I Am Your Evil Twin

I Am Your Evil Twin

File:GB2K06 - I Am Your Evil Twin.JPG
Author	R. L. Stine
Cover artist	Tim Jacobus
Language	English
Series	Goosebumps: Series 2000
Genre	Horror fiction, Children's literature
Publisher	Scholastic
Publication date	June 1998
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	126 p.
Preceded by	Invasion of the Body Squeezers, Part 2
Followed by	Revenge R Us

I Am Your Evil Twin is the sixth book in the Goosebumps: Series 2000.

Plot

Narrator Montgomery Adams seems to have it all: A scientist uncle who lives in Pittsburgh and a mother who must leave her son to go to South-east Asia for a couple months. Luckily for Montgomery, his cousin Nan is the same age as him and the two get along swimmingly. Montgomery hates his name and his red hair.

Uncle Leo spends most of the time in his basement laboratory, but he does take time out of his busy schedule to greet Montgomery by pricking him with a pin and poisoning him with donuts. Monty (as he prefers to be called) is allergic to peanuts, and the donuts from the bakery were fried in peanut oil. Uncle Leo suggests washing the whole experience away with a jug of cider.

Monty has to transfer to the new school mid-semester, but luckily he knows a few of Nan's friends already. He's sweet on one in particular, Ashley. Strangely, his teacher gets miffed when Monty asks which desk is his, as she claims she already told him last week. Ashley helpfully points out his desk for him.

After school, Monty kills time around the mansion while his cousin takes a piano lesson. It turns out he and his cousin are both really good at it and they decide to do a duet for the school talent show.

While waiting for his cousin to wrap up, Monty opens the door to Uncle Leo's Forbidden Basement Laboratory, where someone with a high-pitched voice yells out for him to get out. Uncle Leo surfaces a few moments later and apologizes for snapping, but his basement laboratory is just too dangerous for non-scientists.

The next day at school, Monty and Ashley are flirting and goofing around in the art room when Monty accidentally spills paint all over a classmate's volcano project, and both he and Ashley are punished with after-school detention. Ashley spends the rest of the day ignoring him, though she does finally acknowledge him after school lets out. She caught him trashing the art room and then sneaking out the window. Monty surveys the art room, which looks like a tornado hit it. He questions how she could think he did it, as he was in science class. But she insists that she saw it happen and then tattles on him to the principal.

While cleaning up the art room solo, he spies his reflection in the mirror-- only he realizes the reflection is of someone behind him. Monty tries to chase after the figure but he's stopped by the art teacher who chastises him some more and explains how mirrors work. After school, things aren't much better as he gets beat up by the volcano sons. The next day, Monty spies his double again, this time looking into his classroom from the window. Monty runs across the room and jumps out the window to chase after his double.

Once safely back at home, he says hello to Uncle Leo and then asks if he has a twin. Surprisingly, Uncle Leo admits that he does. He quietly tells Monty that when his mother was pregnant, his father died a month before she was due with twins. Because she couldn't afford to raise two children, she had to give up one. She held on to Monty simply because he was born first. Monty has a lot of questions, but before he can ask about the twin tormenting him at school, Uncle Leo drops a shocker: Nan is his fraternal twin, who Uncle Leo has raised as his own daughter.

Several weeks pass before anything gets worse. On the day of the Big Piano Rehearsal in front of the school things do get worse. Before Monty can go onstage with Nan for their duet, he realizes he left his sheet music in his locker. Along the way, someone shoves him into a supply closet. He escapes the rising fumes of some carefully spilled chemicals and races to the auditorium, only to discover when he returns backstage that Nan went out and started without him. Only she is with him. Only the "him" onstage is not really him at all! The Real Monty yells out to the Fake Monty, who cuts the recital short by pushing the piano across the stage in an attempt to kill the Real Monty.

Monty chases his twin into the halls and the twin confronts him, tells him he's taking over his life, and then punches him in the stomach. He then nonchalantly walks out of the school. The Real Monty gives chase and sees the Fake Monty calmly walking past cars in the parking lot and along the street holding a spray can. He stops to spray-paint a heart around "MONTY LUVES ASHLEY 4EVER" on the door to a car he knows Ashley will pass on her way home.

Monty follows himself home and spies the twin slipping into one of the mansion's open window. Monty races inside to get his uncle, but then remembers he isn't home. Nan however shows up and angrily asks why he shoved a piano offstage. His answer doesn't do much to quell her anger. However, during this argument, Monty and his sister make their way over to the family's computer and discover a scholarly paper authored by their uncle resting in the printer titled "THE FUTURE OF CLONING."

Monty picks up on the paper and realizes his uncle must have cloned him, with the pinprick earlier in the book an excuse to get a blood sample. Nan insists he would never have done such a terrible thing. Uncle Leo interrupts her to confirm that he indeed would do such a terrible thing. Instead of seeking to understand himself, Uncle Leo summons four cloned Montys, who line up behind him in an excellently choreographed moment. They're all dressed identically.

The Montys attack. The kids panic and begin throwing glass beakers at them in a futile attempt to escape. Uncle Leo cries out for them to stop breaking all his expensive equipment. The escape is quickly thwarted when the Real Monty misjudges and knocks himself out when trying to duck under a steel table. He comes to in a supply closet. He spies Nan and the real Uncle Leo, who are also being held captive in the dark dank room. Uncle Leo explains that the other Uncle Leo is just his own clone. Even though he'd never clone another human being, Uncle Leo had no problems cloning himself. Unfortunately he discovered the one downside to clones: They are all evil.

It turns out Monty was cloned last year by Leo Two and the whole pinprick thing was just a coincidence. Uncle Leo didn't know about the Monty clones until a few days prior, and it turns out they had been sleeping in some of the extra bedrooms in the mansion. When he tried to confront Leo Two about the squatters, he got locked in a supply closet.

Then Uncle Leo explains that all the clones have a small blue dot on their right thumb, so that they're easily identifiable against the original. Leo Two drags the Real Monty out of the supply closet. While his Monty minions hold him down, Leo Two tattoos a blue dot on the Real Monty's thumb. Thankfully, before Leo Two can give Nan a tattoo, the Real Monty creates a diversion and she escapes to go get help.

The four Montys don't much like the original and decide to show why they're superior. They walk him over to a bunsen burner and force his hand into the flame. It turns out that in addition to being evil and possessing excellent timing, clones also can't feel pain. Monty tries to sleep through the pain of his badly blistered hand but he has difficulty and tries a meek escape. The clones thwart any attempts at leaving, but they also get surprised by the lab door being kicked in.

Nan arrives and she's brought more scientists! Leo Two expresses outrage at the strangers bursting into "his" lab. Unfortunately, he fell into a trap, as the scientists Nan brought were old college roommates of Uncle Leo. The scientists manhandle Leo Two out of the lab and into a waiting truck. The Monty clones stand idly by and do not attempt to help their creator.

The scientists liberate the real Uncle Leo from the closet. They explain that the truck they're loading up with clones is headed down to South America, where they've set up a lab to do testing on the duplicates. The Real Monty tries to embrace Nan in gratitude, but she shuns him due to his tattoo. Things aren't helped much by the other clones all claiming they're the real Monty too. Unfortunately, one of the Monty clones steps forward and proves he's the Real Monty by reciting the Christmas anecdote about the trains. That's good enough for Nan, and the Real Monty gets shipped away with the rest of the clones into the back of the truck.

The Real Monty realizes that his clones don't know he's not one of them, they think the clone who stepped forward was the Real Monty. As the truck arrives at a loading dock, the clones discuss how they're probably being held until morning when they can be loaded onto a ship bound for South America. The Real Monty spies an armed guard standing watch outside the back door to the truck's compartment.

Monty spies an emergency hatch on the roof of the truck compartment and whips the clones into a revolutionary frenzy by rallying against himself. He inspires the clones to work as one and escape, so that they can reclaim "their" life from the original who is living it. The Montys begin standing on each other's shoulders, with the Real Monty planning to climb out the top. He tells them he'll come back with a rope to get them.

Monty gets to the escape hatch but accidentally hurts his burnt hand in the process of climbing out. He cries out in pain and the clones all realize he's not one of them. They pull the wriggling boy back down into the truck.

The clones descend on the Real Monty. He asks for one final request before they kill him. He'd like to pick another name, as he still hates Montgomery. He proposes Paul. One of the other clones likes Paul and decides he might like to be called Paul too. Another clone comes up with his own name he'd like to be called. Before long there's a brawl among the clones over who gets to be named what. While his copies are distracted, Monty alerts the guard to the fracas and slips out unnoticed while he breaks it up.

Monty walks all night until he finally arrives at the mansion. Nan is confronted with two Montys, both who claim to be the real deal. She decides to test them by giving them half a donut fried in peanut oil. Uncle Leo warns that they don't really know how allergies work and the clone might also possess the allergy. Then one of the Montys gets sick from the donut.

It's then revealed that the Monty who threw up faked it. He practiced vomiting the day before so he could pass such a test, should it ever come up. He also only knew the story about the trains because he overheard them talking about it. Clone Monty shows no remorse for sending the original to his doom. He then utters the book's titular line, "I am your evil twin!"

Tagline

He's one deadly double Template:Goosebumps-stub