Gemini (6 page)

He was on the edge of his seat. “When are they open?”

I glanced nervously at Juanita. Max was playing right into my friends' plans, and I couldn't think of any way out.

“It just so happens,” said Hailey, with a note of triumph, “that all of us are going there this Friday night. Would you care to join us?” A playful, almost flirtatious note crept into her voice as she added, “Maybe let Clara show you where Orion meets up with the Gemini constellation?”

I would need to strangle Hailey in her sleep. Had a conjoined twin ever successfully murdered her sibling? I would have to look into it.

“Oh.” Max drew back into his chair, his shoulders straight. His hand must have tightened around his pack of doughnuts, because it made a loud crinkling sound. He looked again at the door.

It was, I saw, exactly how I'd predicted. Hailey's two-headed invitation had completely freaked him out. Of course. Of course it had. How could it not?

“Have somewhere to be?” Juanita asked Max, seeing him look toward the door.

“W-well, I did plan—”

“You planned what exactly?” Juanita said sharply.

I drew back, pressing my shoulder into Hailey's so hard that I could feel her bones. It was rare for Juanita to take this tone with anyone, but I had heard it a few times before, when she'd felt the need to defend me and Hailey against other people's hurtful behavior. That was when her claws came out.

I didn't want a fight. I didn't want anyone to make any points. All I wanted was for Max to leave, and as quickly as possible.

Max looked at her uncertainly, and before he could come up with any response, Juanita took a quick swerve in her tactics. Her smile turned mischievous. “What are you so nervous about anyway?” she asked, teasing him. “Never been alone in the dark with four girls before?”

“Er, no, I just—”

“Oh, for God's sake,” I burst out, “stop trying to mess with his head. He doesn't have to go to the stupid observatory.”

Juanita raised her eyebrows at me. “Oh, now it's the
stupid
observatory?”

“Leave him alone,” I repeated lamely.

My gut twisted. Why didn't he just leave? Why couldn't this just be over now?

“It—it—it's okay,” Max said. “I—”

I was such a fool. The truth was that from the moment when Max had smiled at me in class that morning, there had been a part of me that had imagined—what? Surely not
dating
him, but . . . Having him smile at me again? Having him become my friend? My incredibly cute friend who made my breath catch with every one of those thousand-kilowatt smiles?

But even that had been a fantasy. I'd imagined that just because he was so good-looking, he must be extra good inside too. See, that's the thing about our species. We can kind of tell the difference between looks and personality, but only kind of. We're always getting the two things mixed up in our heads, even when we know better. That's part of what makes it so hard for people to accept me and Hailey, and it was that very same flawed thinking that had made me fantasize some kind of connection with Max.

But here he was, completely flustered by Hailey's simple suggestion that he come out with us as a group, and after all, the chances were that he was just another skittish, reputation-protecting jock. He was probably afraid of what people would say if he went up there with us.

“It's too bad,” Hailey said. “You didn't seem so scared of us when you first walked in.”

For a long, drawn-out moment the whole Sandwich Shack fell absolutely silent. Bridget's eyes were wide, and her mouth had fallen open in shock.

Juanita waved a hand in Max's direction. “Oh, forget it,” she said. “Just forget it.”

Max said, “I j—”

“I said forget it. We'll see you around.”

She waved at the door. I was frozen, waiting for him to leave so that maybe, just maybe, I could finally breathe again.

He looked like he wanted to say something. But whatever it was, he didn't say it, and then the moment passed. He stood up, and as he did, his face seemed to contort into a strange, rigid anger. I pulled back in alarm; it was as if he'd turned into a different person from the wind-tousled, broadly smiling guy who had walked in here just a few minutes earlier.

Max turned to look at each of us, one by one—Juanita, Bridget, then Hailey, and finally me. With his eyes on me, he opened his mouth as if to speak, but no sound came out, and then he shut it again. He seemed to be as mute with fury as I was with fear.

He shoved his chair too hard into the table, with a loud screech and a clatter. He turned away, grabbed his backpack from the floor, and walked out. As the glass door swung shut behind him, I noticed his bag of miniature doughnuts sitting on the floor where he'd dropped them. Half of the doughnuts were smashed flat.

That night, when I'd had enough of homework, Clara and I headed for the kitchen. I'd been smelling Thai curry for the past twenty minutes, and between that and the fact that I kept thinking maybe I should say something to Clara about Max, make sure she was okay or whatever, I wasn't getting much done.

We found our mom standing in front of the stove with two pots going, her laptop open on the counter nearby.

She looked so different these days. Her hair was all pearly blond and smooth, and she was even wearing makeup. After years of full-time motherhood, she'd just been hired as an adjunct lecturer, to teach the freshman writing classes that the full-time faculty didn't want. Even though most of Sutter's faculty were more casual-artsy-Bohemian types, Mom had decided that she had to look professional. She was busier now too. In the afternoons and evenings she would often sit on the sofa or at the dining table, with stacks of papers to grade.

“There's some mail for you on the counter,” she said, nodding toward a stack of papers. We divided the pile and flipped through it—clothing catalogs and college brochures, as usual. Today it was Anthropologie, Caltech, and UCLA.

“You don't have to save these for us. You can just recycle them,” Clara said, frowning at the image of a beautiful, ethnically ambiguous girl in a dazzling flame-colored dress, peering into a microscope. I couldn't tell if that one was from a college or a clothing company. It didn't matter; none of them were just offering us a dress or a biology class anyway. No, they were all offering the same thing: a life of glamorous individuality and perfection.

On her laptop Mom played a clip from a morning news show. A surgeon and his team of twenty-four doctors and staff were getting ready to separate a pair of ten-month-old girls who were conjoined through the abdomen.

My mom seemed to find these news stories about conjoined twins every couple of months. She would always search for all the information she could find and follow the stories for as long as possible. These twins were Americans, which was awesome for her because they would get way more airplay than, say, Zimbabweans. The operation was happening in San Francisco, just a few hours away from us. Bonus!

Ironically, when Clara and I had been born, my mom
had treated the media like devils incarnate. Instead of just concentrating on staying healthy through a high-risk pregnancy and delivery, she'd focused a crazy amount of energy on keeping almost all the reporters out of the hospital. We ended up with just a couple of newspaper stories, and maybe a mention on TV. If anti-publicity were a career, my mom would rock the hell out of it.

But she was still a fan of everybody else's news coverage. Like these babies now, who between the two of them shared only two legs, one pelvis, one liver, and one large intestine.

The lead surgeon was trying to act all cool, but you could tell that he secretly felt like a little boy with a new box of Legos. The girls' mother cried with joy. Their grandmother praised the surgeons, the nurses, and God, in no particular order. Everybody was celebrating. But the surgery hadn't happened yet.

Clara and I stood beside our mom and stared at the screen as the lead surgeon explained that nine to twelve months was the ideal age for separation, for reasons involving muscular, skeletal, and psychological development.

My mom, predictably, said, “You have to wonder if anyone's weighing the pros and cons. Have they thought about the fact that these girls will have prosthetic legs? That they'll probably have less mobility than they'd have if they stayed together? Or all the health problems they're going
to introduce by splitting up their organs and their bones?”

She grabbed a handful of chopped snow peas and tossed them into one of the pots.

“They're not thinking about quality of life,” Mom muttered. “They're not asking themselves any questions. They're just letting the surgeons have a field day.”

She always went on like this, and we just listened. Or pretended to. But now, unexpectedly, Clara spoke up.

“I don't know,” she said. “A lot of people do just fine with prosthetic legs.”

Mom looked up in surprise. Behind her, the clip from the news show ended and fed into a commercial for a supposedly magical fitness product.

“All my life,”
chirped the woman on the screen,
“I dreamed of having the perfect body. And look at me now!”

“Better than fine,” Clara went on. “People are running in the Olympics on prosthetic legs. They're walking around and living their lives and barely getting a second glance from anyone. And plus, you know, a lot of separated twins do really well. A lot of them are thriving.”

I squinted in Clara's general direction. What was she getting at? That our parents should have had us separated as babies? That was a useless argument, and seventeen years later, it was certainly a moot one. No twins our age now, or anywhere near it, had ever been separated and lived to tell the tale.

It hurt my feelings a little—the idea that Clara would want to be away from me. I mean, it had crossed my mind before, but more as a momentary thing, mainly if we were having a vicious argument and I felt like storming out of the room.

But even then, in those moments when I had those thoughts, I didn't really want to leave. Even then, feeling the warmth of her body next to mine, the rhythm of her breathing—it was a comfort. Knowing that we would have to sort out whatever we were arguing about and be okay again. Knowing that in the end, nothing could change our closeness. To actually be away from her was a dark, cold, lonely thought.

Is that cowardice? Maybe. But I like to think it's just appreciating what I have. Because who doesn't want unbreakable love?

Anyway, I told myself now, maybe Clara was just trying out her ability to stand up to our mother. If so, I wasn't about to stop her.

The front door opened; from where we stood, we couldn't see it, but we could hear it, along with the sounds of Dad walking in and dropping his keys and wallet onto the table, and his battered leather messenger bag onto the floor.

Mom slapped her wooden spoon down on the countertop, turning to give us her full attention. “Didn't you hear
about that girl, just a few months ago? They cut her apart from her sister, and a full year later she died of complications. But that part of the story gets buried, doesn't it? That doesn't make any headlines.”

“Of course I know about that,” Clara retorted, “but that's just one case, and there are so many more where the outcomes are great. How come we never talk about
those
? How come we only talk about the ones who die?”

Dad walked over and hovered just outside the kitchen.

“Late office hours today?” Mom asked.

He shrugged. “One of the students had a lot of questions. Smart kid. It was fun talking to him.” He tilted his head toward Mom's laptop. “You guys watching something?”

Mom jabbed her wooden spoon into the curry pot. “Another needless separation. And a news media so enamored of surgery that even the survival of one twin gets celebrated as a victory. Even when that separation means introducing a new set of disabilities. What no one seems to understand is that you can keep twins together and they can live perfectly happy, healthy, normal lives.”

Clara inhaled sharply but said nothing.

Dad nodded, looking at us for a moment, then back at Mom. “Of course you're right,” he said. “Though it's hard to imagine it until you see it with your own eyes.”

“I never found it hard to imagine,” Mom retorted.

He walked over to her, rested one hand on her waist, and kissed the top of her head. “I know. But you're a visionary. Most of us need more help to get there.”

She looked up at him, with what looked to me like wariness—like she couldn't quite decide whether to take his comment at face value.

Then she turned away, stirring the vegetables with one hand while she turned off both burners with the other, and at the same time called out cheerily, “Could you girls help me set the table?”

We both held still a moment longer, and then, without saying anything, we began moving in unison. We went to get the silverware from the drawer.

One of our house's unusual things is its dining table. Since Clara and I can't face in the same direction at the same time, sitting at regular tables can be a pain. Sometimes literally. Outside the house, we might choose a picnic blanket on the ground, or if there's a backless bench and it isn't too narrow, then one of us can face the table and the other can face the opposite way, holding the food in her lap. Or, like at the Sandwich Shack, we perch on the edges of two chairs, both angled away from the table. But at home we have a U-shaped conference table in the dining nook adjoining the kitchen. Hailey and I sit on the inside of the
U
, and our parents sit facing us.

“Perfectly normal lives,” Clara muttered as she placed
the silverware for herself and Mom, and I placed the silverware for myself and Dad. “I'm sure it's perfectly normal to have to share the job of putting out silverware because we can't be in two separate parts of the same room.”