Chapter 2

Margo’s lips curved in a sly smile. She looked around the walls of Elizabeth’s bedroom, thinking she would redecorate. The bland off-white colors used when the twins finally stopped sharing a room had never been her style. She contemplated a new color scheme.

“Blue, maybe? Red…orange…no, I’ve got it!” she thought excitedly. “Black!”

Her eyes sparkled as she wondered how Elizabeth’s room would look like painted a deep, rich black. She jumped off the chaise under the window and ran for a Sweet Valley phone book in a desk drawer. Flipping through the pages, she found an advertisement for a decorating center. Taking note of the address, she hurried across the room to the bathroom door that separated her room from Jessica’s.

Margo flinched as she opened the door and saw Jessica mirror her actions. Jessica looked just as startled.

“Jess, I need your keys for the Jeep. I can’t find my set,” Margo said.

“Are you out of your mind?” Jessica replied. Her eyes were as wide as saucers. “There’s always been just one set! And furthermore, they’re on the top of your dresser!”

“Oh, silly me. I must not have seen them,” Margo cooed. She turned around and scooped them up. “See you later, sister dear.” She raced out of the room without a backward glance.

Jessica stood there, baffled. Something wasn’t right. She stood there, her head cocked in thought.

“Liz and I have opened the bathroom door at the same time a million times before. Why was that so freaky? And what was that about the Jeep keys? She knows there’s only one set of keys, Mom and Dad only got one set on purpose. Ever since that whole episode with that psycho Margo, she’s been so different.”

Jessica still couldn’t figure it out. She was so disconcerted about the encounter with her twin sister; she forgot why she had opened the door in the first place. She looked blankly at the shower. No, that wasn’t it. She didn’t have to use the toilet, because there wasn’t one. Her gaze wandered across the double vanity and the wide mirror above it. She saw nothing that interested her. However, Liz had left her bathroom door open, which was very un-Liz-like.

Jessica stepped slowly across the bathroom and stopped in the doorway to Liz’s room. Her eyes widened in shock.

The room was a wreck! Elizabeth’s bed was unmade, dirty clothes littered the cream-colored carpet, one desk drawer was pulled almost all the way out, and there was a dirty plate on top of the desk. And it had been there for a while, considering the green fuzz that decorated the plate’s surface. Jessica tiptoed into the room and almost tripped on the contents of the overflowing wastebasket.

“Liz’s articles! What are they doing in the trash?” Jessica quickly flipped through the piles of newspaper articles written since the beginning of the school year. Liz had been on the staff of The Oracle since freshman year, which had seemed like decades to Jessica. “I thought she was saving these for…well, whatever she was saving them for.”

Jessica’s head snapped up at the sound of feet pounding up the stairs. She leaped to her feet and scrambled out of Elizabeth’s room just as she heard Elizabeth’s voice call from the hallway.

“Jessica, the Jeep won’t start, so I’m taking Mom’s car!” Liz called.

“Okay,” Jessica automatically shouted back. “That’s weird. It started just fine when I went to the bakery this morning.”

But as the thought went through her head, Jessica heard the front door slam, and, a second later, her mother’s car squealed away from the curb. She debated going back into Elizabeth’s room but the ringing phone interrupted.

“Jess, it’s me.” Lila’s voice sounded out of breath, like she’d just run five miles. “What are you doing?

“Nothing. Liz just took off like a bat out of hell, and something about it didn’t seem right, but whatever,” Jessica replied, forgetting the incident immediately.

“Oh, who cares about your nerdy twin. I have an emergency,” Lila said anxiously.

Jessica’s ears perked at Lila’s admission. “What it is?” she asked.

“You need to get over here right now,” Lila commanded and slammed down the phone.

“Jeez, what’s her problem?” Jessica wondered as she glanced idly at her reflection in her mirrored closet doors. She glanced down at the yoga pants she’d crawled into that morning and decided they were good enough to wear for Lila’s emergency. She shrugged into a zip-up sweatshirt and headed for the stairs.

Jessica picked up the Jeep’s keys from the small table in the foyer as she opened the front door. Something was nagging at her thoughts, but she mentally pushed it aside in favor of Lila’s so-called emergency.