We couldn’t be adopted.
“I’m not Damia’s mother. Just yours.”
That totally made no sense. I thought of Damia’s and my shared baby album—pictures of Mom, twice as big as she had been with Lars, and pictures of us minutes after our birth—Dad was a maniac with the cell phone camera, and could bore anybody with an excess of pictures of the same thing over and over. He’d gone so crazy snapping pictures on our zeroth birthday he ran down the battery and had to borrow someone else’s phone to call Grams and Gramp and let them know we’d been born.
I shook my head at the green-haired woman.
“I stole Cosima when she was a week old and left you in her place,” whispered the woman. “She has been a boon to us under the hill. Still, I missed you, flesh of my flesh, spirit child.”
My back twitched with shivers.
She lifted my left hand and slid a ring onto my ring finger. Vines of gold and red gold twined around a small green stone, with green gold leaves woven in. She released my hand, leaned forward and dropped a cool kiss on my cheek, then rose and walked away without looking back.
The kiss left a tingling in my cheek like the touch of ice or flame. “But—wait—but—” I tried to say, a stir of confusion and anxiety constricting my throat, and then the school door opened and Damia rushed out, and the warmth of being two who were one reclaimed me.
“Did you miss me?” she asked, which was what we always said to each other whenever we were separated and came back together.
“More than the moon and stars,” I said, a ritual response.
She smiled my smile and I stood and we walked home side by side, our steps matching each other’s.
After supper, when we were at our twin desks side by side in our bedroom, doing homework, Damia said, “Where’d that ring come from? You didn’t have it at lunch.”
I tensed. I had almost forgotten the stranger and her frightening story. “Somebody gave it to me while I was waiting for you.”
“Who?”
“No one I know.” I wished I had never spoken to the woman who said she was my mother.
Damia took my hand and stared at the ring, then twisted it and tried to pull it off. It wouldn’t come. “Some stranger gave you a ring and you put it on?”
“Uh,” I said. “She put it on me. It doesn’t come off.” Though I hadn’t known that until this moment. I had felt the ring’s presence, noticed it once or twice during dinner, and thought how pretty it was, but I had not thought more about it.
Damia frowned, making two upward furrows in our forehead. “It’s really pretty,” she said in a low voice. “I wish I had one like it.”
My mind flooded with money-making schemes so I could buy her a ring. I’d never seen one like it in a store. But maybe I could get her a different one. Ask Mrs. Radich next door if she had any chores I could do for money, like grooming her Persian cat, and Mr. Alexi down the street, who sometimes hired us to weed his vegetable beds. Maybe Dad would let me draw something for him.
Damia touched the green stone in my ring, then turned back to her math.
It was the first crack in the mirror.
WHEN WE WERE fifteen, we got learner’s permits, and Dad took us out to practice driving. Damia wore the Black Hills Gold ring I had bought her, with some help from Mom, for our twelfth birthday, and I wore the one given me by the woman who had messed up my mind. It didn’t come off. Sometimes, it tingled, and strange thoughts came into my head, and that was when I tried hardest to slip it off, but soap and Vaseline didn’t do it. It stayed just the right size, even as my fingers grew.
Saturday afternoon, Dad took us out to a parking lot at a mall that had closed ten years earlier. Weeds grew through the cracked asphalt, and faded herringbone lines marked parking spaces. Here, we could drive in circles, backward, fast, slow. We practiced parallel parking against the curb by the boarded-up hulk of the mall, between red lines Dad had spray-painted on the pavement.
Damia asked me to get out while she practiced parking. She said I distracted her.
“How can I distract you when I’m sitting silent in the back seat?” I asked.
“You’re thinking too loud.”
I got out. I figured she was pissed because this was one area where I didn’t have the same trouble she did. She always parked two feet from the curb. I had tried beaming helpful thoughts at her while she was backing and forthing. Mistake.
I kicked a can on the sidewalk, watched it bounce off a patchy green concrete wall, and tried to fold my thoughts into myself instead of sharing them. My eyes felt hot, and the ring burned on my finger. I rubbed it, trying to ease the heat.
Through the windshield, I saw Dad speaking to Damia, his eyebrows pinching his eyes narrow. I hated that look, especially when he turned it on me.
Something flashed past the edge of my eye. I turned and saw the green-haired woman. She stood still as glass in the shadows near the mall’s main entrance. This time, she wore dull gray-green clothes that blended with the peeling paint on the concrete walls of the mall’s outer skin. Her boots were dark gray, and her hair was green-gray. She smiled and blew a kiss. I felt a flutter against my cheek, as if a moth brushed me, and then something like pain or freezing, as if the kiss seeped through my skin and spread out inside me. She edged into deeper shadows and was gone.
Damia slammed the car door. I turned and saw her standing by the car, staring toward me.
“Damia, you need to park again,” Dad’s voice said.
“What just happened?” Damia asked me.
I glanced toward the place where the woman had stood, then at my twin. “Nothing.”
ON OUR SIXTEENTH birthday, I woke feeling strange. Damia opened her eyes at the same moment and we stared from twin bed to twin bed at each other, the way we did most mornings. Early morning sun lightened the curtains at the window, brought out the color in our pale green walls and pale blue ceiling so our room felt like an underwater haven. Small round mirrors we had glued to the walls like bubbles here and there showed pieces of our room and our self to each other.
Sometimes we waited to see who would smile first, and sometimes we both smiled at exactly the same instant. Those were the good mornings. Sometimes we were both distressed by dreams we had shared, or things that had happened the day before. I would see Damia’s frown and know my face wore the same expression.
“I dreamed you left,” Damia said. She breathed deep and pressed her fist to her sternum. Her eyes looked too bright under her half-lowered eyelids.
“I didn’t dream.” I twisted the ring on my finger, a nervous habit I’d developed in response to twinges the ring sent through my hand once in a while.
We were out of sync. That had started when we were ten, and the gap between us grew wider all the time.
“Happy birthday,” I said.
“Is it?” She slid out of bed and went to the closet, came out with identical pale green blouses. She tossed one to me. It was what I would have picked. I got up and dressed, and we went down to breakfast together, our steps hitting the stairs simultaneously, so it sounded like only one person descended.
Lars was eating Cheerios, shoveling them into his mouth. “Hey,” he said, puffing Cheerios and milk back into his bowl, “look!” He pointed toward our places at the table.
Between our cereal bowls lay a small package with a gold bow on it, a thing the size and shape of a can opener. Mom and Dad were sitting at the table, and for once neither of them was hiding behind a section of newspaper.
“That’s a promise. We can’t give it to you yet,” Dad said. “But we have it waiting.”
Damia and I sat. We consulted silently, then nodded. She picked up the package and unwrapped it. It was a car key.
“Oh, Daddy!” she cried, and leapt up to hug him. I got up a moment slower and embraced Mom.
“Thank you so much!” I said.
“Look in the driveway,” Mom said.
We rushed to the window together and stared out at the ca
r we’d own when we got our licenses. A dark blue Honda Fit. We jumped up and down and squealed as if it were the one we’d pick over all other cars.
“It’s perfect!” Damia said.
“Just right!” I said.
The whole family went outside. Damia and I climbed into the front seats, and Mom, Dad, and Lars crowded into the back seat. Damia and I took turns sitting behind the steering wheel. Lars supplied vroom vroom car noises.
Dad took custody of the key when we climbed out again.
After breakfast, Damia and I ducked into the downstairs bathroom together to check our reflections before heading to school. My ring sent a jab of pain into my finger, so I stared at my hand instead of my image. When I looked up, I saw a stranger in the mirror.
Damia and I had had our hair cut short a couple months ago. Now it was in an in-between state, brown and shaggy with blond streaks, long enough to touch our shoulders, with bangs that covered our eyebrows. Mom wanted us to get it cut again.
In the mirror, my hair looked green instead of brown. Furry red fox ear-tips poked up through it. My eyebrows had thinned and angled up from the inside edges, and my eyes looked farther apart, a grassier green than they should be. I reached a hand toward my foreign face and saw much longer fingers, almost spider-leg thin, coming toward mine in the glass.
“Cosima!” Damia cried. My new eyes met her gaze in the mirror. “Where did you go?” Her breathing came fast and harsh, and her hand lifted, reaching for me, then stopped before we touched.
“I’m the same as I’ve always been,” I said. I wondered if that were true.
Damia shook her head, her mouth drawing into a grimace of fear. “You’re not you,” she whispered. “I feel sick. You—” She gripped the pointed tip of my ear as though it actually existed. She pinched.
“Ouch!”
“Cozy!”
“Let go. That hurts.”
She let me go, and pressed her hands over her mouth. Our hearts beat out of sync, hers much faster, and our twin bond thinned, snapped back, stretched. My stomach churned.
I cupped my soft, furry ears in my hands and squeezed.
My ears shrank back to normal. The green drained from my hair, and my face filled out until I looked like myself again. Like Damia.
“What just happened?” Damia asked. She was gasping. She gripped my shoulders and stared into my eyes.
“I don’t know.” I stared back, memorizing her eyes, her face, her expression, making mine match it exactly.
“That didn’t happen,” she said. “It’s not going to happen again. You won’t let it.”
We looked at each other. She was everything I loved, and I could be just like her. There was never anything else I needed.
We nodded.
“Girls! School!” Dad called, and we raced out and grabbed our jackets and backpacks.
NOW THAT WE were high school sophomores, Mom and Dad didn’t dictate our class choices anymore, but we ended up taking different classes anyway.
The ring zapped me while my social sciences class was watching a documentary about World War Two. The classroom was dark, curtains closed, Mr. Abel at the back semi-monitoring the laptop he was streaming the video through. I had a desk nearest the window wall, toward the back. Soft snores came from the desk nearest mine. Scott Rankin was always short on sleep and usually slept through anything he could, even though the voiceover was talking about war atrocities, and there were images of skeletal concentration camp survivors on the screen.
The ring sent a warm tingling that spread through my hand, up my arm, and on into the rest of me. I tasted chocolate and caramel, and felt like I was wrapped in warm velvet. Happiness and well-being bloomed in me. I stretched, and felt strength in my muscles.
I heard music. It was a quiet melody that hid under the soundtrack of the film and the soft snores of my classmate, the whispers from a couple of girls in front of me. Flutes, drums, and some kind of string instrument, a web of sounds that connected everything. I blinked. The world shimmered. Rainbows edged everything, and a rustle of wings whispered from everywhere, as though I were surrounded by angels.
My fingers looked longer, and gold glowed through my skin.
I laughed and stood up.
“Cosima?” said Mr. Abel.
I turned a different kind of sideways so everything faded to smoky outlines, then walked through the nearest wall. People were black skeletons against the wavery black edges of furniture. I had to get out of the building, out where there was sunlight and plants.
The walls were only smoke. I walked through them to the schoolyard, went to an oak tree and embraced it. Under its rough, wrinkled gray skin, life moved. I kissed the tree, and it fed me green. I fell into a dream of green and sunlight that warmed and nourished me, where every flavor of air, every breath of wind, excited me, even as I held still; I basked in thrilling contentment.
I was still embracing the tree when school let out an unknown length of time later. Damia came to me, but I couldn’t understand what she said, until she said, “Are you going to stay like that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” she said. “You promised.” She gripped my shoulders and tried to pull me away from the tree.
I clung to the tree, then remembered: This was Damia, my beloved sister for whom I cared more than anything or anyone else. I didn’t want to hurt or distress her. I let her pull me free.
She turned me around so we faced each other. She stared at me. Her face paled. “Cosima. Who are you now?”
I looked at her, the self I had been until the middle of social studies that afternoon, the person I loved. “I’m your sister,” I said. Your other self.
“You’re not,” she whispered. “Allie said you stood up and turned into smoke during social sci. What was that? That’s not my sister.”
I hugged her, embracing the shape I should be, and thought what that felt like from the inside, and called that reality back. The soft gleam left my skin. I blinked and lost my shadow vision. My ears crinked as they retracted into themselves; my fingers shortened and stubbed; everywhere in my body I felt a thickening, a heaviness. I had not known how dense we were until I had the chance to be otherwise.
I felt tired. All the green and glow the oak tree had given me was gone. “Let’s go home.”
Damia pulled out of my embrace and stared at my face. Her smile was slow in coming.
THAT NIGHT, AFTER the surprise birthday party with cake and five of our friends from school in our living room, after Lars sticking his finger in the frosting on the remaining cake so no one else would want to eat any more of it, after Mom’s and Dad’s hugs and wishes, Damia and I went upstairs to bed.
She slept as soon as the light went out. That didn’t make sense. I wasn’t sleepy at all.
My real mother came then, veiled in darkness, smelling of jasmine and honeysuckle and book dust. She sat on my bed in a welter of skirts. “Did you enjoy your last day here?”
“What do you mean?” The ring tingled and burned on my finger. My ears stretched. Soft gold glowed from my arms as they lay on top of the covers.
“Time to come home with me,” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Now that you know what you can do, how could you possibly want to stay here?”
“Why did you exchange me?”
She smoothed her dry hand over my cropped hair, tweaked the tip of my ear. “Every so often, we need fresh blood.”
That didn’t sound good. “If I go home with you, will the real Cosima come back?”
She stroked my hair and said nothing.
I couldn’t abandon my sister. “I’m staying here.”
“You’ll lose all that makes you special,” she said. “Everything you enjoyed today. I’ll take it with me. I can’t let you do things like that where others can see.”
I closed my eyes and remembered sliding through a wall, seeing people as shadows, knowing I was invisible. The worldsong, shifting and embracing. W
alking into the web of life, learning what sunlight tasted like, and how it felt to be rooted in the eternity of Earth. I swallowed a bitter taste.
She whispered, “At home, you can be your true self all the time. You can fly, and our sky is full of games. You’ll be able to use your powers to your heart’s content—others will teach you how much you can truly do, things you’ve never even imagined were possible. You will make so many friends, my beautiful daughter, and have so many adventures—we have buildings made of glass and magic. Creatures that are only myth here run wild there. The trees in our forests have voices, and the grasses whisper, and the seas speak. The tastes there—berries as big as your hand, with all the sweetness of summer; cakes made from clouds; drinks crafted of nectar before the bees get to it. You will learn things humans never know.”
My heart twisted with longing.
I opened my eyes and stared through the darkness toward my sister. No one else would ever be such a good friend.
“Come on,” said my real mother.
I sighed and gave up the future she offered. “No.”
She plucked the ring from my finger. I felt as though I were going to crash right through my bed, I was so solid.
“You will regret this the rest of your life.” She rose and faded, her scents, her sounds, her presence. All I heard was my sister’s soft sleeping breaths, like a gentle tide brushing across a beach.
I STARED INTO my sister’s eyes the next morning.
“I dreamed—” she said. “Wait. What did you dream?”
“I dreamed I stayed,” I said. I sat up. I felt so heavy and slow, and already tired, though I had just awakened. Was life going to be like this? Had I always had some of my mother’s lightness inside, and now it was gone?
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