Gemini (7 page)

I raised my eyebrows. “Really?” I asked, trying not to laugh. “That's your sob story?”

With a smile, she brought it up a notch. “I'm sure it's perfectly normal to always balance off the side of the toilet while your sister is peeing.”

I shrugged. “That's a
little
better.” I knew I was egging her on.

“I'm sure it's perfectly normal,” she said, “to have to spend your entire life in the world's smallest rural community so that no one will stare and point and laugh at you when you go out in public and see actual strangers.” Her voice dropped to a half whisper. “And it's perfectly normal to terrify any strangers who do come to town.”

We headed back to the kitchen for bowls and cups.

“Are we going to talk about that?” I asked. “Because we don't have to do that, you know. Stay here, I mean. There isn't a force field around Bear Pass. We can cross the town line.”

Dad, on his way to the dining table with a bowl of curry, stopped short. “Wait. Are you talking about going somewhere? A day trip, like I keep asking you to do? I've got a whole list of places we could go in Sacramento. Or if you want to do San Francisco, there's even more. When do you
want to do this? I've got this whole weekend free. We could see about tickets to some kind of show.”

I glanced warily in Clara's direction. Dad was so excited, I didn't know what to say.

Mom emerged from the kitchen with another serving bowl. “This weekend sounds awfully soon,” she said, her brow wrinkled with worry. “If you want to do something like this, we need to take some time to plan and prepare.”

Dad looked at her quizzically. “Why?”

Mom gave me a slow once-over. “For one thing, maybe you could go natural with the hair first. You don't always have to hit people over the head with things.”

“Mom,” I said, “you are rearranging the deck chairs on the world's largest and most beautiful ocean liner. And I lined them up that way for a good reason, and it's really, really important to me, so don't mess with the damn deck chairs.”

Dad laughed, but Mom frowned and shook her head. “You're not the
Titanic
. You're not doomed.”

“Unless being stared at counts as doomed,” I replied, “in which case, we are our own iceberg. Or at least we're attached to our own iceberg. The iceberg is our conjoined triplet.”

Clara and I silently pushed past them to get the cups and bowls, while Mom and Dad put their serving dishes on the table.

The last time we'd tried a day trip had been four years earlier, in eighth grade, and Clara hadn't made it down two blocks of Old Sacramento before she'd fallen apart. The problem wasn't so much the adults looking at us and then quickly averting their eyes, as if they couldn't bear the sight of us, or urging their kids not to look, or hurrying them away from us with fierce whispers—a sight, apparently, too gruesome for the little ones to bear. And it certainly wasn't the little preschool-aged girl who'd grabbed her mother's hand and screamed, “What is that?”

Those things had upped Clara's stress level, sure. And yeah, okay, mine too. But what really did Clara in was the group of kids our own age who poked one another and giggled and gasped like idiots. They were pretending to be quiet, like they thought we couldn't hear them or understand. Like they were trying to be discreet, or they told themselves they were trying, but it was all mixed up with hidden meanness. That was the thing that made Clara run and hide and never go back.

And yeah, okay, if I'm totally honest? Maybe it was also the thing that made me not fight her on it as hard as I should have.

Because those idiot Decepticons had a power over me that I'd never meant to give them. I knew that each one of them was weak and flawed and full of secrets—because who isn't?—but they could hide it all behind a veneer of lip-glossed,
plucked, and flat-ironed sameness. And I couldn't. Like an animal at a zoo, I was on display, and I didn't get a vote about that. Only, unlike a zoo creature, I didn't have any bars or barriers between me and the crowd. They could walk right up to me. They could poke and prod. And I didn't have any teeth or claws to fight back with.

That was before I dyed my hair pink, before I got the tattoo and started wearing a lot of thick eyeliner and black clothes. I know I'm still on display. I know I still have no weapons. But a kind of armor, maybe. A gesture toward controlling the conversation.

As soon as we returned with the cups and bowls, Mom leapt back into the argument. “People don't stare at you as much as you think they do. You exaggerate it in your heads. You think of yourselves as more set apart than you really are. If you would skip the outlandish getups, you'd hardly be noticed.”

She said this with what sounded like total sincerity. Sometimes I wondered if she could even hear herself.

“Mom,” Clara said in a tight voice as we put down the cups and bowls and sat down, “we're one of the rarest mutations in the human species.”

Depending on who you ask, conjoined twins occur in something like one out of every two hundred thousand live births. And quite a lot of those die in the first day. I'm sure there are rarer conditions, but if you could come up with a
formula for how rare it is plus how visibly obvious it is, we might win. The most common condition leading to dwarfism, for example, is somewhere around five to thirteen times as common as being born a conjoined twin, let alone surviving as one. Booyah.

“I wouldn't go with that choice of language,” Dad put in as he took his seat, “but I do have to agree that your hair is not going to have much effect on how much attention you get, one way or the other. It's more a question of whether you can suck it up a little, right?”

“And appreciate the fact that you're able to have these options at all,” Mom added. “Appreciate your health and all the abilities that you have, and the fact that you're both even here, alive. I'm grateful for that every day, you know.”

I supposed she wanted us to say that we were also grateful—grateful to her and Dad, for making the decisions they had. We probably should have been. I just wasn't sure if I could say it again right then.

“Sometimes,” Clara said, “it seems like you're so set on us being grateful and cheery all the time, you're blinding yourself to reality.”

“Oh, honestly.” Mom shook her head. “You're two completely healthy girls. You go to school. You're good students, you have friends, you do practically everything your friends do. You don't think that's a good life? You don't want to be happy with that?”

“That's not what I'm saying,” Clara said.

But Mom went on. “You know, if you'd had surgery, there's an excellent chance that at least one of you would have ended up paraplegic, with a colostomy. Or dead.” She bowed her head. “And I just keep thinking about that baby who died, and these two babies going in for surgery, with the parents knowing full well they might die too. I don't understand these parents who just write off those risks in the name of looking like everyone else.”

“And what I don't understand,” Clara said, her voice rising sharply, “is these parents who just write off the costs of staying conjoined. You think we can do everything our friends do? When was the last time we went snowboarding with them? When was the last time we joined them for a nice day hike? When was the last time we
danced 
?”

The answer, of course, was never. We had never danced. Honestly, I had never given it much thought. But all of a sudden, I thought,
Why?
What was stopping us?

We could walk forward, we could walk backward, we could shuffle sideways, and we could even run a little. Why hadn't we ever danced? Why hadn't
I
ever danced?

“You know,” Dad said quietly, “some of those things you could do. Probably not the snowboarding. But we could work on the rest of it. Broaden your horizons. And I still think visiting a city might be a good place to start.”

No one answered. Mom looked at Clara, then at me. She didn't look upset, just thoughtful, like she was working something out in her mind.

Then she said, “Hold on.” She went to her laptop and quickly plugged a cord into a set of speakers. A moment later a popular dance tune blasted through the kitchen and adjoining dining area.

My mother splayed her hands out around her. “Go on then,” she said, grinning. “Let's do it! Let's dance!”

Unbelievable. She'd heard some of Clara's words, but not the right ones.

When Clara stormed toward the speakers, I followed without resistance. She turned them off, and a loud silence filled the house.

“No,” Clara said. “I'm not going to dance for you. I'm not going to dance for anybody, and I'm not going to pretend that I'm normal for you.”

I drew in a breath.

For seventeen years Clara and our parents had conspired to pretend that we were normal. If Clara was even halfway ready to stop pretending, it would change everything.

“We're not normal,” she said now, her voice harsh and thick with unshed tears. “You can say that we're two totally normal girls six thousand times, and you can say it as fast as you can like a tongue twister, and you can say it every
night before you go to bed like it's some kind of prayer, but I'm sorry, none of that is ever going to make it true.”

I didn't say a word. But as I followed Clara out of the room, absorbing her fury and her frustration and her deep well of sadness, I understood those feelings, but I didn't share them. Instead I felt a crazy tug of hope.

Hailey and I didn't talk much as we got ready for bed that night, taking turns at the sink and exchanging our day clothes, with their customized fittings—Mom had become an expert seamstress because of us—for loose-fitting pajamas, which we were able to wear off the rack.

It was my night to sleep on my left side, which was unfortunate because my left shoulder had been bugging me that day. When we're walking—or doing anything else, for that matter—I'm on the right, so my left shoulder gets hunched toward Hailey, and the right one has to stretch. Plus, there are some discomforts that come with fitting ourselves onto chairs and benches, and of course into bed, where it's hard to shift positions during the night.

Basically, our bodies are healthy, but like anyone else, we can get some aches and pains now and then when we have to repeatedly move, sit, or lie in positions that aren't perfectly comfortable. Weekly physical therapy and massage helps, and Mom knows how to do some helpful massage moves
between our official sessions, but we also try to make things as ergonomic as we can. For sleep, we've found that the best pillow situation is sharing an extra long one, which was really designed to be a body pillow for pregnant women to prop up their elbows and knees.

I thought about asking Hailey to switch sides, but the pain wasn't that bad. It's better to stick to the schedule as much as possible, lest we degenerate into chaos and bickering.

Lying in bed and doing my best to ignore the pain in my shoulder, I tried to focus my mind on something innocuous. But wherever my thoughts went, some anxiety would creep up.

More than anything else, I kept thinking of Max's twisted, angry face just before he'd left the Sandwich Shack. And the pack of mini doughnuts lying smashed on the floor, as if he'd been squeezing them to smithereens as we'd been talking. It was the oddness of it all that made it stay with me. What had he been so mad about?

When I was younger, if I couldn't sleep, I would mentally trace the stars of the Gemini constellation. Dad had taught us to find it when we were as young as six or seven, keeping us up late on certain clear winter nights, when Gemini would be easiest to spot. He didn't know that much about the stars, but for some reason he needed us to memorize every part of those glittering, dazzling twins, so close to each other that
they formed a single constellation. So we would bundle up in sweaters and jackets and follow him outside with our kid-size astronomy books and the star maps that he'd printed out. We would find Orion or the Big Dipper and use them to trace our way over to the bright stars Castor and Pollux, and from there we'd find the rest of Gemini.

For Dad it was all about the timeless beauty of those twins and their love for each other, which was more important to them than life itself. He couldn't have known how for me it would be just the starting point to falling in love with all the stars.

On other sleepless nights I would picture myself in a space suit, floating somewhere near the moon, all alone—no Hailey in sight—unencumbered by the gravitational mass of my home planet and my home body. I imagined looking back at Earth from there, seeing the whole planet all at once, and finally understanding how all the parts of it fit together—the oceans and the continents and the clouds. Because down here on the surface, where I could see only little patches of ground and sky, I felt like a farsighted person trying to read a book. I couldn't understand anything when it was all up so ridiculously close.

But at some point I started worrying about Gemini, the celestial twins. Were they glad to spend billions of years together in the sky, always on display, or would they rather wander apart and explore?

As for traveling to outer space, the wild impossibility of that began to overwhelm me. I was never going to escape the gravity I'd been born to. And what was wrong with me anyway, for even wanting such a thing? I was strange enough on the outside. Did I have to be so strange on the inside, too?

Just when I thought that Hailey must have been asleep, she uttered one of her rarest sentences. “I know you're right.”

“I am?” I briefly savored the moment before I asked, “About what?”

“About us not being normal.”

Her tone was urgent, but her volume stayed low. We try not to let our parents hear us talking in bed. Maybe it's just a holdover from when we were little and they used to keep coming in to check on us.