Free The Midnight Twins by Jacquelyn Mitchard Page A

too optimistic to sink down into a full depression. She stayed in focus on being ready for competition in March. She sat on the sidelines, a peppy little hero with her hand matching the white of the sweaters they wore with the big green letter R on the front. She spent early mornings in the gym, working her legs on the curling machine, practicing endless but careful combinations of jumps and splits and stretches—anything that didn’t involve her hands. She could practice arm movements and choreography to music with the squad, but no one dared throw her on a mount or even let her balance on the hand of the one boy on the team, Kellen Fish, although she’d been practicing partner stunting in private, years before she technically should have done it. Merry’s combination of balance and strength was so tempting that Coach Everson allowed it, but only reluctantly.
    “You should be in college for this,” she said every time Merry threw herself into a handspring and Kellen caught her and elevated her into a Statue of Liberty.
    But anything extreme was out of the question now. Coach laid down the law.
    Caitlin Andersen had taken over as the captain, and Kiley Karzniak as flyer. Merry was furious.
    One night, Kim and Merry were lying on Kim’s bed, sharing a pizza (Kim wouldn’t eat the crusts and Merry wouldn’t eat the middles, so it worked out well). The windows were open because the weather was so warm, but they had called everyone they knew and there wasn’t a single thing to do. Crystal’s house had been TP’ed and Wade Greenberg had already been grounded for it, and it was only nine o’clock.
    “I want to tell you something,” Kim said.
    “Okay,” Merry answered.
    “It’s kind of deep.”
    “That’s okay.”
    “It’s like, you did this good thing, and you get only bad things,” Kim said. “It’s like being cursed. Not really. But kind of.”
    “I got a lot of good things,” Merry said. “I mean, I saved my brother’s life. You don’t get to feel much better than that.” But she didn’t sound convinced. “Of course, like Mallory says, I would have saved Adam anyway. It’s not like it was anything special. If we were pioneers, we’d have had to pull him out of a flood a couple of times by now, probably.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Mallory did. She thinks it’s sick that everybody made such a big deal out of us doing stuff we were supposed to do anyhow.”
    “But your life is totally messed up!” Kim said, her eyes glistening with unspent tears.
    “Well, thanks,” said Merry.
    “I didn’t mean it that way,” Kim apologized. “I meant messed up for now! I just feel so bad for you. You’re like somebody on the Lifetime Channel.”
    David appeared in the hall, dressed in his brown leather jacket—Merry loved that it was brown leather, not black like some hoodlum or white like a gangster. He looked to her like old pictures of Charles Lindbergh in her history book, thin and straight and tall, like a Norse god with his brown eyes and blond hair. Did Italians have blond hair? Was David adopted? No, Campbell said that Bonnie got pregnant with David just a year after they began working together on the surgical floor at the hospital. David was just . . . gifted, where looks were concerned. Kim was cute, but not like her brother. Under the leather jacket, David wore one of those white sweaters that felt oily when you touched it. Merry wished she could.
    “You don’t look Italian,” Merry said, curling her knees under her butt in a kitten’s pose, hoping to prolong the moment.
    “ Como! ” David explained. “ Tutti blonds in the Alps.”
    “You speak Italian?”
    “He’s taking it,” Kim put in. “There’s a distance course for Latin and Italian and Japanese. Our dad speaks a little. Our one grandpa hardly spoke any English.”
    “It comes naturally,” David said. “ Va bene! Multo grazie! ”
    “Pizza! Gorgonzola!” Kim mocked him. “That’s such crap. I hear you