“I want to be free,” she said finally. “But not free of you.”
My chest tightened. “Free of Bear Pass, though,” I said. “You hate it here, for some reason.”
I remembered Juanita saying, Sometimes I can’t think about anything but busting the gates and getting out of this place, once and for all. They both seemed to see something terrible here that I didn’t see.
And now Juanita was getting out.
“No. I don’t hate it here,” Hailey said now, her voice tight and harsh with emotion. “Sometimes I think I do, okay, yes. But how would I know? I don’t have anything to compare it to.”
“It’s a good place,” I said, “if you think about it. It’s beautiful and peaceful and serene, and the people here have been good to us. Not every single person, not every single minute. But overall? They’ve been kind of amazing to us.”
I was thinking of what Lindsey had said at the dance, about how she had been nice to us for the past six years. Not that one day in the bathroom stall, but ever since. It was true. And yet she was probably the person I liked least in the entire school—or she had been, until that night at the Halloween party.
I still didn’t know what to think about Gavin and Josh and their friends, and the way they’d talked about us that night. But in all these years it was the only time that I’d heard anything like that. And even they had been nice to us the rest of the time. Was it possible that even they, like Lindsey, were just jerks some of the time—thoughtless, insensitive, showing off their stupidity for their friends—but not really evil or hateful at their core?
“You’re right,” Hailey said. “It’s been a good place to grow up. I guess I don’t notice that very much. And I should.” After a moment she said, “What I’m agreeing to is to stay here for now. To go to Sutter for at least two years, and probably four. I guess I’m hoping that after that, you might start wanting to try something different too.”
But the truth was, that wanting was inside me already, pressing up hard against my fear. A hunger for something new. Sand between our toes. City noises in our ears. The rush of an airplane lifting off.
And now I could see it. It wasn’t Hailey that I needed to escape. Because technically, physically, there was nothing to stop us from doing all those things. Hailey didn’t really need to escape me in order to walk up the steps of the Louvre. We knew how to walk up a staircase together.
And yes, Bear Pass had been good to us; our teachers and friends and community, taking their lead from our parents, had given us what we needed all these years. But they couldn’t give us what we needed next.
I wanted to say all that—to take Hailey’s hand and jump out that door with her, however we had to wriggle and squirm to get through it—but the words were stuck inside me. My throat closed up, and I could barely whisper, “I know we have to leave. But I don’t know if I can. When we’re like this.”
I remembered that surgeon on the news clip that my mother had been watching. He’d said the ideal age for separation was nine to twelve months. “It’s the best time in terms of their muscular and skeletal development,” he’d said, “but also their psychological development, too.”
Because after that age—by the time you were, say, one year old—your minds were so intertwined, so dependent on the way they’d grown into each other, was it even fair to say that there was really a place where one person stopped and the other began?
I shifted toward Hailey in bed, my shoulder pressed into hers. “Aren’t you worried about how Alek feels about us being attached? Or if not him, if he’s not important to you, then just thinking about any other guy you might like for the rest of your life . . .” I let my voice trail off.
“It’s not like I don’t get what you’re saying,” she said. “I guess it would take an extraordinary guy to want to be with either of us. But maybe that’s the only kind of guy who’s worth bothering with anyway.”
She shifted around a little, and then she added, “Especially for us, you know? Because I feel like one of the reasons people want that—like, a long-term relationship, or marriage or whatever—is so there’s someone to just be together with in life. Someone they can always count on, someone who understands them better than anybody else does and loves them anyway. Just that intimacy and not being all on your own, you know? I mean, I know that’s not all of it, but it’s part of it, don’t you think? And we already have that.”
I let that sink in for a while. I thought she was probably right. I just wasn’t sure how much better it really made me feel.
Finally I said, “But just walking around in the world—you can’t tell me you like having people stare at us and make rude remarks. Aren’t you scared at all? How can you never be scared?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it’s because I have you to be scared for me.”
I half-laughed, half-groaned.
“No, I’m serious,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it. I think all our lives, you’ve done the caution and the fear so I don’t have to. And I’ve done the anger so you don’t have to.”
“Huh,” I said, thinking that over. “So it’s like each of us hasn’t needed to be a full person.”
“No, no,” she said, “that’s not it. We’re both full people, but we have our specialties. It’s a good thing. You do science and thinking things through. I do art and jumping in. It frees us up, not having to be everything all at once, because we know the other one can handle being whatever we’re not.”
She went on, “I wouldn’t have chosen to have our guts and nervous systems all tangled up with each other, okay? But I also wouldn’t choose to die on the operating table, or to end up paralyzed with a colostomy. None of those things would be my absolute first choice. If it was only up to me.”
I closed my eyes. Behind my eyelids I could see stars glittering without any pattern at all, close enough to touch.
“And at this point,” she said quietly, “I know it’s crazy, but I kind of like who we’ve become together.” She got even quieter, so she was half-whispering. “And I can’t really imagine us any other way.”
What did Hailey feel about me? Not love like you feel for other people, people who matter to you without really being a part of you.
With someone that you love—like, say, maybe your mom—there could be times when you might feel the edges of yourself turning porous and slipping into hers; you might feel in some way that you are not really separate. And then you pull back and you look at this person, you see their whole outline, and you understand that you are not them.
But Hailey and I could never pull back. We could never see all of each other, except in the same ways that we could see ourselves—in a photograph, a mirror image. She wasn’t me, but she was part of me, like my hips and knees and heart and thoughts and memories were parts of me. And you don’t really love your hips and knees and heart and thoughts and memories, exactly. But what is it that you feel about them? Is it less than love? Is it more?
How could you ever live without them? And who would you be if you tried?
All this time, I’d been trying to tell myself that being attached to Hailey was incidental to who I was. Or that it should be. But our connectedness had been part of me since long before I was born.
This was who I was. This was who we both were, together.
Hailey raised her head to look toward me, but not into my eyes, and she never would.
“The truth is,” she said, “I would rather stay the way we are. But if you want to talk to the surgeon, I will.”
In the darkness I shook my head. “No.” My voice sounded so firm that I barely recognized it. “We’re not going to risk both of our lives for that.”
She exhaled, and I exhaled with her, our breath emptying out of us in unison. This fantasy of being solo had been bouncing around in my head for years, but in that moment it slipped out of my grasp—had I only loosened my hold, or had I meant to let it go?—and I watched it drift away like a helium balloon that you kn
ow you will never get back.
“Well, then,” Hailey said, “what are we going to do?”
I looked around our dimly lit bedroom, with its double dresser, its extra-wide desk, its closet full of specially adjusted clothes, its posters of science fiction films mingling nonsensically with obscure medieval artwork.
We’d moved to this house when we were eighteen months old, and in all that time we had never once slept anywhere else.
Hailey had often told me that the white space between objects is one of the most important parts of any picture, with as much significance as the objects themselves. The shape of the space between the two of us had never changed, and it never would. But the background that filled it in could be different, and surely that would transform the picture too.
I turned as far toward Hailey as I would ever be able to and said, “We’re going to get out of here.”
36
Hailey
By the time the sun rose, we had created our first-draft college list. When we’d started in the middle of the night, in the yellow-and-blue glow of our lamp lights, it had seemed unreal. I couldn’t quite believe that Clara had agreed to this. But as the morning light sifted in through our bedroom window, her enthusiasm only seemed to grow.
It was real. We were going to do this—move away. Take care of ourselves. Face the strangers.
My fingers tingled with excitement. Or at least, I chose to believe that it was pure excitement and not unhinged terror, though I could see how this might be open to interpretation. There was no time to waste either. Some of the colleges had application deadlines as early as November 30, giving us less than three weeks to get them ready.
We were downloading the Common Application for college admissions when Mom burst through the bedroom door.
“Oh good, you’re up,” she said. “How was the dance? Did you have a good time?” She looked worried, even though we’d talked to her briefly when we’d gotten home the night before.
Oddly enough, it had been Dad who’d seemed to suspect something last night. When he’d picked us up outside the school, just looking back at us from the driver’s seat of the minivan, he’d somehow known that something was up.
“Someone had a good time,” was all he’d said, but it had been there in his tone, and in his quiet smile. He had known that we’d had more than just an ordinary good time. He had probably known that it had to do with me, and with Alek. And he’d been happy about it. He’d smiled to himself the whole way home.
“Yeah,” I said now, to Mom. “It was good. We even danced a little.”
“Oh.” She brightened. “Well, that’s good. I wasn’t sure if you would.” She hovered in our doorway. “You know, I was thinking, it’s good that you’re trying new things. And sometime soon we should start to talk about what it’s going to be like next year, when you two start at Sutter. There are going to be a lot of new things to prepare for.”
My heartbeat quickened, and Clara sucked in her breath. I kind of wanted to not say anything. But we were going to have to tell her soon. It might as well be now.
“Um, Mom,” I said, “I think there’s something you need to see.”
I held up my laptop, its screen facing her, and she came closer to look.
Her face went pale. “The Common Application?” she said. “Sutter doesn’t use the Common Application.”
I crossed my legs, pulled my spine up straight, and looked right into Mom’s eyes. “We’re not going to Sutter.”
Her eyes widened, and her body pulled back, but Clara jumped in. “We want to see other places and meet new people, people who aren’t from around here. We want to give them a chance. Give ourselves a chance. We think we can handle it.”
Mom shook her head, looking confused. “It’s not like everyone at Sutter is from around here. People come from all over—even from other countries.”
“A few people,” I admitted. “Not many.”
“But also,” Clara said, “I never really wanted to study environmental science. And Sutter doesn’t have physics or astronomy or anything like that. I want to go where I can study what I really care about. We both do.”
Mom kept shaking her head, like she couldn’t control it. “Your father is a tenured professor. Do you know how hard it is to get a job like that? We can’t just pick up and move wherever you—”
“We’re not asking you to do that,” I said quickly, glad that I could at least reassure her about this one thing. “You guys can stay right where you are. We promise to visit.”
She opened and closed her hands. “You’re talking about going without us?”
“Yeah. We are.” I forced a smile for her, but before I could say anything more, I felt my fake smile transforming into a real one. “We can take care of ourselves.”
Mom came and sat down at the foot of our bed. “I know it feels that way,” she said gently. “You two can do an amazing amount for yourselves. You’re very independent. But at the same time, you don’t necessarily notice all the things that your father and I do for you to smooth the way. Driving you around, tailoring your clothes, cooking your meals, arranging accommodations everywhere you go . . .”
“We can do all of that,” Clara said. “We’ll learn what we need to. And the stuff that we can’t do, like driving, we’ll find a way around. Other people manage with bigger disabilities than ours. They manage to live on their own.”
“You’d need to get to physical therapy somehow,” Mom said. “And learn how to cook, which is going to present some logistical difficulties for you. You’ll need to have everything arranged where you can reach it without a step stool and without having to bend down low, because that’s so awkward for you. And what happens if you’re alone and you get injured? There are so many things that could happen.”
“Mom,” Clara said, more gently now. “We’re grateful for everything that you’ve done for us, including teaching us to be independent. And you can still help us, okay? You can still fix our clothes and check in with us every day. You can teach us how to cook, and you can visit us and make sure everything’s all right. There’s a good chance we’ll stay in California, so you can visit a lot. We’re not trying to disappear.”
Mom’s head kept shaking. Actually, the rest of her was shaking too. “But where—”
“We’re going to apply to a bunch of places,” I told her, my voice sounding weirdly calm. “We’ll see what happens.”
“Hailey. Clara. You’re going to need to give your father and me some time to go over all the details of this before we can say yes or no. I can see right now that there are aspects of this that the two of you have not thought through. For instance, with two completely different majors, it will take you twice as long to finish. It’s all right at Sutter, because they’ll give you free tuition. And you can live at home.”
“We’ll get financial aid at the other places too,” I said. “Mom, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to upset you, but Clara and I have made a decision about this. We’re doing this. No matter what you feel about it, we’re going to find a way to make this happen.”
She drew back. “It’s not as simple as you seem to think. Don’t you remember your friend Laura Saunders, last year? She got into six schools, and then she couldn’t afford to go to any of them.”
Something cold trickled down my spine. “Yeah,” I said slowly, “but that’s because her parents were assholes who wouldn’t cover their share.”
“Right,” Mom said, nodding thoughtfully. “The financial aid package takes your parents’ income into account. It only works if your parents are willing to help. So they have to be behind you.”
“Mom,” Clara said sharply, “you can’t be serious.”
“No,” said Dad from the doorway. We all looked up quickly. Where had he come from? “She’s not serious,” he said.
How much of this had he been listening to?
Mom stood up and whirled toward him. “Don’t you tell me I’m not serious. Don’t you tell me what I mean.”
“You’re going to control them with money, Liza? I know you can’t be serious. Or you’re not thinking straight.”
Mom turned back toward me, ignoring him. “I’m not saying no. But this is a decision that we’re going to make together as a family. And if your father and I decide that we need to put our foot down to protect you, to keep you safe, then that’s what we’re going to do.”
Dad looked skeptical but said nothing. Falling back into place, I supposed, as part of her united front.
“We’re just talking about going off to college,” I said. Though I thought I felt nothing but anger, my voice came out sounding sad and defeated. “What terrible thing do you think is going to happen to us there?”
“Well, for starters,” Mom said swiftly, as if she were glad to be asked, “don’t you realize that everyone has a camera in their pocket? You don’t notice it around here because it’s a protected environment, and we can get that for you at Sutter, too, because it’s small and because we’ve already discussed it with the administration. But out there in the world, there’s nothing to stop people from taking pictures and video of you at any time, and doing anything they want with it. You might not even notice they were doing it. By the time you found out, it would be too late.”
I looked toward Clara. For the past few weeks people had been sending me videos of the two of us. As far as I could tell, Clara had never noticed that people were taking these videos. Half the time I hadn’t noticed it either, even though I’d known about the project and had known that this could have been going on.
“You might think they were just texting their friends,” Clara said slowly, “when they’re really taking videos of you.”
“Exactly!” Mom agreed. “And then anything could happen. They could send it to their friends, or a journalist. They could post it online.”
“Liza,” Dad said softly, leaning against our doorway. “Honestly.”
“It’s true, though,” Clara said. “They could. And once that happened, it would be too late. You would never be able to unring that bell. The videos would be out there, and then anyone could do anything with them. Keep reposting them in new places. Whatever.”
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