Twins (7 page)

Her heart said to itself: I will be friends with anybody who utters my name. Anybody who says “Poor Mary Lee,” I will love that person.

French class drew to a close.

One minute before the bell, she allowed her eyes to drift.

He was there
.

Watching her.

It had to be him.

It could be no one else.

Yellow flecks, like gold beneath the waters, glittered in his eyes.

Jon Pear
.

His red cheeks grew redder, a rising fever for her. His breathing was too fast, and his wide chest rose and fell like a signal, forcing her own pulse faster. Next to him the other boys, even though they were seniors, were mere reeds, without muscle or brawn. He was a man.

He was so handsome! And yet not handsome at all, but roughly crude, a mix that gave her the same sinking dizziness she’d felt when she entered the school.

Jon Pear, she thought, and the two words of his name seemed precious and perfect. Jon Pear. And now he’s mine. I have it all!

But she said nothing to him. She could think of nothing to say. She knew not one single thing with which to start a conversation.

His smile broke, like thin ice over black water. Like danger.

Mary Lee would have fallen in love with somebody quiet and loving, somebody sweet and endearing. With Van, in fact. But Jon Pear’s look was not romantic. Not affectionate, but fierce. Their eyes locked as if in combat.

She was afraid of him. Slowly she made a partial turn away from Jon Pear, pretending to hear the French assignment.

He slowly winked, slowly shifted his own gaze, slowly bestowed upon her the corner of a smile. It was only a wink but it was sickeningly violent. And completely sexy.

Her blood pounded in her ears.

The bell rang.

It startled her heart.

People leaped up. Mary Lee would have leaped up, too, but she was Madrigal. Madrigal, of course, showed no such childish eagerness, but rose gracefully, and stacked her books by size.

He was next to her.

She shivered with extraordinary heat, and felt herself glow.

He touched her cheek in an unusual way, dotting it vertically with the very tip of his fingers. She thought the touch would penetrate right into her brain, and give her away. Through the pads of his fingers he would discover somebody else’s brain living in that identical flesh.

But it did not happen. “Did you miss our little gifts to each other, Madrigal?” he whispered.

No time to feel safe. For this was a test. She could not know what little gifts he had given her.

Earrings? Madrigal had an enormous collection.

A book of love poems? There had been one by the bed.

A museum scarf? One lay carelessly draped over the chairback.

What to answer?

Between people in love, there could be only one answer.

“I missed everything,” she whispered back.

How he laughed! His laugh hurtled over her, a stream in spring, full of melted snow, flooding her. “I knew you would,” said Jon Pear. He moved her heavy black hair away from her forehead and kissed the skin beneath.

She trembled violently, for it was her first kiss. But he had no knowledge of her inexperience. Nothing told him the skin that brushed his lips belonged to Mary Lee.

Courage grew in her. “Come,” she said. “Walk me to my next class, Jon Pear.”

His eyes were like a tiger’s, the pupils vertical. “You want to do it again, don’t you,” he said to her.

“Of course,” she said, heart beating wildly, wondering what
it
was.

“I am Jon Pear,” he said softly, as if beginning an incantation. As if he were an emperor reminding his subject who he was. She found it difficult to believe that Madrigal had ever been anybody’s subject.

He cupped her two cheeks in his two hands, and she felt eerily possessed. As if she were not a person, but a china souvenir to grace a mantel. An object that could be dusted and cherished. Or thrown against the wall.

Was he toying with her? Had he introduced himself because he knew that she was Mary Lee?

“Jon Pear,” she repeated, perfectly matching his emphasis. She was, after all, a twin; she could match with the best.

His shadowy eyes seemed old and distant, having nothing to do with his clear childlike skin. He was a combination of sweet and rough that had neither age nor gender.

Take risks, she said to herself, fly alone in this empty sky. She withdrew from Jon Pear’s touch and exited alone from the room.

His emotions were as readable as a twin’s — they rushed and flushed with strength. She was amazed at the force of his feelings. He did not like her leaving without his instruction, not one bit.

What if she had ruined it? Should she whirl around and rush back to him, and let him —

She had been correct.

He followed. He begged. He said he needed her. He said he was sorry he had asked for so much so soon.

She could not recall that he had asked for anything.

They had had a secret language, those two. She burned with jealousy, and with grief.

She and Jon Pear were strangely alone in the crowded hall, and yet strangely under observation. She saw in her peripheral vision a hundred students lining the walls, slipping past in single file, or standing at a distance, staring. What a great impression Madrigal and Jon Pear must have made! Why, she and Jon Pear were ringed as by autograph-seeking fans. By people thirsty to see and touch and have inside information.

They’re envious, thought Mary Lee, because I have him and they don’t.

“Jon Pear,” she repeated, tucking his name into her own heart, knowing already that nobody ever called him by just one of his names, or by a nickname.

He took her hand, and it seemed that their hands merged and became one. He looked into her hazel eyes, and his yellow eyes focused for her as if, from now on, she would see only what Jon Pear saw.

She felt herself rising to meet him, rushing to fall in love with him. It really was a falling sensation, and yet also rising, a tornado of excitement, spinning up and spinning down at the same moment, until she was nothing but a whirl of emotion.

The ring of listening students leaned forward, wanting to overhear. She recognized friends of friends: Geordie, Kip, Kelly, Stephen, Katie, Courtney.

“Shall we choose again?” he said, his voice cracking like ice. Black ice, perhaps, that drivers never saw until it was too late, the car out of control before the driver knew there was trouble.

Her hair, which had always had feelings, prickled beneath his palm, each strand fighting to be free. Whatever choice Jon Pear meant, it was not love, and not nice. Evil soaked his speech.

She wanted to be away from him, to merge and blend with the students along the wall. Instead she was an exhibit at some sort of side show. And what was the show? The choice? What had Jon Pear and Madrigal done on the side, that frightened and drew people?

Fear riddled her, like a shotgun burst in the chest.

Jon Pear laughed again, and this time his laugh was low and musty. It crept beneath things and saw behind things. His gold-stained eyes and white teeth smiled in unison.

Madrigal loved this person? But he is frightening
.
I am afraid of him
.

She would never have used the word boyfriend to describe Jon Pear. He seemed neither boy nor friend.

“I am your twin now,” whispered Jon Pear. “At last, you have somebody who truly understands you. A twin of the heart and soul instead of the flesh and blood.”

The chorus of classmates on the outskirts of their lives seemed to sigh and hiss.

She looked into the gathering and could no longer recognize faces, could not even recognize features, nor tell noses from mouths from eyes.

Jon Pear came very close. He took her hands away from her face, as if they were his hands; as if he owned them; as if she had them only on loan.

What was he doing?

Again his fingertips dotted her cheeks, but —

What did he
—

Jon Pear held a small glass vial beneath her eye. He caught her tears within it, and capped them with a tiny black rubber stopper. The vial, on a heavy gold chain around his neck, fell back against his chest and swung there.

She stepped back from him, staring from the glitter of his yellow eyes to the captured tears. One tear remained caught in her long lashes, and this he touched with a bare finger, transferring the tear to himself. He looked down onto her tear like somebody telling fortunes, and a wild and boyish smile crossed his face.

He ate the tear.

H
OW SAFE BOARDING SCHOOL
seemed now.

How attractive the many miles!

How pleasant the laughing girls who had ignored her.

Madrigal loved this person? thought Mary Lee. On her cheek she could feel dots where Jon Pear’s fingertips had touched her skin. Perhaps he had branded her.

He is evil. My sister, my wonderful sister, would never love somebody like this! There is some terrible misunderstanding here.

Just as Mary Lee had always been able to feel her hair, so she could feel her stolen tear. She and the tear were on the inside of the glass vial, slipping on smooth vertical sides, back and forth on the slippery silk vest Jon Pear wore. Why was he dressed like that? Why didn’t he wear jeans and a shirt like everybody else? What kind of statement was Jon Pear making?

I am your twin now
. Now there was a sick and frightening statement. “I lost my twin, Jon Pear. You cannot replace her. Nobody — nothing — could replace her.”

His face shifted. His expressions were a deck of cards being shuffled. He dealt himself to the bottom. Blank and hidden and oddly threatening.

She looked into the crowd where she saw Scarlett, pretty sweet Scarlett. Who needs a boyfriend? Especially this one. I want a girlfriend. A girl to talk to, and weep with, and gossip with, and know me to the bone.

She gave the boy whom Madrigal had loved one more chance. She waited for Jon Pear to express his sorrow. This was the moment for him to say he understood the magnitude of her loss; he knew she must be bleeding as if cut by a guillotine. She would forgive Jon Pear anything if he, too, ached and wept for the lost twin.

But Jon Pear’s laughter hung in the air, threatening the standing students. “You don’t miss her, Madrigal.”

He closed in on her, and she thought he would strangle her, but he kissed her instead, and even though she wanted to run from Jon Pear, she found him so attractive that she also wanted to hurl herself upon him. To kiss until they both died of exhaustion, like a fairy tale in which lovers dance themselves to a frenzied end.

“You don’t miss her,” he breathed, and his breath was fever hot against her throat. “You got rid of her. Clever you. Everything according to plan. I like that in a woman, Madrigal.”

Where his kisses touched, her skin felt stained. She blistered, as if he had the power to cremate her! To turn her, like her sister, into ashes.

“We are the ‘us’ now, Madrigal. We are the twins. You and I, Madrigal. You didn’t need her. You need me.”

It seemed to take so much breath to speak. More breath than she could possibly drag into her lungs. She was not going to think about what he had said about planning. He could stain this place with his speech, and he could stain her throat with his kisses, but he was not going to stain her memories of Madrigal. She was going to put him in his place, and that place was far from her. “Twins have to be born,” she said. “Twins cannot be made.”

But now his big firm hands covered her cheeks, and his fine strong nose tilted down against hers, and his golden eyes stared hypnotically through her own. “I love you,” he whispered.

I love you.

There was a no more appealing thought in the world. Jon Pear loved her; she could see that. Even though it was a different beautiful girl he loved. His golden eyes were swimming with emotion, and that emotion was adoration.

As she had been half a person at boarding school, so she half-yearned to have Jon Pear and half-yearned to run away, to put even those two thousand boarding-school miles between herself and his eyes and his vial of tears.

Half is crippled; half cannot quite make decisions. In the moment before she said,
Yes
,
anything
,
Jon Pear
,
yes
,
you and I will be the twins now
, Scarlett came between them.

Pretty in a soft and doe-eyed way, Scarlett walked forward as if she were actually retreating. She was a deer at the edge of the meadow. Timid, shrinking beauty. “I didn’t speak to you at the funeral,” said Scarlett. Even her voice shrank, as if she were afraid to get close to Madrigal.

Immediately Mary Lee knew she had hit on it.
They were afraid of her
. Whoever Madrigal had become, her classmates feared her. But how could that be? Madrigal was, after all, just another seventeen-year-old girl! You couldn’t be afraid of —

“I miss Mary Lee,” said Scarlett. Her sweet face crumpled in pain. “I think about her all the time. It was a tragedy, Madrigal. You know what I think of you, but still I’m sorry. You must feel pain beyond anything I would, for you were twins.”

Scarlett thought so little of Madrigal? Mary Lee tried to catch the meaning, but Jon Pear spoke. “Mary Lee didn’t matter,” he said carelessly. “Who needed that second reflection in the mirror?” Jon Pear’s smile seemed like a passageway to some dark place. He took the ribbon and pins out of her black hair and held the heavy weightlike ropes in his large hands. Then, evilly, he twined the ropes beneath her chin as if he intended to make a knot and hang her on a hook.

She tried to take her hair back, but he kept it, as he had kept the tear.

“I want to put flowers on Mary Lee’s grave,” said Scarlett, “but I don’t know where it is.”

She loved Scarlett for being the one to miss Mary Lee. “There is no grave,” she admitted, and the loss assaulted her again. Surely it was a terrible omission, to have no place on earth marking the loss of a life. “She is on the wind now. She is part of the air and the sky.”

“But that’s beautiful!” cried Scarlett. “That sounds just like Mary Lee. Wind and sky.”