(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 37

“You sure you're ready for this?”
We smelled bad. Of smoke and of weird machines, the latter being just the very air inside the barn. Before it exploded, of course. We smelled like someone who had been rolled through a bonfire of burning computers. And I smelled like I hadn't had a real bath and change of clothes for days. Mainly because I hadn't.
“It's weird,” I said, practically eating the words as I spoke, my jaw feeling just a bit out of my control. “I've wanted this for days, and now it just feels... alien.”
We were at my front door. My family's front door. Lights were on inside, even though it was still very early in the evening. They were home. My family was home.
“Maybe just tell yourself nothing ever happened. Walk in like you were never gone,” Mischa suggested. “In a way, you never were. I mean, to them.”
“Yeah,” I sighed, “I know what you mean.”
The handle on the door felt three times the size I remembered it, the sound inside twice as loud as anything I could recall hearing in there. It all lasted a moment, the bizarre feeling of the totally mundane. Then it fell away. Normal began to flood in, take over, put down roots. I could almost feel my brain pulling up the memories of the last few days, like weeds, and replacing them with the life I knew I'd always had. A normal life.
“Mischa?”
“Yeah?”
“Ever feel like a normal life is the most insane idea in the world?”
“Yeah. Sometimes.”
He didn't come in with me. He was still pretty shook by the events at the barn, and who could honestly blame him. His speech had been a bit slurred ever since we got in the car with the nameless guy, and the trip home had been entirely silent on his part. I had seen him like this before, but it was rare. His system just seemed to shut down, if nothing else then just to give him some time to process something. It was rarely something good.
The hallway instantly felt like I had never left. Shoes, jackets, my mom's spare handbag, things like that. The colors and shapes met my eye, but they made very little impact. My mind was focused on the sounds.
They were in the living room. My mom was reading a book, Peter was on the couch, Beebee sleeping against him, having dozed off during what looked like an old comedy movie, apparently one of the many Olsen Gang movies that seemed to be rerun in bulk every now and then on Danish channels. They never even looked up to see me standing in the doorway, looking at them. It might have been for the better. To them, I was just coming back home from school. They had been sharing their home with the other me, never knowing the difference. To them, I was glaring at them like a crazy person, for no reason whatsoever.
“Ida?”
It was my mom calling, the moment I put a foot on the staircase up to my room and Beebee's. The stairs had a squeak. Not a loud one, but the kind that could be heard in the background through just about anything. A soft but sharp sound.
“Yeah, just going up to change,” I called back. It was too late. She had gotten up and was already walking into the hallway to meet me.
“Okay, but we eat in...”
She stopped, her last word followed by an odd, choked sound as she looked at me, even forcing her to take a step back.
“Jesus Christ, sweetie, what happened to you?!”
I stood on the stairs, just two steps up, suddenly looking down myself and wondering what could make me look this iway and still sound, for lack of better terms, not insane.
“Some asshole pushed me into the ditch by the road,” I just blurted out, still trying to think of womewhere nearby that the road actually had a ditch big enough for me to be pushed fully into.
“God, those kids, I'm going to have a talk to their parents one day,” she simply said, walking over to look me over. She tugged on my collar, adjusted my horribly dirty clothes, all in all acting as if a few adjustments could save the mess I currently was.
“Wait... where did you find that blouse? I was looking for it the other day, I thought you'd lost it somewhere.”
I had never given much thought to the details of the copy robot, the first day that it copied me. It had looked like me, the same clothes and all, but it was perfectly logical, in hindsight, that it had been fake. It could copy my face and my overall body structure, but the clothes had to be fake. Fabric didn't just appear out of nothing on its body. Even when it looked clothed, it had essentially been walking around naked. A naked robot, true, but still, the thought was weird to think.
To my mom's question, I just shrugged. She made nothing more of it.
“Go upstairs, and take a bath. You smell like someone rolled you in dead animals or something,” she remarked, leaning in to give me a kiss on the cheek, but backing off with a laugh as the smell became too intense. I smiled. It was a ridiculously banal situation, just her telling me to shower to deal with a bad smell. There was nothing important or pressing, no rush, no stakes. I loved it.
The bathroom was fairly clean. My thoughts briefly drifted to the old cinema, and there was really no comparison, and no point in trying to find one. Just standing amongst the white tiles and clumsily hung towels, I breathed in deep, feeling tears come to my eyes. Turning on the shower and feeling the cold water sa it slowly warmed felt like a luxury, like some extravagant ritual that I had been lucky enough to earn. I dumped every bit of clothing on me on the floor, in a pile, and while the water warmed, I looked at the pile. Dirty and smelly, that was a given, but as my eyes panned slowly over each bit of clothing, I heard, or more accurately felt, screams in my head. I heard the copy beg for its life, heard Patrick curse about driving fast in town, heard Mischa ramble on, trying to understand what was happening around him. When I heard Vera's voice, I looked away. Without the clothes in my sight, the sounds faded, until they slipped away completely.
The shower felt weird, the running water prickly, like someone had slipped fine grains of salt into it. For the most part, I just stood under the water, letting it rush down me. I didn't bother with soap or shampoo, I didn't scrub any more than some basic, dull routine. There were sounds in the water, more sounds from the last few days, and the more I tried to do, the more they forced their way through. As I ran my hads through my hair, the sounds rose to a zenith, and once there, they brought images with them. Glimpses of the copy changing its face to match mine. Camilla's terrified expression. The woman in white.
I snapped myself out of it. Everything was spinning, everything was too loud. The water roared, the white tiles blinded my eyes. Staggering, I made my way out of the shower, feeling my way more than seeing. I found the toilet and sank down to my knees. Like a fire, everything inside of me flared up, and I only heard myself throw up. Naked, shaking, and with tears on my face, I sank down beside the toilet bowl, my wet feet strugglinh against the tile floor to push my body into the corner behind it.
I sat there for a little while, listening to the distant roar of falling water. My brain was trying to escape, I could feel it. I could feel every desperate attempt at erasing a memory and putting something more pleasing in its place. The house on the outskirts of town became a meadow. I had napped beneath an old oak tree, not slept on an old couch under a worn blanket. The abandonned cinema became some fictional apartment somewhere, a simple room full of sunlight that I had sat in, propped up against a wall with my earphones on and music in my ears. The time travelers became tourists, asking me for directions and telling me snippets of stories about their strange home country. Everything was altered and bent, every defense in my head trying to erase what had happened. I let it. I let the fake memories settle in and replace the real ones. The real ones became the stories. The fake ones became my reality. And the tears stopped, my stomach returning to normal.
It was easy to remove every bit of evidence of it. A flushed toilet, a few minutes more under the shower, some torough brushing of my teeth. My reality was seeping back into me, my life welcoming me back with open arms. I did my best not to look at the pile of dirty clothes, though, fearing what they might call back into my mind.
And then I stood there. Looking in the mirror, toothbrush sticking out, hair hanging wet and heavy on my shoulders. For a second or two, the mirror back at the empty school building forced its way back into my mind, the sight of me as I was changing into the second-hand clothes during the rain outside. I felt my body try to help my brain resist the memory, twitches in my muscles shrugging it off. Breathing heavy, feeling a storm rise inside of me, I turned of the faucet, removing the sound of running water. The image of the old mirror remained, but without the sound of water, without the memory of the rain outside, it slowly faded, and all I saw was me, and the white tiles behind me.
“You still in there?” came Peter's voice through the door. I grunted loudly, toothbrush still in my mouth, and he left quickly. But he tore me out of my unwilling trip down Memory Lane. I looked in the mirror again, and there was nothing but me in there. I looked at my body, trying to find a plausible excuse for every bruise and scratch. A single cut on my face looked like a branch might have made it, so much so that I wondered if that might actually be the truth. My shoulders had spots of red, blue and a sickening purple, shallow injuries already in the process of healing. If someone had indeed pushed me into a ditch, those looked like the kind of bruises it would leave. When I looked down myself, the ones on my hips and legs could be explained the same way. And the slightly larger, oblong red mark on my stomach might be from landing on my belly as I fell. It only took me a few seconds to normalize it all, to the point that part of me became convinced that it was the truth, that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. That some jackass had pushed me into a ditch, and the fall had riddled me with minor cuts and bruises. I even ended up looking at my hair with more concern than my injuries! The black dye was looking horrendous, my muddled, brownish roots showing and the same color starting to peek through elsewhere, too. Communal color, it was often called, the bland default of so many Danes. I always felt that it was a genetic flaw in me, that it should be as black as my mom's, matching the Inuit features of my face. But what grabbed my attention this time was not the color, but the amount of attention I was willing to give it. My mind was isolating the bad memories, but part of me still knew what was true and what was imagined. That part was wondering why the color of my hair was suddenly so important.
As I left the bathroom, I wore the long towel and left the clothes behind in the pile on the floor. I didn't normally do that, and I didn't normally get away with doing that. But the moment I stepped into my own room, I saw my mom enter the bathroom out of the corner of my eye. She made no sound, no complaint about the clothes. For a second or so, it bugged me. My mind went to dark places, imagining that she, too, had been copied, that everything around me was false, that my life was a cleverly designed piece of theater, meant to keep me in a state of blissful ignorance. I knwe, deep down, that she was merely worried, no doubt feeling that my encounter with the ditch-bully, which she couldn't know was made up, excused me from such a minor crime. But the lingering paranoia in me didn't care about what I knew deep down. Even as I stood in my own room, I felt I saw ghosts in the patterns on the wallpaper, that every poster hanging there had people in it watching me. I wasn't hearing voices, but the voices were in my head. They were waiting, whispering. Not loud enough for me to hear, but loud enough for me to know.
Fresh clothes were on the bed, neatly folded. I stood and looked at them, their very existence feeling weird to me. Like a thief, I looked over my shoulder, at the closed door, before I leaned over them and touched them, just briefly. In my brain, the memory of sleeping in the damp cinema fought an extended battle with the image of napping in the meadow, the real wanting to come back at the cost of the imagined. It was like a storm gathering strength inside my skull, and I ended up just throwing the clothes aside in some frantic attempt to kill the storm before it found its full footing. Then, I threw myself on the bed.
“You coming down to eat?” I heard my mother ask, and in a partial daze, I turned my head on the bed. She stood in the doorway, the pile of dirty clothes in her hands and a look of worry on her face.
“Sure,” I said, trying to act as if nothing raged in my head. “When?”
“We kinda already started,” she answered, cracking a nervous smile. “But you might wanna get dressed first. I'll keep something warm for you for, let's say, half an hour, how about that?”
I smiled. The mundanity of the situation made my brain do cartwheels. I hated lying, I hated even hiding anything from her. Everything in me tore at me to get out.
“Also,” she added as she was about to leave, “if you're still up for it, me and Peter were thinking something like four o'clock tomorrow?”
I lay on the bed, hands behind my head, not moving a muscle in my face. My mind was racing through any and all possibilities of what she might mean, but nothing came up.
“The town thing? You can still bail, if you want. I know it's not usually your thing.”
She smiled, but I recognized the smile. It was her nervous one, the vulnerable one she put on when she was afraid that someone would say something to disappoint her. I thought of the robot copy talking with her, agreeing to go to this little town festival thing, and how happy it might have made her. I avoided large crowds. She had probably been surprised when it had agreed to it. Apparently, there were things it had never quite picked up about me.
“No, sure, I'm just, you know...”
“Yeah,” she smiled, a happy smile. “Getting literally ditched will do that to you.”
She was happy. It felt strange, like someone playing a prank on you and you acting along just to find out what the actual prank was. But she was happy. She was happy because an imposter had said something to make her happy. For the first time, I felt guilty for having hated the thing, hated the copy of me that was perhaps, in some small way, a better me.
And then, she closed the door. I laid back, staring at the ceiling, at nothing. Putting my arms down along my side again, I accidentally found the clothes with my left hand. A T-shirt, two sizes too big, letting me use it almost like a dress, or a night gown. It felt soft and clean. Trying to help my mind adjust to that thought, I lifted it to my face and smelled it. No grime, no dirt, no dust. No odors that made my nose flinch. Just a T-shirt.

When I opened my eyes again, it was dark. I was still on my bed, wearing the towel, the T-shirt in my hand and the rest of the clothes crumbled up on the bed. A slight draft snuck in through the ever so slightly opened window. That one part of me, the one hiding away in my mind, refusing to replace my memories with pleasant imagination, marveled at how natural it felt for me to just get out of bed and shut the window. I ignored the shapes that part thought it saw in the dark outside. There were always shapes, I told myself. Shapes were all that was left when the darkness made it hard to see the world well.
Perhaps feeling guilty for the pile of dirty clothes I folded the towel neatly before putting on the T-shirt to use as a pyjamas substitute. It felt friendly against the skin, like a warm embrace, even if the fabric had become a bit cold from the contact with the night air. Standing in the middle of my room, the only visible light coming from some street lamp outside, I just breathed. The voices, the sounds and sights, bubbled underneath the surface, but if I just breathed calmly, I stayed on that surface. It didn't matter what was beneath it.
The house was quiet. My mom and Peter had their bedroom downstairs, in the far end of the house, and I never even had to pass by it to get to the kitchen. The air upstairs was always warmer, apparently because, as Peter loved explaining to no end, warm air traveled upward, and cool air traveled down. He knew far more about how that made air circulation work in large houses and buildings than I ever thought would be worth knowing, and the topic fascinated him. I just noted the change when I went down the stairs, as the cool air traveled up the shirt and along my arms and face.
In the living room, on the dining table that stood a  few steps away from the TV, I could see a large plate, softly illuminated by the light from outside. For some reason, it surprised my eyes when I flicked the switch and the light actually came on! The moonlight and errant street lamp glow got instantly drowned out by the light of several lamps, powersaving bulbs giving everything a mellow hue. I blinked several times, trying to adapt, wondering how badly my time away from a warm bed and a working home had affected me. And as I finally made my way to the plate, it played the last joke on me. On it was a note. It simply said “check the fridge. Might not be warm :-)”.
Who knows how long I stood there, like some dummy, holding that note in my hand. I never even noticed how wide my smile was until I put the note down and actually had to keep myself from laughing out loud. There was barely even a joke in there to begin with, but even the slight hint at some dumb remark from someone who actually cared went through every single defense I had in me. With the note back on the empty, and clean, plate, I put my hand lovingly on the paper, enjoying the moment while it lasted.
The hallway light was a bit dim. It had been for some time, a busted wire somewhere along the ceiling that was apparently difficult to fix. Peter had been, as he put it, on the case for over a month, but little had happened. I found the switch in the kitchen, though, bumbling around a bit before my fingers caught it on the wall. The light, much brighter and sharper than in the living room, made my eyes hurt. But even as I blinked the blue and green floating shapes away, I smiled. Just the feeling of my bare feet on the cool kitchen floor was a blessing, as I walked to the fridge that got less and less blurry by the second.
Fresh vegetables. They had been shopping. According to the both of them, my mom and Peter had met at a cooking class and become friends, a short while before my dad went away. They had stayed friends, and after he disappeared, things slowly evolved. Now, they just constantly discussed how to give our family better eating habits. It came in waves. We were apparently in one of those waves at the moment. I ignored the lettuce, tomatoes, and whatever else was there, looking for the leftovers. She always used our old, green and clear tupperware containers for leftovers, never just a plate or a bowl. Germs, she said. They go for the weak points. I went shelf by shelf, then the door. There was nothing there.
With a disappointed sigh, I shut the door. My stomach was grumbling, and it was starting to get loud. I had the distinct feeling that it had been empty since my encounter with the toilet bowl during my bath. I needed something, anything in it. And thus, I reached for the nearest cupboard.
I first just spotted it vaguely out of the corner of my eye. A pale, white shape on the table. I thought nothing of it as I turned to look. Even looking at it, I felt no reason to worry. The tupperware container, on the kitchen counter. It was open, which was admittedly an odd way to keep germs out. At a second look, my eyes now having adjusted to the light, it was clear someone had eaten from it. A fork even stuck out. My thoughts went to Beebee, especially when I noticed the spilled sauce around it. And then, I walked over to it. Potatoes, chicken strips, peas, carrots, and a white sauce, likely bearnaise. Mom liked the mix, a fairly standad Danish dish. But the spilled sauce was a murky, pasta sauce red. I stood there a bit, blinking, my brain's gears slowly turning. Pasta sauce didn't look like that. And when I touched it, it didn't feel like that, either. Pasta sauce was thick and a little creamy. This was almost as thin as water. But sticky. Part of me knew perfectly what it was. But that was the realistic part. The hopeful, imaginative part completely refused to think about blood, mentally flipping through different sauces and dressings, desperately wanting to find one that matched. It failed.
Standing back, I looked at the kitchen counter again. Thin streaks of red ran down the counter. Drips. They pooled on the floor. Not a massive pool, but two small, sticky, red pools, right against the drawers under the counter. Blinking very rapidly and frequently, I turned to look at the fridge again. A red mark was smeared on the thin side of the fridge door. I looked down at my hand. I had some on me. Not much. In a strange state of unnatural calm, I looked myself over. There was no other red. Reaching out, not taking a single step, I turned on the faucet and washed the red off my hand. I was in something close to a dream state as I lifted the T-shirt, looking over my body, fearing the worst. But there was nothing. The blood wasn't mine. For some reason, that realization was the beginning of the end of my dream state. My heart began to race, my chest tightened, my breath became staggered and uneven.
Little stains on the floor. They had no clear pattern, and a few were smeared, like someone had walked over them. Looking at my own feet, I bore some of the responsibility, but there was only a little on me, and with my toes I could feel the smears were dry. Someone had smeared the stains and already left.
They went into the hallway. With my heart pounding in my throat, I squinted in the dim hallway light, following the dark spots along the old linoleum. As they came closer to the main door, they mixed with dirt and scuffmarks. But they went that way.
I didn't think about the fact that all I was wearing was an oversized T-shirt as I opened the front door. The cool night air hit me instantly, making my skin tighten and sending a shiver through my spine. The marks ran down the small stairs and into the front yard, where they disappeared in the embarrassing tall, unmowed grass. The door was not the kind that locked automatically, so without a second thought, I shut it behind me and walked, still barefoot, out into the night.
On the sidewalk, the red marks showed up black under the streetlights, likely due to the light being more yellow than any other color. The marks went off in two directions. One went across the street and north. The other went along the sidewalk, towards where I knew the sports areas were. And as I looked in that direction, I saw something in the distance. It limped. It was roughly my height.
Quickly inside, I tried to catch my breath, thoughts racing through me, and not many of them positive! All I could think of was the stains in the kitchen, and my mom going into a panic about them! Restraining myself from rushing and making noise, I found cleaning rags below the sink and started cleaning.