Free Gemini by Sonya Mukherjee Page B

be werewolves. Ogres. Trolls.”
    â€œAnd you don’t want to show him how wrong he is?”
    â€œWhat for? We barely know him. Why is it my job to prove anything to him?”
    She didn’t answer. She shifted around. She fluffed her side of the pillow and settled into it, and after a few minutes she got quiet. I stopped waiting for her to say something. I thought maybe she had fallen asleep.
    But then she said, “Fine, you don’t have to ask Max. But I’m asking Alek. I know you don’t want me to. I know you’re scared that it’ll freak him out and that other people will hear about it and freak out too, and I know he’s not exactly the best person for improving our reputation as normals—”
    â€œIt’s not that,” I said, my hackles rising at the implication that I, of all people, would avoid a guy because he was considered a freak. Well, actually, a homicidal freak. I hesitated, then added, “Maybe it’s 1 percent about that, but only 1 percent. I never believed any of those rumors or anything.”
    â€œFine,” she said, “but the point is, you only get to veto things that affect our shared nervous system in the lower half of our bodies. You don’t have jurisdiction over this.”
    And there was nothing I could say. She was right.

10
Hailey
    It was a cold, crappy October day. The grass where we normally ate our lunch was soaked. Juanita and Bridget scooted off to some yearbook meeting, and Clara and I decided to move our picnic blanket into a corner of the gym. It was either that or the damp, packed cafeteria, where the tables all had built-in benches. None of that really works for us.
    I hadn’t slept much after our conversation the night before. First I’d been kind of pissed at Clara for how she kept harping on the film studies thing. I mean, I paint. With oils. On canvas. What did that even have to do with film?
    But then I started actually trying to answer that question. Like, okay, you can’t make a film out of oil paints. But what were my paintings about? Was there something in them that I could apply to film?
    My basic thing lately was these twisted Madonna-and-child portraits. So what was that about, anyway? Each of them took a really standard, familiar design, and then incorporated one or two things that completely didnot belong. Was there something I could do with that?
    I’d thought about it for a couple of hours, and finally some ideas had started bubbling up in my head. They were pretty vague. But one thing I did know was that I was going to need help. So, while Clara had snored beside me, I’d sent messages to a few people. I figured I would wait and see what they sent me. And then I would go from there.
    I’d been working mainly with oil paints for the last couple of years, and I felt like I had a groove going there. But now I started to remember the freedom, the thrill of uncertainty, that came with trying something new—something where I had basically no idea what I was doing.
    When I was little, art had always seemed like an adventure to me, and there was always something new to try. Back in preschool, I went mainly for size. We would collect boxes, all the biggest ones we could get from our neighbors and friends, and I would paint them with big strokes of color, stripes and dots and swirls and patterns. We would stand inside the boxes if they were big enough, and I would fill them up with brightness. Sometimes Clara would even grab a brush, or swirl her fingers through the paint to make her own, separate patterns.
    Then we started elementary school, and again and again I heard my mother telling teachers, aides, administrators, and other parents and kids, “They can do everything the other kids can do. They’re typically developing childrenwho happen to be attached. They’re normal. They’re just like everyone else. They’re exactly the same.”
    Normal. Normal.