by Kat Zhang
“She just left,” the teacher said. Her hand was still pressed against her chest. “Really, is it such an emergency?”
Addie was already halfway out the door. “No, it’s not. Sorry.”
We scanned the faces in the lunchroom for Hally’s black-rimmed glasses, searched for a glimpse of her long, dark hair among the café’s coffee drinkers and newspaper readers. But she was nowhere to be found. By the time we left the café, lunch was more than half over.
Hally’s teacher eyed us as we reentered her room. Addie slid into a seat by the door, crossing our arms on the desk. We waited. And waited.
But she didn’t. The minutes passed, long and silent. Hally’s teacher cleared her throat. We ignored her. Finally, Addie stood.
But Addie shook her head and gripped our skirt, wrinkling the cloth in our fists. Taking careful, measured steps, she walked out the door.
Addie froze. I felt her mind go white. Hally hadn’t seen us yet. She stood by her open locker, fiddling with her books. Where had she been? How hadn’t we found her? That didn’t matter now.
But Addie didn’t budge.
Our feet stayed glued to the floor, our lips stapled shut. There were only half a dozen feet separating us and Hally, but it seemed like the world.
A fist closed around our heart. Addie took a painful step forward.
“Hally?” she said. Our sweaty hands fidgeted at our sides.
Hally’s head lifted just a little too quickly, her lips twitching upward. “Oh, hey, Addie,” she said.
Addie nodded. She and Hally stared at each other. I wrestled with my impatience. If I pressed her, it might snap her already slingshot-tight nerves. But if I didn’t, she might lose her courage.
Come on, Addie, I prayed. Come on. Please.
“I . . .” Addie said. “I . . . um—” She looked around, ensuring there was no one listening. “Eva,” she said, so quietly I feared Hally wouldn’t hear her. “Eva wants to learn.”
Our voice gave out. Addie wasn’t even fidgeting anymore, just staring straight ahead, not quite meeting Hally’s eyes.
“Oh, great,” Hally whispered. “That’s great, Addie. Just fantastic.”
Addie gave her a rigid smile.
The end-of-lunch bell rang. Hally grabbed one last book, then banged her locker shut. Her smile lit up her eyes. “I’ll meet you by the front door after school, okay?” she said. “We’ll go to my house. You’ll meet Devon and Ryan properly. It’ll be great. I promise.”
Ryan. The name of the second soul dwelling in Devon’s body. I tucked it away, another piece of these past few days that I just knew were going to change everything.
“All right,” Addie managed to say.
Some boys were already coming up the hall, chatting and laughing. Addie stood by Hally’s locker, watching her walk back to her classroom. But just as Hally was about to enter, she turned and darted back. The group of boys was almost upon us, but Hally leaned in and whispered with a laugh, “This is fantastic, Addie. Really. You’ll see.”
This time, Devon was sitting at the kitchen table when Hally opened the door. He had a screwdriver in one hand and what looked like a small black coin in the other. A mess of tools lay scattered across the table, half encircling him like some sort of wall. He looked up when we appeared in the doorway, then returned to his tinkering with only a nod hello.
“Hi,” Addie said. Her voice had none of the spark she usually pumped into first meetings. With other boys, she could craft a mask of smiles and laughter. She seemed to hardly want to glance at this one.
Why? Because he wasn’t really one boy, but two? Because hidden inside his body were twin souls, nestled side by side?
If so, then Addie looked away for exactly the same reasons I wanted to stare until I memorized the shape of his face. But I wasn’t the one in control.
“Want some tea?” Hally asked. She’d bustled inside after kicking off her shoes and was already halfway to the fridge.
“Tea?” Addie said.
“Yeah. It’s good. I promise.”
Addie bent to untie our shoes, picking at the thin laces. “Okay, sure.”
Nobody said anything about why we were here. Addie stood by the doorway, our arms crossed, our hands gripping our elbows.
I wasn’t sure. We looked to Hally, but she was too busy rummaging in the cabinets to notice. Devon tightened something in his coin, frowning as he did so. Addie and I might as well have not been there.
Finally, Hally turned and laughed. “Well, don’t just stand there, Addie. Come on, sit down.” She pointed to the chair across from her brother. “Devon, entertain her while I get something from upstairs.”
The boy raised an eyebrow without even looking at her. “Isn’t she your guest, though?”
Hally rolled her eyes. “Ignore him,” she whispered as she passed us en route to the stairs. “He’s just rude and antisocial like that.”
“Ignore her,” Devon said, still intent on . . . whatever he was doing. “She’s just upset Ryan took apart her doorknob.”
Hally pulled a face at him, and then she was gone, leaving us and Devon alone. Addie still hadn’t moved.
“You can sit down, if you want,” he said, finally raising his head.
Addie nodded and, after another awkward second, walked over to the chair. She sat. Devon turned back to his tinkering and tools. The seconds ticked by.
Devon looked up.
“So, um . . .”
He didn’t speak. Didn’t say Yes? Do you want to ask me something? He just watched us, his face still half tilted toward his hands.
“So are you really Devon right now, or should I be thinking of you as Ryan?”
The question burst from our lips, and no matter how fast Addie shoved our fist against our mouth, she couldn’t take it back. I was too shocked to speak.
Devon blinked. Or was he Ryan? No, he couldn’t be; he’d just referred to Ryan. The boy frowned, looking more nonplussed than truly annoyed. “No, I’m Devon. But if you’d prefer Ryan, we can—”
“No,” Addie said, leaning back. “No, that’s quite all right, thanks.”
Her coldness wiped the quiet puzzlement from his face, made his expression blank again. Devon nodded and turned back to his tinkering. Silence reigned, broken only by the click of his screwdriver when his hand slipped.
Heat ru
shed to our face.
I fell silent. A wall slammed down between Addie and me, sealing her emotions to her half of our mind. But she didn’t do it quickly enough. I’d sensed the tendril of guilt.
The kettle started to shriek.
“Coming!” Hally called, thumping down the stairs. She skidded to a stop by the kitchen counter and reached over to switch off the stove. The kettle’s screech puttered into a low whistle, then silence. There were a few moments of quiet, interrupted only by the clinking of mugs and what was probably a spoon.
Addie tore our eyes from Devon’s hands. “What kind of tea is it?”
“Oh, um, something my dad gets. I forget the name,” Hally said. She bent over one of the mugs, sliding the spoon out against its rim so it didn’t drip, then brought the steaming mugs to the table. “I put a little cold milk in it, so it’s not that hot. Try it. It’s good.”
She watched as Addie took a sip. We’d hardly ever had hot tea before. This tasted sweeter than I expected, milky and spiced.
“Lissa’s obsessed with tea at the moment,” Devon said. “A month ago it was those ornate pocketknives.”
Lissa. Was she Lissa now? Addie threw a sideways look at the girl sitting next to us, but of course she looked exactly the same. Same dark hair, same dimples, same brown eyes. I didn’t know her and Hally well enough to discern between them.
“I’m not obsessed,” Lissa said, taking a long drink from her own mug. “And I’d still collect the pocketknives if Mom would let me.”
“The tea does taste good,” Addie said quietly.
Lissa smiled at us. A bright, overeager smile. “It does, doesn’t it?”
A moment crawled by. Addie fingered the handle of our mug. Even through the wall in our mind, I could feel her tension mounting. It leaked through the cracks like steam.
“Why me?” she said.
Both Lissa and Devon looked up, the former from her tea, the latter from his tools. The strength of their stares, identical in so many ways, made Addie falter, but she soldiered on.
“Why did you choose me? How did . . . how did you know I was different?”
Lissa spoke slowly, as if weighing each word. “Remember last September, when you dropped your lunch tray?”
Of course we did. We’d been arguing about something or other, screaming at each other in our mind until the outside world faded away. The lunchroom had fallen silent as our tray slipped from our hands and smashed to the ground, mashed potatoes and milk flying through the air.
“Sometimes it seemed like you were talking to someone else, you know? Like someone else was there, fighting.” Lissa paused. “I don’t know. Maybe it was just a feeling.” She flashed a tentative grin at us. “A kinship?”
Addie didn’t smile back.
“Anyway,” Lissa said quickly. “We got Devon to check your files, and they said you hadn’t settled until you were twelve. That was a big clue that something was up.”
Addie hunched over our tea. The soft, sweet steam soothed our frayed nerves. “So you could tell. Just like that.”
“What do you mean?” Lissa said.
“It was so obvious I was different?”
“Well, it’s not like anyone could have hacked into your school files, so—”
“Is there really something so wrong with that?” Devon said. His voice was low. He’d finally set down his screwdriver, his attention completely focused on us. “With being different from the others?”
“You sound like a bad after-school TV special,” Addie said, laughing even as our fingers tightened around our mug. She twisted our voice into a mockery of a chirpy happiness. “It’s okay to be different.”
“Isn’t it?” he said.
“Not like this, it isn’t.”
“But you still came,” he said.
Addie was quiet. Then haltingly, she said, “Eva wanted to.”
Devon’s expression didn’t change, but Lissa smiled.
“I—” Addie frowned. Our head felt strange. Stuffy. Cottony. A little dizzy. She pushed away the mug of tea, but it wasn’t steaming that much, so that couldn’t be it. “I, um . . . I think—”
We swayed.
And then she was gone.
Darkness. We slumped forward, knocking our temple, hard, against the table.
I screamed.
Nothing.
It wasn’t just the silence. It was the emptiness, the lack of—of anything where Addie should have been. Even when we ignored each other, even when Addie tried her absolute hardest to hide her emotions, I could feel the wall she put up. There was no wall now. There was a chasm.
Nausea slapped against me.
“Move the mug. Thank God she didn’t knock into it.”
“She pushed it away herself. It was like she knew—”
“Well, you were being so obvious about it. I’m surprised she drank anything at all.”
The voices faded into murmurs. I delved as deep as I dared into the darkness and searched frantically for signs of Addie. The warmth of her presence, her thoughts, were gone. There wasn’t a scrap to show she’d ever existed.
Our body felt incredibly empty. Hollow. Too big. Of course it was too big. Our body had always held two. Now there was only one.
“Eva?”
“Can you hear us, Eva?” Lissa said.
But of course they heard nothing at all.
“Let’s lay her down first,” Devon said. “I’ll bring her over.”
Hands grabbed our arms and tilted us back in our seat. Someone pulled our chair away from the table. Then more hands, around our waist now. Finally, there was a heave and we were in the air, being carried slowly toward some unknown destination. And I, trapped inside this body that was and wasn’t mine, couldn’t even say a word aloud.
Where were they taking us? Had this all been a trick? A trap? Was this how the government rooted out hybrids who’d escaped institutionalization? By pretending they had friends, had people who understood? By letting them feel like they weren’t alone and then snapping them up while they were vulnerable? We’d walked right into it. Or I had, and I’d dragged Addie down with me.
I’d been so stupid. So trusting. So desperate to believe I might move again.
“Could you get that pillow, Lissa? That one . . . and just put it here . . .”
I felt something soft and solid below us. The hands let go. They weren’t taking us out of the house, then. Maybe they weren’t planning on kidnapping us. I didn’t even feel anything akin to relief—just a little less sick.
“Eva?” It was Devon. “Eva, listen.”
I was listening. I was listening, but they couldn’t know because Addie wasn’t here to tell them.
“Eva, if you’re freaking out, you have to stop. You have to listen to us. Addie’s fine. She’s just . . . asleep right now because of the medicine. We didn’t think she’d take it if she knew—”
They’d drugged us. They’d really drugged us. A flash of anger seared through me, singeing away just a little of the fear.
“Eva, can you move?”
Of course I couldn’t move!
“The medicine will help, Eva,” Lissa said. “Try and wriggle your fingers.”
I tried. I tried like I’d been trying for years—if only so I could get the hell away from here. Nothing happened. I was trapped in a dead prison of skin and bones, shackled to limbs I couldn’t control. What sort of plan was this? Were they trying to help us? Like this?
A hand enveloped mine, and I couldn’t jerk away.
“Eva,” someone said. “Eva, this is Ryan.”
Ryan. Devon’s voice, but Ryan’s, ju
st as Addie’s voice was also mine. Had been mine.
“We haven’t really met yet, but we will. Right now we just want you to try and move your fingers. Move the fingers of the hand I’m holding right now.”
The gentle pressure on our right palm helped orient me. I mentally traced up to the tips of our fingers. Then I tried again to curl them. I tried. I really did.
“It’s been years, I know,” Ryan said. “It’s been a long time, but not too long. You can still do it, Eva.”
I said.
Not alone in the dark like this.
“Eva? Are you still trying?”
“I know it’s hard,” he said.
He didn’t hear, so he couldn’t respond. Instead, a new voice broke through the darkness. Lissa? Hally?
“Eva, trust us.”
Trust them!
“The medicine will wear off in a little bit,” she said. “So please, please try.”
I tried. I lay there in the dark, listening to them talk at me, and tried for what seemed like hours. Finally, exhausted and ready to scream, I stopped.
“That’s right,” Lissa said. “That’s good. Keep going.”
“You’ve almost got it,” Ryan said. He’d said it at least ten times.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t good enough, wasn’t tough enough. It had been too long. And Addie—Addie was gone. I couldn’t do it without her. I had never done anything without Addie.
I’d dreamed so long of being able to move again, every fantasy tasting equally of longing and terror. But I’d never dreamed I would be alone like this. That it would happen like this.
“Come on, Eva.”
No. No—
“You can do it.”
Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up. I can’t do it. I ca—
“Eva—”
“I can’t!”
Silence.
“Eva?” Lissa breathed. “Eva, was that you?”
Me?
Oh.
Oh.
“Ryan—did you hear that? Did you hear her?”