"Replica11 - Lucky Thirteen - Kaye, Marilyn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kaye Marilyn)

"I just think you can do a lot better."

Tasha made a face. "That's easy for you to say."

Tasha had a point. Amy and Tasha's older brother, Eric, had been together for a while now, so Amy wasn't looking for a boyfriend. Personally, Amy didn't believe it was absolutely essential to have a boyfriend — she and Eric had just sort of come together naturally.

But at that moment, in the seventh grade at Parkside Middle School, all the girls were talking about boyfriends, real or potential. Tasha wanted one too. And she'd set her sights on Dwayne.

"Are you sure you can't see him?" Tasha pressed. "Are you even trying?"

Amy knew what Tasha was referring to. She wanted Amy to use her special vision, her unique ability to see farther and more distinctly, even in the dark, than regular human beings.

Amy complied. Concentrating, she surveyed the scene. She identified a couple of girls from school on a ride, and she saw her math teacher trying to fish a prize out of a gigantic bowl. But there was no sign of Dwayne.

"I could probably spot him from the top of the Ferris wheel," she proposed, but Tasha shook her head.

"I want to wait and go on that with Dwayne," she confessed. Amy didn't need superior vision to see that her best friend was blushing. Amy glanced at Eric, but he was doing the guy thing and ignoring his sister.

Then Tasha grabbed Amy's arm, and Amy assumed this meant she'd spotted Dwayne. But she was wrong. "Ooh, look, there's the fortune-teller's tent. Let's go over!"

The proposition didn't thrill Amy, but at least it might take her friend's mind off Dwayne for a while. "Okay," she agreed. "Eric, how about getting your palm read?"

"No thanks," he replied.

"Oh, come on," Amy wheedled. "Don't you want to know your future?"

"I already know my future," Eric said. "I'm gonna flunk Spanish."

"That's a gloomy prediction," Amy said, laughing.

"Tell me about it. We've got an unbelievable assignment," he told her. "We have to translate this entire Spanish book by next week." He amended that. "Okay, it's not a book, but it's a really long story. And I'm stuck on the verbs."

"Can't you get some extra help?" Amy asked him. "Like a tutor?"

"I'm working on it." He looked at her hopefully. "Are you offering your services?"

"I'm taking French, not Spanish," she reminded him.

"I know, but you could learn the entire Spanish language in an hour," he pointed out.

That was an exaggeration but not too far from the truth. Amy's extraordinary skills included the ability to learn just about anything in much less time than it took normal people. But it bothered her that Eric always took it for granted that she would use her abilities to help him out at school. "Sorry, but I don't want to learn Spanish. Not now, anyway."

"Gee, what's the point of having a genetically engineered girlfriend if I can't take advantage of her genius IQ?"

"Oh, shut up," Amy said. She knew he was just teasing, but comments like that got on her nerves. "And keep your voice down, okay?"

"You can't have it both ways," Eric said cheerfully. "I can either shut up or keep my voice down." Clearly, he wasn't particularly upset by Amy's unwillingness to help him out. But she did wish he would remember that his voice had a tendency to carry.

Not that anyone would believe anything they'd overheard. Strolling across the carnival grounds with her friends, Amy knew she looked like an ordinary twelve-year-old girl. With her average height and weight, her straight brown hair, her brown eyes, there was nothing amazing or unusual about her appearance. No one could tell that she had been created in a laboratory. No one could even come close to guessing that she had been cloned from carefully selected genetic material. That her designed DNA made her the most intelligent, the most athletic, the most gifted twelve-year-old girl around. And that somewhere in the world there were eleven others exactly like her.