Olivia nodded. “Well, he had a huge breakthrough much sooner than he expected!”
“Which is?” Olivia cried.
“Not very easy to explain,” Ivy admitted with a grimace. “You know how Brendan’s dad talks.”
“Ivy!” Olivia pleaded.
“Okay,” Ivy said. “I’ll do my best.” She scanned the table and grabbed the salt and pepper shakers from next to the napkin dispenser. “Pretend this salt is your DNA,” she said, shaking some onto the table. Then she made a little mound of pepper adjacent to the mound of salt. “And this is mine.”
“Oh, my goodness!” came a bubbly voice. “I know you! You’re the twins!”
Olivia looked up to see a pale waitress in a butcher’s apron smiling down on them. She was tall and thin, with her long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. “I’m Alice Bantam.”
Ivy was looking embarrassed, so Olivia smiled and said, “Nice to meet you.”
“Oh, I don’t want to bother you,” Alice blurted. “I just came to see if you wanted to order anything.” She smiled hopefully down at Olivia.
“Oh, yes, please,” Olivia replied. “How about a Sweet Strawberry Smoothie?”
“And I’ll have a Bloody Raspberry Shake,” Ivy put in.
“Be back in a flap,” Alice winked.
Ivy leaned forward to Olivia. “I think she’s new,” she whispered. “Anyway,” she picked up where she’d left off, “salt and pepper can’t mix.”
“You’ve clearly never made soup,” said Olivia.
Ivy rolled her eyes. “It’s a metaphor, Olivia. Human and vamp DNA are incompatible. That’s why the two species can’t usually breed.”
“Right,” Olivia said sheepishly.
“Mr. Daniels said that, in V-Gen’s tests, I didn’t show any traces of human DNA, and you didn’t show any traces of vamp DNA. He couldn’t understand how that could be possible, until he remembered what makes us so special.”
“Our incredible coolness?” Olivia joked.
Ivy smiled and shook her head. “The fact that we’re identical twins,” she said. “Which means we both started in the same embryo.”
Olivia shrugged. “So?”
“So Mr. Daniels thinks that somehow the cells in the embryo became polarized. All the vamp cells went to one end,” Ivy said, using the back of her knife to push the salt away from the pepper, “and all the human cells went to the other.”
Suddenly Olivia got it. “And then the embryo split into two babies!” She gasped.
“One vamp and one human,” Ivy pronounced triumphantly. “Mr. Daniels said the odds are like a billion to one!”
Olivia’s heart did a triple handspring. We’re not a mistake, she thought. “We’re a miracle!”
Just then, Alice returned with their drinks. Olivia and Ivy waited until she was gone before clinking glasses. “To us!” they toasted.
“You should have seen Mr. Daniels,” Ivy went on as Olivia slurped her smoothie. “He was so excited. When I thanked him for figuring all this out, he said he was the one who should be grateful. He wants to write his next book about us!”
“First Serena Star, then the Franklin Grove papers and Vamp magazine, and now a book,” marveled Olivia. “We should get an agent!”
“As if.” Ivy smiled and rolled her eyes. Olivia knew Ivy had always hated the spotlight, but, no matter what her sister said, Olivia suspected that she was starting to enjoy the attention just a little bit.
Suddenly, Ivy’s face tightened. “There’s my dad,” she said. She hunched over and sucked back the rest of her Bloody Shake in one gulp. Olivia stared into the pink froth of her smoothie.
“Hello,” Mr. Vega announced.
“Hi,” Olivia and Ivy said together.
“Are you ready to go, Ivy?” Mr. Vega asked, without acknowledging Olivia.
All at once, the joyous rush Olivia had felt at Ivy’s news melted away. She felt like she’d been doing a magnificent aerial cheerleading move, only to discover at the last moment that there was no one there to catch her. What did it matter how she came to be in this world if her own father wouldn’t acknowledge her?
She wanted to ask her father why he didn’t seem to care about her, but the diner wasn’t the right place for that. Instead, she just raised her hand into the air and waved limply to Alice. “May we please have the check?”
Olivia, Ivy, and Mr. Vega said nothing as they waited for the bill.
After a minute, Alice brought it over and slapped it on the table. “Here you go!” she said. “Thanks so much. Really, you girls were a pleasure to serve. You have an energy, you know?”
Alice turned to trot away, but Mr. Vega cleared his throat. “Pardon me,” he called.
Alice spun around. “Yeah?”
“Do I know you?” he said. “I feel certain that I have seen you before.”
Olivia couldn’t believe her ears. That almost sounds like a pickup line! she thought.
Alice screwed up her lips and rolled her eyes around, like she was trying to see the inside of her head. “Nope,” she said after a second, “I don’t think— WAIT A MINUTE! Have you been to any parties at the art museum?”
Mr. Vega’s face bloomed into a smile—a real one, not one of those close-lipped pretend smiles Olivia was used to. “Of course. We met at the last exhibition opening,” he said. “You’re the artist who does those sculptures.”