What. The. Fuck. Wait, I k(no)w this one. DON’T tell me. He’s so n-ice. So gòÓd. What if he k(new)? I said out with the old—you remember the IN part. These boys . . . your FEELings. Equal and opposite erection. HA. What Would Jesus Do? What Will Mom Say? Will Dad Even Notice?
I owe you something but not everything. The one for you is not the one for me.
Love y(our) choice of w(or)ds. The 1 4 you is not the 1 4 me. Paradigm shift, sister—Now 1 + 1 = 4—Math is hard. You + Heath = Good, Me + Isaac = Bad, You – Me = ?
I look at my sister’s response on Saturday night and sigh. I’m going to have to make some hard and fast rules about punctuation if we’re going to continue to communicate like this. I can feel my GPA slipping as I read her embarrassingly inaccurate blocks of text. I minimize the doc and scroll down on the browser to discover that my crack about the GPA isn’t just a turn of phrase.
The Faulkner paper I turned in and subsequently crumpled before dissolving into a hot mess and hiding in the bathroom did not do me any favors. Neither did the take-home government test where I answered the essay section with a series of exclamation points and unhappy faces—or, somebody did. If my sister insists on sharing this body she’s going to have to agree that it’s going to Oberlin next fall, or else.
My phone vibrates on the laptop, mercifully sliding across the touchpad and relegating my grades to a folder labeled To Improve, alongside an app I’d downloaded to brush up on my Italian and an online course covering the musical history of the baroque period. It’s a text from Lilly, whose been monitoring my relationship status like she’s a cardiologist and it’s got a pacemaker.
So you and Heath are back together?
Don’t know that we were ever apart.
What does that mean?
And while I acknowledge the inherent bitchiness in my statement, it’s also technically true. I didn’t break up with Heath, I simply told him he could choose to not have me for a girlfriend and then never read the texts that may have held his decision.
And then I had sex with someone else.
“Shut up,” I say. Unfortunately my fingers are working in tandem with my mouth and I end up texting exactly that to Lilly, who for once didn’t deserve it.
WTF?
Sorry. Not for you.
She texts me back but I ignore it, the low purr of a motorcycle pulling into the driveway drowning out the vibration of my phone. It’s one in the morning, and I should be asleep, reading, studying, improving—doing anything other than what I’m doing, which is pulling on a pair of shoes and a jacket and sneaking downstairs to talk to the boy who I lost my virginity to last week and haven’t spoken to since.
I put on my pissed face as I walk out the door, considering if I’ve got it in me to slap him. Even if I do, most of the anger that’s fueling me has morphed from steam in my head to bubbles of anticipation in my stomach. I don’t know whether I’m going to hug him or hit him until I see him leaning against his bike, the bobbing ember of a cigarette in his hand.
And it’s a hug. A full-out, body-to-body, squeeze-me-please hug. One that goes from soft squishy to hard angles in a second, our mouths finding each other and his cigarette dropping to the ground. A tendril of smoke finds its way to my nose as my heel crushes it out, and I pull away.
“Hi,” we both say at the same time, breathless. I swear he’s blushing.
“So, uh . . .” His eyes go to the crushed cigarette. “I thought you were mad at me.”
“I was mad,” I tell him. The words sound funny coming out in the shape of a smile, the dichotomy of my sister and I fighting for control. “I still am.”
“You don’t look mad,” he says, thumb tracing my lips, which are stuck in a grin I can’t wipe off until I summon the image of my bloodstained sheet.
“Looks can be deceiving,” I say, taking his hand away from my face but leaving our fingers intertwined. A little for me, a little for her. 1 + 1 = 2, sister.
“Why didn’t you call me? Text? Something?”
He looks away from me again, like the broken cigarette might be able to offer up some sentence structure that’s escaping him. I squeeze his hand, aware that I’m going to have to wash mine later in order to get the lingering nicotine smell off.
“Thought you might be pissed. I mean, I’ve never—”
Twisted bodies under moonlight, capable hands, my breath caught in my throat. “Yes, you have. You’re no Virgil, remember?”
“But you were,” he snaps. “I didn’t know how you’d feel about it. Or . . . her, or whatever.” Isaac’s other hand goes to my chest, finger drawing a small circle. Her heart leaps to meet his touch.
But it’s my skin that gets goose bumps.
“What I’m trying to say is, I’ve never . . .” He actually blushes, and I finally get it.
“Deflowered anyone?”
“Um, is that like popping a cherry?”
“That’s a slightly more violent metaphor for the same action, but yes,” I say.
“You and me and metaphors.” Isaac shakes his head. “I was afraid you’d be mad, is all.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted though?” I ask. “Help Sasha Stone do something she’s not supposed to do? Bring out the wild in me? Teach the dog some new tricks?”
“You’re no dog,” he says, hand trailing up my neck. “You’re a girl. A good one. And I . . .” His thumb brushes my cheek, and I watch his pulse leap in the hollow of his throat, naked and vulnerable.
“I’ve never said this to anyone before . . .” He stops, swallowing so hard I don’t know if this is a pronunciation issue or what.
“I like you,” he says, and I burst out laughing.
He smiles along with me, unsure. “What?”
“You,” I say.
He shrugs. “I don’t like many people.”
“Me neither,” I tell him.
“I don’t want to mess this up,” he goes on. “And I feel like in a world where Isaac Harver gets to talk to Sasha Stone about metaphors in the middle of the night, I’m the one that’s going to ruin it.”
I don’t know what to say, because whatever it is will only have the lifespan of a gust of wind in my hair, or however long it takes to get the smell of cigarettes off my fingertips. But I don’t want to tell him that right now, because then I’m the one to ruin it.
“So how’s this gonna work?” he asks, reclaiming the small amount of distance I’d put between us with my laughter. He laces his hands behind my back, resting them on the base of my buzzing spine.
“I don’t know.” I’m honest for once, the well of confusion that has become my middle overflowing up through my throat. I can’t tell him I’m of two minds on the subject, because I’m not. My mind knows exactly what it wants. A high GPA. Oberlin. The future I’ve been guaranteeing myself since the first day of kindergarten. It’s the rest of me that’s in revolt, any ideas I had about my sister only having my heart obliterated in one night under the trees. I shiver at the memory, in a good way.
“I think her needs are very basic.”
“Roger,” he says, pulling me in even tighter.
I can smell smoke on him, emanating from the folds of his clothes. It should be a huge turnoff, but it’s not. Neither is the sickly sweet tinge of alcohol that I can smell on his breath. Quite the opposite.
“And what about you?” he asks. “You got needs?”
“No,” I say, pulling him toward the trees where the shadows are complete. “This is for her.”
There’s the slightest resistance, a moment where our arms are taut and he hasn’t quite followed me yet. Isaac now the dog, one on a leash, that might put down his head and disobey. But my shoulder dips when I turn back, one eyebrow raised, and my jacket slides down so that the thin tank I’m wearing is bright in the moonlight, the rise and fall of my heart underneath it calling to him.
“Jesus, lady,” he says. “And I bet people think I’m a bad influence on you.”
“Now what?”
I still don’t have words. The time when I’m me but not myself hasn’t faded away completely, and won’t until the pleased flush that covers my whole body is safely hidden by my jacket, zipped tightly, sleeves punched down into curled fists. The warm buzz of anticipation is gone, leaving behind the coldness of regret, my mind taking over now that the polluted blood of my sister’s heart is satiated.
“Now you go home,” I say.
I hear him moving, the rustling of leaves and the quick snick of his belt going back together. I tell myself I won’t, but I sneak a glance over my shoulder when he’s bending down for his shirt, the moonlight turning him into a landscape I want to explore again, all lean muscle and flickering dips. I can’t help but wonder what it looks like when I can’t see it, while he’s—
“That’s fucked-up,” he says.
“What, you want to cuddle?” I snap, and the tiniest twitch in his jaw makes me think maybe he does. I’m left feeling like Lilly, all wait— What?
But the look is gone once his T-shirt is back on, like an eraser passed over his face. “Nope,” he says, and smacks my ass as he walks past me. I follow for once, the air behind him smelling like smoke and beer and sex. My sister’s heart speeds up in reaction, urging me on.
“Wait,” I call after him, actually jogging to keep up. Pathetic.
He turns when he gets to his bike, rummaging through his pockets for a fresh cigarette. “What?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, the words coming out more easily than I ever expected they could. So I must actually be, somewhere inside. “It’s just . . . I don’t really know how to do this.”
He flicks the lighter, his face lit up magnificently for a second. “Lucky for you, I’ve got practice. You want to be bad, Sasha Stone. I get it.”
I don’t bother to correct him that it’s not me who wants to be bad, but my sister. Whatever flicker of affection I thought I saw under the trees is gone; the face behind the bobbing ember of his cigarette is stone cold.
“I’ll teach you,” he says.
“Sasha?”
The soft scent of sex is still on me, mixing with the acrid cigarette smoke to make a contradictory fume that clouds my mind. I’m not fully myself, can’t be when I smell like this. The conviction is so deep that I almost don’t respond to my mother calling my own name.
“Sasha?” she says again. It’s hesitant, rising up from the darkness of the dining room just as my hand pauses on the bathroom door. I need to wash. Need to get clean and go to bed. What I don’t need is to try and explain myself to her.
“What?” I copy Isaac’s voice, a question spoken in a voice that doesn’t invite an answer.
“Don’t what me, young lady,” she responds in kind, the tentative thread snipped in half by parental control masquerading as concern. “What were you doing?”
My eyes are adjusting to the dark and I can just make her out, sitting at the dining room table. She’s in her usual chair, facing the window. Which means her question is mostly rhetorical.
“I guess I was being bad, Mom.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath that must come from somewhere behind her forehead because it pulls her eyebrows inward. “What’s gotten into you, Sasha?”
I almost say Isaac Harver’s dick, but then cut it off with a laugh at the literal answer my sister would want me to toss out. At the fact that I’m getting in trouble for something that’s not my fault.
“You said yourself that I seemed happy,” I tell her.
“But why are you?”
It’s a good question. How can I be happy when the clasp on my clarinet case actually creaks from lack of use? How can I be happy when I flubbed a basic scale this week in band, my fingers correcting automatically, but not before Charity’s eyes made a quick dash in my direction, noting the mistake? How can I be happy when my boyfriend and my lover are two different people?
“Because I’m two different people,” I say, answering myself aloud, feeling the jigsaw of my new life click together. I’m a puzzle, definitely. But not the kind that lies flat on the table waiting for someone to piece it together. My broken bits have flurried through the air of their own volition, creating in three dimensions.
And I don’t need finishing.
“Sasha, are you drunk?” Mom asks in disbelief. She gets up, crossing over to me in the dark, her own breath laced with wine from dinner—I take a deeper whiff—and perhaps some after too. I’m not drunk. I just did a lot of intimate things with someone who was, and now we both smell like each other, entangled, inseparable. Like me and my twin.
“What is my sister’s name?” I ask her.
She stops, sagging against the wall for support, her hip pressing into the plaster where my anger used to go until it found the path to my mouth. “What?”
“Her name.” I advance on Mom, my words tight and precise in a way that won’t allow for denial or explanation. All I’m after right now is a fact.
“Shanna,” Mom says, her hand going to her throat as she does, as if the name needs the extra help to be pushed out into the air between us. “Her name was Shanna.”
“Shanna,” I say, and my heart explodes into a stuttering beat at the name, black eruptions fill my already dark vision. I sink to the floor beside Mom, a miasma of smoke and sex rising up from my clothes.
“She’s here, Mom,” I say, my hand going to my chest. “She’s here and there are things that she wants.”
“Don’t say things like that,” Mom says, but she’s two people right now as well. The woman who only finds hope in the pages of romance novels, and the one who is staring at me through tears lit from behind by joy. The woman who keeps one hand to her own throat as if to deflect a death blow, and the other reaching toward me, clasping her fingers with mine as the pulse beats through us all.
“You need to explain,” she says.