Twins

by Caroline B. Cooney

  She would never have used the word boyfriend to describe Jon Pear. He seemed neither boy nor friend.

  “I am your twin now,” whispered Jon Pear. “At last, you have somebody who truly understands you. A twin of the heart and soul instead of the flesh and blood.”

  The chorus of classmates on the outskirts of their lives seemed to sigh and hiss.

  She looked into the gathering and could no longer recognize faces, could not even recognize features, nor tell noses from mouths from eyes.

  Jon Pear came very close. He took her hands away from her face, as if they were his hands; as if he owned them; as if she had them only on loan.

  What was he doing?

  Again his fingertips dotted her cheeks, but —

  What did he —

  Jon Pear held a small glass vial beneath her eye. He caught her tears within it, and capped them with a tiny black rubber stopper. The vial, on a heavy gold chain around his neck, fell back against his chest and swung there.

  She stepped back from him, staring from the glitter of his yellow eyes to the captured tears. One tear remained caught in her long lashes, and this he touched with a bare finger, transferring the tear to himself. He looked down onto her tear like somebody telling fortunes, and a wild and boyish smile crossed his face.

  He ate the tear.

  Chapter 7

  HOW SAFE BOARDING SCHOOL seemed now.

  How attractive the many miles!

  How pleasant the laughing girls who had ignored her.

  Madrigal loved this person? thought Mary Lee. On her cheek she could feel dots where Jon Pear’s fingertips had touched her skin. Perhaps he had branded her.

  He is evil. My sister, my wonderful sister, would never love somebody like this! There is some terrible misunderstanding here.

  Just as Mary Lee had always been able to feel her hair, so she could feel her stolen tear. She and the tear were on the inside of the glass vial, slipping on smooth vertical sides, back and forth on the slippery silk vest Jon Pear wore. Why was he dressed like that? Why didn’t he wear jeans and a shirt like everybody else? What kind of statement was Jon Pear making?

  I am your twin now. Now there was a sick and frightening statement. “I lost my twin, Jon Pear. You cannot replace her. Nobody — nothing — could replace her.”

  His face shifted. His expressions were a deck of cards being shuffled. He dealt himself to the bottom. Blank and hidden and oddly threatening.

  She looked into the crowd where she saw Scarlett, pretty sweet Scarlett. Who needs a boyfriend? Especially this one. I want a girlfriend. A girl to talk to, and weep with, and gossip with, and know me to the bone.

  She gave the boy whom Madrigal had loved one more chance. She waited for Jon Pear to express his sorrow. This was the moment for him to say he understood the magnitude of her loss; he knew she must be bleeding as if cut by a guillotine. She would forgive Jon Pear anything if he, too, ached and wept for the lost twin.

  But Jon Pear’s laughter hung in the air, threatening the standing students. “You don’t miss her, Madrigal.”

  He closed in on her, and she thought he would strangle her, but he kissed her instead, and even though she wanted to run from Jon Pear, she found him so attractive that she also wanted to hurl herself upon him. To kiss until they both died of exhaustion, like a fairy tale in which lovers dance themselves to a frenzied end.

  “You don’t miss her,” he breathed, and his breath was fever hot against her throat. “You got rid of her. Clever you. Everything according to plan. I like that in a woman, Madrigal.”

  Where his kisses touched, her skin felt stained. She blistered, as if he had the power to cremate her! To turn her, like her sister, into ashes.

  “We are the ‘us’ now, Madrigal. We are the twins. You and I, Madrigal. You didn’t need her. You need me.”

  It seemed to take so much breath to speak. More breath than she could possibly drag into her lungs. She was not going to think about what he had said about planning. He could stain this place with his speech, and he could stain her throat with his kisses, but he was not going to stain her memories of Madrigal. She was going to put him in his place, and that place was far from her. “Twins have to be born,” she said. “Twins cannot be made.”

  But now his big firm hands covered her cheeks, and his fine strong nose tilted down against hers, and his golden eyes stared hypnotically through her own. “I love you,” he whispered.

  I love you.

  There was a no more appealing thought in the world. Jon Pear loved her; she could see that. Even though it was a different beautiful girl he loved. His golden eyes were swimming with emotion, and that emotion was adoration.

  As she had been half a person at boarding school, so she half-yearned to have Jon Pear and half-yearned to run away, to put even those two thousand boarding-school miles between herself and his eyes and his vial of tears.

  Half is crippled; half cannot quite make decisions. In the moment before she said, Yes, anything, Jon Pear, yes, you and I will be the twins now, Scarlett came between them.

  Pretty in a soft and doe-eyed way, Scarlett walked forward as if she were actually retreating. She was a deer at the edge of the meadow. Timid, shrinking beauty. “I didn’t speak to you at the funeral,” said Scarlett. Even her voice shrank, as if she were afraid to get close to Madrigal.

  Immediately Mary Lee knew she had hit on it. They were afraid of her. Whoever Madrigal had become, her classmates feared her. But how could that be? Madrigal was, after all, just another seventeen-year-old girl! You couldn’t be afraid of —

  “I miss Mary Lee,” said Scarlett. Her sweet face crumpled in pain. “I think about her all the time. It was a tragedy, Madrigal. You know what I think of you, but still I’m sorry. You must feel pain beyond anything I would, for you were twins.”

  Scarlett thought so little of Madrigal? Mary Lee tried to catch the meaning, but Jon Pear spoke. “Mary Lee didn’t matter,” he said carelessly. “Who needed that second reflection in the mirror?” Jon Pear’s smile seemed like a passageway to some dark place. He took the ribbon and pins out of her black hair and held the heavy weightlike ropes in his large hands. Then, evilly, he twined the ropes beneath her chin as if he intended to make a knot and hang her on a hook.

  She tried to take her hair back, but he kept it, as he had kept the tear.

  “I want to put flowers on Mary Lee’s grave,” said Scarlett, “but I don’t know where it is.”

  She loved Scarlett for being the one to miss Mary Lee. “There is no grave,” she admitted, and the loss assaulted her again. Surely it was a terrible omission, to have no place on earth marking the loss of a life. “She is on the wind now. She is part of the air and the sky.”

  “But that’s beautiful!” cried Scarlett. “That sounds just like Mary Lee. Wind and sky.”

  Van broke through the crowd, ferociously, as if the student body formed a locked door and he had to clobber people to get through. He approached as if he’d be willing to break wrists to break in.

  Jon Pear and Madrigal are an Event, the way Madrigal and I were an Event. I want to be an Event. I do not want to be half, or forgotten, or lost, like boarding school. Jon Pear will make me an Event.

  Van left the circle like a warrior with the courage to leave his troops. Alone, he walked toward Jon Pear and Madrigal, as if getting this close was also an Event.

  When he looked at Mary Lee, Van sucked in his breath and held it for so long, she had to smile. She forgot Jon Pear, though he still held her hair and her arm. How lovely Scarlett and Van were; how beautiful the friendship of sister and brother. It would be good to have real friends. Mary Lee had drawn a new life, but that didn’t mean she had to use every molecule of Madrigal’s. She could choose some of her own.

  She remembered with a start of surprise that Madrigal had despised Scarlett.

  But I’ll be friends with her, thought Mary Lee joyfully. Real girlfriends, like other girls. “Scarlett,” she said eagerly, “this aft
ernoon would you like to go to the mall with me?”

  “No,” said Van sharply. “She would not. She has other plans, Madrigal. She always will.”

  From the gathered, tightening circle of students came another hiss, another murmur, She always will.

  “How brotherly,” said Jon Pear. “Of course, after that unfortunate little episode, Scarlett, I can see how you would need a brother around rather often.”

  Scarlet paled, pressed her lips together, and lowered her head.

  Van stepped between his sister and Jon Pear, and moved her back, as if he were herding her, as if he were her guard dog, and she were a vulnerable lamb. They withdrew into the circle of students, and there they vanished, and Mary Lee could no longer tell one face from another, but instead the students boiled, like water, bubbling and increasing and raising steam.

  What little incident? Why did they hold Madrigal responsible?

  “There’s no need to discuss Mary Lee again,” said Jon Pear. He seemed to be addressing the entire school, for his voice soared as if he carried a microphone. “She may not be buried beneath the soil, but Madrigal and I have buried her. Refrain from mentioning Mary Lee again.”

  People faded and blurred.

  Walls left and returned.

  Mary Lee found that she was walking beside Jon Pear again, deeply exhausted, as if they had hiked miles together over rugged terrain in difficult weather. “Why did you fall in love with me?” she whispered.

  “For your name. Madrigal. Song of the murmuring waters.”

  She tried to remember what Van looked like but found that she could not. Van, she thought, first syllable of vanish. Perhaps that’s all he is, a thing that goes away.

  She did not know why she was putting so much value on a mere hour anyway, a mere hour months ago where nothing really had been shared except a snack.

  I could be Jon Pear’s song of the murmuring waters, she thought.

  “And,” said Jon Pear, “because you are the twin I have always needed.”

  She could not snuff out her twinship like a candle. “I’m not your twin, Jon Pear.”

  Jon Pear’s laughter went in and out like tides slapping underground caverns. It passed from good to evil and back.

  “Ah, but you are, Madrigal. You and I are twins of the soul.”

  She was drawn to him like a child to sticky candy, and could not tear herself away.

  Jon Pear walked her to her car.

  The school day had been so short! Where had it gone, that collection of classes, acquaintances, and curiosity?

  She was filled with thoughts of Jon Pear. They seemed to have multiplied in her, so that there was room for nothing else: his strangeness, his beauty, his familiarity, his ugliness … his evil.

  She could take neither her mind nor her thoughts off Jon Pear.

  Who are you? she thought, for she knew he was nobody ordinary. She wanted knowledge about him. She wanted detail and background. All girls who have crushes on boys want more: they want to see his house, and see his clothes; they want to talk to his friends and see him in sports; they want to read his papers and touch his books and know his life.

  She wanted to know which car was his, what he drove, where he was going, but he simply stood waiting for her to drive away.

  “Tell me everything,” she said to him.

  He laughed. It was an ordinary laugh. “You know everything, Madrigal. I didn’t leave anything out.”

  “I want to hear it all again. I love it. I want you to tell me everything over and over, like bedtime stories.”

  He smiled, and the smile was like Van’s: warm and easy.

  He slid the key in the ignition for her, and turned it, and the radio came on with the engine. A fifties rock station. Mary Lee loved that stuff. So soft and easy. But when she danced her shoulders to it, she remembered her dead sister, who would never dance again.

  She needed to be alone after all. Scream into the wind and sky, cry out for the sister she had lost. She waited for the tears to come; the tears she wanted, for they would make her feel both better and worse. The only way I will ever feel about Madrigal now, she thought.

  No tears came.

  Her eyes were dry. Her thoughts were still mainly of Jon Pear, and the dead twin had hardly a sliver, hardly a splinter, of her emotions. And not a single tear. “I can’t even cry for her,” she said desperately.

  “I have your tear,” Jon Pear reminded her. His smile increased, blocking roads and mirrors and thought.

  She stared at the tiny glass tube on the thick gold chain. “What will you do with it?” she whispered.

  His smile grew even larger, like a mushroom cloud. An explosion. “I like this game, Madrigal,” he said. “I’m glad you thought of a new one. We’ve played the old ones enough.”

  When she got home, the house seemed more isolated than Mary Lee remembered, the neighborhood more remote, the road less used. Even the house itself looked smaller, its windows blank and dead.

  How silent, how sinister, her own driveway felt.

  The sky had grown dark early. Shadows were vapor, wafting up from the frozen earth, caressing her legs.

  The key trembled in her hand.

  She missed boarding school — the chaos and shrieking of hundreds of girls. The lights always on, the radios always playing, the laughter and the arguments always from one room or another.

  She tried to picture Madrigal and Jon Pear laughing and arguing, kissing and exchanging gifts.

  It was Madrigal’s key, of course, because Mary Lee had had to give up everything of her own, and adopt Madrigal’s possessions. The key did not go into the lock easily, and when it did go in, would not open the lock.

  She stood on the front step, pushing and turning and clicking and still the door did not open. The shadows behind her crawled up and touched the backs of her legs.

  And were they shadows? Or the ghost of Madrigal, trying to come back?

  Who was that twin? And who was Jon Pear? What would happen if Jon Pear could read her soul, and imitate her movements, and know her choices the way an identical twin did? Did she want to know Jon Pear the way she once knew Madrigal?

  Eventually the key moved and the lock opened. But it was only the key to a piece of architecture, and not the key to any question in her heart.

  She could think of nothing and no one but Jon Pear. When she did her nails, when she emptied the dishwasher, when she listened to her parents’ chatter, when she watched television … hardly a fraction of her participated. The rest was with Jon Pear.

  And it was, as he had decreed, like twinship again.

  The ordinary world had relatives: parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. But only twins shared molecules and thoughts. Only twins knew each other’s interior.

  Now she felt not quite separate from Jon Pear, either.

  And completely, hideously, separated from Madrigal.

  The evening was heart-quiet.

  Mary Lee went silently away from her parents, who had been silently with her. To the bare wood stairs she went — stairs she and an identical person had spent a lifetime running up and down. She went into Madrigal’s room.

  My room, she thought. I’m Madrigal.

  But she was not Madrigal, and she walked in a trespasser. She stood carefully in front of the mirror. Once they had not needed mirrors. She pretended the reflection was her twin. Oh Madrigal, tell me Jon Pear lied! Tell me you had enough love to go around! Tell me you could love this Jon Pear and your love for me was not diminished by it.

  But it was difficult to think of Madrigal, for she was entwined with thoughts of Jon Pear.

  She took the room apart, inch by inch, studying everything, looking perhaps for an inscription in a book — love and kisses, Jon Pear. But there was none.

  A treasured greeting card. Scribbled-on, ripped-off notebook paper.

  There was none.

  Mary Lee was not surprised to find the same three paperback novels she, too, had purcha
sed, two thousand miles and silence away.

  The extraordinary linkage of Madrigal and Mary Lee had often extended to shopping.

  Vividly, Mary Lee remembered a morning of rage. Not hers. Madrigal’s. In her separate bedroom a year ago, before her own mirror, Mary Lee had stared at herself that morning, bored with the way she did her hair. I’ll part it on the side instead, she had decided. The left side. I’ll hold it back with my new green barrette.

  During her one and only mall expedition with Scarlett, they’d stumbled on a basket piled with gaudy barrettes, marked down from outrageous boutique pricing to affordable leftovers. Mary Lee and Scarlett sorted through every one. Scarlett chose a silver-and-gold braid, while Mary Lee settled on an emerald-green tortoiseshell.

  Mary Lee ran downstairs that day to catch up to Madrigal, who was already having breakfast, only to find that Madrigal, too, had suddenly decided to part her hair on the left, and Madrigal, too, at a different store in a different mall with a different shopping partner, had nevertheless found the exact same emerald-green barrette to hold back her hair.

  Mary Lee was entranced. Out of an entire nation of goods! That two sisters in different malls would choose the identical tiny object!

  But Madrigal had flung back her head, and screamed, a scream of pure wrath, and flung her barrette into the trash. She’d stomped up and down, taking a decade off her age, acting like a toddler in a tantrum. “Why did you have twins?” she screamed at Mother and Father. “I hate sharing my decisions with her! I want to be one person! Make her go away!”

  How quickly Mary Lee had torn the barrette out of her hair. How swiftly she, too, stomped down, going even further than her twin, crushing the offending barrette beneath the hard sole of the brown loafers — shoes she rarely wore, preferring sneakers. Shoes that Madrigal also rarely wore and, dressing separately that morning, had also chosen.

  But later Mary Lee fished Madrigal’s barrette out of the trash, washed it off, and kept it. Very soon after that morning, Mother and Father had decided on the boarding school. But even at boarding school, Mary Lee could not bring herself to wear the green barrette. Madrigal would feel it. Two thousand miles away, would get a headache right on the spot where Mary Lee held her hair down with it.