No. No, this wasn’t possible. This was a hallucination. The part with Gabriel Luna? That had really happened. But this was unreal –

‘Oh, and there was something else your parents agreed to,’ Mr Phillips went on.

‘There’s more?’ I groaned.

‘This part,’ Dr Holcombe said, ‘I can assure you is quite standard, Emerson. We require it of all our patients. For the protection of the institute. We can’t let what we do here get out, of course. There are people — religious leaders, politicians — who wouldn’t understand that what we do saves lives. If people were to leave here with entirely new bodies and faces, but still insisting they were the same person they were when they came in… well, as you suggested earlier, word would get out very quickly. That’s why we require all our patients to allow us to declare their previous identities legally dead.’

My jaw dropped. ‘But I’m not dead!’

‘Legally,’ Mr Phillips said, ‘I can assure you that you are. It all comes down to the locus of identity. Just what is the locus — or perceived location — of our identities… our souls, as it were? Is it the brain? Or is it the heart and body? Nikki Howard’s brain, it’s true, is no longer functioning. Her heart, on the other hand, continues to beat.’

‘Her… heart?’

I laid a hand over my heart. Or, I guess I should say, I laid Nikki Howard’s hand over Nikki Howard’s heart. I felt its steady thump-thumpthump. Up until that moment, the sound of my heartbeat had always been reassuring to me.

Now, it sounded… well, foreign.

‘Emerson Watts’s heart, however,’ Mr Phillips continued, ‘stopped beating well over a month ago. If all motor function has ceased in a body, and the brain is removed, then that person, by the legal definition set in place by a landmark 1984 court decision here in New York state, is deceased. Whereas the person with the living brain and beating heart — in this case, Nikki Howard — is, legally, alive.’

My eyes widened. I couldn’t understand any of this. Did this guy not realize I’m only in eleventh grade? Granted I’m in all AP classes. But still. ‘What?’ I asked again.

‘What I’m trying to explain, Miss Watts,’ Mr Phillips said, slowly, as if by his taking more time to pronounce them, his words would make more sense to me, ‘is that approximately thirty-four days ago, Emerson Watts — according to the current definition of the word as mandated by the laws of the state of New York — died.’

I did not like the sound of this. I did not like the sound of this one bit.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘So according to the state of New York, I’m dead?’

‘Emerson Watts is dead,’ he corrected me.

‘But… I’m Emerson Watts,’ I cried.

‘Are you?’ he asked with a little smile.

It was the smile that did it. Suddenly I was afraid. More afraid than I’d ever been in my life… including when I’d seen that plasma screen television start to fall right where my sister was standing.

‘Yes,’ I said, leaning forward in my chair. ‘Yes. Why are you — I mean, why are we — even discussing this? What are you trying to tell me? Are you really going to sit there and tell me that I’m dead, and that Nikki Howard is still alive?’

‘Not at all. What I’m telling you, Miss Watts, is that you are Nikki Howard.’

I was back in my hospital room — the only occupied patient room in the entire A wing of the Stark Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery — and back in a hospital gown. Dr Holcombe and his staff wanted to run some more tests. How well I did on the tests would dictate how soon I got to go home — or, I guess I should say, to Nikki Howard’s loft, since that’s where my home was going to be once I was released, now that I was to resume Nikki Howard’s contractual responsibilities.

Of course, Mom and Dad told me I didn’t have to go through with it. The part about pretending to be Nikki. They said (later, when Stark’s legal eagle, Mr Phillips, wasn’t around) that they’d find a way to pay the two million — and the legal fees and fines — if I didn’t think I could handle it.

‘We can always declare bankruptcy,’ Mom said, way too cheerfully.

Yeah. Because that’s so what I want my parents to have to do for me.

I told them I wasn’t worried. Not about Nikki Howard’s contractual responsibilities. And I wasn’t. I mean, come on. How hard could modelling be anyway? You just have to stand there in front of the camera with your stomach sucked in, right? Look at all those models Frida’s always reading about in her fashion magazines. They’re not exactly rocket scientists.

But I’d already experienced enough of Nikki Howard’s personal life to know it wasn’t going to be easy. Nikki’s love life alone was… complicated. To say the least. That had my stomach twisted up in knots (although that could have been the acid reflux Lulu had warned me about).

The fact was, I was basically going to have to act like Nikki all the time. Only our immediate family was to know the truth about who I really was. According to Mr Phillips, a story was going to be released to the public that Nikki had suffered a head injury when she’d fainted due to her exhaustion and hypoglycaemia, and that the head injury had resulted in amnesia. This was so that when I showed up for photo shoots and didn’t  recognize make-up artists and stylists Nikki had worked with before, there’d be a rational explanation.

Though if Stark Enterprises really thought amnesia was a rational explanation, they needed a major reality check.

I’d told Mr Phillips right away that there was one problem: I might have already mentioned to Lulu Collins and Brandon Stark that I wasn’t Nikki Howard.

But Mr Phillips didn’t look worried. He said, ‘The amnesia story will take care of that.’

And I realized he was right. Lulu and Brandon would totally believe I had amnesia. They were already prepared to believe I’d been the victim of brainwashing by Al-Qaeda or a spirit transfer. They’d believe anything.

That wasn’t what I was worried about. Really worried about, I mean. What I was really worried about was… well, Stark Enterprises. I mean, they already had my family in an iron grip there was no way we could squirm out of — how were two professors ever going to come up with two million dollars (and fines)?

But someone was also tracking Nikki Howard’s keystrokes on her Stark-issued computer. Someone who hadn’t thought Nikki — or I — would notice. And I didn’t want to be paranoid or anything, but I had a pretty good idea who that someone was.

And that was her employers at Stark Enterprises.

So, yeah. I didn’t want to say anything, but that was concerning me. Stark Enterprises and their sudden omnipresence in our lives.

And one other thing. What had happened to me. The me Christopher had said so long ago looked fine.

‘So… where’s my body?’ I asked my parents as we sat waiting for Dr Higgins to come and escort me to the testing lab. ‘I mean… the one I was born in?’

I saw them exchange glances. Then Mom said carefully, ‘Well, honey… we had it cremated.’

I stared at her in horror.

‘We had to,’ she went on quickly, seeing my expression. ‘We had to have a memorial service. We couldn’t keep what happened to you a secret, there’d been paparazzi at the Stark Megastore, following Nikki Howard around. They got the whole thing on film — it was on CNN moments after it happened. Everyone saw that plasma screen land on you. There was virtually nothing else on television for days — it was a slow news week. We had to have a service. We didn’t have any other choice.’

‘You’ll be happy to know it was very well attended,’ Dad said, as if this was supposed to make me feel better. ‘Stark Enterprises paid for Grandma to come all the way from Florida—’

Suddenly, tears filled my eyes.

‘Grandma thinks I’m dead?’ I asked. No more T-shirts with World’s Greatest Grandchild printed on them for Christmas. No more birthday cards with twelve dollars tucked inside.