Gemini (4 page)

To stir up some distracting controversy, I said, “I don't know. I mean, I really like the colors you're using, Hailey, and maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't it all look a little flat?”

And then they both jumped in to explain about how Hailey
meant
to do it that way. Mission accomplished.

After about five minutes of their joint lecture, Alek turned to Hailey and said, “Well, good luck with that painting. You better let me see it when it's done,” and he went back to his own easel, and that was it. Crisis averted—for now.

But Hailey painted in fits and starts, and I was aware of it because I was distracted too.

Since I do indeed suck at art, I use the class time for independent study. I was doing a semester-long unit on cosmology. This is the sort of thing that normally interests me more than I want to admit, even to myself; I don't think normal people get this kind of thrill from the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, or from knowing that the distant galaxies are racing away from us at such an accelerating rate that someday they will disappear beyond the cosmic horizon, no longer knowable to us. I don't think normal people look up at the night sky and feel this weird, almost painful yearning to be up there, looking back at Earth and seeing it whole, even while knowing that they never, ever will.

But today was different. I couldn't concentrate on my book because I was too conscious of the tiny, suffocating details that pushed right up against me, from Hailey's little huffs of painterly frustration to the way that Alek kept his head bowed down tight over his work.

I stared at the scratched-up window. I tried to think about the big bang and about how even now, at this very moment, another big bang might be happening somewhere, creating a whole new universe with its own set of rules. But all I could think was,
My sister hasn't even learned the rules of our own universe. And she's about to mess up our world.

Every Monday we go to the Sandwich Shack after school, even though the Sandwich Shack sucks. We're talking stale sandwiches, bitter coffee, flat soda. On the plus side, it is right next door to our school.

Monday's the one day when both our parents teach late afternoon classes over at Sutter College—eighteenth-century lit for him, freshman writing for her. If Clara and I wanted to get home right after school, we'd have to squeeze into the back of Bridget's aging VW bug. It can be done, but let me tell you, it ain't pretty. So instead we meet up with Bridget and Juanita for disgusting snacks and drinks.

Clara and I were already sitting down with our crappy coffee and mercifully pre-packaged Rice Krispies Treats when Juanita rushed in and dropped into a chair across from us. She dumped her bags all over the scratched linoleum floor.

“Oh my God,” she said, “I am going to strangle someone. Maybe myself.” She dropped her head into her hands.

“Hey, Susie Sunshine,” I said brightly, “what's going on?”

“Oh, just this whole stupid thing with the college apps. Pletcher made me stay after class again today, so she could give me another freaking lecture about my future. Like it's any of her business anyway. She's just my calculus teacher, not my guru. I need some sugar. Caffeine. Anything.”

Clara handed her a Rice Krispies Treat. “Let me guess,” she said. “Pletcher still wants you to apply to Stanford.”

“Duh,” I said. “Because she's a shoo-in.”

Juanita yanked open the Rice Krispies Treat. “Thank you. This is awesome. But no, I am not a shoo-in.” Her voice was tense and exhausted. She bit into the Rice Krispies Treat and talked around it as she ate. “But it doesn't even matter. The point is, she's hounding me about it, and not just Stanford, either. She has a whole list of places where she wants me to apply, and they're all private, and my parents will have a conniption if I even bring it up again, so whatever I do, somebody's mad at me.”

I held in a sigh. Juanita was always far too worried about people being mad at her. But we'd had that discussion many times before, and there was no point having it again.

“But can't you explain to them—” I began.

“Don't you think I've tried?” She took another bite. “They've seen all these news stories about the rising costs of college, and I keep trying to explain about financial aid, but they just don't understand that I'm not going to bankrupt
them. And of course most of the places Pletcher is talking about are on the other side of the country, so you've got to think about airfare and not being able to come home very often and all that. Anyway, they won't even pay the application fees, so that's it.”

Clara twisted toward Juanita. I shifted away to accommodate her, although it made it hard for me to see Juanita's face.

“Okay,” Clara said, “but what's wrong with Cal? I really think you'll get in, and then you won't have to worry about all these other places, right? I mean, I know it's nice to have options, but Berkeley is one of the best universities in the world, and it's public. Can't you just tell Pletcher that's where you really want to go, and then maybe she'll drop it?”

In my peripheral vision I could see Juanita sinking down lower in her seat. I twisted my head toward her and saw the way she curled into herself.

“Something else is wrong,” I said.

“Yeah.” Juanita's breath caught, almost like she was trying not to cry. “You guys, I don't know why I haven't told you. I guess I've been trying to block it out, like if I don't say it out loud, it won't be real. But my mom has been saying that even the UC system might be too expensive. She's been saying I could live at home and commute to the community college a couple of days a week, and maybe transfer after a couple of years.”

Something inside me went cold. “She's not serious,”
I said. “After a couple of
years
? Two more years of living in Bear Pass? The place you can't wait to get away from? There. Is. No. Way.”

Clara shifted behind me, with a tense little breath that was not quite a sigh.

I pressed on. “Not after all these years of working your ass off in school. Which you didn't even have to do, because you're so much smarter than everyone else in our class. You could have been valedictorian without even trying.”

As I spoke, I twisted myself back around to face her, pushing Clara away in the process. But Juanita wouldn't look up and meet my eyes.

“I don't know,” she said quietly. “I think my mom might be a little scared of me leaving. Scared she'll hardly see me anymore. Scared I'll turn into someone different. I'm not sure.”

I shook my head. “That's not fair to you.”

Juanita bit her lip. “It's not so bad, I guess. I made the best of high school, and I can make the best of this. I can always transfer later.” She squeezed her lips together, and I thought of all the kids we'd known, a few years older than us, who had said they would transfer later, and never did.

“But it's ridiculous!” It came out as a shout, but that was fine. I wanted to scream. “You can't stay home and commute for no good reason! The Ivy Leagues have amazing financial aid! They'll give you a free ride!”

Juanita played with her Rice Krispies wrapper, still not looking at me. “You're with Pletcher on this? You want me to go off to, like, Princeton or Brown or something?”

It was weird how cold I felt, like someone had taken away my body's ability to warm itself.

Juanita had been best friends with me and Clara since the sixth grade. Sometimes she seemed like the only person in the world, outside of our parents, who could honest-to-God see us not as the Twins but as just plain Hailey and Clara. The farther away she went, the less we would see her. And who else would ever be able to see us like she did?

But all these years, knowing that Clara and I were destined never to leave Bear Pass, I'd hitched my fantasy life to Juanita's.

My own future, along with Clara's, had been laid out since infancy. Our parents had searched the whole state of California until they'd found the perfect place for us to grow up and live out our lives. A small community where we could get a complete education, and maybe even find suitable work, without ever having to deal with all those scary hordes of staring strangers.

Starting college would be the hardest part—even Sutter would involve a lot of new faces—but with only about five hundred students, Sutter would be small enough for everyone to get used to us pretty quickly. And then we could go back to disappearing in the crowd.

But Juanita wasn't tied down. She had no limits. She was the one who would go to the East Coast. She was the one who would backpack through Europe and Southeast Asia. If we had to stay holed up here, unseen and unseeing, she would be the one to fly.

“I just want you to do everything you ever dreamed about doing.” My voice sounded weirdly bitter. “Is that too much to ask?”

Juanita gave a short laugh. “Okay, I need a soda. Can I get you something?” She looked at Clara. “Another Rice Krispies Treat? I kind of inhaled yours.”

We shook our heads. When she was gone, I said quietly to Clara, “Don't you ever want to get out of here?”

Clara snorted.

“I'm serious,” I said. “We've lived our whole lives in a town of four thousand people. We go to a school where we basically know every single person, and there's never anybody new to talk to—”

“Or anything new to look at,” Clara finished for me, with a voice that might as well have been a long, slow, exasperated sigh.

It was possible that I might have mentioned this a time or two before.

“And now,” I pressed on, “we're going to go one town over for the next four years, to a college that's barely any bigger than our high school, where they hardly have an art
program, and where, frankly, they let in pretty much everyone who applies.”

This was the part that I hadn't mentioned for a few months, since our last big fight about it, when I'd backed down once again. Clara always hyperventilated at the thought of leaving Bear Pass, even to go to a restaurant, or to buy new clothes. Which was why we never did those things.

At different times a couple of people had asked us whether we felt stifled and trapped by being attached to each other. This always seemed stupid to me, like asking if I felt imprisoned by gravity. I mean,
No
. Like,
Should I?
And like,
I'm a land mammal. Did you want me to be something else?

But never leaving Bear Pass—well, that was different. Being attached to Clara made me who I was, and I liked who I was. Being in Bear Pass was just a circumstance. And it was one that I could very much envision changing.

But asking Clara to move away was just too much. Plus, unlike Juanita, we could get a free ride at Sutter College, the private four-year college just an hour away, where our mother was a lecturer and our father was a tenured professor. Expertise in literary theory and British poetry doesn't traditionally come with all that many perks, but free tuition for your kids can be a pretty good one.

“They do have art!” she whispered back, and I tried to let it go, but I couldn't.

“You know the painting faculty sucks. They're all stuck in the twentieth century.”

Okay, maybe I did have a flash of guilt as I said this, remembering how a couple of years ago Dad had gotten this one Sutter art professor to come and work with me every other week for six months. He'd paid her, but I knew that wasn't the main reason she'd done it. And she had helped me a lot back then. But still.

“Well,” Clara said, “the film studies—”

“Film studies! Great. Okay, Clara, yeah, I'll do film studies, and then we can move to Hollywood.”

“I just meant—”

Just then Bridget breezed in, smiling and waving to us, and we both shut up.

“
You're
still sticking to your plans for next year, right, Bridge?” Clara asked as Bridget scooted into a chair across from us. “Still coming to Sutter with us? You haven't scrapped that so you can go do missionary work in Peru or anything?”

Bridget laughed. “Can you imagine? I'd be lost and confused all day. The locals would waste oodles of time taking care of me. No, it's Sutter for me.” She shrugged.

“You sound pretty thrilled about it,” I said.

She didn't catch my sarcasm. “Yeah, I'm totally excited. My brother's already there, you guys will be there, and a bunch of other people we know. It'll be great. It'll be just like high school.”

A shudder ran through me, and I couldn't stop myself from muttering, “Oh, God help me.”

Clara kicked me in the calf, then flinched at the pain. Because of our conjoined lower spinal column, she could feel my leg as much as I could, so it was pretty much like she was kicking herself.

“Nothing wrong with that,” she said, smiling at Bridget.

Bridget went up to the counter to order. Juanita was headed back, but there was a moment when they paused to greet each other, and I turned as far toward Clara as I could and said what I had been stopping myself from saying for the past however-many months: “We don't have to be trapped here forever, you know. We could go to any school in the country. We could get in anywhere we want.”

After a moment she said quietly, “Because we're conjoined twins?”

I rolled my eyes. What did she want me to say? We basically had straight As and solid SAT scores, and okay, if we hadn't been conjoined twins, maybe that wouldn't have been enough. But we were, and it would.

“It's not too late,” I said. “We have time to apply.”

“Can you imagine what Mom—”

“Anywhere we want!” I whispered, and then Juanita was back, sipping her coffee, the gloom mostly gone from her face.

“Did I ever mention,” Juanita asked with a forced cheeriness, “that this is the worst coffee in the entire world?”
She looked back and forth between us. “What are you two arguing about, anyway?”