Mom was yelling at me, again. Because I hadn’t done my math homework, again. Or, I’d done part of it, but she didn’t recognize that. To her, it’s all or nothing. Always all or nothing. The whole time she was yelling at me, Maya stood mutely in the corner, watching, listening. Thinking about how well she understood logarithms, and how she could concentrate long enough to calculate two pages of them plus some extra credit word problems on fractals without feeling like she wanted to pluck every single hair out of her head.
After Mom was done yelling, she felt bad, and apologized, and I said it’s fine, whatever, and she said I still had to do my math, and I didn’t say anything but I knew that I probably wouldn’t, that I would ask the teacher for an extension, and that Ms. Bayers was nice and would probably give it to me, but that we would both forget about it and I’d end up with a zero for the assignment at the end of the semester, anyway. Mom kept talking, saying I frustrated her because I obviously could do the math, but that I didn’t try. That I was lazy, in a way. That it was great that I could spend so many hours practicing the cello, that it was great that I was in youth orchestra and that the director, Dr. Kazmarov, said I could be a music major in college if I wanted, but that I should try to excel at academics, too. I could be good at cello and math, she said. I could spend all the time I currently wasted playing on my phone on math, and an unchanged amount of time on cello, and maybe half as much time singing and playing bass with the punk band I had with two friends, and about a third more time eating balanced meals, and eighty-seven percent more time flossing, and I would be perfect, who she wanted me to be, is what she said. Basically. Something like that, anyway. Maya nodded silently during the entire lecture, which was irritating. Maya could go to Juilliard, for violin. Maya could play guitar and sing shimmering harmonies a third above the melody, and Maya, as we established, could always finish her math homework, and it would always be perfectly correct.
Maya and I were identical twins. Monozygotic. One egg. Also one placenta for both of us. Not all identicals share a placenta, but we did. We had two amniotic sacks, though, like goldfish swimming around in separate plastic bags squished together. So I don’t know how aware of each other we were, you know, in utero. How well we knew each other. If we knew that the same blood was coursing through us, that we were sharing the same food. That this was problematic. Was she mad at me, when I kicked her amniotic bubble? When I took up more and more room, shoving her higher and higher into Mom’s ribcage?
As we ate dinner a little later, Mom looked at me with that annoying wrinkly concerned parent face where you just want to tell them to get some fucking Botox already while I picked at my broccoli. I hid my roll in my napkin—it was just too carby, too doughy, too fluffy. I did eat several bites of chicken, to appease my mom, chewing each extensively so it seemed like I was eating more even though overly chewed chicken is severely gross. I spit the last bite out, though. I just couldn’t stand it. How much space that food took up in me. How much space I took up, even when I didn’t eat it. I had not ingested more than fourteen hundred calories a day for thirty-five days. This was not because I thought I was fat. It was because I thought I took up too much space. Maya was not concerned with the matter she displaced, and she ate ravenously, as if she would never stop. She must have had five rolls, three chicken legs, and two cups of broccoli before I looked away, sort of grossed out but also in awe. She took up infinitely more space than I did. She was massive, but not fat. It was not so much that her body took up space, but that her radiance did. She ate with joyful abandon, and looked at me with pity and disgust as I quietly spit the last piece of chicken into my napkin and smushed it up with my roll.
Maya was happy to finally get to take up space. Though our genetic material was identical, at birth I weighed four and a half pounds and she weighed barely one and a half. My mom has a picture of us from back then, which she doesn’t know I’ve seen, because she keeps it hidden in her closet in a box with a couple of tiny hats and some papers with tiny footprints on them. Mom never told me there was a picture when she told me about the placenta thing, and how it was a problem because sometimes one fetus got the share of blood and that the other should receive, and so the babies end up discordant. Which sounds like the babies can’t stand each other, but really just means that one is massively bigger than the other.
After we ate, Mom said I needed to finish my math, and maybe then FaceTime my dad, who lives in Memphis now. I didn’t want to finish my math or FaceTime my dad, so I just ignored her and went outside to sit on the stoop. As I walked out the door, Maya looked at me disapprovingly and snuggled in the corner of the couch next to my mom, whose concerned parent face was now lit unflatteringly by her laptop screen as she typed emails. I sat on the stoop for a while, but I had this feeling I get sometimes where my stomach feels sick because I want to do something but don’t know what because there’s simultaneously too many and not enough choices. There’s no sitting and thinking when I get this feeling, and no sitting and letting Mom harp on me, either, so I started walking, alone. What I mean by alone is, without Maya.
I didn’t really know where to go, but after about a block I started heading to Kitri’s house. Kitri’s the one whose parents let our band practice in their garage. We weren’t practicing that night, but since her house was within walking distance and nothing else was, that’s where I went. Mom doesn’t like me out walking alone in the dark, or pretty much anytime. She basically wants to take over my body and live my life for me like a creepy brain sucking alien. So I kind of just ignored my phone when a text came in.
Kitri’s parents weren’t home, and she and her brother Maddox were sitting in the garage, drinking peach schnapps that Kitri said her parents would never miss, that she found way in the back of a cabinet and they didn’t even know it was there and the bottle had a layer of dust on it an inch thick. They were also popping CBD gummies; I’m not sure if that was because they were hoping to get high or because Kitri’s mom is all into paleo and doesn’t usually allow sugar in the house and they just wanted some candy. I sat at the drum set, which was dusty, too, and tapped my fingers on the cymbal. Maddox squeezed onto the tiny stool with me and held out the bottle of schnapps. Sometimes I let Maddox make out with me, even though I don’t really like it. It’s not his fault, he doesn’t know I don’t really like it, so he’s not trying to be all creepy or anything.
I hadn’t had schnapps before, and it was sort of okay for a moment and then I realized that it tasted like moldy oranges smell. I kept drinking, anyway. Maddox put his face unnecessarily close to mine and started messing with the bass drum pedal. He couldn’t even keep a steady beat, so I stopped pinging the cymbal. Kitri was noodling on her guitar. She’s pretty good even though she’s prone to annoyingly minimalistic repetition, and after I took the second swig of schnapps the sounds loosened in a nice way. I tapped my finger on the cymbal again. Maddox started nuzzling my neck and put his hand on my boob, which put me so off balance on my half of the tiny stool that I just got up and walked across the room. He looked hurt but didn’t follow, even though I took the bottle with me. I guess even Maddox has his pride. The bottle really was dusty. I wondered if it was possible for schnapps to go bad. I sort of looked for an expiration date, but didn’t see anything. The more I drank it the better it tasted, though.
Kitri was playing some kind of minor chord progression, and after repeating it about a million times she began singing softly:
I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger,
Traveling through this world below.
There’s no sickness, toil, or danger,
In that bright land to which I go.
The lyrics were not at all like the ones she’s written for our band, which are kind of gross and about stuff like hoping phone-distracted parents get hit by cars and giving secret vasectomies to boys who break up via Tik Tok. “What is that?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s some song our grandpa used to sing,” answered Maddox. Kitri nodded and started into a second verse. “He was a Baptist preacher.” He said “Baptist preacher” with an exaggerated southern accent, the way I had heard his mom do when she made the same statement about her father’s occupation. I found it irritating for someone my age to model the wit of a parent.
My phone dinged, and then again four times in a row. I looked at it, but there were five giant bubbles of text and so many words that I just couldn’t begin to focus my eyes on them, so I left it on the floor in the corner and went inside to the bathroom. I looked around to make sure Maya hadn’t shown up. She hadn’t. I looked at myself in the mirror. I never look like I expect myself to. If Maya were there, maybe then I’d see what I expected reflected in her—identical twins come from a single egg that separates after fertilization, and sometimes if the egg separates at a later stage the twins come out mirror images of each other. What if we, mirror twins, both looked in the mirror, together? Thinking about how the reflections of our reflective selves would look back at us in some sort of infinite circular way gave me even more of a headache than the fractal stuff of my homework.
But when I looked back in the mirror, all I saw was my face alone, pale and round, balloon-like, taking up all the space. I puffed my cheeks up and turned away. Then I peed and started snooping around the bathroom. It was pretty boring. No meds unless you counted some vitamin D and magnesium and more CBD gummies. I popped one. It was strawberry flavored, and reminded me of the little hard candies with the gooey stuff in the middle that my grandma used to give me when I was little. It stuck to my back molar, but I didn’t see any extra toothbrushes in the cabinets, so I just worked at the sticky goo with my tongue while I checked out what was in the shower. There was some shampoo and conditioner and an almost empty bottle of lotion. I like to check out the smell of other people’s shampoos when I’m in their bathrooms, so I sniffed it. It was coconut, which is also what I use, so it wasn’t particularly exciting, and I screwed the lid on and put it back. There was a razor sitting on the tub—the cheap, disposable kind—and I drew it horizontally across my forearm a few times, making bright red tracks. I ran cold water and stuck my arm under it, watching little pink streams flow down the white porcelain and into the drain. Then I dabbed my arm with toilet paper and went back to the garage. Kitri and Maddox were both on their phones now. Kitri didn’t really notice me, but Maddox looked up hopefully, and I smiled at him sort of sickly and decided to just go on back home. I took one more swig of the peach schnapps and picked up my phone. There were two missed calls from my mom. I powered it off.
Walking at night drunk with my phone off was fun. It was kind of like I didn’t exist. No one was around, and I stayed on the grass so my sneakers didn’t make much of a sound. It was so nice that I walked past my house and around the block three times before sitting on the back porch. It didn’t take long for Maya to show up next to me, singing “This Land Is Your Land” softly, but a third above the melody. Which is a weird thing to do—sing the harmony without the melody—but that’s how she always does it. After a while Mom came out, too, all loud, asking why I didn’t answer her texts and calls, and I said that my phone battery was dead, and she said where were you, and I said, at Kitri’s house, and she said are you high or something, and I said, or something, and she got mad and yelled that she was calling Kitri’s parents and my dad and that I should go drink some water and take a shower and go to bed.
I did drink the water and take the shower, but I was still a little drunk and didn’t feel like going to bed. I got out my cello and played a Bach suite, and Maya hummed along, a third above. After I finished the gigue, I put my cello away and went into the hallway. I could hear Mom downstairs in the kitchen on the phone with her you-take-her-on-if you’re-so-good-at-solutions-asshole voice, so I went into her room and got the box with the baby stuff out of the closet. Maya followed silently and sat softly on Mom’s bed. I took out the two hats, the tiny footprints, and finally, the photo. I looked grotesquely huge and doughy in it with Maya being the only reference point for size; she looked like a doll, swaddled in a tiny pink blanket with a tiny bow on her head. My eyes were open in a squinty way, but Maya’s were closed. I realized then that she had no wires or tubes or anything attached to her in the picture. I didn’t think Maya was ever able to survive without wires and tubes. I looked up from the picture and met her eyes. Her face mirrored mine, and they both said, what the fuck, Mom, this picture sucks.
Still, when I put the box away and went back to my room I kept the picture with me and put it in a desk drawer, in between the pages of a random notebook. I brushed my teeth then, and Maya brushed hers, and I got in pajamas, and she got in hers, and I laid in bed, and Maya laid next to me. Then she curled up, spiraling smaller and smaller until she fit in the palm of my cupped hand. Pulling the quilt over both of us, I held her next to my chest, humming the tune Kitri had sung earlier. Maya sang along a third above, her voice tiny, but clear and sparkling and perfectly tuned even as mine broke and wavered. Then, nested together, two extremes of the same fractal, we both fell asleep.
