Double Jeopardy: Lost and Found by Andrew Clements

Being on his own was a nice change--very nice. He looked like no one else, he talked like no one else. For this one day, Jay Grayson was twinless, purely himself. He was a regular, one-of-a-kind kid. And all day long it felt great.

Jay and Ray Grayson are identical identical twins, so alike that even their parents have to search for the freckle on Ray's ankle to tell them apart. And to make things worse, their parents got so giddy after the arrival of their incredibly cute twins that they named them--inexplicably--Jay Ray and Ray Jay. At first being twins is fun, and the two bask in the extra attention they get from everyone. But by the time they finish fifth grade, both boys are feeling a bit inhibited by the constant presence of their shadow selves. It's hard to compete with, hard to differentiate yourself from, well, yourself, another you, sharing your room, your voice, and your life 24/7.

So when the family moves to Cleveland and Ray is sick on the first day, Jay reports alone to his new school, to a homeroom filled with kids with last names between A and L. There he discovers that Ray has no desk, no schedule, and doesn't appear even on the teacher's roll. Then Jay suddenly understands why. Among the manila student folders stacked on the teacher's desk, he spots his own name on a suspiciously thick blue transfer folder and realizes that Ray's records have been mistakenly stuffed into his own folder as if they were one person. Jay knows he should say something to his teacher about the filing error, but the temptation to spend the day just as himself, Jay Grayson, not half of a pair of twins, is irresistible.

As Jay thinks about the experience, he realizes that there is a liberating possibility here. As he puts it to the skeptical Ray, they could both be Jay Grayson, alternating days at school, and have the experience of being non-twins, not to mention every other day off from school, as long as they can get away with it. It's not as hard as they think, either. The twins build a temporary garage hideout inside stacks of unopened moving boxes where they take turns hiding until their parents drive off to work in the morning. In the afternoon Jay and Ray tutor each other on the schoolwork they miss and divide up the homework more-or-less equally.

For the first few days, it's a sweet deal, but the boys soon find that trying to fit into each other's new lives, pretending to be the other on alternate days, has its problems. Lab partner Michelle really "likes" the smooth-talking Ray, but is put off by Jay's shy and stammering attempts at conversation. Ray finds it hard to explain to soccer buddy James why he doesn't have the major knee scrape that Jay acquired at practice the day before, and soon the two guys are hip-deep in deception all around.

Andrew Clements' just published Lost and Found puts a new twist on the oft-used "trouble with twins" plotline. As he consistently does with his intriguingly developed characters, Clements shows the tired-of-being-twins protagonists learning quite a bit about the real knack of being themselves in the midst of their identity deception. As Jay puts it when their cover is blown,

The experiment had failed miserably. Instead of feeling free, they were both locked into a prison of lies. Instead of getting to be themselves, they kept having to pretend to be more and more like each other.

And that could never work. Jay now saw that it was stupid to have thought that they could even pretend to be the same person. They were two totally different people, always had been, always would be--no matter how it might look to others.

Clements has a neat ironic twist for his readers near the end, with Jay forced to play Jay-Ray one more time as he is trying to turn himself in at the school office, but when things get squared away and the appropriate boom lowered on the two part-time truants, Jay and Ray head for their separate homerooms--at opposite ends of the sixth-grade hall--for a new and separate start on the school year.

The brothers walked side by side in silence until they reached the corner, where the hallways crossed. They stopped, then looked at each other for a second or two. It didn't feel like looking into a mirror, not at all. And they both grinned.

Amazing week, huh?" Ray said.