Look Both Ways (2 page)

Meredith didn’t know whether to hug Mallory or push her off the bed. “You’re crying because you dreamed you saw a cat? What’s wrong with you?”

This was the part where Mallory would usually scowl and tell Meredith to get out of her face: forget it, stuff a sock in it, let her alone, no big deal. But this time, pleading with her eyes, Mallory said, “It wasn’t a cat like a
kitty cat
, Mer. It was a lion. A white mountain lion.”

“A white. Mountain. Lion.” Merry tossed her hair. “Please.”

“It was in school. . . . ”

“In school?”

“Yes, in school.”

“Okay. This concerns me, why? I know! Not at all! Mallory, come on. Make sense.”

Merry got up and went back to the mirror and the array of fifteen jars of foundation spread out on the twins’ dressing table.

Then Mallory said softly, “Merry, it was in
school
, and in the girls’ locker room, where the cheerleaders’ outfits were. There was a row of shoes. . . .”

Merry sat down again.

If it had to do with the cheerleaders, it had to do with Merry. Along with Crystal Fish, she was JV co captain. Meredith tried to ignore the fact that what Mallory was saying was giving her the telltale swizzle of tiny electrical shocks along her arms that usually signaled a real vision. How could it be? The past visions were strange and fragmentary but had some slight connection with reality. A lion in the locker room? Mallory wouldn’t have cried if an
actual
lion had walked into the locker room. She’d have climbed up onto a bench and started throwing field hockey sticks at it.

Carefully, Merry said, “Ster, it’s weird and I know it scared you and it probably means something, but I don’t think it means an escaped lion from the circus is going to get into our school and eat somebody. I don’t think it’s
that kind
of dream. And so now, I have to figure out how I can go to school today without looking like I have leprosy.” More gently, she added, “Stop crying, Mallory. It was just . . . a symbol of your disgust for cheerleaders or something.”

“Merry. I . . . knew her. It. The cat. Personally.”

Merry was giving herself a headache standing up and sitting back down. She could feel a vein in her forehead start to throb.

“You knew the cat,” she said. “Mallory, you sound like . . . me! You mean, the cat was a person in costume? Like a team mascot?”

“No, it wasn’t that.”

“You mean you knew the cat the way you know Sunny’s puppy, Pippen? It was a regular cat in real life but giant-sized in your dream?”

When Mallory looked up, anger in her brimming eyes, Merry quickly recognized her mistake.

“No!” Mally said grimly.

Immediately Meredith said, “I’m sorry! Okay? I’m sorry!”

Mallory glared.

But the mere mention of Sunny Scavo’s dog brought so much dark dust whirling back at them from the past—dust with, in its depths, half-visible things that neither wanted ever to see again. Everyone thought Sunny’s dog had run away. But Mallory’s vision of the dog, tortured by handsome David Jellico, had confirmed their suspicions about David’s “cemetery” for so-called road-killed animals. And the truth about David’s “cemetery” led to so much that the twins had to live with forever, but never tell. Kim Jellico, David’s younger sister, had been Merry’s best friend—at least until last spring. Merry had even had a schoolgirl crush on David.

But as their visions about David escalated into nightmares when he began stalking bigger game than cats and dogs, the twins were pushed into an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse. Scared out of their minds, they interrupted David’s dates and showed up where they learned he would be, trying to make sure that David was never alone with a girl. And at last, he got wise. When they showed up in the muddy rubble of a new housing development where David had trapped some poor girl, no one knew what would have happened if Mallory hadn’t found a nail gun left behind by one of the builders and used it to threaten David if he didn’t stop.

But David didn’t stop.

He stopped only when he fell to his death from Crying Woman Ridge, in a face-off with Merry, who he had cornered on the empty road up into the hills. As Merry stumbled with her bloody knees, some sight or sound had frightened David a moment before he would have shoved Merry to the rocks far below.

The whole mess was proof that what began the previous New Year’s Eve was no passing mischief.

Still, they would never know everything that David had done in his hilltop garden. Yes, if some poor girl was buried up there, her parents should know. But David and Kim’s mom, Bonnie Jellico, an operating-room nurse, had been their mother’s closest friend forever. The twins couldn’t turn to their own parents. With what proof? As it was, Campbell had them evaluated for everything from seizures to hormone imbalances. After the death, all they wanted was blessed ignorance. All they wanted was their own lives. As if they could ever have them again.

It started on their thirteenth birthday, when they were stuck at their uncle Kevin’s, babysitting their brother and little cousins. At ten o’clock, a burst of fireworks—not firecrackers but the kind people saw at displays on the Fourth of July—went off outside. Suddenly, the roof was ablaze, exploding an ordinary dull evening into the deadliest night of their lives. Mallory was barely able to roll off the couch as the roof of the wraparound porch collapsed and the living room curtains swooped down in wings of flame. Confused by the darkness, choking on the smoke, she couldn’t find her way. But with the kids herded to safety, Meredith crawled back into the black inferno of the living room. She knew only that unless she could find Mallory’s hand, she would not be divided but erased. Risking her life to save her twin was risking her life to save her own.

And she had.

Somehow, Merry hauled her twin across the floor and out the door before both of them lost consciousness.

When they wakened in the hospital, they were grateful for their lives but alarmed that something between them had been severed forever. At first, they thought it might just be the shock of the fire and the rescue. But though the plum sunburn on Mallory’s seared face faded, the scars on Merry’s palms from her rescue mission were permanent. For the twins, those scars became a symbol of how they had “disconnected” after the fire.

Somehow, it burned away some essential part of their twin-ness.

If anyone had asked them before the fire, neither might have been able to put into words what that meant. It was beyond words—like the Northern Lights, a natural phenomenon that looked like magic except to people who saw it every day. Even their parents never questioned that Mallory and Meredith could talk to each other with their minds as readily as other people talked to each other with their voices. And though this remained, they still felt severed. They were shut out of each other’s dreams, which used to flow between their sleeping minds, and could only find each other’s thoughts with hard work, like picking locks. Their sight was turned outward, instead of trained on each other. The visions came in dreams, then in tiny fainting spells. But always, the visions came.

After David’s death, they thought it was over until their grandmother, Gwenny Brynn, a twin who was the daughter of a twin and the granddaughter of a twin—all of whom had “the sight”—told them they would be this way forever.

But still, the girls only half believed her.

Until that Monday in fall when Mallory woke screaming, the other half kept hoping.

N
ow, a huge gust of October wind threw the nearly bare branches of the huge maple outside the girls’ window with the tapping of a hundred skeleton fingers, as if to remind them: It was back and waiting.

“There’s nothing we can do but be ready,” Mallory said to Merry.

“I don’t think you ever get to be ready,” Merry answered. “Last time, it took us totally by surprise. We didn’t believe it. I think that’s a pattern. If it was reasonable, and you had a warning and could figure it out, it wouldn’t be psychicism.”

“I don’t think it’s psychicism now,” Mallory answered. “I don’t know what to call it but that’s not exactly a word. In our language.”

“Well, psychic-ish,” Merry said. “Visionism. Mediumism.”

“You’re right about one thing. There’s no name for it. And it smacks you right across the shoulder blades just when you think you’ve got a big lead on it.”

They both thought of the long, clean, green, and vanished summer.

The hassles of being the pre-clairvoyant Brynn twins—the teasing for being both the smallest
and
the youngest kids in their grade, the odd looks Mallory got from a teacher when she couldn’t for the life of her remember even the
name
of the French national anthem and then, after a mental call for help to Merry, suddenly sang out the first line with perfect enunciation—it all seemed so sweet and far away.

“It really was great compared to now,” Mallory said, agreeing with an observation Meredith hadn’t spoken—at least not aloud. “I’d give my left molar to change it back.”

“You and me both,” Merry said.

“You know what Mom says: If wishes were horses . . . ”

“. . . Everybody would have one,” Merry finished for her.

“No. It’s: If wishes were horses, beggars would ride!” Mally said impatiently. “It means that everyone wishes for things that they can’t have, and if wishes came true, even poor people would be like everyone else.”

“But they’d still want horses.”

Mallory sighed. “Oh, Merry, you’ll never change.” She thought
, I’d never have believed how comforting that would be.
For an instant, Mallory cherished how Merry would always be the embodiment of her nickname—a buoyant performer who would rather talk to the Animal Channel than be quiet.

And Merry, who usually despaired of Mallory, an antisocial lump who liked only soccer and soap operas, suddenly couldn’t imagine a world without Mallory, who thought she looked just great in her mesh gym shorts two sizes too big.

Merry’s hair still parted on the right and Mally’s on the left. Merry still wrote with her right hand and Mallory with her left. They still had identical sprinkles of cinnamon freckles across their noses. They still each weighed ninety pounds and stood 4’11 ¼” tall.

No one except the twins would have seen them as different from before or different from each other.

No one could have grasped just how miserable it was to again have to face the fact that they were independent beings with independent psychic powers.

“I started to think it was over too,” Merry began. “And not because everything’s orange Jell-O to me, like you keep saying to everyone. I take it as seriously as you do.”

“It’s just that you haven’t had a dream like the old ones yet, and you’ll know when you do,” Mally said darkly.

“I’m not stupid, Mallory. They look different.”

Mallory perked up. “They do to you too? Is it like . . . I don’t know . . . they’re like movies. Like a real film instead of a soap opera?”

“They’re deeper,” Meredith agreed, but added, “I wish we didn’t know that.”

“I wish someone besides Grandma knew that we did,” Mallory admitted. “Someone . . . normal. Not that Grandma’s not normal.”

“I know what you mean. Someone like . . . us.”

“Our age,” Mally said, and thought for a moment how, last winter, she’d begun to confide in one of her older teammates on the Eighty-Niners, Eden Cardinal. Eden seemed to understand—to more than understand, really. But Mallory stopped short of telling the whole truth. What if Eden really knew? She’d run. She’d think Mallory was a head case . . . or worse. It was too much to risk. Eden was a junior, a popular junior, and the closest thing Mallory had to an actual girl friend. She went out of her way to call Mallory, to come over and force her to come out for a cup of coffee at Latte Java—even after both twins withdrew into a closed society of two following David’s death. Mallory was grateful. But if regular people knew the real story . . . what if they thought that she and her sister were involved in David’s gruesome games? No, no, no. Having secrets was horrible. Being alone with them was horrible. The only worse thing would be other people knowing.

“You’re right,” Merry said. “They’d just talk about us later.”

“I didn’t say that. Did you
hear
me?”

“No, it was honest-to-God just a hunch,” Merry admitted. Without meaning to, for a moment, both of them grinned.

“Drew doesn’t,” Mally said. “He knows and he doesn’t talk about us.”

“Drew only knows the outlines,” Merry pointed out.

Drew Vaughn, their neighbor, had known the twins since they were born. Even the terrors of the past ten months hadn’t scared him off. In fact, he’d lost his job because of the number of times during the David crisis that he had run off to answer the twins’ strange requests or panicky phone calls. Because he was steadfast, they got to keep their lives, at least from the outside. Merry’s friends could still be counted on to swear friendship forever or war to the end—and you could be sure that the vows would last the entire weekend. Big mouths on the team made snide remarks about Mally being so short, she could run through the legs of the defenders, until she brought the Eighty-Niners another trophy. Their mother was a stickler, their brother infuriating, their father happily flaky.

What the twins had become might be as big and mysterious as a dark galaxy, but it could never consume their small, bright, ordinary, annoying, and beloved world.

And now, they would hold on to that world like a rope in a high wind.

B
y the time Mallory had showered away her tears and Merry had applied enough makeup to resemble a Kabuki dancer, both girls were composed enough to race downstairs, grab a bagel, and jump into Drew’s car. Merry planned her own dash with care. Although she normally wouldn’t have been caught dead in a hoodie, she borrowed one of her sister’s biggest ones to slip out under cover before her mother noticed how peculiar she looked.