Under Their Skin by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page A

with Eryn?
    Nick bent in front of Jackson’s door and maneuvered the pin into the lock.
    â€œIt goes straight in and then you have to push on it until it clicks,” Eryn told him.
    The click came just as Eryn was saying the word click.
    â€œNow,” Nick said. He turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped into Jackson’s room. Eryn, scrambling to catch up, shoved Ava’s door open all the way. It swung back and banged against the wall, knocking over a tennis racket.
    A tennis racket? Eryn thought. Just like mine?
    Ava’s room was painted the same light turquoise as Eryn’s room back at Dad’s house. The first poster Eryn noticed was of Liam from The Best Band—almost exactly the same poster that had hung in Eryn’s room until last night. A book of piano music lay on the desk.
    It looks like she’s a lot like me, Eryn thought numbly. Maybe . . . maybe it’s really just Jackson who’s totally different from us?
    But just as she thought that, she heard Nick scream from down the hall.
    â€œNo way! Eryn, you’ve got to see this! It’s like Jackson cloned my room!”

TWELVE
    Nick had been kind of braced for seeing dead bodies.
    But what he saw struck him as even stranger: a lacrosse stick and a basketball spilling out of Jackson’s closet, a trumpet mouthpiece balanced on the desk, a freaking map on the wall that might as well have been his own globe ironed out flat. Jackson even had the same sports books lined up on his bookshelf, with all the soccer balls, basketballs, and baseballs on the spines grouped together.
    Nick could wake up in this room and barely notice any difference from his own.
    He took a step out of Jackson’s room and raced down the hall toward Ava’s.
    â€œWhat’s it like in there?” he called to Eryn. “Oh.”
    Ava’s room was like a combination of Eryn’s room at Dad’s, plus the way her room at Mom’s had looked until last night. The Best Band posters were everywhere, andit looked like Liam was also Ava’s favorite TBB member. A poster of an intense-looking girl playing tennis hung over the bed, with the word Perseverance in large letters at the bottom.
    â€œMaybe we misunderstood?” Nick suggested. “Maybe Mom said Ava and Jackson are too much like us, and that’s why they didn’t want us to meet?”
    â€œThat’s crazy,” Eryn said. “And—that’s not what she said.”
    She stood on the rug in the middle of Ava’s room—the rug was striped, just like the one in Eryn’s room. She slowly spun around, like she was trying to get her eyes to believe what she was seeing.
    â€œMaybe . . . ,” Eryn said, “maybe it’s that Ava and Jackson are a lot like us in the activities they’re involved in, but they have a bad attitude or something. So Mom and Michael are afraid that if we met them, their bad attitudes would rub off on us.”
    â€œYou’re the one with ripped-up posters in your trash can,” Nick said.
    â€œI don’t have a bad attitude!” Eryn protested.
    Nick decided not to say Then why’d you tear up your posters?
    â€œAnyway, it was a long time ago that Mom and Michaelsaid we couldn’t meet those other kids,” Eryn said. “Back when I still had all these same kinds of posters on my wall.”
    She gestured at Ava’s walls.
    â€œHow much do posters and bedspreads and tennis rackets tell you about what a person’s like?” Nick asked.
    â€œPeople change,” Eryn said fiercely. “Kids outgrow things.”
    Nick guessed that was her answer to the question he hadn’t asked, about why she’d ripped down and torn up her posters.
    â€œWe need to become, like, super-detectives or something,” Nick said. “Find out what in these rooms really means anything.”
    Eryn walked over to the desk and began opening