This Darkness Mine Read online

  My fingers fly through my locker combination without thought, my mind idly following the junior high band as they murder our fight song, its agonizing death floating down the hallway. They’ve pounded through the first sixteen measures, and I’m bracing myself for the bridge when my locker is slammed shut, my index finger two inches from losing some length.

  “What the hell?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Isaac Harver says as he leans against the wall.

  My heart hits at least a hundred beats per minute as I glance up and down the hall, but there’s hardly anyone here this early. Just me, the sixth-grade morning class using the shared band room, and the only person in the world I know who actually owns a black leather jacket.

  And somehow Isaac wears it like it’s any other coat, as if he could take it off and still look like a badass. I glance at the tattoo trailing down his neck into his white T-shirt and the scabs on his knuckles from where—the word is—he punched out Jade McCarren’s dad last week when he shorted him on weed.

  Intimidating or not he almost took off one of my fingers, and I need all ten if I’m going to Oberlin.

  “Thinking,” I say. “Not your normal mode of operation is it?”

  He smiles and I stop breathing for a second, either because he might be about to stab me or because he has dimples.

  “So, what?” he says. “You came over to the dark side for a minute when you gave me your number?”

  I yank my locker open for the second time. “I did not give you my number,” I say between clenched teeth, and my anger makes him take a step back. People are always surprised when roses have a few thorns, like the girls who wear khakis and live with our natural hair color aren’t ever going to bite.

  “Yeah . . .” Isaac’s eyes narrow as he watches me fish a copy of Great Expectations out of my locker, even though I have no idea why I need it, since English isn’t until after lunch. “Except you did.”

  It’s my turn to slam the locker, and I’m about to say something nasty when there’s a hand on my shoulder, heavy, cool, and calm.

  “Everything okay?” Heath asks, his voice as steady as his pulse.

  Isaac doesn’t look at my boyfriend. I can feel his eyes on me even though I’m staring at my locker.

  “Yeah, man,” Isaac says. “Everything’s peaches.” Then he flicks a strand of my hair over my shoulder as he walks away.

  Heath’s grip on me tightens. “What was that?”

  I turn into him, switching my view from the numbers on my locker to the steady, sensible third buttonhole on Heath’s shirt. It’s Tuesday, so he’s wearing his blue oxford.

  “Nothing,” I tell him, my eyes slipping slightly upward to the collar of his new tee, crisp and white, barely stretched. I remember that Isaac’s was worn out, with the tiniest drop of rust on the edge that was probably blood.

  “Just a psycho being a psycho,” I add, because Heath hasn’t let go of my shoulder, and I can feel the tips of his manicured nails through my sweater.

  I head toward the band room, Heath in my wake as the sixth graders spill out to get to their wing before the rest of the high schoolers fill the halls. I swear I can feel the strand of hair that Isaac touched burning right through my clothes.

  Which makes no sense because we’ve barely exchanged ten words our entire lives, even in a school this small. The only memory I have of him is from third grade, when he wrote the f-word in red crayon on the bottom of the tube slide, and we all dared each other to go look at it.

  He’s at the end of the hall, headed for the back door where smokers sneak one before first period. I watch him take the turn, part of me hoping I never see him again and another part willing him to look back at me. Then he’s gone, and my heart stops.

  It actually stops.

  I make the oddest noise, the slightest oooh, as I lose the beat, my hands clamping to my chest as if I can reset the metronome there with my fingers. Heath is at my side, hands tight on both arms now, forcing my arms deeper into their sockets, my collarbone protesting. I can’t speak, can’t tell him to stop. My heart has left me. I felt it go, slipping down the hall to follow Isaac. Like a rubber band stretched too far it comes back to me, slamming into my rib cage just as I crumple to the floor.

  One beat.

  Two.

  A thread of regularity.

  “I’m fine,” I say to Heath, who came down to the floor with me. “Not enough to eat this morning, I think.”

  He digs in his pocket and pulls out a package of granola, which should be some kind of heroism in this moment but instead all I can think is that he’ll be a great dad and somehow that’s unsexy as hell right now.

  “Just get me off the floor before anybody sees me,” I say, waving away the granola. He’s a gentleman, hand on my elbow, counting to three, saying “careful,” as I come to my feet.

  Heath holds the door to the band room open for me, and I get to my chair without falling, snapping together my clarinet and trying to reclaim the steps of this day, the ones that need to accumulate to get me through the week, the month, the year. Everything that needs to pass to land me where I deserve to be—the first clarinet chair in a bigger room than this, surrounded by real musicians.

  Isaac Harver is not going to distract me from that.

  And if my heart stops first, I’ll find a way to keep going without it.

  I monitor my pulse throughout the day, slipping my fingers onto my wrist and counting, well aware that if I collapse again Heath will call 911 and I’ll spend my evening explaining that my heart travels with Isaac Harver now. Which is just as ridiculous as it sounds, even taken symbolically.

  How he got my number I don’t know, but I definitely didn’t give it to him, I reassure myself as I pull the cuff of my sweater back down over my wrist in sixth period. My pulse is right where it’s supposed to be, my heart behaving instead of traipsing toward certain doom. Lilly flops into the seat next to mine, her hair ballooning up into a mushroom cloud that carries nothing more lethal than an overdose of lavender vanilla.

  “Hey,” she says. “When you get a chance I need a baby picture for the yearbook.”

  I’m still counting heartbeats, so she clarifies.

  “The senior baby pictures?” she goes on. “Cole Vance gave us one of him in the tub, but you could totally see his dick. I had to photoshop some bubbles in. They were really small bubbles. But I guess he was a baby then, so he gets a waiver on that one. Although, maybe it matters even on babies? Do some boy babies have bigger—”

  I stop her with my hand in the air.

  “You need a baby picture of me?”

  “Yes.”

  “For the layout of senior baby pictures?”

  “Yes.”

  I nod. “Got it. Stories of Cole Vance’s prepubescent penis not necessary.”

  “Brooke thought it was funny,” she huffs.

  “Brooke would,” I shoot back. “Just give me the bare minimums of what I need to know. I’m operating on overload as it is.”

  And while this is certainly true, I don’t know why it’s suddenly getting to me. Pressure is my environment, like a creature three miles underneath the sea. If you took all the expectations away, the shock would kill me, my lungs flattening and refusing to reinflate.

  “You okay?” Lilly asks.

  I’m not used to hearing this question. I am always okay. That’s when I realize both my hands are to my chest, shielding my heart from an unseen threat.

  “I’m fine,” I snap, dropping my arms to my side.

  I love Lilly but Charity Newell is her cousin, and I can’t say for sure that she was entirely happy for me when I defended first chair successfully. She might actually care if I’m okay. She might be checking for cracks in my veneer.

  “Did you finish?” I ask, waving Great Expectations in the air to change the subject.

  “You bet,” she says, flashing her phone with highlighted SparkNotes.

  “Nice,” I say. “Slacker.”

&
nbsp; Lilly shrugs. She’s always been this way, smart enough to skate by but not really caring. She’ll be married in five years, have three kids before thirty and call herself happy.

  Great expectations, indeed.

  Her eyes are glued on Cole as he walks in the room, and I’m guessing her mind might still be on baby pictures, but probably not mine. I roll my eyes and schedule a reminder in my phone to ding the second I walk in the door. If I don’t grab Mom as soon as I get home, I’ll forget. There are bigger things on my mind, and the last thing I need is Lilly hassling me about it if it slips through the cracks.

  Heath comes in and gives me a smile, but takes his usual seat at the front. I study the back of his shirt, the precise cut of his hair—always even because he gets it trimmed on schedule. Next to me, Lilly is teasing Cole about bubbles. Legs crossed, body at an angle, eyes cast upward, fingers twisting in her hair. Everything about her is screaming at him to notice her and it’s working.

  Meanwhile I’m ramrod straight staring at Heath’s back, well aware that he’d be irritated if he knew his tag was sticking up.

  I don’t tell him.

  three

  All the stupid people I know are happy.

  A fresh set of nails. The release of a new video game. Mascara that doesn’t run. Shiny rims on a car. These are the things I hear people gushing about as I walk out of school, their momentary elation at the simplest things serving as a reminder that I have higher ideals, bigger goals, a reward in my sights that won’t chip, wash off, wear down, or become boring. Sometimes I think I should borrow Dad’s earplugs to get through the day.

  I drive home, ignoring the ache of my hands as they clench on the steering wheel. I’m squeezing more than necessary, thinking about Cole and Lilly in English. A cloud of pheromones surrounded them by the time Mrs. Walker started class, their eyes on each other’s mouths when they talked, straying to other body parts as if they lacked the willpower to control their gaze.

  Heath and I aren’t like that, never have been. There’s a calm assurance in our relationship: he is my boyfriend; I am his girlfriend. We’ve been together since eighth grade, a slow escalation from texts that held nothing more than casual information (I’m home. Going skiing. Your hair is pretty.) to mild groping in his parents’ den that came about more from curiosity than passion. We make out because we’re supposed to. That’s what couples do.

  The clinical nature of our relationship doesn’t bother me, the hard and fast definitions of what we are to each other reading more like a contractual agreement than anything bordering on affection. We’re cutouts on top of a wedding cake, fingers interlaced but bodies permanently frozen far apart from each other, our smiles painted on. And who cares, really? Wedding cakes are supposed to have toppers. Girls like me are supposed to have boyfriends. Checkmark.

  My phone dings at me as I walk in the door, right on schedule. Picture, it says.

  “Mom,” I yell, kicking off my shoes. “I need one of my baby pictures.”

  I flip through the mail on the table, adding to the pile of acceptance letters from colleges I have no intention of going to. Still, they look nice padding the bottom drawer of my desk.

  “Mom,” I call again, raising my voice to be heard over the ice dispenser as I get a drink. There’s no answer. I gulp down half the glass of water and pour the rest on the aloe plant she keeps on the kitchen windowsill. Its leaves are trimmed back, the tips brittle and brown from where she’s had to clip it so many times to treat the little burns she always manages to accumulate in the kitchen. She’s had the same plant for ten years; it’s one of the more useful things we own. So I water it when I’ve got anything left in my glass, one hard worker to another.

  “Mom,” I try for a third time, irritated now. I’ve got homework, studying, and hopefully at least two hours of practice ahead of me. Taking care of this baby-picture business was supposed to be a quick chore, a box to checkmark. But she’s not home, which means I’m going to lose time digging through plastic bins jammed at the back of the hall closet.

  I open the door and flop to the ground, dragging out an old globe, a pair of waders that fit no one, a shower mat that ended up in here for some reason, and a shoe rack with zero pairs of shoes on it. The photo bins are stacked nicely on top of one another, the only thing in here with any semblance of order.

  But that’s on the outside. Once I pop the top off the first one, I realize I’ve signed up for more than a few minutes of browsing. Mom’s never been the neatest person, but the tubs aren’t even sorted by decade. There’s a shot of my mom in the nineties wearing plaid and drinking beer out of a Styrofoam cup in the same bin as a sepia-toned shot of someone I don’t know and don’t have a timeline’s chance of ever having met.

  “Seriously?” I mutter under my breath as I toss a picture of Dad proudly displaying his first cell phone. I jam my hand to the bottom of the pile and close my eyes, counting on dumb luck to deliver me from this mess of undated, unnamed, unorganized people. A sharp edge slides under my thumbnail and I yank back, dragging it with me.

  The paper is thin, the corner jammed a couple millimeters under my nail, angry red dots of trapped blood welling around it. I pull it free and unroll it, expecting to see the receipt from when Mom bought the plastic bins.

  But it’s a picture. Specifically, an ultrasound.

  “Wonder what Lilly would make of that,” I say to myself. I don’t know if fetal-me would be more interesting to her than Cole Vance’s tiny penis.

  Except . . . it’s not me. Or rather, it’s not just me.

  I scan panel to panel, analyzing what I see, separating black from gray, sound bouncing back off solid versus liquid. The shapes are difficult to distinguish, more white noise than picture. But the neatly printed text at the bottom cannot be misinterpreted, my mother’s name and the date—when she would’ve been pregnant with me.

  But I’m not alone in there.

  A paradigm shift is defined as a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions, and people often come unmoored when they occur. The Catholic Church persecuted Galileo when he argued for a heliocentric universe; people didn’t know germs caused illnesses until the nineteenth century.

  And I thought I was an only child until just now.

  I take it well, all things considered. That is to say I fall over, crumpling the photos I’d tossed aside. A thousand sharp-edged corners dig into my skin as all the blood leaves my head, my fingers and toes tingling as every drop concentrates to my center. To my engorged heart.

  I felt it swell at the sight of two amorphous blobs, vague outline of limbs entwined with one another, heads inclined as if sharing a secret. My heart beats to tear through my chest, my collarbone pounding with the rhythm of it. I am no longer flesh and bone; I am one organ only.

  And it will have its way.

  I didn’t know I stopped breathing until I take a deep gasp, the black spots on my vision fading with the action. My hands come back to life, curling around the ultrasound as my mind grapples with the new information, scanning the tidy columns of known things it has acquired and not finding a spot to fit this particular fact.

  It’s in the shape of a question mark, and I don’t allow for those. There is no place for this, so I stare until the feeling is back in my hands and feet, until I’m able to slowly sit up, the world righted again though so much in it has gone wrong.

  I fold the picture, taking care to crease only the white lines separating the pictures, as if the yet-to-be-born could be harmed. It makes a perfect rectangle, a life-changing fact that fits neatly in my pocket. I put the rest of the pictures back, stack the bins, toss all the useless things no one ever sees back where they were, relegated once again to nonexistence.

  Like my twin sister.

  I. Things I Know

  A. Ultrasound

  1. According to date and name of mother, one of the fetuses is me.

  2. Both of the fetuses are female.

  3. This has been kept from me on pur
pose.

  II. Things I Don’t Know

  A. Sister

  1. If she was born

  2. If she died

  3. If she was adopted

  B. How Isaac Harver got my number

  I shake my head and erase out the last line as irrelevant. I don’t like not knowing things, but that list has suddenly become longer than I imagined possible, and I need to prioritize. I write unlikely next to adopted. We’re not rich but definitely comfortable enough to afford two kids. I’ve chewed the eraser off my pencil, spitting out the soft pink nub and crunching the metal that held it between my teeth while I think.

  Mom came home half an hour ago, Dad shortly after. She’s banging pots and pans around in the kitchen, his earplugs are doing overtime, so neither one of them knows I’m not playing clarinet up here. Instead I’m weighing my options.

  I can walk downstairs, the ultrasound trailing behind me like a ticker-tape parade celebrating the dawn of a new world, one in which I’m aware of my anonymous sibling. I know how that will play out. Mom will cry; Dad will yell; I will stand like a pillar in a storm, demanding truth. I spit out the metal casing from the eraser and chomp down on the wet wood of the pencil, appreciating the give in it when everything else seems to be pushing back at me.

  I fold up my list, blowing away the last bits of eraser that linger from eradicating Isaac Harver’s name. If only I could drag one across my brain, ridding myself of him up there too. My heart gives a little shudder at the thought, and I look down at my chest.

  “Shut up,” I say.

  Mom’s voice floats up the stairs, hitting the same notes as always. Din—ner. It’s an F sharp followed by a half step down to the F, the normalcy of our routine inked out in notes of black and white. I can shatter this, sweep everything to the side in a discordant crash, but then I’ll have to deal with Dad’s bullish baritone, Mom’s panic in a jarring soprano. My blank stare, whole rests of nothingness, can only bear so much.

  Or, I can do what I do best.

  Figure things out on my own.