Chapters (46)
- Cover
- Other Titles
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Friday
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- Saturday
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- Sunday
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- Monday
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- EPILOGUE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Then Unremarkable Man is behind her, wiping at his mouth and saying, “Ohmygod, have you seen that video? That lady in the barrel?” and she knows that it is real. Of course he has seen it; everyone has seen it – 450,000 YouTube views in one day. Jokes in all the late-night monologues, links posted on Facebook walls, an amusing story to end the local evening news. Over and over again, endless video loops of the initial plunge, the loud bounce, the flip into the air. Drop, bang, flip. It’s funny now – she lived, so everyone can laugh about it. And now everyone knows who she is.
“Yes, I’ve seen it,” Finn says, shrugging his hand off her shoulder.
“Wait,” he says, leaning forward and squinting towards the television. “Is that…you?”
Finn goes cold. There she is – it’s clearly her, no getting around it. The round face and red-apple cheeks, the wide lips, the deep-set eyes, grey like an angry ocean, the strawberry-blond (although uncharacteristically over-styled and over-highlighted) hair: it’s Finn, giving an on-air interview. Except that it’s not Finn. It’s Nicki, a parallel-universe, white-trash, reality-TV version of Finn, with her spray-on tan rubbing off on the edge of her white tube top, giant pink sunglasses pushed back on her head. It has been three years since Finn has seen Nicki, but she looks exactly like Finn expects her to. Even through the wobbly television image, she can tell that Nicki has aged in the very same ways she has, a thought she finds supremely disturbing, as if she can’t even grow older on her own without Nicki being seven and a half minutes behind her. Finn can’t hear what Nicki’s saying, but she can tell she’s upset, one hand moving spastically through the air as if she’s trying to shoo away a fly.
“Whoa, you have a twin,” says Unremarkable Man. And even though Finn knows he doesn’t mean it literally – it’s just one of those things people say when they wear the same pair of shoes or do their hair the same way, as if they had any idea what being a twin really meant – as soon as he says it, she can feel her lips start to prickle, her throat close over. It’s as if hearing the word twin is enough to send her into anaphylactic shock, as if her body is actually physically allergic to the thought of having to share its nuclear DNA with another living organism just because its progenitor cells decided to fucking split during a blastocyst collapse.