Gemini (16 page)

“It's not that hard to figure out,” said Gavin. “I know exactly who strips down every night in Max's dirty mind.”

There were a few loud whoops. Hailey and Alek both turned their heads in the direction of the noise, as if by instinct. They were both quiet now.

Against my will I pictured Lindsey in her cheerleading uniform, performing a striptease in front of Max. I supposed all those guys were picturing the exact same thing, with the only difference being that they were presumably a lot happier about the image than I was.

Then Gavin said, “Problem is, one girl at a time isn't enough for this guy. He's planning to double down, this
one is. And I do mean double, and I do mean down. A sweet little blonde and a pink-haired vixen, all rolled into one sick package.”

And everything grew quiet. Not just in the backyard. But in the courtyard, too. The only sound was Rihanna's voice floating out faintly from the living room stereo.
I'm friends with the monster that's under my bed
.

Hailey and Alek were still looking toward those voices, listening. It seemed to me that none of us were breathing.

And then Max said, without a trace of laughter in his voice, “Dude, you are disgusting.”

“Hey, I'm not into judging,” Gavin said. “Whatever you're into. Dudes, trannies, Siamese twins. It's all good.”

I could feel Alek looking at me. And I could feel Hailey looking at Alek. I pulled my arms tight around myself and tried not to look anywhere at all. I had never wanted so badly not to exist.

Max's voice was firm and perfectly controlled. “I am not a pervert.”

Pervert?

I could feel every inch of my own skin. And most of all, that ridge near the bottom of my lower back where I came together with Hailey. The ridge that made me not just one of the girls in the senior class, to be evaluated as hot or not, leered at or asked out or sneeringly dismissed, but something else entirely.

Pervert.

“Come on,” Josh said, laughing. “Who wouldn't go for an automatic three-way with identical twins?”

And Gavin: “Talk about two for the price of one. You know, there are four watermelons, but I heard that between the two of them, they've only got one—”

There was a brief scuffling noise, followed by a screeching sound that might have been metal scraping against concrete.

Then something heavy and solid slammed against the side of the house.

The next voice I heard was definitely Max, but a version of Max that I had never remotely encountered before.

“Dude,” he said—not shouting, but absolutely clear above the music, and without a trace of a stutter—“if you ever. Say that perverted crap. Again. I will smash your face. Against this wall. I will break your arms. You will never. Play basketball. Again.”

We all stood there, not looking at one another—me, Clara, Alek. My mind raced every which way, like a tweaking jackrabbit:

• They were just a bunch of Decepticons. Their puny thoughts were insignificant to me.

• Or, they were right about everything; they were just speaking truths I didn't want to hear.

• Just a week ago, at Max's house, these assholes had pretended to be all friendly and relaxed, and I'd thought that maybe they weren't so bad.

• I'd been an idiot.

• They were giving voice to Alek's secret thoughts.

• But was Alek Max in that scenario, determined not to be a pervert? Or was he Gavin?
Two for the price of one.

• Max was the biggest jerk of all.

• Clara liked him, and she couldn't turn that off in a flash. She couldn't choose to not care.

• Neither could I.

Alek was standing there, hearing it. What was he thinking?

I should say something to Clara.

Alek should say something to both of us.

What was he thinking?

What was he thinking?

Then Amber appeared out of nowhere, gaping at us. Had she heard everything too? Would she be the one to start saying stuff to make us feel better? She would say all the wrong things. I would have to slap her. I would have to scratch her, and then Clara would have to pull her hair. It would turn into a giant catfight.

I giggled. It came out in a kind of gasp, and I realized that I hadn't been breathing. Maybe I was getting giggly from the oxygen deprivation.

Everyone stared at me.

I shut up.

Amber turned to Alek. “Sorry,” she said, “but that's not a costume. You're outta here.”

“Oh yeah, sorry about that,” he said. “I didn't have time to find one.”

“No excuses,” she said. “You've gotta go.”

He frowned. “You're not serious.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Um, Alek,” I said, “Amber doesn't know the meaning of not being serious.”

“That's right,” Amber agreed, oblivious to the insult, “and if you don't get out of here, I'm going to sic the dogs on you.”

We all looked around. Amber didn't have any dogs.

“Okay,” he said, holding up his hands, “I'm gone.”

He slipped away.

We stood there. I was still reeling, punch-drunk. I didn't have a grip on the situation. But there was one thing I knew for sure.

“Actually,” I said, “we have to go too. Clara has a headache.”

Behind me I could feel Clara trembling, her breath coming out in short, shallow bursts.

“We told Juanita and Bridget we'd see them here,” I told Amber. “Will you tell them we had to go?”

“Of course. But can I do anything for you?”

I shook my head. “Is there a quick way out of here, without going through the house or the main yard, so we can just get out front and call our dad?”

She frowned at me for a moment, but then nodded. “Sure. Let me show you where the gate is.”

I have no idea what it feels like to be alone, but the middle of the night is when I can come closest to imagining it. Sure, I can feel Hailey's back pressed against mine, I can hear her breathing, and I'm conscious that I don't have the freedom to get up and move around. But at least I can't feel her mind humming along beside mine. My mind, for once, is on its own.

And what do I do with that mental freedom? Mostly I use it to wallow in old topics that Hailey got tired of talking about years ago. I think, for example, about the Hilton twins, and why they weren't allowed to get married.

Violet and Daisy Hilton were pygopagus twins, which means they were conjoined back-to-back, like me and Hailey. When we were little, Mom sometimes told us stories about the Hilton twins' talent and charm, but she left a lot out, which we learned only when we got hold of a full book-length biography in middle school. Hailey and I passed it back and forth until we were both finished reading, but I was the only one who read it multiple times.

Born almost a hundred years before us, Violet and Daisy were abandoned by their unwed mother, who saw them as monsters, her punishment from God. Then they got adopted and turned into a traveling vaudeville show, without being given any choice about it. My ultimate nightmare—dancing onstage for the freak-ogling crowds, night after night.

What gets me about these twins is that Violet actually found someone who wanted to marry her, and she wanted to marry him, too, but the authorities wouldn't give them a marriage license. Violet Hilton and Maurice Lambert went all around the country trying to get that license, and of course Daisy was always along for the ride, which was why again and again they were turned away. Everyone with power said that a conjoined twin getting married was immoral and indecent. Because, of course, whatever went on between Violet and Maurice, Daisy was always going to be right there with them.

Violet and Maurice finally gave up, but not without getting a lot of press coverage, and Maurice Lambert was soon known throughout the land as a pathetic freak—a man with a conjoined-twin fetish.

All of this happened a long time ago. In many ways the world is completely different now. And in many other ways, it isn't.

Sure, there might be another Maurice Lambert out
there somewhere right now. A guy who would want a girl with another girl attached to her back. But what kind of guy would he be? What would need to be wrong with him, to want a thing like that?

If a guy ever did like me—or Hailey—would he have to be, by definition, a pervert?

These are the kinds of questions that I try to answer in the middle of the night, while Hailey slumbers peacefully beside me.

Some nights are longer than others.

•  •  •

In the shower that morning I scrubbed myself raw. I wanted to remove every last atom of that green witch makeup. If I took off a few layers of skin in the process, fine. I only wished I could scrub my ears so hard that I could erase everything I'd heard in the last twenty-four hours.

When I looked down at my arms, my hands, my belly, I thought,
Disgusting
.

It was true. I was disgusting. A mutant. Had I really forgotten that? Had I imagined, in some fleeting moment, that there was anyone in the world who wouldn't be horrified at the thought of touching me?

I knew I wasn't supposed to absorb Max's words like this. My mom had explained it a thousand times. The way we view ourselves has to come from the inside, not from the reflection that we see in other people's eyes.

But sometimes it seems to me that reflections are all we have. Without them, we could never see ourselves at all.

We took turns getting dressed. Hailey wore black pants with a snug, low-cut, velvet maroon top—it clashed with her pink hair, which I would have told her if she'd asked—and I wore jeans with a lavender button-down shirt. She wore a necklace of rough, chunky metal beads on a leather string, and I wore a dainty leaf-shaped pendant.

Sometimes I don't mind the way Hailey dresses, because it sets her apart from me and allows me to have my separate self by default, without having to do anything but stay bland. But on this particular morning, her top and her necklace made me angry. Her tight shirt, with that expanse of creamy white flesh above it—she had succeeded in scrubbing off all the glitter—made me feel exposed. Her necklace appeared to be made out of rusty old gears or bits of things picked up in shop class, and it looked like at any moment it might tear at her skin and make her bleed.

“Why do you have to wear that thing?” I demanded as I waited for her to apply her makeup. “It's going to give us tetanus.”

It was the first time I'd spoken all morning. Hailey jumped, and her lip liner went skidding across her cheek. “What thing?” She rubbed at the lip liner with the back of her hand.

“You know. That ugly necklace. Where did that even come from?”

She looked down at it. “I ordered it online, remember? You saw me open the package on Friday.”

“Well, it's ugly.”

She raised her eyebrows, stared at me in the mirror, then shrugged. “Yours is pretty.”

She finished with her makeup, and we turned so I could get a good look at myself in the bathroom mirror. Despite all my scrubbing, I saw now that there was still a streak of green running along my hairline on the right side.

“Damn it!” I bit out. “It's never going to come off. Maybe I should just leave it.”

Hailey opened a drawer and pulled out a bottle of makeup remover and a cotton ball. “Get it off now,” she said, holding them out to me, “or you'll feel weird all day.”

“You don't think I'm going to feel weird all day anyway?” I snapped.

Hailey looked at me. Her phone, which was sitting on the bathroom counter, giggled—her standard ringtone. She glanced at it, but she didn't do anything.

Even though Hailey hadn't said a word, I kept arguing with her anyway. “How could I ever have a day where I don't feel weird? They used to put people like us in the circus! We go around this town, acting like everybody here accepts us, like they all think we're just one of the gang, but it's never been true.”

It had been a long time since I'd talked like this out
loud, but suddenly I felt so energized, I knew I should have been shooting my mouth off all along.

Hailey put the makeup remover and the cotton ball back into the drawer. She shut it hard. “You know, you're not the only one who had a crappy night. The party, Alek, those goddamn—and then I barely slept a wink, and you were lying there snoring.”

“I'm the one who was awake all night,” I protested. “You were asleep! Nothing bothers you!”

She gave a short, loud exhale. “Yeah, right. Nothing bothers me. Sure. That's what you have to tell yourself, right? Because your head is so crammed with your own problems, if you tried to make room for mine, your brain would burst open at the seams.”

I stared at her in the mirror. When I found my breath, I managed to gasp out, “What are you so mad about? What did I do?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head. She took in a long breath, so deep I could almost feel it in my own lungs. “It's not even you.”

Quietly I said, “Then why won't you tell me what happened with Alek?”

“He's out of the picture,” she said. “And by the way, I think Mom's trying to fatten us up again. I smell bacon. We should go see about that.”

In the kitchen, our mom was indeed frying bacon. She wore a bathrobe; her hair was unbrushed, her face still puffy with sleep. She barely looked up as we walked in. Clara took two mugs from a cabinet and handed them to me, and I started pouring us coffee.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, “how's it going? How were the trick-or-treaters last night?”

Mom looked up at me with a pained expression. “The trick-or-treaters were very cute,” she said. “Not as many as last year. But very cute.”