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He flicks the lighter, his face lit up magnificently for a second. “Lucky for you, I’ve got practice. You want to be bad, Sasha Stone. I get it.”

I don’t bother to correct him that it’s not me who wants to be bad, but my sister. Whatever flicker of affection I thought I saw under the trees is gone; the face behind the bobbing ember of his cigarette is stone cold.

“I’ll teach you,” he says.

“Sasha?”

The soft scent of sex is still on me, mixing with the acrid cigarette smoke to make a contradictory fume that clouds my mind. I’m not fully myself, can’t be when I smell like this. The conviction is so deep that I almost don’t respond to my mother calling my own name.

“Sasha?” she says again. It’s hesitant, rising up from the darkness of the dining room just as my hand pauses on the bathroom door. I need to wash. Need to get clean and go to bed. What I don’t need is to try and explain myself to her.

“What?” I copy Isaac’s voice, a question spoken in a voice that doesn’t invite an answer.

“Don’t what me, young lady,” she responds in kind, the tentative thread snipped in half by parental control masquerading as concern. “What were you doing?”

My eyes are adjusting to the dark and I can just make her out, sitting at the dining room table. She’s in her usual chair, facing the window. Which means her question is mostly rhetorical.

“I guess I was being bad, Mom.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath that must come from somewhere behind her forehead because it pulls her eyebrows inward. “What’s gotten into you, Sasha?”

I almost say Isaac Harver’s dick, but then cut it off with a laugh at the literal answer my sister would want me to toss out. At the fact that I’m getting in trouble for something that’s not my fault.

“You said yourself that I seemed happy,” I tell her.

“But why are you?”

It’s a good question. How can I be happy when the clasp on my clarinet case actually creaks from lack of use? How can I be happy when I flubbed a basic scale this week in band, my fingers correcting automatically, but not before Charity’s eyes made a quick dash in my direction, noting the mistake? How can I be happy when my boyfriend and my lover are two different people?

“Because I’m two different people,” I say, answering myself aloud, feeling the jigsaw of my new life click together. I’m a puzzle, definitely. But not the kind that lies flat on the table waiting for someone to piece it together. My broken bits have flurried through the air of their own volition, creating in three dimensions.

And I don’t need finishing.

“Sasha, are you drunk?” Mom asks in disbelief. She gets up, crossing over to me in the dark, her own breath laced with wine from dinner—I take a deeper whiff—and perhaps some after too. I’m not drunk. I just did a lot of intimate things with someone who was, and now we both smell like each other, entangled, inseparable. Like me and my twin.

“What is my sister’s name?” I ask her.

She stops, sagging against the wall for support, her hip pressing into the plaster where my anger used to go until it found the path to my mouth. “What?”

“Her name.” I advance on Mom, my words tight and precise in a way that won’t allow for denial or explanation. All I’m after right now is a fact.

“Shanna,” Mom says, her hand going to her throat as she does, as if the name needs the extra help to be pushed out into the air between us. “Her name was Shanna.”

“Shanna,” I say, and my heart explodes into a stuttering beat at the name, black eruptions fill my already dark vision. I sink to the floor beside Mom, a miasma of smoke and sex rising up from my clothes.

“She’s here, Mom,” I say, my hand going to my chest. “She’s here and there are things that she wants.”

“Don’t say things like that,” Mom says, but she’s two people right now as well. The woman who only finds hope in the pages of romance novels, and the one who is staring at me through tears lit from behind by joy. The woman who keeps one hand to her own throat as if to deflect a death blow, and the other reaching toward me, clasping her fingers with mine as the pulse beats through us all.

“You need to explain,” she says.

twelve

There is a fight.

For once I’m not participating. I sit in my chair, staring at the empty one across from me where my sister was always supposed to be, Mom and Dad throwing words at each other so quickly, they’re like a physical bond between them. The only one left standing.

Dad clearly thought I’d finally ratted him out about his affair when he got home from golfing to find no dinner, his wife and daughter stern-mouthed and stiff-spined at the table. I think that conversation might have actually gone better than what Mom served up, a calm repetition of what I’d told her the night before.