“Rats!” I heard her growl.
As she came stomping down the stairs, Mom and Dad were gaping at me boggle-eyed.
Lily
Jake got one thing right—I didn’t like Bump from the start. But more about that meatball later.
Because we had been awake since three o’clock in the morning that sixth birthday, we went to bed right after dinner. The last thing I said to Jake was, “Should we tell Mommy and Daddy?” Jake said, “Not yet.”
Years later not yet is still going on.
For a long time our parents didn’t have to tell us to go to bed. We couldn’t wait to be alone in the dark so we could giggle and talk about our amazing secret. Our talk happened in an up-and-down direction because we had bunk beds then. Of course I was on top.
It’s like the secret was our new toy. But it wasn’t an easy toy to play with. I think at first we thought we were magicians or wizards. We figured we had powers. “Maybe we’re superheroes,” Jake said one day. “Yeah,” I said, “maybe this is what superheroes are like when they’re little kids.” We were actually serious. Well, not serious enough to try flying off our roof. But serious enough to make up magic words and paint a stick gold and convince ourselves it was a magic wand. We tried to make the teakettle talk. We tried to make daggers spring from our fingernails. We tried to set the sofa on fire by staring at it. Nothing worked. Shoot, we couldn’t even make a chair walk across the room.
We tried to wizardize somebody else. Bump Stubbins started coming around on his WonderWheels the day we got our own WonderWheels. We would go riding off down the sidewalk and there he was, pedaling along with us. He kept turning off and saying, “This way! This way!” but we never followed and he had to turn around and catch up with us. One day I had enough. I pointed the gold stick at him and said, “Moozum!” three times and concentrated as hard as I could. At first I pictured his arms falling off. I peeked and saw that wasn’t happening, so I settled for just making him disappear. But there he was, as visible as ever and even more annoying because he was smirking at me.
So we figured out pretty quick that whatever power we had—we still didn’t have a word for it—was just between the two of us. And we had more to learn. One day I heard a thump in the dining room. Jake was on the floor, ready to cry, rubbing the back of his head. “What happened?” I said. “I let myself fall backward,” he sniveled. “I thought you would catch me.”
Another time I was in the backyard and I wanted Jake to come out and play, so I closed my eyes and I concentrated on his name: Jake…Jake…come to me. My eyelids were getting sore, and still he wasn’t coming. I found him in the basement playing with Mom and Dad’s tools.
I would think about cupcakes and say, “What am I thinking about?” and he would say “donkeys” or “Bugs Bunny”—anything but cupcakes.
Every day we said to each other, “What are you thinking? What are you thinking?” We never knew. Weeks went by. Months. Nothing happened. We tried playing hide-and-seek. We couldn’t find each other. We were back to being ordinary run-of-the-mill twins. It’s like our powers had tricked us. Teased us. Made us feel special, then backed off.
“Maybe it was a phase,” I said.
“What’s a phase?” said Jake.
I had heard our parents use the word. “I think it’s, like, when you outgrow something.”
Jake’s mouth pouted. “I don’t want to outgrow it.”
“Me neither,” I said. Our heads came together and we were sad. We went to bed sad.
But on our next birthday—our seventh—we woke up in the middle of the night. At the train station. To a blinding light. And the smell of pickles.
Jake
So that’s how it went from then on. Every birthday night—July 29—there we were, at the old train station, in our pajamas, waking up from the same dream, the blinding light of the oncoming train, the smell of pickles. We weren’t worried about our power ditching us anymore. We knew it was there. We knew it would come and go on its own schedule, not ours.
I was happy to call it our “thing” or “power.” But that wasn’t good enough for Lily. She kept saying it had to have its own one-of-a-kind name. Then one school morning I felt something pressing my nose. I opened my eyes. Lily’s face was hanging upside down from her upper bunk. “Goombla,” she said. I just stared. “It’s goombla.” I knew exactly what she was talking about. We finally had a word for our special thing. Goombla. I just didn’t like her timing. It was five o’clock. “Go to sleep,” I growled, and turned over.
Every birthday I gave Lily a train car. Every year she gave me a stone. But there were no more parties at the house. Lily was afraid Bump Stubbins would show up again, so she begged our parents to do our birthdays at The Happy Hippo.
One thing was the same for every birthday: we got twin presents from Grandpa Dooley (our mom’s dad). We call him Poppy. Poppy and Grandma Dooley lived in California. Dad says they were flower children left over from the seventies. They were hippies. They lived over a garage and drank green tea, and Grandma wore a flower in her hair every day like it was still the seventies. In pictures we saw, Poppy’s hair was as long as Grandma’s. The only shoes they had were sandals.
Grandma died trying to save the redwoods. She was perched in a giant redwood two hundred feet up for eight days and refused to come down until they stopped cutting down the trees. But something broke up there and she fell. And then, in a way, so did Poppy.
“Poppy went off the deep end,” Mom and Dad told us. He tried to be a regular person. He got a haircut. And socks. He got a job in a supermarket and then an office and then a bank. But he just couldn’t do it, not without Grandma. One day he walked out of the bank and never came back. He walked clear out of California. He was gone by the time of Uncle Peaceboy’s wedding and our birth on the train. Nobody heard from him until a strange box came to the house the day before our second birthday. It was from Mexico and inside it were two sombreros. Even though they were kid-sized they were still too big for us, but we wore them anyway, down over our faces, because we loved them so much.
Poppy sailed to every continent. He worked on freighters and tankers. Every birthday a box arrived from a different country. We got bolos from Argentina, tiny silver elephants from India, emu feathers from Australia, voodoo masks from Haiti. The two gifts were always identical.
“Why doesn’t Poppy ever come see us?” We were always asking that. The only answer we ever got was, “He’s trying to find himself.” That made no sense. When we got old enough to have our own email address, we kept sending messages to his BlackBerry: “Hurry up and find yourself so you can come see us.” He always answered us, but the only thing that showed up on our porch was a birthday box every July 29.
Bump Stubbins kept showing up too. Lily kept telling him to get lost. He was a real clown. He would crash his bike into a telephone pole. He would pretend to walk into a wall. He would reach into his nose with the tip of his tongue. For a while there he had a new act every day. I guess he figured if he could make Lily laugh, she would let him join us. But she wouldn’t even look at him. Me? I just thought he was funny.
He was especially funny the day Lily and I were on the porch wearing our sombreros and practicing our Mexican: “Si si!” and “Muchos gracias!” Bump comes along, and before you know it he snatches my hat and plops it on his own head. I was mad at first, but when I saw how funny he looked, all I could do was laugh. But Lily went after him. He jumped down from the porch and started running. That’s the day he found out how fast Lily is. She caught him and grabbed for the hat. But it didn’t come right off because it had a string that went under the chin, and when she pulled at the hat the string caught his neck and he jerked to a stop. Lily grabbed the hat and brought it back to me. Bump staggered home whimpering, and we figured that was that.
That day after dinner Bump showed up with his mom. She showed our parents the mark on his neck. And here’s where it got surprising for Mrs. Stubbins. Before she had a chance to say
anything else, Lily squeezed out from between Mom and Dad and piped up, all cheery, “I did it!” Mrs. Stubbins first looked shocked, then disappointed because she didn’t have a chance to complain or accuse anybody. She glared at Lily, glared at me, glared at our parents. “Well,” she said, “I hope you’re going to punish her for choking my son.”
“Oh, we will,” our father said.
I guess Bump still wasn’t satisfied, because then he snarled at Lily, “And you ain’t twins neither. Twins look exactly alike.”
Lily went for him, but Dad caught her by the shirt collar. He smiled at Mrs. Stubbins. “We have it covered.”
After Bump and his mom stomped off, Dad said one simple word to Lily: “Room.”
Lily put a grump on her face and slumped upstairs. She wasn’t going to our room but to the Cool-It Room. Lily will explain that in a minute.
See, what Mrs. Stubbins didn’t know is that Lily confesses. (I already told you that she lies, but she never lies when the question is, “Did you do it?” She steals my pumpkin seeds but never denies it.) Confessing is very rare among kids. And she didn’t mind getting punished, especially when punishment was the Cool-It Room.
Lily
I loved the Cool-It Room. Jake knew it but our parents didn’t. They saw me grumping and slumping and they thought I hated it. I was like Brer Rabbit in the briar patch. No! No! Anything but that! Pleeeeeze don’t throw me in the Cool-It Room!
The Cool-It Room was on the third floor. Still is. It’s a big old house we live in, and most of the third floor is a dusty attic loaded with junk from renovated houses. But there’s also a door that leads to a little room. Dad says I first got sent there when I sawed Jake’s foam-rubber football in half because I was mad at him. I guess I couldn’t stay out of trouble, because I kept getting sent to the attic dungeon, which Dad started calling the Cool-It Room. Jake started getting sent up too, but only about once for every ten times for me. We were always sent up with a cooking timer. Dad set the timer according to “the horribleness of the crime,” as he used to say. When the timer went ping! we could come out.
Dad was a genius. He knew that the worst punishment for a kid is boredom. And that’s what the Cool-It Room was: B-O-R-I-N-G. Ceiling, floor, four walls—it was nothing but six bare sides. So I don’t blame Dad for figuring I’d be good just to stay out of there. But it just wasn’t in the cards, I guess. I kept messing up, Dad kept pointing: “Lily—Cool-It Room.” So I figured as long as I was going to be spending a lot of time there, I might as well make myself comfortable. I started sneaking stuff from the attic into the room. Braided rag rugs. A white wicker rocking chair. A bench. Cushions. Books. Games. And my carnival prize, Joe the grinning gorilla. Whenever I wasn’t in the room, Joe got to sit in the rocking chair.
It got to be so nice in there I started getting in trouble just so I’d get sent up. Even Jake liked it. Which he didn’t at first. He would just mope and grumble and stare at the timer till it went ping! But after I fixed up the room, we did coloring books (when we were little) and Monopoly and Old Maid. We had burping contests, which of course I always won. And we played tic-tac-toe on the walls. Those were some of the happiest times of my life, playing games and writing on the walls of the Cool-It Room with Jake. Sometimes we kept playing after the ping!
So yeah, I confess. So yeah, I get in trouble. What’s the big deal? You do the crime, you do the time. What’s there to be afraid of? Be smart and you can even make it fun.
My only regret was that Jake wasn’t up there enough. Sometimes I tried to frame him and get him banished with me, but it never seemed to work. He lives his life in the lines, like he colors. Hates trouble. I asked him a thousand times. I’m asking now: What are you so scared of?
Oh, another regret. I don’t get sent to the Cool-It Room anymore. Dad says I’ve outgrown it. Now I get “big girl” punishments, like grounding and cutting my allowance.
Jake
I am not scared. I just don’t get into trouble, that’s all. Why should I? Trouble means punishment. Who needs that? I’d have to be loony. And I’m not loony. I’m sensible. Even my mother says it. “My sensible boy,” she calls me sometimes. “My spunky girl,” she calls Lily. “Cool,” says Lily. “I’d rather have spunk than sense.” I rest my case.
Anyway, when Lily came down from the Cool-It Room on the day of the big sombrero choke-off, she said to Mom and Dad, “That was a lie what Bump said, wasn’t it? Me and Jake are really twins, right? Even if we look different?” I thought her voice sounded wobbly, and when I looked I saw she was ready to cry. Mom grabbed her. “Of course you are, honey. You know why?” “Why?” sobbed Lily. “Because you were both twin eggs inside Mommy at the same time. So there.” Suddenly Lily was beaming and dancing and shaking her fist at Bump, wherever he was: “Yeah! Twin eggs!”
But all that got me thinking. That night in our bunks I said up to Lily, “So I guess we can be twins and still be different.”
“Duh,” said Lily. “In case you didn’t notice, you’re a boy and I’m a girl.”
“I mean different in other stuff,” I said.
“What other stuff?”
“I don’t know, like, almost everything.”
She threw her stuffed pig at me. “That’s a lie. We’re not different in everything.”
I ticked off a few things. “You get in trouble. I don’t. You can’t stay still. I can. You collect train stuff. I collect stones. You hate dogs. I hate worms. You like chocolate. I like strawberry—”
“We both like pumpkin seeds,” she butted in.
“Yeah,” I said, “but I don’t steal yours.”
She crowed, “And we both have goombla! What about that?”
“Big deal,” I said. “That’s the only thing. Everything else is different.”
“We are not different.”
“Yes we are.”
“Bull,” she said, and down came her stuffed watermelon.
“See?” I said. “Who else sleeps with a watermelon?”
That bunk-time argument went on for months. Every time we did something different, I said, “See?” Every time we did something the same, she said, “See?” But most of the things we did the same were because she made it happen that way, so she would be right about us not being different. Like one day we got ice-cream cones and she got strawberry.
“I know why you’re doing that,” I said.
“Doing what?” she said, as if she didn’t know.
“Eating strawberry. So we’ll be the same.”
“I can eat strawberry if I want.”
“You never ate strawberry in your life. You hate strawberry.”
“I love strawberry,” she screeched. “I hate you.” She knocked my ice-cream cone to the ground.
“See how different we are,” I said, all calm. “I would never do that.”
Lily kept trying to cram us into sameness, but the differences kept popping out.
When we were nine we played Pee Wee Baseball. Our team was the Robins. Lily was a pitcher. I was a catcher. One day we played the Beagles, and Lily was pitching against Bump Stubbins. Bump whiffed at three straight pitches, but when the umpire called, “Strike three!” Bump just stayed there, digging into the batter’s box. “Strike three,” the ump said again, and Bump looks up to him and says, “It’s only two strikes.” “It’s three, son,” says the ump, and Bump goes bananas. His Mohawk is gone by now but his personality is even worse. He starts pounding the plate with his bat and screaming, “Strike two! Strike two!” He slams his cap to the ground. He’s red in the face. He wails like a baby. It’s one of the all-time tantrums. I have a front-row seat. I take off my catcher’s mask so I can see better. Finally the umpire says, “Son, take a seat on the bench. This game is over for you.” Kids don’t usually get ejected from Pee Wee games, but that’s what happened. When Bump didn’t go, the ump put some bite in his voice: “Son—go. Now.” That sent Bump packing, but it wasn’t good enough for Lily. She comes stomping off the mound jabbi
ng her finger at Bump: “Yeah—yer outta here! Back to the bench, ya dumb meatball!” And now the ump points to Lily and goes, “And you too, miss. Your game is over.” As Lily steamed off to the bench, I actually fell on my back, I was laughing so hard.
In our bunks that night I said, “See? Different. You were pitching. I was catching. You hate Bump. I don’t. You were mad. I was laughing. You got thrown out. I didn’t.”
She got quiet. She said, like to herself, “I was mad. He was laughing.” She perked up. “Aha! Mad. Laughing. They’re both feelings. See—we’re the same.”
“Get real,” I snickered. “Laughing ain’t feelings.” And I added, just because I felt like it, “Boys don’t have feelings.”
Lily wouldn’t let it go. At dinner the next day she said, “Daddy, Jake keeps saying we’re different. Tell him we’re not.”
Dad put out his hands. “Hey, don’t get me in the middle. You guys sort it out.”
“You’re just exploring your twinness, is all,” said Mom. “Argue away.”
“But Mom,” Lily squealed, “he says boys don’t have feelings. They do too, don’t they? Tell him.”
Mom kept a straight face but her eyes were laughing. “Of course boys have feelings. Sometimes they’re just afraid to show it. Boys are funny that way. Your brother loves you. Love is a feeling. Therefore—pass the salt, please—your brother has feelings.”
Lily stuck her tongue out at me. “See? You have feelings. You love me.”
I didn’t say anything.
Lily
That was such bulldung, Jake saying he had no feelings. Even though Mom said I was right, I wanted to prove it for myself. But I was having a hard time.