Hi, guys!

Sorry it took so long to upload this chapter. I usually only update when I've got the next two chapters complete, but I decided I wanted a cliffy so I had to write a chapter I hadn't planned, and now I have my cliffy. I hope you like it ^^ And yes, I am evil.

Alright, so here is another chapter for Aaliyah-Babygurl, who says she 'needs more Zack&Cody in her life'.

Enjoy!

PS: I promise you won't have to wait for the next chapters too long. I mean, I'm evil, but I'm not that evil... They're already waiting in line to be read by you!

***************************************CPOV******************************************

Zack wouldn't leave me alone for almost two weeks. One time, he was about to hurt somebody who dared to come near us with the wrong expression on his face. I got so angry I didn't talk to him for two days. I didn't really expect it to affect him in any way, but strangely, he seemed upset about it and nothing similar happened again.

By the time he finally calmed down, I had nearly stopped noticing his eyes on me, and so had my friends. Then, one day, Barbara commented about how 'my stalker' was nowhere to be seen. Only then did I realize that Zack was gone. I waited for him to come back, but he didn't.

After that, it were all back to normal. I was glad about that. I still tried not to walk alone, but mostly because even though Zack had quit being all hysterical, Mom hadn't. I knew she was still worried when I and Zack left the hotel in the morning and when I got back, I noticed the relief in her face.

At least she had - unwillingly - allowed me to do whatever I wanted in the afternoons. 'Do whatever I wanted' meaning 'Go to the club meetings'.

The club was a group of educationally gifted students Barbara and I had founded in our second year. We were ten now, and we met every Wednesday afternoon to discuss highly interesting topics the teachers refused to do in class. I had a feeling that was because they simply didn't understand them themselves.

Besides me, Barbara, Liv, Tyler, Tapeworm, and Fred, there were four younger kids in the club: Katherine and Theodora, also called Kathy and Theo, best friends, Giulia from Italy and a boy named Oliver who had the strangest habit of never blinking which I found was terribly irritating.

The principal had offered us a room we could use as long as we wanted. We also had his permission – and, more importantly, the keys - to use the library and the chemistry/biology/physics collection as long as we promised not to do anything dangerous with the stuff.

Today, we wanted to discuss the wave-particle dualism. We had brought a big pile of books full of theories, but actually, they were just there to create a scientific mood. Most of us had already read those books before. I myself could tell of at least three that they were completely useless.

We were sitting in a circle around a table on which we had put the books. Briefly, I thought that if Zack had ever come there, he would have laughed himself to death. My eyes immediately darted towards the windows, almost expecting to see him standing outside, watching me. He wasn't there. The only gaze I felt was Oliver's.

"Alright," Fred said "I'll start. See, I believe that Max Born's theory is not true. His writings on this matter are more hypothetical than acceptable even when we are talking about such a difficult topic. He jumps to conclusions that the reader cannot comprehend. I think he left physics and joined philosophy there."

Liv nodded. "He probably got so obsessed with finding a solution that the scientific spirit left him."

"Uh…" Theo said, slightly embarrassed, "What was his theory again?"

"He said that the wave's amplitude at a certain place is equivalent to the probability of finding a particle at this place," I explained to her. She nodded understandingly.

"So it is the opposite of Einstein's interpretation of wave-particle dualism?"

"That's the problem," Fred told her. "Born meant to explain the phenomena of WPD, but the longer you look at it, the more the theories seem contradictory."

Barbara frowned. "In my opinion, Born's theory does make a lot of sense. It is the most plausible explanation for WPD I know. Maybe you guys should read his book more carefully."

"I have," Fred answered, a little annoyed. "And I found it very queer."

"Well, maybe you're just not smart enough to understand it!" Barbara snapped.

Tyler rolled his eyes. "Hey!" I called, "This is supposed to be a spirited discussion, not a silly fight!"

Barbara gave me a murderous look, but shut up.

"Then give us your opinion to discuss about!" Giulia said, smiling.

I smiled back. "Well, my opinion is that all of WPD is a mistake resulting from technological limitation. At first, the diffraction patterns were detected holistically by means of a photographic plate, which could not detect individual particles, so the notion grew that particle and wave properties were mutually complementary, in the sense that different measurement apparatuses would be required to observe them. Today we can see the diffraction patterns emerge as a statistical pattern as we watch individual electrons and clearly, quantum particles are particles indeed who behave in an extraordinary way!"

My smile turned into a grin as I could nearly watch question marks rise from a few heads. Giulia, however, never batted an eyelid. "Aren't that the words of L. Ballentine?" She asked sweetly. The question marks seemed to grow.

"Indeed, they are. But although they are not my words, I still believe they are true. And who am I that I could explain Ballentine's theory better than Ballentine?"

"Who is this Ballentine you keep talking about?" Kathy asked worriedly. "Do I have to know?"

"No, you don't," I told her. "You may as well remember these words as those of Cody Martin."

"Now who is jeopardizing the scientific spirit?" Barbara complained. "This is supposed to be a spirited discussion, not a possibility for you to steal Ballentine's glory or try to improve your flirting skills!"

I blushed and leaned back into my chair. "Don't you want to say anything else to defend Max Born?"

****************************************ZPOV*****************************************

"Jake, if you don't get your behind down here in the next three seconds, we're going without you!"

Ian had a very loud voice. Sometimes I felt sorry for his mother – I was sure he must have been a nightmare when he was a baby. What's more, he had a sister who was two years older than him and had the same voice.

"Coming!" Jake yelled down the staircase, and "Bye, Mom!" He shouted over his shoulder. After a few more seconds, we heard the flat door slam shut and then the sound of his skateboard rolling down the wheelchair ramp. Jake never went anywhere without his skateboard, except to school, where it had gotten him into trouble too many times.

"What are we doing today?" Ian asked as we walked down the road towards the subway station – meaning: Ian and I walked, Jake drove.

"Mark and Alex are waiting for us at the mall," I answered.

Ian grimaced. "Mark? Isn't that the tiny insecure one?" I grinned at the description and nodded.

"I don't understand how you can stand hanging out with him!" He said. "He is so annoying! Can't we just go see a movie and sadly forget picking them up?"

I kicked his leg. "No, we can't. He's a friend of mine, and he's a great guy once you get to know him."

Jake snorted. "Yeah, and buy yourself a big box of ear wax…" I wondered about if I should hit him, too, but I decided that I would probably just hurt my hand like Bob had and besides, Mark could be pretty unnerving.

We picked Mark and Alex up at the mall and after that, we all decided to go to the movies – most of us liking that suggestion because Mark would shut up that way. The guys wanted to see a horror movie, but I convinced them to see a comedy instead.

We laughed a lot and we also spent a lot of money on popcorn, nachos and drinks. For some reason I never knew, Jake's soda went down Alex's shirt during the second part of the movie, causing Alex to throw popcorn at Jake. Unfortunately, he missed him and the popcorn hit Mark instead, who discovered a new way to use nacho pepper sauce, and soon after, all our drinks and food were on the floor, in our shorts or in the hair of the people sitting around us. Somehow a complete stranger managed to get some pepper sauce in a place pepper sauce should never, ever be, and ran off to the bathroom. As I said – we had a lot of fun… It was over far too soon.

As we were all more or less covered on soda and feeling kind of sticky, we headed towards the mall fountain. We could have used the bathroom, but that was so… conventional? We had a nice little water fight, at least until they threw us out.

They could have saved themselves the trouble – we snuck back in anyway, because Jake needed spares for his skateboard. On the way to the store, Ian spotted two kids from our grade looking at some absolutely horrible purses.

"Do they actually want to buy those or are they just looking for something to kill their cigarettes with?" He laughed.

Alex frowned. "I think they really want to buy them. They are two of the goofs his brother," He nodded towards me, "hangs out with. They are all such geeks; they'd never even touch a cigarette." He patted my shoulder and grinned. "Must be horribly embarrassing to have a brother like that…"

I felt anger rise inside of me. I suppressed it. I couldn't afford to lose my temper right now. So I forced my lips to curl up into something that was supposed to be an answering grin and shrugged casually.

"He's your twin brother, right?" He asked. I nodded. "Oh boy, poor you. People must be mistaking you for him all the time. I feel really sorry for you, man."

I didn't know how it happened, so it definitely wasn't my fault. I couldn't control it. But suddenly I was standing in front of Alex, grabbing his shirt and pulling him closer to me. He was bigger than me, but I didn't care.

"Make one more comment like that about my brother, and you can feel sorry for yourself."

*****************************************************

I left quickly after that. All the way home, I didn't stop cursing myself and my temper. I could have slapped myself for what I had done and said. Why, heck why was I such a giant fool when it came to Cody? Oh right, I knew the answer. But I still needed to get myself under control. Maybe I should take anger management classes, I thought.

When I reached the hotel, it was almost four o'clock. I had planned on staying away much longer, and I knew I was going to be alone in the suite as Mom was probably out and as it was Wednesday, Cody wouldn't get home until six. I'd have plenty of time all to myself. That was good.

****************************************CPOV*****************************************

We had to end the club meeting early that day because Liv and Tyler's grandmother was coming and they had to search the mall for a purse they could give to her, and Fred had something very important to do he wouldn't tell us about.

When I got to the Tipton, Mr. Moseby and Mrs. Schnitzelgrubermeiger Hsien Von Helsinger Kepelugerhoffer were having a fight in the lobby. I would have stayed to watch, but someone threw a Frisbee in their direction and I quickly sneaked away before he could blame me.

Mom wasn't there when I arrived at our suite. She had left a note on the living room table that said she needed to go to the mall to buy food, but I was pretty sure she just wanted to spend some of the money she'd gotten from Mr. Moseby the evening before as long as it was still there and hadn't made its way into Zack's wallet yet.

I made myself a bread with cheese and read a few pages in my brand new history book; it was about the riots and civil commotion during the French Revolution – very interesting. The only reason I didn't read it in one rush was that I thought it would be a pity if I didn't have anything to read the next day.

After a while I began to worry about what Zack was doing. He was unusually quiet. So I finished the chapter 'Ludwig XVI. and the Estates-General' and walked over to the bedroom after I had carefully put a bookmarker to the page.

I don't know what I expected – probably I expected to find the room deserted, maybe a note from Zack that said he had remembered the old times and was re-exploring the vent. But I did not expect what I actually had to see, and for quite a long time after that I used to wish I had never found out.

My twin brother was lying on the floor with his head bent over something I couldn't see. He was humming to himself; it was a soft-pop love song I knew from the radio; it was called 1,2,3,4. While I was still watching in amazement, he moved, giving me full view of a very lifelike painting… of me.

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Ah... don't you just love cliffies??? *evil grin*