Page 21 of This Darkness Mine

“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.