Gemini (3 page)

So when Max had walked into our English class earlier, I hadn't actually seen Clara's pupils widen. But I'd caught sight of her smile. I could tell she thought he was cute. And now we were to learn that he was a stargazer, too? She was bound to be intrigued by
that
bit of news.

“Come on, Bridget,” Juanita said. “You know what light pollution is. That's when the city lights keep the night sky from getting totally dark. Right, Clara?”

Clara set down her turkey sandwich and clicked into Junior Professor Mode. “Yes, that's the most common definition. Remember the observatory at Sutter College?”

“Oh yeah,” Bridget said. “We went there, what, like six months ago? You could see a ton of stars.”

“That's because it's so far away from any big cities,” Clara explained. “You'd never be able to see so many stars in LA.”

Bridget took a big swig from her water bottle and nodded thoughtfully. Her little face was all tight with concentration behind her giant glasses. “Yeah, I figured it was something like that, because then he also said that he was totally relieved to get up here in the mountains, where he
could get a decent look at the Andromeda galaxy. But I still don't understand why he would even think that was what Amber was asking him.”

Clara shrugged. “Hey, if you think movie stars are more exciting than a spiral galaxy that's on a collision course with the Milky Way, you're entitled to your own opinion.”

I studied Juanita for a minute, wondering if she was really serious about not being interested in Max.

Juanita caught my eye, and a hint of a smile twitched at her lips. “You know what I was thinking?” she said. “I bet Max would love that observatory we visited. I wonder if he even knows about it yet.”

Was she talking about inviting Max up there for Clara's sake? Or for her own? Did she understand that Clara was interested in him? And even if she did understand, would it occur to her to treat it seriously—to back off if she did like him, like she would for another friend? I had no history to go on here.

“Someone should tell him about it,” I said slowly, looking for clues in Juanita's expression.

Bridget lifted her tiny eyebrows behind her giant glasses and leaned forward eagerly, as if in great suspense—which she probably actually was. “But who?”

Juanita smiled. “Here's what I'm thinking. We tell him we're going up there to see it, and we invite him to go with us. You know, just a casual group thing, no big deal.”

“Really?” Clara asked without looking up, and with maybe just the slightest quaver in her voice. “I thought you said you were done with boys.”

Juanita's laugh verged on a slight cackle. “Oh yeah, I'm done with them, but you're not.”

I almost cackled myself. Of course, I should have known that Juanita would be on top of this, and totally on my side. She didn't want to invite Max to the observatory because she was interested in him herself; she wanted to invite him so Clara could get a chance to know him. In a dark, quiet, beautiful place, where my sister would be totally in her element. And where, because of the darkness, our conjoinment would become all but invisible.

Clara stiffened for a moment, but it passed. “Nice try,” she said, her voice so close to normal that I was pretty sure I was the only one who could hear its thin, sharp edge. “But the observatory is sacred. I won't go there with just anyone.”

“Who says he's just anyone?” Juanita asked. “Don't you want to find out?”

Clara shook her head. “Not particularly, no.”

And this was such a freaking pathetic lie that I couldn't take it anymore. “Well, I do,” I said, “so we're going. That's that.”

“Really?” Juanita looked puzzled. She looked at me, at Clara, and back at me again. “Um, okay, then when should we go?”

“Friday night,” I said.

“Hailey!” Clara hissed. “Cut it out! I don't want to go.”

“But I do,” I said, “and Juanita does, and Bridget does. Right, Bridge?”

“Sure,” Bridget said, “it'll be totally fun. I like the observatory. Plus, it's the perfect place for Clara to ask Max to the Sadie Hawkins dance.”

I cocked my head to one side. Had Bridget just pulled a random idea out of left field, or was she actually a step ahead of us all?

“Ha!” Clara said. “Now, that's a good one. I'm sure one of the cheerleaders has snatched him up for
that
already.”

She jerked her head in the direction of the senior A-list picnic table, where at that very moment Max was surrounded by a veritable swarm of cheerleaders and jocks.

Bridget frowned behind her heavy glasses. “Maybe they haven't gotten around to asking him yet. Or maybe cheerleaders aren't his type.”

Clara shook her head sadly at Bridget's hopeless naïveté. “Bridge,” she said, reaching over to pat Bridget on the knee, “you know I don't like to dance.”

By which she meant that she—
we
—had never danced. Not once. Not even in the privacy of our bedroom.

“Maybe you could go and not dance,” Bridget suggested. “Maybe he would understand.”

Clara froze for just a second, then started talking rapidly,
with forced cheerfulness. “You know what I was actually thinking? This whole Sadie Hawkins concept is pretty sexist and backward. Girls can ask guys out anytime they want, so why do we need a special occasion for it? Maybe we should all boycott this event on feminist grounds.”

Juanita stared at Clara, her eyes alight. “I'm not saying you're wrong, but you seem to feel very strongly about this all of a sudden. What's up?”

“Nothing. Could we just please change the subject? Please?”

Juanita squealed. “Oh, look at you! You're nervous because you
want
to ask him out! Otherwise you would just be ignoring us.”

Clara shook her head, and her voice rose to an unnaturally high pitch. “I don't even know him! I haven't even spoken to him!”

“Yeah, I know,” Juanita said. “But you think he's cute, don't you? Cute plus telescopes—what more do you need? So it seems that Bridget has once again accidentally hit the nail on the head. You are
definitely
asking Max to the dance.”

“Can anyone hear me?” Clara asked. “Am I not speaking out loud? That is not going to happen, I promise you.”

“Sure it is,” I answered, brushing the crumbs from my fingers. “Because if you don't ask him, then I'm going to ask him for you.”

My main priority for the rest of that day was to avoid Max at all costs, which was a little tricky, since I didn't even know which classes he was in. I wasn't sure if Hailey was serious about asking him to the dance on my behalf, but I wouldn't have put it past her. This was the girl who had convinced our fifth-grade teacher to make me go first for every class presentation, in order to help me get over my stomach-churning stage fright. Which didn't even work.

I had spent the last seventeen years trying to camouflage my shocking self with all the bits and pieces of normal life I could grab. My wardrobe was bland but never out of style; my musical tastes were borrowed from my classmates. My opinions, often sharp inside my head, were normally softened before being spoken out loud. When people talked about doing things that, because of my situation, I couldn't possibly do—driving a car, riding a bike, skiing, kissing a guy—I tried not to point it out to them. I tried not to make anyone uncomfortable.

And this, of course, included never attending a school dance, let alone asking a boy to one. I wasn't sure what it would look like if Hailey and I tried to dance, but I was pretty sure it wasn't a sight that anybody needed to see.

Hailey, on the other hand, followed none of my rules. And she adored making people uncomfortable.

So when I saw Max walking in the hallway up ahead of us, grinning and chuckling at something that Lindsey Baker was saying to him, my fear was instantaneous and instinctive. Before I even had time to think about it, I was babbling something to Hailey about needing to go back to our locker, and yanking her bodily away from Max and Lindsey.

Later, when I saw him crossing by a few yards away, I was more prepared, and managed to distract Hailey with some questions about a recent scandal in the art world.

The closest call came when he turned up in our fourth-period physics class. He arrived just as the teacher started to lecture, so Hailey couldn't accost him, but all through class I didn't hear a word that anyone said. Luckily, as soon as class ended, some guys got him involved in a discussion about sports. Hailey didn't try to break in.

Finally we arrived at our last and most pointless class of the day—art.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, art is probably the most unique contribution of the human species, now that we know that chimpanzees can create tools and dolphins have a type of
language. Art may, in fact, be the one thing that elevates us above our animal natures.

I heartily despise it.

“You know why you hate art?” Hailey asked me as we walked into the art room.

“Cut that out,” I said. “I hate it when I'm thinking about something and then you just start talking about it, like you can read my mind. Try to remember that we're not telepathic, okay?”

“I'll tell you why,” she said as she led me over to the cabinet where she always stashed her favorite paints and brushes. “It's because you suck at it.”

“Well, obviously I suck at it,” I said. “That's a given. But also, art itself sucks.” Okay, I don't always soften my opinions when it's Hailey that I'm talking to.

She shook her bright pink head. “You just don't get it.”

“Or,” I suggested, “maybe there is nothing to get.”

I helped her carry her paints and brushes over to her easel, where she had already sketched out and begun to paint a portrait in the medieval style.

This was something she'd been doing since the end of junior year. She'd copy the painting techniques from the Middle Ages, back when nobody had figured out things like perspective to give dimension to things, so it all looked flat and depthless. Back then the one thing that everybody wanted to paint was the Madonna and child. So Hailey
adapted that format to paint things like a curvaceous pop star holding a tiny photographer on her hip, or in this case, a woman in a burka cuddling a naked baby girl.

If it were anybody else, I would have guessed she was just pretending to have a point, but Hailey is always sincere. Still, when it comes to her art, she keeps her words to herself. Whatever she's trying to say, she says it only with paint.

Hailey took her time setting up her equipment. There were maybe fifteen kids in the art class, and lately Hailey had been grabbing a spot near the window each day. She said it was for the light. She never said it had anything to do with being near Alek Drivakis, who just happened to always work nearby.

Alek had been doing this thing where it would be like a Thomas Kinkade painting, one of those cute English-cottage-and-flowery-garden scenes, except there would be a corpse rotting in the yard, or half the cottage would be burned to the ground. Two months into the school year, he had nearly finished the third painting in the series.

When he arrived that day, Hailey was swirling a brown oil together with a cream on her little palette. It seemed to me that she glanced up at Alek, then too quickly away, as he stowed his black messenger bag and got out his supplies. But I might have been making this up, because I can't ever see Hailey's face that well. It's hard to say how much my reading of her is sisterly instinct and how much is pure invention.

Alek is always dressed head-to-toe in black, and his hair
and eyes are dark, dark brown. He's only a hair taller than we are (and we're average-size for girls), but I have to admit that when you look him right in the eyes, he turns out to be surprisingly good-looking.

It's funny how a face like that can slip through the cracks, going unnoticed by most of the girls, maybe because he's short and doesn't play any sports, or maybe because people still remember when he first came to town, moving in with his grandparents back in seventh grade. He would sit in class drawing pictures of people being killed in a startling variety of different ways, and he kept his head down, his face obscured by his hair falling across it, and never spoke to anyone if he could help it. There were rumors that he had murdered his parents, or alternatively, that he had witnessed them committing murders and that they were now in prison. Those rumors had long since faded, but I supposed they had left their mark.

Today he brought his paints and his brushes, canvas, and palette over to the easel where he liked to work, but before beginning, he came over to look at Hailey's painting. They faced it together, so I couldn't see either of their faces clearly.

He said, “How did you make her eyes look so sad?”

“Well,” she said, “see, there's this line here, and I thought the shape of the eyebrow, like that?”

For a moment I could hear my own breathing, and Hailey's, too, hers a little faster than mine.

“Your paintings rock,” Alek said at last. “They make my brain feel the burn.”

“Thanks,” she said quietly, in a way that she was never quiet. And then, after hesitating in a way that she never hesitated: “That means a lot, coming from you.”

I knew he wanted to say something else. They both did. And it hit me. She was going to ask him to the dance. Maybe even right that minute.

The invitation was inevitable—I could see that now—but did I want her to just go ahead and get it over with? No, I did not. Even Alek wasn't enough of a weirdo not to be horrified by the thought of dating a conjoined twin. He would turn her down—maybe nicely, maybe not—and from that point on, every moment that we spent around Alek was going to get more and more painful, full of awkward humiliation on all sides.