by Mia Miller
Inside your eyes I see the rest of my days
And I hope you’ll accept me for who I am.
I fall in love with you again and again,
And until my very last breath, you will be my forever.
Which prompts the questions
Are you mine already?
Have I conquered you?
Are you mine already?
Have I conquered you?
At first sight, I have known you are special.
You have the eyes I want to be lost in
And the heart I don’t want to ever share.
In you, I found a home I want to live in
Since we, met I’ve been living in a dream world
Which I don’t want to ever wake up from
Inside your eyes, I see the rest of my days
And I hope you’ll accept me for who I am.
I fall in love with you again and again
And until my very last breath, you will be my forever.
Calling me cute sounds nice
Calling me hot sounds kind
But calling me yours for life
Is all I want, please be mine.
His voice fell like a feather against my skin. I listened to his words, eating them up, fascinated and moved by the intensity of feelings Oscar conveyed to me with his song. The room burst into applause at the end, so I guessed I wasn’t the only one the song had made an impression on, though I doubted they felt even a fraction of what was bubbling inside me. All the mixed signals I thought I was seeing in Oscar were just vibes I got from his jitters, for sure.
Leigh, who was watching my reaction, reached over and touched my hand over the table.
Happy for you, she mouthed. In a heartbeat, she got up. “Can you join me in the bathroom?” she asked, and I threw Kayla a questioning look.
She raised her shoulders and flicked an unsure glance to Leigh. I had the feeling there wasn’t much love lost between those two.
Once we were in the bathroom, instead of going into a stall, Leigh placed her hand on my shoulder and looked at me in the mirror with a weird light in her eyes.
“That was so nice of him to sing that to you, right?”
Nice didn’t cover the depth of feelings I had felt Oscar trying to convey to me, but I had zero interest in talking to Leigh about it.
“Right,” I said, looking toward a stall door. If she wasn’t going to go in, I was.
I turned to her and smiled, but my smile died on my lips at the serious look she threw at me.
“I’m only doing this because we are friends. We are friends, right Cordelia?” she asked me and I involuntarily scrunched up my nose.
“I guess,” I agreed
“This morning, I was in Greenwich Village . . .”
I raised a brow at her, losing my patience.
“Well, I saw Oscar there,” she said hurriedly before adding, “with a woman.”
What the hell?
I kept my smile.
She fidgeted with her phone, not really looking at it, yet, moving her fingers feverishly over the screen. It didn’t look at all like she wanted to say anymore, but I waited, expecting her to tell me it was some sick joke and she was kidding. “They were definitely not just friends,” Leigh said, and I felt like a small, cold hand gripped at my insides and pulled at them with the clear intention of ripping them apart.
“I’m only telling you because we’re friends, I mean, I did good telling you, right?” Leigh insisted.
“Yeah, um, yeah . . .” I had already started to walk out of the bathroom, but when I reached the door I stopped and turned.
“I mean . . . are you sure?” It was almost incompressible for Oscar to be with another woman when he told me he had been at his dorm all morning.
“Yeah, honey.” She looked almost concerned, which was too much too soon, and I looked away.
“You know, you are the weirdest mixture of good and evil,” I told her. “I can’t figure you out.”
“People are not black and white.”
No. I guess they weren’t.
“Thanks, Leigh,” I said and burst out of the restroom, unseeing.
My first instinct was to run away. It lasted for about a nanosecond.
Oscar was walking down the hallway toward me with the widest of smiles on his perfect, kissable lips. Ugh.
“Did you like the surprise?” he asked, placing a small kiss on my nose, and I felt the pain subside. I could do this.
All I had to do was ask him, and then he would tell me it wasn’t him and he had no idea what Leigh was talking about.
“I loved it. I really did, thank you.” It was the truth. “Can I talk to you privately for a second?”
I was already pulling him toward Micky’s office. Luckily, Micky was not in there so we were soon entombed in silence when we shut the door behind us.
“What’s up, Dellie?”
“I . . . okay, Leigh told me something confusing, and I will burn in the tenth circle of hell if I just get upset with you over a misunderstanding, so . . . here goes nothing. Were you in Greenwich Village this morning?”
His face went white, and his mouth straightened into a line.
“Yes,” was the only thing that came out of his mouth.
“Surely, if Leigh saw you, you know where I am going with this?”
He only nodded.
“So it’s true?” I shrieked.
“Dellie, I need to explain something to you,” he whispered.
“I don’t—”
“Please,” he said, more urgency in his tone than I’d ever heard. “Hear me out, I swear, there is nothing romantic about it.”
“Well? Were you with a woman? Is it as bad as Leigh suggested?” I pressed.
“It is and it isn’t.”
I shook my head.
“I need head space. I need to be alone. Whatever it is, explain it tomorrow,” I told him.
“Please, let me explain!” he begged and I spun on him.
“Explain? I didn’t think there would be much to explain about you being out with another girl and then lying to me about it!” I glared at him as I grabbed the doorknob. “You did it to yourself.”
I left, despite all the beats of my heart calling me back to him like a beacon of light.
I sat on my bed in my dorm room, tears streaming down my face. I was reading the letters I had sporadically received throughout high school. There was something going on with Oscar, and I was intent on moving past the pain and understanding what was behind that veil. But how? I reread all of the letters, trying to remember what kind of questions and stories from my side they were responding to, and what kind of questions I had asked and had been left unanswered.
I tried to remember and went back to that morning at camp.
The counselor with the high-pitched voice had screeched his last name, and I had seen the top of his russet hair moving through the waves of kids. I had run, my measly piece of paper in my extended arm. He had been just one breath away. “Oscar!” I’d said, and he’d turned. His eyes had looked different, shadowed by a hint of green. His hair had looked spikier than it should have. He had turned and stared. His smile. His smile was wrong . . .
Chapter Twelve
Delia
Now
Something was wrong, and I was so afraid to find out what it was, I felt out of breath. I needed to be out of that stuffy dorm room.
I didn’t really know where else to go, so I called a cab service and went to Anton’s studio to work. Since he’d given us full access to the space while we worked on the project, I didn’t feel at all bad about crashing the studio in the middle of the night.
Unlocking the heavy wooden door, I pushed it open and looked into the dark depths of the place. I dreaded someone would be there. Conversation was the last thing on my mind.
It was late enough that the space was silent, so I got to work setting up a station. The only problem was that I had no idea what I wanted to create. I stood in front of a
white canvas placed on a high easel and wondered what colors I could mix. I stood for what felt like ages and nothing came to me. I squeezed a bit of yellow color from a tube and threw it in an undetermined pattern onto the white surface.
Nothing.
I grabbed the yellow paint can and splashed it on half the canvas.
I didn’t remember falling asleep, but I had. The mark of yellow paint had stretched and dried across the page into a perfectly zigzagged shape. I checked myself quickly into a mirror and got out from there.
I didn’t remember taking the particular turn that I did. I was halfway down the block before I stopped abruptly at seeing Oscar being shoved against a wall by a guy while another large man watched with a bored look on his face. Athletic or not, Oscar was half the guy’s size, and he was going to take a beating if he didn’t stop whatever it was he was trying to do. My lips parted, and my breath hitched as I started feeling my bag for my phone. When I looked up, Thug-Like Guy was tapping Goon-Guy on the shoulder, getting his attention before nodding in my direction.
Oscar’s face turned to me for a glimpse and then he did a double take as if he didn’t believe I was standing there. He exchanged what sounded like hushed threats with Goon-guy, and they parted with one final push-shove. I stood there, waiting for an explanation, and Oscar approached me, saying, “What do we have here?”
What the hell?
If I hadn’t been looking right at him and known it was Oscar then I wouldn’t have recognized his voice. He scratched his throat as he came to a stop in front of me. I looked down trying to decide whether to flee or stay. I snorted, seeing that in my frustration from the night before, I hadn’t realized I’d splattered some yellow paint onto my sneakers. I moved from the splash of color to his boots.
Wait, his boots? I lifted my eyes slowly, perusing his long legs, his narrow hips, his hands clasped on them in a questioning stance, his leather jacket. His leather jacket? I didn’t remember ever seeing him in something other than T-shirts and hoodies. But then again, how long had I really known him? My eyes reached his, and they looked weird too. The liquid gold was there, but there were also flecks of green. They were narrowed as he scowled at me as if I were the one who’d wronged him and not the other way around.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, and again it was as if he was in disbelief he was actually seeing me. His hand rose, barely touching one of my curls, and then dropped back to his side. He bent his face toward mine, and I was sure there was one trajectory alone his lips could be after. I shifted out of his reach and glared.
Did his hair topple over his forehead quite like that yesterday?
Either I was going crazy or his hair was a tad longer.
“I worked here on something last night.”
“You sound upset.”
“Bet your ass I’m upset,” I whispered, his tone was gutting me.
His forehead leaned into mine. “You don’t deserve this.”
“Deserve what? Your mood swings? You’re right, I don’t.”
He sneered at me, at my hesitance, at my silence.
That smile . . .
It was all wrong.
My hands went to my chest, checking for a heartbeat. I was pretty sure you remained out of heartbeats when blood froze in your veins, right?
When I was younger, my dad had taught Corbin and I card tricks. He had a lot of them up his sleeve, a favorite past time on his long tours, and we’d soon mastered them. Then he taught us how to play poker, much to our mom’s dismay. Corbin had given up not long after, Dad always jesting about his heart on his sleeve. Me? Not so much. My dad said I had a poker face I could win gold with. I just thought he said it out of love.
Turned out, my poker face worked that day too. I fought the heavy feeling in my stomach and the sudden coldness that dribbled down my spine like a skeletal finger counting my vertebrae one by one.
I swallowed and just raised my eyebrows at the man standing in front of me.
“You know what else I deserve? I deserve an explanation as to why you’re pretending to be Oscar.”
His head fell, his grimace the very face of sadness.
“Go home, Delia. Go home and talk to him, and then after you hear what he has to say, come see me.”
“Well, how do I find you?”
“He knows.”
***
It was dark inside Oscar’s dorm room when he opened the door, and he blinked at me like he hadn’t seen light in eons. I stepped inside the room, noted that Scott wasn’t there, and opened the curtains.
“Dellie, how are you?” He sounded like he hadn’t talked in eons either.
I stood in the middle of the room, hoping to convey my fury without speaking, because I didn’t know what kind of words would come out of my mouth given the circumstances. I just shook my head and stalked to the closet. The door banged against the wall from the force I pulled it open with, and I rummaged through the coats on hangers feverishly. Hoodies. Blazers. An overcoat. No leather.
“Can I at least know what you’re looking for?” he asked my back.
“Do you own a leather jacket?” I asked the closet.
“Fuck.”
That was it. That was all he said . . . all he gave me. Not an explanation, not a touch on my shoulder saying we were okay, we would be okay, we would be back to normal. I turned slowly, shuffling toward the door, trying my hardest to blink back the tears that were burning my eyes.
“Look at me,” he said in a barely there voice.
I did, and I saw him through a blur.
“So, Oscar, did you have a good time this morning with me? Was it as good for you as it was for me?” I pushed it, as I’d later find out, too far.
“What the hell are you talking about? No, please. Don’t say that. Not again!”
“Not again, what, Oscar?”
“You know!’
“What do I know, Oscar?” I matched his scream, closing my stinging eyes, feeling two large blobs fall on my cheeks.
“You know . . .” His voice trailed off, and he looked to the ceiling as if begging the skies for mercy. After a moment, he heaved out a deep breath and squeezed his eyes shut. “Come on, Dellie, let’s talk,” he said, touching my hand and urging me toward the window seat. I squeezed his hand, feeling a jolt that tightened my chest. How many years had I craved for the touch of a liar?
When we sat, he chose to sit opposite to me. Our knees were touching, and his eyes wandered down to the street. I let my head rest on the wall as he settled his forehead against the windowpane—his reflection the perfect mirror of his face and a reminder of his lie.
“I have an identical twin.”
I waited with bated breath the rest of his explanation. After a few beats, I mock-gasped.
“No, really?” I sounded more sarcastic than I intended to, but I didn’t care.
“I’m sorry you had to find out on your own, rather than me telling it to you straight. What happened?”
“Shouldn’t I be asking the questions?” I shot back.
He shrugged and sighed, fogging up his reflection and making it disappear for a few moments.
“I . . . I don’t understand why you lied to me,” I said, wanting to go on but stopping when his eyes confronted mine.
They were swimming with desperation.
“I didn’t.”
“Omission of truth is still a lie in my book.”
“How?” He was stock-still.
“What?”
“How did you know it wasn’t me this morning?” he asked, and I noticed he was holding his breath.
“I didn’t at first. But then it was the little things like his hair is the same but different, his eyes are the same but different, and his touch is the same but different.” His eyes snapped to mine and I was quick to clarify. “Nothing happened. I mean, I don’t think anything happened. I think the only time he kissed me was yesterday?” I hated that I didn’t actually know.
He nodded.
“No
one, and I mean no one except our parents could tell us apart. Ever,” he said.
“That would make for some weird happenings,” I mused, and he scoffed. -
“Yeah.”
He resumed his looking at the street, telling his story to the reflection.
“I was born first, and my mother and father were surprised by Oswald. At the time, my dad was stationed in Haiti, and he somehow managed to get mother to live there. Their medical facility was not equipped with ultrasounds, so even though she was big early on, they didn’t assume anything. I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but I started to resent him. He was always clinging to me on the playground, at home, when we went shopping,” Oscar said.
I touched the tips of my toes to his, nudging him. He returned the touch in an almost shy manner that made me smile.
“Imagine what it’s like to always see another one of you everywhere you go. In school, in your bedroom, in every single place you go, and have that multiplied with every one saying they can’t tell the two of you apart.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “It was like I didn’t exist by myself. I couldn’t stand that!”
He was silent for a beat, but I said nothing back. My silence spurred him on. “Granted, our personalities have never been alike. I liked singing early on, and he was more into sports. I wanted to stay in my corner and sing, he wanted to exhibit us to the whole world. We were two ginger clones, can you imagine all the things kids said to our faces and behind our backs?” he asked me, and I cringed, remembering the first day I’d met him. “Oswald thought we were stronger together, I thought we were weaker. He pulled, and I pushed. We’re still doing that.”
I let my eyes linger on his strained figure, memorizing it.
“Don’t you love him?”
“It’s complicated.” His answer came immediately. “I love him, and I resent him. I don’t get him, yet, I can always tell what he’s thinking. Or at least, I thought I could. I just don’t know anymore.”
“Why not? He’s your brother, that should be the only reason you need to love him.”
“You don’t understand. When we were younger, he thought it was funny how no one could tell us apart. There was this one time when he told my piano teacher I was going to stop lessons with her because she had bad breath. He messed with the wrong boys on the playground and told them he was me. He broke a window and told them my name instead of his. Stuff like that.”
