I can’t sleep after that.
The truth of what’s happening to me is like a thick fluid in my chest, a pressure no amount of coughing could dislodge. But I said it all to Isaac, the one person in my life who doesn’t belong, the puzzle piece that turns my perfect square into an unnamed shape. And he believed me—granted, he got totally pissed off at the implications—but he believed me, which was more than I bargained for.
Part of me thought he’d tell me I was crazy, and make an invective-laced escape before my insanity spread to him. In a way, I’d counted on that being our end, an easy way out for both of us. Isaac had surprised me by rolling with the punches, accepting everything I said as truth—something Heath couldn’t do even when my words were much more believable.
I hop online, nerves telling me there’s no sense lying in bed. I pull up my assignment for English, maximizing the word processor window to glance over where I’d left off on my paper about a Faulkner short story.
Much in this story depends upon the classic and stereotypical gender roles that both men and women succumb to. For instance, on the surface, it seems that the majority of the men’s primary focus is on defending women.
It’s a decent start, but I have no idea why I apparently hit return a thousand times before typing the next sentence. There’s a huge block of blank space, and I can just see the top of the next line of text peeking at me from the edge of the paper. I scroll down.
And nearly vomit.
It’s only one line, but even her font is aggressive to me, to be sure this is a message I can’t ignore.
WE NEED TO TALK
If I saw that written on the top of a test I’d feel my heart plunging along with my GPA. It’s a damning sentence, one that invites the reader to freely interpret until the conversation is rejoined. It sends alarm notes through my entire system, like the marching band just matched the natural frequency of the football stadium and the whole thing collapsed in a pile of concrete dust and broken rebar, human limbs sticking out at odd angles.
So talk
I type, having to delete and fix those two simple words three times because of my shaking hands.
I sit there stupidly for a full minute, staring at the blinking cursor, but nothing happens. Which is not all that surprising, since this isn’t exactly a text message I’m sending here. Plus, the person I’m expecting to answer me is me so . . .
I rest my hands on the keyboard and exhale, doing my best to empty my mind the way Lilly always says to when she pulls out the Ouija board at sleepovers. I’m as blank as can be, focusing on the beating of my—or her—heart, willing the twin inside of me to answer, when Mom opens my bedroom door.
I make an inarticulate shrieking noise that would get me expelled from any and all music programs, and fly about two feet up in the air, banging my knees on my desk.
“Jesus, Mom!”
“Honey, language,” she says, brow furrowing.
“Sorry,” I say, my hands rubbing my bruised knees.
“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, but I saw your light . . .” Her eyes trail to my laptop, like she expects to see something as equally appalling as my taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Are you doing homework? At this hour?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” I tell her.
“Honey, it’s . . .” She looks at her wrist like everyone her age who used to wear a watch, then squints at my bedside clock. “It’s four in the morning. You need to go to bed.”
“You’re right, I should,” I agree, quickly minimizing my Faulkner paper before she sees I’m using it to communicate with . . . myself.
My laptop goes to sleep before I do, the dark screen staring vacantly back at me.
I wake up with a scratchy throat and swollen feet. I know exactly what’s going on with my throat; the smell of cigarettes is still in my hair, something I remedy immediately, washing away Isaac and moonlight and words I should’ve left unsaid with a thorough scrubbing of raspberry shower gel. How the heck one cigarette made my feet swell I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m allergic to tobacco.
“Virgil my ass,” I say to the showerhead, then clap my hand over my mouth.
“Get it together, Stone,” I say once I’m out, hair up in a towel and fingernail file rubbing off the tips of my nails, the pads of my fingers, anything that might’ve touched that cigarette—and Isaac.
My twin might have my heart, but that’s it and that’s all. And it’s not like it’s ever been a huge part of my life. The rest of my body belongs to me, and the ratio is not in her favor.
I make hasty apologies to Mom as I brush past her in the kitchen, my laptop bouncing against my shoulder blades inside of my backpack, each thump reminding me of how warm it felt this morning when I picked it up. Warm from use.
I cut band for the first time in my life, utilizing a shaky lower lip and the word cramps to break down any barricades Mr. Hunter might have thrown up against me, leaving before I even took my clarinet out of the case.
The library is busy, students with first-period study hall and second-period English typing as fast as hunt and peck will allow. I shake my head as I brush past them to a corner where my only company is a ficus plant. I settle into a study carrel as the Faulkner paper fills the screen. Except my sister has erased everything I had written, her words ballooning to fill pages now that she can be heard.
First things first, let’s clear the air, get this off my/our chest—no pun intended. YOU KILLED ME. Killed me dead [almost, not quite, better luck next time]. Those once tiny toes you buff and scrape dead skin cells off of now are murder weapons, sis. Not like you meant it, but damage was done BUT I’M NOT ~done~. The cord, the cord, the cord. You kicked it, I died. S—l—o—w—l—y while you sucked your thumb. Yeah, really. Just one of the twenty /ten fingers / ten toes / but I didn’t get / any of those/. I was starving but you did the eating—no mouth, no teeth, no, no—you gorged your(cell)f—ha, ha, get it?—on mine. But not this heart, my heart, our heart—yours was a pussy little thing, I’ll tell you—MINE WAS STRONGER.
I know she’s right, even as I feel a habitual defense rising in my throat. I’m not accustomed to being accused of things; being wrong is not my forte. Even so, I can’t argue with what she’s saying. For years I’ve felt spikes of anger, the hot-blooded rush of a temper I’m not supposed to have, curdling my words so that I can almost feel a permanent filter on the roof of my mouth, a physical thing required to keep myself in check.
But it’s not me, and never has been. It’s her, revolting against a lifetime of working for my body, feeding my needs, pumping my blood, with no chance of escape and no release of duties. Even as I read I feel a calm spread over me, an assurance that these darker moments, these breaches of who Sasha Stone should be, are not my fault.
I was okay with it, for a while, living vicariously through you . . . but here’s the thing. YOU’RE NOT VICARIOUS. I could shut off the blood supply—you might not notice. You’re a cold, cold thing, Sasha Stone. Set the metronome by her. Practice practice practice makes perfect and THAT’S WHAT YOU ARE, RIGHT? Except, except not quite. Other girls they say maybe their pulse skips / heart misses a beat. Not yours though, not yours IT’S NOT YOURS. He[ath] is not what I want I will not have him.
Here too lies an explanation for why my perfect boyfriend with symmetrical hair and a wardrobe of nonaggressive colors does nothing for me. He wouldn’t. How could he stir the love of this passionate girl, whose emotions are dark slashes on paper? There’s a delicious thrill in seeing her words, the pent-up violence that I incapacitated long ago with a simple swing of my foot. My twin in the flesh would be intimidating; I can see that. But it says something that I undid her, in the beginning.
So, let’s fix this. Fix it. How do we (fix it?) You work hard, I play hard. Equation solved. X+ y = sasha (who am I?) stone. Two parts of one w(hole). You’ve had your time, now it’s mine. So is (I)saac That’s-My-Type Harver. But it’s—what do they say?—“complicated.” No shit to that. This won’t be easy, sis. But it will be F-U-N.
Get some sleep. You’ve got a GPA to maintain. Night-night.
I’ve kept my cool through most of her ranting, even though my fingers itch to correct the punctuation that I’m sure she considers artsy, instead of just plain incorrect. I imagine her bashing my laptop keys, all emotion and no thought, an indescribable flow of feelings that Strunk and White have no bearing on. Illiterate or not, my twin has me flustered, and it’s one of her last statements that sticks with me as I head to second period, plastering a self-assured smile on my face for everyone’s benefit.
This won’t be easy, sis. But it will be F-U-N.
That line has me scared, because I’m not familiar with either one of those things.
Friday at lunch I kind of bite Heath’s head off, and it’s not because I’m starving. I’ve spent most of the week hoping that my body doesn’t either collapse or run off to be slutty with random boys. It takes constant vigilance and I’m exhausted.
“What the hell is going on with you lately?” Heath asks me, after I tell him for the third time that he’s chewing too loudly.
I sigh and stab my salad like it’s the one irritating me. “I really don’t want to fight,” I tell him. And it’s the truth. I really don’t. It’d be much easier if we could just move forward.
“Too bad,” he shoots back, in an unexpected display of spine. Brooke raises her eyebrows at me from the next table over, and I know if I give her the sign she’ll cross the distance and remove whatever discs have started to re-form back there. I roll my eyes to let her know I’ve got it.
“Why do you insist there’s something going on with me?”
“C’mon, Sash, really? You collapsed in the hallway last week, let a complete stoner sniff around you, started talking about abortions in class, you took off your clothes in front of me with your parents right downstairs, for the love of God—”
I haven’t even finished the first eye roll, so I just let it become more expansive.
“—and you skipped band on Monday. Now tell me, when has that ever happened?”
“Heath, I’m under a lot of pressure right now.”
Which is true. But he knows me, knows that I love exactly that. So the excuse won’t fly far. “And . . . ,” I add, before he can mount an argument, “I’ve been thinking maybe we could use some time apart.”
His face falls like the puppy that gets left behind at the pound.
It’s an old trick I’ve used on myself a few times. If I can’t decide between two things, I imagine depriving myself of one—and let my stomach tell me what the answer is. Heath has been irritated with me, yeah. But he’d rather be angry at his girlfriend than not have one. Now he’s the one who’s gone pale, the one who looks like he’s about to go to the floor, right down there where his belly just bottomed out. I twirl a bit of carrot in the bottom of my salad bowl, letting him process the fact that it’s more interesting than his emotional distress right now.
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” he says, his voice dropped yet another octave in an attempt to secure a cone of silence around what he’s realizing might be a breakup conversation.
“No,” I agree, with a nonchalant shrug, “it doesn’t have to be like anything. Do you want to be with me or not? Make a list, pros and cons, whatever you feel is appropriate. Then get back to me.”
I get up to toss my trash as the bell rings, feeling lighter than I have in years in comparison to the black hole opening up behind me. What used to be—and maybe still is—someone I’m supposed to care about.
“Dude, that was totally badass,” Brooke says from the backseat of my car.
“I know,” I say, still flying a little from the high of quasi-dumping Heath. The plodding nature of our relationship, like a calendar planner that goes five years into the future, had always felt like safety. With safety comes comfort, but also mind-numbing consistency. I feel the newness of my life right now, down to a tingling in my fingertips as I drive. My sister said it wouldn’t be easy, but that had been.
“Fun, too,” I say aloud.
“That’s a bit much,” Lilly says, glancing up from her phone as she sits in the passenger seat. “You don’t have to be mean about it.”
“I’m not trying to be mean,” I shoot back.
“Yeah, it comes natural,” Brooke agrees.
“Not quite what I was saying.” I give her a dark look in the rearview mirror as I pull in to Lilly’s driveway. “Make it quick,” I tell her as she hops out to grab her spats. “Even I won’t be able to talk Hunter out of busting our butts if we miss pregame.”
Lilly doesn’t have to pretend to shiver. Punishment in band means lining the practice field before early rehearsal, a cruel job involving flashlights and heavy layers in the dark morning hours of the late-autumn Midwest.
“So?” Brooke prompts me once Lilly disappears inside her house.
“So what?”
“Don’t give me the doe eyes, Stone. You suddenly ditch the one guy you’ve let up your shirt and don’t think I’m going to ask you about it? Spill, and don’t try to tell me you’re just on the rag, because you and I have been synced since sixth grade and I’m sporting whities tonight.”
“TMI.”
I turn in my seat, but Brooke just stares back at me. She once stared down a tuba player for a straight hour on a long bus ride, so I might have to concede this one.
“Fine,” I give. “What do you want to know?”
“What’s the deal with you and Harver?”
“No deal,” I half lie. As far as I know there is nothing going on between Isaac and me. That’s all my sister.
“I call bullshit. I’m not saying you guys have, like, long philosophical conversations about nature versus nurture. You probably don’t even talk, but there might as well be a highway of fire drawn between the two of you for all the hot looks that go back and forth.”
“Nice. So you think Isaac and I are friends with benefits?”
“Friends? Don’t know. Benefits . . . well, I’m just going to say that your complexion has never been better. Like, you know, blood flow has increased to certain parts of the body. Maybe you grew a heart.”
“Maybe I did,” I snipe back, alarmed at how close she is to the truth.
“Whatever. I was just curious.”
“Curious about what?” I drop my voice as I see Lilly shut the front door behind her, waving her spats triumphantly.
“If Sasha Stone found out how good it feels to be bad,” Brooke says, and tips me a wink.
The truth is most of me doesn’t know how it feels to be bad. My sister feels so vibrant inside my body now that I’m aware of her; it’s like everything else about me—skin, hair, teeth, arms, legs, toes, and eyes—are merely part of the vehicle that was made for her, just waiting patiently for the takeover when they got to live too. I’ll fight it as long as I can, my mind the last holdout once everything else has abandoned itself to this new experience.
I ignore my phone during the football game, squeezing out the fight song like it’s the best sixty-four measures that ever existed and avoiding eye contact with the brass section. They don’t even make it into my peripheral.
I drop off the girls, ignoring a weighted suggestion from Lilly that I check my texts and a knowing nod from Brooke when she gets out, shutting the passenger door with her butt and then smearing her face all over the window as I try to back out of her driveway. I laugh, my mouth making the right shape and my throat producing the sound it’s supposed to, but the truth is I can’t wait to get home.
I can’t wait to stop being myself.
Hands that don’t fumble or hesitate, no waiting for permission or asking in the first place. Tree bark scraping across my skin as I slide down to the ground, knees a weak mess of desire. But I don’t feel the pain, don’t feel the hard ground underneath me or the pressure on top now. I can’t feel these things, because it’s not me. Not my body curled in ecstasy, toes pointed at the moon. Not my nails slicing red ribbons down his back. Not my blood rising to the surface of my neck, something I’ll have to hide later, when I am myself again.
There are no words, only sounds, as if my clarinet were jammed down her throat, every breath passing unintelligible sounds that compose a song of victory. She is a feral thing, my sister, long denied and now unleashed. She takes what she wants, scratching, pawing, tearing at him. She’ll have bruises, but so will he.
The three of us will study them later, and remember.
I wake sore, lips swollen as if I’d played for hours. My fingers stray to my face, brushing aside hair somehow laced with dead leaves. The rising sun catches a note taped on the footboard, lined paper bearing a message meant only for me.
Told ya it’d be fun
And underneath me, a smear of blood on my sheets.