The Midnight Twins (3 page)

“They do so.”

“So do yours.”

“I don’t have any friends like that,” Mallory said.

Merry realized, with a pang of sympathy, that this was true. Now that they were in junior high, boys didn’t want to hang with Mally for the same reasons she
still
wanted to hang with them. Mallory’s best friends were high-school girls from the Eighty-Niners, the traveling soccer squad. They liked her enough. But there was no such thing as a high-school girl who would want to sleep over with a thirteen-year-old if she wasn’t babysitting her.

“Well, when you see people, just say, ‘Thanks for the present,’ ” Merry said, soldiering on. “Say, ‘Thanks for coming.’ Are you stupid or something?”

“We told them not to bring presents.”

“But nobody pays attention to that. They’ll bring some anyway,” Meredith said hopefully, examining her reflection in the long mirror their father had glued to the back of their door. Her blunt-cut black hair shone like a new boot. A box-pleated melon miniskirt, the light wool tweed crisscrossed with pale blue strands, worn over white tights, topped off by a cami and a man’s blue twill cuffed shirt, matched her alternating white-and-melon fingertips and toes perfectly. She sighed in hard-earned pleasure. It had taken four hours at the Deptford Mall—an expedition that would have excited Mallory as much as shopping for batteries. But the effect was worth it—casual, not too on-purpose, dressed up a little bit by the three matching pearl studs their parents had given each girl. Their mother had pierced their ears—taking care to put two holes in Mallory’s left ear and two in Meredith’s right ear—to tell them apart. A trio of tiny, perfect pearl studs was their parents’ present to each girl.

When the girls turned out to be mirror twins, and the piercings corresponded to the correct side for each girl, Campbell was astonished. When she’d chosen the spots for the piercings, she’d had no idea.

Merry wondered for a moment if she should ditch her pearls for her white-bead chandeliers. But that would hurt their parents’ feelings.

Mally was wearing
her
pearls. That was at least a start.

So Meredith ransacked her sister’s closet. There were only two remotely possible shirts. The best hope was a cream-colored thing with a hint of a ruffle at the shoulders. It was clearly meant for summer, but Mally could throw it over a long-sleeved tee, if Mally
had
a tee that didn’t look as if it had gone under the lawn mower. Meredith could lend her a real silk gray turtleneck, but she would spend the whole night watching Mally like a hawk. Mally was
such
a slob. She threw herself around like an eleven-year-old guy—still! She wore hockey skates! She
rode her bike
to school in nice weather, to Meredith’s utter humiliation. She slept in Bugs Bunny boxers. Mally’s definition of “dressed up” was wearing something she hadn’t already worn twice—in the same week! And still, all she had to do was brush her hair and zip! Mallory was as beautiful as Merry, except that for Merry it was a full-time job.

Merry was too young to have any idea that all the washing grains and crunches she inflicted on herself were unnecessary—that both girls’ basic elfin cuteness was genetic. She liked seeing herself as a slave to her appearance. It justified how much she spent on things just because she liked how they smelled. It justified the hours she spent simply stroking her soft, textured garments, nearly in tears because they were so beautiful and they would last long after she, Merry, got old and died. She would never have considered it a selfish thing that she locked the box where she kept her jewelry or crossed elastic bands over the front of the shelves where she stored her sweaters, folded in order not just by color but by shade.

She wanted to forbid people to touch her things, but couldn’t bear to admit it. It was at odds with her generally sentimental and loving self—about which she was also vain.

Finally, knowing it would be wrong to let her twin go down to the party looking like a homeless person, she pulled down her silky turtleneck, the color of moonlight on a summer lawn, trying to put the picture of it with a mustard stain on the middle out of her mind.

“Here, Mal,” Merry said. “You can wear this under your nice cream blouse. . . .”

“I hate that blouse. It’s too tight!”

“It’s supposed to be tight, duh! It’s supposed to show you have a waist!”

Mally grumbled as she rolled out of bed and headed for the shower. “I barely do have a waist.”

This was true. At four feet and ten inches, neither of the girls had yet what would be termed “figures.”

Meredith did her best to cinch in at the middle what basically went straight up and back down. Despite the personal distinction she made between herself, a cheerleader, and her sister, a jock, Merry also was a committed and agile athlete. Only eighty-eight pounds, she was the team’s cocaptain and a “flyer,” tossed five feet into the air above the gymnasium floor to land in a basket catch, lifted on the thighs and shoulders of bigger girls of the pyramid.

Mallory emerged from the shower with wet hair and an alarmed expression.

“Why did you have to invite guys?” she asked. “Everyone thinks I’m an idiot. I probably dreamed I was on fire because of unconscious free-floating anxiety or something.”

“Free-floating what? They’re not sleeping over! And no one thinks you’re an idiot,” Meredith explained. “How could they? You never say anything. They probably just think you’re gay.”

“Maybe I am gay.”

“Well, then dress up for the girls. Jeez, Mal. You’re trying to drive me crazy,” Meredith finally said, spinning Mallory around, tucking and fussing. “And it’s working. Stand up straight!”

“Ugh,” Mallory said, and flicked at the ruffles that flattered her strong, broad shoulders. She stood up straight and her natural grace took over. “I look like crap. I wish I was wearing a tracksuit.”

“You look
normal
, Mal. You’re not used to normal. Most people don’t wear gym shorts in December with T-shirts that have stupid graffiti jokes on them.”

“I love my shirts! Drew gave me those shirts.” The girls’ next-door neighbor was a boy three years older, but had grown up with the twins. When Drew’s mother, Hilary, wanted to torment them, she brought out photos of all three of them wearing diapers and nothing else. Now, Drew had a special place in their hearts because he had recently acquired both his older sister’s Toyota truck and his driver’s license.

“He gave them to you
after
he wore them until they were too small!” Merry snapped.

“That’s what I think was so sweet,” Mallory replied in Drew’s defense.

“They have sweat stains on the pits!” Merry sneered.

“Big deal. I wear them to sleep in! What’s wrong with sweat?” Mallory used their ancient language to warn Merry to stop talking. “Laybite!”

After a long, tense pause, Merry said with a sigh, “Listen, Mallory. I’ll shut up in a minute. People have been planning for this for weeks.”

A hundred kids had been invited by e-mail, most of them eighth graders and freshmen. But Drew, still a steadfast friend, especially to Mallory, despite the great divide that had opened between them two years before when Drew went to high school, was bringing at least six of his cross-country teammates. Who knew who else might hear about the party and show up to affect nonchalance? Maybe her best friend Kim’s older brother, David!

Merry shivered with excitement over this fact alone.

“Mally, just make an appearance,” Merry pleaded. “Pretend you’re going to have fun. It’s my birthday, too, and you have no right to make me feel guilty for being excited.”

“Of course. It’s all about you, Merry.”

“Well, if you sit up here, people all over town are going to think you’re a mutant or something! No one misses her own birthday party. It’ll be all over town tomorrow.”

In this she was correct. In Ridgeline, population 1,501, everyone knew the Brynn twins.

If they didn’t know the twins to speak to, they’d seen their soccer and cheerleading photos—from the first grade to last year’s snapshots—displayed on the wall behind the counter at Domino Sporting Goods, the store Tim owned with his best friend, Rick Domini. Everyone in town passed through Domino Sports, to buy backyard tetherballs and knee braces and hockey sticks and team uniforms and running shoes—although the Target out by the Deptford Mall was cheaper. Loyalty made them spend the extra dollar or three—that, and the confidence that came from Tim’s amiable ability to remember to ask about their trick knees or shin splints.

People liked making the Saturday morning circuit around Ridgeline’s brick-paved town square. It hadn’t changed in any essential way for 160 years.

The Mountain Beanery Coffee Shop had replaced the dress-maker, and the Ridge State Bank had taken over Helmsley’s Funeral Home. (People still saw this as a fair exchange and made jokes about it.) When Miss Alice’s daughter, Jenny, took over Miss Alice’s Dance and made it into Jenny’s Leap Beyond and Fitness Fit for You, she built her own little square studio out near the middle school, making way for Open Sesame, the Greenbergs’ bagel bakery and deli.

In the middle of the square was a larger-than-life-size bronze that people had seen all their lives but which few understood. A woman in a long, sweeping cloak held two children’s faces against her skirts. Although it was called
Courage
, the statue depicted the widow of one of the miners who died ninety years before when a shaft collapsed in a copper vein up off Canada Road. Out from the square, like four spokes, the four arteries—Main Street, Pilgrim Road, School Street, and Cemetery Road—led to the places anyone might imagine and a few that no one would.

Main Street got most of the traffic. It went to the big concrete loop that formed the entrance to the highway into New York City, one hundred miles away. If people went straight, past the highway overpass, eventually they came to the Deptford Mall and Cinema. School Street passed all six area schools—the elementary, the middle school, the two public high schools, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Ridgeford Community College.

By contrast, Pilgrim Road was barely traveled—and to the annoyance of its residents, only sporadically plowed. Just a few blocks out were the big, three-story clapboard homes that had been farmhouses before Ridgeline was a proper town. In one of them, Tim and Campbell Brynn lived with their family.

When they fell from ladders, or popped hernias, needed hips replaced or benign tumors excised, when they had babies that wouldn’t come the regular way or children whose inflamed tonsils kept them coughing and smelling of VapoRub all winter long, the people of Ridgeline met Campbell . . . usually first as a pair of whimsical blue eyes between the rim of her surgical hairnet and the top of her face mask. She was tender and efficient when they fell asleep frightened, cheerful and solicitous when they awoke in pain.

Her girls were a local landmark. Everyone told the tale of their birth to friends from out of town, if they got around to it, like the story of the hurricane that passed through twenty years before and didn’t destroy one single house but did drive an egg into the trunk of a tree without breaking the shell. Never gave their parents a day’s trouble, neighbors said of the twins—although Campbell would have disputed that point. The twins and their ten-year-old brother, Adam, had never, so far as any of them knew, had an argument of substance with anyone except Drew.

And those were sacred and planned rituals.

For him, the twins regularly devised tortures, as if he were still their old playmate on the wooden swing set. They waited until he was parked in the driveway with a date and then dumped a twenty-pound bag of birdseed from their bedroom window onto the roof of his car. Then, patiently as a sibling, Drew waited until the right moment to exact his revenge, with an amiable determination. Color copies of Merry with cucumber slices over her eyes, sunbathing behind the garage in her little brother’s boxers with the Sunday comics spread over her chest, were taped to dozens of the lockers at her school. Mallory’s new Australian fleecy boots, left outside her back door to dry, had cherry tomatoes tucked in the toes.

The Brynns were not unlike most families in Ridgeline.

There were fewer divorces than the New York State norm, but the town had its share of single moms. Even in most of the two-parent families, both parents worked. The usual number of children was three instead of two. The Methodist and Presbyterian churches faced each other squarely on corners of the same street. Most kids knew how to skate by the age of three and to ski by the age of five, and even men whose sons had moved to Seattle still turned out for the Friday night football games. The copper mines were gone now, but the copper remained, tinting the soil up in the hills with a sparkly grit. The copper miners were gone, too. But they had left behind large families. In the cemetery, the same names that repeated along ranks of headstones—Morgan, Vaughan, Massenger—still showed up on the athletic plaques at school and the dentists’ shingle at the medical center.

At its best, Ridgeline was like a family, defending the eccentricities of its elders and generally embracing newcomers who made an effort to put down serious roots. At its worst, it was like a family, withholding approval, trading speculation and gossip, feuding and forgiving. Like a family, at holidays and funerals, weddings and graduations, they gathered to mourn and to celebrate. Fully a tenth of them or more gathered that Friday night to wish the twins a happy passage to the next plateau of their lives.

That Mallory was being such a mule was made even worse by the fact that they would be spending their
real
birthday—New Year’s Eve—babysitting their brother
and
their three younger cousins.

Campbell had laid down the law. “Dad and I have waited for years to go to New York for New Year’s Eve. You’re needed when you’re needed. And I’m certainly not going to pay a babysitter when I have you two, especially not after throwing you a big birthday bash. So lose the long face, Meredith. Mallory’s taking it okay.”