Gemini (20 page)

“It's not that you're disgusting,” he said, “and it's not that the idea of you is disgusting. I'm not saying that at all. And you're so nice, and so interesting, and I really do like talking to you. But . . .” His voice trailed off. He had angled himself away from me now, and he looked off someplace, out at the horizon.

“But,” I said softly. “Of course.”

Behind me Hailey let out the quietest and saddest sound I could ever imagine.

Max looked down, his gaze almost meeting mine for a moment, but then sinking all the way down to the ground. “You do understand, don't you, Clara?”

My heart had stopped beating. My lungs were empty.

“Of course,” I said, or maybe just whispered, or maybe didn't really say at all.

Just one kiss. If he would give me one kiss before he vanished, before the fantasy of him vanished. The fantasy of him, or anyone like him, ever seeing me as just one
individual girl like any other—as just myself. And liking what he saw.

And what if I were normal?
I wanted to ask.
What if it was just me, standing here on my own? Would I be good enough then?

“Oh no, you're crying,” he said.

“No I'm not.”

I blinked rapidly and brushed my fingertips over my lashes, which were barely even damp.

“It's not like I can't see myself,” I said. My gaze had fallen back down to the frayed hem of Max's jeans. “I know what I am. I don't know why we're even talking about this.”

“N-no, d-don't say it like that. It's j-just m-me. I just don't happen to—but I really—it's just kind of r-random, right? Feeling that way or not.”

I couldn't be having this conversation. How had this even happened? It seemed I had somehow admitted that I had a crush on him, but I'd never meant to admit it, was sure I hadn't said the words, and yet somehow it was out there.

I wanted to run away. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to faint and wake up somewhere else, in a world where Max didn't exist.

But I looked up at him, and through my tremors I met his eyes and said, “No, it's not random. It's a lot of things, I
guess, but some of it is physical attraction, and you're never going to feel that.”

Max blinked, and he opened his mouth as if to speak, but no sound came out. What could he possibly say?

It was time to leave. I would never be able to look him in the eyes again, let alone have a normal conversation. I was throwing myself at him, even as he pushed me away. I was a big wet puddle of pathetic, and all I wanted now was to seep into the ground and disappear.

Except that wasn't true. I wanted something else. I wanted information.

Because even as most of me seemed to drown in this moment, one small part of me was looking beyond it, into a long hazy future, and probably a lonely one, where someone like Max could never be a part of my life. But was that only because I was conjoined, or would it have been true anyway? Were there other things about me that made me unwantable? That was the part I couldn't answer.

And as I stood there breathing rapidly, feeling Hailey hold herself so still and silent behind me, my anchor and my shackle and my security blanket and my life's companion, I found that even stronger than my need to run away was my need to know.

So I looked up at Max and said, “I'm not going to keep
bothering you, but just tell me the truth, just this one time, okay? Just tell me, if I weren't conjoined, would it make any difference?”

He looked at me for so long that time and space seemed to open out between us, a chasm as vast as the future.

Finally, looking into my eyes, he said softly, “Honestly? I have no idea.”

I've seen a lot of movies. I've watched a lot of TV. It's not like I don't know what the San Francisco skyline looks like. It's not like I've never seen the Bay Bridge. But it turns out real life is a whole other thing. Actually looking right up at those white suspender ropes on the bridge, and across the water at the whole city. Shining under pure sunlight, as if to say,
Fog? What fog? Don't go telling me how I'm supposed to be
.

And the freeways. And then the crowded city streets. All those cars. All those pedestrians. Being right in the middle of so much reality. My blood just started buzzing.

We drove all the way through the city and out toward the ocean, through rows of narrow houses and small apartment buildings. Pretty Victorians gave way to featureless midcentury rectangles, houses that a preschooler might build with a stack of blocks.

The Golden Gate Arts campus itself—which was so far from the actual Golden Gate Bridge that you couldn't even
see the damn thing—consisted of several plain, squat buildings surrounded by green grass and trees. At the edge of the parking lot, a dirt walkway surrounded the grass, and a pair of garbage and recycling cans overflowed with old coffee cups and fast-food containers.

As Mom pulled into a parking space and turned off the minivan, a couple of college-age girls got out of a nearby car, laughing as they collected their jackets and backpacks and portfolios from their backseat. They wore tight black clothes, their hair was dyed black, and their eyes were circled with thick black eyeliner.

All at once I wasn't sure how I felt about any of that, and I almost regretted my own thick eyeliner. Was I just a poseur? Were they?

Maybe at art school my makeup and clothes would look like an awkward, pathetic attempt to fit in. The thought made my chest feel tight and heavy inside.

I peered toward Clara. “You ready?”

She nodded in this sort of sped-up, hyperactive way, like she wasn't so much agreeing as having a minor, terror-induced seizure.

I pulled open the minivan's door, and we scuttled down the ramp.

I could smell the ocean, but I couldn't see it. Garbage and exhaust fumes mixed with the salty ocean tang, all of it startlingly unfamiliar.

The two girls, laughing and teasing each other, stood beside their small, faded-brown car, the doors still open.

One of them glanced our way, and she stopped laughing. A confused look crossed over her face.

“What?” said her friend.

Mom was closing up the minivan, my portfolio under her arm. Clara and I stood there waiting, and maybe we looked like two girls who just happened to be standing really close to each other, or maybe we didn't.

The second girl quickly scanned us and turned away. “Um,
anyway
,” she said pointedly to her friend, and she sort of laughed, but you could hear her discomfort.

The minivan beeped, and then Mom was next to us, ready to go.

We started toward the walkway, which meant we were also walking toward those girls. They took turns glancing nervously in our direction. As we passed by them, I could feel them turning toward us more and more, unable to resist the pull.

“Oh my
God
,” one girl stage-whispered to the other just a moment after we passed.

“Have you
ever
?” asked her friend.

Of course she hadn't ever. There are just a handful of us alive throughout the world. We kept walking. I told myself that the shakiness I felt was coming from Clara's body, not from my own.

Behind us their voices got louder. “They must be, like, Christian Scientists.”

“You mean Scientologists?”

“I don't know. Whoever it is that doesn't believe in medicine. You know, like surgery? To separate them? Hello? Or maybe an abortion?”

I started turning toward them.

Clara grabbed my hand. “No! Come on. Just keep walking.”

My mom nudged me. “Hailey. It doesn't matter.”

But it did. Not what they thought, but how we responded. Whether we cowered away or pushed through it. That mattered.

I knew we weren't really going to come here for the summer, let alone in the fall. Clara could never handle it. Sutter would be hard enough for her, with all those new faces; I couldn't ask her to tackle an even bigger environment, a place where there would be new faces every single day, day in and day out, with no chance to ever catch her breath and relax. Not yet; not anytime soon. But I did have to convince myself—and convince her, too—that we could at least get through this one day without falling apart.

And I had to convince myself that the trembling that I did feel in my own body now was pure rage, and nothing else.

I strained toward the bitchy girls. Clara tried to pull me away, but I yanked myself around and planted my feet, holding my ground.

“And which religion is it,” I demanded loudly, “that requires that every child be lobotomized on her third birthday?”

The girls looked at each other nervously. They didn't make a sound.

I said, “You don't know the name of your own religion? Oh, I'm sorry, was that information stored in your frontal lobes?”

One of the girls looked at her friend and said, “Let's get out of here. This is some seriously weird crap, and it's giving me the creeps.”

They hurried away. As the adrenaline faded, I didn't even know whether to feel like I'd won or lost.

“All righty then,” Clara said, her voice shaking and straining toward lightness. “We freaked out the freaks at an art school in San Francisco. We're probably the first people ever to accomplish that. Maybe there's a special prize for it.”

I forced a smile. “One can only hope.”

•  •  •

So I feel weird admitting this, but growing up in Bear Pass and never going anywhere else, I had only ever seen a
handful of Asian people in real life. Bear Pass is just really, really white. I don't know why. Maybe it's because we're near the snow line, so the people turn white for camouflage, like polar bears.

Anyway, when the admissions lady came out to meet us in the waiting area, and she turned out to be Asian, there was this interval where I was so distracted by trying not to pay attention to her Asian-ness that I forgot to even notice how she was trying not to pay attention to our conjoinedness. It was like this mutual game of everybody trying to act like we were totally used to one another and we absolutely didn't care or even notice what anybody looked like anyway.

She spoke with Mom for a minute, pleasantries were exchanged all around, and then Clara and I followed her toward the interview room while Mom stayed behind. A few other kids were waiting nearby, some with a parent and some without, and they all played the game too as Clara and I stood and shuffled through. It wasn't that they didn't stare, but they tried to hide it. They stared furtively, peeking up at us and then looking back down at their phone screens or their Golden Gate brochures, then peeking again. And none of them said a word.

About half of them were wearing thick black eye makeup, just like mine. It really bugged me. I felt like they'd
all stolen something from me. Like they'd ripped off a layer of my clothing and left me awkwardly exposed.

As we followed the admissions lady, we passed by an elevator. I was hoping we might get on it, because I'd never been on one before, or at least not that I could ever remember. A young guy in jeans and a T-shirt punched the button to go up, and there was a little dinging noise, just like I'd heard on TV. But we walked right by. I stared back wistfully for a minute, wanting to know what it would feel like to ride up into the air. But then the admissions lady—Judith was her name—asked me some question, and I had to turn away.

I didn't even have much time to soak up all the art that filled the hallway. The walls were covered with paintings, drawings, photographs, and mixed-media collages; in the center of the walkway was a series of sculptures, some semi-realistic and some abstract, inside Plexiglas boxes. Student artwork, I supposed. Still, it was the closest thing to professional art I'd experienced in real life. Most of what I knew about the current art world came from following artists, students, and galleries online.

In the interview room Judith had us sit on a little sofa. There was an easel on one side of the room, and she set my portfolio next to it, then took out one of my paintings and set it on the easel. She was wearing a snug, retro-fifties-style dress and bright-red high-heeled
pumps, and this getup seemed to make her movements a little awkward—the bending down, the stepping backward to have a better look. It was hard to tell with all her makeup, but I guessed that she was only a few years older than us, so maybe she was new to the job.

The way we were angled on the sofa, I couldn't really see what she had put up on the easel; only Clara could. So, without discussing it, Clara and I stood up and turned so that I could see.

Judith turned to us with a look of alarm. “Oh, please! You can sit.”

I hesitated for just a second before explaining, “Um, I can't really see if we sit.”

“Oh.” She looked flustered. “Um, wait. I can move the easel.” She picked it up and shuffled over awkwardly, struggling to stuff the easel into the tight space between her desk and the sofa.

“It's okay,” I said. “We'll just stand.”

So we stood there while she went through the paintings and talked about why she loved them. She would look each one over for half a minute and then start burbling away. As she worked her way through, her praise kept getting more and more effusive, even though I had put all my favorite pieces near the front. By the time she got to the pencil sketches at the back, she was practically calling me the greatest living artist in the world.

I enjoy praise as much as the next person. But this was so hollow that instead of making my pride bubble up, it just sank it like a stone in my gut.

“But do you have any suggestions for me?” I asked. “Any ideas for making my work stronger?”

“I'll leave that to your professors when you get here,” she said. “And now please, if you'd like to sit, we can talk about you and your plans.”

She proceeded to babble away about why Golden Gate Arts was the earth's greatest resource for burgeoning artists such as ourselves. (She seemed to think that Clara and I were an artist team.) Listening to her, I had the feeling you get with infomercials, where part of you is deliriously excited to try this amazing, life-changing new product, but another part is pretty sure you're being had.