As for Mia—like me, she was sleeping all night again, and I was beginning to wonder whether someone else really was responsible for her sleepwalking. Couldn’t there have been some natural cause for it? If not, the person to blame seemed to have given up trying to get into my little sister’s dreams.
Mia herself had taken the precaution of installing a complicated anti-sleepwalking system in her room, a clever construction made of wires, string, saucepan lids, and a Swiss cowbell that would set off an earsplitting alarm if she got out of bed without first removing the string around her ankle. I almost stumbled over this device when I went into Mia’s room on Saturday evening, only to find Lottie turning critically back and forth in front of the mirror.
It was just before six, and the whole house was buzzing with activity because this was Ernest’s fifty-third birthday, and he wanted to celebrate it at a restaurant with a small family party, as he put it (he wasn’t to know that the family party had been infiltrated by a clone). It was nice that the family party included Lottie, not so good that the Boker and Emily were in it. And naturally Charles would be there as well, which had Lottie in a state of great agitation. I mustn’t forget to tell her that she’d recently had a boyfriend called Jonathan—just in case Charles mentioned it to her.
“No, this one’s no good either!” Lottie was grimly inspecting her reflection in the mirror. “I look like my aunt Friederike in the dress she wears for housework. Like a country bumpkin.”
I exchanged glances with Mia. “That’s the eleventh dress she’s tried on,” Mia whispered, and then her piercing detective look was back. “Are you okay?”
It wasn’t the first time Mia had asked me that question this week. To be precise, it was the twenty-sixth time. I’d kept count. And when she looked at me through her glasses, like now, wrinkling her nose, the real Liv was very close to surfacing again. I couldn’t let that happen. It was just too dangerous.
So Clone-Liv replied nonchalantly, “Of course. Thanks for asking.” Then I turned to Lottie. “You look great!”
“No, I don’t,” she wailed.
“I’d wear the green dress if I were you. That’s the one that suits you best,” said Mia.
“But Ch—er, but everyone will have seen it so often before,” said Lottie, sighing deeply.
“You don’t want Ch—er, everyone thinking you’ve dolled yourself up specially for them, do you?” replied Mia.
“That’s true.” Lottie took off Aunt Friederike’s housework dress, picked up the green dress lying on Mia’s bed with a whole heap of others, and slipped into it. I helped her to do up the zip fastener and looked at her admiringly.
“Perfect,” said Mia. “Now you just have to do something to your hair to make it look as if you hadn’t done anything to it.”
If it wasn’t too late for that, because Lottie had used the curling iron on it, which had much the same effect on her natural curls as pouring water on burning oil.
“Maybe I could dampen it down a bit,” said Lottie, making for the bathroom.
“Yes, or get it wet right through,” I murmured, wondering how and when I could broach the subject of Jonathan.
Mia pushed the sleeping Buttercup aside and dropped on her beanbag. “Are you really all right, Liv? You look kind of funny.”
“If you ask me that once more, I’ll ask Lottie to do you one of those elaborate braided hairstyles, like that fruit basket the other day.”
Normally Mia would have put out her tongue at me, but not today. Was it my imagination, or did she squint at one of her decorative cushions in passing?
I went out of her room, to be on the safe side.
Ernest’s invitation for this evening had taken us all by surprise. Or more precisely, the reason for it. Not even Mom had known it was his birthday. Incredible. Even if she’d met him only in February last year, you’d think she’d at least have checked the key data before moving in with him, and his birthday was part of that.
We’d baked a cake in honor of the day, with 53 picked out on it in mandarin segments, and Florence had departed from her principle of not being in the same room as tree murderesses. Ernest had been moved to tears that his daughter could actually bring herself to have breakfast at the same table as us and the cake.
On the other hand, I didn’t get a chance to tell Lottie about Jonathan before we set off for the restaurant. It was only a couple of streets away, but Ernest drove there with Lottie, Mom, and Florence, because their shoes weren’t suitable for a walk. Mia and I set out on foot. Grayson was coming straight from basketball, and Charles, Emily, and the Boker were meeting us at the restaurant. After a few rainy days, it was bright and cold again, and ice had formed on the puddles. Mia enthusiastically broke it to splinters by jumping on every puddle with both feet at once.
“No one would think you’re going to be fourteen in March,” I said.