“Thought you might be pissed. I mean, I’ve never—”
Twisted bodies under moonlight, capable hands, my breath caught in my throat. “Yes, you have. You’re no Virgil, remember?”
“But you were,” he snaps. “I didn’t know how you’d feel about it. Or . . . her, or whatever.” Isaac’s other hand goes to my chest, finger drawing a small circle. Her heart leaps to meet his touch.
But it’s my skin that gets goose bumps.
“What I’m trying to say is, I’ve never . . .” He actually blushes, and I finally get it.
“Deflowered anyone?”
“Um, is that like popping a cherry?”
“That’s a slightly more violent metaphor for the same action, but yes,” I say.
“You and me and metaphors.” Isaac shakes his head. “I was afraid you’d be mad, is all.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted though?” I ask. “Help Sasha Stone do something she’s not supposed to do? Bring out the wild in me? Teach the dog some new tricks?”
“You’re no dog,” he says, hand trailing up my neck. “You’re a girl. A good one. And I . . .” His thumb brushes my cheek, and I watch his pulse leap in the hollow of his throat, naked and vulnerable.
“I’ve never said this to anyone before . . .” He stops, swallowing so hard I don’t know if this is a pronunciation issue or what.
“I like you,” he says, and I burst out laughing.
He smiles along with me, unsure. “What?”
“You,” I say.
He shrugs. “I don’t like many people.”
“Me neither,” I tell him.
“I don’t want to mess this up,” he goes on. “And I feel like in a world where Isaac Harver gets to talk to Sasha Stone about metaphors in the middle of the night, I’m the one that’s going to ruin it.”
I don’t know what to say, because whatever it is will only have the lifespan of a gust of wind in my hair, or however long it takes to get the smell of cigarettes off my fingertips. But I don’t want to tell him that right now, because then I’m the one to ruin it.
“So how’s this gonna work?” he asks, reclaiming the small amount of distance I’d put between us with my laughter. He laces his hands behind my back, resting them on the base of my buzzing spine.
“I don’t know.” I’m honest for once, the well of confusion that has become my middle overflowing up through my throat. I can’t tell him I’m of two minds on the subject, because I’m not. My mind knows exactly what it wants. A high GPA. Oberlin. The future I’ve been guaranteeing myself since the first day of kindergarten. It’s the rest of me that’s in revolt, any ideas I had about my sister only having my heart obliterated in one night under the trees. I shiver at the memory, in a good way.
“I think her needs are very basic.”
“Roger,” he says, pulling me in even tighter.
I can smell smoke on him, emanating from the folds of his clothes. It should be a huge turnoff, but it’s not. Neither is the sickly sweet tinge of alcohol that I can smell on his breath. Quite the opposite.
“And what about you?” he asks. “You got needs?”
“No,” I say, pulling him toward the trees where the shadows are complete. “This is for her.”
There’s the slightest resistance, a moment where our arms are taut and he hasn’t quite followed me yet. Isaac now the dog, one on a leash, that might put down his head and disobey. But my shoulder dips when I turn back, one eyebrow raised, and my jacket slides down so that the thin tank I’m wearing is bright in the moonlight, the rise and fall of my heart underneath it calling to him.
“Jesus, lady,” he says. “And I bet people think I’m a bad influence on you.”
“Now what?”
I still don’t have words. The time when I’m me but not myself hasn’t faded away completely, and won’t until the pleased flush that covers my whole body is safely hidden by my jacket, zipped tightly, sleeves punched down into curled fists. The warm buzz of anticipation is gone, leaving behind the coldness of regret, my mind taking over now that the polluted blood of my sister’s heart is satiated.
“Now you go home,” I say.
I hear him moving, the rustling of leaves and the quick snick of his belt going back together. I tell myself I won’t, but I sneak a glance over my shoulder when he’s bending down for his shirt, the moonlight turning him into a landscape I want to explore again, all lean muscle and flickering dips. I can’t help but wonder what it looks like when I can’t see it, while he’s—
“That’s fucked-up,” he says.
“What, you want to cuddle?” I snap, and the tiniest twitch in his jaw makes me think maybe he does. I’m left feeling like Lilly, all wait— What?
But the look is gone once his T-shirt is back on, like an eraser passed over his face. “Nope,” he says, and smacks my ass as he walks past me. I follow for once, the air behind him smelling like smoke and beer and sex. My sister’s heart speeds up in reaction, urging me on.
“Wait,” I call after him, actually jogging to keep up. Pathetic.
He turns when he gets to his bike, rummaging through his pockets for a fresh cigarette. “What?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, the words coming out more easily than I ever expected they could. So I must actually be, somewhere inside. “It’s just . . . I don’t really know how to do this.”
He flicks the lighter, his face lit up magnificently for a second. “Lucky for you, I’ve got practice. You want to be bad, Sasha Stone. I get it.”
I don’t bother to correct him that it’s not me who wants to be bad, but my sister. Whatever flicker of affection I thought I saw under the trees is gone; the face behind the bobbing ember of his cigarette is stone cold.
“I’ll teach you,” he says.
“Sasha?”
The soft scent of sex is still on me, mixing with the acrid cigarette smoke to make a contradictory fume that clouds my mind. I’m not fully myself, can’t be when I smell like this. The conviction is so deep that I almost don’t respond to my mother calling my own name.
“Sasha?” she says again. It’s hesitant, rising up from the darkness of the dining room just as my hand pauses on the bathroom door. I need to wash. Need to get clean and go to bed. What I don’t need is to try and explain myself to her.
“What?” I copy Isaac’s voice, a question spoken in a voice that doesn’t invite an answer.
“Don’t what me, young lady,” she responds in kind, the tentative thread snipped in half by parental control masquerading as concern. “What were you doing?”
My eyes are adjusting to the dark and I can just make her out, sitting at the dining room table. She’s in her usual chair, facing the window. Which means her question is mostly rhetorical.
“I guess I was being bad, Mom.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath that must come from somewhere behind her forehead because it pulls her eyebrows inward. “What’s gotten into you, Sasha?”
I almost say Isaac Harver’s dick, but then cut it off with a laugh at the literal answer my sister would want me to toss out. At the fact that I’m getting in trouble for something that’s not my fault.
“You said yourself that I seemed happy,” I tell her.
“But why are you?”
It’s a good question. How can I be happy when the clasp on my clarinet case actually creaks from lack of use? How can I be happy when I flubbed a basic scale this week in band, my fingers correcting automatically, but not before Charity’s eyes made a quick dash in my direction, noting the mistake? How can I be happy when my boyfriend and my lover are two different people?
“Because I’m two different people,” I say, answering myself aloud, feeling the jigsaw of my new life click together. I’m a puzzle, definitely. But not the kind that lies flat on the table waiting for someone to piece it together. My broken bits have flurried through the air of their own volition, creating in three dimensions.
And I don’t need finishing.
 
; “Sasha, are you drunk?” Mom asks in disbelief. She gets up, crossing over to me in the dark, her own breath laced with wine from dinner—I take a deeper whiff—and perhaps some after too. I’m not drunk. I just did a lot of intimate things with someone who was, and now we both smell like each other, entangled, inseparable. Like me and my twin.
“What is my sister’s name?” I ask her.
She stops, sagging against the wall for support, her hip pressing into the plaster where my anger used to go until it found the path to my mouth. “What?”
“Her name.” I advance on Mom, my words tight and precise in a way that won’t allow for denial or explanation. All I’m after right now is a fact.
“Shanna,” Mom says, her hand going to her throat as she does, as if the name needs the extra help to be pushed out into the air between us. “Her name was Shanna.”
“Shanna,” I say, and my heart explodes into a stuttering beat at the name, black eruptions fill my already dark vision. I sink to the floor beside Mom, a miasma of smoke and sex rising up from my clothes.
“She’s here, Mom,” I say, my hand going to my chest. “She’s here and there are things that she wants.”
“Don’t say things like that,” Mom says, but she’s two people right now as well. The woman who only finds hope in the pages of romance novels, and the one who is staring at me through tears lit from behind by joy. The woman who keeps one hand to her own throat as if to deflect a death blow, and the other reaching toward me, clasping her fingers with mine as the pulse beats through us all.
“You need to explain,” she says.
twelve
There is a fight.
For once I’m not participating. I sit in my chair, staring at the empty one across from me where my sister was always supposed to be, Mom and Dad throwing words at each other so quickly, they’re like a physical bond between them. The only one left standing.
Dad clearly thought I’d finally ratted him out about his affair when he got home from golfing to find no dinner, his wife and daughter stern-mouthed and stiff-spined at the table. I think that conversation might have actually gone better than what Mom served up, a calm repetition of what I’d told her the night before.
“Jesus Christ. Just . . . Jesus Christ,” Dad is saying. I almost don’t recognize him without his earplugs in, his forehead touching the table where his dinner usually is.
“Honey, I just think we should listen and consider. Sasha says—”
“That our dead daughter is living inside our other daughter,” Dad finishes for her, finally lifting his head. “That’s what she says.”
Mom looks at the table, the high polish that she gives it every week providing her own twin. “Is it entirely unbelievable?”
“Yes,” Dad says, raising his arms like he’s the band director about to take us into forty-six measures of whole rests. Nothing there. Should be obvious.
I get up, my chair smacking the wall behind me. I can hear bits of plaster filtering down behind the wallpaper, see small grains of it slip out from under the baseboard.
“You’re going to tear this house apart,” Dad yells at me, and I’d almost award him some points for a great metaphor if I thought he did it on purpose.
“Back off,” Mom snaps at him, and he does, jaw coming together with an audible click. I don’t think she’s told him to do anything in the last ten years or so, but he must have been well trained once because the skills are still there.
“Honey, do you need anything? What’s wrong? Can I get you something to eat?” Mom’s hands are on my shoulders, running down my arms. Her skin trying to give heat to a baby who died inside her and her words trying to feed a child who hasn’t eaten in eighteen years.
I am suddenly very important.
“Sure,” I say. “Leftovers are fine.”
I sit down in the perpetually empty chair as Mom leaves the room, unspoken words trailing behind her and promising a fight upon her return. The house looks different from here, like I’ve found a new world in our own dining room. Dad watches me as I settle into the cushion, which is stiff and like new.
“Sasha, I don’t know what’s going on,” he says. “But it’s not what you think it is.”
I nod to let him know I’m listening, but I definitely don’t agree. From the kitchen I hear the clink of plates, the patient hum of the microwave that was a wedding present they haven’t given up on yet.
“If you need some help, any kind of help . . .” He trails off, obviously hoping I’ll finish his sentence with the words he doesn’t want to say.
I don’t know when Dad and I stopped communicating. The awkwardness between us is a slow growth, one no one noticed until it was too late, metastasized. He’s trying, I know, and I should be meeting him halfway. But it’s been so long since there was anything more between us than lame jokes he throws at me to tease; the only interaction we’re familiar with when it comes to each other is irritation. But there’s nothing funny about his daughter possibly being insane, no tidy column for the deceased twin to be crammed into.
“I don’t need help,” I tell him. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Mom puts a plate in front of me, her lips twisting a little when she sees where I’m sitting. Steam rises up from my plate, heat escaping with little pops from a pork chop that I ignored at dinner last night.
“Sasha,” Mom says quietly. “Maybe it will be easier for us to understand if you can tell us more about why you think that Shanna—”
Dad slaps the table so hard, the chandelier shakes, tiny music drifting down among us. “Don’t encourage her,” he yells. “We only have one child and I’ll be damned if I’ll watch her go crazy and let you help her.”
“You never mourned her!” Mom shrieks, anything she was holding in check flowing out on the last word, a crescendo that feels like it will break the window.
“She never existed!” Dad roars back, with a volume I didn’t know he had the capacity for. If I combined all the words he’s spoken to me over the years they would not equal those three, words borrowed from a fight they should’ve had years ago.
I look down at my plate, the corn safely tucked to one side, what’s left of the pork chop mangled but not touching anything else. I’ve even taken my knife and scooted the breading crumbs away from the pooling butter from the corn. I didn’t know I was so much like Dad until now, so compartmentalized and factual. His food never touches, either.
They’re still yelling at each other when I throw my plate. All of it’s touching now, smeared on the wall and dripping down to mingle with the plaster dust.
They look at me, mouths both agape at this new person. I might be nasty once in a while, push back from the table too fast and leave the room in a huff. But Sasha Stone is a good girl. Sasha Stone does not throw her dinner across the room and watch it puddle on the floor with something like satisfaction brewing in her gut.
That’s someone else entirely. And they don’t know how to handle her.
“Sasha . . .” Dad’s eyes are still on the floor, not able to meet mine. He says, “Go to your room” at the same time Mom says, “Clean up that mess,” and they look at each other, unsure how to coparent when the child isn’t a perfect ten.
So I don’t do either. I walk out the front door and get in my car, wondering where I should go and who I should see. My hands find my phone, and my sister decides without asking.
There’s a subtle shift Monday morning after the revelation. Mom and Dad are being very careful with me, and each other. Whatever fragile peace they found between the two of them after I left seems to be based on pretending nothing happened. Dad grabs toast and leaves as if work might evaporate if he doesn’t get there on time. I seriously doubt anything so substantial as a tax firm could cease to exist, but if you asked me that about a twin six months ago I would’ve said the same.
Now I know better.
I feel her inside me, beating more quickly when I picture Isaac’s face, responding whenever I say her name me
ntally. I only thought of her as sister until yesterday. Mom had said her name hesitantly, like a bad word you whisper because you don’t actually know what it means yet.
Like fuck. Except you k(now) what that means.
That’s waiting for me on the Notes app on my phone when I get to first period. I roll my eyes at the parenthetical, but the tingle that I feel all over my body is testament to the truth of Shanna’s statement. When I passed Isaac in the hallway my fingers instinctively clenched Heath’s, earning me a subtle pressure in response that barely registered against the tumult Isaac’s wink sent through me. Her heart reacted, certainly, but I can’t ignore the fact that since I’ve given her some free rein with my body it’s starting to get some ideas of its own, too.
I ignore the blush spreading in my cheeks at the thought of Isaac, the pins and needles rushing through my spine as I remember his naked back in the moonlight, and tell my hands it’s time to prioritize.
Mr. Hunter’s handwriting is sketchy at best, and when there’s a challenge he deteriorates into a first grader with a caffeine buzz. He’s written that word—CHALLENGE—across the white board in red Expo marker, but he was overly excited and made the first letters too large, so the last few are squeezed in like a bowel obstruction. Somebody thought they’d be clever and added a tiny R in the corner, complete with an explosion. Insensitive or not, it’s accurate.
Because somebody is going down.
When there’s a chair challenge, the second- or third- or fourth-chair instrument makes a play for the seat ahead of them. It either ends with someone firmly entrenched in their proper place and an expanding sense of superiority to their immediate right, or a palpable air of embarrassment while the challenged shifts to the left, taking their case, music, and a tucked tail with them. It’s a weird moment, complete with mumbled excuse mes and other pretenses at politeness as the demoted and the promoted switch places, one barely keeping a lid on a victorious smile while the other is probably considering ending somebody’s marching-band career with a solid whack to the back of the knee.