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 Iâd 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. âI know youâre right.â
âI am?â I briefly savored the moment before I asked, âAbout what?â
âAbout us not being normal.â
Her tone was urgent, but her volume stayed low. We try not to let our parents hear us talking in bed. Maybe itâs just a holdover from when we were little and they used to keep coming in to check on us.
âWeâre not normal,â she repeated, âand we never will be. But thereâs no point fighting against that, or hiding from it. We just have to accept it.â
I groaned. Somehow Iâd imagined, for just a second there, that she actually had something worthwhile to say. âGod, Hailey, is that, like, some brilliant new insight? Iâve been accepting it for seventeen years already.â
âNo you havenât,â she insisted, with that same hushed urgency. âYouâve never accepted it. Not ever. You struggle against it every day of your life.â
Helpless, I asked, âWhat do you want me to do?â
âI want you to stop being afraid of living in the world. Stop being afraid of yourself.â
âOh,â I said, my voice as small as a little girlâs. âIs that all?â
âIf you werenât afraid,â she said, âwe 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
âThe last time we tried itââ
âWe 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, itâs up to them, but itâs not our problem one way or the other. Because thereâs nothing actually wrong with us. And if we would just be okay with being freaks, then we could actually do something.â
A deep shiver ran through my upper body; sometimes that happens without me fully understanding why. Though I wasnât crying, a slight dampness seemed to wet my lashes and then pass, like one of those blink-and-youâll-miss-it spring rainstorms.
I closed my eyes. âWhat is it that you want to do, Hailey?â
âI donât know.â She shifted toward me, so her shoulder rested against mine. âJust something besides staying here.â Her voice dropped to a softer whisper. âI canât 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?â
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-oneâand theyâd been born into slavery, in an era before modern medicine.
My bookshelves held a stack of biographies of conjoined twins whoâd come before usâsome that Mom had bought us when we were younger, and others that Iâd ordered for myself. Iâd 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