Gemini

by Sonya Mukherjee

  “Exactly,” Mom said, triumphant.

  “And then when we walked down the street,” Clara went on, with just a slight tremor in her voice, “instead of people saying, ‘What’s that thing?’ they would say, ‘Oh, there are those girls we saw on YouTube.’”

  Mom frowned.

  “And then at that point,” Clara said, “there would be no reason for us to hide away anymore, because the whole world would already know all about us.”

  Mom stared at Clara, her face awash with horror and confusion. She must have been trying to figure out the same thing that I was. Was Clara making an argument about how awful it would be to show up on YouTube? Or just the opposite?

  And then, from the corner of my eye, I thought I glimpsed Clara’s slow, tentative smile.

  I looked up toward Dad, where he hovered in the doorway. Mom had her back turned toward him, so she couldn’t see his face. She couldn’t see what I could. Dad was smiling too.

  Slowly, testing all of them, just to make sure that we were really thinking the same thing, I said, “There would be no reason for us not to go away for college.”

  Clara kept smiling. And Dad did too.

  I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. But just hours ago, after all, Clara had agreed to leave our cocoon. And if she thought this would help her do it, who was I to argue?

  Mom shook her head. “I don’t think you’re getting my point. We never raised you to be a circus act. We never raised you to be on a vaudeville stage, or on the modern equivalent of it either. That’s no way to live your life.”

  “But neither is this,” I said. And then, thinking over the options, I shrugged. “Actually, I guess that is one way to live your life, and so is staying here. There are lots of ways. They’re all life. But the point is, it’s up to us, which one we choose.”

  Mom’s lower lip trembled. Dad looked down at the floor, his expression once again unreadable.

  Clara nudged me. “Is that video ready for posting yet?”

  “What, mine?” I thought about it. “It’s kind of lame right now. And we’re not even in it that much.”

  “I’m sure they sent you a bunch of stuff from last night’s dance,” she said. “You could add that.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I guess we could just tack that on. I don’t know, though. If we’re going to put something out there, I’d rather make it better than just a bunch of random candids. Like maybe more from our own perspective or something.”

  Mom pressed herself against our bedroom wall. She glanced at Dad, but he wouldn’t meet her eye.

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “Do I need to confiscate your laptops? Do I need to turn off the Wi-Fi?”

  I looked her right in the eye. I could see her fear and confusion—could see all the terrible things whirling through her brain that she felt she absolutely had to protect us from—but I felt detached from those feelings, like they couldn’t touch me at all, and it was almost hard for me to care.

  Care, I told myself. Try to care.

  There had been so many times when I had cared. When I had felt for her fear, and for Clara’s, too. But this was not the time. This was not that moment.

  I took a deep breath and forced my voice to sound as patient as possible. “It won’t make any difference. Everything’s backed up to the cloud. We can access it from our friends’ computers.”

  “Not if I don’t allow you to go to their houses,” Mom said, her voice faltering.

  “Oh, Mom.” I shook my head, losing my grip on my last thread of sympathy. “How are you going to stop us?”

  Clara started to giggle nervously, even as tears welled up in her eyes. She elbowed me. “Hailey,” she said, “I know what we can post.”

  37

  Clara

  By the time the soccer field came into view, as we walked toward it along the cracked sidewalk and then up into the Bear Pass High School parking lot, it was already obvious that the place was packed. Not only was the parking lot full, but the street was lined with parked cars, trucks, and SUVs, many of which I recognized as belonging to my classmates.

  Many, but not nearly all. Girls’ soccer was big around here, and there would be lots of Los Pinos students and families too.

  Los Pinos was about forty minutes from Bear Pass, a bigger town that we never visited, though Mom sometimes went there to shop and do errands.

  My nerves jangled, and my mind raced. So many strangers. So many people who had never seen us.

  It was noon, and we had spent most of the morning practicing with Bridget, Amber, and Kim, while Juanita had worked on setting up all the details and logistics, and making sure the soccer team and coach were on board. We’d done all of this at Juanita’s house, while our mother had presumably sat back at our house, crying or tearing out her hair or making frantic phone calls to family members, or whatever it was that she did when she was alone and worried sick. At least she hadn’t tried to prevent us from leaving the house. And although she hadn’t said that she would go along with our plan to leave for college, her look of despair as we’d left the house had given me a perverse ray of hope.

  We’d been working hard at this, but I wasn’t ready at all. I was never going to be ready. As we reached the edge of the field, I realized I was holding my breath. When I let it out, it made a little puff of cold mist, despite the bright sunny sky overhead.

  We looked out across the field. Sure enough, our side of the field was packed—the bleachers full and surrounded by foldout chairs, with people huddled into jackets and sweatshirts and even a few blankets under the cool morning sun. Our classmates and their families, mostly. People we knew.

  On the Los Pinos side there were almost as many people, all on foldout chairs. So far, none of those strangers seemed to have noticed us. At least, nobody was staring or pointing, as far as I could tell.

  Instead all eyes were on the field, where the Bear Pass girls, in their red uniforms, played Los Pinos, in white and green. I didn’t know much about soccer, but I could see that Lindsey was dominating, weaving between defenders as she took the ball down the field with a speed and agility that were frankly beautiful to watch.

  “I’ll go talk to Amber,” Juanita said. “I want to make sure they’ve got everything they need.”

  “And Josh,” I said as she hurried off. “Make sure he gets the good camera.”

  Hailey had told me that some of the best videos she’d gotten had been from Josh, and also that he’d seemed eager to help out with her project. I didn’t know what to make of that, but I knew that if we were going to do this thing, I wanted it done well. So, fine. Let him help.

  As we hovered back behind the bleachers on our side, the ref blew the whistle and the players left the field. All at once all the tensions of the morning, the week, the month, the year, drew themselves into a tight point at the center of my chest, a thing so small and dense that it threatened to suck all my surroundings into its gravitational pull.

  Dan and Alek, with a couple of Alek’s friends, were setting up a sturdy table and two chairs in the center of the field, while Amber and Kim set up their sound system. In what seemed like just a couple of minutes, though it must have been longer, Juanita ran over to us.

  “Come on. It’s time!”

  I couldn’t breathe. Juanita and Hailey stared at me, both of them smiling. “Come on, come on!” Juanita repeated, beckoning.

  Helpless, I followed her onto the field.

  All around us now everyone was watching. And that dense ball of tension was still at the center of my chest, but now I was somehow outside it, observing it rather than feeling it, and time felt slow and thick, yet crystal clear as we walked across the field, the center of more attention than I’d ever felt before, its weight heavier, surely, than what we could hold.

  When we reached the chairs, Alek and Dan held out their hands; Hailey and I took them, accepting their help as we stepped up onto the chairs, and then from there onto the table.

  We turned around and lo
oked at the crowd. On one side, a sea of strangers. On the other, our classmates, our friends, our neighbors. All of them, on both sides, waiting to see what we were going to do.

  And in one of the foldout chairs near the front, there was Max, looking up at us with a stillness that I couldn’t read, shouldn’t even want to try to comprehend.

  I should try not to look at him. I should try.

  Centered in front of us on the field, Josh held up not a phone but a high-end video camera belonging to Bridget’s parents. I tried not to think about what that camera meant.

  Just be here. Don’t think about it. Don’t think. Don’t.

  And then it came on, through the speakers—Lady Gaga’s voice, speaking so loudly and clearly that I thought it could be heard for miles, telling us just what to do.

  Following the lady’s instructions, our paws went up in the air.

  Amber had helped with the choreography and with teaching us how to move. We’d had just a couple of hours to practice, after a lifetime of standing off to the side. Now we were center stage. The moves weren’t fancy—not by other people’s standards—but they were certainly new to us.

  The music revved, picked up, and zipped off into the opening notes of a song that had been on our playlists for just about as long as I could remember: “Born This Way.”

  Our hands moved first, from left to right above our heads. Our hips came next. The beat pulsed, loud, maddening, demanding.

  The crowd was watching. Strangers and friends. Their faces all unreadable. Their thoughts all unknowable. They watched us, and we did our best to dance.

  As Lady Gaga’s huge voice filled the space around us, spilling out into the parking lot and the street, we moved with painful awkwardness through the steps that Amber and Kim had tried to teach us. We weren’t even vaguely in sync with the music, which rumbled and vibrated up through the table.

  How many people would end up seeing this video? Would strangers, finding it online, send it to their friends? If we left Bear Pass—when we left Bear Pass—would we run into people who had already seen us because of this? And what would that mean, if we did?

  I’d always thought that my worst nightmare was to be like the long-ago Hilton twins or Millie-Christine, making a spectacle of ourselves for strangers. But at least those girls had had talent and skills. And no Internet.

  So many things were running through my mind that I was only half-conscious of the pulsing music surrounding us. The outdoor speakers boomed, impressively loud, but in contrast to how I’d imagined this moment, the music seemed to have nothing to do with our awkward movements.

  This was pointless. We were idiots. What kind of a plan was this? Dance terribly, put it up on YouTube, and expect that to somehow give us freedom? What were we thinking?

  Still, I kept dancing, or trying to.

  Then Juanita jogged out toward us across the field, and behind her, a dozen of our friends—including, among others, Alek, Bridget, Dan, Amber, and Kim. They gathered around the foot of our table and began to dance along with us, using roughly the same moves that we’d practiced.

  I hadn’t known they were going to do that.

  As Lady Gaga switched to a commanding chant, Hailey held out a hand to Alek, who was dancing beside the table. He pulled himself up next to us. The music picked up, and in his own clumsy way, Alek danced with us.

  The beat throbbed through the table and up into my feet. It filled the space around us, vibrating out into the air beyond. I felt giddy and ridiculous, like at any moment I might laugh, cry, fall off the table, or all of the above.

  I glanced in Max’s direction—stupid, stupid, don’t look—and saw something on his face that might have been a smile. I looked away.

  Was it a smile?

  Don’t look. Don’t look. It doesn’t matter.

  No matter what you do, you’ll never know his thoughts.

  Another group of Bear Pass kids ran over to dance with us, and then another. A few of their younger siblings joined them, middle school and elementary school kids, kids who had known us all their lives and smiled at us easily now, laughing and jostling one another. The middle school kids were thinking about their own moves, not ours, and the littlest kids weren’t thinking about anything at all.

  Across the field the soccer teams were stretching, pacing, drinking from their water bottles, paying no attention at all to our dance. Lindsey leaned back in a chair and closed her eyes, as if shutting us out.

  But half of our school was dancing with us now—had Juanita planned all of this?—and when I looked over at the Los Pinos side, a few of those kids were up on their feet, dancing in front of their chairs. They all looked much better than Hailey and Alek and me, as if they could actually sense the beat.

  And then the funniest thing happened. I started to sense it too. My hips, along with Hailey’s, swung to one side in time with the music, and then they swung to the other side, and we were still in time. I could actually tell.

  For the first time in my life, I could feel the rhythm and the music running all the way through me.

  Lady Gaga’s voice ran through my own silent breath, and where I had been moving out of time to the music, trying to find my alignment, suddenly it was different; the music was inside me, moving me, a part of me. I’m on the right track, baby, I was born to be brave.

  Somehow I had shifted closer to the edge of the table, toward the Los Pinos side. They weren’t that far away, all those strangers from our rival school, and in the front row a couple of guys were nodding along with the music, smiling.

  As I looked at them, one of them caught my gaze in his, and just at that moment, maybe by coincidence or maybe because of the eye contact, I registered that he was cute. He kept looking right at me, nodding in time to the music, and his smile grew wider.

  Maybe he liked the song or the dance steps. Maybe he thought it was cool that we were brave enough to get up here. Or maybe—most likely, really—he was laughing at us.

  But then it struck me. This was the Cynic talking, and she was an absurd little wussy-girl. Always had been.

  And Idiot-Girl bounced up to her feet and leapt ecstatically across the ring to knock the Cynic flat on her back, not with a punch but with a ridiculous purple bubble filled with unicorns, which left the Cynic dizzy and down for the count. And Idiot-Girl pinned the Cynic down and whispered softly, teasingly, into her ear, You’ve had your turn. Now I’m taking over.

  And I kept dancing in time with the music, and at the same time looking at that cute guy whom I’d never seen before and would probably never see again, and for once I did what I wanted, without waiting to figure out whether I should.

  I reached out one hand, pointed at him, and beckoned for him to come over.

  His friend laughed, then elbowed him and nodded in my direction, telling him to go over to me.

  And he did.

  The Cynic, half-conscious on the floor, continued her chant, He was just doing what he thought he had to do. People were watching, and he didn’t want to look like some jerk.

  Idiot-Girl’s purple bubbles formed a gorgeous chain, until they spelled out in perfect cursive letters: So what?

  The cute stranger climbed up onto the table, and he started dancing next to me. He wasn’t great, but he had the beat. Without knowing why, I started laughing, and then he started laughing too.

  I looked out toward our side of the field, the Bear Pass side, and almost everyone was on their feet now, dancing with us.

  And then I saw them, standing near the bleachers—my parents.

  They were looking at us, watching us dance. They had somehow tracked us down.

  Neither of them were smiling. Mom looked vaguely shell-shocked, and Dad—well, who ever knew what he was thinking? I liked to think that he was secretly pleased but just covering it up from Mom. Maybe, maybe not. At least neither of them was scowling openly, and they weren’t rushing the field to try to interrupt our dance.

  I looked away, and I let my body feel the bea
t.

  The night before, sitting out on those bleachers, feeling the shared heat of Hailey’s blood stir inside me, I had been bathed in the cool glow of the moon’s reflected light, counting lunar craters that I would never be able to explore.

  Today, despite the chill, the sun shone brightly between the clouds. Its light fell directly on my face and hands, having hurtled all the way through space to reach me in less than eight and a half minutes. And as I danced among my friends and classmates and this one cute stranger, I felt as if this whole blue-green expanse of planet lay before me, all lit up with mysteries.

  And I imagined a hairless, tentacled, teenage girl-creature on another planet somewhere out there in a distant constellation, circling some other star, gazing out across the vast expanse of space toward us here on Earth. I imagined her using her super-high-powered alien telescope to zoom right in on me and Hailey, these rarest of mutations in perhaps the strangest species ever to have evolved on this improbably fertile planet, living and laughing and dancing so awkwardly here among the stars at the edge of the Milky Way.

  And I thought, Well, good. Let her stare. I think we’re quite a show.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you for picking up this book. It’s had a long journey from its earliest drafts, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone who helped along the way.

  Many thanks to Steven Chudney for your wise counsel and guidance, your patience and support, and for making me believe in Santa Claus.

  Zareen Jaffery, thank you for giving this novel a wonderful home, and for all your keen insights, which deepened it and brought out the best in it.

  Thanks, too, to the entire team at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, especially Justin Chanda, Mekisha Telfer, Krista Vossen, Jenica Nasworthy, Chava Wolin, Katy Hershberger, and Chrissy Noh, for all your hard work in bringing books to life and to readers.

  I.W. Gregorio and Abigail Hing Wen, you’ve been part of this story from the beginning and at every step of the way, nudging it toward its best and truest parts and bolstering me with your encouragement and understanding. I’m forever grateful for your astute reading and generosity.