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“To meet up with Sorina?” Nicole asked, curiosity thinly veiled, but less sharp than the rest of our group.
I smiled in response, though I didn’t feel it. “No, I mean, I see her around town when I’m walking.”
Nicole opened her book, adjusting her backpack on the bench. “Why do you walk around town?”
“To clear my head. I don’t sleep well.”I am the dream, and the dream is me. Your existence is her undoing.I reached for the notebook in my pocket but stopped myself. I didn’t want to write poetry in front of Nicole, and I hoped the words wouldn’t slip away from me.
“Must be nice,” she remarked.
“Not sleeping well?” I asked.
“No,” she corrected. “Not being afraid of who will find you in the dark.”
The dark didn’t scare me. Maybe it was because I could see clearly when I walked the town, when my feet made soft sounds on the road. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“I wish you would tell us where you’re really from,” Nicole said, startling me. “I’ve been watching you since the first day, and you’re … different.”
“What do you mean?” Again, I repeated myself, this time with a different question.
“It’s like … like you’re Amish or something. You know there’s an Amish community not far from here? You remind me of them—or how I imagine they are. You don’t know things a normal teenage boy should know. What was the ranch like where you grew up? No TV? No, like … real people?” It was the most I’d heard Nicole say, away from everyone else, away from school. She was opening up in front of me, and I liked her.
“I guess you could say that,” I said.
“So you’re like the Amish people?” she goaded.
“I guess. What did you mean when you said it must be nice?” I asked, circling back.
Nicole rolled her eyes, and in that moment, she looked like her twin. “You’re a boy. You can walk around town at night without a care in the world, right? When new people move here, it’s mostly to escape something. Escape the city, crime, and all the scary things in the world. Dads move their families here because it’s safe. But what they don’t see is … nowhere is safe when you’re a girl. Are we investigating a string of missing boys? No. You don’t have to worry about anything.”
I bristled at her words. I knew she was right in a lot of ways. And maybe that’s why saying what happened to me and my past was so hard to get out. I was ashamed. Ashamed I didn’t fight.
“If you want to walk around the town at night, you can come with me,” I said, not sure if I meant it. I was always baiting Sorina out into the open. But I hoped I didn’t have to do that anymore.
Nicole smiled, shaking her head, knowing where my thoughts lingered. “Sorina might not like that.”
“We’re not … I don’t know.” I pulled my leg onto the bench, turning my body to the cemetery.
Nicole brushed her hair from her face and narrowed her eyes at me. “Jessica might get jealous.”
I turned toward her sharply. “What?”
“She told me you would be an easy lay back on the first day of school. That she’d break you.”
I flamed red, my stomach rolling.Break you.“I’d rather she didn’t talk about me like that,” I said, sounding like a puritan or however the fuck Amish people must have sounded.
“I told her she shouldn’t say stuff like that, but she never listens to me.”
“Aren’t twins supposed to be in tune and connected and all that? You two seem so—”
“Opposite? Yeah. Everyone can see it, but they don’t know how awful it is to feel it. I wish we were close. How wonderful to have someone born with you, growing up with you, and next to you throughout this life? Right? That’s supposed to be this nice thing. And it’s not. We’ve always fought, always been at odds. I don’t know, we don’t have many pictures from when we were little, but when I see one where we’re smiling together, it feels like I’m looking at some other babies. Not little versions of us. You know, she always wanted to pump me for information about Eric, too. Since she knew I was partners with Amber.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “Why?”
“She likes Eric. Always has. As far back as when we were in kindergarten and he was in first grade. They used to be boyfriend and girlfriend when we were seven, before everyone broke apart into their groups. Until we all realized that Eric’s family had money, and ours didn’t. It was simpler then, before we knew words like prep and skank, and …” She looked away.
“Do you think Eric would have ever been into her?”
“Not in public. Just like Amber and me couldn’t be friends in public. Who knows? She sneaks out too, you know. The evil twin. She enjoys being that.”
