Ten minutes into last period, as Mr. Strain was going over the procedure for the cheek-cell experiment, Ivy glanced down at the piece of paper that she and Olivia had been passing back and forth since the beginning of class. It had started when Ivy had jotted down one possible theory concerning their parents. Olivia's latest pink-ink-penned theory was about halfway down.
THEORY 14: Mom bites Dad, feels guilty, runs off with kids, can't hack single parenthood??? Ivy tapped her pen thoughtfully against her lips. Glancing up, she caught Vera shooting her a mean look. Ivy returned her stare, and Vera angrily whispered the word "traitor" right at her. Ivy rolled her eyes and scribbled, Vera should go eat some garlic!
Olivia smiled when she read it, looked in Vera's direction, and then wrote, Just ignore her!
Mr. Strain came around to hand out materials, and Ivy covered the page with her book so he wouldn't see it. "I read the article in today's Scribe," he said with a smile as he held out a tongue depressor for their experiment. "As twins, your cells should be nearly identical."
If so, then Olivia must have some vamp in her, thought Ivy. "Here's hoping," she said aloud.
"I keep meaning to ask," Olivia whispered once their teacher had moved on, "what are you doing this Saturday? My mom wants you to come over for lunch."
"Okay," Ivy said as she filled out their lab sheet.
Olivia sighed. "Then she wants to take the two of us shopping."
Ivy stopped writing. "I think that's the first time I've ever heard you sound unhappy about shopping," she pointed out.
"My mom is going completely overboard," Olivia explained. "After you left last night, she started researching Goth cookbooks, and got excited about some recipes she found."
"Really?" Ivy grinned. "Like what?"
"Blackberry blood souffle," Olivia said, looking like just thinking about it made her want to puke. "That does sound delicious," Ivy admitted.
"Gross," Olivia said under her breath.
"I hope that you will all discover something about your own genetics today," Mr. Strain told the class. "You may now begin."
As Olivia scraped the inside of her cheek, Ivy twirled her emerald ring around its chain. Their matching rings were the only things either of them had from their biological parents. While Olivia got to work on making their slide, Ivy took the chain from around her neck, and examined the ring thoughtfully. The emerald, a rich green, was set in a platinum band, which was covered with etchings in yellow gold that looked like rivers on Earth as seen from outer space.
As Olivia delicately pressed the two glass slides together, her ring sparkled up at Ivy.
Maybe the rings are some sort of clue, Ivy thought. Ivy pulled the microscope over and slid her ring under the lens. Bringing it into focus, she followed the etchings with her eye, turning the ring slowly.Maybe she'd find something written there, between the tiny rivers.
Something caught her eye as she rotated the ring, but it wasn't on the band. It was actually in the emerald: a tiny blurry shape that looked like it was floating in the field of bright green.
"What is it?" Olivia whispered. "Let me see!"
"I don't know," Ivy said softly. "Probably just a flaw in the stone." She kept trying to adjust the position of the ring and the microscope's focus, but she couldn't make the blob out clearly.
Her sister poked her impatiently. Ivy pulled the ring out from under the microscope and held it up. She squinted, trying to see whatever it was with her naked eye, but she couldn't.
She turned the ring over. When she brought it right up to her nose, she could just barely make something out. She brushed one finger lightly over the exposed underside of the stone and felt tiny marks.
There's something carved on the bottom of the emerald! Ivy realized.
"What do you see?" Olivia asked eagerly.
Without answering, Ivy quickly put the ring back under the microscope lens, upside down this time. She turned the knob to refocus the microscope until . . .
She could see a tiny symbol, clear as night: it was the shape of an eye, with a V inside it.
"I can tell that you see something!" Olivia whispered urgently. Shoving Ivy over, she held her ponytail out of her way with one hand as she looked into the eyepiece.
"A symbol!" Olivia squealed as Ivy carefully drew the insignia in her notebook.
"Something wrong, ladies?" Mr. Strain called. Olivia looked up. "Sorry, Mr. Strain," she said, smiling. "It's just that there's more to my . . . cheek than I ever realized!"
Ivy took her ring out from under the lens. Olivia replaced it with her own and bent back down over the eyepiece.
"Does yours have the same mark?" Ivy whispered.
Olivia nodded excitedly. "What do you think it is?"
"A jeweler's mark, maybe?" Ivy guessed.
Olivia looked up at her quizzically.
"Maybe the jeweler put this tiny symbol into his work," Ivy went on quietly, "the way a painter signs a painting. We might be able to use this mark to find the person who made the rings or cut the stones."
Olivia's eyes flickered as she caught on. "And that person might have a record of our parents' names!"
"I'm pretty sure that it's a vamp jeweler," Ivy said, taking a turn to look through the microscope at Olivia's ring. "I can tell from the symbol.
Vamp businesses often hide tiny marks in their signs and logos and stuff to identify themselves as vampiric. They don't always use a V, but they often do."
Mr. Strain appeared in front of their desk.
"That does not look like a cheek slide," he said sternly.
"We were just fooling around," Olivia said with a panicked glance at Ivy.
"Right," Ivy agreed. "We were being . . . ha ha . . . cheeky." Olivia giggled nervously as she returned her ring to her finger.
Ivy didn't have a chance to talk to Olivia again until they were heading home.
"Maybe we'll find out that our biological mother is a master jeweler!" Ivy said a few blocks from her house, her hands jammed in her pockets to protect them from the cold. "Maybe she made our rings herself."
"That would be cool," agreed Olivia.
Just then, Ivy's cell phone rang. "Dad," she announced, glancing at the caller ID display and flipping open the phone.
"Hello, Ivy," her father's smooth voice intoned. "Will you be joining me for dinner tonight? I am preparing hemoglobin stew with parsnips."
"Hi, Dad," Ivy said. "I'm glad you called.
Olivia's coming over this afternoon to, uh . . ." Olivia mimed reading a book and taking notes.
"Do some research," Ivy finished. "She's dying to meet you."
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. "It is fine for Olivia to come over, but I am afraid I must leave for an appointment with a client," her father said at last.
"Can't you change it?" Ivy pleaded.
"No," her father said simply. "My regrets," he finished and hung up.
Ivy sighed, her warm breath forming a frosty cloud in the air. "The good news," she told her sister, "is that the computer will be free." She kicked a rock into a pile of frozen leaves. "The bad news is that my dad won't be there." She couldn't help feeling disappointed. Why isn't my dad more eager to meet my twin sister? she thought.
"That's okay," Olivia said, swinging her book bag onto her other shoulder and putting her arm through Ivy's. "We'll cross paths one of these days."
"He's already two hundred years old," Ivy said with a roll of her eyes. "'One of these days' could be two decades from now!"
Olivia had been to Ivy's a handful of times before, but the mansion at the top of the hill still blew her away. From the outside, the place looked like something out of a Civil War epic - or an old black-and-white vampire movie.
The inside was just as glamorous. She'd seen Ivy's basement crypt bedroom with its huge closet. And she'd helped to decorate the gothic third floor ballroom for the All Hallows' Ball, so she wasn't expecting Mr.Vega's study to be a pile of old decorating magazines on top of a bangedup filing cabinet. Still, Olivia couldn't keep from being impressed when Ivy opened the door to the study on the second floor.
All four walls were lined with bookshelves.
There was a huge mahogany desk crowned by a flat-screen computer monitor, and across the room was an enormous globe in the middle of a rug that looked like a starry sky. Next to it, on top of a wide pedestal, stood a gray model with tiny paintings on the walls.
And then Olivia looked up, and realized that the dark-wood bookshelves lining the walls stretched up for another story, and there was a narrow walkway - like a balcony - to enable browsing up there.
This place is awesome! she thought.
Ivy dragged a second high-backed blacklacquer chair behind the desk and motioned for Olivia to sit beside her as she powered up her dad's computer.
The screen lit up with a black-and-white photograph of Ivy in profile, looking thoughtful, the outline of tree branches against a sunset sky behind her.
"I wish my father would change his background," Ivy said with a sigh.
"But that's such a good picture of you!" Olivia exclaimed.
"Look at my nose," her sister scoffed. "It's huge."
"Hey," Olivia countered with mock offense.
"You better be careful what you say about our nose!"
Ivy grinned. "Are you ready for the Vorld Vide Veb?" she asked.
Olivia nodded and Ivy clicked on an icon of a moon in the corner, and the screen went black, except for three big Gothic letters in the center: V V V
"Can anyone access this?" Olivia asked.
Ivy shook her head. "Your computer needs a special chip just to get this far."