We had always thought boys were all Mouth and Dick. But we would have painted him as an Ear. His fingers, long and slender as the Mona Lisa’s. Would they feel cold and tingly on our backs or hot on our hips? Maybe he was nonbinary, too, like his friend. We didn’t care. We wanted to be, too, if it meant this: a body made of contradictions and parallels. We wanted whatever he had. We both did, but we would share. Somehow. He carried a pocketknife and carved our likenesses from empty coffee cups and Styrofoam to-go plates, objects we had carelessly tossed in the trash. We each wanted to believe the picture he made of us was the best.
After the next class, Sebastian invited us to his own dorm to study. Staver brought a study partner, too, a boy named Cline. We loved his soft voice and asymmetrical hair. A boomerang and an antique mandolin hung on the walls. The ceiling was dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars. Sebastian’s roommate, Colson, had a face as rounded as ours was sharp, a scratchy voice, and short dreads. He offered us grog. That’s what he called his concoction in a steaming mug. All the other students we had met so far only drank Coke or beer.
One of us stared. One of us said, with our eyes, that Sebastian was nothing compared to Colson, who moved like a dancer. Like a high-wire artist. He was made of steam. We could see right through him. Or was it smoke? We had never met anyone before who seemed to float more than walk. He could adapt to anything, we could tell, by the way he pretzeled his fingers around a pencil.
He had a superpower we couldn’t name. Perhaps he could walk on the snow without falling in. Or maybe he could see what people hid behind their eyes. Since as long as we could remember we had been looking for boys—or girls—as slippery and strange as us. We should have known: we had to leave home to find them.
How did one of us know Colson was the one? How did we know how to breathe? To go back to sleep when we woke up in the middle of the night? To open our eyes to the sun?
Not just one of us wanted Colson. But one of us wanted him more.
We looked these boys over, temples to toes, not sure what we were looking for. And then we knew. We had found their tattoos, twin punctuation marks, a semicolon on each boy’s palm, Colson’s right, Sebastian’s left.
“You know what it means?” Sebastian asked us. “It means pause.”
Colson walked behind his friend and planted his hands on his shoulders, with a comfort we had never seen between boys.
We didn’t need to know more once we knew they had marked themselves for each other. Just as we had.
They told us they had grown up together, in the same small town halfway between Detroit and Traverse City. “We’re kind of like twins,” Sebastian said.
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m black, you mean,” Colson said. “And he’s light brown.”
“That’s the least of it.”
“Twins are so special?” Colson sat on his bed and patted a space for one of us to join him. He wore a flannel shirt and soccer shorts, a mix of sporty and hip. On his bare legs, his hair disappeared into the camouflage of his skin.
“When we were little, one day we switched clothes and pretended to be each other. Nobody knew we had swapped places,” we said.
“Not even your parents?” Sebastian sat on his bed, his back against the wall, and one of us sidled up, to sit hip to hip.
“Even we forgot.” We felt the boys’ breath. We wanted to feel more. More what? We weren’t thinking in words. Blood rushed between our legs, the way it had that day when we had wielded our gun and pointed it out the window. We shivered—one frightened, one thrilled. More power. We wanted more of this. Of these boys. Of what was in their mouths and on their skin.
“That’s kind of creepy,” they finally said.
“You have no idea.”
Every day after class, the four of us studied together. Sometimes we were five, with Staver, or six, if Cline came, too. We twins went to health services and started swallowing birth control pills with our toast. Finally, one day, we paired off—boy-girl, boy-girl—on the two small beds.
We told Colson and Sebastian, “When you touch me, you touch her. Anything that happens to one of us, happens to both.”
“Sounds kinky,” Colson said.
“Not physically.”
“Ooh, mysterious,” Sebastian said.
We threw up our hands. “We’re just warning you.”
One of us walked our boy across campus, to our room, while the other stayed with her boy in his. Our boys dropped the blinds; we dimmed the lights.
In our two separate rooms, at the same time.
We wiggled out of our blue jean shorts and black tights, our semitransparent white tops stretched over bright-colored cotton camisoles. We removed our best panties, chosen for the occasion, with no blood stains or holes, then we slid under the covers in the narrow twin bed crammed against the wall. There was no room to lie next to each other, so one of us had to climb on top. They hesitated, so we went first. Turned out, we twins knew more than they did.
We each held our boy in our hands, then in our mouths. We slurped and gulped and hummed. We couldn’t see our twin, but we sensed we were in sync. We wrapped our long dark hair around his sex and rubbed and strummed, the gesture not so different from playing guitar and singing along. Our thumbs so nimble, our throats so warm. They helped us with their hips, pressing us to thrust with our hands, then mouths, faster and faster.
And then we stopped. To linger, to lengthen the moment. To let them enter us, like a room. But first, to slip on a condom.
They fit inside our bodies the way air fills a room. All we wanted at that moment, which felt like our entire lives, was for them not to stop.
The springs squeaked, and we listened. Where had we heard that creaking before? Yes. The soundtrack of our childhood.
We pumped our hips and heard nothing more but the sound of our clenching, then our shivering. Our bodies went soft. We didn’t mean to cry. What would our boys do if they saw? We hid our faces in our hair.
Then our boys cried, too. That’s how we knew they were ours.
Each in her separate room, we made love for the first time. We had had sex before, quick and dirty, in cars and bathrooms. This was different.
Braided together with our boyfriends—which was what they now were—we spent the night apart for the first time. Yet we stayed twinned, knowing what the other had gone through. We tried not to wonder how long we would float, bodies linked to boys, brains to each other. We could double-date, but we couldn’t be quadruplets.
Weeks passed, and we spent more time with Colson and Sebastian. We pulled their ears and nibbled them. We took the back of their hips, which they couldn’t see, and molded them in the shape of our palms. They took us in their mouths and waited for us to push their heads away with our hands to signal we were done.
We pressed their temples like elevator buttons. We lifted and rocked their ankles. We let our hair sweep their cheeks. We blew bubbles and looked at their faces through them. We slipped lists into their pockets. We imprinted our creases onto theirs, and the pattern stuck. We walked in reverse so we could see their backs shrinking smaller and smaller. We dangled their legs in the crooks of our elbows and watched the knots in every muscle unbend. We rolled them across the floor and leapfrogged on top.
We wore their shirts, and they wore ours. We played guitar and sang for them, and they crumpled at our feet. They rode their bikes to class, and we ran beside them, trying not to flaunt the fact that we were faster. They helped us with our homework, so we would ace the requirements for our meteorology class. We needed to prove, scientifically, that Dad didn’t actually control the weather.
They lent us their earbuds and played music we didn’t know we needed to hear. Afro punk, art punk, baroque pop. Coldwave and cow punk, crust core and dark cabaret. They played us emo and ethereal wave. Gypsy punk, grunge, geek rock, and indie folk. Math rock, Mod revival, Paisley Underground. Power pop, reggae, hip-hop, swamp pop, roots, and, finally, synth.
We talked
futures. One wanted to teach, one wanted to fly. Their desires mixed with ours, in our heads and between our legs, so much we barely could tell ourselves apart.
On our pillows, they confessed their secrets. One: that he had kissed a boy. And liked it. And would do it again. The other: that he had killed a man.
We shucked off the covers and made for the door. Our throats filled with reflux, rusty metal down our pipes.
Then he laughed. “A joke.”
We would tell them our secret. The big one, about Dad killing his dad. Which we decided, at that moment, was the real reason we didn’t talk to him.
We really would tell our boys. Soon. That’s what you did when you loved someone. That’s how you knew you did.
We didn’t go home for fall break, because Dad was there. We waited to visit Mom and Ya-Ya till we knew he was away on a hunting trip. We texted them every week. But when Dad tried to contact us, we ignored our phones.
27
When we moved to off-campus housing, the summer after freshman year, we unpacked only what we needed in our new lives. A few half-shirts would hold us till winter. Jeans ripped at the knees. Guitar, bass, ukulele. We didn’t play the songs we had written for the Slutty Twins. The irony had been chased out of them.
The first thing we did was fill up the bathtub. We hadn’t had one in the dorms. Now we could bury ourselves in bubbles whenever we needed to slow our pulse.
It was Staver who saw the ad on the bulletin board at the back of the Renaissance art history class they took with us. “Wanted: Models for life drawing. Great hourly rates.” In hip coffee shops and old-school cafeterias, in the supermarket and on the dance floor, men kept telling us we looked like models. So what if they were feeding us a pickup line?
Staver answered the ad, too. With their crescent-moon face and slinky limbs, they were as luminous as paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts, so no wonder they were hired by the same professor who hired us, for different days. Our only interest was the cash. Their parents provided an ample allowance, so we didn’t understand why Staver took the job.
“It’s the principle,” they said.
“The principle of what?” we asked.
“Representation.”
We scrunched up our mouths and waited, as we always did, for Staver to patiently explain.
“Nonbinary people need to be portrayed more often in art.”
Of course. People like them, with Adam’s apples and plucked eyebrows, with broad shoulders and soft skin, with slim waists and concave chests. Or other combinations that didn’t have to be contradictions. Like so many people we saw on campus, now that we knew what to look for: Boys with bows in their long hair. Girls in leather jackets and motorcycle boots. Hadn’t they opened our eyes to these things the first day we met?
When it was our turn in Life Drawing, we worked as a team. When one of us tired of holding a pose, the other resumed. The students hardly blinked. Did they see that one of us had a skinned knee, the other a birth mark on her left shoulder? Sometimes we wanted to scratch ourselves up, cut our skin in different places, just to test if anyone really saw us at all. They kept drawing our ears and hair, our eyes and thighs, as if we were one person.
Look, I’m the curvier one. My breasts are twice the size of hers, one of us wanted these art students to notice. These abs? No small feat, the other wanted all to see. But no one did.
We stifled sneers. What a waste of attention. We bit our index finger, the way Mom always did when she couldn’t bring herself to say what she needed to say.
When fooling people is too easy, it’s no longer fun. It was never meant to be fooling, anyway. More like dipping a finger in hot water to test the temperature.
Yet all those eyes also made our skin buzz. The hair on our arms tingle. The air run through our lungs.
One day, midpose, the AC blew out in the studio. Students started to sweat into their charcoal, turning it to mud. When our smooth skin puddled, the professor told everyone to go home. They could finish their drawings at the next class.
In the old house with the rickety wraparound porch that we rented with two other girls—the other half of our string quartet—the AC died, too. The grid had officially been overloaded on that record-hot day. To escape the heat, we wound our way to a shady place we knew, hidden deep in the woods near campus. We didn’t invite our boyfriends or Staver, who tagged along so often, making our foursome into five. We wanted to skinny dip, just the two of us, naked as we were in the womb, swimming even then.
We wanted to cool our tempers. Why were we so riled up? Not just from the temperature.
But first we filled our pack with clementines and peanut butter crackers. Lemonade and a rifle. There could be bears out there. There could be men who didn’t like it when we caught their pickup lines and threw them back.
We could have bought a pocket-size. Or even one disguised as a phone, if we had wanted to. Or a hands-free gun we could shoot just by swiveling our hips. But we were secretly proud of the nosy way the muzzle poked out, like a live thing. We had carried the rifle this far through our lives, and we were used to its heft. We wouldn’t admit even to each other that we were still attracted to its power. No matter how hard we tried to run away from Dad, we brought him in our pack, thanks to ever looser open carry laws.
We had wrangled our hair into messy buns that tumbled out into high ponytails once we had raced each other to our favorite tree, the one that cooled the air like iced tea. We rolled in the grass and wove clover into each other’s hair. We could breathe again. Out here, without the attention-pollution of the city, we could finally hear each other think. We inhaled the silence. It fed us.
Under a canopy of leaves, we fanned the backs of each other’s necks with fresh-picked ferns. We peeled our fruit, stripped its membranes, then sucked out all the sweet juices. Refreshed, we bushwhacked further than we ever had, past twisted, prickly vines. Brambles tripped us, lodging thorns in thin skin, our hands reddening with overripe berries. We cursed our cuts. We ranted at each other. “Whose idea was it to come to this jungle?” “Who said this could beat the heat?”
And then we saw it. Not a mirage, but real water. We ran, ignoring thorns. We didn’t mind more stings, if they could be healed. Every pore was thirsty.
We tipped our toes in the spring-fed pond. Then our hands. In such a secluded place, we might as well have been in our bathtub. No one could find us. We had tramped this trail a dozen times before without discovering this private cove, the pond just wide enough across for a few lazy strokes.
We were never modest together, our bodies so similar that undressing in front of each other seemed like looking in the mirror. So we lingered. Waited to pull off every last stitch and skinny-dip in the deep. We savored the feel of our sweat-soaked stretchy V-necks that landed right above our navels. Then we peeled the shirts off and did sun salutes in our sports bras. We unzipped our high-tech hiking shorts, then unsuctioned our underthings from our breasts and buttocks, letting them breathe in the breeze. We stretched our necks up to the clouds and said we were works of art.
Art history taught us new vocabulary: The women in paintings were “figures.” They weren’t naked, they were “nudes.” They didn’t swim, they “bathed.” They had no fur “down there,” like children.
We stood in the bubbling froth of the spring and let glistening waves fall over our nipples, mimicking one of our favorite paintings, of the goddess of love riding the water on an oyster. “Look, I’m Venus on the half shell!”
Then we dove in. Our ears filled with water, so we weren’t sure we heard anything at first. Footsteps. A small cry of pain: those damn thorns. Someone was watching us.
“Who’s there?” we called.
At first all we saw was a rustle of ferns and pokeberry vines. Then someone emerged from the trail we had just tramped down. He had to have been far behind, or we would have heard him before we jumped in. Maybe he had taken a shortcut and hidden in the trees. Maybe he had learned how to disap
pear in the woods, the way Dad had once taught us. Or maybe we had just not been paying attention.
His breath came quiet, so we figured him an athlete, with lungs so strong he barely had to huff. With arms that long, his fingers stretching out like webs, we guessed he was a swimmer. A star. A fish. He swayed a little, though, off kilter. Must have filled his water bottle with damn strong alcohol.
Then we saw who he was. That guy from the life drawing class. Blond hair as yellow as pee. Teeth as white as sin. The guy whose eyes never left us, even to look at the paper in front of him.
“I followed you,” he said, crouching at the edge of the water.
“You’ve been watching us?”
“You didn’t see me behind the bushes? You put on quite a show. You’re like goddesses, you know.”
Dad had described us that way all our lives, and it had always scared us.
“Didn’t your mom teach you about privacy?” we asked. “Didn’t she teach you any manners?”
“You didn’t seem to care about that in class.”
“Get out!”
But instead he edged closer: khaki shorts and U of M shirt, meticulously scuffed slip-on boat shoes. We thought his kind only moved in packs.
The pond was small. If we left the water, we would give him what he came for: a private viewing of naked women. And God knew he wouldn’t stop there. We weren’t “figures” in his eyes. Nude bathers? Not to him.
“You can’t pretend you don’t want it. Not when you go around stripping in public. I don’t believe you do it for the paycheck.”
“Fuck off.” We inhaled all the air, trying to appear bigger and stronger than we were.
He scooped up our clothes and phones. “You come on out, I’ll give them back.”
How had he missed our rifle? So much stupid inattention. We had been smart enough or lucky enough—or stupid enough ourselves—to drop the pack on the bank opposite where we had shed our clothes. We front-crawled to the other side, then pointed the rifle at him. But before one shot could graze his skin, he fled, as fleet as if we had transformed him into an animal.
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