Half

by Sharon Harrigan

  When we explained things we didn’t think needed explaining, we talked too fast. At least that’s what Mom always said. We didn’t mean to. “It’s like queer,” we said. “Like bitch or nerd. If you use it on yourself, you take the venom out of it. You say: You can’t hurt me with that word anymore. It’s mine.”

  Maybe she heard us, maybe not. She was busy patting the whining homunculus on the back. Lifting him up and down, squat and rise, her baby-elevator trick that doubled as a workout.

  Even without our kiss, Bo got his wish. He made the cut for the football team. Rumor had it he could take on the whole starting lineup for girls’ field hockey, all at the same time. What we believed? That he could find a picture on a porn site and Photoshop their faces in.

  When people at school asked what we meant by the name of our band, we would whip out our phones and play them a riff we had recorded. A guitar lick that could suck them dry.

  Dad didn’t like our “indecency,” but he let us play anyway. “Only,” he said, “because music was what you were born for.” He had always told us we were better than anything on the radio. He had played guitar since before he was born. That was his story: before. He played all instruments, but cymbals best. He played with the seasons and the atmosphere. He played us to sleep and, too often, woke us up with dissonant chords after midnight. We had strummed along since we could remember.

  We played in our bottom bunk, heads bumping the sagging springs above. We played in our unfinished basement, orange mold mountains and waterbugs our only audience. We played in our garage, cowering under power tools that spontaneously turned on from the vibrations of our amps. And inevitably, we posted our songs on the internet.

  In the clips, we dressed almost alike, in jeans and sweaters. One loose, one tight. One virgin, one whore. The two twin states, mirror images, sullied and pure. Like the two of us, virtually identical.

  We played for our fourteenth birthday party. We were technically a duo, not a band. Paula on lead guitar and vocals. Artis on bass and drums. In black bottoms, white tops, and Dominatrix boots, we looked like waiters in a fancy restaurant that cooked up the customers.

  We crammed into our one-car garage. It crackled with the surplus Christmas lights Dad bought one year but couldn’t afford to turn on, bulbs in every shape and color. Pelts and antlers swung from the ceiling, and weed whackers and power drills dangled too close to our heads. We belted out every beating to our butts and our brains. We sang out our family secrets in codes even we couldn’t yet understand.

  We played the soundtrack to the movements of our bodies, the movies in our brains, and our hormones and growing pains turned electric.

  Dad joined in the performance, commandeered the drums, adding unbidden cymbals. It was hard to distinguish the instrument from him. It sounded like his boom when we forgot to wipe our feet. Like his bellow when he didn’t approve of our clothes.

  We danced in a trance while we played. Our friends couldn’t help but copy. Nevaeh and Haley. Marietta and Eliza. Gigi and Nikki. Not Bo, but who needed boys?

  With so little air, we stripped down to sports bras, forgetting Dad was there. We twirled and sang and strummed and banged.

  No, we didn’t bang, Dad did. Or was it thunder?

  He picked up our shirts and snapped them at us.

  Clang clang clang. Our eardrums popped. Lightning struck the driveway and ignited the asphalt. Everyone emptied into the street, away from the flame. Without all those bodies crammed together inside the garage, we shivered and pulled our shirts back on.

  Then—and this is the weird part—it rained for one hot minute. Just enough to put the fire out.

  We touched each other’s sleeves to share what we knew in a flash: that the fire stopped because we had covered ourselves. Dad wasn’t just playing with our band. He was taking command.

  We kept strumming and singing. Thunder backed us up. Dad danced next to us, moving his arms to the weather’s jaggedy rhythm, bumping his elbows into our ribs to remind us he was there.

  “Do we need to go in?” we asked him, at the end of our song.

  “No,” he said. “I made it far away this time. But I can always make it close.” His fingertips burned our cheeks. We smelled burnt hair, and our messy buns loosened, strands falling out over our faces.

  He made the thunder and lightning? Was that the real reason we couldn’t invite our friends to spend the night? Why he had banned us from sleepovers?

  He buried his hands deep down in his pockets, and his face darkened to silence us.

  After our final song, with real-live thunder keeping our beat right outside the window, our friends followed us into the kitchen. Ya-Ya waited with the same pineapple upside-down cake she baked every year. Mom, Dad, Ya-Ya, and all our friends tried to crowd around us at the Formica table. Some had to stand in the doorway.

  We lit fourteen candles, and our friends sang, “Happy birthday, Slutty Twins. Happy birthday to you.”

  “What you call them?” Ya-Ya slid her glasses down her nose, caught a stray hair from her bun, and smoothed her best dress. Even in her special occasion clothes, she still smelled of stale grease and crinkle-cut fries.

  “That’s the name of their band,” our friends said. “It’s ironic.”

  “Like opposite?” Ya-Ya looked at Dad, who grew up as her translator.

  “Like playing with fire,” he said.

  We blew out the candles, wishing Ya-Ya would make her cakes right-side up once in a while.

  “In Old Country,” Ya-Ya said, “we were virgins on our wedding night.”

  “They’re not saying they’re not virgins,” Mom said. “They’re just saying . . .” Did she know what we were saying?

  Haley stepped in. “They want to change the meaning of slut.”

  “Like it can mean you have a passion for something,” we said. “You can be a book slut, say, if you like to read.”

  “What about their hymen?” Ya-Ya asked.

  Mom ignored our hymens and brought our presents to the table. We opened boxes of lip gloss and origami money cranes, envelopes weighted with gift cards. Ya-Ya gave us shoes. She always gave us shoes. Shiny, sturdy, respectable. Little kids’ shoes. Virginal shoes. School girl shoes. Mary Janes. The kind of shoes it would be impossible to have sex in.

  “Shoes shined, conscience clear.”

  Our friends looked to us to translate Ya-Ya, but we just rolled our eyes.

  On the internet, our viewers clamored for more. So we uploaded new songs, with new outfits and dance routines. We wore “costumes,” not our real clothes. We were characters, not ourselves. We painted our mouths cinnamon red-hot, parted our lips, and made a little pout. We set the filter to create a soft, hazy light. It was all ironic, though. Right?

  When strangers told us online we were hot, when anonymous comments arrived asking us what we were wearing, what we slept in, the color of our underwear, we didn’t bolt the way we did when men whistled on the street, catcalled us at the mall or library, licking us up with their eyes. The screen seemed to shield us.

  We channeled every starlet, every diva, every heartthrob, every voice, every thrust of hip and dip of the chin.

  Dad said we had inherited his musical genius. He told us we were divine. And, finally, we believed.

  We could lure and sway. Better yet, we would finally be able to run away.

  We would find a way to monetize the songs, to sell the data they collected or make listeners watch an ad. If we figured it out, we would be able to buy a house. For us two. For the times when Dad’s thunder and lightning were not just part of our backup band. We knew what he could do. He had warned us. We could buy a house for Mom. She was so small she could have squeezed between the bars of a cage. But she wouldn’t. Not unless we gave her someplace else to go.

  At fourteen, we didn’t know what “jailbait” meant. Strangers used that word in the comments they left after watching us perform our songs.

  We didn’t foresee that “slutty twins” would
be one of the most common phrases in the history of internet searches. People weren’t looking for us when they typed the phrase in. But when we popped up, they made us into everything they had been searching for. We didn’t know we would go viral.

  We couldn’t keep up with the comments. We couldn’t even count them. No one seemed to realize anymore that the name of our band was ironic.

  We were followed on social media and on the street. By now we covered our bellies and our asses when we ran. We would have covered ourselves in a sheet like we did for Halloween in second grade if that would not have attracted even more attention. We were two, we were strong, we were fast. But what if next time we weren’t fast enough?

  One evening, on our after-dinner run, a man with a half-zipped fly and a fistful of daisies chased us, shouting, “Wait up, Slutty Twins.” We sprinted ahead but not so far we didn’t feel the flowers he threw hit our asses.

  Inside, we changed into sweats, then told Dad. The ends of his mouth curled up toward his eyes. “What did you expect with a band name like that?” He wanted us to say he was right. He always got what he wanted.

  “I’ll make them disappear,” Dad said. “But you have to change the name of your band. You have to change your look. You have to listen to me from now on.”

  Why did we always have to change? Why couldn’t the world change instead?

  We didn’t know Dad could hack. If that’s what he did. He wouldn’t let us watch.

  He created a computer code to erase every trace of us in cyberspace. At least that’s what we told our friends. They said, with that kind of skill, why didn’t he become one of those software hotshots who retired, a millionaire, by thirty?

  We couldn’t say because Dad wasn’t a normal human being. Because when we asked how he did what he did, all he said was, “Magic.”

  “The shoe make the man,” Ya-Ya liked to say. We slipped into our birthday patent leather Mary Janes. And became, simply, the Twins.

  Not long after we lost our shot at fame, Dad lost his job at the plant. He wasn’t the only one. “It’s like a disease,” Mom said. “It started when you were little. The robots taking over. Remember when I tried to get my job back at the bank?”

  First tellers had become obsolete. Assembly line workers. Cashiers. Receptionists. Travel agents. Bakers. Warehouse workers. Even some therapy animals: our science teacher told us someone invented mechanical harp seals for Alzheimer’s patients.

  Dad said he would sue to get his job back. Couldn’t stand by and do nothing when the whole city was getting the blood sucked right out of it.

  “Who you going to sue, the Japanese,” we asked, “for making their cars so good?”

  At that, he flew into our room. We closed our door so the daycare babies wouldn’t see and shut the windows so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. Then he flung from our shelves all our framed photos and artwork. Our retro turntable and LPs. Our rainbow bracelets with glass beads. He ripped up lyrics from our favorite bands, which we had taped all over the walls. He threw Day of the Dead mirrors and nail polish bottles at us when we tried to stop his rampage. He dropped our heaviest books on our stocking feet. “Out!” he said and shoved us when we wouldn’t obey.

  We listened outside our closed door, ears to wood, as he shattered our treasures. “Don’t go in,” Mom whispered. We said nothing more and waited him out, like a storm. “You don’t know what he’s capable of,” she said, then slunk away.

  But we did. We had overheard Ya-Ya’s words at Papu’s funeral: Dad killed his own father. You never forget your first memories. Especially when Dad was helpful enough to remind us, now and then, what he was really like.

  Minutes or hours later, we picked up the cracked glass and let it pierce our skin. We tripped on shards, and blood soaked our socks. We sucked the thick liquid from our fingertips, pretending to be vampires.

  At dinner, all we did was swallow and scrape our plates. We nudged Mom to stand up for us, for once, as she had promised she would.

  “Honey,” she said, in a long drawl, like a dribble from a spoon. She swayed toward him, her freshly made mouth quivering. “Of course you’re upset. But the girls—”

  “I’ll buy them anything they want once I get another job. You too, babe.” He knelt beside Mom’s chair and buried his face in her lap. “A house with two bathrooms,” he promised. “A diamond ring to match the sparkle in those goddess eyes.”

  We looked away from them and at each other but still had to hear the kissing and cooing that curdled the milk in our half-empty glasses.

  19

  He never kept those promises.

  And Mom was wrong. We did know what Dad was capable of, which is why we killed him. We had to protect ourselves. No one else did.

  That’s what everyone says on those crime shows.

  Which doesn’t mean it’s not true.

  The brick wall couldn’t move no matter how hard it was pushed, and apparently, neither could we. The snow swirled and spooked, hypnotizing us. We were getting sleepy, the way people do, we had heard, in the moments before frostbite.

  20

  We saw ourselves walking to our babysitting job that night, passing the shells of abandoned houses. Front yards tall with crabgrass. The smell of cooked-up cough syrup and singed hair. We could measure how long a neighbor had been laid off from the height of the pokeweed choking the shrubs.

  We fed the kids their plain macaroni, gave them a bath, squeezing blue degreasing dish soap into the water, and read Go to Sleep, Groundhog to them in bed. We turned off the light half an hour early, hoping they wouldn’t know the difference. We had biology to do.

  The big sister climbed out of bed first. “I need a drink of water.”

  The little brother trudged out to the living room. “You didn’t kiss me good night.”

  We stroked their backs and carried them to bed. Then they said:

  “You need to stay with me and pet my hair.”

  “You need to hold my hand, or I’ll have nightmares.”

  “I can’t sleep without music.”

  “I can’t sleep unless there’s no sound at all.”

  We patted them and played the ukulele we always carried in our backpack. We waited for their slow breath to arrive, for the tiny wheezes to escape their noses. We tiptoed out, and then the little brother said, “I only sleep in the day.”

  His big sister said, “We turn into bats at night.”

  We stomped back to their rooms. “Not. One. More. Word. Or else.”

  They exhaled, and it sounded like snuffling back tears, but we told ourselves it was only sleepy breath. Our yelling erased the words from the groundhog book we had read to them so sweetly. All they would recall were our threats. We said, “You get out of bed again, and you’re grounded. For the rest of your sad little lives.” Then we slammed the bedroom doors.

  They were silent for the rest of the night. When Dad hollered at us and used those same words, we had never dared talk back, either.

  What had we become? Or, rather, who? We covered our eyes so we wouldn’t have to look at each other.

  21

  Then.

  And now.

  But finally we let ourselves see. We lifted our eyelids, tenting hands over foreheads so we could look at each other through the static of snow. We punched each other’s biceps. “See what he did? He made us hard.” If that wasn’t enough to indict him, what was?

  We shivered some heat back into our veins. We wriggled to let the blood flow. We weren’t ready to leave quite yet.

  One of us said, “It’s better to be soft?” The fluffy snow squished under our heels. “No one was going to rescue us. Mom was worthless.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  We didn’t want to be mean. One of us, at least. Anyway, who said we needed rescuing? We weren’t like his pathetic tow truck customers.

  22

  The day Dad sold the Bull, Mom asked him how we would practice for our road test when he traded in our only vehicle for a
tow truck.

  We wondered the same thing, but we just said what we knew he wanted to hear. “Epic.” At least he had a job. If we didn’t give him lip, we still thought he might even pay us back for all the treasures he had broken, over the years, in our room.

  Mom, still in her daycare uniform, sunflower T-shirt and hair pulled back in a scarf, waved him off. She washed her hands over and over. She did that blinky thing with her eyes that made her look like an alien, zinging around the living room, stacking errant blocks the daycare babies had knocked over. “We can’t . . .”

  But Dad was already opening the passenger door, beckoning us outside. We saw him through the kitchen window, in work boots, jeans, and short sleeves despite the cold. He had trimmed his beard and hair for the occasion, which begged for pictures. We grabbed our new phones—hard-earned through nights and weekends at Downriver Chik-N—short down coats, and stocking caps. We dashed outside, took photos of him and his new truck, then climbed in.

  The truck was a tank, a whale, a mountain. Every bit as big as he was. Bright yellow letters rose up on the cab, embellished with thunderbolts: “Moose Tows.”

  At dinner, Mom asked how he paid for it.

  He uncrossed his legs. Leaned back, the way he didn’t let us, lifting the chair on two legs. Leaned forward again. Then said he had mortgaged the house.

  Mom stopped swirling her fork in mashed potatoes, stopped pretending she was eating them. She left the table without another word and buried herself in bubble bath.

  We didn’t know much about mortgages. If we lost the house, we figured we could always find another, maybe a better one, with two bathrooms so we wouldn’t have to hold it in every time Mom decided to soak herself. Dad had been out of work for a whole year. At least now he would be out of the house, too.