Page 14

He grabs my hand and entwines our fingers, a knot I can’t break. He rolls to his side to face me, our eyes as connected as our hands. “I don’t have other girls.”

My heart accelerates, breath stills in my chest, skin explodes as a million nerve endings scream to be pressed against him. It’s so good it’s painful and I jerk awake, fingers splayed open on the pillow where his head rested in my dream, where I see an indent on the pillow I never use, and hair that isn’t mine.

I sit up fast, only to be hit by a wave of black. I’m dizzy, my heart still beating at the cage of my ribs as if it wants to get out. I collapse back onto the bed, my head landing on Isaac’s pillow, a faint whiff of cigarette smoke puffing up around me.

He’s been here. He’s been in my bed.

I should be terrified, but instead my hands are going up to my own face, fingers tracing my lips the same way he did, trying to recall the feeling. My heart stutters, elated, as my mind fills in the blanks. His voice. His face. The look on his face as he leaned into me and . . .

“No.” I slide off the bed, too weak to stand. I reach for the desk to pull myself up but only knock off a pile of books, the ultrasound fluttering to the floor almost as an afterthought. I grab it, the comforting black and white giving me something to look at, something concrete that can’t be denied.

But there’s a gray area. I see it now. A smudge where my twin and I overlap, our fetal bodies entwined as my hand had been with Isaac’s. I study it as my heart calms, my breath returns. My fingers are shaky, pulse still weak as I touch the point where my sister and I intersect, the adrenaline of wanting Isaac still thick in my veins.

“Oh my God,” I say, the truth hitting me like a surprise stinger after you thought the song was over.

We’re not facing each other in the ultrasound.

Because even then we each wanted different things.

I call Heath, the person who makes the most sense in the world. He comes over right away, like I knew he would. Mom and Dad trust me entirely, which works out great, because no one cares that I shut my bedroom door as soon as he’s in the room with me.

No one but Heath, that is.

“What’s going on?” he asks, clearly nervous at this sudden change.

“Why does something have to be going on?” I ask, aiming for coy but falling somewhat short of the mark. Straightforward is how I operate best, so I do what I did in the dream, taking my shirt off without a word and tossing it into the air.

It doesn’t hit the fan like it did in my dream with Isaac, doesn’t fly straight for Heath’s head to send him crashing into me in a tangle of laughter onto the bed. Instead it lands on my desk, covering my doodles from the night before, the sketch of my own face, looking bored with the boy I’m trying to seduce right now.

Trying and failing.

“What are you doing?” Heath asks, actually backpedaling into the closed door at the sight of me in my underwear.

“I’m . . .” I don’t know what I’m doing, obviously. The girl in the dream with Isaac did, for sure. But the boy in that situation seemed to know what he was doing too. Heath just looks terrified, which I hardly think is necessary. I’m not built like Brooke or anything, but I do get checked out by everyone from the flutes to the football players.

“What’s the problem?” I ask. “Don’t you like what you see?”

“Sasha . . .” His eyes make the journey over my body, once, twice. He swallows hard, then crosses the distance. Not between me and him, but between him and my shirt, which he tosses at me.

“Put that on,” he says. “We need to talk.”

With the door open, it seems. When the sound of dinner cooking downstairs and the comforting pale pink of the hallway safely in reach, Heath sits next to me on the bed.

“I do like what I see,” he says, hand encircling mine, space between everything else. Just like the wedding cake toppers. Plastic. Perfect. Placated.

“But you’re going to Oberlin, and I’m—”

“Not,” I finish for him. “Right, I know. I wasn’t proposing to you, just be to clear.”

“I know that,” he says quickly, and I think I might detect the slightest trace of relief in his voice. “But . . . what if you did get pregnant?”

I don’t remind him that I’m on the pill, a dubious gift given to me a few years ago after a horrific ovarian cyst incident. The prescription came along with an awkward conversation with Mom about how this was a medical necessity and I shouldn’t regard it as permission.

“What if I didn’t?” I say, hand tightening on his.

“Sasha, I just . . .” He swallows hard, Adam’s apple bobbing. “I can’t.”

I pointedly look at his crotch, where it’s very obvious that he can. That gets a smile, the even whites that his orthodontist worked so hard for making an appearance.