There is a fight.
For once I’m not participating. I sit in my chair, staring at the empty one across from me where my sister was always supposed to be, Mom and Dad throwing words at each other so quickly, they’re like a physical bond between them. The only one left standing.
Dad clearly thought I’d finally ratted him out about his affair when he got home from golfing to find no dinner, his wife and daughter stern-mouthed and stiff-spined at the table. I think that conversation might have actually gone better than what Mom served up, a calm repetition of what I’d told her the night before.
“Jesus Christ. Just . . . Jesus Christ,” Dad is saying. I almost don’t recognize him without his earplugs in, his forehead touching the table where his dinner usually is.
“Honey, I just think we should listen and consider. Sasha says—”
“That our dead daughter is living inside our other daughter,” Dad finishes for her, finally lifting his head. “That’s what she says.”
Mom looks at the table, the high polish that she gives it every week providing her own twin. “Is it entirely unbelievable?”
“Yes,” Dad says, raising his arms like he’s the band director about to take us into forty-six measures of whole rests. Nothing there. Should be obvious.
I get up, my chair smacking the wall behind me. I can hear bits of plaster filtering down behind the wallpaper, see small grains of it slip out from under the baseboard.
“You’re going to tear this house apart,” Dad yells at me, and I’d almost award him some points for a great metaphor if I thought he did it on purpose.
“Back off,” Mom snaps at him, and he does, jaw coming together with an audible click. I don’t think she’s told him to do anything in the last ten years or so, but he must have been well trained once because the skills are still there.
“Honey, do you need anything? What’s wrong? Can I get you something to eat?” Mom’s hands are on my shoulders, running down my arms. Her skin trying to give heat to a baby who died inside her and her words trying to feed a child who hasn’t eaten in eighteen years.
I am suddenly very important.
“Sure,” I say. “Leftovers are fine.”
I sit down in the perpetually empty chair as Mom leaves the room, unspoken words trailing behind her and promising a fight upon her return. The house looks different from here, like I’ve found a new world in our own dining room. Dad watches me as I settle into the cushion, which is stiff and like new.
“Sasha, I don’t know what’s going on,” he says. “But it’s not what you think it is.”
I nod to let him know I’m listening, but I definitely don’t agree. From the kitchen I hear the clink of plates, the patient hum of the microwave that was a wedding present they haven’t given up on yet.
“If you need some help, any kind of help . . .” He trails off, obviously hoping I’ll finish his sentence with the words he doesn’t want to say.
I don’t know when Dad and I stopped communicating. The awkwardness between us is a slow growth, one no one noticed until it was too late, metastasized. He’s trying, I know, and I should be meeting him halfway. But it’s been so long since there was anything more between us than lame jokes he throws at me to tease; the only interaction we’re familiar with when it comes to each other is irritation. But there’s nothing funny about his daughter possibly being insane, no tidy column for the deceased twin to be crammed into.
“I don’t need help,” I tell him. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Mom puts a plate in front of me, her lips twisting a little when she sees where I’m sitting. Steam rises up from my plate, heat escaping with little pops from a pork chop that I ignored at dinner last night.
“Sasha,” Mom says quietly. “Maybe it will be easier for us to understand if you can tell us more about why you think that Shanna—”
Dad slaps the table so hard, the chandelier shakes, tiny music drifting down among us. “Don’t encourage her,” he yells. “We only have one child and I’ll be damned if I’ll watch her go crazy and let you help her.”
“You never mourned her!” Mom shrieks, anything she was holding in check flowing out on the last word, a crescendo that feels like it will break the window.
“She never existed!” Dad roars back, with a volume I didn’t know he had the capacity for. If I combined all the words he’s spoken to me over the years they would not equal those three, words borrowed from a fight they should’ve had years ago.
I look down at my plate, the corn safely tucked to one side, what’s left of the pork chop mangled but not touching anything else. I’ve even taken my knife and scooted the breading crumbs away from the pooling butter from the corn. I didn’t know I was so much like Dad until now, so compartmentalized and factual. His food never touches, either.
They’re still yelling at each other when I throw my plate. All of it’s touching now, smeared on the wall and dripping down to mingle with the plaster dust.
They look at me, mouths both agape at this new person. I might be nasty once in a while, push back from the table too fast and leave the room in a huff. But Sasha Stone is a good girl. Sasha Stone does not throw her dinner across the room and watch it puddle on the floor with something like satisfaction brewing in her gut.
That’s someone else entirely. And they don’t know how to handle her.
“Sasha . . .” Dad’s eyes are still on the floor, not able to meet mine. He says, “Go to your room” at the same time Mom says, “Clean up that mess,” and they look at each other, unsure how to coparent when the child isn’t a perfect ten.
So I don’t do either. I walk out the front door and get in my car, wondering where I should go and who I should see. My hands find my phone, and my sister decides without asking.
There’s a subtle shift Monday morning after the revelation. Mom and Dad are being very careful with me, and each other. Whatever fragile peace they found between the two of them after I left seems to be based on pretending nothing happened. Dad grabs toast and leaves as if work might evaporate if he doesn’t get there on time. I seriously doubt anything so substantial as a tax firm could cease to exist, but if you asked me that about a twin six months ago I would’ve said the same.
Now I know better.
I feel her inside me, beating more quickly when I picture Isaac’s face, responding whenever I say her name mentally. I only thought of her as sister until yesterday. Mom had said her name hesitantly, like a bad word you whisper because you don’t actually know what it means yet.
Like fuck. Except you k(now) what that means.
That’s waiting for me on the Notes app on my phone when I get to first period. I roll my eyes at the parenthetical, but the tingle that I feel all over my body is testament to the truth of Shanna’s statement. When I passed Isaac in the hallway my fingers instinctively clenched Heath’s, earning me a subtle pressure in response that barely registered against the tumult Isaac’s wink sent through me. Her heart reacted, certainly, but I can’t ignore the fact that since I’ve given her some free rein with my body it’s starting to get some ideas of its own, too.
I ignore the blush spreading in my cheeks at the thought of Isaac, the pins and needles rushing through my spine as I remember his naked back in the moonlight, and tell my hands it’s time to prioritize.
Mr. Hunter’s handwriting is sketchy at best, and when there’s a challenge he deteriorates into a first grader with a caffeine buzz. He’s written that word—CHALLENGE—across the white board in red Expo marker, but he was overly excited and made the first letters too large, so the last few are squeezed in like a bowel obstruction. Somebody thought they’d be clever and added a tiny R in the corner, complete with an explosion. Insensitive or not, it’s accurate.
Because somebody is going down.
When there’s a chair challenge, the second- or third- or fourth-chair instrument makes a play for the seat ahead of them. It either ends with someone firmly entrenched in their proper place and an expanding sense of superiority to their immediate right, or a palpable air of embarrassment while the challenged shifts to the left, taking their case, music, and a tucked tail with them. It’s a weird moment, complete with mumbled excuse mes and other pretenses at politeness as the demoted and the promoted switch places, one barely keeping a lid on a victorious smile while the other is probably considering ending somebody’s marching-band career with a solid whack to the back of the knee.
Not that I’ve ever been in that position. I’ve never lost a challenge.
I head back to the cages and spot Charity Newell huddled in a corner with her friends, practicing deep-breathing exercises like there’s a baby on the way. I’ve still got moonlight and back muscles on my mind, so I haven’t put it all together until I spot Lilly standing with the Charity supporters. Our eyes meet and she makes an oh shit face like I just caught her on a couch with Isaac.
I mean Heath.
“Nice,” I say, loudly enough for her to hear. I don’t need Shanna’s foul mouth to shred people; kind words said nastily are sufficiently sharp.
Lilly immediately ducks her head and comes to me as if I called her to heel, but Charity says her name in a way that sounds like she’s half drowned already and needs all the buoying she can get. Lilly stands in between us, a piece of unthinking metal stuck between polar opposites, her eyes loose, swiveling marbles.
“I’m telling you, his dick is the width of my gear shift, and I’ve had my hands on both enough to kn—” Brooke drops the penis lecture she’s delivering to some poor freshman when she sees us, putting together what’s going on much more quickly than I did.
I’m slipping.
I swing my cage door shut at the thought, pinching my index finger hard enough to pop a blood vessel. “Dammit,” I yell, going down on one knee to assess the damage, clarinet case clattering to the floor.
“Not bad,” Brooke says, hovering over me. “You’ve got the tone right, but when it’s pain a nice solid one syllable is the way to go for a swear. Much more satisfying.”
I cradle my hand to my chest, letting the pain sweep up my arm so I can pretend that’s why there are tears in my eyes. Not because I know I’m about to lose first chair, and definitely not because Lilly left with Charity’s entourage. I’m not even going to acknowledge the possibility that tears are pooling because Brooke is still here, offering a hand to help me up, keeping up a steady stream of useful swears for any situation. I’ll pretend the pain is what’s making me cry.
That way she can too.