Alex's double peeked out from behind the washing machine, then stood up slowly. Her eyes flicked back and forth between Alex and Justin, and she wore a tight-lipped, wary expression. She moved out into the room, not speaking. As she moved, Alex looked her up and down, frowning.
The double was the first to speak. "You're not hurt bad, are you?" she asked, biting her lip and looking at Justin.
"I don't know -- it hurts a lot. I guess we'll have to see --" he started, but Alex interrupted.
"Okay, nice that you care and all, but -- you're just my double. I'll take care of things with Justin. But first, we need to take care of things with you." She reached to pull out her wand, and the double made a face, but nodded.
"Rattle and hum, put 'em back together-um," Alex intoned, giving her wand the requisite flick. The double blurred and seemed to slide across the floor into Alex -- but the clothes she had been wearing dropped to the floor.
Alex shook her head and looked at the pile of clothes, puzzled. "That's never happened before... what's up with that?" She looked to Justin for an answer.
Shifting uncomfortably, Justin said, "How about I tell you after you get me up to my room and I get that ice pack?"
"Oh! Right! Sorry...." Taking Justin's hand, Alex waved her wand, but Justin reached out to grab her wrist, stopping her before she could transport them.
"The clothes -- put them in the dirties, so nobody notices."
"Right," Alex said again, moving quickly to pick them up and toss them into the hamper by the washing machine. Then she giggled. "Well, well -- you helping me with how to cover something up. Who would've expected that?"
Justin's only answer was to roll his eyes and grimace. "Yeah. Very odd. Now, upstairs...?"
"Okay, okay, I'm getting there." Once again taking Justin's hand, Alex completed the spell this time, and the two of them were upstairs in his room. Theresa was already there, and looked at her two eldest children with a mixture of annoyance and worry.
"What took you two so long? I was going to go back down and check on you in a few more seconds."
"I wanted to check and see how bad Justin was hurt," Alex covered quickly, "but he wouldn't let me."
"And a good thing!" Theresa said, scowling at Alex. "That's not something you need to be doing."
Alex rolled her eyes in answer. "Mom, please. Like I want to see that. I just wanted to make sure he wasn't bleeding or anything."
Their mother's scowl didn't diminish in the least, however, as she stared at Alex for a few seconds. Finally, she turned to Justin, her scowl dropping as she did. "You take what I've brought you and -- check yourself," she said, nodding toward the water, tylenol, icepack, and hand mirror on Justin's bedside table. "I'll be back in a few minutes to see if you need anything." Moving toward the door, she took Alex by her upper arm and pulled her along.
*
Meanwhile, back in Justin's dorm room, Alex's first double was sighing. "Nothing," she said out loud. "This doesn't make any sense at all. I can't believe Justin would be experimenting with magic and not keeping any notes about it -- that's not like him." She paused, then absently spun a pencil on Justin's desk. "Unless it was a new experiment -- or something secret. What could he be doing that he wouldn't want anyone to find out about...?"
She turned and looked around the tiny dorm room. It was tiny -- perhaps twelve feet by ten feet -- with his desk, desk chair, dresser, bed, and a mini-fridge packed into it. Those had come with the room, and were typical institutional furniture: serviceable, but completely unstylish. Justin and Alex had added posters -- a couple of Tears of Blood, plus a couple of ones of girls in bikinis that Alex had practically had to force Justin to put up. She smiled, remembering that conversation.
"Look. You're a guy, with a room nobody else can tell you what to do with for the first time in your life. If you don't have pictures of girls up, people are going to think you're gay, or a complete and total nerd."
The smile suddenly turned to a frown. Wait... there's something else. That's not how that argument ended. What happened next?
Picking the pencil she'd been playing with up, Alex tapped it against her teeth, scowling as she thought hard. She'd won the argument, she knew -- the posters were proof of that. But there was something else that had happened... something important.
Laying the pencil back down, she got up and moved around, looking at the room from different angles, hoping something would stir her memory. Nothing. "Okay. So let's say Justin has a secret. Where would he hide it?" She looked at the computer on his desk, but shook her head. No -- if it was there, she wasn't going to find it, not without help. And she could waste a lot of time looking. She'd already looked under his bed -- not that she'd found anything there, or expected to. Justin was too much of a neat freak to just shove things under his bed.
She moved to the closet, opened it, looked it up and down. Clothes hanging, shoes on the bottom, a few boxes on the top shelf -- wait. One of those was a shoebox. If his shoes are at the bottom, why would he need a shoebox up there?
Alex stood up on tiptoe, but couldn't quite reach it. Damn shelves built for tall people. I could get the chair, she thought, but frowned even as she was thinking it, looking at Justin's wheeled desk chair. Or... She reached into her pocket and took out her wand, gave it a flick to loosen her wrist up.
"Shelf is too high, it makes me sigh, get that box down so I don't feel like a clown." The box appeared in Alex's hands, and she smiled, then put it half under one arm while she tucked the wand away again. With that done, she opened the box -- then stared in shock at the contents.
