cool it was that her earrings matched her nail polish. Then, before it got weird, I asked her the big question.

“Do you think maybe you could help me? I’m doing a genetics report and I need to interview all the identical twins at our school.”