Read Online Tandem by Anna Jarzab - Free Book Online Page A

I’d be surprised.” He lifted his eyes to mine. It was shocking, how familiar they were, and yet how foreign, like I’d never seen them before in my whole life.
    A horrifying suspicion tugged at me: what if Grant was crazy? I’d been operating this whole time on the assumption that he was a reasonable, rational being—I’d even considered the possibility that this was all a misunderstanding, although that seemed like too much to hope for. But what if he was insane?
    Because what he was proposing was ludicrous. Was he saying that Grant Davis had never existed, that since infancy he’d been someone else, this “Thomas Mayhew” that he claimed to be? Or was he telling me that he—whoever he thought he was—had replaced Grant, pretended to be him? Of the two options, I wasn’t sure which was the hardest to swallow, but the idea that there could be two unrelated people who looked exactly the same was so unlikely that it made my head hurt.
    “So you’re … what? Grant’s evil twin?” That was the only possible explanation, if he was telling the truth, although it was very telenovela, and in no way easy to believe.
    A short, harsh laugh escaped his throat. “Not exactly.”
    “Then what are you?”
    “Sasha,” he said deliberately, “what do you know about parallel universes?”

SEVEN
    Now I laughed. “Parallel universes? Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?”
    “Your grandfather is a theoretical physicist,” Grant said. “You must have heard him talk about them at some point.”
    “You’re not trying to tell me that you’re from a parallel universe!” I considered again my hypothesis about his mental stability. Parallel universes? That sealed it: Grant was officially bonkers.
    “Actually,” he said, standing up, “I’m trying to tell you that you are.”
    “That’s ridiculous!” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He’d hit it on the head when he said that Granddad was a theoretical physicist, because that’s what parallel universes were— theoretical . No one had ever proven that they existed.
    He shook his head. “I know it’s a shock. But you know that it’s not impossible.”
    “You’re out of your mind,” I said, folding my arms obstinately across my chest.
    He rubbed the back of his neck; he was trying not to get frustrated, a battle he was clearly losing. “I don’t have time for this to sink in gradually, so I’m going to be very frank with you. You’re from one universe and I’m from another. This one. We’re not in your world anymore—we’re in mine.”
    “And what world would that be?” I struggled to suppress the wave of hysterical laughter that was rising up. “Oz?”
    He was right about one thing: Granddad had told me about parallel universes. When I was young, inventing worlds was part of my nighttime ritual. I would climb into my bed while Granddad took a seat in a nearby chair and we’d spin all kinds of crazy stories about universes inhabited entirely by sentient Popsicle sticks, or talking flowers that ate cotton candy, or wizards who could only use their magic to conjure pancakes. But never this. Never universes so similar to ours that they contained doubles of people we actually knew. Because the implication of such worlds only made us remember, with sharp pangs of grief, what was missing in our own.
    “That’s not an easy question to answer, but I guess you could call it Aurora,” he said. I took a few seconds to assess him as if I was just looking at him for the first time. There was nothing about him to suggest that he was crazy. He wasn’t acting shifty or unhinged. It was precisely the opposite, in fact; he seemed alarmingly serious.
    “Grant—”
    “My name’s not Grant,” he insisted, his voice tight and agitated. “It’s—”
    “Thomas?” He nodded. “You want me to call you Thomas? Fine. That’s fine. I’ll call you whatever you want. I’ll call you Rumpelstiltskin if it means you’ll let me go.”
    “I liked