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.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Now, 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 steadfas
t, 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.
THE END OF INNOCENCE
By 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.
“You’re postponing the inevitable,” Mallory told her.
“Exactly,” her twin agreed.
Merry’s mother was usually halfway ready to be in a bad mood just from having twins who were almost fourteen and an eleven-year-old son. She was freshly frazzled by a new full-time job as the chief emergency room nurse at Ridgeline Memorial. It was a crushing schedule with more chaos than Campbell liked. Sleep had become her sacrament, and the twins had awakened her by yelling. So Merry was already on thin ice when, just two strides from the door, she heard her mother say, “Meredith. What happened to your face?”
Merry said, “I’m . . . I’m trying a new makeup.”
“You look like you escaped from the mummy diorama at the Natural History Museum.”
“If I take it off, it’ll be worse.”
Campbell lowered her newspaper. “I, ah, doubt that.”
Meredith grabbed a clean washcloth, ran it under the tap, and dabbed at a small place on her forehead. She turned to face her mom. Campbell stood up. “Meredith!”
“I wanted my skin to be clear for tryouts!” Merry pleaded.
“So you touched it up with a blowtorch?” her mom asked, as skeevy little Adam started making noises like the sound of bacon frying.
Reluctantly, Merry explained the toothpaste cure.
“Brilliant,” Campbell said. “That’s brilliant, Meredith. Could I have a minute’s peace? Well. Let’s get some heavy-duty moisturizer on it. And I’ll ask a dermatologist if there’s something I can bring at noon.” She began dabbing judiciously at Meredith’s temples. “It’s worse up here. You’ll be lucky if this clears up by Christmas!”
“That’s three months!”
“I was exaggerating,” said Campbell. “But winter’s clearly coming early if mice are coming in.”
The house did have an unseasonable chill for so early in October. Tim banned heat until Halloween. For a few weeks, they’d have to get out the sweaters with the big weird flowers and farm animals on them, the ones knitted by Grandma Gwenny—which no one ever wore anywhere outside except to Grandma’s or places like church, where no one cared if you looked like you were wearing the wrapping paper for a fruitcake.
“Mom, you’re an angel,” Merry said fervently, hugging Campbell impulsively.
“Everyone says so,” Campbell replied, giving Merry a shoulder squeeze when her usual behavior would have been to wrap her daughter in an octopus grip. She turned back to her newspaper, and, with just the wisp of a puzzled glance, Meredith ran out the door. Mallory was slipping into the front seat and withdrawing into the tent of her own hoodie.
“What’s up, Brynn?” Drew asked. He meant Mallory, who was truly his buddy and who wouldn’t have answered if he’d called her by anything but her last name.
“Didn’t sleep much,” Mallory said. “Didn’t go for my run, so I’m not awake. And I don’t feel like talking.”
“What else?”
“If I wanted to tell you why I’m not talking, then I’d be talking. Which I’m not.”
“Meow!” Drew said.
Merry spoke up, “That reminds me. I had this idea about the lion. . . .”
“Laybite!” Mallory cautioned her, using their old twin-language for “Stop it!” She said again, so quietly Drew didn’t hear, “Laybite, shosi-on-up-on.”
“Excuse me for thinking!” Merry snapped.
“Don’t bother,” Mallory told Merry. “I’ll let it pass because you don’t do it much.”
“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my,” Drew teased them. “Maybe you’re wearing animal prints to Homecoming. Isn’t that what they call them? My mom says those are in this year.” Merry smirked. No one ever saw Mrs. Vaughn’s clothes because, although Drew’s sisters were in college, their mom still put on an apron the size of a pup tent and baked five loaves of bread and five dozen cookies a week. She must leave them on people’s porches after dark, the way Aunt Kate did with bags of carrots and zucchini. “Aren’t dresses on the tiny minds of females this time of year?”
“In your dreams,” Mally said. “Which is to say, not mine.”
“Oh well,” Drew said, cranking up one of the ancient rock CDs in his collection. “Stop praying. I’ve already got a date.”
Mally sighed. “I should warn her you have athlete’s foot.”
“Don’t try to fool me, Brynn. I know you’re speechless.”
“That would be because I’m sleeping. I can get in ten good minutes before school. It’s freezing in here.” As if it heard her, the wind obligingly blew a bushel of dry leaves through the passenger-side window. Mallory sat up to spit out a mouthful. “Ugh! I just used Pearl Strips on my teeth.” Both of them stared at her, Drew nearly taking out his own mailbox. “Well, don’t look like I said I had a hair transplant! I do like my teeth to be nice!”
“Pearl Strips?” Meredith gasped. “You just started flossing last year!”
This is Monday to the tenth power, Mallory thought.
“It doesn’t close,” Drew apologized. “The window fell down into the well that day I bulldozed the housing development playing mortal combat with David Jellico.”
“Which we jokingly refer to as the first time he tried to kill me and my sister,” Mally snapped.
“Forgive me for wrecking my car to stop him! How quickly we forget the knight in shining armor!”
“Hardly shining . . .” Mally said, stifling a yawn. Drew’s green Toyota was now verifiably two-tone, rust-over-emerald.
“Jeez, Brynn! You’re snarky even for you. What’s eating you this morning?” Drew asked, leaning across Mallory to turn up the volume on the CD player. As quickly as he did, Merry slipped out and back into her seat belt in order to turn it back down.
“You don’t have to blast that thing!” Merry shouted. “I am a human being too, you know. You can talk to me.”
“Okay,” Drew said, “I’m loving the mask.”
Blushing, although no one could tell, Merry said, “It’s a skin treatment.” Merry had just applied a new layer of makeup over the moisturizer.
“Hope it works,” Drew said. “I mean that sincerely.”
They passed Tony Arno, who ran the five miles to school in miniscule shorts until the temperatures hit the single digits—to the disgust of all the guys and the rapture of the girls—and somehow never stank the rest of the day. “Hi, Tony!” Merry called out the window, smacking heads with her sister, who appeared not to waken. “He’s so cute. He could have any girl.”
“Yes, he’s very cute,” Drew agreed with a sigh. “Especially the Speedo.”
“You’re just jealous. I heard he likes Neely,” Meredith went on. She began to chatter about Neely Chaplin, the new girl from Chicago, and Merry and Caitlin’s only real rival for the second spot on varsity. Meredith didn’t want to brag, she said, but she basically considered her own spot assured. Her tumbling alone would nail
it.
“I may have ignored this before,” Drew said. “Ten times at least, but not because it isn’t fascinating.”
“Drew, you know flyers are the hardest to find.”
“Absolutely. I have a hard time finding you if your dad forgets to cut the grass. Or forgets to get me to cut it.”
The last few blocks were crowded with bikers and, as they neared the school, the smokers, who gathered around the fire hydrant at the required fifty feet from the school entrance, exactly opposite the picture window of the principal’s office.
By that point, Meredith had wound herself up so tightly on the subject of tryouts that she was like a mechanized toy, practically bouncing in the seat; she couldn’t have stopped if Drew had burst into flames. As he turned into the lot, Merry went on, “You know, Drew, small can be weak. And you can be a flyer and still be a lousy tumbler. But if you’re strong, you can be too big to get thrown. I can do both. That’s why Crystal isn’t all-around. Imagine trying to lift Crystal Fish on one shoulder.”
“I actually imagine that quite a bit,” Drew said. Crystal was totally gorgeous, all five feet, eight inches of her, with twisty blond hair that hung to her hips and legs that the boys at Ridgeline seemed to consider some kind of local resource, like a silver mine.
“Don’t be such a stereotype. Guys revolt around Crystal like planets around the sun,” Merry said. “It’s absurd.”
“They revolve, you mean,” Drew said gently.
“They revolt around you,” Mallory said, waking up.
“It’s true. I haven’t had a serious relationship in six months,” Merry said. “Am I doing something wrong?”
“Not that I can see. Guys love women who never close their cell phones,” Drew said. “It gives them their space.”
But Merry was deep in conversation on the phone with Alli, who was repeating her comments to Caitlin, and waving to Erika. The cheerleaders approached the car and absorbed Meredith as she hopped out of the backseat, as if they were first graders playing amoeba tag.
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