Half

by Sharon Harrigan

  We don’t want to go to school. School is either too hot or too cold. It’s too early and we’re too tired. Lunch is late, so we’re always hungry, and we’re not allowed to eat in the orchestra room anymore because our teachers say the crumbs will attract rats.

  School is an endless string of socially awkward encounters. “Pass me that pencil. Let’s make small talk. Do I know you? Do you like me? I mean, Do you like-like me?” The other part of school, the part that isn’t stressful, is boring. And then some parts are stressful and boring at the same time.

  Do our teachers like us? Do all our friends talk behind our backs at the sleepovers we’re not allowed to go to?

  What do people say about us? Is it true? Have they figured out our codes? Do they know what we mean? Or do they just hear what we say?

  We don’t know if we’re special or if we just think we are. We don’t know if we’re good or bad. Santa Claus knows. We wish we could still believe that. We don’t know anything, to be honest. By the time we read this again, we’ll be old. Then we’ll know everything.

  All we know now is this:

  We’ll always be together.

  We sealed the letter in a box with the label “Open in ten years.” By then we would be grown up. Not like our parents, though. We would still be kids inside. Always. We would never let our kid brain die, never forget what it felt like to be us right now.

  We would have no more questions. That’s what we really thought.

  15

  But now?

  The wall of the church scratched our backs, even through thick coats. The brick didn’t budge. Neither did we.

  One of us said we should stop this nonsense already. What were we learning that we didn’t know?

  The other urged us on. We were almost there, weren’t we? Almost to the part of our lives where we became who we were now.

  The part that would explain why we did what we did to Dad.

  The red-hot part of our lives. It started between our legs. It began with the guns locked behind a door. It hid itself in the underwear drawer. That part.

  16

  We both started our periods the same day. Mom pointed out her pads under the bathroom sink and said, “Help yourselves,” which sounded like, “Don’t ask me, I’m busy.” We didn’t need to. We had each other.

  Dad was working the afternoon shift at Ford. Mom had closed Sunflower for the day and gone to the hospital. “Nerves,” was Dad’s only explanation. Perhaps he thought we would understand, now that we were thirteen. We didn’t want to know if “nerves” would happen to us as we ripened and matured. If black eyes would appear in our sleep, as they did with Mom. If we would cower and lower our voices till all sound disappeared.

  We craved rare steak. We wanted it so much we almost smelled it. The scent of our bodies.

  We bit into apples and left our marks in front of the boys at school. But we were afraid of tampons. They could violate us. We were sure they would hurt. If they got stuck, how would we coax them out? Would we no longer be virgins?

  No matter how much Mom cleaned, the cracked linoleum and stained carpets always reeked of warm milk and pureed peas, diaper rash and ear infections. Everything we had went to Mom’s daycare babies. Our old toys lined the living room on rickety shelves: ponies with pink hair, hamsters on trikes with removable underwear, plastic squirt guns that glinted like metal.

  The real gun belonged to us, whether we wanted it or not. Our birthday present, back when we had actually asked for a hamster.

  That afternoon we opened the gun safe. Did Dad really think we didn’t know where he had stashed the key? He hid it in his underwear drawer, which meant he wanted us to find it.

  We were just going to look at it, we said. Hold it. Caress its octagonal barrel, long and strong. Take it apart. Smell the metal, unbreakable and cold. We just wanted to dry the inside, rub linseed oil on the warm brown wood of the stock with a soft white cloth. Cleaning a gun wasn’t so different from cleaning a flute. Our orchestra teacher let us try out all the instruments. You have to keep your equipment pristine, he said, or it won’t do what you ask it to.

  The Winchester was an antique, Dad said, a present from his dad, which he had passed on to us. We would give it to our kids someday, we told each other, as if we would share our children the same way we shared everything else and we twins would live in the same house forever.

  We fingered the action, breaking it open to wipe it down. We polished it. We stroked the trigger and trigger guard till they gleamed, the bolt and bolt handle, stock and forestock, sight and muzzle. We left the safety for last. Or maybe we forgot it. We were always forgetting things.

  We made music, one of us playing guitar while the other played with the gun. One had better pitch, the other better aim.

  Behind the curtains, we watched squirrels and cats, little kids on Big Wheels, teenagers in baggy pants leaning on telephone poles, their pockets bulging with baggies. We pushed the muzzle through the musty cloth, aiming out the corner of the window, telescoping up and down our block, taking turns. We were just looking, we said. No different from using binoculars. The magazine was empty.

  At first we made sound effects to mimic pulling the trigger. But soon that wasn’t enough. We wanted more. More power, more fire, more action. The more the gun gleamed, the more we wanted it to blind us.

  We were the gun. We were one with it.

  We found Dad’s ammunition in his other drawer, under the condoms and lube. Next to a photo of a boy we didn’t know. He reminded us of someone, but we couldn’t remember who.

  Our blood ran hot. It bubbled up to our fingertips. We don’t remember which one of us aimed and which one watched.

  We pointed at a squirrel. They were always stealing seed from the birds. “Vermin,” Dad called them. “Pestilence.” He said we should catch them in traps and feed them to dogs. If he were there with us, he would say, Stop thinking and do it.

  We shot. The rifle bucked, and we fell back, onto the guitar and each other.

  Only then did we see that the squirrel looked like the stuffed animals we had clutched to our chests not so long ago in bed. The discarded toys that stared at us from the plastic bin near the TV.

  The turkey vultures would tear the animal to pieces before Dad returned from the factory. But not before we tore into ourselves. We scratched our arms till they turned red, bit our fingers bloody.

  We should have buried the squirrel in our yard. Or dug a hole and thrown in the entire afternoon. We wanted to lock the gun away and hide the key better than Dad did. We wanted to bury it. We wanted to bury everything that just happened, then throw ourselves into the hole. But instead, we took turns prancing through the living room, past our old army men, our dolls and bears and blocks, our squeaky balls and crinkly chickens, past all we had toyed with and then, much too quickly, tossed aside.

  In eighth grade we joined track and sprinted in spandex and sports bras. After practice, we strutted home with our sculpted abs bare, hair flying down our backs, over shoulders, into everybody’s business.

  See our hips? our clothes said. See the dip from our blossoming chests to the tiny slip of our waists?

  “Cover up,” Dad said, so we did. But only while he was looking. When he spotted us on a run, he yelled out the window of the Bull, “Cover your ass, if you don’t want it grabbed.”

  Back at home, we gave him lip for harassing us. “For protecting you,” he said.

  He wouldn’t grab us like that. But was it true, what he said, that every other man and boy wanted to? That we were taunting them?

  “Play outside,” he commanded, as if treating us like kids would stop our nipples from poking through our shirts.

  When we didn’t respond, he pushed us out the door. We thought every dad moved their kids that way—yanking arms. swatting butts, squeezing shoulders so tight they might never be able to shrug again.

  Too old to play, we sat in the yard watching our dog hump the rug he had dragged out of his doghouse, the
n shaking him off when he targeted our legs.

  We used to think Rex was hugging us. In fourth grade, we had asked Mom, “Can people only get pregnant when they’re in heat, like dogs?” In fifth: “How do babies get out of their mothers’ belly buttons?” Our sixth grade “family life” curriculum taught us girls cures for morning sickness and stretch marks, what to expect from Caesareans and epidurals. No one mentioned how the baby wormed its way inside. What the boys were learning in a separate classroom was a mystery.

  In seventh grade our gym teacher taught health once a month. She wore a whistle so loud it could have scared away bears. We set up folding chairs on one side of the basketball court and listened to her explain why she couldn’t have a baby. Then she told us not to laugh at boys when they “got their little boners.” The older people get, the more they will say anything, our silent open mouths said. The first thing they lose is their embarrassment.

  We buried our heads in our armpits. “Boys can’t help themselves,” she said, echoing Dad, “when you dress like you do.” She looked at us two, but we knew she meant all of us in the room. All the girls in the world.

  Finally, in eighth grade, we had real sex ed. Ms. DeMeter, in cornrows and basketball shorts, passed out condoms and cucumbers. We choked back questions like “Do they ever get this big in real life?”

  We didn’t titter. We sat, serious and still, pretending not to want to sprint away from all this.

  We were fecund and fertile. We were nubile and knew it. Mom’s long-ago words echoed in our heads: “You’re my too, too much.”

  After school, we climbed the pear tree and hid in its multiplying branches, waiting for dark. We slipped the school-issued condoms from our pockets and inflated them, smothered them in cherry lip gloss, and licked them like lollipops.

  After sex ed, we claimed not to be virgins. “Only virgins sleep in pajamas,” we said, wearing T-shirts to bed.

  “Only virgins wear dresses,” we said, hooking thumbs through our belt loops.

  “Only virgins live in Virginia.”

  “That’s why we’re in Michigan. A place so cold it’s shaped like a mitten.”

  “Or a boxing glove.”

  We pretended to be cold and callous, too. As tough as the statue of Joe Louis’s fist Dad liked to drive by downtown. We rejected every boy in our grade who asked us out. We didn’t need boys when we had each other. That was our story, anyway.

  But Bo didn’t like to be told no.

  He lived on our block and watched us glide down the street in little more than underwear. “You’re so hot,” he said. “I got some ice-cold pop to cool you off.”

  Bo had known us since our mothers pushed us all around in strollers. We would run through sprinklers with him in nothing but Pull-Ups. Sure, we had been sweet on him when we were younger. We had all played Red Light, Green Light. Freeze Tag. Statues. We had ridden our bikes together in the sticky weather and shared melting candy bars in the sun.

  “Orange Crush?” we asked.

  “With a straw?” He knew us too well.

  We let him lead us on—up his step, onto his porch, into his room, where he opened us each a can of sticky froth.

  We knew about him, too. How he lived with his mom, who worked at the same factory as Dad and wouldn’t be home till six. It was only four.

  Bo’s house sagged. It was even more cramped than ours. His porch crumbled under our sneakers, and the holes in his screen door let in bugs as big as birds.

  His room smelled like formaldehyde and chocolate milk. Science class and the school cafeteria. The sandbox at the playground where we used to bury his tow trucks and toes. The kiddie pool in his backyard, before it was turned into a flower pot. The plastic lion mask he let us wear for the kindergarten parade on Halloween. His walls were covered with football and hockey memorabilia from games at Pontiac Stadium and the Joe Louis Arena. If we could have bottled his room as a perfume, we would have called it Boy.

  “We’re friends, right?” he said. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

  As little kids we had sat on the curb, waving to cars as they passed. Once a man stopped and rolled down the window. Bo had grabbed our hands and yelled, “Run!”

  We had the same feeling at that moment that we had had then, half lured in, half pulling away. We sat in his room the way we sat in our bodies. Not knowing we had a choice.

  “Take it all off,” he said.

  At first we just stared. He was too small to play football, too big to look like a nerd. He was cute in the way Mom’s daycare babies were. But maybe we thought that because we had seen him in a diaper.

  We sisters pressed our legs into each other’s. We sat on the edge of Bo’s unmade bed, but somehow our backs were against the wall. His jeans moved. We started to giggle, then pressed a hand over each other’s mouths. Don’t laugh when those poor boys get their little boners.

  We could see in the way he hunched forward in the chair, his chin almost on his knees, what he was trying to tell us. That there are things they don’t teach us in school. Things we need to know.

  “Just for a look. Pinky promise,” he said. They can’t help it when you dress like that.

  We were little kids again. We had played doctor at eight, nine, and ten. But back then, we had nothing to show.

  He started to strip, and so did we. We didn’t expect him to wear boxers, like Dad. If only he had had briefs. His bare legs were as sweaty as his face. We stood on display, all three of us, cold and silent as skeletons in science class.

  “You have hair,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much.”

  Maybe we really were wolves. “We thought you never saw a girl before. That this was educational.”

  “There’s this thing called the internet,” he said. “Maybe you heard of it.”

  We pulled the bedspread over our shoulders and slumped back on the mattress.

  He preened, his chest stretching across the room. “Don’t tell me girls don’t sneak it, too.”

  The Crush bubbled up from our bellies, through our throats, oranging our eyes and ears.

  He pulled on Redwings sweatpants. “Do something for me.”

  “We have to finish our run.” We zipped back into our body-hugging pants, our tiny clingy sports bras, and prepared to finish our three-mile warm-up.

  “Not now. Tomorrow. Let me kiss you both in front of my locker, when everyone’s looking.”

  “You said we’re just friends.”

  “We can pretend. I want people to think I can handle two girls at once.”

  “We don’t think so.”

  “Then I’ll tell everyone you came to my house and showed off your cunts.”

  “But we didn’t.”

  Or maybe we did. He would say so, and that was practically the same thing. All we could do was storm to the door and slam it behind us.

  He followed us onto the porch, the concrete crumpling into his dirty socks. “Your word against mine. I can say whatever I want. Two at a time. Ménage à trois.”

  We crammed our feet into our shoes. “We’ll tell everyone you dropped your pants for us.”

  “Please do. Know what they’ll call me? Lucky. And you? The slutty twins.”

  We tied our laces so tight they hurt. Maybe he had heard us in the pear tree, pretending not to be virgins. Maybe saying or even thinking something makes it so. When we had wanted The Groundhog to see his shadow, he had seen it. When we had wished to be in every class together, we were. If Dad could climb McKinley without a rope, maybe we could make our thoughts materialize. Even if we weren’t wolves, we might not be quite human, either.

  “You know what they’ll say,” Bo shouted as we ran away. “Why did you wear skimpy clothes?”

  We also heard what Bo didn’t say, what we knew others would, if we blabbed: Why did you ask for it?

  We stopped our run short, heading into our house. The skin on our strong bare bellies pleaded with us to cover it up, so we shielded our navels with our forearms, even
before Dad opened the door. “I warned you,” he said, reading our minds or our limbs. “Next time you go outside, wear some clothes.”

  We jumped in the shower and tried to disappear down the drain. We grabbed a towel, and it swallowed us. We had to push and shove and ferret our way out. We would have to find our bodies again, lost in oversized sweatshirts, even if it took a whole year.

  17

  Whoosh. Whatever wasn’t covered shocked from the sharp wind. Nose, mouth, teeth. Nostrils, lashes, tips of ears. The liquid lubricating our eyes almost froze stiff.

  That’s what happens when you don’t cover up, our bodies were telling our brains. Our thin skin said, Dad was right; it’s dangerous out here. Here meaning everywhere.

  He was just trying to keep his girls safe.

  Like they do in Saudi Arabia.

  18

  In eighth grade, the graffiti on our lockers had read, “Instant orgy. Just add one.” The janitor painted over it the next day, but our nickname stuck. “The Slutty Twins” followed us to high school.

  At first we tried to slough the label off. Us? Sluts? Middle fingers in the air, arms up like the half-naked Statue of Liberty herself. Give me your hungry. Give me your horny. Give me a break. Slut you!

  When that didn’t work, we tried burying our breasts in sweatshirts that would practically cover the whole country. For a year we wore prim button-up collars. One-piece bathing suits. “Granny gowns.” Even men in cars stopped catcalling. Guys didn’t seem to see us at all.

  But our music drowned under all that fabric. If we wanted to play, we had to unzip. So now, at fourteen, we changed our clothes and named our band the Slutty Twins.

  “What’s that mean?” Mom asked, when she saw us inking posters on the kitchen table for a gig in our friend Haley’s garage.

  “It’s what they call us at school, so we co-opted the term.”

  “You what?” She readjusted the baby on her hip and leaned in to hear. We rolled our eyes. We knew she hated when we used fancy words. But at that age, we loved feeling smarter than she was. She didn’t know the latest memes. Couldn’t recognize our favorite YouTubers. Texted with one finger.