12/12/12

I wrote this story in college. It was later published in Heavy Traffic Magazine.

In my peripheral, I watch Ava. From this angle, her profile is eclipsed by thick side bangs. Still, I study her automatically, matching her micro-movements without choosing to. She draws her breath in and out at a rabbit’s pace, and so do I. Ava’s sitting at the desk adjacent to mine, like always. If her presence were removed from the edge of my vision, my world would spin off its axis, and all my vital undulations would halt; no more heart beat, no more rabbit breath. I’d unlearn it all.

Right now, we’re in French class. I don’t speak French, or English, though I understand the mechanics of both languages perfectly. I have selective mutism. Shallow highschool teachers and guidance counselors often mistake it for a learning disability, but they misunderstand me. I am perfectly able to talk, I have the vocal cords, the words, the confidence. It’s a choice I make deliberately. Silent air is unpolluted air. Too many people waste their breath, their time, saying what doesn’t need to be said, adding to a toxic verbal sewage that clouds people’s attention and generates unnecessary discord. Animals aren’t eroding the planet, and that’s because they don’t talk.

I love shutting the fuck up, so does Ava. Silence is an activity, like reading, that gets mislabeled as passive. Free of cluttered speech, the two of us soak in subtler information and remember it eidetically. We don’t need language to influence an outcome.

Ava is my exception and I am hers. We talk to each other in our shared twin-speak which our child psychologist, Mrs. Donovan, in a moment of professional epiphany, discovered to be a sped up version of English, made lipsy by our candy-colored braces. When Ava and I speak, our tongues flutter and flick and we take pleasure in our mutual private reality. If a normie wanted to eavesdrop on our hyper-chatter they would only have to make a recording then slow it down. I’ve caught our mother, audio recorder in hand, standing outside our bedroom door, attempting this several times.

There’s a copy of Breaking Dawn wedged inside my French textbook. My only consolation in life and death is that Ava has an identical copy under the cover of hers. In perfect synchronicity, we read about werewolves and vampires, both of which are real entities creeping around the woods of our Pennsylvania hometown.

We don’t need to exchange looks to exchange looks. When a line of the text makes Ava’s lips tilt up or wilt down I know without watching, because I feel my mouth being tugged in the same direction. Ava was born ten minutes ahead, so I am the delayed one, the imitator, trapped in repetition.

When Miss Tremblay, our young Canadian teacher, starts her daily quiz, asking the class, “Quelle est la date aujourd’hui?” a dozen hands shoot up. Miss Tremblay doesn’t call on any of our classmates, because she is obsessed with pestering Ava, trying to get her to speak.

“Ava. Quelle est la date aujourd’hui?” she repeats.

Ava looks up from Breaking Dawn. I do the same. She hits Miss Tremblay with an empty glare.

“La date?” Tremblay insists, lifting her eyebrows and pointing to the date written on the whiteboard. Her condescension is heavy, but there’s a minor shimmer of fear in her question.

I eye the faded coffee stain on the left breast of Tremblay’s button-up, a stray translucent hair on her lip, and a single, premature gray hair spiking out of her pixie cut. I pity her and her disarray. She wouldn’t be so ugly if she only knew how to pay attention. I lower my gaze and retreat back into the book, our lips crawling upwards.

We’ve succeeded in freaking her out, that dumb cunt.

Miss Tremblay gives Ava a break and calls on Sophie, the bubbly blonde bitch who always knows basic information and tries to flaunt her grasp of a surface-level interpretation. Everyone adores her, except Ava and I, but of course she doesn’t know that.

“C’est le mercredi, 12 décembre 2012,” Sophie answers. Her lips fill to the brim with glossy satisfaction.

Tremblay squeals out an over-enthusiastic “oui, oui!”

“C’est un jour très spécial!” she claims.

12/12/12.

Aren’t we so lucky to be alive to see the calendar numbers align in such a satisfying way? It’s too bad that, unless bitten by a vampire, none of us will live to see it happen again.

Ava’s gaze keeps flicking out of her book to our left, her 10 o’clock, where Nathan sits. She lifts a can of rainbow unicorn energy drink to her lips. I take a sip. Then, she stares into the back of his neck with an intensity strong enough to trigger spontaneous combustion.

Nate has one of those faces that could be anyone’s face, like the face of a passing stranger in the mall who you never consciously observed, and, yet, his likeness has been recycled in your dreams ever since, used to fill in extras. If you googled “face,” he would appear as a stock image with a watermark, and that’s exactly the sort of thing that I’m attracted to.

He’s wearing a heather gray sweatshirt. So anonymity-core. Ava and I have our uniform, matching black hoodies, and black skinny jeans worn in order to resist interpretation while still conveying our vague depression and unapproachability.

Nate is a blank slate, and that’s why I’m in love with him, because he’s everything and nothing in an instant and will be for eternity. Of course, Ava gets the desk closer to his and the better view of his neck, that freaking whore.

Looking at my twin triggers me. I get these intrusive thoughts, wondering whether I’m hot-or-not. It’s hard to distinguish between ugly-hot, atypically-hot, and universally-hot. One time I hired a hotness consultant off the internet, a 40-year-old guy from Estonia, and sent him nude pictures of both of us. He ranked Ava a half a point above me, which is impossible. I tried it again with a different consultant and got the same results.

Identical penny-colored bangs frame both our faces but our freckles form different constellations. Mine are in all the wrong places. She has an emerald freckle in her right iris that gives her eye the eternal animation of a Blingee sparkle. Maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s her charisma of being first that I lack. Whatever it is, it isn’t fair.

I haven’t been paying attention. Miss Tremblay orders the class to flip to the Natural Disasters chapter. Amid the dutiful flipping, Ava slams her textbook shut, letting Breaking Dawn slip out. She grabs the energy drink and gulps the rest of it down, places it in front of her, then crushes the pink-and-blue can between her hands. The class pauses their flipping to stare, as Ava tosses the metal disc across the room. Though it nearly grazes a few ducked heads, the can lands in the trash with graceful accuracy. All eyes on her, Ava gets up and crosses the room, heading towards the door.

Miss Tremblay is trembling.

“Where are you going?” she asks.

Ava responds with a slow eye roll, facing the class, as she pushes herself out the door.

Knowing that I have to, I get up and follow her, bringing my drink with me.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Tremblay demands, her pixie cut quivering, “There’s no way you two have to use the bathroom at the same time, every time. Sit down.”

I flash my pink tongue at her and shove through the door.

I find Ava in the handicapped stall, our favorite. I don’t knock before entering. She never locks it. Ava greets me in twin speak as she finishes pissing with her skinny jeans wrapped around her ankles. I don’t respond.

“What’s wrong with you? Why so shell-shocked?”

Ava mock-smiles.

I punish her with silence. I know that she is dying to talk and that I’m the only person she can exchange language with.

“Stop staring at me as if you’ve never seen me pee before!”

She’s faking annoyance, but mine is real. I turn around and face the corner of the stall.

“Alyssa, quit being a freak and speak up.”

Though I can’t see it, the weight of her sardonic grin brands itself onto the back of my neck.

“Your turn,” she says.

We switch places. I squat above the toilet, slither down my jeans, but hold in my piss.

“You want me to quit looking at him. What’s-his-name?”

We lock eyes, interrogating each other. As I watch her right eye glint, a violent urge surges through my body, a desire to pluck out her animated freckle and drown it like a deer-tick.

I keep my face blank, my body still, but she succeeds in reading me anyway.

“Well, I have a better idea,” Ava announces, “Why don’t we just share him, the way we share everything?”

I let the piss trickle out.

“Fine,” I say. Of course, she knows I’m lying.

“At least we’re not siamese twins. We don’t have to use him at the same time,” she says, as she takes an indigo sharpie out of her hoodie and starts to write equations on the grime-lined tiles of the bathroom wall.

“His name is Nate.”

She adds a capital N to her equation.

“This isn’t Twilight, you know,” she tells me, “I may have seen a real-life vampire, but I’ve never seen a girl with two boyfriends. Mathematically impossible.”

“Not if we duplicate him. Not if you’re subtracted from the equation. Not if…”

“Not if,” Ava interrupts, as she continues to write, “We are of equal value and we divide ourselves by each other to equal one.”

“And then what?” I yank up my jeans, struggling to get them over my thighs because they are so freaking tight. They cut off the blood flow in my legs, causing an ever-present tingling sensation at my ankles, a masochistic pleasure. It must be akin to autoerotic asphyxiation but I wouldn’t know.

“Coupling will become possible,” Ava says, touching the marker cap to the tip of her lip and holding it pensively like a cigarette. She stares beyond the illuminated slits where the plastic stall wall doesn’t quite meet the tile, into the adjacent stall, where an unsuspecting pisser surely senses the heat of her twinkling gaze.

What an invasive bitch, always penetrating everybody’s eye sockets and hardcore judging them. I can’t stand my sister behaving all stoic and hypercritical, so I lunge into action. I strike-out, viper-like, smacking the marker off her lip. Ava remains unfazed, as if she saw it coming, and continues to stare without blinking.

Triggered, I pick up the marker, which has warily rolled an inch into the next-door stall, and uncap it. The cap plops into the toilet water. I shove Ava by her shoulder with my empty hand. Her spine thuds against the wall. She pushes back. Her freckle-face scrunching up with effort. Being of equal strength, we reach a stalemate. Neither of us can move the other. I arch my left hand over her head, wielding the marker. As I start to drag it down onto her skin Ava snaps into a frenzy of defense. She scratches me. Despite having the flimsy fingernails of an anemic, she leaves a series of red semi-circles near my collarbone.

“You’re completely ratchet sometimes, you know that?” She says, kneeing me in the stomach and shoving me off. I yelp, sounding muted, like a drowning kitten in a velvet bag.

Ava swaggers out of the stall. “What did you even draw on me, huh?”

She peers into the crusty mirror and sees the blue line racing from her widow’s peak to the space between her eyes.

“Oh,” she smiles, “A number one? Exactly my point, Alyssa.”

I join her in the mirror. My face is her face is mine, but mine is frowning deeply, and she is laughing like a fucking maniac, smearing hand soap onto her forehead.

***

It’s lunchtime. The semi-circles on my neck still sting. I refuse to sit with Ava at our usual table, so I spot What’s-His-Face. Nate.

The cafeteria is located in the school’s basement. It’s dim with a dungeon aura. The fluorescent lights are muted and flickering, perpetually at the end of their lives. There are white, cascading banners hanging from the ceilings. Milk advertisements. Each one says “Got Milk?” on it and features a celebrity brandishing a milk mustache.

No one in this backwards town is capable of paying attention. Anyone with half a brain can see that Got Milk? ads are damningly pornographic, designed to stir up the hormones of recent puberty victims. Looking at the banners, us teens get our first whiff of nostalgia. We start to crave our mother’s milk. Our liquid brains form links between milk and metamorphosis and facial hair and mealtime and celebrity and sex. The brand strategy is genius.

If a parent or teacher finally noticed the obvious, they would find their conservative sensibilities disturbed. Not only are they too stupid see the wires of mass-manipulation techinique running through every corner of their lives, but they are also incapable of appreciating the sexual electricity of such a disturbance. Personally, I seek refuge in celebrity faces.

There’s a milk-mustachioed Taylor Swift, Olsen twins, and a pre-pubescent Justin Bieber. Underneath the Miley Cyrus banner, Nate is sitting alone. As I make my way towards him we link looks for a split-second before I sink my gaze into the plastic table. I place my sequin-embellished lunchbox in front of me, feeling a tinge of an embarrassment for it, as I sit down across from him. One corner of Nate’s mouth twists upward, causing a dimple to deepen. The dimple is poking fun at me. I still can’t recognize his face as the sum of its parts.

“Hey, Ava,” he greets me with my sister’s name.

I narrow my eyes and shake my head.

“Oh,” he says, “You’re the other one.”

I nod slowly and release an extended, dramatic sigh. The metal clasps of the lunch box click as I pry them open and take out an apple with more bruises than my fucked-up knees. My teeth scrape through the skin and into the apple’s mushy underworld. It tastes like chalk.

“So you’re, like, a mute?”

I nod. The apple rot is making me gag a little, so I spit chunks of the brown slush into a napkin.

“Cool. I hate talkers,” he says, as he observes my gagging.

I remove the nastified napkin from my mouth, not bothering to conceal its contents. Then I watch as his veiny fingers unfold the top of a strawberry milk carton. His veins are amazingly protruded, like a puffed up tangle of blue wires. I envy the cardboard as it touches his lips.

“Did a cataclysmic event silence you?” he asks.

The creativity of his question both pleases me and catches me off guard. I feel my freckles glittering as I smile and shake my head. His dimple reveals itself again.

I break our moment of reciprocated grinning to look up at the Miley Cyrus banner, because, in my periphery, I swear I saw her milk-crusted lips animate into a venomous chuckle. With not just any venom, but Ava’s. I don’t need to look over my shoulder to know that my sister is sitting behind me, a couple tables back, glaring and already orchestrating some upcoming destructive act.

Nate notices that my head is tilted up at the banner, at the portrait of Miley as an innocent country girl, in a tight white tank and short shorts, her legs spread slightly apart.

“You scared of the lactational propaganda?” He asks.

I shrug.

“I am,” he says, “They drug the milk here, for sure. It’s like Moloko Plus, except it makes us docile and sterile. Milk to mellow us out. No more school shootings, no more teen pregnancy. Two birds killed, one stone.”

I laugh a little, finding Nate suspiciously intelligent. There’s no way he isn’t a reflection of my own mind. I had to have invented him. No one compatible with me, besides Ava, exists.

Suddenly the marks left by Ava’s nails shiver with renewed pain. I shift my chest-length hair behind my shoulder and brush my fingertips against the aching spots. I wince, somewhat performatively.

“Did someone bite you?”

Nate’s question is void of concern. He smiles wider this time. I can see his teeth peaking out, a glossy set of carnivorous instruments. I don’t nod or shake my head. Instead, I look deep into his eyes, which are gray and wide-set, strangely like mine and my sister’s. Through this eye contact, a flash of ecstasy is transferred between us. The transaction is not romantic. There’s no wholesome, shared sparkle of understanding. I don’t know him. All this gazing amounts to a simple exchange.

In fact, the less I know, the better. He is just a crush, an abstract goal. A crush is just an opportunity that gets crushed when you open the door. It’s the only untainted stage of any relationship. A crush is so killable. If I got to know Nate, the crushing phase would crack and hatch into a more complex relationship, one which would involve attachment, a series of shared emotional extremes, then a devastating process of detachment. What proceeds the initial phase is rarely worth it.

I haven’t unlocked the key to immortality or the unraveling of time yet, but there is one thing that I have discovered precociously- a method for sustaining the crush phase and extending, for an infinity or a lifespan, that ecstatic initial feeling of fascination for an unfamiliar person. Don’t you envy amnesiacs for their ability to live in the beginning forever? I do. For amnesiacs, every song would preserve that strange charm that fades after the first listen. Every face would remain a blank slate, beaming with potential. Every kiss would be a first kiss and you could lose your virginity for the thousandth time.

I don’t want to be immortal, sounds like hell. My theory of hell is that it is a state of knowing everything. It’s when you are trapped in an eternity where time still progresses linearly, but without end, which causes you to feel the exponentially heavy boredom of everything you already know being repeated. Obviously, this would be unbearable. This is also why vampires are soooooo post-suicidal. They have to endlessly mourn their inability to die. There’s nothing new under the sun and that’s why sun and light in general are sheer torture to them.

In this case, the opposite of hell is not-knowing. If you want to live with the everlasting sense of everything being new, you simply have to not-know. In the case of crushing, it’s easy. You preserve it by not talking to your crush, forgetting him, and failing to recognize him. You see him walking down the hall, past your locker, and your only thoughts are “Huh? What? Who?” In the confusion, you get a burst of infantile wonder, and you think “Where do I know you from? The future, maybe.”

Not everyone can look a person in the eye without developing an emotional bond, I’m exceptionally talented in that department. I know, better than most, how to not-know. Nate and I are still locked in our gazing. Whatever depth was hidden behind his eyes, whatever information, I’ve now sucked it clean out and disposed of it. The exchange is more of a robbery. I wait for one of us to look away.

It’s Nate who breaks it, but it’s Ava’s fault, that attention whore. He looks past my shoulder, at her.

“Don’t look now, but your sister-” he starts.

Acting on a sudden instinct, I duck my head down. I feel a rush of air on my neck as an object flies over me. I hear the satisfying sound of Nate catching it. When I raise my head, I see Ava’s half-eaten apple resting in his palms.

I whip my body backwards, so I can view Ava’s smug little grin, complete with that singular, sparkling pupil. I shoot her a snarl and flip her off.

When the bell rings, signaling that lunch has ended, Nate gets up, dizzy and stumbling a bit. He doesn’t bother to wait for me.

I linger in the cafeteria, until it’s just the two of us. Ava approaches me and hovers over my shoulder briefly, before whispering, in twinspeak, “Just testing your reaction time. You’re improving. Maybe someday I’ll be the slow one.”

“Bitch,” I say.

Her expression darkens into a sneer.

“Do I need to remind you? You’re excessive. You’re, like, a clone. You’re so extra. What do you bring to the world that I don’t already? Nothing. So why do you even exist?”

I lift up my foot and stomp down on her toes in a swift motion sped up by anger. To my surprise and satisfaction, her reaction time is too slow, and Ava gets hurt.

“Insecure bitch,” I say, and I leave her there, wounded. I walk to class.