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crumpled jeans. I glared at her and got up to put them back on the shoe shelf in the closet. Then I went back to my computer and clicked the SimuLife icon. The “Welcome to SimuLife!” window popped up again, although this time my computer didn’t freeze. Progress. Now that it was actually in front of me, I vaguely remembered playing it back in the day. Granted, it was for a few weeks, tops. There hadn’t seemed to be much of a point other than making an avatar of yourself and having it do random things. I went over to “options” and selected “uninstall.”
    A message popped up: “Please insert game disk.”
    I sighed deeply. Maybe I could just delete everything in my account. I clicked “sign in.”
    “Please insert game disk,” said the popup window again.
    I clicked on “cancel account.”
    “Please insert game disk” said the popup window yet again.
    Of course I didn’t have the game disk. Of course it wasn’t going to be that easy.
    “So how was your day?” asked Rina, who was now sitting on the floor giving herself a pedicure with some of mynail polish. I walked over to my closet. It’s a fairly big walk-in and there are some built-in cubbies along the back wall, where I usually throw tech stuff I don’t need anymore—old cell phones, manuals, warranties, all that crap. I started digging around, wondering whether the old SimuLife disk was in there somewhere. I didn’t know whether uninstalling the program was the way to go, or whether some other solution would reveal itself if I could just sign into the game. Either way, I needed that disk.
    “My day,” I said, tossing aside some dusty USB cables, “was extremely stressful. Probably because I spent all of it worrying about what to do about you and how to get rid of you—” Whoops.
    “Get rid of me?” Rina sounded hurt.
    “Yeah, well…I mean, no, not get rid of you. But you know, how do we put you back in the game?” I asked. “That’s where you live. I’m sure you want to go back there, right?” I started sorting through a stack of random CDs. No SimuLife. I did find something marked “summer vacation sing-along mix,” which looked promising and which I flung onto my bed, but no SimuLife.
    “Not really.” Rina shrugged. She admired her newly painted toes. They were now a pale, shimmery peach color, and I was surprised she hadn’t picked one of the glittery fuchsias or bright greens in the polish collection. “All I do there is sit around the house. I write in my journal a lot, butthere’s never much to write about. Out here is way better. By the way, I went downstairs and ate some cookies because I was hungry. I hope that’s okay.”
    “Oh my God, yeah,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t realize—of course, yes, eat whatever you want. Are you still hungry? Do you want something else?” Wait a minute, what was I doing? I was trying to get rid of her, not running a bed-and-breakfast.
    “No,” Rina said, indicating an empty package of Oreos in the corner.
    “Wow,” I said. “Hope you have a fast metabolism.”
    “I do if you do,” she answered cheerfully. “Oh! I almost forgot. Right before you got home someone called for you. Anne? I talked to her.”
    “What?!” I froze in the middle of shuffling through another stack of old CDs.
    “Yeah, she wanted to know if you could forward her a physics e-mail your teacher sent that she accidentally deleted, so I said sure—”
    “You pretended to be me? Are you crazy? ”
    “No, it was fun! So I thought tomorrow, I could go out and—”
    “What? No! It’s bad enough you picked up the phone, which you can’t do anymore, by the way. And you definitely can’t leave the house.”
    “Why not?”
    “Rina. Think about it.”
    She thought—visibly. She actually looked like she was pondering a weighty dilemma. Then she looked totally bummed and I realized how I must’ve seemed to my friends all day.
    “It might be weird if people saw two of us?” she asked.
    “Yes! Thank