"It never fails…" Principal Neil Hackett whipped his bathrobe on over his body and hastened for the front door. "As soon as I stick a foot in the bath, someone comes to the door." His tiny dog, Roswell, was perched on the edge of the sofa watching syndicated episodes of "The X-Files," but it looked up to muse unconsciously on the sight of his master with those skinny legs sticking out from under that robe and up to that bathing cap on the bald head on top. Securing his robe tightly, Hackett peeked out of house first and looked to his front stoop. A deep groaning sound from his lips, he turned round securing his robe and reached to the door, grasping and turning the doorknob in one gesture and pulling the door open.
"Hello there, Principal Hackett…" Clad in a pink sweater and black denim jeans, Pim Diffy looked up to him from the front stoop of his house with a sunny disposition and wide grin as her façade to the unethical corruption in her soul. "I'm going door-to-door reminding people that not all of us have things as good off as others. You know, more than eighty-five percent of the country is so poor that they do not even have Cable TV, computers or Internet in their homes. Majorities of people do not even have cell phones or medical insurance to go see the doctor or even surface-to-air missiles or even any of that neat stuff. I am asking good people like you to open your hearts and wallets…"
"Come on, come on, speed it up…" Hackett twirled his finger to speed Pim along. "I want to see 'The Emperor's New Groove' on TV before I have to be at school."
"Principal Hackett," Pim pulled out her metal coffee can. It was painted white and had the letters P-I-M on it in large red letters. "Could you give to The People In Mortality fund? It's a society that takes care of widows and orphans in need of…"
"Pim," Hackett tightened his robe to keep from being branded a degenerate. "Don't you recall? I already gave you twenty dollars for your charity yesterday, and…" He realized what the letters in People In Mortality stood for. "Wait a second, is this a scam to save money for you to get tickets to that Aly and AJ concert?"
"Like I care about a pair of twins who can't sing a note?" Pim was always confusing the two girls with the Olsen twins. "They're horrible, and that TV series was even worse…. Well, except for the little sister who was kind of cool…" She lifted up her donation can. "It's such a worthy charity…" She made a face of harmless innocence.
"Well," Hackett reached to his change tray on the shelf by the inside of the front door. "I guess I can give another five dollars."
"Only five…?" Pim reacted with her voice climbing higher and her face even more pathetic.
"I think I got a ten dollar bill…"
"Only ten…?"
"Hey, why don't I dump all I got into your can?!" Hackett lost his temper and poured several weeks of loose change and small bills into her can. Coins bounced off the rim and rolled off the porch. One bill floated partially away to be snapped up by Pim while a Canadian quarter made a klunk in the bottom. Pim was suddenly very happy and ecstatic at how heavy her can was becoming.
"Mr. Hackett," Pim wiped away a few crocodile tears. "You are a beautiful human being."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah…" Hackett mumbled sarcastically under his impatient breath. "If I miss Cusco open the show, I'm going to be pretty teed off young lady." He gripped the front of his robe and slammed the door shut.
"You didn't shrink me back all the way!" A few blocks over, Keely walked with Phil into Herbert George Wells High School while looking at her hands self-consciously and looking down at the floor around her. "I don't think I was this tall before. Someone is going to notice."
"Look, Allison Hayes," Phil had sarcastically nick-named her after the female actress from the 1958 classic, "Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman." "I told you not to play with the transmorph, and you nearly blew up the house. Not to mention you crushed my drums, my bed, my nightstand, my clock… Thank god, my Wizard is stress tested up to fifty tons. Just be grateful the military wasn't called out before you went crashing through the town!"
"Hey, Keely, looking good!" Seth Washmer wandered past through the passing throngs of students.
"I am taller!!!" Keely looked at Phil with abject fear and paranoia.
"Look, Keely," Phil rolled his eyes as he came to his locker, swung out his shelf and prepared his usual crackers and cheese. "You're experiencing reverse-vertigo. It comes from going to normal height from a great height. All I did was hit the reset and you went back to your original height, but next time, when I tell you not to play with…"
"Your gadgets, I won't play with your gadgets." Keely answered in sync with Phil's exact words in perfect unison.
"Hi, honey!"
Students and faculty turned to the sound of the voice calling above the volume of all the others. It was Keely's mother, Mandy Teslow, with the voice of a Simpsons cartoon character. Her voice was in high decibel as it ricocheted off the school walls around laughing students. Some of Keely and Phil's peers were glad they didn't have a parent that embarrassing while others started laughing and poking fingers to make fun of Keely for having a mom with that cartoon voice.
"Mrs. Teslow." Seth Washmer had stepped back to meet Keely's mom. "Can you say out loud for me, "Don't have a cow?"
"What a strange and weird young man." Mrs. Keely didn't get the reference and instead passed on the notion. Turned down, Seth made a face of confusion and went on his way.
"Can you do something about her embarrassing me?!" Keely turned to Phil.
"Hey honey…" Mandy Teslow kissed her daughter. "You left so fast that you didn't get your lunch." She lifted and shook the paper bag. "Tofu sandwich and alfalfa salad."
"I can see why she left it." Phil mumbled under breath before Keely poked him.
"Honey," Mandy beamed over her only daughter, the only good thing to come out of a brief marriage to a philandering husband. "I am so looking forward to our shopping trip this afternoon. You know, we get so little time together now that you and Phil are… well, you know… a couple."
"Mom…" Keely was mortified realizing her peers and classmates considered her mother talking to her to be a humorous incident.
"Oh please…" Mandy looked around the crowd of young adults moving past. "Like any of these kids don't have parents."
"Heck, some of them are parents." Phil mumbled under breath thinking of at least one school cheerleader and two of the geeks in the science club.
"Honey, I'll pick you up to go shopping right after school." Mandy squealed in delight as a warning school bell rang. "In fact, Phil can come along too if he likes. Why I bet by the end of the day, he could be calling me mom too!" She giggled her quirky cartoonish chuckle. "It'll only be a matter of time before you two make it official!"
"Mom!!!!" Keely's eyes glazed over and she spun around trying to look away. Her legs were buckling in embarrassment and her emotional pressure was hitting its zenith.
"I love you too." Mandy pinched her daughter's cheek and kissed it. "Are you getting taller?!" Keely shot a look at Phil as Mandy beamed and stood in indefinite love for her daughter. A brief sigh, a light gasp and Mandy Teslow was on her way toward the front entrance. Watching her finally depart was a load off Keely's socially pressed ego, but she still groaned out loud as Phil closed her locker while gobbling up his last cheese cracker.
"I don't want to go shopping with her." Keely's shoulders drooped and her head hung low as she scuffed her feet walking and talking to her first class with Phil walking with her on her left side. "I mean, don't get me wrong, I love her, but… I don't want to be around her all the time."
"I know what you mean." Phil sympathized. "I recall once my mom took me to that large flat building with all the stores…"
"You mean the mall."
"Yeah, the mall," Phil continued. "I wanted this really cool suede leather jacket with faux fur lining, and she came rushing up to me with…"
"Phil, this is about me." Keely interrupted his story. "I don't want to let my mom down, but I don't want to go shopping with her. I'm not a little girl anymore. I have gone shopping by myself. I can do it without her. If only there was some way I could send someone else like me…" Keely stopped a mere few feet from Messerschmidt's algebra classroom. "Phil, did you bring your Wizard with you to school?"
"Well, yeah, I always bring it with…" Phil was suddenly aware of her thoughts. "No. Keely, I was talking about this just this morning. You have become so dependant on my future gadgets for solving your problems that you don't even try anymore. You have to deal with your mom yourself."
"Oh, come on, Phil." Keely realized again times he had used it for far less. "You once used a replicant of me to blow off Mia."
"Well, yeah…" Phil recalled that.
"And I know you once created a replicant of me to stay the night with you." Keely added another example.
"Yeah, but… wait a second…" Phil did a double take. "I never did that." He looked back at her, but she just gave him a long knowing gaze. "I didn't." He insisted, but Keely continued looking at him as if she knew he had done so. "Okay, I once considered it, but the point is that I didn't do it because I knew it was wrong, and so is this. The Wizard is not a tool for deceiving one's parents."
"Yet, that's all Pim ever does with hers." Keely pointed out.
"More proof that it's wrong." Phil pointed out. "No, Keely. I'm sorry, but if our relationship means anything to you, you have to prove to me that I'm more to you than my gadgets. I'm cutting you off." He turned to the classroom only to look up to the tall, intimidating presence of a man whose shadow reached over him as a German invasion force crushing everything before it.
"Any time, street urchins…" Messerschmidt was waiting.
Phil and Keely rolled their eyes separately and squeezed past him into the room and took their usual seats. Dropping her purse and taking out her notebook and binder, Keely looked to Phil to acknowledge him and then panned down to the nip of his Wizard partially obscured in his open backpack sitting open on the floor. It was right there. She could grab it if she wanted, but she staved off that compulsion for now. She and Phil had four out of seven classes together through the day. Last period was Philosophy with Mrs. Simms. Phil was the only person Mrs. Simms trusted to leave the room and return to class before the final bell, and that gave Keely several chances to lift the Wizard. By the end of the day, Phil would not be guarding the Wizard, plus she knew that Mrs. Simms would let her leave class early to cover the closing announcements in the office. After that, Keely could just return the Wizard at any time. She just had to take a side trip to the ladies room, which was always empty before the dismissal bell. It was a perfect plan free of any problems.
"Okay," Keely braced herself, aimed the Wizard upon herself and felt the tickle of electrically-charged particles of plasma bouncing off her from the scan. It kind of felt like what she expected a low-wattage electrical bath would feel like. After scanning herself from the tip of her head to her toes, she turned the device to the empty corner of the room and clenched her finger determinedly on the button underneath and watched as ambient room particles, dimensional matter and electronic signatures formed a mindless replicant of herself from a cursory scan of herself and a basic memory composition of the human genome. Like Phil had once told her, it was less than cloning but closer to being a solid thinking hologram with a pre-programmed mind set. Once formed, the replicant had limited awareness and the intelligence level of an infant. The Keely clone reacted with short head turns absorbing data from around her until she had enough knowledge to be aware of concepts.
"Okay," Keely tucked Phil's Wizard to her purse and looked out into the empty school hall. "I'm sending you shopping with my mom."
"I like shopping." The replicant was struggling to form thoughts.
"Yeah," Keely realized then how upset Phil would be if, change that, when he found out. "Just don't do anything stupid around my mom. Be careful."
"I like your mom." The replicant replied. "I like your clothes. How do they taste?"
"My mom is going to think I'm an idiot." Keely was stressing already. "I'm going to have a lot of questions if I pull this off. Please, please don't say stuff like that. All you got to know when shopping with my mom is "how does it look?," "how much is it?," and "does it fit?," Got it?"
"I'm going shopping!" The replicant grinned vacuously.
"The things I do to avoid my mother." Keely told herself, looked out and saw her mother coming down the hall looking for her. Hoping she had seen her first, she pushed her clone out ahead of her. The replicant stumbled partially a bit bewilderedly and confused and looked back to the ladies room as the door closed against it. Keely just huddled behind the door hiding and listening as she hoped the replicant did what it was meant to and left with her mother.
"Keely, honey," Mandy Teslow found the image of her daughter already in the hall. "You didn't have to come looking for me. I'd have found you."
"I love shopping!" The replicant answered ecstatically as the true Keely groaned in hiding at the simplicity of its comments.
"I know you do, honey." Mandy answered under the screaming dismissal bell over their heads. The replicant reacted afraid and scared from the sound but felt assured near the mature Mrs. Teslow. "Oh, we're going to have so much fun!" The hall was getting full of racing students, classmates rushing to lockers and the sounds of cries and cheers. One female student rushing into the restroom nearly revealed the true Keely Teslow hiding at the door, but a crowd of football players blocked Mandy's image of her sudden twins.
"I guess we better get going before we get crushed." Mandy tugged at her daughter's hand to escape this teenage wasteland.
"I'm going shopping!!!" The replicant cheered out loud as a few classmates and peers wished her goodbye. In the wake of that madness, the real Keely Teslow slipped out while watching from the restroom and gripping her purse then bolted around Lily Foster and Tricia Hall of the cheerleaders and Grady Spaggett of the Science Club in a mad dash into the other direction for Mrs. Simms' room. Veering around Seth Tanner and Will Samms with her purse swaying off her shoulder, she screeched to a stop into the room at Phil collecting his things at his desk. Mrs. Simms was erasing the board as she studied her next day's assignments. Keely's breath was racing and her heart was pumping fast as she braced herself on Phil's desk with her left hand holding her up and her blonde locks swaying before her perfect facial features.
"What took you so long getting back?" Phil asked her out loud.
"Traffic…" Keely choked out partially telling the truth.
"I thought it took you…" He suddenly realized he was missing something from his pack. His Wizard! Where was it?! When did he last use it?! His own heart beat quickened and his eyes rounded in fear. The last time he had lost it was almost a disaster, but he had learned from that incident and now had a backup plan less convoluted than masquerading as an extra-terrestrial. "My Wizard?" He noticed his teacher and then lowered his voice for Keely. "Keely, I can't find my Wizard."
"You can't?" Keely sounded surprised and innocent as she pulled Phil's pack close to hide her left hand reaching into her purse and palming the missing gadget. "Well, it must be somewhere…" She blinded Phil's view with his own textbook and whipped out his Wizard with her other hand. "Here it is!!! Phil, I swear… sometimes you're so distracted."
"Yeah," Phil grimaced awkwardly and began returning his things to his pack that Keely had removed. "For a split second, just a split second, I thought you might have taken it…"
"Oh, Phil…."
"What did you finally do with your mom?" Phil zipped his pack closed with his Wizard inside.
"Oh," Keely was not expecting that query and realized she actually now had to lie. "I, um, called her after lunch and said that, uh, you were taking me to the movies and if we could do it another day."
"Sounds good…" Phil looked upon her as a guy with a girl he loved than the old buddy they once were. "What movie do you want to see?"
"How about that new Ben Stiller flick…." Keely hoped nothing went wrong in this scheme.