One (Sarah Crossan)

The End Of Summer

Summer’s breath begins to cool.

The ink of night comes earlier and earlier.

And out of the blue

Mom announces that Tippi and I

will no longer be taught at home.

‘In September

you’ll join a class of juniors

and go to school

like everyone else,’ she says.

I don’t make any

ripples.

I listen

and nod

and pull at a loose thread in my shirt

until a button

falls away.

But Tippi doesn’t stay silent.

She detonates:

‘Are you kidding me?

Have you lost your minds?’ she shouts,

then argues with Mom and Dad for hours.

I listen

and nod

and bite at the skin around my fingernails

until they start to

bleed.

Finally Mom rubs her temples, sighs, and gives it to us straight.

‘Donations from well-wishers have dried up

and we simply can’t afford to homeschool you.

You know your dad hasn’t found a job yet

and Grammie’s pension

doesn’t even cover the cable bill.’

‘You girls aren’t cheap,’ Dad adds,

as though all the money spent on us

—the hospital bills and special clothes—

could be saved if we’d both

only

behave a little better.

You see,

Tippi and I are not what you’d call normal—

not what you see every day

or any day

for that matter.

Anyone with a jot of good manners

calls us ‘conjoined’,

though we’ve been dubbed other things, too:

freaks, fiends,

monsters, mutants,

and even a two-headed demon once,

which made me cry so hard

I had puffy eyes for a week.

But there’s no denying our difference.

We are literally joined

at the hip—

united in blood and bone.

And

this

is why

we never went to school.

For years we’ve been cooking up chemistry potions

on the kitchen table

and using our yard for P.E.

But now

there’s no getting out of it;

we are going to school.

Not that we’ll be in a state school

like our sister Dragon,

with kids who pull knives on teachers

and drink Tipp-Ex for breakfast.

No, no, no.

The city won’t fund our homeschooling but

they’ll pay

for a place

at a private school

—Hornbeacon High—

and Hornbeacon is willing to have that one place

count for the two of us.

I guess we’re supposed to feel lucky.

But lucky isn’t really how

I would

ever

describe us.

Everyone

Dragon stretches out on the end of the double bed I share with Tippi,

her bruised feet pointed while she

paints her toenails a deep metallic blue.

‘I don’t know,

you might like it,’ she tells us.

‘Not everyone in the world is an asshole.’

Tippi takes the polish, starts on my right hand and

blows my fingernails

dry.

‘No, you’re right,

not everyone’s an asshole,’

Tippi says.

‘But around us,

they all morph into them.’