Chapters (55)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Cast of Characters
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Part Two
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- A note on the Author
They were the first girls I knew of to wear pants under a skirt. They never wear makeup, unless they are bored, and then, contrary to the belief that makeup should enhance your beauty, they paint a green strip above each eye or add a dash of hot-pink blush until they look like punk-rock dollies.
A red twin found me sitting on a bench outside the nail salon, waiting for my nails to dry. I had been there an hour, staring at the tiny pink heart painted in the upper right corner of each nail.
Do my nails love me? Do I have a heart beating under each finger, each with the ability to function alone from the rest of me? I wanted to be alone from the rest of me, too. From the hair that fell on my face, and the knees touching each other, the scratchy eyelashes and toothache. From the certainty that I was failing Sean and that if I wasn’t failing him, he was surely failing me.
“Hey, movie star,” boomed the red twin. “You’ve been there all day.”
She knew because she had been watching from her window, as she bathed a dog in a tub filled with Kiehl’s vanilla cleanser. I couldn’t really talk. I could just about hear. Hers was a new accent and I liked it right away. Liev’s nonspecifically other accent was still my favorite, although Sebastian’s drawl came a near second.
She insisted I come up to her apartment for peppermint tea. It was her apartment because it was in her name, but her boyfriend had all his records stored in the living room and her sister regularly ran up phone bills totaling hundreds of dollars. A thoroughly unexpected ferret slouched across the floor, arrogant and shifty, and a baby alligator had meek occupation of the bathroom sink.
I sat on the sofa and petted her teacup Chihuahua, which was still a little wet and smelled of Kiehl’s. Its short hairs dotted my freshly painted nails. As I drank a few sips from the cracked mug, the red twin kept disappearing and coming back flustered. I thought she was taking coke, and I thought it sucked that she was sharing her stinking peppermint tea but not her drugs. The red twin later told me that she kept running to the back bedroom to try and wake her napping boyfriend.
“Guess who’s in the front room. You have to get up or you’ll kick yourself.”
“Is it Led Zeppelin?” he enquired, raising his head of curls from the pillow.