Free Twins by Caroline B. Cooney Page A

hand.
    She missed boarding school — the chaos and shrieking of hundreds of girls. The lights always on, the radios always playing, the laughter and the arguments always from one room or another.
    She tried to picture Madrigal and Jon Pear laughing and arguing, kissing and exchanging gifts.
    It was Madrigal’s key, of course, because Mary Lee had had to give up everything of her own, and adopt Madrigal’s possessions. The key did not go into the lock easily, and when it did go in, would not open the lock.
    She stood on the front step, pushing and turning and clicking and still the door did not open. The shadows behind her crawled up and touched the backs of her legs.
    And were they shadows? Or the ghost of Madrigal, trying to come back?
    Who was that twin? And who was Jon Pear? What would happen if Jon Pear could read her soul, and imitate her movements, and know her choices the way an identical twin did? Did she want to know Jon Pear the way she once knew Madrigal?
    Eventually the key moved and the lock opened. But it was only the key to a piece of architecture, and not the key to any question in her heart.
    She could think of nothing and no one but Jon Pear. When she did her nails, when she emptied the dishwasher, when she listened to her parents’ chatter, when she watched television … hardly a fraction of her participated. The rest was with Jon Pear.
    And it was, as he had decreed, like twinship again.
    The ordinary world had relatives: parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. But only twins shared molecules and thoughts. Only twins knew each other’s interior.
    Now she felt not quite separate from Jon Pear, either.
    And completely, hideously, separated from Madrigal.
    The evening was heart-quiet.
    Mary Lee went silently away from her parents, who had been silently with her. To the bare wood stairs she went — stairs she and an identical person had spent a lifetime running up and down. She went into Madrigal’s room.
    My room, she thought. I’m Madrigal.
    But she was not Madrigal, and she walked in a trespasser. She stood carefully in front of the mirror. Once they had not needed mirrors. She pretended the reflection was her twin. Oh Madrigal, tell me Jon Pear lied! Tell me you had enough love to go around! Tell me you could love this Jon Pear and your love for me was not diminished by it.
    But it was difficult to think of Madrigal, for she was entwined with thoughts of Jon Pear.
    She took the room apart, inch by inch, studying everything, looking perhaps for an inscription in a book — love and kisses , Jon Pear . But there was none.
    A treasured greeting card. Scribbled-on, ripped-off notebook paper.
    There was none.
    Mary Lee was not surprised to find the same three paperback novels she, too, had purchased, two thousand miles and silence away.
    The extraordinary linkage of Madrigal and Mary Lee had often extended to shopping.
    Vividly, Mary Lee remembered a morning of rage. Not hers. Madrigal’s. In her separate bedroom a year ago, before her own mirror, Mary Lee had stared at herself that morning, bored with the way she did her hair. I’ll part it on the side instead, she had decided. The left side. I’ll hold it back with my new green barrette.
    During her one and only mall expedition with Scarlett, they’d stumbled on a basket piled with gaudy barrettes, marked down from outrageous boutique pricing to affordable leftovers. Mary Lee and Scarlett sorted through every one. Scarlett chose a silver-and-gold braid, while Mary Lee settled on an emerald-green tortoiseshell.
    Mary Lee ran downstairs that day to catch up to Madrigal, who was already having breakfast, only to find that Madrigal, too, had suddenly decided to part her hair on the left, and Madrigal, too, at a different store in a different mall with a different shopping partner, had nevertheless found the exact same emerald-green barrette to hold back her hair.
    Mary Lee was entranced. Out of an entire nation of goods! That