"The Auld Triangle" by Dropkick Murphys is playing right now. Who here likes the Dropkick Murphys? Be sure to answer that in your review… I'm a curious SOB…

Phil brushed some more straw off of his fedora as they entered Adam's house.

"Hey, Keely," he said, "I thought you were leaving…"

"Well… I was going to," Keely explained, "but I ran into Phil… apparently, from what he told me, his brakes are shot…"

"Yeah…" Phil muttered. "Tow truck will get it out of the ditch…"

"And we didn't want to wait in the blistering summer sun…" Keely added.

"Alright then…"

Phil eyed a gray fedora resting on the table. When Adam was in the other room, he replaced his hat with the one on the table, and put the gray one on his head. Keely didn't notice this either, as she was busy dialing her home phone.

"Start talking," her sister Ashley said from the other end. Adam came back into the room, and noticed that Phil had taken his hat. He took his hat off of Phil's head, and switched it with the black one on the table.

"Hey, Ash, is Mom there?"

"Uh… not… physically…"

"Oh…kay… well… did you tell her that I'm goin' to the mall today?" Ashley started chuckling. "What? What happened?"

"Let's just say… you're going to make a very intimate connection with your room…"

"Wha--… Bu… I… What happened?"

"She heard about your failure in Chemistry and French…"

"So what, two bad grades constitute grounding? Besides, I'm pulling my French grade up--"

"From a 27 percent!"

"That was because I was absent on the day of a huge test- it wasn't my fault I got chicken pox!"

"It was your fault that Bonnie did…" Ashley pointed out, as Phil quickly switched the hats again.

"Hey… shut up."

"Well," Ashley said, and then in an eerie impression of their mom, added, "you're not coming out of your room until your grades are up…"

"Alright… okay, bye," Keely said, and hung up the phone. Adam returned the hats to their rightful spots, and looked out the window.

"Hey…" Keely muttered, "The tow truck's here, Phil…"

"Oh," Phil said, "good…" He waited until Adam faced away, took the gray hat, left his black one on the table, and ran out with a hurried 'goodbye.'

Adam saw the black hat on the table, and sighed in frustration.

"Man…" Keely muttered, walking into the house. "Can't believe I can't go…"

"Phil!" Ashley said in mock shock. "You can't be here- Keely's grounded!"

"I can't be here?" he asked.

"Pfft," Ashley muttered. "Ask if I give a flying…" (The rest of that sentence doesn't necessarily need to be written in a civilized story.)

"This sucks," Keely said, as she mounted the stairs, Phil right behind her.

"Well…" Phil muttered, as he shut the door to Keely's room behind him. "There is a way around this…"

"There is?" Keely asked excitedly, sitting on her bed.

"Yeah… just use the replicator…"

"Do it! Do it!"

Phil took the replicator out of his pocket, and zapped Keely once over. He then turned around and produced a KeelyClone.

"Okay… now we can go…" Phil said. "You," he added, pointing to the KeelyClone, "just sit here and think about how to improve your grades…" The KeelyClone nodded perkily, and began to look around the room.

Much to Phil and Keely's horror, the door swung open.

"Hey Kee-" Ashley started, but stopped. Keely on the left, Phil in the middle… Keely on the right… something was amiss here…

The KeelyClone turned around, but Phil covered her/its mouth before she/it could talk.

Ashley began to talk slowly. "I am going to leave the room… come back… and if things haven't changed, I am calling a psychologist…" She slowly, shakily turned around, and left the room.

Phil handed Keely the automatic gravitators and she lowered herself out the window. "I am really good looking, aren't I?" the clone asked, looking at herself/itself in the mirror.

"Yeah," Phil replied, and walked out the room.

"Phil, am I crazy?" Ashley asked, grabbing him by the shoulders as he lowered the stairs.

"Um… no… I don't think so. Why?"

"So did you see the other Keely up there?"

"I think you've been inhaling something nasty," Phil said. "Or maybe some medicine is having a bad side-effect…"

Ashley sighed… she knew what she saw… but if Phil didn't see it… and he was right there… nobody was going to back up her story… they'd call her crazy.

No, she wasn't going to tell anyone about this…

I think about everything about this story… I even decided to put the pronoun of the KeelyClone "she/it" instead of "it/she"…