Keystone (27 page)

“Where’s your grandfather?” I whisper as Zane unlocks the door. The farmhouse windows are all black and there are no cars in the gravel spaces outside. I expect Zane’s grandpa to meet us at the front door with a shotgun.

“Gone,” Zane says, rattling the key in the lock until it pops open. “Passed on, about seven years back. And Gram was the year before him.”

He says it so casually that I have to swallow the knot that pops up behind my tonsils. I’m not sure, even having felt what I did in the circle, that I’m ever going to be able to talk about my mom being gone like it’s not the hugest event in my entire life.

“This place has been the family cottage since then,” Zane goes on.

“It’s not a cottage, jock strap,” Zaneen says. “It’s a safe house.”

“Going to be,” Robin underlines each word in the air with her finger. “Since it’s not quite finished yet.”

“Which no one’s supposed to know,” Zane grumbles.

“Like it matters,” Zaneen adds, stepping inside. She flips on the lights without having to feel around for the switch.

“We have an alarm system that is so accurate, it can zap anything from flies and nuclear warheads,” Zane says it’s hard to tell if he’s just joking. He points to a silver panel installed on the wall. There is a TV screen over the top of it and the whole thing looks like the controls for a space ship- weirdly out of place on the weathered, old paneling. Zane taps it with a finger. “This sucker is wired from the fence, to the grounds, to the barn, to the perimeter, and to the house. Even if someone popped their head through a hole in the perimeter, they’d trigger the ground sensors first. And if they somehow got past the ten acres of trip wires and booby traps, then they’d set off the motion detectors around the barn or the house. And the sirens. And then the knockout gas starts spraying. We’ll just make it easy and say this: No lights and no sirens means we’re all good.”

I lean a shoulder on a doorframe and suddenly feel that degree of tired where I’m fantasizing about how soft and comfortable the wood floor looks. I don’t even realize I’ve closed my eyes until Robin taps my shoulder and I open my lids to see Garrett and his soft grin.

“Go with the girls,” he says as Robin goes to a staircase, around the corner of the kitchen. She breaks in with a deep voice that I’m sure is her imitation of Zane’s grandfather.

“Girls up and boys down,” she barks as she stomps up the stairs. “There’ll be no foolin’ around in Gpop’s house.”

We sleep like slats, the four of us lying wrong-ways, across the king size bed upstairs. But when I wake up with what turns out to be the back of Deeta’s limp hand across my forehead, I scramble out off the bed and my field blows out in a panic. It takes a minute for me to remember where I’m at.

Robin’s gone. Deeta flops over and her hand slaps Zaneen’s cheek hard enough that Zaneen wakes and scrambles out of the bed like I did. But when Zaneen spots me, she gives me an instant glare, as if I was controlling Deeta’s hand.

“That was Deeta,” I say.

“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” she snaps.

Maybe it’s because I’m so tired or because my back is creaky from sleeping with my feet bowed off the side of the bed or because I just can’t take it anymore, but I turn off my
I’d-really-like-to-be-friends
censor and say exactly what I’ve wanted to.

“I don’t want to be enemies,” I tell her.

Her glare narrows even more, until I’m only looking at the smear of yesterday’s mascara. “Who says we’re enemies?”

“You consider us friends?”

“I don’t need to be friends with everyone.” She shrugs. I should just let it go. I should just walk out and know that I tried, but I can’t. I grab her arm and as she tries to wrench it back, the words come blasting out of me.

“Why do you have to hate me so much?” I say, my fingers clamped tight. “I’m not trying to get with Garrett just to stomp all over your feelings.”

“I know,” she growls, ripping her arm loose. Her eyes well up and her smeary mascara runs in fat gray drops down her face. “But nothing’s like it should be. You should’ve been Alo and I shouldn’t be Simple. Did you know I’m the only one in my family, for
generations
, that hasn’t received a sign? You can’t imagine what that’s like—being the useless twin. Especially in my family.”

“You’re not useless,” I say, but I know it’s not very convincing. I don’t know her well enough to know all the ways she’s not.

“It doesn’t matter anyway. It wouldn’t even matter if I got the sign of Addo stamped on my forehead right this second. All
everybody
talks about is you.
Nali’s got balls! Nali re-Impressioned without blinking! Nali’s so awesome, of course Garrett chose her as his Vieo!”

She breaks down in sobs and I lay my hand on her shoulder. Zaneen is not what I thought. She’s only trying to be the twin that can measure up. She’s trying to thrive as a stem of lethal belladonna, different but still adequate, among the generations of Middleditch hemlock. And when she lifts her face out of her hands to look at me, I feel like we’re both trying to chisel through the concrete pain and metal emotions to poke a hole in everything that separates us and finally get a real glimpse at each other.

“I don’t know what other people say about me,” I tell her, “but I can tell you what’s true. I don’t have balls. None. I wish I did. What I’ve got is a corner that I was backed into. The only reason I re-Impressioned without blinking was because…well, what else could I do? The Fury killed my entire family. I re-Impressioned because I know I can’t stop The Fury on my own, but I want to be a part of the community that does.

“And Garrett…I…” My eyes travel away from her, across the floor, up the wall and back to her. “I understand. I’m blown away by him too. It’s just so messed up that we both have to feel that way, about the same guy, at the same time. I’m not with him to drive you crazy. I’m with him because I’m crazy about him. I won the lottery on this one, but it could’ve just as easily been you.”

She steps back, but I see something happen in her eyes. Like a ship rocking, turning upside down. I want to believe that everything she thought of me before is capsizing and that she’s making the effort to climb up the other side of it and see my point of view. She looks away, but then she smiles and wipes her eyes.

“I’ll try
,
” she says. “Not to hate you, I mean. I’ve gotten pretty good at that kind of thing though. Probably from years of being
the Simple Twin
.”

“Thanks. Belladonna.”

She smiles again before she turns and walks out the bedroom door. Just as she disappears, Robin bellows up the stairs, “Nali, Deets, Neen…GET UP! WE’RE LEAVING FOR THE JUNKYARD!”

The farm looks a lot different than it did last night, in the dark. The grounds are a huge mess, chunked up all over, like it’s been turned for planting.

“Those are all the sensors,” Zaneen says beside me. I don’t know why she’s the one wedged between Garrett and I, but I worry that it’s like peeling open the wound in her a little wider. But as I watch her leg knock against Garrett’s, I wonder who’s wound is really worse right now. I try to ignore the itchy, raw feeling I have every time their shoulders bump together.

After what Zaneen told me upstairs, I shouldn’t be the jealous one, but I am. I’m not freaking out that Garrett might suddenly feel something for her and run off to be Simple. It’s way worse. I’m jealous that Zaneen can touch him at all.

I remember fantasizing about being able to touch Garrett whenever I wanted, but then I finally did, and now I know exactly how smooth and soft his skin really is. Even my fingertips ache with the memory. And the whole right side of Zaneen is over there just smashing and touching and brushing and bumping into Garrett like it’s nothing. I let my forehead drop against the window with a thump.

I start counting the clumps where I think sensors might be hidden, but there are too many of them. There’s not a foot between chunks and it’s impossible to tell where one is and one isn’t.

Once we’re out of the front gate, the road twists and turns like a nauseating drinking straw and when it straightens out, we pass through a town that is lined up along the single main road. Then we pass another town that’s only a little more sprawling than the first and the silly-straw road returns for a full half hour of rollercoaster tricks that eventually shake off the black top and give way to a dirt road. And the entire time, Zaneen sings and talks and puts her fingers on Garrett’s arm. Even though I can tell that Zaneen is going out of her way to show me that her touch is completely casual and means absolutely nothing, not being able to do it myself makes me want to rip her fingers off in the nicest way possible.

When I finally catch a glimpse of the junkyard, it’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s a flat cinder block building, miles from the last sign of life we saw, with a crazy-tall, chain link fence behind it. Flattened cars, old tires, and rusty junk are piled so high behind the fence that we can see it over the top of the building when we pull up. The windows are covered in dust the color of dried clay and there’s a sign in the window that looks like it’s never been moved. Handwritten in fat, red marker, it says OPEN. I touch the photo and the card in my pocket and try to make myself happy that the place isn’t closed.

Zane opens the door for me and Zaneen scoots in ahead, with a thank you thrown over one shoulder. Garrett’s right behind me, but Robin scoots between us and I sigh.

The shop smells just like the floor looks: smeared, greasy, brown. There are piles of metal things and rubber things and things that look like they’d never be of any use to anybody, everywhere. Even in the middle of the floor. Zane walks right up to one heap and extracts a small arrow-shaped thing, which sends a million other rusty, sharp things clattering to the floor.

“I haven’t been able to find one of these in ages!” he squeals.

“It’s sixty-five bucks,” a man says as he emerges from a swinging door behind the counter. There’s no doubt that he’s the slouchy boy in the picture, with around thirty years added to his skin, fallen out from the crown of his head, and stuffed into a pair of dirty gray overalls. Clint wipes his fingers off on a greasy rag that does less cleaning than smearing, before dumping the rag on the counter, beside a dirty cash register. He raps his filthy knuckles on the register’s read out. “Considering that you’re still in the hole with me for about eighty, Middleditch, you can just leave that back where you got it.”