Free Gemini by Sonya Mukherjee

worrying about Gemini, the celestial twins. Were they glad to spend billions of years together in the sky, always on display, or would they rather wander apart and explore?
    As for traveling to outer space, the wild impossibility of that began to overwhelm me. I was never going to escape the gravity I’d been born to. And what was wrong with me anyway, for even wanting such a thing? I was strange enough on the outside. Did I have to be so strange on the inside, too?
    Just when I thought that Hailey must have been asleep, she uttered one of her rarest sentences. “I know you’re right.”
    â€œI am?” I briefly savored the moment before I asked, “About what?”
    â€œAbout us not being normal.”
    Her tone was urgent, but her volume stayed low. We try not to let our parents hear us talking in bed. Maybe it’s just a holdover from when we were little and they used to keep coming in to check on us.
    â€œWe’re not normal,” she repeated, “and we never will be. But there’s no point fighting against that, or hiding from it. We just have to accept it.”
    I groaned. Somehow I’d imagined, for just a second there, that she actually had something worthwhile to say. “God, Hailey, is that, like, some brilliant new insight? I’ve been accepting it for seventeen years already.”
    â€œNo you haven’t,” she insisted, with that same hushed urgency. “You’ve never accepted it. Not ever. You struggle against it every day of your life.”
    Helpless, I asked, “What do you want me to do?”
    â€œI want you to stop being afraid of living in the world. Stop being afraid of yourself.”
    â€œOh,” I said, my voice as small as a little girl’s. “Is that all?”
    â€œIf you weren’t afraid,” she said, “we could go to Sacramento. Or San Francisco. And then we could go to Stanford or Berkeley or Yale. Paris. Tokyo. Sydney. Just let everybody stare if they want to.”
    â€œThe last time we tried it—”
    â€œWe were only thirteen. Yeah, I know, it sucked. But you just have to start embracing it. Let them look at you. Show them what you are. Let them be comfortable or not, it’s up to them, but it’s not our problem one way or the other. Because there’s nothing actually wrong with us. And if we would just be okay with being freaks, then we could actually do something.”
    A deep shiver ran through my upper body; sometimes that happens without me fully understanding why. Though I wasn’t crying, a slight dampness seemed to wet my lashes and then pass, like one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spring rainstorms.
    I closed my eyes. “What is it that you want to do, Hailey?”
    â€œI don’t know.” She shifted toward me, so her shoulder rested against mine. “Just something besides staying here.” Her voice dropped to a softer whisper. “I can’t let this beall there is. How long are we going to live? Another sixty, seventy years maybe, if we both stay healthy? Do you want to spend all of those years stuck in one place?”
    Sixty or seventy more years. Yes, possibly. Though many conjoined twins die at birth, and some have serious health issues, others have lived full lives. Daisy and Violet Hilton, the famous back-to-back, singing and dancing conjoined sisters of the twentieth century, had lived to be sixty. Millie and Christine McCoy, the back-to-back conjoined stage stars of the nineteenth century, had made it to sixty-one—and they’d been born into slavery, in an era before modern medicine.
    My bookshelves held a stack of biographies of conjoined twins who’d come before us—some that Mom had bought us when we were younger, and others that I’d ordered for myself. I’d read most of them more than once, looking for any clue about our lives and what we might expect. Hailey was content to skim or ignore most of