The first time that Noah noticed something was wrong with Jamie was when Jamie laughed. Not because the joke wasn’t funny. Because Jamie hadn’t laughed like that before. It was too perfect, too loud, almost as if he had listened to people laughing and copied the sound without understanding why.
The pair had known each other since nursery and knew everything about each other. The shortcut through the woods, the abandoned water towers, the place where they had carved their names into the large oak tree in Jamie’s garden.
So when Jamie disappeared in the woods for 6 days and came back not remembering where he had been, Noah noticed. He noticed the way that Jamie would try the foods he hadn’t tried before, the way that sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, he’d stare at the birds in the sky like it was his first time watching them fly. But despite this, Jamie seemed to remember everything apart from how he went missing. He knew every secret, every memory, he smiled at the right time and to everyone else he seemed normal.
Noah tried to ignore it, tried to ignore the tickle at the back of his spine every time Jamie smiled at him. He tried to ignore the feeling that something, everything was wrong. Because if Jamie wasn’t Jamie then who was he? Where was he? And where was the real Jamie?
When the clock on his bedside table blinked 2.17 A.M., Noah stopped trying to sleep and checked his phone instead. As the screen lit up, a message from Jamie came through.
“Come outside!”
Out of the corner of his eye, Noah saw a shadow move in his garden. Tiptoeing across his creaky wooden floor, he padded softly over to the window and looked outside. Under the pale moonlight stood a figure. The garden was almost completely dark despite the night sky light filtering through the trees, yet he could somehow make out Jamie’s smile. Pushing the window open, Noah called out to the figure below.
“Why are you here? It’s late. Go home.”
“I wanted to see you.”
The reply came almost instantly and suddenly Noah’s spine was tickling. The voice was Jamie’s. Of course it was Jamie’s. Almost. It was Jamie’s the same way the laugh had been almost Jamie’s, the same way the smile had been almost Jamie’s. The same way everything about him was almost right.
Up in the safety of his room, Noah stared down below into the garden. And staring at the curve of Jamie’s lips, the blankness of his eyes and the way his arms fell at an odd angle by his sides, Noah knew that this wasn’t Jamie. And really, he had known all along.