Gemini (23 page)

“Black,” she said. “Black will do just fine.”

“So,” I said as the minivan pulled out of the parking lot, “we need to stop at the mall to buy a couple of dresses.”

I tried to make this sound like the sort of normal, casual thing that I might say on any ordinary weekday. Never mind that we had never been to a mall in our lives. Mostly we shopped online.

“Don't be silly,” Mom said. “It's November. You don't need any dresses in November.”

“I meant formal dresses,” I explained patiently. “For the Sadie Hawkins dance. I'm going with Alek. And I thought Clara just might want to tag along, so she'll need a dress too.”

Mom didn't answer. I gave Clara a sidelong glance, worried that she would side with Mom, but she didn't say a word. In fact, if I wasn't mistaken, she was smiling faintly.

“Yes,” she said, “I think I'd like to get a dress for that.”

I didn't understand what was going on with Clara today. But at the moment I definitely liked it.

“Absolutely not,” Mom snapped. “You are not going to any dance with that boy, Hailey. And I do not want you spending any more time around him.”

“Really?” I gave a short, bitter laugh. “Why, what did he do to you?”

Mom glowered at me in the rearview mirror. “That was the same boy who came to our house all covered in blood the other day. You were angry at him. You were telling him to leave. You sounded like you never wanted to speak to him again. And now you're going to a dance with that boy? I don't think so.”

“Alek,” I said. “His name is Alek, not ‘that boy.'”

“Well, you're not to talk to him anymore,” Mom said. “He's bad news. I can tell.”

“Oh, you can
tell
,” I spit out. “That's a good one, Mom.”

“Hailey!” Mom turned around to glare at me over her shoulder.

“What do you want me to say?” I demanded as she turned her attention back to the road. “‘Gee, Mom, sure, I'll stay away from this guy because you don't like the look of him.' Because that's what you've taught us all our lives. That's what you've preached to the whole town, right, that if someone looks weird, you should definitely avoid them? You know, he's the only one who—Oh, forget it.”

“What?” Mom demanded sharply. “The only one who what?”

I shook my head. There was no point trying to explain.

No, that wasn't it. It wasn't that there was no point. It was that I didn't want to. I wanted to hold this feeling inside myself and not share it with her. Not even share it with Clara. I didn't want to try to put it into words, even for myself.

Mom looked at Clara in the rearview mirror and asked, “What was she going to say?”

“I can't read her mind, Mom,” Clara said bitterly. “You should know that.”

Mom gripped the steering wheel tightly, her knuckles white. “I never said it was based on how he looked. It's the conversation that went on at our house. I don't want any more of that sort of thing going on.”

I stared at my reflection in the window, then decided to try a different tack. “What if I went with a different boy? Then could I go?”

“To the dance?” Mom exhaled sharply. “Why do you need to go to this dance so badly?”

“I'm just trying to figure out your exact policy on dating,” I said. “Am I allowed to date other boys, as long as they're not Alek?”

“I'm sure you could go to this dance without a date,” Mom said. “They allow that, don't they?”

“Why won't you just answer the question?”

There was no response.

“Well, look. One way or another, we
are
going. If you and Dad won't drive us, we'll get Juanita or Bridget to drive us. You're not going to physically stop us from leaving the house, are you?”

Mom hit the brakes, hard. It took me a second to realize that this was because we'd arrived at a traffic light.

We sat there, silent, as the light stayed red. And stayed red. And kept staying red.

Up until now my mother had never expressly forbidden us to date. But I think she had assumed it would never come up.

When we were little, Clara and I sometimes played with baby dolls. We would pretend to bathe them in a little doll bathtub, push them in a double stroller, and take them to the “beach” at one end of our living room. And sometimes we would talk about “when we're mommies someday.”

I'm not sure exactly how old we were when Mom started to quietly shut the fantasy down. It seems to me that when we were little, she would smile when we talked about what we would do with our babies someday and what we would name them, and then later she stopped smiling, and later still she stopped meeting our eyes.

But maybe that's not even true. Maybe she had always had that same pinched, closed-off look when we brought it up, and it just took us a while to notice.

As we got older, we stopped talking about being
mommies or getting married when we grew up. Our mom was always carrying on about how normal we were and what normal lives we could lead, but I think we both began to understand that she didn't actually believe this. Or maybe in some ways she did, but not in others.

And it wasn't that I wanted to marry Alek anyway. It wasn't that I wanted to have his babies.

Did I want that someday, with someone? It was hard to say. There were so many uncertainties behind that question, so many far-flung unlikelihoods and questions buried deep inside it that it was like a tangled knot of yarn that I'd set aside, pushed deep into a corner of the closet of my mind. I didn't know what I would want someday, or what might be possible.

But I knew what I wanted right now. I wanted to dance with Alek. I wanted to feel his hands on my arms, my waist, my skin. And I wanted him to look at me again, the way I had caught him looking at me a few times now, when he thought I hadn't noticed. I wanted him to look at me like that, and to do it even when I was looking back.

The light turned green.

“Clara,” Mom tried as the minivan pulled forward, “you don't want to go to the dance, do you? You've never been interested in that sort of thing, and just because Hailey has this forceful personality—”

“No,” Clara said, “she's not forcing me. I agreed to it.”

“You
want
to go?” Mom demanded incredulously.

Clara shrugged. “What I want is for Hailey to go. And I'm willing to go with her.”

“Well, I'm not willing—”

“Mom,” Clara said, her voice quavering just a little, “we're almost eighteen. You have to start letting us make our own choices.”

Mom didn't answer. She just kept driving. But a minute or two later, when I looked up into the rearview mirror, I saw that she was silently crying.

Late that night I whispered into the darkness, not even knowing for sure whether Hailey was awake or not. “I want to talk to a surgeon.”

I felt Hailey's quick intake of breath, and then the absence of any breathing at all. Finally she said, “I truly did not think you were serious about that.”

“Well, I was.”

Her voice turned sharp. “You're afraid of walking down a city sidewalk. You're afraid of going to a dance at our own school. But you're not afraid of elective surgery that might very well kill us both?”

I breathed in her anger. I held it in my lungs until I could speak. “I didn't say I wasn't afraid.”

She made a frustrated noise, half groan, half wail. “Clara, honestly, you can't be this in love with Max. You're going to cut us apart on the off chance that he might start liking you then?”

“It's not Max.”

“I'm sorry, that came out really mean, but I just—”

“It's not Max,” I repeated more forcefully. “I want you to go to art school, Hailey, and I don't want to come with you.”

“Oh, Clara,” she said, her voice quiet and sad, “we don't have to go to art school. I've always known that wasn't going to happen.”

“But I want you to. I want you to have the life you want.”

“And what about you? What would you do then?”

“I don't know.”

I would have to go off to college somewhere, I supposed, since I would have no excuse to stay back in Bear Pass. I would have to learn how to live on my own—without Hailey, without my parents, without my familiar landmarks. The whole idea made my stomach churn painfully. I had to try not to think about it, though. Had to focus on doing the right thing. The right thing for Hailey, and maybe for myself.

“Caltech?” Hailey suggested. “Berkeley?”

My chest tightened, and my throat felt dry. “I haven't given it that much thought.”

“Well, we couldn't go anywhere right away,” Hailey said. “If we actually got surgery, I'm sure the procedures and recovery would take up our lives for a good long time before we could move on.”

I hadn't thought about that. But it was almost a relief—a waiting period.

“You know,” she said, “you really don't need to keep
worrying about all this. We can go to Sutter. I'll apply to film school there, and the painting program too, and it will be fine. I've been thinking a lot about it, actually, and I'm okay with it. Hopefully we can live with Juanita and Bridget. But even if we have to live at home, it's still okay.”

“I don't believe you, Hailey. I don't believe that would be okay for you at all.”

“I still think,” she answered gently, “that this is kind of about Max.”

I could still see him looking down at me, a sadness in his clear blue eyes that was maybe not quite pity but close enough.
Honestly? I have no idea.

“It's not about Max,” I said.

“You're talking about a huge decision,” Hailey said. “You're talking about risking your life and changing everything. And it's the first time you've ever told me that you want this. Are you completely sure it's not about Max?”

“God, Hailey, would you just—I just— It's not him, but any other guy I ever— This is what I'm always going to be to everyone who looks at me, ever. And I'm sorry, Hailey, I'm not trying to make you feel bad, and maybe it's different for you, but I'm afraid I'm going to be lonely for the rest of my life.”

Out of nowhere a sob wrenched my body. I covered my face in the darkness.

I had thought I was suggesting surgery for Hailey's
sake, so she could go off to art school and pursue her ambitions. I had never meant for the conversation to take this pathetic turn.

Hailey leaned a shoulder against me, the back of her arm brushing mine, her skin surprisingly warm. Her foot touched the bottom of my calf, and I could feel the pressure of the touch in my own leg, but I could also feel it in her foot, in the nerve endings that transmitted their information up through her body to the base of our spine, and from there up to both of our brains.

She said, “We might be the least lonely people in the entire world.”

“I know,” I said, forcing myself to breathe normally, even as the tears still flowed. I knew the truth of what she was saying; I accepted it as a fact; but I couldn't feel its weight any more than I could feel the weight of the Earth's atmosphere pressing down against me. It was just a part of my existence.

“I know,” I said again. “But don't you want someone to look into your eyes from the outside and just love you for who you are, for all of you?”

She didn't answer.

After a minute I said, “And it's not only that. Other people just do what they want to, you know? They just get up and go. They don't have to negotiate every move they make. They don't have to compromise.”

Hailey gave a short laugh. “Well, which is it? You want love, or you want freedom?”

“I want both,” I said, and the anger that I'd breathed in from her began to grow inside me. “I want both, and if we stay together, I don't see how I'll ever have either one. Or how you will either.”

“You're willing to die for that, Clara? We're only seventeen. We haven't even really started our lives yet. We don't know what we can have and what we can make happen. Are we not going to give ourselves a chance?”

“But that's what I'm saying. That's what I want. I want a chance.”

“But I mean a chance at life as ourselves, Clara, without tearing ourselves apart.”

“That's not what it is. We can still be ourselves. We can be more ourselves, if we're not standing in each other's way. Cutting ourselves from each other isn't the same as cutting ourselves apart. It doesn't make us any less of who we are.”

“Doesn't it?”

I couldn't answer. Really, how could I know what it would mean to separate ourselves from each other? How could I know whether I would still be myself or not, without her?

She sighed. “Well, anyway, it doesn't matter, because it would kill Mom and Dad. We can't do that to them.”

I thought about Mom in the kitchen, watching those
video clips, nearly in tears over those baby girls whom she'd never even met.

I imagined our parents sitting in a hospital waiting room like all those parents in the news clips, waiting for their conjoined twins to be separated, hoping that they both might survive. I tried to imagine how that would feel for them, but of course I couldn't imagine it at all.

“It's not even a question,” Hailey said. “Not when you think about it that way, right?”

“We don't even know what the odds are,” I said, so quietly that I could barely hear my own voice.

“Clara, they've shaped their lives around us. Mom sacrificed her career, and Dad basically did too, compared to what he could have done.”

This was true; he'd given up a tenure-track position in UCLA's English Department to move up here and teach at a place that nobody had ever heard of. This was not the life he'd once been destined for.