Twins

  I have no friends, she thought.

  She wanted to die, the way at boarding school she had wanted to die. Friends were everything, everything!

  Jon Pear spoke so softly it was not speech, but thought etched with a sharp metal tool upon the opposite brain. “You have me, Madrigal,” said Jon Pear. “I am your twin now. Come. We will work on your next gift.”

  “No!” shouted Van. “We won’t let you! Everybody knows what kinds of things you do! There aren’t any victims left around here. You can’t get away with it again.”

  “I’m not Madrigal,” Mary Lee said, desperate now. There had to be a way out. “I’m Mary Lee.”

  “You think we’d fall for that?” Van was shaking with rage. “You think we’d believe for one minute that you’re sweet Mary Lee? Get out of town, Madrigal. Take your sick boyfriend and go. Nobody would care. Nobody would miss you.”

  She went.

  She could not stand alone, not against an entire school, and besides, Jon Pear cared. He was a friend and, in the end, aren’t friends everything?

  Chapter 9

  I HAVE A BOYFRIEND, thought Mary Lee.

  A pillar in a falling world. Somebody to walk with. Somebody who wants to walk with me. Somebody who wants to walk with me only.

  Jon Pear seemed to have no classes, no teachers, no school, nothing but the task of moving Madrigal from place to place. He seemed able to stay with her for good.

  But is it for good? said the corners of her heart and the depths of her gut. Or is it for evil?

  His arm lay around her. It was strangely light, as if he were made of aluminum instead of flesh and bone. If she hugged Jon Pear, would she feel ribs and spine? Was he even human?

  Mary Lee needed answers.

  She began carefully. “Being a twin,” she said to Jon Pear, “is like being an occupied country, with an occupying army watching every move. Since I’m not used to being single, I’m trying to understand who Madrigal was just before the accident.”

  “Who Madrigal is,” said Jon Pear easily. “It would have been a cute game if Van and Scarlett had believed you were Mary Lee, but they didn’t.” He smiled at her, a wide shining smile. “And who you are, Madrigal, is evil.” The smile was happy as sunbeams, yellow dust on warm summer days.

  “Not pure evil, of course,” he said. His eyes were gold. “I’m pure. You’re mixed. But you always surrender to me, because being bad is so much more fun. You’re good at bad, Madrigal.”

  Mary Lee refused to think that. We were identical. I would have known if I had a sister who was good at bad.

  Jon Pear drew his finger around Mary Lee’s face, as if he were drawing her portrait. As if he could style her personality, and her actions, and even her smile. She knew it was the truth, then, that Madrigal had been good at bad. Would she, Mary Lee, surrender to Jon Pear? Did Mother and Father know? Had they read in Madrigal’s heart what Mary Lee hadn’t? A turning to evil for the fun of it?

  But what was it they did together, Madrigal and Jon Pear? Whatever it was, it involved victims: Scarlett and others.

  “Scarlett,” she whispered through thickened tongue and brain, “and the others … what …?”

  “Who cares about them? They’re history, we worked them over.” His gold-stained eyes were as impossible to understand as medieval stained glass windows. “Choose another one, Madrigal. It’s your turn. I saved your turn when you were offing Mary Lee.”

  The flecks of gold left his eyes and hung in the air between their faces, like a veil. His eyes, without gold, were black stones at the bottom of some endless shaft.

  Mary Lee held her hair behind her head, using her hand for a barrette and thought of Madrigal, flinging away the elegant green ornament as if she were … flinging away her twin.

  Mary Lee wanted to hide. To hide she had to get home, and to get home she had to get away from Jon Pear and from school.

  Time to tell Mother and Father who I am, she thought.

  How bizarre if they did not believe her, either. What if she had to resort to a laboratory! Genetic blood typing, or something, to prove which twin lived. Prove she was Mary Lee.

  “I can’t choose now,” she said, forcing herself to sound irritable instead of afraid. “It’s only my second day back and my heart hurts. I need to be away from all this pressure.”

  “You love pressure,” he snapped.

  A shiver raced all the way up her spine into her hair, down between her eyes, and back to her ribs, an all-encompassing shudder.

  How do I get out of this? I’ll be a victim myself if I’m not careful of Jon Pear. He will hate me for tricking him. He’s dangerous. But I can’t go on being Madrigal, either. She’s dangerous, too.

  Jon Pear’s eyes tracked the shudder. His shining smile hid behind twitching lips.

  “My darling Madrigal,” he whispered. “Song of the murmuring waters. We go on, you and I, regardless of your feelings after the fact.”

  After the fact of what? The — she hated the word; it was a sick ugly horrid word — the offing of Mary Lee?

  His eyes were boiling. His patience burned off, leaving the real Jon Pear snarling at her. “Pick, Madrigal!” He spit the consonants. “Choose!” He lingered on the vowels. “Who shall it be?”

  She had to close her eyes. “Jon Pear, why did you take my tear?”

  “What do you mean, why? I love to scare people. People are always scared when you do something they don’t understand. Look at you. You were terrified even though you knew perfectly well what I was doing.”

  “What were you doing?” she said.

  Jon Pear was getting really annoyed. He took the gold chain off and dropped it over her head. Her own tear hung beneath her own throat. She jerked off the rubber cap and poured the tear out on the floor. She was being superstitious and stupid, but she hated him wearing her tear. “My sister — ” she began.

  “Stop using her for an excuse! Once you began loving me, you didn’t have room to love anybody else, and you know it. You have a very limited capacity for love, Madrigal.”

  He kissed her. The kiss was both demanding and giving. She actually enjoyed it, actually wanted more, at the same time she wanted to run.

  “You’re whiplash,” she whispered.

  He loved that. He lifted her like a china doll and swung her around. “My darling whiplash,” he said, “please choose.” He seemed younger than he had, and sweeter.

  If I knew the rules to the game, thought Mary Lee, I could play. And if I knew the rules to the game, I could also end it.

  He kissed her throat.

  She would stop this game as it happened, as she saw the mystery unravel. Perhaps she could be the heroine of this high school! The savior! She’d win those hostile people back as her friends. She’d be the most popular girl in school after all, if she could stop Jon Pear in his tracks. Therefore, she would start in with him. She’d gather facts. Then, cleverly, she’d end whatever charade Jon Pear was playing. “You choose, Jon Pear. I’m too tired.”

  He doubled over laughing. “All right. We’ll cruise the town and pick somebody up. Van has warned everybody here. But there are two private schools and another high school and the Arts and Music High School. We’ll go to Arts. Any kid that decides to do nothing but play the oboe all day long is flaky, and they’ll go along with flaky suggestions. Once they’ve gotten started, of course, there’s no way out.”

  Mary Lee felt tough and competent. I will provide the way out, she said to herself. Didn’t I survive all by myself at boarding school? I can handle anything.

  Jon Pear led her out of the school. Even though she was going to trick him, she felt like a follower, not a leader planning to go in some other direction. Her opposition was melting. She was being steered by him as if she were a wheel. His wheel.

  Jon Pear crossed town and found the Arts and Music High School. There, the driveways were so lined by the vertical points of cedar trees, the school was invisible. Only the hedges were real.

  The int
erior of Jon Pear’s car was sleek and electronic, stupendously expensive, technologically years ahead of anything Mary Lee had ever driven. He must have a very rich family, thought Mary Lee. She wondered if Madrigal had visited Jon Pear at home. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who had a home, or parents, or closets, or breakfast.

  Jon Pear frowned. His big lips drew into an odd pout, his golden eyes hooded by his own brows.

  The marching band was practicing formations on a field beyond the student parking lots. A single student watched from the pavement. Jeans, jacket, and short hair made it difficult to tell whether it was a boy or a girl.

  Jon Pear smiled. “There,” he said softly, a hunter spotting a deer. “We’ve got one.”

  Mary Lee saw that surrendering to Bad did not require her to do Bad. It only required that she go along with it. “What will you do?” she asked, sick and fascinated at the same time.

  Jon Pear laughed. “What will we do?” he corrected her.

  Chapter 10

  JON PEAR PARKED, LEAVING the car without a word. She sat in the passenger seat, knowing that neither she nor that student in jeans should be a passenger of Jon Pear’s.

  It was a girl, lots of makeup on a gamin face, hazel eyes, and tipped nose. Her legs and tiny feet treated the band’s marches like ballet music, and she danced in slow motion as Jon Pear spoke to her.

  Again and again, she giggled, tilting her head flirtily, dancing.

  Jon Pear was at his handsomest. His golden-certain self gleamed like a trophy before her. When she paused to hug herself against the cold, he whipped off his jacket like her male dance partner and roped her close to him with its empty sleeves. They both laughed, and he leaned down, and she leaned up, and they touched — not lips, but foreheads.

  Jon Pear escorted her to the car.

  She, too, had surrendered. Whatever he had offered her, she was eager to have.

  Mary Lee trembled, but the girl was laughing.

  “Hi,” she said to Mary Lee, ducking into the backseat. “Jon Pear says you’re getting up a party to go into the city. I never go in unless I’m with friends because you know it’s so dangerous. But when you’re in a group, of course, you’re not afraid, so this is really great. I’ve been noticing Jon Pear around the high school. I don’t go to Arts yet, but I keep applying, maybe some semester I’ll qualify, but of course right now I’m only a sophomore at the regular high school with you. This is pretty neat, what a great car! I usually don’t hang out with seniors. In fact I hardly even know any seniors. My name is Katy, and you’re Madrigal, aren’t you? I love your name. Jon Pear says it means song of the murmuring waters. Are we just going to party? See a movie? What will we be doing? Who else is going?”

  Katy did not seem nervous, but as if babbling was normal for her.

  Jon Pear eased his car off the Arts campus. His eyes were icier than the wind, and his smile more cruel.

  The car, utterly silent, without the slightest bump or jostle, moved on like soft butter being spread. At a stoplight, where the car ceased traveling forward so gently, so imperceptibly, that Mary Lee could not even compare it to normal vehicles, she thought: I’m just getting out. There’s a McDonald’s over there, I’ll just use the phone, call Mother and Father, leave Katy and Jon Pear to whatever —

  The door handle did not move.

  The temperature in Mary Lee’s body dropped several degrees. Without attracting any attention she slipped her fingers to the door lock on the window ledge. She could not pull it up.

  Jon Pear was smiling broadly. He did not look at Mary Lee. He did not look at Katy in his rearview mirror. He smiled down the road and into the night he had planned.

  Van had supposedly “warned” everybody in the high school — but two thousand students attended that high school. Nobody knew “everybody.” When people said “everybody,” they meant the hundred or so kids they actually knew.

  So this is what a victim looks like, thought Mary Lee. Katy. “Don’t you have to call your parents, Katy?” said Mary Lee.

  Now she had Jon Pear’s attention? “What are you up to?” he hissed incredulously.

  Katy was bouncing eagerly, a ballet dance from the waist up. “Heck no. My parents never care what I’m doing. I mean, they don’t even care what they’re doing, you know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean,” said Jon Pear sympathetically.

  Mary Lee didn’t. What kind of parents were those?

  Jon Pear passed the fast food places: Burger King, Roy Rogers, Arby’s, Subway, and Dunkin’ Donuts vanished. He passed motels and garages, discount stores, and factories.

  He accelerated, and drove upward onto the raised superhighway that led into the depths of the city.

  “Jon Pear, this is a limited access road,” said Katy. “I mean, like, from this road we sure aren’t going to stop at any houses. I thought, you know, lots of people were going to the party. How are you going to pick anybody up? Did you actually mean to get on at the next entrance? Because I know a shortcut if what you want is — ”

  “We’ll meet everybody else there,” said Jon Pear.

  Who will they be? thought Mary Lee. Who are the other players in this game? If I don’t go along with Jon Pear, I won’t get answers and be able to stop him … but what if I can’t stop him? What if Katy and I end up in serious trouble? And neither of our parents will know where we are?

  It seemed more and more possible that her identical twin had gone on dates not to dance, not to see movies, not to park the car and kiss … but to hurt people.

  “I don’t want to go after all,” said Mary Lee. “Take me back to the school. I have to get my car. Katy, I’ll take you home.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to go home,” said Katy quickly. “I mean, this is pretty exciting. I don’t get to do stuff very often.”

  Jon Pear’s laughter filled the glossy car. He clicked on a CD and turned the volume up high enough to move tectonic plates. Rap. Words of rage and hate blended with screaming instruments.

  Seventy-five miles an hour. Impossible to open a door and escape, even if the doors opened. The driver, however, controlled the locks.

  The suburbs ended.

  The city began.

  It was a city whose symphony and museum, fabulous department stores, and famous shops lay in the very center. Ring upon ring of abandoned wrecks of buildings circled the safe part. The safe part — joke; this was not a city with safe parts — was contained in a very small area. People drove into the city only on the raised highway, keeping themselves a story higher than the human debris below.

  It was a place where garbage was permanent and graffiti was vicious. The homeless died in pain, and the drug dealers prowled like packs of animals looking for victims.

  Mary Lee did not like to look out the window whenever she went into the city, because the alien world down there was so horrid she could not believe they were citizens of the same country. Guilt and fear cancelled each other out, and she just wanted not to see it, and not to let it see her.

  Jon Pear got off the highway.

  “Not here,” said Mary Lee in alarm.

  The road onto which he exited was pockmarked like a disease. Shadows moved of their own accord, and fallen trash crawled with rats.

  “Jon Pear, you got off too soon,” said Katy nervously. “People never get off the highway here. Get back on! The only safe exit is another mile up. This is a terrible neighborhood, even I know that. Jon Pear, we can’t drive here!”

  Jon Pear smiled and drove here. He drove very slowly, the way only a big, heavy car with automatic transmission can move: creeping like a flood over flat land. So slowly they could see into the broken windows and falling metal fire escapes, down the trash-barricaded alleys and past the sagging doors of empty buildings.

  A gang in leather and chains moved out of the shadows to see what was entering their territory.

  “Jon Pear,” said Mary Lee, too afraid to look and much too afraid not to look, “what are you doing
?”

  It was impossible to imagine that human beings lived here. It was another planet … as the mind of Jon Pear was another planet.

  The gang could have enveloped the car, but perhaps they were too surprised, for they simply watched, and Jon Pear turned the corner.

  Here, not even streetlights worked; they were long destroyed. Not even cats prowled. A stripped car lay rusting on the sidewalk. Distant sirens as distant as foreign lands whined.

  Jon Pear stopped the car.

  What if the car breaks down here? thought Mary Lee.

  She tried to picture her sister doing this and could not. Madrigal, to whom beauty and order and perfection mattered?

  “You better sit up front with us, Katy,” said Jon Pear. “Madrigal, move over closer to me. Katy, get out of the car and get in front with Madrigal.”

  “I don’t want to get out,” said Katy, terrified.

  Jon Pear swiveled in the driver’s seat. He extended his right arm in a leisurely manner, so it lay over the back of the seat. His golden smile filled his entire face, and he swiveled his head and widened the smile even more.

  Katy had no smile whatsoever.

  “What do you think we’re going to do?” said Jon Pear. “Leave you here?”

  There was a soft friendly click, and the locks on the four doors rose, like tiny antennas.

  “Come, Katy,” said Jon Pear, “come sit in front with us. Just open your door and walk around.”

  I can’t let her do that, thought Mary Lee. He might — he might actually — no. Nobody would do that. But what if he — no. I refuse to believe that —

  Katy got out.

  Jon Pear, his smile completely intact, as if he had become a wax figure of himself and would gloat for eternity, reached back, shut her door himself, and locked up.

  “No,” whispered Mary Lee, and she was not saying no to Jon Pear, or no to the neighborhood, but no to Madrigal, who had done this before.

  Jon Pear put the car in drive but did not set his foot on the accelerator, so that the car moved of its own accord, only a few miles an hour, and Katy could keep up with them if she ran fast enough.