You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  “Adina, are you all right? Is something wrong?”

  Not something. Everything. The tremor in my fingers spreads up my arms, earthquaking my shoulders. What if it’s starting already? No. No. That’s ridiculous.

  Sinking into the chair, I shield my face with my hands, hiding from Arjun, from the portraits of Beethoven and Dvořák and even Claude Debussy himself, who is disappointed I’ve botched his prelude.

  Footsteps. Arjun is coming closer. Something touches my right shoulder—his hand. Oh. He rubs it tentatively at first, back and forth, then in circles. Everything in me becomes acutely aware of the few square inches of acrylic his fingers are stroking. My skin is electric beneath it. He has never touched me quite this way before, this intimate, this deliberate.

  “Adina,” he says softly, pianissimo. “Adi, please talk to me. I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s the matter.”

  I drop my hand from my face to find he’s kneeling in front of me. Concern has widened his eyes, and all his earlier harshness has disappeared. He is the Arjun I love again, the Arjun who gave me a cartoon character Band-Aid when I skinned my knee. I wish I could melt off this chair and into his lap.

  The tension in my shoulders eases the tiniest bit, and he moves his hand away.

  I’ve never wanted to tell anyone about this family heirloom of a disease. But I’ve always been able to talk to Arjun: when school is unbearable, when I’m frustrated with Tovah, when I’ve had a bad day.

  I inhale, filling my lungs completely. “My mom . . . she’s sick.”

  “Sick how?” He sits back in his chair and turns it toward me. Our legs are almost touching. He is wearing striped socks.

  “Do you know what Huntington’s disease is?”

  “I’ve heard of it, but I’m not sure how much I know.”

  “Most people don’t.” Leaving out my own genetics, I explain what the disease is, how there is no cure. And then: “My mom has it. She was diagnosed four years ago.”

  “I’m so—”

  “I have it too,” I blurt, then backtrack. “I mean, I will have it. It’s genetic, and I took a DNA test. A few weeks ago. I—I tested positive. I found out today.” I stare at the floor. “And my sister tested negative.”

  Arjun blinks a few times. He lifts an arm as though to reach for me, but then drops it, as though hugging is crossing a boundary he’s already made clear he won’t cross.

  “I . . . I had no idea.” He shakes his head. “Sorry doesn’t seem to encompass it, but I’m sorry. So sorry. That’s . . .”

  “Shitty. It’s shitty, and there’s no other word for it.” There isn’t enough air in this room either. I will never get enough air into my lungs.

  “They find new cures for diseases every day,” he says. “You’re still so young.”

  There is the word I hate again: “young.”

  “It’s not fair,” he continues. “God, you’re so talented. It’s not fair at all, not to anyone.”

  “I know it’s not fair. But—it’s happening.”

  Silence for a few moments. I become more aware of how close his chair is to mine, and that nearness distracts me from everything else. Delicate black lashes frame his eyes, and I ache to run my fingers through his neatly combed hair, to mess it up.

  I am not some vulnerable fawn, and I won’t let my result turn me into one. I want to be a girl he cannot resist. So I scoot my chair a centimeter closer to his and say, “What happened that day I tried to kiss you?”

  “Adina—”

  “I’m serious. Why did you stop me?”

  He sets his jaw, which is shadowed with stubble. “I told you. I’m your instructor. And you’re only seventeen.”

  What he doesn’t say: that he stopped me because he doesn’t like me.

  “I’m not seventeen. I turned eighteen three weeks ago.” The age of consent in Washington is sixteen, anyway. I have looked it up.

  “What?” A crease between his brows vanishes almost as quickly as it appears. Then he shakes his head like my age doesn’t change anything. “It’s not a question of whether I like you or not, or how old you are. This is—I don’t do things like that. I can’t do things like that.”

  “Kiss people?” Even when I am not talking, I part my lips, painted with an extra layer of Siren red, in the hopes he won’t be able to look away from my mouth.

  The forehead crease reappears. I’d like to iron it out with my lips. “Even if you weren’t my student, it’s still . . .” He gropes for the right word. Wrong. Inappropriate. “Unprofessional,” he finishes.

  I love seeing him flustered like this. I already feel more like myself. “You still haven’t told me you don’t want to.”

  “Adina.”

  He has to stop saying my name like that. Like a growl. Neither of us dares move for a long time. The power I discovered with Eitan, I want it with Arjun. I want to tell him all the ways I’d touch him, with my hands, with my mouth, how I’d make him feel so, so good. How he’d make me feel good too. How I’d wrap my legs around him in his chair and scrape my nails down his back . . .

  “I think about you so much,” I say. “I think about touching you all the time.”

  He grips the arms of his chair, skin stretching tight across his knuckles. My breath catches in my throat, my heart going more allegro than the final movement of a Brahms sonata. It’s going to happen. It’s finally going to happen. Then something changes in his face, and he gets to his feet, rolls up his shirtsleeves. Paces.

  I get to my feet and follow him, weaving a few fingers through my wild hair, hoping he will imagine what it would feel like for him to do the same thing. He is only a couple inches taller than I am, and we are nearly eye to eye. There’s half a foot between our chests. If we exhaled at exactly the same time, we’d be touching.

  “I see how you look at me. How you’re always finding ways to touch me. It’s not accidental. I know it. Haven’t you—haven’t you thought about us? Together?”

  I let my gaze drift toward his belt buckle so he understands what I mean by “together.” Rest-two-three-four, rest-two-three-four.

  He shoves his sleeves up even more, past his elbows, showing more of his bronze skin. “You’ve had a lot of stress today,” he says slowly. “You should be spending this time with your family. Not here.” He adds more distance between us, stands beneath Beethoven. “I’m so sorry.”

  I wish he’d stop apologizing.

  “You want me to go.”

  “I think that would be for the best.”

  I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek, so hard I taste metal. “Arjun. Don’t you find me attractive?”

  He pauses, and for a second I’m certain he won’t even answer me, considering he’s skirted all my other questions. Instead he does something I’ve never seen him do: he rakes a hand through his hair and makes this sound halfway between a grunt and a sigh, this action that seems at once frustrated and flustered. It’s not something Arjun the teacher would do. His hair is sticking up, but he doesn’t seem to care.

  He puts his back to me, so I can’t see him when he speaks. “You need to go, Adina. Please. I’m not going to ask you again.”

  Somehow I buckle my viola back into its case and shove my arms through my jacket sleeves. Somehow I find my way to the door. Somehow I stumble down the hall and into the elevator, where I punch-punch-punch-punch-punch the first-floor button five times in a row.

  Age seems to matter so much when you’re young, but to me it’s a meaningless number. I should be able to relate more to the kids at school than to my twenty-five-year-old teacher, but I don’t. I can’t tolerate any of their insipid conversations about who cheated on who and who asked who to homecoming and who drank so much they threw up at whoever’s party last week.

  This, with Arjun, isn’t going to happen. I have a finite number of minutes before I start dropping plates the way Ima did at the beginning, before I lose coordination in my fingers, before I can no longer stand in front of an audience and do
the only thing I’ve cared about for years. Despite all that, I cannot have what I want.

  I hate him for sending me away.

  Ten

  Tovah

  I HATE MYSELF FOR LETTING her go. I’m not certain of many of my emotions today, but I’m positive about that one.

  Positive. I have to strike that word from my vocabulary. I’ll never be able to use it casually.

  Rain pelts the windshield, wipers slashing across it. My vision blurs. A car behind me honks. I’m in a loading zone, so I circle the block and find a new parking spot. Turn the wipers off so I can hide underneath a layer of rain-spattered glass.

  Why couldn’t we both be lucky?

  For a few minutes after Dr. Simon delivered the news, I was overwhelmed with relief. My mind swelled with possibilities. I could date. I could have children. I could grow so old my hair turns gray, then white, then falls out. Before, I never let myself think about my future unless it involved Johns Hopkins. A one-track mind made the past four years easier. But suddenly there were so many choices.

  “Even a negative result can be complicated,” Dr. Simon said, but I didn’t understand what she meant until I saw Adina.

  Adina, who I cut out of my life after she deleted my applications. After she said, without words, that her dreams mattered more than mine. I’d been jealous of her much of our lives, but I kept it buried. She set hers loose. She was the prodigy, the center of attention, the girl with the spotlight bright on her beautiful face. Clearly she couldn’t stand to see me getting something I wanted. While I’ve missed her, I haven’t been able to forgive her.

  Somehow I figured that whatever happened, we’d deal with it together, despite our recent history. Maybe because we’re twins. Maybe because you think the worst-case scenario is impossible. You’re invincible. Nothing can touch you, not death, not disease, not losing your best friend. Or someone who used to be your best friend.

  I text Lindsay the results and wait a few minutes for a reply. Nothing comes. Then I scroll all the way down to the last name in my contacts. Zack. Suddenly I want to talk to someone who knows nothing about my family and this disease.

  I type Hey, hit send, and immediately panic. Who just says hey?

  My phone vibrates.

  Hey.

  I’m racking my brain for a response when another message appears.

  What’s up?

  After a minute of deliberation, I type back, Homework. You? A minute to come up with two boring words. I’m brilliant.

  Hunting for the perfect canvas board. Dragged Troy. We’re gonna grab pho later, if you want to join. Don’t worry, NOT A DATE ;)

  His messages seem so effortless, like he doesn’t proofread them a dozen times before hitting send. I’m seriously considering saying okay when I get another text from Aba asking where I am.

  Back to reality.

  Another time. AP Bio calls.

  Before I pull back into traffic, I study my face in the rearview mirror. I examine each freckle. Each pore. Each blemish. What decided Adina tested positive and not me? Was it somewhere between the gene that coded for dark hair and the one that gave me blue eyes?

  On the drive home, my foot punches the gas pedal in sharp bursts, the car throwing me forward and backward at every light.

  Today we got answers, but they’ve only sparked more questions.

  The first time our lives changed was April of eighth grade. Our parents sat us down in the living room and explained that Ima had finally been diagnosed with something called Huntington’s disease. The whole conversation made me feel selfish, because by the end of it, when Adi and I learned we were at risk too, I hated that I couldn’t be sad only for my mom—I had to be sad for myself, too.

  There was a girl in my earth science class whose mother had breast cancer. With enough chemo and possibly a mastectomy, her mom might get better. She could go into remission. There was no way to stop what was destroying Ima.

  “You can ask any questions you want,” Ima said, but the only question I had was why? And there wasn’t an answer to that one.

  After my parents had gone to sleep, there was a soft knock on my door. Adi tiptoed into my room and climbed into my bed. Back then, we still spent a lot of time together, but it was mostly outside of school. Our parents had both of us tested for the gifted program, and I got in and Adi didn’t.

  Viola was the only future she saw for herself. Part of me wondered, sometimes . . . if she became famous one day, however famous violists can become, what would that mean for me? I tried violin in fourth grade when she picked up the viola, but I didn’t have the patience for those long songs, and I had no rhythm. I was on a downbeat when everyone else was on an upbeat.

  Adi pulled the sheets tight around both of us, and for a while neither of us spoke. “I’m so scared for Ima,” she said finally. Her tears soaked the too-big Science Olympiad T-shirt I wore to bed.

  “Hakol yihyeh b’seder,” I said over and over, stroking her soft hair. Everything is going to be okay. We didn’t usually speak Hebrew with each other, only a few words scattered here and there. It sounded more reassuring in Hebrew, though.

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “I’m older. Naturally, that makes me smarter,” I said, making her laugh at the old, unfunny joke. “Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it together. Okay?”

  Adi’s toes touched my legs beneath the sheets. Her feet were icicles. “Do you think we should get tested?” Ima and Aba had said it would be up to us when we turned eighteen.

  I was quiet for a long time. I’d only recently made a five-year plan. More like a ten-year plan, considering I’d be in med school for a while. What did Ima’s diagnosis mean for that future I’d already grown so attached to?

  By the time I spoke again to tell Adi yes, she’d fallen asleep. A few weeks later, she told me she didn’t want to know her fate. But I didn’t just want to know; I needed to know. Most people never get to know their futures like this. Over the years it would start to hit me that getting tested and having the answers wouldn’t mean everything was okay. Ima was still sick. For a short time, though, I believed the test would spell out my entire future.

  When I get home, I’m antsy. I can’t focus on homework and my parents are talking about Adina in hushed tones. So I put on the special sports bra that fits my double-Ds like a shield and go for a run. My typical route: Burke-Gilman Trail along Gas Works Park, northeast through the University of Washington, Seattle’s huge public college, then back to Wallingford, the neighborhood we’ve lived in since Adina and I were born. Nirvana’s Bleach pulses against my eardrums.

  It’s nine degrees Celsius outside. I refuse to measure anything in Fahrenheit. All scientists use Celsius, which is much cleaner and simpler. Water freezes at zero, boils at 100. I try not to think about how cold it is. Instead I focus on the reason goose bumps are prickling my arms: the tiny muscles attached to the hair follicles are contracting, making the hairs stick straight up, causing my skin to pucker.

  I run track in the spring, and the rest of the year I jog almost daily to stay in shape. I started running track in middle school because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get into Johns Hopkins with advanced classes and a 4.0—I had to be extraordinary. An AP kid and a scientist and an athlete and a student council rep and a hospital volunteer.

  Some people love running to clear their heads, but I usually relish the extra time to think. This afternoon, though, my head fills with thoughts I can’t control. How Adina’s feeling. What this means for her future. What I’m supposed to say to her besides I’m sorry a hundred times because it’ll never be enough. How getting a disease named after you is clearly a great accomplishment, but it’s not quite the same as claiming a star or a city.

  Siegel disease: the tendency to overanalyze everything.

  Chinese takeout containers are spread across our kitchen table. My fortune declared WEALTH AWAITS YOU VERY SOON. Aba got the same one.

  It’s after seven p.m. when Adina gets h
ome. Aba jumps to his feet, and Adina shrinks away like a frightened cat. “Hey, Adina. Do you want some hot and sour soup? We saved you some.”

  “Not hungry.” Her knuckles are white on the handle of her viola case, and her red lipstick is stark against her ashen face.

  I push a piece of broccoli around my plate.

  “I know how you feel,” Ima tries.

  “No,” Adi says, and I notice she doesn’t look directly at Ima, “you don’t.”

  Ima’s head is jerking up and down, up and down, up and down. That will never happen to me. Instead of relief, I feel a tightness, like my entire body has been mummy-wrapped.

  Adina aims her gaze at me. “This is your fucking fault. I didn’t want to know. I told you I needed more time.”

  Language, I expect one of my parents to say, but the warning never comes.

  “I . . .” I grip my chopsticks, unsure what to say. She took the test because I asked her to. Forced her to. But the results were decided a long time ago, imprinted in our DNA.

  “Adi,” Ima says, “this is no one’s fault.”

  Adina ignores her. She places her palms flat on the table and angles herself closer to me. I’d be able to see her pores if they weren’t microscopic. “You wanted to know so badly, and you made me do it with you—why? As punishment? Or because you couldn’t handle doing it alone?”

  Both. That’s the truth.

  I snap my chopsticks in half. Maybe she sealed her own fate when she pressed delete. No—I force the illogical thought from my mind.

  “You would’ve wanted to know eventually,” I say, but my assertion is half-hearted.

  She snorts. Smacks the table. “Because you know me so well?”

  “Girls,” Aba says quietly. “Let’s all give each other some space, okay?”

  Without saying anything, Adina spins around and climbs the stairs to her room, her door slamming shut.

  Give each other some space. That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? There’s too much space between my sister and me, an entire galaxy I fear our results have made impossible to cross.