Gemini

by Sonya Mukherjee

  About half of them were wearing thick black eye makeup, just like mine. It really bugged me. I felt like they’d all stolen something from me. Like they’d ripped off a layer of my clothing and left me awkwardly exposed.

  As we followed the admissions lady, we passed by an elevator. I was hoping we might get on it, because I’d never been on one before, or at least not that I could ever remember. A young guy in jeans and a T-shirt punched the button to go up, and there was a little dinging noise, just like I’d heard on TV. But we walked right by. I stared back wistfully for a minute, wanting to know what it would feel like to ride up into the air. But then the admissions lady—Judith was her name—asked me some question, and I had to turn away.

  I didn’t even have much time to soak up all the art that filled the hallway. The walls were covered with paintings, drawings, photographs, and mixed-media collages; in the center of the walkway was a series of sculptures, some semi-realistic and some abstract, inside Plexiglas boxes. Student artwork, I supposed. Still, it was the closest thing to professional art I’d experienced in real life. Most of what I knew about the current art world came from following artists, students, and galleries online.

  In the interview room Judith had us sit on a little sofa. There was an easel on one side of the room, and she set my portfolio next to it, then took out one of my paintings and set it on the easel. She was wearing a snug, retro-fifties-style dress and bright-red high-heeled pumps, and this getup seemed to make her movements a little awkward—the bending down, the stepping backward to have a better look. It was hard to tell with all her makeup, but I guessed that she was only a few years older than us, so maybe she was new to the job.

  The way we were angled on the sofa, I couldn’t really see what she had put up on the easel; only Clara could. So, without discussing it, Clara and I stood up and turned so that I could see.

  Judith turned to us with a look of alarm. “Oh, please! You can sit.”

  I hesitated for just a second before explaining, “Um, I can’t really see if we sit.”

  “Oh.” She looked flustered. “Um, wait. I can move the easel.” She picked it up and shuffled over awkwardly, struggling to stuff the easel into the tight space between her desk and the sofa.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll just stand.”

  So we stood there while she went through the paintings and talked about why she loved them. She would look each one over for half a minute and then start burbling away. As she worked her way through, her praise kept getting more and more effusive, even though I had put all my favorite pieces near the front. By the time she got to the pencil sketches at the back, she was practically calling me the greatest living artist in the world.

  I enjoy praise as much as the next person. But this was so hollow that instead of making my pride bubble up, it just sank it like a stone in my gut.

  “But do you have any suggestions for me?” I asked. “Any ideas for making my work stronger?”

  “I’ll leave that to your professors when you get here,” she said. “And now please, if you’d like to sit, we can talk about you and your plans.”

  She proceeded to babble away about why Golden Gate Arts was the earth’s greatest resource for burgeoning artists such as ourselves. (She seemed to think that Clara and I were an artist team.) Listening to her, I had the feeling you get with infomercials, where part of you is deliriously excited to try this amazing, life-changing new product, but another part is pretty sure you’re being had.

  After a while she did ask some questions about life in Bear Pass, but every time I tried to steer the conversation toward my art, she would swerve off in another direction, talking about what an asset I—we?—would be to the Golden Gate Arts community. How challenging and invigorating we would be.

  Struggling against that heavy stone in my gut, I tried asking, “Do you want to know about my influences?”

  After some vague response Judith started praising me and Clara for our courage and leadership, two traits that she had apparently invented for us out of thin air.

  “Do you want to know about my goals?” I tried, and then she went off about how everyone could learn so much from those who had lived through uncommon struggles.

  “Yes,” I said, exasperated, “I suppose I would be interested in meeting someone like that.”

  Judith cocked her head to one side and narrowed her eyes at me.

  “Of course,” I added, “I probably wouldn’t even ask them about their uncommon struggles, unless they were the ones to bring it up, because they would probably be so sick of talking about it, they would be like, ‘Oh please, can we just talk about anything else? I would rather talk about the molecular structure of table salt than talk any more about my uncommon struggles.’”

  Judith’s mouth was open now. And not just a little bit.

  Clara held her face in her hands.

  “I mean,” I clarified—briefly deluding myself that this was a gesture toward politeness—“that’s how I imagine that person would feel. I have no way of actually knowing.”

  I could see what I was doing, how I was trashing this interview, throwing it away and stomping all over it, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. I’d had so little hope of really coming for the summer anyway. And now I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. If they wanted me this badly, and if the reason they wanted me was not so they could teach me about art but so I could teach others about courage and leadership, then what was the point?

  I watched as Judith struggled to form her mouth into a smile. “That is so interesting,” she said, her voice both bright and cold. “I think you will find that Golden Gate will provide just the nourishment you need for those fascinating ideas of yours to flourish.”

  25

  Clara

  When we stepped out into the building lobby after the interview, I was surprised to see that Mom wasn’t waiting on the bench where we’d left her. It was a relief to have an extra moment to ourselves, without her watchful eye or her worried questions.

  “Can we go outside?” Hailey asked me. “I need some fresh air.”

  “Mom’s going to freak if she can’t find us. She’s probably just in the bathroom.”

  “Just for a minute,” Hailey said. “We’ll be back before she is.”

  We started down the hallway. I drew in a breath and forced myself to say out loud the sentence that had been repeating itself in my mind all morning, like one of those terrible pop songs that you can’t get out of your head, no matter how much you dislike it. “If you want to come this summer, we can.”

  My voice came out squeaky, but audible.

  Hailey stopped abruptly, causing us to lurch awkwardly. “You’re serious?”

  I nodded. “And if you want to come back next fall . . .” I sucked in my breath. “I’d be willing to think about it.”

  Hailey twisted her body and her head, trying with all her might to look at me. “You’d think about coming to art school? What the hell are you talking about? You hate art!”

  “Yeah. I don’t know.” We started walking again; we turned a corner and started toward the building’s outer doors.

  My own dreams were all impossible fantasies. So if Hailey had a chance at the things she wanted, no matter how little appeal those things held for me, how could I stop her from trying?

  “I’ve just been thinking,” I said, “if it’s something you really want, then at least I—”

  I stopped abruptly, because there, right near the big pair of heavy glass doors, was Alek.

  He stood a few yards away, with his back to us, and he didn’t see us. He had a bunch of paintings lined up along the backs of some chairs, which in turn were lined up along one of the lobby’s long gray walls. He switched the order of a couple, looked at them for a minute, and then started putting them into his portfolio, one by one.

  There was a half-burned cottage, familiar from art class at school.

  A shadowy charcoal drawing that I thought might be a self-portrait, the head bowed l
ow, the dark smudges around it looking vaguely like wisps of smoke.

  And then something else that I had never seen before.

  “Come on!” Hailey whispered fiercely to me. “Let’s go!” She tugged on me, trying to pull me around and away from Alek.

  “Wait!”

  I resisted her, turning back to look at Alek’s painting. He had picked it up and was getting ready to put it into his portfolio. It was partially obscured by his arms and hands, but still, I could see plenty.

  It was a painting of Hailey, but her hair was such a pale pink, and so wispy and loose around her face, it almost could have been me. Her face was pale too, as if all the color had been drained from it, and she was staring straight ahead, wide-eyed, her mouth slack. She wore light gray pants and a cream-colored boatneck top, which was more like something I would wear in real life, not her. Everything about her in the painting was pale and washed out, except for one thing.

  She was alone—entirely alone. And where I should have been, there was nothing but blood. Streaming bright red from her back, and pooling behind her in a mass of darkening, deepening shades of red, it was everywhere, a massive amount of blood, more than she could afford to lose.

  His back to us, Alek shoved the painting into his portfolio, clasped the case shut, and swung it over his shoulder as he turned around.

  “Oh!” He jumped with surprise when he saw us there.

  And that was when I started screaming.

  26

  Hailey

  While Clara shrieked like a crazy person, I stormed toward Alek, shouting as Clara stumbled along behind me.

  “I told you I never wanted to see that painting again! I told you to destroy it!”

  “All right, all right, I put it away! See, look, it’s gone!” He gestured at his portfolio, where he had tucked the painting away.

  At the other end of the lobby, three or four people stood still, staring at us openly. Most of the other people we’d seen had been much more furtive, but I guess shrieking tends to get a whole different level of attention than just Walking While Conjoined. Good to know. A woman in a pencil skirt and silk blouse rushed past them, coming in our direction.

  “I didn’t know you were going to walk up behind me like that,” Alek said. “I was getting it ready for my portfolio review. And I’m sorry, but it’s one of my best pieces.”

  Oh, how I itched to slap him.

  “What do you mean, you told him to destroy it?” Clara demanded. “I’ve never seen this painting before. When did you see it?”

  “That’s what he was showing me on his phone on Saturday night, at the Halloween party. I didn’t want you to know about it.”

  It was my fault. If I hadn’t wanted to go outside, we never would have walked into that lobby. I wished I could rewind that part. Or go back further and make sure that Alek really did destroy the painting, and the photographs of it too. Clara would never be able to unsee that image now, any more than I would.

  The woman in the pencil skirt had reached us. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is someone hurt?” She didn’t seem surprised by the sight of conjoined twins, or maybe her surprise at that was just subsumed by the alarm about our yelling and screaming.

  “We’re fine,” I lied.

  A couple more people had come into the building, and they joined the ones who were already there, all staring our way.

  “Are you sure?” the pencil skirt woman asked.

  “We’re fine,” I repeated. “No one’s hurt.”

  After one more drawn-out searching look at each of us, the woman nodded and walked away. She stopped near the small crowd that had gathered at the other end of the lobby, and it looked like she said something to them. They all looked at us, and then they quietly dispersed.

  Was that how it would be if we came here for the summer? Would people periodically gather to stare at us, then get broken up and sent away by some staffer?

  Before my imagination could start spinning out of control, I pushed the whole thought away. Of course we weren’t coming for the summer anyway. I didn’t even have to consider whether I could handle it, or how it would feel for me. Those things didn’t matter, because it was Clara who couldn’t deal. It was her fear that we wouldn’t be able to push through. It would be cruel to even try. That was it, I told myself; I was just looking out for her. That was all I needed to know.

  “I need to sit down,” Clara said. “I need some fresh air. I need something to eat. I need to go home,” she babbled, her face turning paler by the second. “I need to get out of here. I need privacy. I need to be outside.”

  Alek grabbed her arm, then looped it around his own shoulder. “Let’s just get her over to these chairs,” he said.

  “No,” I told him, “we need to get outside.”

  Alek glanced at his portfolio, sitting there on the empty chairs. I had dropped mine at the other side of the room. We left them both where they were; Alek opened one of the big glass doors and led us, in a sideways shuffle, out the doorway to a concrete patio surrounded by grass.

  “The grass,” I said, and we went there and sat down.

  Clara leaned forward into her knees, holding her head in her hands.

  “Lean against me if you want,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  “Why are you so calm?” she demanded, as if I’d done something wrong.

  “Oh, Clara . . .”

  Alek hovered over us. “Can I get you something? Do you need something to drink? Food?”

  “We’re fine,” I said. “I think you’ve done quite enough.”

  “This doesn’t normally happen,” Clara said. “Hailey, don’t make it sound like this happens all the time. How do you know we’re going to be fine?”

  Alek said, “Look, I told you, I’m really sorry about—”

  “You’re not sorry,” I said, cutting him off. “If you were sorry, you would have destroyed that painting like I told you.”

  “But it’s so sad!” he protested. “You see that, right?”

  “All I see,” I said, “is that you used a repulsive image of me to try to promote yourself in your application, even after I told you not to.”

  But the truth was, I saw other things too. I saw that Alek, the one guy who I’d ever thought might like me, didn’t like the real me at all. He liked a different me—a grotesque fantasy version. A me without Clara. But there was no such thing. I didn’t know who that person would be—the person I would have become if I hadn’t been attached to her, if we hadn’t been part of each other—but I knew it wasn’t me at all.

  “Wait. Hold on.” He sat down in the grass, in a spot where he could face both of us. Behind him a concrete walkway cut back through the grass until it met a small concrete-covered square, where a group of students walked by, two girls laughing at something that one of the boys said. None of them even glanced in our direction. Farther back more walkways led to a series of other buildings, which were maybe three or four stories tall. This place was bigger than I had imagined it. Also uglier.

  Alek said, “I understand what you’re saying, but I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of my best work. It’s the saddest thing I ever made, and probably the scariest.”

  I closed my eyes. Did he really think that was the point? His pride in his artistry was the most important thing?

  “You’re an artist, Hailey,” he said. “You know how it is when you make something and it’s like a piece of you, a better piece than you even knew you had.”

  “I’m an artist,” I agreed, “but I’m a person first. And if that’s a better piece of you, well, I don’t even know what to say.”

  “This is coming out all wrong,” he said. “I’m obviously not saying it’s a good thing. It’s what I was trying to tell you before. The things I paint are like, I don’t know, maybe my nightmares or something.”

  I opened my eyes and assessed him coldly. “Seriously? That’s supposed to make us feel better?”

  But maybe it did make me feel better. Maybe it coul
d. Depending on what the hell he thought he meant by it.

  On the walkway behind him a couple more students walked by. None of them looked our way.

  I went on. “So you’re telling me that when you go to sleep at night, you have scary nightmares about English cottages burning down. You’re telling me that’s what wakes you up in a cold sweat. That, plus me all covered in—” I stopped, choking on my own words.

  Clara finished my sentence. “Blood.”

  She was still shaky; I could feel it. God, how I had wanted her never to see that painting. That fantasy of her gone, turned to nothing but a pool of blood. And me, what—free?

  Asking me to be free of Clara was like asking me to be free of being a girl. If he didn’t like me as I was, then he didn’t like me, period.

  Alek gave a sad imitation of a smile, his eyes downcast. “I don’t mean it quite that literally.”

  But he was saying that it wasn’t a fantasy. It was a nightmare. But why was he having nightmares about me at all? And why this nightmare?

  He looked at me searchingly. “Hailey. Can I tell you something? Please?”

  I let out a loud, hard sigh. “I think it would be better if you didn’t.”

  Clara shook her head. “Actually, I want to hear what he has to say.”

  Alek cleared his throat, looking back and forth between us.

  I gave him a curt nod. “Fine. Go ahead.”

  He rested his elbows on his cross-legged knees, and his eyes searched the clouds for a minute, as if trying to locate his thoughts there. “Um . . . Okay. So when I was ten, my parents took me to Southern California. We went to Disneyland, and then we went to this little beach town in Orange County. The beach was amazing. And the ocean. I freaking loved it. And one day they took me into this Thomas Kinkade art gallery that they had there in the town. And I just fell in love with those paintings.”