Losi came home from school with a body from the Empathery.
Carol stood in the kitchen making lasagna. The garage door slammed, and she wiped a strand of hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist. She listened to her children kicking off their shoes, then their hissing whispers. Carol straightened from her cooking, leaning the heels of her palms against the counter’s edge.
“You two had better not be planning anything,” she warned.
The whispers quieted. Someone called, “Hi Mom.”
“Losi?” Carol leaned over the counter to peer down the empty hall leading from the family room to the garage. The voice didn’t sound like Losi—too low, too nasal—but the rhythm of the words was the same. Carol waited for her two teenagers to waltz around the corner, but the hall remained empty.
“It’s me, Mom.” Losi’s strange voice drifted over the walls. “I got an assignment at school today.”
It was probably a cold. Something had been going around school lately, and Losi must have caught it. Carol returned to layering noodles and sauce in the glass dish. “This had better not be a complaint, missy. Homework is a requisite part of education.”
“We know, Mom,” Cole droned, and Carol closed her eyes and shook her head.
Losi said, “My English class was talking about empathy…”
Carol’s hands went limp over the lasagna. Dread settled like a crouching tiger in her stomach. She had to swallow twice before she called, “Losi, if we’re going to have a conversation, I want to see your face. When you talk to someone, you look them in the eye.”
They were familiar words, something her husband told the kids every time he lectured them. Carol clung to the phrase, drawing composure from it. She listened to the shuffle of feet down the carpeted hall.
Losi stepped into the kitchen. Blonde hair coiled in a braid over her shoulder and down her chest, where her hands fiddled with its end. Blue eyes flitted about the room, wide and worried. A wine-spill birthmark splashed her jaw and leaked onto her neck. The dread began to lash its tail, and Carol leaned against the counter and folded her arms over her chest to contain it. This was not Losi. Losi had Dave’s dark hair and Carol’s green-brown eyes. But as she waited for Carol to say something, the girl’s foot tipped onto its toe and rocked back and forth—one of Losi’s nervous habits since childhood.
“Losi!” Carol snapped, pleased the ring of authority hadn’t fled her voice.
“It was a school assignment, Mom,” the girl said in Losi’s words, though not her voice.
Cole edged into the family room beside his sister. Carol felt her insides go limp with relief at his familiar whip-thin form topped by hair swept with too much gel. He was two
