Half

by Sharon Harrigan

  “Where does she think meat comes from? And I don’t mean Burger King.”

  She was vegetarian, but we didn’t tell Dad. We didn’t want him to make fun of our favorite teacher. He leaned against a tree, and we could have sworn it swayed from his weight.

  He tossed Mom a bag from his pack: bologna sandwiches, ridged potato chips, and Red Pop. “You start your lunch while I go take a piss.”

  At first we didn’t wonder why he took our gun with him. In case he accidentally peed on a bear and had to defend himself? Had he said there were bears here?

  The sun edged west from the middle of the sky by the time we realized he wasn’t coming back. We didn’t worry whether he was safe. He had the gun and cartridges. Nothing could hurt him anyway, not frost or fire. We had seen him weather all these ills without a hint of normal human pain. Even poison ivy left him alone. Ms. Rosen had taught us another useful word, as part of her fourth-grade mythology unit.

  Immortal.

  After a while, we had to pee, too. We didn’t want whatever sucked in Dad to find us, so we barely left the trail.

  Had he said we should follow? No cell service could reach such remote wilderness. Had we misheard? Had we listened at all? We stared at the trail ahead so long, squinting to catch a trace of his return, our eyes and brains went fuzzy.

  “He must have told us to meet him back at the truck,” Mom finally said, countless mosquito bites and goosebumps later. So much time had passed, our stomachs growled again, like our imaginary bears. Dad’s trail had disappeared.

  How could we find our way, without a map in our head? By the sun? Had we walked west or east? The full moon stared down, and we willed it to werewolf us so we could sniff our way home.

  We had sprayed Fuzzy Slippers on our pulse points at breakfast. Every heartbeat magnified the perfume, and it spread across the whole forest, smoke signals saying, “Fresh young meat: come and eat.”

  Spiders and gnats haloed our heads. Chiggers and ticks were doing their invisible damage, we were convinced. Even our heads itched. Could we get lice from the woods? The centipedes no longer rolled over for us. They mocked us with their hundred legs. Even if we had had that many, we couldn’t have caught up with Dad.

  The air drained of pine and sap. Now it reeked of poison ivy and nettles. Salty sweat dripped into our throats, raw with an unfamiliar metal taste, perhaps a substance only known to double-digit kids. Ten might be kick-ass, sure, but who was doing the kicking?

  “Which way do we go?” we asked Mom, but she didn’t know. Especially not when her nerves acted up. She breathed hard, and not from exercise. This always happened when we needed her most. As usual, she said, “Don’t mind me. I’m just hyperventilating.”

  A shot rang out in the distance. Then a closer one. Maybe it was hunting season for twins.

  We remembered Ms. Rosen’s unit on current events. There had been a string of shootings all over the country, she had said. In movie theaters, elementary schools, and on college campuses. In churches and mosques. During marathons and in the middle of nothing at all. You could even watch reporters falling dead on TV.

  The trees were alive. Or were we hearing squirrels moving through the leaves? Raccoons could be rabid, we knew. They had better not smell the dribbles from the Red Pop cans in our bags.

  In the end, we found the right direction by choosing the opposite way Mom proposed. That usually worked. Or maybe we followed the shots. Even though we had learned the word pacifist in school, Dad knew what we really were. What he had made us.

  Where does meat come from? Hunters. What do hunters use? Guns. We were so hungry by then we would have eaten a squirrel. A porcupine rustled above us, devouring the bark of a tree. Another hour out in the wild and we would have eaten him, too, quills and all.

  When we looked away, the animal pounced and pushed us to the ground. Pee wet our downy legs.

  But it wasn’t a porcupine. It had soft fur like a bear. Like a beard. It was Dad.

  He wasn’t dead. Of course not. But—surprise!—neither were we.

  “Was this some kind of trick?” we asked.

  “Part of your present,” he said. “I taught you how to navigate the woods. Only way to learn is to find yourself lost. That’s how we did it in the army.”

  We stared at his throat, searching for the same life-or-death spot he had pointed out on Mom, wondering if our thumbs were large enough to press into it.

  “And you followed the gun, instead of running away.” He tossed us the rifle again. This time, we caught it.

  We didn’t dare ask what had happened to the Hamster Hotel. Next time we snooped in the master bedroom closet, all we saw were dirty shorts.

  Instead, we did what usually worked to calm us down—pulled the guitar off its hook on the wall. We took turns playing with our naked thumbs. Our calluses grew with every strum.

  12

  After fall bled into winter, it snowed for a week. We plastic-wrapped windows and ski-masked our skin. “You look like a burglar,” we said. Then: “I’m trying to steal a little heat.”

  “We’re freezing our butts off,” we told Dad, so he “reheated our backsides” with a slap of his huge hairy hand, the sting reminding us, every time we sat down, not to complain again.

  One record-cold day, he shoveled the whole block. Neighbors parted drapes and watched from picture windows. He peeled off flannel, stripping to an undershirt tight enough to caress his pecs and showcase his thick neck.

  Mom, in floor-length pink down, offered Dad coffee, but he waved her off. The steam might have melted him.

  He built a snow fort and filled it with our sleeping bags and stuffed animals. Mom shouted from inside that we would freeze more than our butts, the whole night under the stars, but Dad wouldn’t give in.

  “It’s too cold out there, even for the dog,” Mom said.

  “It’ll thicken their skin. I slept outside in Alaska, and look what it did for me.”

  We didn’t budge from the kitchen table. We didn’t even shake our heads no. So he lifted us up, one in each arm, and carried us out to the fort.

  We could hear him argue with Mom on the other side of the locked door. “You going to call the cops?” he asked. “You want those girls in foster care? I could even say the whole damn thing was your idea. Have you taken into custody.”

  We huddled on top of each other in the corner, the way the hamsters had in their cage in our second-grade classroom. We waited till the house went black, then sneaked off to Nevaeh’s on the corner and hit her window with an iceball. Five throws later, she let us in through the basement door, her baggy narwhal T-shirt barely covering the letters on her days-of-the-week bikini briefs. We covered her mouth, the way Dad had so often covered ours. “Don’t tell your parents we’re here. We’ll leave before they see.”

  We didn’t tell her why we were there. We knew to keep our family secrets. We were special. We understood that Dad needed to train us the way he had been trained. Because we weren’t human, exactly. A little bit less or a little bit more, we weren’t sure. All we knew was that no one could know. “If you tell what happens in this house, you’ll be taken away and never see your mom again,” Dad told us long before we knew what the words “foster care” meant.

  We slept on the floor, in the sleeping bags we had brought along, next to Nevaeh’s bed. At dawn, we rose and fingered our way through her yard, down the block, back to our fort. Our house lay dark, the windows closed, the curtains drawn. We pretended to sleep. And waited.

  Finally, Dad unzipped our sleeping bags. Mom clasped us to her chest, eyes bloodshot. She must have kept them open, staring at the ceiling, all night.

  We ate bacon and pancakes, fuel for the fire in our bellies, Dad said. We inhaled all the air in the room, aiming to double our size and strength and pretend the cold night air had changed us.

  Only when the phone rang did we notice we had lost our hats. Left them at our friend’s. We knew the call came from Nevaeh’s mom, from the way Dad’s
mouth curled into a fake smile.

  “Nevaeh can bring the hats to school,” he said. “They don’t need them now.”

  He hung up, and his face twisted into a snarl. “So that’s where you slept.”

  We held our guts to hold down our food. How could we have been so careless, unless we wanted him to know we couldn’t handle the snow. Maybe we wanted him to see we could never be like him.

  He plunged a hand into his front pocket and pulled out a pocketknife. We could feel our skin prick at the sight of it. What new rite would he perform with our blood? The worst part? We knew we deserved it.

  “Give me your hands,” he said. We could run but we couldn’t hide, so we did what he said.

  “It’s yours.” He laid the mother-of-pearl pocketknife from Alaska across both of our palms, the one we had coveted on Groundhog Day. His beard shook with silent laughter, enjoying, no doubt, our open-mouthed but silent shock. “You almost outsmarted me. I have to give you credit.”

  The knife burned from his body heat. It was a hot potato we passed between us.

  “Keep it in your pocket. Next time you roam the streets at night, it might come in handy.” He tousled our hair, his own callused hands softer than they had ever been.

  Then he was gone.

  When he returned from the basement, he lay two rabbit fur coats on our laps. He had promised to make them for us so long ago we barely remembered he had.

  We wore the rabbit furs as if they were our skin. We wore them doing homework or watching TV. When it was too hot to wear them during the day, they blanketed our beds. Of course, the coats were the first things we packed in our bags, preparing for the sleepover party of our best friend.

  Nevaeh was that rare thing, almost as good as a twin. She sat with us at lunch and gave us tropical fruit gum with a liquid heart and warned us when the teacher was looking so we could stop chewing. She lent us a swipe from her root beer lip gloss, and we swooned in a sticky girl clump, drunk from the fumes.

  After school, we raked the lawn, building piles of leaves so big that bears could have lived in them. We scooped up decomposing mounds, their wet fermented smell pickling our fingers and sliming our pants.

  That’s when Dad told us why we couldn’t go to Nevaeh’s party. “You can’t trust people outside of the family. You shouldn’t tell them anything.”

  “But Nevaeh is almost like our sister. Mom will say yes. Mom always says yes.”

  “You talking back to me?”

  “No. You’re reading our minds.”

  “OK, smart-ass. No sleepovers. Ever. No eating at anyone’s houses, either.” Dad scooped a confetti of leaves and showered us with them, leaving a dirty trail on our freshly washed hair.

  On the school bus, the Friday before the party, the girls who had been to sleepovers before said that in the dark all the secrets came out, the ones that bonded best friends. Without us there, on the other side of midnight, Nevaeh might become some other girl’s best friend. No one would learn our secrets. Like the one about how Dad had killed his dad. Nevaeh’s mom might have called the cops, and they might have dumped us in a foster home. No wonder we weren’t allowed to have sleepovers.

  In the cafeteria, the Monday after the party, Haley, our second-best friend, told us what Nevaeh had told her, after the parents snored and the house filled with spooky rattles and creaks, during that flash of in-between time after the night and before the day.

  Nevaeh had said she only hung out with us at school because she had known us since kindergarten. That now she had grown out of us.

  Then, later that day, as the bus bumped over potholes, Haley whispered to us that another girl had said we were stuck-up. And a few of them had called us skeletons, just like our mom.

  We trudged home from the bus stop and stuffed our mouths with so much peanut butter and jelly we wanted to throw up. But we didn’t. We needed to keep the sandwiches down so we would grow breasts like Nevaeh’s, because we secretly suspected what she meant when she said she had grown out of us was that she wore a bra already, but we didn’t yet need one.

  The next morning, we squeaked the daycare babies’ caterpillars and placed the tiny people around the dollhouse kitchen, pretending we were playing with them as a joke. We hated Mom for leaving the toys out to tempt us, and we hated ourselves for hating her.

  We hated babies, too, though the baby in the dollhouse in its teeny tiny cradle was so adorable we had to slip it into our pockets and smuggle it to school.

  At lunch, Nevaeh said that Haley had said, deep down in the dark, that she thought we couldn’t do sleepovers because we wet the bed or sucked our thumbs. Or both.

  On a field trip to Fantasyland, a display of Christmas decorations at the rec center, everyone talked about their crushes. They wouldn’t name names, but everyone knew—everyone who went to sleepovers. They said they could only reveal the identities of the school’s cutest boys in the part of the night when the sky glowed so black it glinted blue, like the hair of you-know-who. No, we didn’t know.

  “That’s when the magic happens?” we asked. “Only after midnight?”

  “It’s not magic,” Eliza said. “It’s like being drunk. You know how grown-ups only tell the truth if they’ve been drinking?”

  Dad fed us spoonfuls of whiskey when we had a sore throat, and the liquor burned like when we washed a cut, so that probably didn’t count. “Your parents let you drink?” Were we missing that, too?

  “Not that kind of drunk,” Eliza said. “The kind where you stay up till you’re so sleepy you’re dizzy and kind of tipsy and you have to lie down or else you’ll fall but you’re too excited to go to bed, so you’re like an asleep-awake zombie.”

  “I know,” they all said.

  When we came home from school, we emptied the toys from our closets and bins and donated them all to Mom’s daycare babies. We decided that, every day from now on, we would bypass the bunnies and Barbies and lock ourselves in the bathroom in the morning. We would spend every minute before we had to catch the bus smoothing our hair and choosing our underwear.

  One morning our messy buns kept falling out and tumbling over our eyes. Dad yelled, “You’re going to be late.” He always said that, but he was always wrong. Until we missed our bus. By a hair.

  “Don’t give them a ride,” Dad commanded Mom. “They’ve got to suffer the natural consequences, or they won’t learn.”

  We walked two miles to school. Rain pelted us the moment we stepped outside. We could have sworn Dad had gashed a hole in the cloud to punish us.

  We learned a lesson, all right—that Dad was a prick. We gnawed the skin on our fingers, making them bleed, cutting ourselves up for using that word. It was a tough word, and we had to toughen up or no one would invite us to parties, even in the daytime, anymore.

  We decided to get “drunk” at home. We stayed up Friday night, after lying quietly in bed till we heard our parents’ slow breath from behind their closed door.

  We whispered, bunk to bunk, willing our eyes to open wide, listening to the strange sounds our mouths made—garbled, slurred, and sloppy. We didn’t dare climb out of bed. We would have tripped all over ourselves.

  We told each other our crushes, not just on boys but on teachers. On actors, singers, and athletes. Even on other girls. We were in a half-dream, half-awake state. We told each other we could fly. Weren’t we doing it right now in our beds? Or were we only in our heads? The space between the two worlds shrank as small as the smallest hours of the night.

  13

  We were so quick to forget all he gave us—the pocketknife, the rabbit furs. Not so fast to forget he was a prick. That word, the one we slung in middle school, shouldn’t still be our favorite insult. Hands on hips, mouths puckered into pouts. Chins turned up to the sky, defiant.

  We thought everything about our lives would be different now than it had been back then. We made plans. We wrote them all down, which was supposed to make them real.

  14

  We decided
to write a letter to our future selves. We squeezed our knees together in our cramped closet, flattening the Game of Life with our elbows, pillowing our heads with the down coats we had let fall from their hangers. We uncapped a pen that leaked black ink onto our chipped fluorescent-blue nails. Black and blue was our favorite look. We even dyed the tips of our hair to match.

  We wrote in a small notebook whose metal spirals were as raggedy as our fingers.

  Dear Future Us:

  We’re in seventh grade.

  We live in a little room with two bunk beds and one tall dresser and one desk and two chairs we have to move to the kitchen when it’s time to eat dinner.

  We never “fall out of bed.” We never “bump into the furniture.” That’s just code. Don’t forget what it means.

  Don’t forget, because people might say it to you. They might look at their shoes and swear they tripped on the stairs. And you’ll know they’re lying.

  We like fuzzy socks. Fuzzy ski caps. Fuzzy sweaters.

  We’re five foot five and ninety-seven pounds, and we can’t get rid of the big red pimples on our foreheads, even when we scrub so much with witch hazel that our skin becomes thin enough that we can almost see through to our cheeks.

  Maybe they’re lying to protect someone, so don’t call them liars. Just braid their hair and share your gum.

  We spend most of our time staring into space. That’s not true, but it’s what Mom says.

  Really, we’re thinking. Things like:

  Are we ugly or pretty, straight or gay or bi? Smart or nice? Do we have to choose? Do you have to be one thing and not another thing at the same time?

  We don’t know if we could ever love anyone as much as we love each other, and we’re both girls. Does that make us queer? Does Nevaeh think we are? Do we love her? In that way? What about Bo?

  Sometimes we want to be boys. Is that bad?

  Sometimes all we want to do is take a shower and imagine that the first violin or the first viola is in the stall with us. The first violin is a boy, and the first viola is a girl. They both have long hair and perfect pitch.