Free Thumped by Megan McCafferty Page A

intentions toward my sister.
    I pat his shoulder in what I hope is a comforting way.
    “All I’m asking is that you give her tonight to rest and recover. If you really believe what you have with her is real, then you’ve got your whole future together, right?”
    He grumbles in a vaguely affirmative way.
    I shut his door behind me.
    “I helped myself to your closet.”
    Harmony is watching me from the doorway to my parents’ room. She’s already changed into black leggings and a T-shirt. She’s running her fingers through her raggedly chopped hair. She looks exactly like me, if I had gotten butchered by my stylist.
    “And I look like I’ve helped myself to yours,” I say, tugging at the gown with a laugh.
    It’s pretty surreal to be standing there as our alternate selves, the girls we could have been if my parents had adopted her and hers had adopted me.
    “He promised not to bother you tonight,” I assure her.
    She says thank you, but I swear I catch what looks like a flicker of disappointment crossing her face. I’m too exhausted to take this up now though, and practically crawl to my bathroom.
    Tired as I am, I need to take a shower so I can scrub off all my makeup. I take off the gown I—or Harmony—will never wear again. I avert my eyes from the full-length bathroom mirror and run the hot shower so the glass will steam up quickly. I’m still for seriously icked out by the sight of my ginormity. And it’s not, like, a lazy lump of excessive poundage. This thing gets around . The B$B is designed to move the way real twins would as this point of gestation, as they must be moving inside Harmony right now. She’s never once complained about not having seen her feet since August. But I’ve never gotten used to seeing myself like this, as if an alien race of parasitic gymnasts have colonized on the other side of my belly button.
    Unfortunately, I can’t avoid looking at myself once I’m in the shower. The B$B looks every bit as convincing when I’m naked. It’s really freaky. As I soap up my body, I can’t detect where my abdomen ends and the synthetic skinfeel of the bump begins. These nasty stretch marks had better be part of the illusion or I’m going to need a major skinfeel transplant when this thing is over.
    If I didn’t know any better, I’d actually believe I was pregging.
    Could I be pregging?
    Gaaaaah.
    Jondoe had warned me that the B$B could mess with my mind. He won’t give us any details about how he got it or from whom. All he’ll say is that he had been approached by a multinational conglomerate to help find the perfect test subject for it.
    And that guinea pig is me.
    Of course, I had to ask the obvious question: Why would a corporation in the business of faking preggs offer a sneak peek to someone rich and famous for making preggs? Well, it turns out that getting mocked up is far more common among certain circles of RePros than anyone on the outside would ever imagine. A top-earning Sperm will fake a pregg (or two, or more) in a desperate bid to delay his inevitable obsolescence and retirement from the industry. The faux Surrogette is usually an aspirational famegamer. She gets paid handsomely for signing on for the con, not to mention a major boost to her brand, which she can later trade up for a career as a singer, actress, or brand ambassador. Apparently, it’s kind of an open industry secret. I sometimes wonder if Lib has turned a blind eye to the truth all along. Money talks, sure, but it also shuts up when it has to.
    There’s also a huge market out there for obsolescents who want to experience pregnancy long after the Virus has shut down their reproductive systems. I can vouch that ALTERR is the closest to the real thing. It’s so convincing that I sometimes worry that the joke is really on me, that Jondoe is really that skilled and has succeeded where other Sperms before him have only failed: the fabled insemination without penetration. Maybe this bump is legit and