She nodded, while I quietly smiled to myself.
“But we’ve got to avoid Amber,” Hailey said. “I can’t believe you came without a costume.”
“She’s in the living room,” I said. “If we go down that hallway on the other side, she won’t see us, and we can pop right out into the courtyard.”
Alek looked over at me, and something like surprise splashed across his face, then retreated. “Oh, hey, Clara,” he said. It was almost like, for a second there, he had actually forgotten that wherever Hailey was, I was always there too. He said to me, “Do you want to c—” and stopped himself. Then he laughed. “You don’t mind?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“After you, then,” he said.
“Actually,” Hailey told him, “it’s easier if you go first to break through the crowd.”
“Oh. Yeah, right.”
We followed Alek through the kitchen and down the hallway, which was crowded at the start but grew empty as we approached the bedrooms. Amber’s room had its door standing open, and I saw some movement inside the room. I jumped in surprise, afraid Amber had somehow gotten past us and over to her room, where she would surely spot us. But it wasn’t her; it was a couple making out, the girl leaning back against the wall while the boy leaned into her. I looked away quickly, wishing I hadn’t seen.
Just past the bedroom, we went through a pair of sliding glass doors into a small courtyard.
We were around the corner from the main backyard. I could hear a few voices over there, and the low throbbing of music from inside. But this little nook was relatively quiet, and empty apart from us. The outdoor lights gave a soft yellow cast to the tiled patio and its table and chairs. The sky was dark except for a sliver of moonlight.
“I just wanted to ask you,” Alek said as he pulled the sliding glass door shut behind him, “if you’ve thought about that summer art program.”
I sensed Hailey’s disappointment in the stillness of her body and the extra half beat she took before answering. Though honestly, I didn’t know what she had expected him to say. Had she thought he was going to open with a declaration of undying love or something? Or had she secretly wanted him to love the Glinda costume, which he had so far failed to acknowledge in any way?
“Oh, yeah, that sounded like it might be kind of interesting,” Hailey said. “I haven’t looked into it or anything.”
This was a total lie. She had already spent hours poring over the school’s website. Not to mention pressuring me into going down for the interview—though we still hadn’t approached our parents about that. With any luck, they would refuse to let us go.
“Well, you know, I’m going down for my interview and portfolio review this week, and the deadline is coming up pretty soon. I was thinking if you want, maybe we could try to coordinate our appointment times. Or even, you know, if it’s not convenient for you to go, I might be able to bring your portfolio for you. I’m not sure if they allow that, but I thought we could maybe ask.”
Hailey’s blond wig was starting to sag slightly to the right. “Um, yeah,” she said, with convincing nonchalance. “I guess I could maybe think about that.”
“It’s no commitment, obviously,” he said. “Well, just the application fee.”
From around the corner came the low hum of guys talking and laughing in the main backyard. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” flowed out of the living room’s stereo system—one of the old standards that had been on Amber’s Halloween mix since her very first Halloween party, back in first grade, when her mom had still been choosing the songs for her. I crossed my arms and looked down, trying to absent myself as much as possible from Hailey and Alek’s conversation.
“What do they want to see?” Hailey asked. “For the portfolio review?”
Alek started telling her the details, which I was pretty sure she already knew.
More voices came from the backyard now, and I recognized at least one of them—Max. He was talking to some other guys. It sounded like Gavin, and maybe Josh.
“I know you’ll get in,” Alek was saying to Hailey. “There’s no way they won’t love your stuff.”
Hailey said, “Well—”
“Wait,” he interrupted. “Don’t say no. I also wanted to show you something I’m working on for it.”
He pulled out his phone and tapped the screen a couple of times. As he did, I could hear Max and the other guys joking around in the backyard, around the corner of the house. A voice that sounded like Josh’s said, “Delicious, juicy watermelons.” This was followed by raucous laughter.
Alek held his phone out to Hailey, showing her something on the screen. I started trying to peer over at it but got distracted as Gavin said, “Seriously, Max, you haven’t hooked up with any girls since you moved here. What’s your story?”
“No story,” he said.
Hailey stared into the screen of Alek’s phone; their heads were bent close together. But then I felt her stiffen, and her head jerked back, away from him.
“Not that I’ve heard about you hooking up with any guys, either,” came another voice from around the corner—Tim?
“I like girls,” Max replied. His voice sounded casual, but loud enough to be perfectly clear above the lightly taunting laughter of the other guys.
“What’s the matter, then? No girls at Bear Pass are hot enough for you?” Josh said.
He made it sound like Max could have his pick of any girl at the school. Which was probably true.
Hailey said something to Alek, but I wasn’t listening, just straining to hear every word of the other conversation.
“I didn’t say that,” Max said, sounding unconcerned.
“All right, then tell us. Who’s hot? If you had to pick.”
There was a brief silence, then more laughter.
Alek said, “Hailey, no, that’s not—”
“Then what the hell?” Hailey said sharply.
And then from around the corner, Gavin said, “I know. I know who Max goes home and dreams about at night.”
Who? I was desperate to hear the answer, and I was also equally desperate not to hear the answer.
“I don’t think you do,” Max said. His voice was still calm, but maybe too calm. Or too controlled. The words were enunciated with great precision.
“So you admit it!” said Josh. “You do have dreams at night.”
“I nnever ssaid I wasn’t human.” He didn’t quite stutter on this, but some of the consonants were just a little drawn out.
Alek said something to Hailey, his voice quiet but urgent. I felt Hailey’s resistance, but I didn’t want to know anything about it. I could only think, Shut up! Shut up and let me listen!
“It’s not that hard to figure out,” said Gavin. “I know exactly who strips down every night in Max’s dirty mind.”
There were a few loud whoops. Hailey and Alek both turned their heads in the direction of the noise, as if by instinct. They were both quiet now.
Against my will I pictured Lindsey in her cheerleading uniform, performing a striptease in front of Max. I supposed all those guys were picturing the exact same thing, with the only difference being that they were presumably a lot happier about the image than I was.
Then Gavin said, “Problem is, one girl at a time isn’t enough for this guy. He’s planning to double down, this one is. And I do mean double, and I do mean down. A sweet little blonde and a pink-haired vixen, all rolled into one sick package.”
And everything grew quiet. Not just in the backyard. But in the courtyard, too. The only sound was Rihanna’s voice floating out faintly from the living room stereo. I’m friends with the monster that’s under my bed.
Hailey and Alek were still looking toward those voices, listening. It seemed to me that none of us were breathing.
And then Max said, without a trace of laughter in his voice, “Dude, you are disgusting.”
“Hey, I’m not into judging,” Gavin said. “Whatever you’re into. Dudes, trannies,
Siamese twins. It’s all good.”
I could feel Alek looking at me. And I could feel Hailey looking at Alek. I pulled my arms tight around myself and tried not to look anywhere at all. I had never wanted so badly not to exist.
Max’s voice was firm and perfectly controlled. “I am not a pervert.”
Pervert?
I could feel every inch of my own skin. And most of all, that ridge near the bottom of my lower back where I came together with Hailey. The ridge that made me not just one of the girls in the senior class, to be evaluated as hot or not, leered at or asked out or sneeringly dismissed, but something else entirely.
Pervert.
“Come on,” Josh said, laughing. “Who wouldn’t go for an automatic three-way with identical twins?”
And Gavin: “Talk about two for the price of one. You know, there are four watermelons, but I heard that between the two of them, they’ve only got one—”
There was a brief scuffling noise, followed by a screeching sound that might have been metal scraping against concrete.
Then something heavy and solid slammed against the side of the house.
The next voice I heard was definitely Max, but a version of Max that I had never remotely encountered before.
“Dude,” he said—not shouting, but absolutely clear above the music, and without a trace of a stutter—“if you ever. Say that perverted crap. Again. I will smash your face. Against this wall. I will break your arms. You will never. Play basketball. Again.”
18
Hailey
We all stood there, not looking at one another—me, Clara, Alek. My mind raced every which way, like a tweaking jackrabbit:
• They were just a bunch of Decepticons. Their puny thoughts were insignificant to me.
• Or, they were right about everything; they were just speaking truths I didn’t want to hear.
• Just a week ago, at Max’s house, these assholes had pretended to be all friendly and relaxed, and I’d thought that maybe they weren’t so bad.
• I’d been an idiot.
• They were giving voice to Alek’s secret thoughts.
• But was Alek Max in that scenario, determined not to be a pervert? Or was he Gavin? Two for the price of one.
• Max was the biggest jerk of all.
• Clara liked him, and she couldn’t turn that off in a flash. She couldn’t choose to not care.
• Neither could I.
Alek was standing there, hearing it. What was he thinking?
I should say something to Clara.
Alek should say something to both of us.
What was he thinking?
What was he thinking?
Then Amber appeared out of nowhere, gaping at us. Had she heard everything too? Would she be the one to start saying stuff to make us feel better? She would say all the wrong things. I would have to slap her. I would have to scratch her, and then Clara would have to pull her hair. It would turn into a giant catfight.
I giggled. It came out in a kind of gasp, and I realized that I hadn’t been breathing. Maybe I was getting giggly from the oxygen deprivation.
Everyone stared at me.
I shut up.
Amber turned to Alek. “Sorry,” she said, “but that’s not a costume. You’re outta here.”
“Oh yeah, sorry about that,” he said. “I didn’t have time to find one.”
“No excuses,” she said. “You’ve gotta go.”
He frowned. “You’re not serious.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Um, Alek,” I said, “Amber doesn’t know the meaning of not being serious.”
“That’s right,” Amber agreed, oblivious to the insult, “and if you don’t get out of here, I’m going to sic the dogs on you.”
We all looked around. Amber didn’t have any dogs.
“Okay,” he said, holding up his hands, “I’m gone.”
He slipped away.
We stood there. I was still reeling, punch-drunk. I didn’t have a grip on the situation. But there was one thing I knew for sure.
“Actually,” I said, “we have to go too. Clara has a headache.”
Behind me I could feel Clara trembling, her breath coming out in short, shallow bursts.
“We told Juanita and Bridget we’d see them here,” I told Amber. “Will you tell them we had to go?”
“Of course. But can I do anything for you?”
I shook my head. “Is there a quick way out of here, without going through the house or the main yard, so we can just get out front and call our dad?”
She frowned at me for a moment, but then nodded. “Sure. Let me show you where the gate is.”
19
Clara
I have no idea what it feels like to be alone, but the middle of the night is when I can come closest to imagining it. Sure, I can feel Hailey’s back pressed against mine, I can hear her breathing, and I’m conscious that I don’t have the freedom to get up and move around. But at least I can’t feel her mind humming along beside mine. My mind, for once, is on its own.
And what do I do with that mental freedom? Mostly I use it to wallow in old topics that Hailey got tired of talking about years ago. I think, for example, about the Hilton twins, and why they weren’t allowed to get married.
Violet and Daisy Hilton were pygopagus twins, which means they were conjoined back-to-back, like me and Hailey. When we were little, Mom sometimes told us stories about the Hilton twins’ talent and charm, but she left a lot out, which we learned only when we got hold of a full book-length biography in middle school. Hailey and I passed it back and forth until we were both finished reading, but I was the only one who read it multiple times.
Born almost a hundred years before us, Violet and Daisy were abandoned by their unwed mother, who saw them as monsters, her punishment from God. Then they got adopted and turned into a traveling vaudeville show, without being given any choice about it. My ultimate nightmare—dancing onstage for the freak-ogling crowds, night after night.
What gets me about these twins is that Violet actually found someone who wanted to marry her, and she wanted to marry him, too, but the authorities wouldn’t give them a marriage license. Violet Hilton and Maurice Lambert went all around the country trying to get that license, and of course Daisy was always along for the ride, which was why again and again they were turned away. Everyone with power said that a conjoined twin getting married was immoral and indecent. Because, of course, whatever went on between Violet and Maurice, Daisy was always going to be right there with them.
Violet and Maurice finally gave up, but not without getting a lot of press coverage, and Maurice Lambert was soon known throughout the land as a pathetic freak—a man with a conjoined-twin fetish.
All of this happened a long time ago. In many ways the world is completely different now. And in many other ways, it isn’t.
Sure, there might be another Maurice Lambert out there somewhere right now. A guy who would want a girl with another girl attached to her back. But what kind of guy would he be? What would need to be wrong with him, to want a thing like that?
If a guy ever did like me—or Hailey—would he have to be, by definition, a pervert?
These are the kinds of questions that I try to answer in the middle of the night, while Hailey slumbers peacefully beside me.
Some nights are longer than others.
• • •
In the shower that morning I scrubbed myself raw. I wanted to remove every last atom of that green witch makeup. If I took off a few layers of skin in the process, fine. I only wished I could scrub my ears so hard that I could erase everything I’d heard in the last twenty-four hours.
When I looked down at my arms, my hands, my belly, I thought, Disgusting.
It was true. I was disgusting. A mutant. Had I really forgotten that? Had I imagined, in some fleeting moment, that there was anyone in the world who wouldn’t be horrified at the thought of touching me?
I knew I wasn’t s
upposed to absorb Max’s words like this. My mom had explained it a thousand times. The way we view ourselves has to come from the inside, not from the reflection that we see in other people’s eyes.
But sometimes it seems to me that reflections are all we have. Without them, we could never see ourselves at all.
We took turns getting dressed. Hailey wore black pants with a snug, low-cut, velvet maroon top—it clashed with her pink hair, which I would have told her if she’d asked—and I wore jeans with a lavender button-down shirt. She wore a necklace of rough, chunky metal beads on a leather string, and I wore a dainty leaf-shaped pendant.
Sometimes I don’t mind the way Hailey dresses, because it sets her apart from me and allows me to have my separate self by default, without having to do anything but stay bland. But on this particular morning, her top and her necklace made me angry. Her tight shirt, with that expanse of creamy white flesh above it—she had succeeded in scrubbing off all the glitter—made me feel exposed. Her necklace appeared to be made out of rusty old gears or bits of things picked up in shop class, and it looked like at any moment it might tear at her skin and make her bleed.
“Why do you have to wear that thing?” I demanded as I waited for her to apply her makeup. “It’s going to give us tetanus.”
It was the first time I’d spoken all morning. Hailey jumped, and her lip liner went skidding across her cheek. “What thing?” She rubbed at the lip liner with the back of her hand.
“You know. That ugly necklace. Where did that even come from?”
She looked down at it. “I ordered it online, remember? You saw me open the package on Friday.”
“Well, it’s ugly.”
She raised her eyebrows, stared at me in the mirror, then shrugged. “Yours is pretty.”
She finished with her makeup, and we turned so I could get a good look at myself in the bathroom mirror. Despite all my scrubbing, I saw now that there was still a streak of green running along my hairline on the right side.
Gemini Page 12
