The Twinning Project (2 page)

Oh, Lessi,
she thought,
this is so uncool
.

Dr. Traum just looked at her, smiling, until she blurted out, “What did I do wrong?”

Even uncool-er.

He frowned. “Oh, no. Nothing wrong at all. I need your help.”

“Me? Help you?”

“If you would. There's a new student in school. I want to be sure he gets off on the right foot here. I'd like you to be his mentor, his guide. His name is Thomas Canty.”

“The YouTube guy?”

“He's had problems in other schools, to be sure. He's an excellent violinist. I'd like you to make him feel at home in the orchestra, too.”

Alessa wanted to say,
You've got the wrong girl, Doc. I've got enough problems guiding myself
. But the chance to help somebody interested her. Nobody had ever asked her to do that before.

“What should I do?”

“Just be his friend. And if anything seems, well, odd to you, let me know so I can help him.”

“What kind of odd?”

Dr. Traum got closer. His face was very smooth. No wrinkles for such an old dude. Botox, like Mom? “This has to be between just us, Alessa . . . Thomas's father died several years ago. It was very difficult for him. Sometimes he thinks he hears voices. I want to know about it.”

“You want me to spy on him?”

“I want you to help me help him. You wouldn't want anything bad to happen to him because we didn't reach out, would you?” Dr. Traum stood up. “Can I count on you, Alessa?”

“I'll try.”

“That's all I ask. Thanks so much. You may go back to class.”

Alessa had to heave herself up from the soft couch.
I've got to do those exercises,
she thought
.

Outside the office, she wondered if Dr. Traum should have told her all that stuff about Thomas Canty. Wasn't that private? But she was excited about being a mentor, a guide. Maybe even a friend.

NEARMONT, N.J.

2011

 

B
Y
the time I had filled out all the papers, it was lunchtime. I wasn't sure where to sit after I got my food. You have to be careful where you start off sitting because you can get stuck there.

I was pretending I knew where I was going while I scoped the tables. It was the usual: jocks . . . fashion girls . . . thugs . . . brainiacs—you know. I spotted the rebel tables just as a big fat girl stood up at one of them and waved at me. Next to her was a guy with black eye makeup and a girl with green hair, both wearing big “Save the Earth” buttons. I could get into that environmental stuff if the tree huggers weren't such know-it-all spazzes.

I walked over slowly, checking out the big girl who had waved at me. She'd been reading on her laptop. When I got closer, I could see it was something about
Twilight
. Not even the stupid vampire book itself, but something
about
it. Like it was so important you needed to
study
it.

It's major to get the first words in. “Bad enough to read that toxic waste, but to read
about
it?”

Her head jerked a little, like I'd jabbed her. Then she said, “You've got to know your enemy.”

That was something my dad would say, so I was interested. “Vampires are your enemy?”

“They don't exist.”

“So why are you reading about them?”

“Because the idea of them exists. People believe in them.”

“Stupid people,” I snapped.

“Exactly,” she said. “You've got to understand what stupid people believe so you can understand the world we live in.”

I dug her right away. She was no dummy. But I stayed cool. “I might be able to get behind that.”

Then she said, “So what did that kid on YouTube actually do to you?”

“Actually,” I said, mocking her serious tone of voice, “nothing.”

Everybody at the table was looking at me. I don't think they believed me.

“So why did you do it?” She was intense.

“He was a bully,” I said.

“But he wasn't
your
bully,” she said.

“Every bully,” I said, “is
your
bully.”

The way she looked at me, I was afraid she was going to hug me. The other kids at the table all looked at each other with these dorky looks, rolling their eyes, lifting a corner of their lips. But I could tell they liked what I said. Not that I cared.

“I'm Alessa,” she said. “I can show you around the school.”

“Sounds like a plan. I'm Tom.”

NEARMONT, N.J.

2011

 

A
FTER
Dr. Traum heard me play, he patted my shoulder and put me in with the first violins. He said if I did everything he told me, I'd get to play a solo at the winter concert. I thought,
Big whoop
. That's an Eddie expression.

I'm an okay fiddler. I started when I was three. Dad played the violin, and we loved to play together. We played everything—Mozart, bluegrass, the Beatles. I kept playing after he disappeared so I could imagine he was still there next to me.

Every time I practiced, I warmed up with a couple of minutes of the dueling-violins number from
Riverdance.
We'd seen it on TV once, and Dad and I loved whaling away, especially when he'd come home from one of his trips coaching star violinists. We didn't do the dances, but we always ended up laughing. And then Dad would get serious and hug me around the shoulders. When I was smaller, he'd drop to his knees and touch his forehead to mine. Sometimes I thought he could tell what I was thinking.

Dr. Traum was new at the orchestra job, and he left the musicians alone. I had the feeling he didn't know that much about music. Alessa was the only cello player in school who was bigger than the cello. She wasn't very good.

My classes were all right. I like school, at least the learning part, not the having-to-get-along-with-other-people part. Math is math, you're right or you're wrong, and the books we were reading in English were okay, especially
The Prince and the Pauper,
by Mark Twain, my all-time favorite, which I've read lots of times. It's about a poor boy with a bad father and a rich boy who's on his way to becoming king of England. They switch lives for a while. The poor boy's name was Tom Canty, like mine, which is why I named my imaginary twin after the prince, Edward Tudor.

Science has hardcore information you can use. How else do you think I learned to make stink bombs? French is memory. So is music. I have a good memory. In tech lab, the controls on the computers were easy to bypass, so I could surf the web looking for new tech gadgets and bomb recipes.

We hardly ever had gym, maybe because there were so many fat kids in school or maybe because the gym teachers were only interested in the jocks. That was okay with me. I've never played much ball because I don't like teams. Anyway, I'm not into sports. That's Eddie territory. He's good at every sport. We're mirror twins. Opposites.

That first week at Nearmont we played dodgeball, the meanest game ever invented. I hate it. It's like a training game for bullies. This one kid, a huge kid with a lot of pimples on his forehead, Todd Britzky, would yell, “Britzkyball!” and pick out someone slow or fat or scared, then fire away. He nailed Alessa hard. The gym teacher was busy on his iPhone, probably doing stuff for some varsity team.

I watched Britzky. He had that jock-bully walk, but I could tell he really didn't have much confidence in himself. He looked over his shoulder a lot, and his eyes flicked around. I figured I'd have to find a way to mess with his mind; he was making Alessa miserable, and she was trying to help me learn my way around school. But I didn't have time. I had to act fast.

I slipped the grease gun out of my pocket and up my sleeve and walked out on the gym floor. When Britzky heaved the ball toward me, I batted it away.

“You're out,” he said.

“You're roadkill, pizza face,” I said.

He got so red, his pimples lit up. Kids started stamping their feet. Britzky didn't know what to do. He knew he had to do something or he'd lose his bullyhood, but he probably knew my reputation from YouTube. I stood my ground, waiting for him to charge. I slipped the grease gun into full automatic.

A hand closed around mine. It was Dr. Traum's. What was he doing here? Following me?

“You have to obey the rules, Thomas,” he whispered. “You're not a special person here.”

“Nobody's special, and everybody's special,” I said, remembering my last conversation with Eddie. I always love to quote Dad.

Dr. Traum looked at me hard, blinked, and nodded. “I've heard that before.”

He opened my fist and took the grease gun. I waited to hear him tell me I was expelled or at least suspended. But he walked out of the gym without looking back. Maybe he really needed another first violinist.

NEARMONT, N.J.

1957

 

E
DDIE
Tudor thought the new football coach was a kook. He didn't seem to know that much about football, and at practice he didn't wear sweats and a ball cap, like most coaches. Instead, he wore a shiny pale green suit. It was almost a zoot suit. The pants were pegged and stitched up the sides. The shoulders of the jacket were so big, it looked as though he was wearing football pads, and the lapels were wide, almost like wings. He wore a white shirt and a skinny purple tie.

The guys on the team thought he was trying too hard to look hip, but Eddie told them to give him a chance, since he was new, and maybe he was just trying hard to make a good impression. Eddie was the captain, so if there was a problem with the new coach, it would be his job to represent his teammates. No sweat. He liked being Captain Eddie.

One day the week before, the school psychologist suddenly quit, and so did the football coach. The next day Dr. Traum arrived to take over both jobs. Eddie was trying to like him. He was the coach. But it wasn't easy.

Now it was Dr. Traum's first game at Nearmont Junior High, and he didn't know all the players or all the plays in the playbook. Eddie stood on the sidelines waiting to go back into the game. He told himself to concentrate, to forget about Dr. Traum.

Eddie loved football. He was the quarterback. He thought the best feeling in the world was during those wonderful few seconds when the ball was in your hand and the entire field was spread out in front of you, waiting for you to make your play.

At that moment, he truly felt like Captain Eddie, powerful, in charge, a prince of the universe. Time stood still as he watched the opposing players rushing toward him, growling like attack dogs ready to pounce. He would dance out of their way until he spotted one of his teammates in the clear, and then he'd throw the ball.

And he loved the crowd, loved hearing them whistle and yell. The new cheerleader, Merlyn, had a way of whipping her head from side to side so that her long black hair looked like a flag snapping in the wind. The crowd chanted “Touch-down” or “Dee-fense” in rhythm with her magical hair. Her voice, sweet and silvery, knifed through the crowd noise.

Sometimes, Eddie imagined Dad in the crowd. Dad had seen him play PeeWee football, but he was gone before Eddie made the junior high varsity as a seventh-grader. He was the starting quarterback! Dad would have been so proud. He always said Eddie would be a great quarterback someday.

And Dad would know. He traveled a lot, all year long, giving private coaching lessons to star college and professional quarterbacks.

Dr. Traum banged Eddie's shoulder pads, waking him out of his thoughts about Dad. “You ready, Eddie?”

“Ready, Coach.”

“Okay, Eddie, let's go,” Dr. Traum said. “Blue seventeen.”

“That play's not working, Coach. They're reading it.”

“I said, ‘Blue seventeen,' Eddie.”

Eddie ran out on the field and waited for the huddle to form around him. Blue seventeen was a pass-action play. He was supposed to pretend to hand off to a running back before he stepped back to pass. It was a good play when it worked, but it hadn't been working all game. The other team was supposed to pause while it tried to figure out whether Eddie was really handing it off or faking it, which was supposed to give him a couple of extra seconds. But the fake hadn't fooled them, and that was why Nearmont was twelve points behind in the fourth quarter. Eddie didn't want to do it, but if Coach said so . . .

“Red nine, fourteen, green twenty-three, eight, blue seventeen.”

The ball came back into his hands. He turned, bent over, and pretended to hand it to the best running back on the team. He wanted to
really
hand it off—a better play—but Coach said . . .

Coach is wrong.

You're supposed to obey Coach.

I'm the captain.

Just do it!

Eddie stepped back to throw, the ball in both hands under his chin, the way Dad had taught him. He pulled his right arm back, elbow bent. While he stretched out his left arm, pointing left, he looked to the right, hoping to confuse the other team. He dropped his right shoulder, snapped his throwing arm forward, and stepped down on his left foot. He twisted his wrist and fingers as he let go and followed through with his empty hand facing the ground.

Just before he let go, he heard the other coach scream, “Put a hat on him!” and he spotted a slight movement out of the corner of his left eye. It was too late to react.

A helmet slammed into his chest, and he hit the ground hard, no time to roll into a ball. His head slammed into the ground.

Lights blinked off, like a power failure in a thunderstorm.

When they came on again, Eddie could hear his pal Ronnie yelling from the stands, “Eddie! Eddie!”

The coach was looking down at him. “You okay?”