Gemini (27 page)

“What?”

“It's never going to be a supernova. The sun. That's not what happens.”

“Oh my God, Clara.”

“I know. I know that's not the point. But you make it sound like you
want
this to end up on YouTube. Is that what you want, Hailey? Is that what you're secretly hoping for?”

I was as stunned as if she'd slapped me hard across the face. “Are you being even halfway serious right now? You think I would do that?”

“I'm not saying you would put it up on the Internet on purpose. But you know you want us to move away from here, Hailey. You've been looking for ways to push me into that. Maybe somewhere in the back of your mind, this is another way to do it. Get us exposed to the world anyway, and then there won't be any point in hiding, right?”

“Clara,” I said, every muscle in my body tight and tense, “honestly, you're crazy. This is the opposite of that. This is about trying to figure out if I can make the film school thing work, so I can maybe learn something new and expand inside myself without having to leave at all. This is me making peace with staying where we are. This is you winning.”

Quietly she said, “But what if I don't want to win?”

“What do you mean?” Hailey asked slowly. “You don't want to win? What does that mean?”

“Why do you think I contacted that surgeon?” I asked her. “Because I don't want to force you to stay here with me forever. I'm not trying to keep you prisoner here in this tiny little town that you hate so much.”

“Oh.” Her voice became more muted. “So you're just giving up. I was hoping you meant that you actually
wanted
to leave.”

As she said that, a strange thing flashed through my brain. It was as if Hailey and I were sitting together in a tiny, sealed capsule floating in outer space, and she had unexpectedly opened its door. And all at once I could see the vast universe all around me, a dark, freezing vacuum, awash with the distant fire of uncountable stars; and I could feel the eerie weightlessness of being untethered from the only world I had ever known, and I didn't know whether the breathlessness that I felt was awe or terror, and I didn't
know if I should jump out through that capsule's door or slam it shut.

“I don't know what I want,” I said. “It's just—well, do you ever feel like you're trapped in a tiny box and you're running out of air?”

After a long minute she said, “You're telling me you feel that too?”

I thought of last night's kiss, and even now I felt something thrumming inside me. Or maybe I was feeling it thrumming inside Hailey. It was hard to know. Whoever it belonged to, I could feel it just the same, hot and strong and impatient, and increasingly claustrophobic.

But what was this thing that had me tied up and trapped? Was it that band of flesh that connected me to Hailey? Or was it something else?

What would it even mean to jump through that capsule door, if I could find the guts to do it?

“Don't you ever want to be free of me?” I asked.

There was a long silence, filled with nothing but the sounds of our almost-synchronized breathing. Almost synchronized, but not quite.

“I want to be free,” she said finally. “But not free of you.”

My chest tightened. “Free of Bear Pass, though,” I said. “You hate it here, for some reason.”

I remembered Juanita saying,
Sometimes I can't think about anything but busting the gates and getting out of this place,
once and for all.
They both seemed to see something terrible here that I didn't see.

And now Juanita was getting out.

“No. I don't hate it here,” Hailey said now, her voice tight and harsh with emotion. “Sometimes I think I do, okay, yes. But how would I know? I don't have anything to compare it to.”

“It's a good place,” I said, “if you think about it. It's beautiful and peaceful and serene, and the people here have been good to us. Not every single person, not every single minute. But overall? They've been kind of amazing to us.”

I was thinking of what Lindsey had said at the dance, about how she had been nice to us for the past six years. Not that one day in the bathroom stall, but ever since. It was true. And yet she was probably the person I liked least in the entire school—or she had been, until that night at the Halloween party.

I still didn't know what to think about Gavin and Josh and their friends, and the way they'd talked about us that night. But in all these years it was the only time that I'd heard anything like that. And even they had been nice to us the rest of the time. Was it possible that even they, like Lindsey, were just jerks some of the time—thoughtless, insensitive, showing off their stupidity for their friends—but not really evil or hateful at their core?

“You're right,” Hailey said. “It's been a good place
to grow up. I guess I don't notice that very much. And I should.” After a moment she said, “What I'm agreeing to is to stay here for now. To go to Sutter for at least two years, and probably four. I guess I'm hoping that after that, you might start wanting to try something different too.”

But the truth was, that wanting was inside me already, pressing up hard against my fear. A hunger for something new. Sand between our toes. City noises in our ears. The rush of an airplane lifting off.

And now I could see it. It wasn't Hailey that I needed to escape. Because technically, physically, there was nothing to stop us from doing all those things. Hailey didn't really need to escape me in order to walk up the steps of the Louvre. We knew how to walk up a staircase together.

And yes, Bear Pass had been good to us; our teachers and friends and community, taking their lead from our parents, had given us what we needed all these years. But they couldn't give us what we needed next.

I wanted to say all that—to take Hailey's hand and jump out that door with her, however we had to wriggle and squirm to get through it—but the words were stuck inside me. My throat closed up, and I could barely whisper, “I know we have to leave. But I don't know if I can. When we're like this.”

I remembered that surgeon on the news clip that my mother had been watching. He'd said the ideal age for
separation was nine to twelve months. “It's the best time in terms of their muscular and skeletal development,” he'd said, “but also their psychological development, too.”

Because after that age—by the time you were, say, one year old—your minds were so intertwined, so dependent on the way they'd grown into each other, was it even fair to say that there was really a place where one person stopped and the other began?

I shifted toward Hailey in bed, my shoulder pressed into hers. “Aren't you worried about how Alek feels about us being attached? Or if not him, if he's not important to you, then just thinking about any other guy you might like for the rest of your life . . .” I let my voice trail off.

“It's not like I don't get what you're saying,” she said. “I guess it would take an extraordinary guy to want to be with either of us. But maybe that's the only kind of guy who's worth bothering with anyway.”

She shifted around a little, and then she added, “Especially for us, you know? Because I feel like one of the reasons people want that—like, a long-term relationship, or marriage or whatever—is so there's someone to just be together with in life. Someone they can always count on, someone who understands them better than anybody else does and loves them anyway. Just that intimacy and not being all on your own, you know? I mean, I know that's not all of it, but it's part of it, don't you think? And we already have that.”

I let that sink in for a while. I thought she was probably right. I just wasn't sure how much better it really made me feel.

Finally I said, “But just walking around in the world—you can't tell me you like having people stare at us and make rude remarks. Aren't you scared at all? How can you never be scared?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Maybe it's because I have you to be scared for me.”

I half-laughed, half-groaned.

“No, I'm serious,” she said. “I've been thinking about it. I think all our lives, you've done the caution and the fear so I don't have to. And I've done the anger so you don't have to.”

“Huh,” I said, thinking that over. “So it's like each of us hasn't needed to be a full person.”

“No, no,” she said, “that's not it. We're both full people, but we have our specialties. It's a good thing. You do science and thinking things through. I do art and jumping in. It frees us up, not having to be everything all at once, because we know the other one can handle being whatever we're not.”

She went on, “I wouldn't have chosen to have our guts and nervous systems all tangled up with each other, okay? But I also wouldn't choose to die on the operating table, or to end up paralyzed with a colostomy. None of those things would be my absolute first choice. If it was only up to me.”

I closed my eyes. Behind my eyelids I could see stars glittering without any pattern at all, close enough to touch.

“And at this point,” she said quietly, “I know it's crazy, but I kind of like who we've become together.” She got even quieter, so she was half-whispering. “And I can't really imagine us any other way.”

What did Hailey feel about me? Not love like you feel for other people, people who matter to you without really being a part of you.

With someone that you love—like, say, maybe your mom—there could be times when you might feel the edges of yourself turning porous and slipping into hers; you might feel in some way that you are not really separate. And then you pull back and you look at this person, you see their whole outline, and you understand that you are not them.

But Hailey and I could never pull back. We could never see all of each other, except in the same ways that we could see ourselves—in a photograph, a mirror image. She wasn't me, but she was part of me, like my hips and knees and heart and thoughts and memories were parts of me. And you don't really love your hips and knees and heart and thoughts and memories, exactly. But what is it that you feel about them? Is it less than love? Is it more?

How could you ever live without them? And who would you be if you tried?

All this time, I'd been trying to tell myself that being
attached to Hailey was incidental to who I was. Or that it should be. But our connectedness had been part of me since long before I was born.

This was who I was. This was who we both were, together.

Hailey raised her head to look toward me, but not into my eyes, and she never would.

“The truth is,” she said, “I would rather stay the way we are. But if you want to talk to the surgeon, I will.”

In the darkness I shook my head. “No.” My voice sounded so firm that I barely recognized it. “We're not going to risk both of our lives for that.”

She exhaled, and I exhaled with her, our breath emptying out of us in unison. This fantasy of being solo had been bouncing around in my head for years, but in that moment it slipped out of my grasp—had I only loosened my hold, or had I meant to let it go?—and I watched it drift away like a helium balloon that you know you will never get back.

“Well, then,” Hailey said, “what are we going to do?”

I looked around our dimly lit bedroom, with its double dresser, its extra-wide desk, its closet full of specially adjusted clothes, its posters of science fiction films mingling nonsensically with obscure medieval artwork.

We'd moved to this house when we were eighteen months old, and in all that time we had never once slept anywhere else.

Hailey had often told me that the white space between objects is one of the most important parts of any picture, with as much significance as the objects themselves. The shape of the space between the two of us had never changed, and it never would. But the background that filled it in could be different, and surely that would transform the picture too.

I turned as far toward Hailey as I would ever be able to and said, “We're going to get out of here.”

By the time the sun rose, we had created our first-draft college list. When we'd started in the middle of the night, in the yellow-and-blue glow of our lamp lights, it had seemed unreal. I couldn't quite believe that Clara had agreed to this. But as the morning light sifted in through our bedroom window, her enthusiasm only seemed to grow.

It was real. We were going to do this—move away. Take care of ourselves. Face the strangers.

My fingers tingled with excitement. Or at least, I chose to believe that it was pure excitement and not unhinged terror, though I could see how this might be open to interpretation. There was no time to waste either. Some of the colleges had application deadlines as early as November 30, giving us less than three weeks to get them ready.

We were downloading the Common Application for college admissions when Mom burst through the bedroom door.

“Oh good, you're up,” she said. “How was the dance?
Did you have a good time?” She looked worried, even though we'd talked to her briefly when we'd gotten home the night before.

Oddly enough, it had been Dad who'd seemed to suspect something last night. When he'd picked us up outside the school, just looking back at us from the driver's seat of the minivan, he'd somehow known that something was up.

“
Someone
had a good time,” was all he'd said, but it had been there in his tone, and in his quiet smile. He had known that we'd had more than just an ordinary good time. He had probably known that it had to do with me, and with Alek. And he'd been happy about it. He'd smiled to himself the whole way home.

“Yeah,” I said now, to Mom. “It was good. We even danced a little.”