Paperquake (4 page)

"We've got zillions of orders to fill at the other shops," Lily explained. "But Dad and I will go over on Sunday, and you can come with us then, sweetheart."

Violet smacked her hand down on the tabletop, making everyone jump. "I'm going with Jazzy and Rosy tomorrow!" she cried. "You have to let me! It's not fair if they get to do everything and I don't get to do anything! I'm fourteen, too, remember! And if they're going, I'm going. It's going to be all three of us together—from now on." She felt tears on her cheeks and brushed them away angrily.

She met the amazed stares of Jasmine and Rose with a fierce glare, then felt a burst of happiness when Jasmine grinned and gave her the thumbs-up signal.

"Sure, Dad, we'll all go together," Jasmine said. "We'll keep Vi safe, don't worry."

Rose just sat there, frowning.

Violet sat back and blew her nose into her paper napkin. Then she polished off her dinner while they discussed her plan. But eventually Lily and Greg gave in. "I guess you can't turn away a willing worker, eh, girls?"

"You got it, Dad," said Jasmine.

Rose snorted. "If Vi wants to be a drudge, who are we to stop her?"

Of course, her sisters wouldn't understand in a million years, Violet thought. They had each other, and always had. They were almost always together at school. And they were busy together on weekends, with girlfriends or boyfriends, at club meetings or sporting events, always leaving her behind. This time she'd be with them. The hair-dyeing date with Beth would have to be rescheduled and a full day of cleaning lay ahead, but that was a small price to pay for the chance to turn twins into triplets once and for all.

Violet dreamed she was lying on her bed, stabbing a needle in and out of a piece of fabric stretched onto a round wooden frame that she held on her lap. She chose among different colors of yarn from the bag next to her on the bed, and worked them into the picture she was needlepointing. It was nearly done—a portrait of a handsome dark-haired man with bright blue eyes, his face made up completely of tiny stitches.

She was working in the beige stitches of his rather large nose when the bed began shaking violently from side to side. She clutched the needlepoint frame tightly and squeezed her eyes shut.

Stretching. It's just the earth, stretching.

When Violet opened her eyes, it took her a moment to realize that the bed had stopped shaking. Was she still in the dream? She could feel the weight of the needle in her hand and the silky strand of yarn against her skin. That was especially weird because she'd never done any sort of sewing in her life. The man's face seemed familiar, but she couldn't think where she'd ever seen him before.

She slipped out of bed and dressed in her jeans and a gray sweatshirt, still feeling tense from the dream. Her body was alert, ready for the earth to move.

The idea that the earth could move was something she would never get used to, even though she'd been born right here in California and lived on top of fault lines all her life. Her father had tried to soothe her with tales of how people in other parts of the country lived with the threat of hurricanes and tornadoes—both of which could be as devastating as earthquakes, or even worse. But Violet didn't think hurricanes and tornadoes were in the same league as earthquakes. They were weather conditions, and you could see them coming. In most cases, you had time to prepare, to take cover, even to evacuate if necessary. With earthquakes there was no warning. No preparation time. The only completely safe place to be was
off
the earth—up in the sky. People in airplanes didn't feel earthquakes. But what if you weren't in an airplane? Where could you go when the very earth beneath your feet turned deadly?

She took a deep breath. She would ask her parents to check their earthquake supplies again. Make sure the first-aid kit was in an easy-to-find spot, that there was extra drinking water stored away. Was their house bolted securely to the foundations?

As she hurried down the hall to find her parents, a gentle snore from her sisters' room made her stop at their door.

Jasmine and Rose were still asleep. Violet recalled the plan she'd made the evening before. This was the perfect opportunity. Pushing her fears about earthquakes to the back of her mind for the moment, Violet went to her sisters' long dresser and opened the bottom drawer. She pulled out two plain gray sweatshirts, identical to the one she wore. Then she found the jeans they had worn yesterday—Rose's lay folded neatly on her desk chair; Jasmine's lay in a wrinkled heap on the floor next to her yellow-quilted bed. Violet put the clothes she'd chosen for them at the foot of each bed.

She stood quietly for a long moment, watching her sisters sleep. Strange to think that once they'd all been curled up together, sleeping, swimming, waiting to be born. Slowly she moved to Rose's desk and lifted a pair of scissors from the pencil mug—it would have been impossible to locate anything on Jasmine's paper-strewn desk—then walked to the head of the beds.

Jasmine slept on her back with her arm thrown up over her eyes. Rose, slept on her stomach, her long hair fanning out over the pink quilt. Violet cautiously lifted a lock of Rose's hair and snipped off a good two inches from the end. Holding her breath, she turned to the other bed and considered Jasmine.

"Come any closer with those scissors, Vi, and you'll be dead meat." Jasmine spoke softly, her eyes still covered. "And not from a weak heart, either."

Violet jumped back, bumping Rose's bed."
Mmmphh,
" objected Rose.

Jasmine uncovered her eyes and sat up. "What in the world are you doing?"

Violet's face was flushed. She crossed to the windows and pulled back the pink-and-yellow curtains. "Rise and shine. It's time to get up."

Rose groaned and turned her head away from the sunlight. "But what are you doing in here, Baby? It's the middle of the night."

"She's come to kill us," Jasmine said.

"I told you, stop calling me Baby," Violet told Rose automatically, clenching her fist around the lock of hair she'd removed from Rose's head. Good thing both sisters had the same hair color. "Come on, we have to get going. Dad wants us to take the nine o'clock BART. Here are your clothes." She threw the jeans and sweatshirt to Jasmine, then flung the other set at Rose.

Rose and Jasmine exchanged a look, eyebrows raised. Violet hated their wordless code. It was yet another facet of their twinship—and proof of her exclusion.

"Thank you, Jeeves. You may go now," Rose said haughtily. She tossed her hair over her shoulders. Violet was glad Rose couldn't see the missing chunk from the back.

"You may return the scissors now, Jeeves," added Jasmine. "We won't require any further services."

Violet dropped the scissors onto Rose's desk with a clatter, then stomped out of the room. Their laughter followed her down the stairs and into the kitchen, where she slipped the lock of Rose's hair inside a plastic sandwich bag and tucked it into her pocket. Already the day seemed sour.

It seemed even more sour when Lily came in and switched on the radio. A news announcer was talking about earthquakes, giving a summary of all the precautions families should take to protect their homes from damage. Violet listened carefully, then started quizzing her mom about their own family's level of preparedness. Lily brushed away her worries. "We've got everything we need, dear. Extra cans of food, lots of bottled water, a first-aid kit—everything." She kissed Violet on the top of her head. "And yes, the house is bolted to the foundations, the big bookcase in the living room is bolted to the wall, and none of us has pictures in heavy frames hanging over our beds. We've covered all the bases. We even have a fire extinguisher."

The memory of three shadowy figures, outlined by flames, flickered in Violet's head.

Then Jasmine and Rose came into the kitchen, ready for breakfast and dressed identically—but not in the gray sweatshirts and jeans that Violet had chosen for them and that matched her own. Instead they wore overalls and green cotton sweaters. Their golden hair swung in identical ponytails. Violet spread jam on a muffin and sipped her orange juice. She pushed the vision of the children out of her mind and told herself it didn't matter about her sisters' clothes. There would be other days, other outfits, other chances.

 

The triplets had been three tiny babies at first—two bald healthy babies with blue eyes, one frighteningly tiny baby with a thatch of dark hair to match her darker eyes. "Once I almost mixed Jazzy and Rosy in the bath," Lily would confide to people who looked into the triple stroller in astonishment. "But then I put a dab of pink nail polish on one of Rosy's toes, and after that we always knew the difference. Of course, there was never any question of mixing up Vi. I keep her with me every second. We're so afraid she won't make it."

Then they were three little girls—two bold, mischievous girls with golden curls, and one very sickly girl with brown frizz. Their mother dressed them all differently right from the beginning, believing from the first that each girl should forge her own identity. Only on holidays would they be dressed in identical outfits. Lily and Greg's favorite photo was one taken on the triplets' third birthday: three girls in matching flowered dresses, with yellow hair ribbons for Jasmine's braids, pink for Rose's, and purple for Violet's. Whenever Violet looked at photos of herself flanked by her sisters, she thought of the kindergarten worksheets that directed: "Cross out the one that doesn't belong."

When people commented, as they always did, Lily readily launched into her Triplet Talk. "You know how identical twins are formed, don't you?" she'd ask. "How the sperm from the father fertilizes a single egg from the mother, and then the fertilized egg splits into two parts? Well that's what happened with Jazzy and Rosy here. But Vi, now, she's different. She's from a separate egg and sperm entirely. But they all grew in here together." (Lily would pat her belly at this point to illustrate.) "Amazing, isn't it? Three babies at once—though poor Violet was the teensiest thing you ever saw. The doctors didn't think she'd live. She's our miracle."

When the girls started school, their father insisted on separate classrooms. "It's important for each to develop her own personality," Greg maintained. Violet remembered feeling lost without her sisters in kindergarten. She looked so completely different, most of the kids didn't even know she belonged in the same family, much less was one of triplets. In first grade, Violet's heart, never strong, began pumping erratically, and she needed an operation to fix things. She missed so much school that she had to repeat the entire year. After that, Rose and Jasmine were always a grade ahead of Violet. They were a boisterous pair who made friends easily. Often they would bring friends home after school. They formed clubs in the backyard, holding meetings high in the old oak. Violet rested after school, reading in the living room under Lily's watchful eye.

Although the doctors assured the family that Violet was fully recovered from her heart surgery, it wasn't until Violet was in third grade that Lily could bear to leave the house to work. Violet was glad when she did, though it seemed strange at first to come home to a housekeeper who urged all three girls to play outside instead of to her cautious mother who kept her safe indoors. Jasmine and Rose allowed Violet into their after-school clubs, but only as their little mascot. They never let her climb up to the highest level of the tree house. She might get dizzy the way she used to before the operation, they worried, and fall. When Violet and Beth became friends, Jasmine and Rose took Beth aside on the playground and warned her always to look after poor Vi. They were afraid she would die young.

In fourth grade three kids in Violet's class took to walking with their arms around each other, telling everyone they were triplets, too. So what, they said, that one girl was African American, one was visiting for a year from Japan and didn't even speak English yet, and one was a red-haired, freckle-faced boy? Other kids laughed—even the teacher laughed—but Violet was mortified. She tried to ignore them the way Beth said she should, but no one knew how she cried at night over their teasing.

When Jasmine and Rose entered junior high, they began taking special pleasure in their identical appearance and started dressing alike to enhance it. "It's just a phase they're going through," Lily murmured to Greg when he complained about living with "a couple of clones." But when Violet joined them at junior high a year later, she felt more left out than ever. Jasmine and Rose were a special club unto themselves—in which Violet could never be anything more than a charter member.

For her science project in September, Violet had written a report about triplets. She learned that fraternal triplets were no more closely related to each other than to any other siblings in the same family. Each fraternal triplet grew from her (or his) own fertilized egg. Fraternal triplets were the most commonly occurring type—not that triplets could ever be called common. She learned that identical triplets, all three children growing from one fertilized egg, happened most infrequently. Their own case—a combination of identical and fraternal—was the middle ground. Violet wished fervently that theirs had been one of the other combinations. life would be so much easier if all three were identical or different.

Dyed hair would help. And identical clothes.
If only Jazzy and Rosy would cooperate.
Violet took her plate and glass to the sink, glancing resentfully over her shoulder at her sisters in their overalls, their matching heads bent together over the comic section of the newspaper.

Greg entered the kitchen, buttoning his shirt. "Ready, girls?" He blinked exaggeratedly and put his hand to his eyes. "Am I still seeing double, or what? I thought the eye doctor corrected my prescription."

"We like it this way, Daddy," said Jasmine, looking up.

"It's fun," said Rose. "Some people can't even tell us apart."

"
Hmm.
" Greg glanced over at Violet, who was drying her hands on a towel, then back to Jasmine and Rose. "Well, I can tell you apart no matter what, and don't you forget it."