The Midnight Twins

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Mallory didn’t even know if her family had cloth table napkins. Her mom put a roll of paper towels in the middle of the table and told everyone to grab one at dinner—when she was home for dinner. When she wasn’t, dinner was always what their father called “broccoli and something” that their mother had made earlier.

  “Why don’t you ever cook?” Mallory asked Tim. “Mom works. You work. She works as much as you work.”

  “Not really, because I own the store. There’s a lot more . . . bill paying and stuff. We have a deal about cooking. She cooks and I . . . built the garage,” Tim explained.

  “You built the garage once, for six months, but she’s been cooking for sixteen years,” Mally said. “It’s not really fair, is it?”

  “I take you to Sunday school,” Tim said.

  “And sleep in the car.”

  “She works nights!” Tim said. “She works ten twelve-hour days and then has two straight weeks off! Come on! I only get three weeks a year off! Plus, you work at the store. I thought you were on my side.”

  “I was,” Mallory said. “I guess I just didn’t realize I used to be a sports feminist and not a real feminist.”

  “Heating up the broccoli and chicken is considered cooking,” said Tim, in a last bid for his daughter’s respect.

  “Carrying in the bags is not considered shopping,” Mally retorted.

  For two weeks, Tim walked around pouting.

  Then, in an elaborate gesture, he took a six-week cooking class at Hickory Woods Tech. The girls and Adam then got pasta and broccoli, pasta and shrimp, pasta and chopped tomatoes, pasta and ham, pasta quattro formaggi. Merry and Adam were mad at Mallory for complaining. They felt their gorges rise when they saw the blue boxes come out of the cupboard.

  Mally was sorry she’d ever brought it up.

  Maybe, Mally thought now, it was because Aunt Kate didn’t work at all that she always seemed so calm.

  Campbell was always pulling her hair up into spikes because she was always late. She was always wondering aloud if a person could do CPR on herself.

  Maybe Aunt Kate’s house was the house of a person who didn’t have stress. Uncle Kevin was a lawyer. Even the little girl cousins wore clothes from an English designer. Still, Mallory was proud of her mother. She couldn’t imagine a life that had enough time for actually making fossilized bread. Campbell’s job was boring, sticking needles into sad babies and old people so they didn’t starve or dry up (Mallory had never seen Campbell in the exciting pressure cooker of the operating room). But it was a real job.

  Merry completely disagreed.

  She worshipped Aunt Kate’s house.

  She insisted that raising a family was a real job, too. Meredith wanted to have a dozen babies and make needlepoint pillows.

  Mallory still wanted to grow up and one day be her dad’s partner in the sporting goods store he owned with Rick Domini. She wished the store were called Brynn and Daughter, instead of Domino Sports. She loved working at the store on Saturdays, smelling the new ski gloves and leather boots, getting free basket-balls and occasionally meeting very young (or very former) pro athletes who seemed to have gotten lost on the way to somewhere else at Domino Sports in Ridgeline.

  But it wasn’t really the shellacked bread that was so irritating tonight, Mally admitted to herself. Did she wish she were somewhere else tonight? Only with her entire soul. Even Mally, who was antisocial, wanted to be at a party tonight. People who babysat on New Year’s Eve were considered the crud at the bottom of the social barrel, below girl computer geniuses (Mallory actually was sort of a girl computer genius).

  But then, they hadn’t even opened half their gifts yet. They’d decided to wait until tomorrow to make the delicious memory last longer. It had been a fabulous party.

  And, to be honest, their parents really never did anything fancy, like Kate and Kevin did, such as dinner parties and Broadway shows. All they did was have Drew’s parents and Bonnie and their brothers and sisters over to play board games.

  In the summer, they all went for ten days to the family camp, and Tim and Campbell would drink beer and do wacky eighties dancing around the fire pit. When they went to movies, it was at the art cinema, for two dollars a ticket, to see old movies like Lawrence of Arabia—which they also forced on the twins.

  Okay, they deserved their big night. But the twins both thought Campbell was overdoing the concerned-parent bit.

  “We’ve just never left you alone and gone so far away before,” Campbell went on.

  And on and on.

  Even Meredith finally gently reminded her mom, “We’re hardly going to be alone. Grandma Gwenny will be here in a couple of hours.”

  Tim’s mom was coming to sleep over with the children, no later than ten that night. Since Tim’s father had a mild heart condition, they avoided large crowds and unfamiliar germs, and were having only a few friends over for bridge and a late supper. Tim’s sister, Karin, who also lived in Deptford and was home because she, just like Campbell thirteen years before, was in the final stages of her pregnancy, was also on alert.

  Nothing could go wrong.

  “Stop worrying!” Mallory scolded her mother. “You know you just want to leave, so leave!”

  “Mally,” Meredith said. “Come on. You’d worry. There’re a lot of kids here.”

  “But we have every number, in our pockets, up on the chalkboard, and next to the phone, for everybody from the pizza guy practically to the FBI!” Mallory protested.

  She glanced at her little brother, Adam, with a grimace.

  There was trouble on two legs. Adam had a gift.

  He was deep in whispered conversation with his cousin, Alex, a year younger, and Mally knew something was up. Nearly eleven, Adam was a devious little creature. Maybe he had convinced Kim Jellico’s brother, David, to give him fireworks. She knew Adam had asked. Kim had told them. And Mally had seen David just the morning before. He was cruising past the forest road near their house where Mally took her run. He didn’t seem to be going anywhere and it was break, so why wasn’t he asleep like a normal guy? Almost out of breath, Mally yelled out a warning to him: No way was he to give Adam fireworks! David just laughed.

  “I’d never give fireworks to a little kid, even a little kid like you,” he said. But David was a guy and prone to idiot jokes.

  Mallory would never forget him popping up at Kim’s bedroom window with a black nylon stocking over his face the night of Kim’s eleventh birthday sleepover. The girls all screamed, and Kirsten Morgan went hysterical (although Kirsten Morgan was always going hysterical).

  Mally was the only one who didn’t scream. She went outside and got up in David’s face, yelling at him that he was a freako idiot. David wasn’t even with his friends. He was alone and he was fourteen, old enough to know better. Merry called Mallory a jerk for yelling at David on Kim’s birthday. But Merry would have forgiven David if he’d thrown a small hand grenade into the open window. She said boys were just immature.

  She always got limp around David, looking at him from under her eyelashes. Like he would notice Merry in ten million years!

  What if Adam had fireworks all strung together under the front porch right now? Adam did stay over with Alex the night of the party, only two days ago.

  “Let’s play hide-and-seek outside!” Mally announced as soon as all the parents were disposed of. Her little cousins Hannah and Heather, who were five and four, clapped their hands and ran for their coats.

  “We’re too big for hide-and-seek,” Adam announced with elaborate apathy.

  “You’re too scared you can’t beat me,” Mally teased him. “You’ll never be able to run as fast as I do. I’m an athlete!”

  “Can so,” Adam said.

  “Can not,” Mally answered. “The tree is goal and I’ll give you to a hundred. Hannah, go back and get your boots on. It’s freezing out here. One game!”

  Once she was finally (supposedly) counting, Mallory got down on her hands and knees and crept a
few feet under the porch. There was what appeared to be the world’s largest collection of cracked old Frisbees under there, and a bike pump, and a feral cat that winked at her and disappeared, but nothing that looked like rockets or bombs. Behind her, she heard Adam shriek gleefully, “Home free!”

  They played eight or nine games, using up more than an hour. Then they played flashlight tag for another half hour.

  That ended when Hannah got lost in the neighbor’s grape arbor—two acres over, as there were only two houses on the long road.

  To placate Hannah, who was whining big time, Meredith made hot chocolate and Mallory set up a DVD on the life cycle of a lion cub for the little girls. Alex and Adam went up to Alex’s room to play Mally’s skater and soccer video games—as well as the Doom Slayers game her mother didn’t know about. Mally didn’t dare tell on Adam, who would tell on her right back. That had been the big whispering secret with Alex. Well, her mother hadn’t asked her, point-blank, “Mallory, do you own an exceptionally violent computer game?” Had she? And so, strictly speaking, Mallory wasn’t lying.

  An hour later, the little cousins began to nag to put their party hats on.

  “It’s a little early,” Merry told them. It was barely eight o’clock.

  “Let’s eat first.” She’d made the little kids macaroni and cheese with hot dogs sliced into it.

  All the kids ate dutifully and put their dishes in the dishwasher. Aunt Kate even had a magnet on it that read CLEAN ME or I’M CLEAN that she turned over when she started a new load.

  Then Hannah asked, “Can we bang pans outside? Mom always lets us.” The last sentence was a dead giveaway that this was a total lie.

  “I don’t know,” Meredith said slyly. “Do you think you’re old enough?”

  “I do. I’m not afraid of the dark!” Hannah said stoutly, even though she’d been crying loud enough for people in Manhattan to hear her just an hour earlier.

  “Well, then, let’s see what we can find!”

  “Aunt Kate probably doesn’t want people banging on her French cookware!” Mally said with a hint of vinegar in her voice.

  “Mal, don’t be a butt pain.”

  “Well, she probably doesn’t. . . .”

  “Just take it easy.” Meredith got out four of Aunt Kate’s forty-five or so saucepans. She pulled out a big boiler and a frying pan and another wooden spoon when Alex suddenly confessed that he’d like to bang in the New Year as well. “What about you, Adam Ant?”

  Adam simply sneered.

  “Not everything fun is babyish,” Merry told her brother. “And not everything babyish is bad.”

  They flipped on a news channel that promised festivities from around the world: There was already a rap group so new that even the twins didn’t recognize them dancing around a big stage crisscrossed with racing lights.

  Mallory would remember that she felt something not new, but unaccustomed as a conscious thought, in those final minutes.

  She felt an intense and magnetic upsurge of love toward Merry. She smiled at her twin’s funny, pretend-adult domestic ways—wiping up every drop of the children’s dribbled chocolate from their hands, scooting Hannah and Heather into their footie pajamas and setting their parkas nearby, so that they could rush outside to bang on the pans and then be whisked into bed. To Mally, who lay on the couch the whole time, all this seemed impossibly dear. It was as if Mally was seeing Merry the way Merry would look when she was grown and a mother. But under the tide of affection was a kind of dismay—as if she, Mallory, might not actually be there with her twin when Merry was grown up.

  She realized that she never thought of Meredith in terms of “love.” Love was what she felt for family, best friends, even Kim’s adorable dog, Tofu, or a song, a sport, a season like summer. How could she love Meredith? How could she love the sharp point of her own chin, the sound of her own voice spoken the way other people said they heard their own voices on a recording? She was Meredith.

  “Giggy,” she said to Mally, who looked up with a full-blown smile. It was one of the oldest of their twin words, and neither had any idea what it had once meant. Perhaps it simply meant love.

  “Happy birthday, Ster,” Mally said. Adam jumped up and took the cue, pulling from each pocket a plastic bag tied with a ribbon. He handed one to each of the girls. Inside was a charm: a megaphone for Merry, a soccer ball for Mally.

  “You can pin them on your sweater with diaper pins, like Kim,” he said. “Happy birthday, Ster.” There was a moment of quiet among the three of them before Mallory reached out and gave Adam’s hair a soft tug.

  The charms would later be found in the yard, under a frosting of broken glass.

  They hauled Adam across both their laps and started tickle-torturing him in gratitude.

  Then all three were all but knocked backward by a sudden uprush of air from the half-open double doors at the front of the house.

  The plastic covering Uncle Kevin had put in place of the screen flew off with a whickering sound.

  And then, the very windows shook in their frames with the force of the explosion.

  “What the hell is that?” Merry shouted.

  All of them could see vivid angry outbursts rocketing up from every window. They heard the whistle and saw fountains of red, gold, green. Next came the staccato of strings of firecrackers and the deep gutturals of cherry bombs.

  “Cool!” Adam shouted, over the screams of the younger children. “Is this why you were going on about the fireworks? Is it a surprise?”

  “Adam Brynn!” Mallory shouted, noticing that Hannah and Heather were now crying hard and clinging to Merry. “Look at how much you scared the little kids. I told you, no fireworks!”

  Adam’s freckled face was a map of shocked betrayal. “Me? Those aren’t mine! I don’t know what they are!”

  All six of them ran out the front door, but the girls couldn’t focus: Fireworks were exploding behind the house, too, in the rock garden, near the back door.

  “I don’t see anybody!” Mally yelled.

  “Me neither!” said Merry, trying to keep both Hannah and Heather from simultaneously climbing her like a jungle gym. The fireworks weren’t corner-store sparklers, but big, deafening, semi-pro, the real thing.

  “Should we call the fire department?” Merry asked over the din.

  “They don’t seem to be doing anything, just exploding,” Mallory shouted as they herded the kids back onto the porch. “Adam, swear on Mom’s head, you didn’t know a thing about this?”

  “I swear. I asked David Jellico to get fireworks for me ten times, and he wouldn’t!”

  Merry’s cell phone began to vibrate in her hip pocket and to play “Song of Joy.” She answered: It was Will Brent, wishing her a happy birthday.

  “I can’t talk,” she said. “Some neighborhood idiot set off a mess of fireworks, and it’s not even midnight!” She glanced up at Mallory. “Me too,” she said quietly. Mallory smirked. Then the telephone inside the house began to ring and they ran for it. By the time the twins got everyone back inside and explained to their grandmother that what she was hearing through the receiver was not a gunfight on Pumpkin Hollow Road, they were too exhausted to do anything but flop down into the big couch under the front window.

  Merry thought of it first.

  Why had Gwenny called?

  It wasn’t near time for her to come over.

  “What’s up, Grandma?” she remembered asking.

  “I was thinking about those fireworks,” Grandma Gwenny had said.

  But no one had told Grandma Gwenny about the fireworks until after she called.

  She could be as strange as they were.

  “Don’t worry,” Grandma had said. “It was just a prank. No one is hurt. Right? You’re sure? I’ll be there soon.”

  “No one is hurt. But you sound funny. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Gwenny Brynn said. And she told herself, Be still, Gwen, it’s nothing! But she knew it was something . . . though not wh
at the something was.

  “What was all that about?” Meredith asked. “Did you arrange with Grandma to call?”

  “Not me,” Mally said.

  “So what do you think that was? Who did it? The neighbors?”

  “I don’t even think the neighbors are over there. Their house is totally dark.”

  “Maybe they were inside making out.”

  “And then they jumped up from making out and decided to set off eighty million fireworks all around the house of the people next door?”

  “There is that,” Merry admitted.

  “It was probably Will,” Mallory ventured, knowing even as she said it that Will Brent was as likely to pull off a scary practical joke as the girl at the Video Box was likely to be polite.

  “You know it wasn’t.”

  “Well, he called right then!”

  “He knew it was the time I was putting the little kids to bed. Well, almost time. He’s at Lizzy White’s party. He knew it was a time when I could talk. I should call him back.”

  “Do you have to? Right now?”

  “No,” Merry said finally. “He can wait. You’re supposed to let guys wait.”

  Mally asked, “Are you hungry?”

  “Only so I could eat my own leg. Maybe Grandma will bring something. She’ll be here any minute, trust me. She sounded all weird. She probably thinks we’re dead out in the yard,” Merry answered.

  “She’ll bring cucumber and cream cheese on toast squares!” Mallory said with a laugh.