(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 17

I had my worries when first I saw the car that the four had managed to get a hold of. It could be stolen from a junkyard and it wouldn't have surprised me, rust covering what seemed like half of its exterior, scraped paint, which might once have been either blue or green, filling the rest. It looked like a car wreck, which somebody had forced back into the shape of a car. It sounded somewhat like it, too!
"What exactly is it that this friend of yours might be able to do?" asked Vera as we finally pulled in at the parking lot opposite the train station. She had said very little on the way there, seeming to not exactly know how to handle the situation. It was abundantly clear that none of the four of them were used to someone outside their little circle making demands, even when it was, or was presented as, something meant to help them. There was something stiff about them. Not so much in the way they moved, but in the way they reacted to one another. As if they all knew what to do when they did it amongst themselves, but with no room for improvisation when others interrupted them. I knew that a bit from group assignments at school, with a few kids being extremely good at it when it was only them in a group. If someone else tried to help, it usually ended in sneers and frustration. Some people worked best, or only worked, in their own way, even when working with others. People were weird.
"He just knows a lot of people. Every time something unusual happens, even small things, he knows everything about it before everybody else. If people have seen this blond lady around town, he knows. And he can probably figure out where she hangs out the most. I only saw her by the harbor, so..."
Vera said nothing. She seemed very concerned about the whole thing, but there was never any attempt to complain or pressure me into saying anything. I had seen that around school, too, although never this intense. She was desperate. Or more likely, they were desperate. It made sense, actually. They could very well be the only ones of their kind left anywhere near. Whatever that kind really was.
She stopped at the parking lot, the car braking rather abruptly, making me slam into the seat belt rather hard, and a little painfully.
"You cannot mention any of this to anyone, Ida. You understand that, right?"
For a few seconds, I just looked at her, completely lost for words.
"So... I can't tell people that I'm helping time travelers from the future find some lady with a thing for white, who replaces people around town with exact copies, including me?"
She just looked at me with very serious eyes, and nodded.
"Okay. Good to know. Like, just in case I ended up saying it to someone crazy enough to, you know, believe me."
I ended the sentence by looking at her, expecting the insanity of the situation to somehow dawn on her. She just smiled, and nodded. I happily ignored that near complete lack of reaction to my sarcasm. Then, I leaned in quick and gave her a small hug. Not surprisingly, she was, well, surprised. She took it well, not pushing me away, but it seemed mostly because she had no idea how to respond to it. I just looked at her for a second or so. Nothing happened. Then I got out of the car.
It was past noon. I still had no clear idea how long I had been unconcscious at the house, but the important thing was that school had not ended yet, at least not for the older students. The lunch rush had no doubt come and gone, but it was fairly common for most students to go for a small snack on one of the later breaks. It was as much a social thing as hunger, a way to get away from the smaller, often noisy kids and the prying eyes of adults. You often knew your group, the people that you felt and were considered to belong with by what people you joined to go snacking at either the grill or one of the places that sold candy by the weight. My group was mainly me and Mischa.
As the sun rose slowly, the snack pilgrimage finally began, and true to form, I quickly spotted him in the thin stream of students moving sluggishly from the school towards the grill and, for some, past the grill and into the center of town for whatever they needed. He was walking alone, and he seemed unharmed.
"Hey, Misch," I said, sliding up beside him. For some reason, he first looked at me, and then looked behind us, apparently trying to spot someone he was waiting for. I clearly startled him, shaking him out of whatever he was doing on his phone.
"You're... I thought you stayed at the school?" he said, a bit more baffled than I had expected.
"Yeah, about that... Look, I need you to follow me," I half whispered, leaning in like someone telling another some deep secret. He still seemed a bit out of it, constantly looking back over his shoulder. I threw a glance in the same direction, just once, but saw nothing of interest.
As we entered the train station, the grill was slowly being packed with other students, at least a dozen already crammed in and waiting for food. Grumbling below my breath, I pulled Mischa out the door opposite the entrance, one of the doors out towards the train tracks. He made a few confused noises, half words that meant nothing other than that he didn't understand why I was pulling him around.
"I need to tell you something," I said, sighing as my nerves started getting the better of me, at least a little bit.
"Is it about Hanky?" he asked, seeming very concerned. I looked at him, now the one to be baffled.
"What? No, what about her?" I asked. Hanky, or Hanne-Katrine, was one of the more annoying people in my class, a girl with far too much pride in the fact that her dad made fair money renting out houses around town for far more than they were worth. She was especially nasty towards those kids whose families actually rented from her dad.
"Well, all that about her calling you a sand nigger. I thought you were..."
"She did what?!" I said, a bit louder than I felt good about.
"Yeah, she... I mean, you just told me that. Right?"
Honestly, I had no way of answering that question. I chose to simply shake my head and wave it away, physically, by waving my hands in front of my face like I was swatting flies.
"Look, Misch, I think I'm in some trouble, and I need your help to get out of it. Some people keep bugging me and I think I need something at the old school, the one you picked me up at the other day."
"Okay, but didn't you just take the bus there last time? I thought you just needed us to..."
"No, not you, not, I mean, the both of you. Just you. You, the one you, you," I said, realizing almost immediately that I was rambling. He took it remarkably well.
"Ida, are you on some kind of medication? Something you maybe forgot to take?"
It didn't seem as if he meant to roast me. He actually seemed legitimately concerned that I was.
"No. No, Misch, look, I need your help. I need to go to that school again, but I don't wanna go there on my own. The place is major league #*@!ed up, I swear."
"You make it sound so delightful."
"For #*@!'s sake, Misch, stop it with the quips!"
I suddenly noticed that my voice had slowly grown in volume, and people, the few that were there by the train track, were beginning to pay a bit more attention to me than I liked.
"Misch, seriously, I need you to help em through this," I added, keeping my voice low and trying to seem a bit more sane.
Misch nodded slowly, still a bit rocked by my emotional outburst. "Okay, but what exactly is going on, then? Who is bugging you?"
A million or so lies soared through my brain, ways I could make it all sound plausible without telling the highly implausible truth. None of them, sadly, seemed any good to me, not enough for me to deliver them with a straight face.
"It's because they..."
I cut myself off, instantly noting that it worried him.
"I mean, there are these..."
I could feel my eyes darting back and forth, to the point that it strained the muscles in them and made my head hurt.
"#*@! it," I sighed. "Some people who claim to be time travelers from the future want me to help them mess with some psycho bitch who dresses in all white and is swapping people around town out with copies that obey her."
Mischa just stood there. His facial expression did not change a bit, almost to the point that he seemed to not breathe. Around us, the entire world seemed to be on pause, and I scanned the platform by the train track a few times to make sure nobody was actually listening in.
"So..." said Mischa, finally. "Uhm, Ida, we need to talk. Like, seriously talk. Are you okay?"
I felt like crying. I felt like just dropping to my knees and bawling my eyes out, until someone came and picked me up and carried me away to somewhere. My stomach kept politely asking if this was the right time to throw up uncontrollably, and it was becoming more of a struggle for me to convince it that no, it was not the right time. I wanted to scream. I wanted to punch Mischa, and then punch myself for punching him. And then maybe punch the brick wall, or wait for the train and punch that. I did exactly none of that. I just breathed in deep. Then one more time.
"Look, I know all this sounds insane," I said, and cut Mischa off with a wave of my hand before he could, sarcastically, deny it. With him standing there, silent and immobile, I walked over to the nearest trash can. With a bit of digging, I pulled out an empty soda can. Mischa's eyes kept leaping back and forth between me and the can as I rturned to talk to him.
"You said you just talke dto me, right? Something about Hanky being a bitch again, right?"
He nodded. Honestly, he seemed increasingly terrified and might have nodded if I asked him if he had played paddy cake with a pack of wild gnomes recently.
"Did she wear this? Did she wear my..." I looked down. "Did she wear this flowery blouse, the one I am wearing now?"
"Yeah, you were, I mean she... What?"
Feeling my blood pumping far too furiously in my veins, I pulled the tab off of the soda can, and threw the can on the ground. Mischa's eyes, for whatever reason, followed the can. When he finally looked at me again, I showed him the tab, right to his face. Then I showed him the back of my other hand. Then, while he looked at it intensely, I used the broken bit on the tab to quickly make a cut on the hand.
"Holy #*@!, Ida, is that supposed to convince me you're sane?!" he bursted, his voice cracking and sounding almost like a baby girl.
"Look at it," I said, staring at him. His face was twisted into an expression of both fear, disgust, and most of all, confusion, but he looked.
"Remember where the cut is and how it looks. When you see her again, check if she has a similar cut. Because if she doesn't..."
His eyes just kept jumping back and forth between my eyes and my cut hand. It was a small cut, no doubt completely harmless, but it was bleeding a little. He said nothing.
"Mischa, focus," I added, seeing very little to convince me he did.
"Mischa, if she doesn't have that cut, she can't be me. Because....?"
I waited for a response, but all he did was make some incoherent, almost word, sounds.
"Because I have this cut, Misch. I have this cut, she does not. So if you don't see a cut, you're not looking at me. Do you understand this?"
He nodded, still saying nothing but a few meaningless sounds.sent the train station platform another look, making sure nobody was gawking at my little show. Nobody was. Then I waved at him to go back. The moment he left the platform, I grabbed my hand with tears in my eyes. I had never thought a small cut would hurt that badly.

"So..."
We were sitting by the bike racks near one of the town's administrative buildings. A wooden table, the very standard picnic sort with benches built in, that every school and many other places had tons of, was placed near the bikes, for some straneg reason, as if the first thing people wanted to do after riding a bike was sit down for lunch. I was looking at Mischa, sipping on a small chokolate milk I had bought with some of what little money I had left. Mischa was looking in my general direction, but he refused to look me in the eyes, getting a weird expression whenever I made him. An expression I was pretty sure I had never seen before.
"So, I mean... you're... I mean, you," he said, pointing directly at me and finally meeting my eyes, "you're not you. Or you're not her. There are two of you. Am I getting that right?"
I nodded, trying to resist the urge to go into details. He was clearly struggling with this.
"So are you like twins? Can you read each other's minds?"
I stopped sipping at the chokolate milk for a second, then took one more sip.
"No. And I don't think twins can actually do that, either."
Part of me wanted to laugh at how disappointed he seemed from that reply, but I held it in. I held it all in. I had no idea what to say, so for once, I chose to say nothing. This seemed like a talk-when-spoken-to kind of situation.
"But.. you're you. I mean, you're the real you, right? How do I know?"
I completely stopped nervously fondling the milk box. I had never thought about that angle.
"I guess because I told you all this. Why would some evil clone tell you all this?"
His eyes widened.
"Oh #*@!, you could be an evil clone!"
I silently cursed at myself for that remark.
"Maybe you want to confuse me, to keep me from...."
It was clearly dawning on him what was wrong with his train of thought, but I pushed him, anyway.
"From what? Nobody has any reason to tell us anything. They only told me because I'm special, somehow."
"Special, how?" he asked, not catching the subtle hint.
"I don't know. If I did, I would have said that," I answered, trying to stay polite about it. "I thought it was because I could make people disappear by touching them, but..."
"You could what?" he quickly interrupted. I threw the milk box at the trash can at the end of the table. It bounced on the edge, then fell to the ground, and with a displeased grunt, I got up to get it. It had torn me apart that I forgot to pick up the soda can I had used for the cut, and now, this felt like a bit of redemption.
"I don't know why, but when I touched people, they sort of exploded and disappeared in a ball of colored dots. Apparently, it's some kind of time energy or something. But I hugged one of them, and nothing happened. The only thing that's really changed is that I changed clothes. So either I just ran out of time eexplosion juice, or I need to get some clothes that help me do that. And if I was really out of energy, I don't think they'd be interested in me anymore."
Mischa nodded. It was more a nod of agreement than understanding, his eyes still zipping around in their sockets, chasing the thoughts that clearly ran through his head.
"And... those clothes were the ones from the school, or the flea market at the school? The school flea market is selling magic clothes?"
I gave a bit of a chuckle as I sat back down. Hearing someone I knew actually talk about it all made me realize how absolutely silly it all sounded. Had it not been real, had I not actually experienced it all, I would never have believed it.
"Yeah, I guess they do."
"So... Why are they magical?"
The word was starting to bug me. Magic belonged in fairy tales and children's books, just some dumb excuse to tell stories about people who could do whatever they needed because of how pure their hearts were or something. Bad storytelling, my teacher would probably say. But I had no other word for it, not yet.
"I don't know," I answered, dragging the words along as my mind went through possible explanations. It wasn't that there were no possible reasons. It was more that there were too many. "Something bad happened at the school. Something real bad. Maybe that's why. Maybe it's more of a curse."
"What bad th..." Mischa stopped. Something had clearly just dawned on him, but his brain was still struggling with putting the last details together. "Wait," he finally said, "you said something about tasting dead people or something. No, wait, breathing, you said you were...." He looked at me, a sudden terror flowing through his eyes. "Ida, what did you mean by breathing dead people?!"
With my voice becoming increasingly uneven, as my mind pulled out images I would rather forget, I explained what I'd seen to him, and what I had figured out it all meant. He listened, never interrupting, not even to ask questions. Part of it might have been him just being stunned. The whole thing was clearly getting to him, although he had no idea how to react. So he basically didn't.
As we walked back to the train station, or rather, the bus station next to it, my gaze crept over every house, every facade, every car in the street and every person on the sidewalks, both the one I walked on and on the opposite side of the road. Mischa was done for the day in school, but I still had classes. The copy still had classes. It was living my life, but on the upside, it was also taking my place in school. Hopefully, it would take my place being grounded, although I still had my worries, no matter how the time travelers had tried to assure me that the copy would not go on a killing spree.
"How do we..." Mischa stopped mid sentence, suddenly looking around rather nervously, too. Then he leaned in to whisper. "How do we know who is a copy?"
It was a good question.
"I don't know. When I have the..." I sighed, not wanting to say the words. "When I have the magic clothes on, time travelers make these little sparks start up. But copies do nothing."
I noticed how his glance ran over absolutely everyone in the immediate vicinity, like he was trying to guess if anyone else was a copy, watching us. As we got on the bus, we both stared at people in a very unusual way, and a few of them noticed. I caught myself in the act and forced my face to relax, to take on a more appropriate expression. Mischa wasn't quite as self-aware.
"Relax," I whispered as we left the station. There were perhaps four other passengers on the bus, and the driver. Not a lot, although that was common for many buses in the area. Most of the small towns had few inhabitants, and many cars. Public transport was pretty good, especially for such a lightly populated area, but people either didn't want to depend on it, or there simply were no people. The first time I rode a bus in Copenhagen, where people crammed together on long bus rides every ten or so minutes, I remember panicking. I was only four, but it stuck, the memory of my mom having to calm me down as I cried about people squishing me. I probably thought I was going to die. Things were different in the big cities.
"What do they want from you? The time travelers, I mean?" asked Mischa as houses began to end outside and open fields of late season crops began to take over. It took no time to get out into farm country. I could walk from the station or my home and be in farm country in mere minutes.
"I told you, they...." I stopped. Mischa was nodding, he clearly hadn't forgotten.
"Yeah, I get it. You're special, they're in trouble. But exactl what do they want you to do? Are you going to fight that white woman or something?"
"No," I answered, not entirely sure what to say next, but thinking hard about it. "I think they want me to find a way for them to take back control or something. Maybe they want me to find new recruits for them or something, I don't think they have the technology to just make people to do stuff for them, and they seem to have lost..." I fell silent as it fully dawned on me that every explosion that night, the night when I saw the woman disappear, was probably a time traveler, maybe even one of their friends! "... they seem to have lost some people."
Fields went by, a beautiful but nearly monotone landscape, very soothing to the mind. Adrenaline was still in my system, though, and I kept alert amidst the fields.
"So they want to recruit people to help them fight some evil threat?" asked Mischa. I nodded. "Sounds like some new Harry Potter reboot, if you ask me."
I looked at him, feeling a bit hurt by being reduced to a movie reference.
"No, I think it's more like recruiting child soldiers for some supernaturl cult or something."
There was a moment of silence from him, but his brain was clearly crunching.
"You basically just summe dup Harry Potter, you do know that, right?"
The remark tumbled around my head for a second, then I laughed. I laughed for real, not just a restrained giggle or chuckle. As I felt the laugh release some of the pressure inside, I laghed more, harder.
"Oh god, I'm a #*@!ing space wizard," I pretend complained, hiding my head in my hands.
"No, time wizard," Mischa corrected me, clearly glad to see me laugh again. "Space wizards are Star Wars."
For a brief period of time, perhaps just a minute or so, the world seemed better again. It was just a quick laugh, but something in me woke up, clearing away the cobwebs of dealing with barely coherent people forcing their problems on me. It lasted as long as the last fields outside went by the window. But as the houses began appearing, signalling that the old school was closing in, my mind fell back into the previous rhythm. Not entirely , though. I felt a bit of renewed strength surge through my body.
Standing at the bus stop, looking at the school laying there silent and immobile, the only sound being birds chirping in the overgrown bushes, I began regretting that I had pulled poor Mischa along. Flashes of the rooms inside ran rampant in my head, replaying both what happened and everything my brain could possibly imagine might have happened, realistically or not. I had pulled him into this. I was now pulling him farther in. And as I did, my former worries about myself and abour things like safety and making sense of it all changed into a feeling of guilt for what I was doing to him. What I was inevitably going to end up doing to him. I had no idea what that was, but I had a nagging sense that the guilt was not entirely misplaced.
"It's around the back," I said, starting to walk to where I knew the loose window to be. Mischa hesitated, obviously a bit confused about the directions. At that moment, something came back to me.
"Wait, your brother went here, didn't he?" I asked, not thinking before opening my mouth. Mischa's face became a bit gloomy as he nodded. "Sorry, I mean, I just..."
"It's okay," he said, voice calm, eyes on the buildings. "Yeah, he went to school here, back before we got the new house."
"You okay about this?" I asked, trying tentatively to measure his state of mind. He seemed pretty okay.
"Yeah, I try not to think too much about it. It's just a school, right? He didn't, like, die here or anything."
I nodded, still keeping my eye out for him to show signs of not being okay. He showed none of them. And when we found the window, now flapping only a tiny bit in the breeze, he walked up to it as if he hadn't a care in the world.
The inside was as I remembered it, dim and smelling of stale, moist air. Something made my stomach feel weird as we entered, though, something I hadn't felt the last time, or simply didn't remember feeling. A sting, much like when a spark flew from me to some time traveler. But it didn't fly. It stayed, poking my stomach like a knitting needle.
"What the #*@! happened here?" asked Mischa, and I was a bit surprised at how quickly he noticed something wrong. Like an animal sniffing the ground, he got down on all four, sniffing and touching the floor before finally standing up again.
"Smells like badly burned pork," he remarked, and images, imaginary but convincing, of people exploding into colored dots, leaving nothing but black streaks, ran through my head. I said nothing, though, simply picking up my pace instead and heading into the hallway. I quickly found the clothes, the same piles that I had taken from before, and started snatching pieces one by one. To my surprise, Mischa walked right past me, heading towards the furniture section. Towards the entrance to the big building.
"No, don't," I said. He turned to see me opening the zipper on my pants, and the look in his face was enough to make me forget for a moment that I was changing in the middle of the corridor. I quickly closed the pants, though not the zipper or button.
"Uhm, Ida, what..."
"Look, if magic clothes are what lets me know if #*@!ing time travelers are trying to kidnap me, I'm not taking any chances. Now, please turn around."
"But I was already..."
I signalled the seriousness of the situation with a sternly pointed finger, and he turned back the way he had been, with a prolonged sigh.
"Look, Ida, I just want to know what the hell this is all about. I mean, there's clearly more inside this place that is somehow important, right?"
I grunted in agreement as I reluctantly grabbed a pair of boxers from the small pile I had gathered.
"So how about you change here, and I go into the other rooms and check them out? Win-win, right?"
"Nobody goes alone in here, Misch. This place is #*@!ed up..." The last few sounds were garbled as I pulled another sweatshirt with outdated logos on it over my head. ".. and I don't want to get separated."
He grumbled a bit and was about to say something when I threw a second pile of clothes at him. When he turned around to pick them up from the floor, he stopped, looking over the clothes I had decided to put on.
"You're #*@!ing with me, right?" he said, voice dry as a salt cracker, as he stared at the faded green pants and black and orange striped sweatshirt. Then he looked at the pile at his feet. "Tell me you're #*@!ing kidding, please."
I patted his back as I walked past, still fighting to stuff all my own clothes into a plastic back I had grabbed from the many boxes of them. The copy had my school bag. I was just happy I kept my phone in my pocket. I had wondered how the copy would handle that bit of stealing my life, but part of me really didn't want to think about it.
When he showed up with his own bag, I gave him a somewhat offended look.
"No," he said, as if reading my mind, "I am not going all 70s or 80s or whatever with you. I put on the socks and T-shirt, and crammed the boxers in my pocket. That has to do it." I opened my mouth to argue with him, but he quickly and firmly raised a finger at me. "Ida, I am wearing someone else's discarded undershirt and socks. I am not wearing some stranger's underpants."
Rather than argue, I nodded and walked carefully towards the door that would lead to the glass walkway and from there to the big building.