Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board (Weeping Willow High)

by Aarsen, Zoe

  “Hi, honey!” Mom called when she heard me enter the house through the side door in our kitchen. Our storm door had a way of banging twice due to its busted spring, clap clap! She was in the living room, reading the newspaper as she liked to do on weekends, still wearing her glasses and drinking a mug of coffee I knew she had probably made hours earlier when she had gotten up to walk the dog. “How was the party?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Olivia got a brand new Prius.”

  “Randy and Beth always have spoiled that girl. Start dropping hints with your dad,” Mom instructed me. “Brand new cars are not really within my realm.”

  “So,” I announced, setting my backpack down on the table behind our sofa and smiling at her, “Guess who got asked to Homecoming.”

  “Get out of town!” my mom exclaimed. In her defense, she taught a bunch of college kids, so she was always eager to practice what she thought was cool slang. “Who? Wait! Were you guys hanging out with boys last night?”

  “No, Mom,” I said. “We were in Olivia’s basement all night, just like I said we’d be. Her brother asked me.”

  “Evan? Isn’t he a little old for you?”

  One of the curses of living in a small town was that everyone’s parents knew every kid at school. All of our families picnicked together, coached in the same little league, carpooled to the ice skating rink.

  “He’s only two years older than me. Not a big deal,” I insisted, even though in my own heart I thought it was kind of a huge deal.

  A huge enough deal that I was still a little apprehensive about how Candace, Olivia, and Mischa were going to react. Olivia was relatively easy-going and nice to most girls at school, at least nicer than the stereotype of the blond, rich, popular high school girl. Candace, on the other hand, could be vicious. Mischa had a tendency to respond in social settings in a manner directed by either Candace or Amanda.

  I drifted off to sleep on my own bed, my muscles aching with sleepiness from not having been properly rested the night before. As I recalled the strange feeling that had come over me when Hannah had told her stories, the hair on my arms stood straight up in my warm room.

  Of course it wasn’t evil spirits that were levitating the bodies, I assured myself. That was just crazy thinking. I didn’t even believe in ghosts or spirits or poltergeists, evil ones or well-intentioned ones. I had spent a large part of my childhood trying to summon the spirit of my twin to no avail. If Jennie hadn’t been able to figure out how to cross the divide of energy separating the living from the dead to communicate with me, then why would a random spirit—who didn’t have any particular reason to be interfering with the sixteenth birthday party of a girl in a boring part of Wisconsin—bother to contact us?

  But still, it was weird, I thought.

  I slept soundly despite the daylight hour. Dreams began and ended without reason, as they often did whenever I fell asleep at an odd time of day, or slept too late in the morning.

  I dreamt briefly of a birthday party, one of our own. I couldn’t be sure which birthday it was, perhaps when we turned five, but in my dream it played back in my memory like a fuzzy Super-8 home movie, muted. Jennie and I wore matching paper party hats, pink cones held onto our heads with a slim string of cheap white elastic. We were dressed as we often were around that age, with Jennie in blue and me in red, my mother’s primitive technique for keeping track of which twin was which. Our grandparents were there, as well as neighbors, singing enthusiastically in silence, their mouths moving in the dream as Jennie and I beamed and leaned forward in unison to blow out our candles. Olivia was there, very small for her age, and solemn-faced. She had been a very serious little girl when we were younger. Cheryl was there, smiling and in pigtails. My father moved around the table in our old dining room with his video camera, my mother cut our cake and placed neat slices on paper plates with the Barbie logo printed on them. In a lucid moment after this memory closed out of my dream, I promised myself that I’d ask my mom when I woke up about which year we’d had a Barbie party.

  What might have been minutes later just as easily as it might have been hours later, my dream shifted into one that was significantly darker. I was suddenly out on our old lawn in the dead of night, freezing in my paper-thin nightgown, feeling the blazing heat of the fire engulfing our house singe my bare arms and face. Neighbors were lifting me, carrying me further away from the house, and sirens interrupted the quiet of the night, delivering firemen to our house far too late to make any difference in our future, with their hoses and yellow suits. I could never remember in my dreams or waking life how I’d ended up out on the lawn. What had awakened me so late at night and inspired me to leave the house?

  In my dreams, as clearly as in my memories, I could see my parents’ writhing silhouettes, black against the raging flames behind them, emerge through the front door of the house. My father’s striped pajamas had caught fire. A fireman threw a heavy safety blanket on him and wrestled him to the ground out on the lawn to stifle the flames as my mother, her face caked with black soot, wildly searched the crowd that had gathered to watch the midnight spectacle. She looked so deranged, so unrecognizable with her hair mussed and her face smeared, that all I saw was the white of her nightgown and her frantic dark irises darting against the whites of her eyes. When she saw me in the arms of a neighbor near the fire truck, she ran toward us on bare feet across the crunchy frozen grass.

  “Where is she?” she had asked me in a strangled voice, shaking me by the shoulders. “Where is your sister?”

  In the years since the fire, I had come to realize after running those terrible moments through the processor in my mind hundreds of thousands of times that my mother had no idea when she first saw me which twin I was. All she had assessed in the frenzy of the emergency was that only one twin had made it out of the house. In my dream I felt nothing, neither fear, nor horror. Perhaps I had been in shock that night, suppressing all of my memories of sensation.

  For the first half of my life, my entire identity was shared with Jennie. Everyone who saw us assumed that we were two halves of a whole, non-existent without our other half.

  “My, they’re so cute,” people would comment. We weren’t. We were average-looking, and chubby with chipmunk cheeks. The year that Jennie died in the fire, we were both missing our front teeth. It was our identicalness that was cute and memorable, not our features. Had I not been born a twin, people might have said behind my mother’s back that I was a homely child.

  “They’re so well-behaved,” people would compliment my mother. But we weren’t that, either. We fought and bickered constantly. We were always jealous of the attention the other twin received from our parents. Whatever toy was being played with by our twin was the only toy in the house we wanted. We had duplicates of every toy in the toy chest, but even that wasn’t the solution to the problem. Our parents failed to understand that it was exactly the toy that Jennie was playing with at any given moment that was the toy I wanted. More than anything else in our toy chest, we fought tooth and nail over our Lite Brite sets, so violently that eventually Mom claimed she had donated them to homeless children (even though after Jennie died I found both boxes hidden away in the garage).

  We were definitely not well-behaved. Tricking our parents and teachers was a never-ending source of entertainment for us; we would swap clothes, swap nametags, insist on being called by the other twin’s name. Our parents were frequently infuriated with us. My mother cautioned my father on a daily basis that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, being home with us all day long while he was off teaching lectures on campus. Managing the two of us using an elaborate system of head games was a full-time job for her. Whenever Jennie was allowed to do or try something first, I sulked. Whenever I was allowed to go first, Jennie immediately would complain, When is it my turn? It’s my turn now!

  Naturally, throughout my whole life people have suggested that I read books and studies about identical twins sharing telepathic powers, secret languages and co
des, inexplicably having the same habits. Enough time had passed since Jennie’s death that I had no recollection of us sharing any such special connection. I remembered only her presence and a sense of comfort in having her near. Being a twin made me acutely self-aware; I didn’t need a mirror to know how ugly my scowl was when I was angry. I could still remember crying to my mother, “Tell her to stop making that face!” whenever Jennie glanced at me with her brow-furrowed frown, because I thought it was hideous and I knew I was capable of looking exactly the same way.

  After the flames had been extinguished, the chief of the fire department approached my mom and dad and they exchanged words quietly, too far away for me to have overheard. My mother collapsed into my father’s arms, and we were all driven in a police car to the hospital in the next town over, where we were assigned separated rooms and monitored for smoke inhalation. I was told by a doctor that my mother had been sedated and that I would be able to see her in the morning. Nurses brought me tomato soup and allowed me to stay awake, watching cartoons, until the sun peeked over the horizon. I was eight; too young to understand death. Too young to understand that Jennie was gone—gone—and I’d never see her again. For at least a year, I kind of expected that one day I’d wake up for school and suddenly she’d be back, unharmed and fully restored, her old self as she’d been before the fire. Special twin connections aside, somehow that night in the hospital I’d already known factually that Jennie was dead. I couldn’t remember if any of the concerned nurses had told me, or if I’d just drawn my own conclusion as the flames were put out with the fire hoses and I’d watched, saucer-eyed, on the sidelines.

  The next afternoon, my mother and father entered my hospital room together. My mother sat next to me on the edge of my bed, her eyes swollen from so many hours of heavy, drugged sleep. My father stood stoically behind her, his hands on her shoulders.

  “Jennie, we have something to tell you that’s going to be hard to understand,” my mother began.

  I opened my mouth to correct her, and for just a fraction of a second, I hesitated. I had an opportunity to switch, I realized. I could have let them go on believing that I was Jennie, and that McKenna had perished in the fire. But as an innocent, naïve eight-year-old, I didn’t see any value in that. My instinct to correct the incorrect was too great. “I’m McKenna, Mom,” I corrected her.

  I was too young to know that parents really do have favorites; they can’t help it.

  Even the medical chart that dangled on a clipboard at the foot of my hospital bed had my name listed as Jennifer Laura Brady. Had it been wishful thinking on my parents’ part when my intake form had been completed, or just an innocent mistake? I had never dared to ask.

  Six months later when my mother would still sit alone on our front porch every night, her eyes fixed on the empty singed lot on the corner as spring heated into summer, I drifted out there one night and sat down beside her on our porch swing. “I could be Jennie if you’d like that,” I offered earnestly. Her bereavement was that severe. I was willing to do anything, even sacrifice my own identity, to make my mom right again.

  When I woke up, the sun was low in the sky, suggesting as I yawned and stretched that it was almost dinner time.

  “I don’t feel like cooking. What do you think about going to Bobby’s?” Mom mused as I opened the fridge and lingered there, reviewing options. Showing my face at Bobby’s with my mom on a Saturday night would have been mortifying when I was still the old McKenna. But now, after a momentary hesitation, I agreed. Sleeping through the day had rendered me starving and there was nothing in our fridge that could compare to a giant chef’s salad at the diner.

  As we stepped outside our house, Trey was pulling into the driveway next door in his sputtering gray Toyota. I had a split-second flashback of its interior: the squishy front seat and the faint smell of pine from the air-freshener that dangled from his rearview mirror. My first instinct was to look away and pretend as if I hadn’t heard his engine shut down a mere ten feet away from me. But then my mom had to be a huge geek and wave, making a friendly exchange unavoidable.

  “Hi there, Trey!” my mother called out as Trey climbed out of his parked car.

  “Hi, Mrs. Brady,” Trey replied. My mother still went by Mrs. even though everyone in town knew my dad had taken off seven years ago. Without saying a word to acknowledge me, he nodded at me with a dismissive expression that told me everything I needed to know: he thought my ascent into popularity was deplorable, he was disappointed in me, and the social rift between us had deepened.

  “He’s a handsome guy, that Trey,” my mother said once we settled into our own car and were putting on seat belts. “I never would have thought he’d turn out so cute; he was a goofy-looking kid. What’s his story at school? Girlfriend?”

  I could see what she was trying to do: insinuate that I should take more of an interest in Trey. “He’s a total freak, Mom. Girls avoid him and think he’s some kind of killer.”

  My mother started the car’s engine and then told me coolly, “Freak? I don’t like this new habit of yours of looking down on everyone else at school. Ever since you started spending time with Olivia and Candace again, I don’t think you’re aware of how critical you’re being. You weren’t like this when you hung out with Cheryl.”

  Ugh, of course my mom wouldn’t understand that I couldn’t be both popular and retain strong ties with my unpopular friends. And she’d never in a jillion years understand why I, a normal, functioning teenager, could never be in a romantic relationship at Weeping Willow High School with Trey Emory, even though despite as Candace had rudely pointed out the day before, he was really hot if you could overlook his strangeness. All of my memories of him when were children led me to believe he was a serious smartass when he opened up, too. I distantly remembered him making me and Jennie giggle and blush with his wisecracking.

  While we were at Bobby’s eating, I felt a buzz emerge from my purse and checked my mobile phone to find a text from a number I didn’t recognize. It included a photo attachment. The photo was of an x-ray, and accompanying it was a message which said, Cleared for dancing. Evan.

  Saturday nights in September served as my reminder that I hadn’t completely escaped of my previous life as a nerd. Everyone at school knew I didn’t have a boyfriend, but I was still relieved not to have been observed by any witnesses driving home from the diner with my mom as the sun was setting. While Friday nights so far that school year had been girls’ nights—sleepovers, trips to the movie theater—Saturday nights seemed to be reserved for boyfriends. I knew that even if Olivia and Hannah had gone to see the latest Ryan Marten horror flick in the afternoon, as Mom and I were driving home from the diner, it was a safe bet that Olivia was applying her baby doll pink lip gloss in her bedroom, waiting for Pete to pick her up for a birthday dinner. Candace and Isaac were surely bumping around town in Isaac’s truck, probably up to no good. Probably even Matt and Mischa had plans to go to the movies or split a pizza at Federico’s.

  Olivia was the kind of girl who enjoyed constant social stimulation, so even though she was out on a romantic birthday date with Pete, she texted me, Candace, Mischa, and Hannah throughout the night with pictures of her butternut squash ravioli in truffle sauce, the miniature flourless chocolate cake that waitresses brought out with a candle on it, herself posing with Pete and the waitresses who’d been sweet enough to sing Happy Birthday and embarrass her after dinner, and the gold necklace that Pete had given her as a gift with a pendant in the shape of an “O” for Olivia.

  A year ago it would have been ridiculous for me to have thought there was a chance I’d have a boyfriend before the end of high school, but now I had started wondering if I might have my own Saturday night dates in the near future. Maybe by July, when my seventeenth birthday rolled around, there would be some cute guy in the picture with a sparkle in his eye, like Evan, who’d surprise me with a romantic gift. After all, a year ago it would have been crazy to think I’d ever be joining Olivia and
Candace on a trip to the mall. Anything could happen in a year, or as I’d soon discover… a week.

  I lay on my stomach across my bed reading a magazine, when my attention was caught by a strange flash of light outside my window. I got up and raised my blinds for a better look, and once my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw Trey sneaking around in his own back yard with a flashlight. His bedroom light was still on, and I could see directly into his room across from my own bedroom window. Lights were still on in the front of the house, where his parents and younger brother were probably watching late night Saturday comedy shows. Trey crouched down, and appeared to be digging for something beneath the bushes that lined the fence separating the Emorys’ yard from our own.