“There’s some cheese in the freezer,” he offered, like that would make up for eating the last of our groceries.
I heard the freezer door creak open and closed as I mashed the tuna more energetically than necessary. I would miss the albacore, white tuna that didn’t kill dolphins. I might not be able to afford the good stuff ever again. That’s what I missed, what I worried about, not my stupid brother who would do whatever he wanted now, leaving me and the memories behind.
The phone rang, the landline loud, echoing off the bare walls that had been covered in art a week earlier. We turned to each other, staring until the second ring, when my brother, Sebastian ran for the phone, vaulting over the lone couch to reach the black antique still hanging in the hall. I followed, but not anything parkour. He’d changed so much in the past six months, getting bigger, stronger, faster, while I’d grown more tired.
“Yeah?” he answered.
I leaned against the wall, folding my arms over my chest, watching Bas nod and gulp like the Bass that used to hang on the wall over dad’s desk.
He looked directly at me with a faint line between his eyes, a line that I knew probably resided on my own face. I couldn’t help but have his looks, being twins and all, even if he did tower above me these days. A year earlier it had been hard to tell us apart. I told him it was because he was such a pretty boy, but sometimes it felt like it was me who wasn’t sexy enough. My gymnasts body didn’t help much.
“It’s going to be great.” He nodded some more, said a few ‘yeah’s,’ and then hung up.
“Well?” I followed him back to the kitchen where he grabbed another can of tuna out of the pantry.
“That was Tony.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I got that. Anything new? Did he do some breaking and entering or whatever he did that got him thrown out of school?”
His jaw tightened and he straightened like he wasn’t already looming enough. “It wasn’t his fault. It was Daughtry who…” He inhaled deeply and shook his head. “His dad’s taking us to the airport in fifteen minutes.”
I blinked at him while my stomach churned and my fingertips tingled. “What? I thought you were leaving on Monday. I don’t get it. Why are you so excited about gutting fish?”
“Not a gutting job,” he muttered as he mashed the tuna with more force than I’d done. “I’ll be on the boat.”
“Boat? How is Anthony doing you any favors by getting you a minimum wage job…”
“Good pay. It’s an oil rig. I wouldn’t be able to walk into a job like this.”
“That sounds dangerous, the kind of job you couldn’t just walk out of.”
He walked over and put a hand on my shoulder, smelling of tuna, but I didn’t want him to take that hand away. He didn’t usually touch me, said I sucked the life out of him with my negative energy. My dad had been the one to give me good solid hugs when I felt so overwhelmed, so worn down by everything. Thinking about my dad made my throat thick.
“It is what it is. We can’t pretend that we’re spoiled little rich kids anymore. My grades weren’t good, I hated school, and this way you can go to college like you planned instead of having to wait a year so that you can apply for scholarships. I can send you money instead of being stuck doing nothing with my life.”
I shook my head tightly before I swallowed down a lump in my throat. He would really and truly be leaving me alone. “You can’t take a dangerous job just because you want to get out of school. What if I did that?”
He smiled slightly as he shook his head no, squeezing my shoulder before he let go.
“You’re not like me, Vi. You’re smart. Not just smart but disciplined. I don’t know anything that you couldn’t do if you put your mind to it.”
He wasn’t stupid, whatever his grades said. As for discipline, how could he think that joining the workforce a year early wouldn’t require discipline? He’d been sick so long, maybe he just needed to move, to get out, to do something and there wasn’t enough at the school to satisfy him. But, he’d never been good at time management, organization, keeping on top of everything, what if he got involved in some really bad stuff? What if…
I sighed and opened the mostly bare pantry. “Fine. Let’s see what I can cook up in 15 minutes.”
He smiled widely, his teeth bright white making him look startlingly nice. “You’re the best. Do you think that I need to deal with registrations and stuff at school?”
I stared at my brother, for some reason incapable of following through on something that he’d sacrificed for so long. He was running away. He was running away from everything, his past, the grief, me. He couldn’t hang on after what we’d suffered. I inhaled and pressed my hands down on the counter, the marble smooth and cold under my hands.
“I’ll do it after you’re gone. Are you going to take your violin?”
He frowned and shook his head. “I won’t have time to play it. Are you going to be okay?” His voice was so low and deep now, it reminded me of my dad.
I stared at my plate of tuna and beans, cold and slimy. “I’ll survive. I’ll stay busy like always, even without the gymnastics or the music lessons.”
He rubbed my shoulder again, a touch that felt so warm and good. I almost cried then, almost screamed at him, nearly broke. Instead I pulled away from him and pulled out a mixing bowl.
I mixed furiously while he got his things together. I couldn’t let him throw away his future without giving it ten minute’s thought. He would regret it. He’d wanted so much to be like dad. Dad had gone to Calder, school for Boys, so Sebastian had gone to Calder. He’d always hated it, talked about going to public school, art school, any other school, but never to dad. With dad gone, didn’t he care anymore about earning his approval? Even if he didn’t, he had to realize how idiotic it was to throw away all those years at the school that some parents would kill to get their kids into.
He needed to focus on grades, study and do his best academically, to stop stressing about getting into the elite social club he’d been too sick to get into. He needed to stay somewhere I could make sure he was taking care of himself, getting enough to eat, not doing something stupid. If only I could go to school for him.
The thought froze in my brain. I looked at my reflection in the glass cupboard door. With the poor light, I couldn’t tell if it was my face or my brother’s looking back at me. My features weren’t exactly masculine, but without makeup, with my short and efficient haircut, I’d never been particularly feminine. My body wasn’t all that girly either. I had a strong, lean gymnast’s body in spite of not having done gymnastics since the accident. Was it possible for me to pass as my brother? Only if no one had seen him recently.
I shook my head. That was crazy. I couldn’t possibly convince anyone that I was Bas.
The phone rang again and I went to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Bas? Make sure you bring your…”
“It’s me, Violetta,” I interrupted Anthony.
He laughed. “Yeah? I guess you don’t sound like him now, but a year ago… Anyway, tell him I won’t be able to make it for an hour, okay?”
I could feel the excitement in him. He was way too happy about going on an oil ship.
“You shouldn’t go. I’m sure your daddy can get you into a good school even if it’s not Calder. It’s no better for you to throw your life away than my brother.”
He laughed. “Ah, Lettie, are you worried I’ll forget about you? I’ll be sure to give you a nice, long hug before we take off. I hope you’re making me something special.”
I scowled and hung up the phone. Lettie was my least favorite nickname, and he knew it. I had let him hug me after the funeral, but it hadn’t touched the numbness. At least having to sell the house, make decisions had cracked the ice a little bit.
I wrapped my arms over my relatively flat chest trying to think, but my heart was pounding too hard, like I was at the beginning of a long intricate series of flips that I had to land perfectly, eac
h one precise or I’d crash and burn. I felt like that, my life spreading out into that weird crystalline silence right before life moved too fast to possibly control or even see coming.
I could do it. Sebastian had been so sick the last year he’d been there, he’d missed months before Mom and Dad died. I’d kept his wig from when he’d lost his hair, the manga type hair that I’d thought made him look more girly, but he always had a scowl on his face. I could scowl. Could I scowl for 8 hours a day? I frowned fiercely at the wall and then toned it back to moderate scowl, then back to full on grimace.
I had some ace bandages for my wrists in gymnastics that I could use to wrap my chest. His old clothes, his uniform before his height exploded would fit me fairly well. I could stuff the toes of his shoes. Was I missing anything?
His room. I could probably get through classes okay, but I wouldn’t be able to convince anyone I talked with for very long. Could I? I’d always been calm and clear-headed, not bouncy like my friend Cynthia. Sebastian hadn’t been calm, but he hadn’t interacted very well. Maybe withdrawn, solitary would be okay.
“Sebastian, does everyone have to share a room in Calder?” I asked him when he came down with a blood red duffle bag.
He scowled. That was the face. I could do that.
“That’s the only lame thing about not going for my senior year. Seniors don’t have to bunk.”
I exhaled and nodded. “Tony said he won’t be here for 45 minutes. You can help me make something. You should learn how to cook while you’re on your own.”
He grinned at me. “I’ll watch.”
I took a deep breath and led the way to the kitchen, glancing at him, watching the way he moved and practicing a little bit until he caught my weird shuffle. I would have to work on that later.
I focused on baking, whipping together batter with whatever was left in the pantry, some walnuts, raisins, a can of pumpkin, all creating a beautiful batch of muffins when I pulled them out of the oven.
He filled a grocery bag with them and gave me one last hug before he pulled away, his face as solemn as it we were at the cemetery. “You’re going to be okay. You’re always the solid one who knows how to make things work out. I’ll miss you Vie.”
I stared at him, feeling strangely empty while he gave me one last smile and headed out the door, where Anthony waited for him.
Did I know how to make things work out? How could anything work out now with mom and dad gone? No, but I couldn’t stop living. I had to keep going. It might be easier to pretend I was someone else, to forget about Violetta Tancetta and be angry-at-the-world Sebastian. It would be easier to stay away from my relatives who hated me. Maybe I’d even make connections with some of the snobby boys that were supposed to help him with his future. If I couldn’t think of my life, my future, at least I could think about his. As my mother said: if you’re not happy, you’re not being useful.
What if I failed? What if they discovered me? What could they do to me? Throw me out, refuse to refund the tuition, but honestly, how was that worse than where I stood staring at a blank future ahead of me?
What about showers? I shrugged. I’d either shower at night, or give myself a sponge bath the old fashioned way. Boys were supposed to stink.
With that happy thought, I went to bed, my last night at home. I slept dreamlessly.
The next morning, I got up while it was still dark to walk through the house and the garden outside, hearing my mother’s laughter in the herb garden, my dad’s low voice in the dining room, calm that kept us all on keel. I didn’t even have tears to fight. If they’d come, I’d welcome them. Now would be a good time to have a breakdown, alone, miserably alone. Instead I straightened my shoulders and went upstairs to his closet, fingering my short hair as I went.
Sebastian’s old wig fit easily over my locks, the artfully messy strands hiding half of my eyes. I resisted the urge to smooth it back, instead grabbing some gel and roughing it up even more. When I looked up, my brother, while he had cancer and did chemo, looked back at me.
I blinked, but I still looked like him. As I got dressed, wrapping bandages around my chest until I really looked like a boy, put on his white button-up shirt, pulled on his jacket then tied his shoes, I told myself that it wouldn’t be too hard to impersonate him, not when he’d been so unlike himself when he’d gone to school. It was ironic that for someone we’d all thought would die, he was finally healthy, then my parents were gone. They’d been attacked by a tiger in a parking lot. The headlines had read, SHOCKING ATTACK LEFT ORPHANED TWINS IN FINANCIAL CRISIS. Not really, but I couldn’t be certain since I’d never read them.
Before I grabbed my backpack, or rather, his backpack, I went to the garden behind our mostly empty house. I couldn’t leave my mother’s most precious possession. When I finished digging it up and putting it carefully in the backpack, the cab was there, waiting to take me across town to the wealthiest area where monstrous mansions hunkered away from the street.
After winding through long, perfectly picturesque neighborhoods, the cab pulled up at the curb in front of a school that rose up majestically, like a castle behind the wrought iron fence.
For a minute I sat there, paralyzed before I swallowed and got out. I paid the cabbie and swung my backpack over my shoulder. I walked towards the gates, fighting the urge to turn and run. I felt like an idiot. What was I thinking? This was the kind of stupid, mad stunt that Anthony would come up with, not me. I would be studying and working on my rotation.
“Watch it!” I heard from a distance right before someone plowed into me. I fell down, scraping my hands on the cement and scattering all the papers I’d printed and filled out, registration and payment slips for the last year at Calder, school for boys.
“Hey,” a low voice rumbled above me, a clearly masculine voice that I should try to emulate. I looked up, thinking that I should pay attention to his posture and movements, but I forgot about everything when I saw his face, close to mine, a tall, dark, handsome stranger who spectacularly filled out the blue blazer with Calder’s golden insignia on his left breast. He crouched down, over me, blocking out the rest of the world while he gathered my papers.
His smile looked tense beneath the long dark hair that fell forward over his cheekbones, framing his angular features. I wanted to smooth his mouth, to ease the tension out of him. Before I could, he stuck my papers in the folder, handed it to me then moved on without another word.
“Thank you,” I whispered at his back, still on the pavement, in shock. Shock? I wasn’t in shock because of some guy. I scrambled to my feet and straightened my jacket. My hands shook as I walked towards the school, more and more boys around me as we neared the wrought-iron gates. If this was how I reacted at the slightest contact with the opposite sex I was in trouble. What was wrong with me? Sure, I’d had crushes from time to time, maybe triggered by my attendance at a strict all-girl’s school, but this was not the time for it. I had crushes on male gymnasts. That guy had been far too tall to be attractive to me, even if his brown eyes had looked like melting chocolate and his hair like silky threads of deepest fudge.
I was just hungry. I needed to eat, to study, to get into the rhythm of this school until it became normal for me to be immersed in raw testosterone. What about pheromones? From what I could remember from Biology, it seemed that women developed higher levels of Estrogen when exposed to men, and vice versa. I shook my head. I wouldn’t get close enough to anyone for that to make a difference. I would be particularly careful to stay away from tall, dark, chocolate-like boys.
“It’ll take more than that to get into Orion’s inner circle.”
I glanced up and saw a tall guy, red hair, sneer on his mouth that reminded me to scowl. What was he talking about? I summoned Bas’s best nonchalant shrug.
“Like I care?”
He shook his head pityingly, edging closer to me so he could hover over me in an oppressive way. “Don’t tell me that you didn’t transfer here for the sole purpose of bumping int
o Orion and making a good impression.”
Orion? Orion Daughtry, Sebastian’s nemesis was the beautiful boy who had helped me when someone else had knocked me over? Not good. Also not good was the fact that this sneering jerk didn’t recognize me.
I scowled at him, forcing myself to meet his gaze without flinching. “I’m not a transfer. I’ve been here for three going on four long, painful years. That you don’t recognize me breaks my heart.” I didn’t recognize him. I needed to go through the school yearbook and memorize names and faces. Why hadn’t I thought of that? What else important was I missing?
His eyes narrowed as his sneer shifted to a snarl. “Tancetta. I heard that you were finished with the Butcher’s Boys.”
I almost smiled. At least he’d finally recognized me. Talking to this charmer made it easy to snarl and sound like my brother. He’d said these words to me dozens of times. I could impersonate the exact tinge of resentment.
“Because Orion thinks I’m not good enough to join his flying monkeys? I’m here for single most comprehensively ambitious education you can buy. Don’t be too broken-hearted about my coming back. I’m sure I’ll have more important things to do than stalk you and your friend.”
He sniffed. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you, Tancetta. If you try anything like last January, you’ll be out for good.”
I blinked at his back. My heart sank. This might be a very short experiment. What idiocy had Sebastian done last January?
I stood inside the front gates, the folder in my arms that contained my proof of legitimacy while the flocks of boys in their navy blazers streamed around me. Before I continued to the broad flight of steps I had something to do.
I walked around the building then feeling completely out of place and ridiculous, dropped to my knees and started pawing in the flowerbed like a nervous dog with a bone. Finally, I tucked the small plant beneath the old evergreen shrubs that lined the massive stone building. I had it planted, the rarest plant in my mother’s collection, something that she’d grown from seed the year my brother and I were born and after all this time was only ten inches high.
Butcher, Baker, Vampire Slayer: A Retelling of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night Page 2
