Reality
Taped to Tippi’s locker is a note:
Why don’t you
go back to the zoo???
Yasmeen grabs the paper,
scrunches it
into a tight ball,
and launches it
along the hallway.
‘Assholes!’ she shouts.
‘You’re the animals!’
Students with books in their arms
lean on lockers and against one another.
They stare
wide-eyed and
open-mouthed,
glad for an excuse to ogle us unhindered.
I knew it was way too much
to ask everyone to accept us—
or even to leave us
alone.
Yesterday was a fluke and today
reality has arrived.
Yasmeen says,
‘They’re afraid of you,
like they’re afraid of me.
We’re different
and that’s bad.’
Tippi stops us and squints.
‘Why are they afraid of you?’
she asks Yasmeen,
her voice a spiky challenge.
Yasmeen turns.
‘I have HIV,’ she says, quite simply
and
tucks tiny strands of hair behind her heavily studded ears.
‘I reek of death,
of low life expectancy. Like you guys,
I guess.’
‘Yes,’ we say in unison
and head for geometry to work on problems
a lot less complicated
than our own.
In Geometry
‘But how do they know?’
Tippi asks
Yasmeen.
We are supposed to be correcting
each other’s answers,
talking through the equations we
got wrong.
Mr Barnes, the teacher,
isn’t even in the room.
He left
after setting us the task and hasn’t come back.
‘I told them.
I didn’t think it would matter,’ Yasmeen says.
‘But the thing is,
it isn’t like cancer.
With HIV
people think you’ve only got yourself to blame,
right?
Well,
I refuse to justify myself by
explaining
how I got it.
Screw that
and
screw them.’
How?
Yasmeen still hasn’t asked us
the questions
which most people blurt out
within minutes of meeting us:
‘Couldn’t you be separated?’
and
‘Wouldn’t you want to try?’
What people really mean is that
they’d do
anything
not to live like us,
that finding a way to look
normal
would be worth
any risk.
So even though all I want to ask
Yasmeen is how, how, how
on earth
she ended up with HIV,
I will not be the one to ask.
Remnants of Him
‘Bastards,’ Jon says
when he hears about the note
on the locker.
Tippi tickles her own armpits
and oo-oo-oos
like a monkey
until we laugh
and the malice of the message
has been boiled away
a bit.
We should be in study hall again
but are at The Church
sharing a bag of salted pistachios
and a bottle of cider.
I give Tippi narrow-eyed evils
when she takes a big swig straight
from the bottle
and fold my arms
over my chest to show my disapproval.
The smell of the booze
makes me think of Dad unsteady and angry
and I don’t want any
part of that.
But then Jon takes a turn
and passes it to me.
I can’t resist.
and taste the remnants of him on it,
the closest I’ve ever come to being kissed.
And I sip until
my head swims
while everyone else
blows smoke rings
into the air.
Then we do animal impressions,
mewing and cooing and oo-oo-ooing,
turning The Church into
our very own zoo.
‘Seriously, the note was stupid,’ Jon says.
He takes the bottle from my hands
and guzzles down the last dribbles.
I shrug, try to look
unruffled.
‘Hatred’s better than sympathy,’ I say,
and play with the ends
of my hair,
willing Jon
to keep
his pity-free eyes
on me.
Not Fair
Dragon drops her dance bag in the hall
and slumps on to the sofa.
‘I didn’t realise you were taking classes on Tuesdays,’ I say,
putting down the book I’m reading.
Tippi looks up and mutes the TV.
‘I’m teaching the little ones
in exchange for my own lessons,’
Dragon says. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’
‘No,’ Tippi and I say together.
‘We didn’t know that.’
We watch the silent screen,
the characters’ mouths
opening and closing,
their desires lost on us.
Mom comes into the sitting room.
‘There’s ravioli on the stove, Dragon,’ she says.
‘Did you know Dragon was working?’ Tippi asks.
Mom nods. ‘No harm in her pulling her weight,
is there?’
‘And what about us? Should we get jobs too?’ Tippi asks.
‘It’s not the same thing,’ Mom says.
‘Don’t make this into an argument about your equality.’
She grabs the remote and laughter from the TV
fills the room.
But Mom doesn’t understand:
Tippi isn’t angry that we aren’t working;
she’s pissed off that our little sister
has to.
Changing
In the overheated locker room during a free period,
we change for P.E. early so we don’t have to strip
in front of a gaggle of girls.
Not that we’ll take part
like the rest of the class—
we will join them for warm up stretches
and the wind-down walk.
We will
sit out
the soccer game.
Yasmeen pretends to be texting
and doesn’t look up as we
unbutton
our shirts.
We are sitting in our bras
taking a breath
when the door
swings open
and the most beautiful girl in the whole school,
Veronica Lou,
bounds in
like an excited Labrador,
her shiny black hair
bouncy behind her.
She peers at us and stops,
holds her bag
up
like a shield and says,
‘I thought I heard the bell.’
Yasmeen picks at her teeth.
‘Next period starts in five minutes, Ronnie,’ she says,
and Veronica nods
quickly,
furiously,
back
ing out of the locker room
like she’s just seen a monster.
Dessert
Grammie is late
so we head for ice cream,
Jon and Yasmeen pressed up close behind us.
It isn’t like New York City here
or even Hoboken
where people are used to seeing oddballs:
the man who rides his bike
dressed like Batman,
the obese belly dancer
on the corner of Park and Sixth,
and us,
the glued-together twins
who hobble around
on crutches
clutching each other.
In Montclair we are new and
unexpected.
But still,
we try to focus,
our hands
pressed against the freezer glass,
our eyes
on rainbow rows of ice cream.
I want vanilla yoghurt.
Tippi chooses coconut cream
with chocolate chips.
Tippi and I share a lot
—we always share dinner—
but rarely,
if ever,
a dessert.
The Worst Thing
Slurping up the last of my frozen yogurt,
I overhear someone say,
‘Being a Siamese twin has got to be
The Worst.
Thing.
Ever.’
And no one laughs
because it’s not a joke.
It’s just meant to be very sad and
very true.
Yet
I can think of
one hundred things
worse than
living alongside Tippi,
than living in this body
and being who
I have always been.
I can think of a thousand things worse.
A million.
If someone asked.
Tragedy
I would hate to have cancer.
I would hate to have to get hooked up
to a machine every week
so they could pump poison into me
in the hope it would save my life.
Our uncle Calvin died of heart disease at
thirty-nine
leaving behind three sons and a pregnant wife.
Grammie’s sister drowned in a barrel
of rotten peaches and stagnant water
when they lived on a farm
as little girls.
On the news are stories about
child abuse and famine and genocide and drought
and I have never once thought
that I would like to
swap my life for any belonging to those people
whose lives are steeped in tragedy.
Because having a twin
like Tippi is
not
The Worst
Thing
Ever.
Again
Dad comes back from another interview
and doesn’t talk.
He sits with Grammie watching
Law and Order
and drinking warm beer.
After three bottles he storms out
and doesn’t come back for hours,
not until he is red-faced and fizzing.
‘Someone make me a sandwich,’
he commands,
leaning against the kitchen table.
Dragon jumps up
from her homework
to do it.
‘Ham?’ she asks.
Dad ignores her and sits on the sofa.
He is asleep before
she has even buttered the bread.
For Myself
Dr Murphy wants to know what happened in school,
so I tell her about the first week.
I talk about the pretty girls
in my class,
the lazy teachers,
and about Yasmeen’s pink hair.
But I never mention Jon.
I keep Jon to myself.
Blood
Tippi and I are teaching Grammie how to
tag herself in online photos
when the blood comes.
We plod into the bathroom
and
I smile at the rust-coloured spot
as I do whenever this happens,
each time it’s proven
that I am a real girl.
Dragon is in her room
doing the splits.
‘Got any sanitary pads?’ Tippi asks.
Dragon
leaps up
and pulls a full packet of pads from her closet.
‘Have them,’ she says,
and hurls them at us.
Tippi catches the pads.
‘Won’t you need them?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Dragon admits.
I glance at the place on Dragon’s body where a baby would
show itself,
but that’s not it.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.
Dragon flicks her hair over her shoulders.
‘You guys aren’t regular.
Must run in the family.’
But that is
not it
either.
What is Possible
‘Conception is possible,’ Dr Derrick said
three years ago
when our first period came.
‘But carrying a baby to full term
in conjoined uteri
would certainly
kill you
or
the baby.’
This is his professional opinion.
Then again,
he told Mom
we wouldn’t see our second birthday.
Yet
here we are.
Sexy
‘I like the way you say “squirrel,” ’ Jon says, laughing.
‘How do I say it?’ I ask.
We are in the common room
next to an open window.
Tippi and Yasmeen are
watching YouTube clips of Simon Cowell’s worst insults
and no doubt
committing them to memory.
Jon pulls the straw from his carton of juice
and drags on it like it’s a cigarette,
then blows imagined smoke
through the window.
‘I don’t know.
You say it like it’s two syllables.
“Squir-rel,” ’ he says.
‘It is two syllables,’ I tell him.
‘Squir-rel. Squir-rel.
Yes, definitely two syllables.’
‘Nope.
It’s one.
It’s one long, sexy, nut-eating word.
Squirrel.’
It comes out of his mouth like
squeeerl
and then
it’s my turn to laugh.
‘You have managed to make it
sound
sort of sexy.
I admit that.’
He sucks on the end of the plastic straw again.
‘Not hard.
I mean, if you use your whole mouth to speak,
your tongue and teeth and lips,
most words are sexy.
Especially the word sexy.
Sex-y,’ he says, slowly.
And again,
‘Sex-y.
Try it.
Use your whole mouth.’
He doesn’t laugh.
He is watching me.
‘Sex-y,’ I whisper.
‘Sex-y,’ he says.
‘Yeah.’
Driver’s Ed
The instructor stutters as she explains
how cars work
—what the pedals do and where the indicators are—
but when I aim the key at the ignition,
she grabs my wrist.
‘I h-h-honestly
don’t know how this will work.
How can you coordinate your feet
quickly enough to avoid cr-cr-crashing?
I can’t understand it.’
And that’s the thing.
People don’t understand
our synchronicity,
the quiet connection
that flows between us.
‘Everyone knows that
ninety percent of communication
is nonverbal,’ Tippi says,
and
while the instructor thinks about this,
I start the engine.
Train Ride
We are tired of getting rides
to school and back again every day
so we take the train home
with Jon
and pretend we can’t hear all the words around us
like little waspy stings.
‘I bet celebrities don’t even have it this bad,’ Jon says.
‘I can’t imagine what it must be like
for you.’
‘It’s like that,’ Tippi tells him
and points at
a woman across the aisle with a phone
aimed at us like a sniper rifle.
‘Want me to say something?’
he asks.
‘No,’ I say quickly
because
I do not want a scene
and
I definitely do not want
Jon to save us.
The Phone Call
‘I got the job this time,’ Dad says.
‘I definitely got it.’
He sets a pizza box
down on the kitchen table
along with a bag of
sodas
and for once,
as a family,
we eat together,
telling each other
about our days,
mainly listening to Dad,
hearing how the director of Foley College