Gemini (17 page)

“Okay,” I said. “Well, what's wrong?”

“It's those twins. Remember the ones we saw the news story about? The little girls they were separating for no good reason?”

No good reason. Like staying fully attached through the chest and abdomen forever would be totally copacetic. I rolled my eyes.

Mom looked down at the bacon. In a subdued voice, she
said, “Well, the surgery went okay, and they were both doing fine, or so it seemed, but now the littler one—well, she didn't make it. She just—” She looked up at me. “She died!”

“Oh, I'm sorry, Mom.” I patted her on the shoulder.

“Well,” Clara said, “that's too bad. It really is.”

But the truth was, we didn't know these little girls. Of course it was very sad for them and their family, but it didn't make sense that Mom was so upset. She was on the verge of tears. She acted like every pair of conjoined twins in the world was a part of her inner circle. And every twin who died was not only a tragedy, but also evidence that all of her own choices had been the correct ones.

Clara and I took our coffee cups to the table in the dining nook adjoining the kitchen and sat down. As we sat, Clara made a slight twisting motion away from me that was just a little different from normal, and I felt an unaccustomed pulling at the lower back, in the place where our flesh came together. It didn't hurt, and it was over in a moment, but something about it made me catch my breath.

An image flashed into my mind. The image that Alek had showed me the night before, on his phone's screen. The vision that had come from his mind, and that should have stayed there, locked away. But it had invaded my own brain now, and I didn't know if I would ever be able to get it out.

“What's wrong?” Clara said quietly. “I feel like you're not breathing.”

It was true. I caught my breath, drew it inward in a shudder.

I felt her looking in my direction, but not too far. Not twisting enough to draw Mom's attention.

“I'm fine,” I whispered.

But I wasn't. All night I'd been feeling this weird thing that I couldn't name, an
offness
, like there was a giant piece of me that didn't fit into the rest. Or a piece that wasn't fitting because it was pulling away from the rest, not in a clean break but in a jagged, messy rip that had maybe just begun.

Lying awake all night while Clara slept—at least that was how it seemed to me, though she denied it—had only made it worse. Hour by hour, minute by minute, I'd been dropping further into this dark hole that kept getting bigger all around me.

The worst of it was that I could never tell Clara what had gotten under my skin. Bad enough that she had heard those awful guys in Amber's yard. She didn't need to know the other thing, the thing that I had seen.

Keeping a secret from my sister was like holding some large, bitter foreign object in my mouth. It felt crazy and wrong, and I wasn't sure how long I could manage. All our lives, I had kept almost nothing from her—how could I?—and that was part of the beauty of being us. But I had to try.

“You're going to ask her about San Francisco today,
aren't you?” Clara whispered. “Is that what you're so worried about?”

San Francisco. God. All those hours of lying awake, and I'd barely even thought about San Francisco.

All those years of telling Clara she was wrong. Telling her there was nothing to fear. That it was all right to be a freak. Telling her, and telling myself too, that I didn't care.

I'd been lying to her, and lying to myself. I kept saying that I didn't mind being a freak, but the truth was that I just never fully believed that we
were
that freakish. Never fully believed that the people around us didn't accept us and get us and know us for who we were. Or that new people couldn't quickly learn to do the same.

From where we sat in the dining nook, we could see Mom at the kitchen stove, flipping the bacon slices back and forth with a pair of tongs, staring down at them, probably still thinking about that damn dead baby.

Dad stumbled in, looking barely awake, in his pajamas and with his salt-and-pepper hair sticking up at a lot of weird angles.

When we'd called him the night before, asking him to pick us up early from the party, he hadn't asked why. I knew he could tell that we were both upset. But all he said was, “Everything okay?” And we both said, “Yes!” with unconvincing brightness. Then he asked if there was anything he could do for us, and we both said, “No!” in the exact same
way, and we got into the minivan, and he said, “Radio?” and we nodded, and he turned it up loud enough that there was no more pressure to say anything at all. And I appreciated that.

Now he went over to Mom and kissed her on the forehead, then watched her for a moment before asking her, “What is it?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head, and actually sniffled a bit. “It's just those babies they were separating. One of them died. It's just hard to hear, you know? To think about it.”

He pulled back, looking at her carefully. “You all right?”

“Of course I'm all right,” she said, her tone turning irritable. “It's their mother who isn't all right.” She flipped a slice of bacon, then added, apparently as an afterthought, “And their father. Why am I the only person in this house who seems to be bothered by any of this?”

“Of course I'm bothered,” Dad said. “That's very sad for that poor family.”

“It's more than sad. It's a travesty, the way the doctors push the families to do this. They don't give them all the information. If it wasn't for—If I had listened— You would have just— It's just wrong.”

“I know,” he said gently. “We did the right thing. You were right. You were right from the start. And our girls are fine.”

Clara whispered to me, “Do you want me to ask her for you?”

San Francisco. After everything that had happened, now Clara
wanted
to go? And she wanted to bring it up
now
?

“What the hell?” I whispered back. “Are you pranking me?”

“We had a deal,” she whispered, “and we're sticking to it.” And then she called out brightly, “Hey, Mom, we have something we want to ask you about.”

Mom looked up.

Clara started explaining the summer art program and the interview, and how I didn't really want to go but wanted to see if I could get in. It was just an adventure, Clara told her, like I'd planned to say all along. Just a lark.

“So do you think you could give us a ride down there sometime next week, if we can get an appointment?” Clara asked.

I didn't understand what was happening.

My phone giggled again. I shut it off, powered it down completely. There was nobody I needed to hear from today.

The bacon sizzled loudly in the pan.

“San Francisco?” Dad said. “You should make a whole day of it, if you're going. There's so much to see. Maybe I can find a way to go with you, at least for part of the day.”

Mom shot him an angry look. “I don't see the point,” she said, turning back to me and Clara. “If you're not actually going to go this summer.”

Clara went through the whole explanation again. It
was just for fun, she said. “So you're free on Wednesdays and Thursdays, right?” she asked.

Mom didn't even look at her, but she carried a platter of pancakes over to the table. “We had a lot of leftover candy bars from last night,” she said, “so I chopped some up and mixed them into the pancakes.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Here I was afraid that my belly might look flat all day.”

“There's also a bowl of mixed berries,” Mom replied.

Dad looked back and forth between Mom, Clara, and me before speaking. “You should do this. Even if it's nothing but the interview, it will be a great experience for you. And if we can't make it work with my schedule, then you three can just go, and we'll all go back together on a weekend and see the sights.”

“I don't know,” Mom said as she laid the bacon out on a paper-towel-lined platter. “San Francisco has all those hills. I haven't driven there in years. And the minivan . . .” She looked worried.

“Well,” Dad said, “I think you'll be fine. But if you really don't feel comfortable, or if you can't find a time on Wednesday or Thursday, then I'll take them. I'll cancel classes and office hours if I have to. I know you don't like to cancel yours, since it's your first year teaching and you're still proving yourself. And that's reasonable.”

Mom's eyes widened, and for a second I thought she
was going to start shouting at him. But she just cleared her throat and said in a steady voice, “They're talking about this whole summer program. Six weeks. That's an awfully long time. We would have to find an apartment to rent.”

Just yesterday I would have said she was wrong—that six weeks was nothing. But today I wasn't as sure. Last night had left me feeling exposed, stripped down in a way that I wasn't sure how to fix. Could we honestly wander around among strangers? For six weeks?

I cleared my throat, pushing these thoughts down into the cold cellar of my brain. Fearful thoughts were not for me. Those were Clara's job.

“We might be able to live in the dorms,” I said. “That's something we can ask about at the interview.”

Now Mom looked really alarmed. Standing there with the platter of bacon in her hands, a thick lock of hair falling into her eyes, she demanded, “But where would
I
live?”

“I think we can manage it on our own,” I told her, willing myself to fully believe this. “It would be a great experience for us.”

“That's an interesting thought,” Dad said. “You know, I bet you'd do just fine in the dorms. I bet that would work really well.”

Mom set the bacon down on the table and dropped into her chair. “But I thought what we talked about for the summer, what we agreed on—”

“You keep saying ‘we,'” Clara said sharply. “You know, you don't always have to speak in the first person plural. Some of us have to. But you don't.”

“Clara,” said Dad as he came over to the table, “your mother is just trying to think through all the ramifications. You don't need to take that attitude with her. It's not constructive.”

“Right,” Clara said. “And refusing to let us out of a ten-mile radius is constructive? Refusing to even take us to this interview, when we know perfectly well you've got nothing else to do that day? What are
we
so afraid of, Mom?”

Now Clara was the angry one? The adventurous rebel? I dropped my head into my hands. I wanted to crawl back into bed and finally get the sleep that had eluded me all night.

Mom pinched her lips together and served herself some pancakes from the platter, while we all watched her. Finally she said, “What
I
am afraid of is that you girls don't understand what you're getting into. You've never been on your own. You've never lived in a house where everything wasn't set up especially for you, where you didn't have someone to cook for you and reach the high shelves and drive you around to appointments. You've never—”

The doorbell rang.

We all looked at one another.

Dad said, “Anybody expecting a visitor?”

We shook our heads.

He went to the front door. There was some murmuring, and then Dad said in a loud, friendly voice, “Of course, come on in.”

After a pause he added, “No, we were just having breakfast. We've got plenty. Come have some pancakes with us.”

I looked at Mom and at Clara, and I could see that neither of them had any idea who was at the door.

But I was pretty sure that I knew exactly who it was. I clutched my phone, where it lay silently on the table next to my plate.

Dad came back into the dining room, trailed by the very last person on earth I wanted to see.

Alek. And
now
he was wearing a costume.

Alek had a hatchet planted in his head, and about a gallon of blood flowing down through his dark hair, onto his face, and even splattered on his T-shirt, which for once was white, not black. But he still wore his usual dark jeans and black sneakers.

“Hailey,” said Dad cheerfully, “this young murder victim tells me he's a friend of yours. I'm assuming he's been up all night, with that hatchet in his head.”

“I've never seen him before in my life,” Hailey muttered.

“Great, great, perfect,” said Dad, either oblivious or deliberately ignoring Hailey's surliness—it was hard to tell with him. “Alek, was it? Sit down. There's a spot for you right there. I'll get you a plate. Do you drink coffee?”

Alek shook his head. As Dad trotted off to get the plate, Alek approached the dining table, but he didn't sit down, and he didn't seem to notice me or my mom. He looked only at my sister. “Hailey,” he said, “I'm sorry.”

She didn't acknowledge him, and my mom just stared
at him in confusion, so it was left to me to ask, “Did you seriously go home last night and put on the hatchet and the blood, and then go back to the party?”

Alek's eyes widened, and he drew back. “What? No! Of course not. I put this on when I got up this morning.”

“What for?” I asked.

“It's an apology!” From his tone, I gathered that he had thought this was obvious. “Hailey was so ticked off at me last night. She wanted to kill me with her bare hands, and I get that. I deserve it. I
encourage
it!”

This guy was seriously odd, I thought. And in almost the same moment, another thought struck me, clobbered me really, with a force that almost knocked me cold: a guy this strange could be serious,
really
serious, about liking Hailey.

I would never have a chance with a nice, normal guy like Max—and I did still think of him that way, even though I wished I could hate him now—but Hailey might have a chance with a weirdo like Alek, assuming that he didn't turn out to be a bona fide murderer.