9
Clara
Hailey and I didn’t talk much as we got ready for bed that night, taking turns at the sink and exchanging our day clothes, with their customized fittings—Mom had become an expert seamstress because of us—for loose-fitting pajamas, which we were able to wear off the rack.
It was my night to sleep on my left side, which was unfortunate because my left shoulder had been bugging me that day. When we’re walking—or doing anything else, for that matter—I’m on the right, so my left shoulder gets hunched toward Hailey, and the right one has to stretch. Plus, there are some discomforts that come with fitting ourselves onto chairs and benches, and of course into bed, where it’s hard to shift positions during the night.
Basically, our bodies are healthy, but like anyone else, we can get some aches and pains now and then when we have to repeatedly move, sit, or lie in positions that aren’t perfectly comfortable. Weekly physical therapy and massage helps, and Mom knows how to do some helpful massage moves between our official sessions, but we also try to make things as ergonomic as we can. For sleep, we’ve found that the best pillow situation is sharing an extra long one, which was really designed to be a body pillow for pregnant women to prop up their elbows and knees.
I thought about asking Hailey to switch sides, but the pain wasn’t that bad. It’s better to stick to the schedule as much as possible, lest we degenerate into chaos and bickering.
Lying in bed and doing my best to ignore the pain in my shoulder, I tried to focus my mind on something innocuous. But wherever my thoughts went, some anxiety would creep up.
More than anything else, I kept thinking of Max’s twisted, angry face just before he’d left the Sandwich Shack. And the pack of mini doughnuts lying smashed on the floor, as if he’d been squeezing them to smithereens as we’d been talking. It was the oddness of it all that made it stay with me. What had he been so mad about?
When I was younger, if I couldn’t sleep, I would mentally trace the stars of the Gemini constellation. Dad had taught us to find it when we were as young as six or seven, keeping us up late on certain clear winter nights, when Gemini would be easiest to spot. He didn’t know that much about the stars, but for some reason he needed us to memorize every part of those glittering, dazzling twins, so close to each other that they formed a single constellation. So we would bundle up in sweaters and jackets and follow him outside with our kid-size astronomy books and the star maps that he’d printed out. We would find Orion or the Big Dipper and use them to trace our way over to the bright stars Castor and Pollux, and from there we’d find the rest of Gemini.
For Dad it was all about the timeless beauty of those twins and their love for each other, which was more important to them than life itself. He couldn’t have known how for me it would be just the starting point to falling in love with all the stars.
On other sleepless nights I would picture myself in a space suit, floating somewhere near the moon, all alone—no Hailey in sight—unencumbered by the gravitational mass of my home planet and my home body. I imagined looking back at Earth from there, seeing the whole planet all at once, and finally understanding how all the parts of it fit together—the oceans and the continents and the clouds. Because down here on the surface, where I could see only little patches of ground and sky, I felt like a farsighted person trying to read a book. I couldn’t understand anything when it was all up so ridiculously close.
But at some point I started worrying about Gemini, the celestial twins. Were they glad to spend billions of years together in the sky, always on display, or would they rather wander apart and explore?
As for traveling to outer space, the wild impossibility of that began to overwhelm me. I was never going to escape the gravity I’d been born to. And what was wrong with me anyway, for even wanting such a thing? I was strange enough on the outside. Did I have to be so strange on the inside, too?
Just when I thought that Hailey must have been asleep, she uttered one of her rarest sentences. “I know you’re right.”
“I am?” I briefly savored the moment before I asked, “About what?”
“About us not being normal.”
Her tone was urgent, but her volume stayed low. We try not to let our parents hear us talking in bed. Maybe it’s just a holdover from when we were little and they used to keep coming in to check on us.
“We’re not normal,” she repeated, “and we never will be. But there’s no point fighting against that, or hiding from it. We just have to accept it.”
I groaned. Somehow I’d imagined, for just a second there, that she actually had something worthwhile to say. “God, Hailey, is that, like, some brilliant new insight? I’ve been accepting it for seventeen years already.”
“No you haven’t,” she insisted, with that same hushed urgency. “You’ve never accepted it. Not ever. You struggle against it every day of your life.”
Helpless, I asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to stop being afraid of living in the world. Stop being afraid of yourself.”
“Oh,” I said, my voice as small as a little girl’s. “Is that all?”
“If you weren’t afraid,” she said, “we could go to Sacramento. Or San Francisco. And then we could go to Stanford or Berkeley or Yale. Paris. Tokyo. Sydney. Just let everybody stare if they want to.”
“The last time we tried it—”
“We were only thirteen. Yeah, I know, it sucked. But you just have to start embracing it. Let them look at you. Show them what you are. Let them be comfortable or not, it’s up to them, but it’s not our problem one way or the other. Because there’s nothing actually wrong with us. And if we would just be okay with being freaks, then we could actually do something.”
A deep shiver ran through my upper body; sometimes that happens without me fully understanding why. Though I wasn’t crying, a slight dampness seemed to wet my lashes and then pass, like one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spring rainstorms.
I closed my eyes. “What is it that you want to do, Hailey?”
“I don’t know.” She shifted toward me, so her shoulder rested against mine. “Just something besides staying here.” Her voice dropped to a softer whisper. “I can’t let this be all there is. How long are we going to live? Another sixty, seventy years maybe, if we both stay healthy? Do you want to spend all of those years stuck in one place?”
Sixty or seventy more years. Yes, possibly. Though many conjoined twins die at birth, and some have serious health issues, others have lived full lives. Daisy and Violet Hilton, the famous back-to-back, singing and dancing conjoined sisters of the twentieth century, had lived to be sixty. Millie and Christine McCoy, the back-to-back conjoined stage stars of the nineteenth century, had made it to sixty-one—and they’d been born into slavery, in an era before modern medicine.
My bookshelves held a stack of biographies of conjoined twins who’d come before us—some that Mom had bought us when we were younger, and others that I’d ordered for myself. I’d read most of them more than once, looking for any clue about our lives and what we might expect. Hailey was content to skim or ignore most of these, which I couldn’t understand. We’d never met any other conjoined twins in real life. Those books were the closest thing we had.
Like the Hiltons and the McCoys, Hailey and I had always been, essentially, perfectly healthy. Sure, we’d had a few extra doctors’ visits when we were small, and a bit of continuing physical therapy and extra monitoring—more when we were younger, less and less as time went on—but for the most part, we seemed to have as good a shot at full lives as any singletons we knew.
“It’s not such a bad place,” I said. “You act like Bear Pass is some kind of hell on earth, but it’s actually really beautiful. Do you ever look around? Really take it in? The huge green trees? The mountain air, the stars?”
“Seriously? You’re trying to sell me on the scenery? It might be beautiful, but how would we even know? We’ve never seen anything else. We’ve n
ever seen any other mountains, or any other trees. We’ve never seen the ocean. Or a lake, or any other river besides the one that runs through town. We’ve never seen the New York skyline, or the Eiffel Tower. Or the Golden Gate Bridge. We’ve never—”
“The Eiffel Tower? How are we going to get there? How are we going to fit ourselves onto an airplane? I mean, how do the seats even work?”
For a brief moment she was actually quiet, and I thought maybe she was seeing reason. But then she said, “I think we could probably do it. It might not be super-comfortable for such a long trip, since we’d have to be stretched away from each other and angled a little weird from the seats and everything, but if the seats are close enough, I think we could make it work. And anyway, even if we couldn’t, there are always cruise ships.”
I sighed. “Okay, fine, whatever. But what about the people here? They’ve been good to us, Hailey. It’s like everybody’s family here.”
“Yeah, sometimes literally. The amount of inbreeding—”
“No. Stop. That’s not true. We’ve lived here all our lives, and in all that time nobody has ever sent reporters after us. Nobody has ever posted anything about us online. They’ve respected our privacy, they’ve protected us, and they’ve treated us like real people. Have you ever thought about how amazing that is?”
“Clara, okay, but don’t you understand? I want to see museums. I want to see original paintings, and the churches of medieval Europe. I want to study with real artists, or I’ll never be able to become one myself.”
“If you would just think about the film studies department—”
“Goddamn film studies.” She sucked in her breath. “Okay, fine. You want me to make films so bad? I’ll apply for film studies at Sutter. I’ll do that for you. I mean, I want to try new things, right? I might as well start with that, but that’s not where it stops. I want to try a lot of things.”
She paused, and I could feel what she was going to say before she said it, and I wanted to stop her, but I didn’t know how.
“Like dancing,” she said.
“What, like tap dancing?” I blurted, before she could go on. “Ballet? Or do you want—”
“You know what I want.”
She was right. I did.
“I’m asking Alek to the dance,” she said, “and you should still ask Max.”
“Oh, you have got to be kidding. Didn’t you see how much we freaked him out?”
“It was a little weird,” she said, “but Juanita and I shouldn’t have been so bitchy to him. Anyway, you can’t make assumptions about what it means or what he’s capable of. You can’t go off crying in a corner every time someone acts strangely around you.”
I shook my head in the darkness. “Yeah, right, Hailey. The way he was looking at us, we might as well be werewolves. Ogres. Trolls.”
“And you don’t want to show him how wrong he is?”
“What for? We barely know him. Why is it my job to prove anything to him?”
She didn’t answer. She shifted around. She fluffed her side of the pillow and settled into it, and after a few minutes she got quiet. I stopped waiting for her to say something. I thought maybe she had fallen asleep.
But then she said, “Fine, you don’t have to ask Max. But I’m asking Alek. I know you don’t want me to. I know you’re scared that it’ll freak him out and that other people will hear about it and freak out too, and I know he’s not exactly the best person for improving our reputation as normals—”
“It’s not that,” I said, my hackles rising at the implication that I, of all people, would avoid a guy because he was considered a freak. Well, actually, a homicidal freak. I hesitated, then added, “Maybe it’s 1 percent about that, but only 1 percent. I never believed any of those rumors or anything.”
“Fine,” she said, “but the point is, you only get to veto things that affect our shared nervous system in the lower half of our bodies. You don’t have jurisdiction over this.”
And there was nothing I could say. She was right.
10
Hailey
It was a cold, crappy October day. The grass where we normally ate our lunch was soaked. Juanita and Bridget scooted off to some yearbook meeting, and Clara and I decided to move our picnic blanket into a corner of the gym. It was either that or the damp, packed cafeteria, where the tables all had built-in benches. None of that really works for us.
I hadn’t slept much after our conversation the night before. First I’d been kind of pissed at Clara for how she kept harping on the film studies thing. I mean, I paint. With oils. On canvas. What did that even have to do with film?
But then I started actually trying to answer that question. Like, okay, you can’t make a film out of oil paints. But what were my paintings about? Was there something in them that I could apply to film?
My basic thing lately was these twisted Madonna-and-child portraits. So what was that about, anyway? Each of them took a really standard, familiar design, and then incorporated one or two things that completely did not belong. Was there something I could do with that?
I’d thought about it for a couple of hours, and finally some ideas had started bubbling up in my head. They were pretty vague. But one thing I did know was that I was going to need help. So, while Clara had snored beside me, I’d sent messages to a few people. I figured I would wait and see what they sent me. And then I would go from there.
I’d been working mainly with oil paints for the last couple of years, and I felt like I had a groove going there. But now I started to remember the freedom, the thrill of uncertainty, that came with trying something new—something where I had basically no idea what I was doing.
When I was little, art had always seemed like an adventure to me, and there was always something new to try. Back in preschool, I went mainly for size. We would collect boxes, all the biggest ones we could get from our neighbors and friends, and I would paint them with big strokes of color, stripes and dots and swirls and patterns. We would stand inside the boxes if they were big enough, and I would fill them up with brightness. Sometimes Clara would even grab a brush, or swirl her fingers through the paint to make her own, separate patterns.
Then we started elementary school, and again and again I heard my mother telling teachers, aides, administrators, and other parents and kids, “They can do everything the other kids can do. They’re typically developing children who happen to be attached. They’re normal. They’re just like everyone else. They’re exactly the same.”
Normal. Normal. Normal.
Just like everyone else.
Exactly the same.
Even then, I understood why she was saying it. Understood that it was the best thing to say. The simplest thing for other people to understand.
But something in me hated it, and I wanted to rebel.
We were not like everyone else. Who besides us had two minds that understood each other perfectly? That worked in such perfect synchrony that they could operate their four legs and four arms in unison without discussion, giving them twice the strength of a regular child? Not to mention twice the imagination and bargaining power, whenever we wielded them in unison, which we often did. We weren’t normal. We were magical.
I couldn’t rebel at school. This had been made clear. If we didn’t behave there, if we didn’t act like everyone else, they might want to send us away to a special school, which wouldn’t be as well-suited to our needs. The school we went to, a regular school, was the right one for us, and that was why Mom had been there almost constantly—once or twice a week, sometimes more—meeting with teachers and administrators, sitting in on classes, making sure we were accommodated in just the right ways, and in just the right amounts.
Part of the deal was that we had to be perfect, so they would understand that we were okay.
At first my rebellions were so tiny, they went unnoticed. I drew pictures of me and Clara with wings, flying away over the clouds. Or with animal tails and hoofs, or even scales and talons. I dre
w a whole classroom of kids in one big conjoined circle. I was trying to say something, I think, but nobody seemed to hear. They thought my pictures were cute.
Then one afternoon, when Mom was busy in the kitchen, I took all her favorite picture books off the shelf. All the ones about kindness and compassion and loving yourself just as you are. While Clara looked on in horror, I tore out a few key pages from each one. I painted them with my tempera paints, a collage of patterns and colors. Then, while they were still wet, I folded them into different shapes and pressed them into one another, adding tape and staples to secure them.
By the time Mom came out of the kitchen, I had a strange, unwieldy tower that was taller than I was, and at least twice as wide. Clara and I were both covered in paint, and so was the hardwood living room floor, and part of the closest wall. There were a few spatters on the nearby sofa. Most of the picture books were ruined.
I held my breath and waited for a punishment that never came.
They bought me more paints and paper. Watercolors, ink pens, and pastels. A huge set of brushes. A new easel. Books and videos about art. They rearranged that corner of the living room and made it my studio.
I’d failed at rebelling. But I felt like maybe they’d heard at least part of what I was trying to say.
• • •
I didn’t expect to see Alek until art class, but as Clara and I walked toward the gym for lunch, I noticed him trudging down the hill from the art room, a thick portfolio slung over his shoulder. His black T-shirt and black jeans hung loosely on his slight frame.
When I caught his eye, he lifted a hand in greeting and walked over.
Calm down, I told myself. He’s just a guy. This is no big thing.
“You robbing the art room?” I asked, nodding at the overstuffed black portfolio. “You forgot your mask.” I made two V signs with my fingers and placed them over my eyes, like one of those black masks that burglars wear in cartoons.
“Oh damn, I thought I was wearing my invisibility cloak. Now I’ll never get away with these invaluable treasures. And by ‘invaluable,’ I mean they have no value whatsoever.” He pulled one out as evidence. It was one of his own paintings, a pillaged English cottage with flames and smoke rising into the soft blue sky.
Gemini Page 6